Humans Need Not Apply
- Thread starter Joe
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Another job being replaced is immigration official. Last time I came through immigration in Dallas, I had no interaction with a human, just a person directing everyone to a kiosk. In Houston, they had the same kiosk, but an official did verify my info/passport.
GS_Dirtboy
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That's a bunch of horsepucky! No robot can EVER do my job! I attach the engine and drive train to the chassis of automobiles being assembled. How is a stupid robot ever going to replace me? Do you know how much training it requires just to get to my level?
scotttswan
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Time for An unconditional basic income ?
Joe
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The new Apple system for payments will mean in addition to not needing someone to take your order, you won't need someone to take your cash or credit cards. Just someone to hand you your food - and of course that will be automated as well.
Technology has made human drivers more dangerous - it's dangerous to cross the street now because of some idiot texting. More reason to replace human drivers with automation. Will the automated cars in Argentina of the future still allow the human to honk their horns to vent their frustrations?
Technology has made human drivers more dangerous - it's dangerous to cross the street now because of some idiot texting. More reason to replace human drivers with automation. Will the automated cars in Argentina of the future still allow the human to honk their horns to vent their frustrations?
Nice video Joe, thanks!
Everything that was discussed seems like a natural progression of what I have been seeing happen my whole life and didn't have any real surprises for me. I've been through a lot of changes in my lifetime. I watched Armstrong step on moon in 1969 on a black and white television - and the TV didn't have a remote control! I'm not an old guy either, and the world has so much more to go in the near future.
I'm an avid science fiction fan (not sci-fi - although I like to entertain myself with that and fantasy, real science fiction is a passion). I try to be a rational scientifically-oriented thinker (as much as possible for me, at any rate). I've been programming computers since about 1974. I started with a Texas Instruments console computer (can't even remember the model) that had two monitor wires screwed into a TV (I had a small black and white TV in my room by then) and used a cassette tape deck to store data with sound. I've learned to program old computers with punch cards. I used to have walls of technical books that I had to refer to in order to do what I wanted.
Now, I have literally a world of information at my fingertips and something that might have taken me an hour or two to look up, cogitate, compare and mess around with before, I can find in less than a minute usually - and often as a whole code block I can copy and paste into my code! I've been using code generators for years that take a database and generate programmatic objects that do 90% of the work of reading and writing to a database and free me to concentrate on the really important stuff - logic. What used to take teams of programmers can be done with one or two - and as the video mentioned, that doesn't include the really, really advanced stuff being done.
I've seen this coming for a long time. Vernor Vinge, one of my favorite science fiction authors, has posited a "singularity" that follows the seemingly asymptotic curve that represents technology advance - what happens when the curve reaches virtual infinity on the vertical scale? There have been stagnant times in the past, and probably will be again in the future, but technologically something has to happen. People keep thinking that we've come close to some kind of ceiling technologically, but I don't believe so. Vinge (I highly recommend the Peacer War books) wrote a couple of books about a some people who had access to technology that allowed them to create a stasis bubble around them and travel forward into the future. Many wanted to escape their time and live in a more advanced society, so they packed themselves and sometimes their families up, with the best technological and survival gear of their times and "jumped" forward - only to find the Earth empty. The Singularity had happened and there was no evidence of what had happened. No dead bodies, just an Earth returning to nature. Maybe everyone became energy beings or were uploaded into computers or who-knows-what.
Some of the things that people are working on these days is completely amazing. Artificial matter, for example. It's been awhile since I've read up on it, but basically electrons are trapped in a special solid matrix and the orbit of the electrons are controlled around center points (or holes) in the matrix representing atoms with the number of electrons a specific atom has. this whole setup has a weird ability to mimic other materials. The texture and appearance of the substance would appear closely as if the matter were made up of the intended atoms that are being faked, although material properties such as strength, tensile, etc., would be whatever the object is actually made out of.
Quantum entanglement and information seeming to be transmitted faster than light. The idea that the universe is in reality akin to a computer and maybe some of its properties can be manipulated.
Solid printers. Nano technology. Completely new materials with completely new properties created in orbit around Earth. Asteroids being moved into a lunar orbit and mined for more material than has ever been mined on Earth itself. Power generation satellites for clean, plentiful power direct from the sun at incredible efficiencies. Hell, NASA even has a prize program for creating a Beanstalk (a cable stretching from the Earth to a point in orbit upon which, for example, an elevator could ride)...
One thing stood out in my mind towards the end of the video, the narrator said:
"[technology is a] tool to produce abundance with little effort."
I believe that the way things are going we may end up tearing ourselves apart as a global society before we solve enough of the problems to provide enough abundance of food, clothing, shelter and a reason to live aside from simply working and procreating. There are too many powers in the world that want to force people into "ownership" relationships and while that exists, we need to work. I can't see how the local and global economies could just shift overnight to plenty for all and no reason to hoard. The most powerful in the world would control these technologies for their own benefit and that mustn't happen.
Humans have to start looking outward. With all of this coming abundance, we are still living on a world of limited resources. The resources are mostly recycled and renewable in many ways, but it's a closed system and the more of humanity that occupies space, the more materials are needed. The eastern hemisphere was pretty much a closed system some 500 years ago. The colonization of the western hemisphere by people who were technologically and socially advanced changed the world in a way that had never been done on such a scale: it provided the "barbarians" outside of the "empire" (the closed system) that brought the change already starting before the colonialization back around to the eastern hemisphere even stronger.
