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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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There was a story in Climbing mag back in the 80's about climbers staying on the ground controlling robots who do the climbing for them.
Written by Mel Banks(??)
I agree that one of the biggest social and economic issues we will have to face is fewer jobs due to automation. Suppose Trump is successful in jump starting more investment in US manufacturing. These factories will be automated to the hilt leading to minimal jobs once the robots have been set up.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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While some say females may eventually rule the world [with robots? Will they be able to find my adventure hideouts -- or the guys who do the likes of later on? My ADDH =? ADDH; ADHD; DSM-III; DSM-III-R; keeps me from worrying how we will be fed in free food lines of the future
Ed, We need more Luddites to solve the problem of your thread ..............
is the Trumpster is such a Luddite?
Make a law that our communites are paid for robot replacement of humans per hour. We then spend what they earn while we sit on our A 's............watching the Patriots We have got to feed the dumb white boys to get policy in favor of this idea.
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Social climber
SLO, Ca
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In the legal profession technology now does what junior lawyers used to do- look at documents to find important information (the term "documents" now really means all data wherever and however stored.) When I started out in the dark ages (2001!!) bankers boxes of paper files used to be put in my office and I'd paw through each one, billing the client 8+ hours a day at hundreds of dollars an hour for my brilliant legal work. Now that would never happen.
I'm sure other legal work can and will be lost to technology. A lot of the basic stuff is pretty rote. On the other hand, there is plenty that would be hard for machines to do.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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You should see the house my plumber lives in.
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
Nothing creative to say
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Could installation of water pipes ever be outsourced to automation?
No, but replacing faucets and kitchen drains is no longer easy money. And a lot of copper sweat work for residential is not that hard to do if you have a few asbestos heat screens.
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c wilmot
climber
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Just move to a one room cabin in Montana and reject technology
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
Cali
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THe problem, especially for food, is that the documentation doesn't usually begin until it is loaded onto a container. And what you want to really know comes long before that. The place where work will move is out to where production begins, not at the shipping source. And those will not be union jobs either.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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The sky is not falling. Everything has been changing for quite a while now. The list of changes is long. Perhaps you’re just starting to notice. I think it all started with fire, and then degenerated to the wheel.
(Ye gods, I heard the same thing from my parents. People who make these kinds of complaints are almost always OLD PEOPLE. Look in the mirror.)
As usual, things are not as simple and dogmatic as novices think. If economic change is political, then everything is political (which I suppose it is).
TGT2: Then electronics and the intard net made self publication possible and the major music commercial distribution channels are struggling to survive.
Not quite. Self-publication opportunities notwithstanding, industry concentration in music has not changed over the last 150 years (even though the rap artist 50 Cent and others proclaimed the major publishing houses would be gone in 10 years; it didn’t happen).
The industry has always been controlled by 3-5 major publication organizations for one primary reason: it’s apparently impossible to consistently choose winners in the industry. Hence, music houses must rely upon serendipity stochastically by funding pools of artists. The music houses fund new bands (entry costs to promote and produce a new band a few years ago is about $200K), but they don’t know which bands will “hit.” So they fund many in the genres they participate in not unlike how venture capitalists fund start-ups in their tier of the market. Market research would seem to help determine which bands to promote and produce, but people / consumers do not know what they want either. They know what kind of genre they like, but they cannot consistently pick out winners either. (“I know what I like, but which song or band should I next listen to?”) Consumers tend to rely upon word-of-mouth and are influenced a bit by gatekeepers and opinion leaders (who change with the winds of culture).
It was only during the 60s and 70s that small labels arose in music publishing (for some social reasons relating to serving the two markets of young people (rock-n-roll) and parents who thought R&R was evil), but most all of those young houses (often Detroit-based music labels in R&B) have faded into obscurity or demise.
This dynamic of not-knowing-which-investment opportunity-to-fund applies not only to music but all forms of entertainment, and even regular businesses where legitimacy, credibility, assurance, trends, fads, and fashion are important. Predicting such things is not straightforward.
