<[email protected]> wrote:
> As to the future of labour when automation is added, consider the fact that > many > things are already automated, yet we still mostly manage to find > employment. > Ford addressed that, in the part I quoted: [OBJECTION TO THESIS] If technology resulted in unemployment, everyone would already be out of a job because technological progress has been going on for hundreds of years. [REBUTTAL] This really just amounts to saying “it hasn’t happened yet, so it will never happen.” . . . > It's just in different areas where automation is not prevalent, primarily > in the > service industries. Ford addressed that, too, and there are some videos on his web site showing prototype robots targeted to service industries. He makes a good case that there are few jobs that will not soon be automated -- either partially automated (reducing the number of workers) or fully automated (eliminating workers). > A further effect of automation is that the productivity of > the individual is increased thereby. Until the machine becomes antonymous and the individual is no longer needed. We all know that people nowadays are likely to find another job. Ford (and I) are not talking about the present situation but rather the outcome in the near future, given present trends. > IOW we all get wealthier because those > machines are working for us. > Unfortunately they are not working for "us" but only for the factory owners. > > We just change from actually doing the work ourselves to telling the > machines > what to do. Two issues arise: 1. Once you tell a machine what to do (program it), it never forgets and you don't need to tell it again. Your job is finished. 2. For many jobs, machines will soon be better at figuring out what to do than we are. There will be no need to tell them what to do. They are, at long last, learning to learn, as the AI people predicted they would decades ago. They are learning to deal with messy, real life situations. Take, for example, the Google car that drives itself through California traffic autonomously. No one "tells" it what to do in any detail. They do not lay out an exact route, and program exactly when it should stop and start. That would be impossible. Instead, the machine watches traffic, traffic signals, road conditions and so on, and figures out for itself. That is no mean feat! Driving a car is difficult. > Something we already do now e.g. when we drive a tractor rather than > mowing grain by hand as we used to do. > Tractors will soon drive themselves. Prototype robot driven tractors are already in use. They do a better job than human drivers so, using less gas, and distributing fertilizer and seed more effectively. Food factories are almost entirely automated. Ford's website shows robots identifying ripe strawberries and picking them without damaging them. That is something humans find difficult to do. - Jed