The only way I can see to go forward is to go into space. The cultures that will flourish in Earth orbit, the Trojan points between Earth and the Moon, Earth and the Sun, etc, colonies on the moon, on Mars, would do the same for Earth that colonizing the western hemisphere did for the eastern.
Let Earth become a backwater, decadent park world where hundreds of millions or even a couple of billion people lounge around and do nothing. The rest of us will go to the stars
Everything that was discussed seems like a natural progression of what I have been seeing happen my whole life and didn't have any real surprises for me. I've been through a lot of changes in my lifetime. I watched Armstrong step on moon in 1969 on a black and white television - and the TV didn't have a remote control! I'm not an old guy either, and the world has so much more to go in the near future.
I'm an avid science fiction fan (not sci-fi - although I like to entertain myself with that and fantasy, real science fiction is a passion). I try to be a rational scientifically-oriented thinker (as much as possible for me, at any rate). I've been programming computers since about 1974. I started with a Texas Instruments console computer (can't even remember the model) that had two monitor wires screwed into a TV (I had a small black and white TV in my room by then) and used a cassette tape deck to store data with sound. I've learned to program old computers with punch cards. I used to have walls of technical books that I had to refer to in order to do what I wanted.
Now, I have literally a world of information at my fingertips and something that might have taken me an hour or two to look up, cogitate, compare and mess around with before, I can find in less than a minute usually - and often as a whole code block I can copy and paste into my code! I've been using code generators for years that take a database and generate programmatic objects that do 90% of the work of reading and writing to a database and free me to concentrate on the really important stuff - logic. What used to take teams of programmers can be done with one or two - and as the video mentioned, that doesn't include the really, really advanced stuff being done.
I've seen this coming for a long time. Vernor Vinge, one of my favorite science fiction authors, has posited a "singularity" that follows the seemingly asymptotic curve that represents technology advance - what happens when the curve reaches virtual infinity on the vertical scale? There have been stagnant times in the past, and probably will be again in the future, but technologically something has to happen. People keep thinking that we've come close to some kind of ceiling technologically, but I don't believe so. Vinge (I highly recommend the Peacer War books) wrote a couple of books about a some people who had access to technology that allowed them to create a stasis bubble around them and travel forward into the future. Many wanted to escape their time and live in a more advanced society, so they packed themselves and sometimes their families up, with the best technological and survival gear of their times and "jumped" forward - only to find the Earth empty. The Singularity had happened and there was no evidence of what had happened. No dead bodies, just an Earth returning to nature. Maybe everyone became energy beings or were uploaded into computers or who-knows-what.
Some of the things that people are working on these days is completely amazing. Artificial matter, for example. It's been awhile since I've read up on it, but basically electrons are trapped in a special solid matrix and the orbit of the electrons are controlled around center points (or holes) in the matrix representing atoms with the number of electrons a specific atom has. this whole setup has a weird ability to mimic other materials. The texture and appearance of the substance would appear closely as if the matter were made up of the intended atoms that are being faked, although material properties such as strength, tensile, etc., would be whatever the object is actually made out of.
Quantum entanglement and information seeming to be transmitted faster than light. The idea that the universe is in reality akin to a computer and maybe some of its properties can be manipulated.
Solid printers. Nano technology. Completely new materials with completely new properties created in orbit around Earth. Asteroids being moved into a lunar orbit and mined for more material than has ever been mined on Earth itself. Power generation satellites for clean, plentiful power direct from the sun at incredible efficiencies. Hell, NASA even has a prize program for creating a Beanstalk (a cable stretching from the Earth to a point in orbit upon which, for example, an elevator could ride)...
One thing stood out in my mind towards the end of the video, the narrator said:
"[technology is a] tool to produce abundance with little effort."
I believe that the way things are going we may end up tearing ourselves apart as a global society before we solve enough of the problems to provide enough abundance of food, clothing, shelter and a reason to live aside from simply working and procreating. There are too many powers in the world that want to force people into "ownership" relationships and while that exists, we need to work. I can't see how the local and global economies could just shift overnight to plenty for all and no reason to hoard. The most powerful in the world would control these technologies for their own benefit and that mustn't happen.
Humans have to start looking outward. With all of this coming abundance, we are still living on a world of limited resources. The resources are mostly recycled and renewable in many ways, but it's a closed system and the more of humanity that occupies space, the more materials are needed. The eastern hemisphere was pretty much a closed system some 500 years ago. The colonization of the western hemisphere by people who were technologically and socially advanced changed the world in a way that had never been done on such a scale: it provided the "barbarians" outside of the "empire" (the closed system) that brought the change already starting before the colonialization back around to the eastern hemisphere even stronger.
The only way I can see to go forward is to go into space. The cultures that will flourish in Earth orbit, the Trojan points between Earth and the Moon, Earth and the Sun, etc, colonies on the moon, on Mars, would do the same for Earth that colonizing the western hemisphere did for the eastern.
Let Earth become a backwater, decadent park world where hundreds of millions or even a couple of billion people lounge around and do nothing. The rest of us will go to the stars
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