Of course this hardly will assuage anyone’s concerns about losing his or her job. As some have suggested here, change is constant, and the market is hardly a compassionate mechanism for allocating scarce resources among people.
As for the terrible automation / technology introductions (which are really just innovations) that are changing the competitive landscape, here’s a short list of the major ones over the last 100 years that have diminished jobs for labor at all levels: the development of professional managers; accounting; finance; HRM; supply chain management; game theory; new analytical qualitative models; new conceptual notions about value, inimitability, and the fungibility of resources; new organizational forms (integration, outsourcing, contracting, alliances, transnationals); Demming’s teachings about JIT, efficiencies, Kanban, Kieretsus, quality control; planning; technological standards and formatting for hi-tech industries that increase efficiencies and adoption effectiveness but also foreclose competition; organizational architectures, hierarchies, integrating mechanisms, control systems, and culture; etc. I’m sure there are many more, but these are the ones that come immediately to my mind.
An innovation may well require new labor (jobs), but the final result must be a diminishment of costs and the increase in quality of outputs, otherwise it won’t be copied by followers to become an industry standard practice. So, in the end, the total number of discrete jobs will always decline.
About educational innovations (e.g., online courses): the promise that companies like Udacity offer is not simply for lower costs but also (if done well) courses customized to each individual student. When a system can accurately assess whether students are assimilating content or not and why not, then the design of a system can stipulate that students do-over a lesson or route them off onto a pre-designed loop of learning based upon the characteristics of their learning failures. (It is possible that a system can know that it’s you when you type on your keyboard.) I saw a presentation at SCU by the CEO of Udacity, and the learning capabilities of their system is very promising. Very ingenious, very quantitative. I was especially impressed by the CEO’s closing comment at the end of his presentation. He said that he had come to think that an education should be a human right. That opened up my eyes, and I thought such systems could help to change the world. I are an academic / teacher, and I think there is a great deal of waste in the current systems. “Waste” matters if one is concerned about reaching more people with educational training and development.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Have ya ever had a robot work on your 10 year old car or come to your house to fix your plumbing?
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
Cali
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Not yet. And they will only happen when it is cheaper to program and run the robot than it is to hire an illegal.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Pfc. Gustavo Rosales, a plumber from 2nd platoon, 76th Vertical Engineer Company
Nobody asked for his papers
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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You climbers are going to be replaced too.
That will be all.
Good day.
Not so much replaced, certainly not by climbing robots. More likely you will be standing in a room with great virtual technology...
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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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The singularity is near! Look busy.
Sh#t my dog is pissing me off right now. Computers will never be able to do that as well as I can.
If it's just a matter of what we want - how we want society to evolve - how we want technology to affect our lives and futures - then sure, it's as simple for us to do as it was for us when we decided to evolve opposable thumbs.
What, me worry?
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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It took me a few hours to figure out what IT meant in the Topic Heading.
I'm fine now.
--General Ludd
Other than that, this is gold standard forum fodder, OT or not.
Ed, we all get as old as we think we are until the body says "Slow the hell down." Brilliant post, Ghost. I didn't know your bureaucratic background.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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The jobs that people cite being most insulated from threats of technology advancement seem to revolve around physically observing and manipulating the environment, and interacting with people. The assumption is that computers are stuck in a box without wheels or multi-axis rotating grasping arms, or that they remain "robotic" designs that are distinguishable from people, that they cannot classify human emotions based on visual, auditory, thermal, or other sensors. It all comes down to supply and demand.
As soon as someone senses that other low-hanging fruit for getting rich with robotics and AI technologies have been plucked, then plumber jobs will no longer be safe. The good news for plumbers is that there are a lot more attractive targets for getting rich rather than replacing humans to repair pipes. But it will happen at some point much sooner than most people think. I suspect that the AI to control a car in real-time with pedestrians and all manner of random intersections, that sounds a lot less constrained, a lot more complicated, than plumbing in your house. That already exists today. The only obstacle is that taking plumbers' jobs is just not that attractive yet.
As soon as we have widespread humanoid robots capable of generalized mobility and manipulation of objects, and these are coupled with AI as it advances to the point of improving upon itself, we will pass a tipping point where humans are no longer in control.
Machines are already better at physically perceiving physical symptoms in humans, such as heart rate, pupil dilation, temperature, perspiration, etc. They can be taught to read facial expressions and apply whatever is the current state-of-the-art perception techniques that a human can teach to another human. What is not there yet (maybe? maybe it is for non-public use?) is the coupling of AI to decipher the context and intent of the people, to decipher what they are thinking and why, which today requires human beings to process the observations. I suspect there will be great advances in this area for law enforcement and criminal prosecution, and the technology will trickle out to eventually replace people in sales and negotiating positions. Well, they will at least replace most of the role of advisers and jury-pickers and such, until such point that robots supersede people.
Basically, technology is not going to be the limiting factor in all of this... the economic or political motivations are going to govern which areas advance most rapidly, but no area is immune from advancing technology.
Edit: Munge, you had a few specific questions about how to attach data to physical products from point of production throughout the distribution chain. This is ancient news in the IT and shipping world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-frequency_identification
https://www.hidglobal.com/solutions/returnable-transport-item-solutions
http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?1338
I switched out my old leather wallet for one with electromagnetic shielding a few years ago because the credit card companies started using RFID. You don't even need to steal a credit card anymore. Just stand next to somebody who has an unshielded wallet.
I'll be honest and admit I haven't read the "block chaining" stuff that Ed sent yet... but CBC (cipher block chaining) is basic technology for encrypting data and every computer network engineer since the mid-90s is at least partially aware of this stuff. Maybe I'm assuming too much right now regarding the link Ed shared, but it seems pretty logical to combine RFID transport logistics with basic cryptographic principles to ensure that the data reflecting point of origin and transit history are not subject to unauthorized modification in transit, and to ensure that they cannot be repudiated (i.e. claimed to have been tampered with in transit).
In any case, I think Ed was using that example to pivot onto the bigger question of automation. There is not a lot of crazy magic involved in the RFID stuff or the cryptography stuff. Much more crazy magic in what they pay Ed for :)
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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I spent some time observing the worksite across the way this afternoon.
There was a crane onsite lifting skeletons of rebar into place, among other tasks being carried out by REAL workers.
It was enlightening, and so is this discussion.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Another recent New York Times article was explicitly about the use of robots in the workplace and what that will possibly mean for the near-future. It's just one of many huge challenges that we are going to face because of the exponential growth of technology. Robots with software will replace blue collar workers; software without robots will replace white collar workers. Software programmers will be in demand. Clearly, it is a trend that will continue at least for the short term without some willful intervention by society. On the other hand, surely we must be into this trend for at least a few years now, and look at what the overall unemployment numbers are. Many of the jobs are not the best jobs, but it gives us (society) something to work with.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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This ain't exactly Silicon Valley, but the UCM faculty and students are right on top of a lot of tech stuff that continues to amaze me.
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Brilliant post, Ghost. I didn't know your bureaucratic background.
Dunno about the "brilliant" part. Maybe you're right about that, maybe not. But my "bureaucratic background" consists entirely of me running at top speed away from any bureaucracy I encounter.
That's why my military career didn't work out. It's why I'm uneducated. Seriously. Several universities tried to graduate me, but none of them were successful. Academia is just as bureaucratic as government or the military, and each time I found myself involved in it, I fled.
Same for work. I just have to think about the concept of blindly following rules in some huge organization and I break out in hives.
Which left me with relatively few choices in life: Freelance designer, writer, and climbing bum. I've managed to combine all three of the them over the years, and am currently mostly writing. Yes, I write about an industry that is hamstrung by bureaucracy, but, thank whatever gods there may be, I can do so without being confined to a cubicle, or reporting to a manager.
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