Millions of Jobs are going up in flames.
Linda says, “I lost my job to a computer! After graduating from college with a masters degree I became a tax account, and earned good money. Then after working for the same company for 16 years I was let go because computer programs like Turbo Tax, cost less and do a better job. So today I’m stocking shelves at Wal-mart and I’m not alone. Bill a fellow worker was an electrical engineer for 11 years, designing and testing circuit boards. Four years ago he was replaced by a computer program, which even Bill admits, does a better job, and at a fraction of the cost. Then there is Andrea a single mother, with a law degree, whose job was taken over by e-discovery software, and yes, it does a better job at a fraction of the cost. Today she’s a Produce Associate at Walmart stacking fruits and vegetables. She says “I feel defeated and helpless, how am I ever going to pay off $63,000 in student loans. And to make matters worse my x-husband has lost his job as the manager of a camera store. This is because smart phones are wiped out millions of jobs selling and manufacturing cameras, PDA's, GPS, and MP3 players. So today he’s delivering pizzas and only paying a fraction of his child support.”
Linda is not alone, for federal government reports show that over 10.3 million college graduates are now either unemployed or underemployed. Their numbers are likely to continue to grow because in 2012 companies, universities, and government spent of 1.5 trillion dollars on advanced technology research and development.
Oh, there are still jobs, but as good entry level jobs vanish these millions of people are putting downward pressure on wages in all jobs.
The Digital Age is Exponential
We are moving from the mechanical age, which started with the industrial revolution, into the digital age. The profound difference In the digital age is that the rate of change. Today smart phones are more powerful than large multimillion dollar computer were 40 years ago. A number of modern technologies are advancing exponentially.
Some new technology will show up, computers, robots, artificial intelligence, the sequencing of the genome, nanotechnology, 3d printing, etc... What happens next is wild claims and predictions, robot will rule the world etc… Next comes years of disappointment, none of the wild claims come true. Out of nowhere we are blindsided. IBM Watson a new kind of intelligence emerges. Watson can read, memorize, and understand 200 books a second. This is not true intelligence but only the same ability to read and compare and evaluate the contents of books that is required of college students. But it is significant in that Watson can in 2 seconds memorize all the knowledge of a 4 years of college. Currently the speed and power of Watson is doubling every year.
Heads up, the following job destroying technologies are advancing exponentially! They have already wiped out well over 200 million traditional jobs, like Linda, Bill, Andrea, and her X’s.
Smartphones are great because they do so much. Five years ago one would have had to buy a cell phone, a camera, an mp3 player, a GPS, an ebook reader, an alarm clock, a flashlight, and a computer and one still would not have the power of one smartphone. Buying all of that stuff created a lot of jobs for assembly line workers, truckers, shelf stockers, and cashers. Tody camera stores are going out of business, or cut back on staff. All in all smartphones have caused the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Farming today robot are replacing laborers, reducing the cost of food, cutting energy and water usage. Robot are running dairy farms, trimming grapevines, plowing fields, operating hydroponic greenhouses, sorting, packing and warehousing, fruits and vegetables. Farms will soon employ more robots than all of the worlds car factories. Robots are very productive working 24 hours, 7 days a week.
Internet power, has wiped out thousands of newspaper, magazines, TV and radio stations have gone out of business, laying off thousands of educated and skilled people. Ebooks are taking away the work of loggers and paper makers. In hundreds of other arias jobs are vanishing, get a dental or medical x-ray and most likely the image will show up on a computer screen, no more film or chemicals needed, and the image can be viewed and interpreted by a radiologist thousand of miles away, maybe even in another country.
Free stuff has wiped out millions of jobs. It is estimated that over a billion dollars worth of free labor has gone into the development and maintenance of the Linux operating system. And that is just the tip of the free software phenomena for there are thousands of applications from word processors to esoteric math routines, all free and all wiping out paying jobs for college grads. See: FREE - THE FUTURE OF A RADICAL PRICE by Chris Anderson
3D printers are wiping out thousands of jobs, printing dolls, toys, working guns, bones, kidneys, ears and other body parts, houses, industrial buildings, automobiles, and even turbine blades for jet engines. Today 3D printers are capable of manufacturing object too small or complex for traditional manufacturing. 3D printer are opening up the nanotechnology world which will reduce the cost of many things by one or two orders of magnitude.
Nanotech has two sides, first are things like computer chips with ever shrinking wires and transistors, resulting in ever smaller more powerful and cheaper computers. The second and more profound is to automatically assemble machines in the same way plant seeds assemble the plant from resources in the environment. This will wipe out many jobs in mining, smelting and assembly work. see: Engines of Creation: by Eric Drexler
Biotech - Synthetic biology by altering the genetic structure of algae, they can be made to generate gasoline and jet fuel suwage. This will wipe out many jobs drilling for oil, and the building of pipelines. See: As the future Catches You by Juan Enriquez.
Crowdsourcing taps into free or low cost knowledge that are available from the billions of people connected to the internet. The power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the work of a specialized few. Wiping out many jobs for researchers and engineers. See: CROWDSOURCING by Jeff Howe
Singapore skyline
Jobs are moving to China, India, Mexico and other third world countries. The factory closings get the publicity but they’re only the tip of the iceberg; it is the outsourcing of professional jobs that is growing the fastest. Thanks to the high speed internet, companies can save more than $35,000 a year by outsourcing the work of engineers, programmers, accountants, writers, architects, scientists and other professionals. This is possible because some third world nations have made education their top priority. Their goal is not just to catch up with America, but to surpass us academically. Many of their professors have earned their doctorates from Harvard, MIT, and Caltech. These Third World Universities are very demanding, with more work and less social life than most American schools. It is this growing abundance of low cost, high quality knowledge workers that has Boeing Aircraft employing 800 Russian engineers, working on the design of their next airplane. Microsoft has a rapidly growing and very successful software research center in China. General Electric is operating a major research center in India employing over 1,700 scientists and engineers, many with Ph. Ds.. Also in 2008, Indian accountants prepared over one million U.S. income tax returns, outsourced by U.S. accounting firms. With little publicity, thousands of companies are moving their intellectual jobs offshore. This shift is happening quietly, almost secretly. The only visible sign is a growing glut of empty office buildings, as some of America’s best paying jobs silently vanish.
Robots are Coming! Yes, I know people have been predicting robots taking over for the last 30 years, and yet, it has not happened. The sales rate of robots has grown slowly because robots have been too expensive and stupid. This is changing as computers are getting cheaper, smaller and much more powerful; while robots are getting a lot smarter. Thanks to the U.S. military which is spending billions of dollars on robot research and development, to create fast, deadly robot soldiers. The result is that robots have become cheaper and much smarter than ever before.
Japan is facing a big demographic shift with a rapidly growing number seniors and a shrinking number of caregivers. So billions of dollars are being spent to develop smart robots to help in assisted living homes. They have also developed toy talking animal robots which some of the elderly make loving friendships with, these robots listen attentively to the same story over and over again, alway making appropriate positive comments. Oh yes and they work 24/7 and cost less.
Food Chef Robots
What might this robotic burger cook of the future do better than the slow, inefficient, wage-sucking line cooks of yore?
- It slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles only immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.
- …custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground after you place your order? No problem.
- It’s more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.
Furthermore, the "labor savings allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients and the gourmet cooking techniques make the ingredients taste that much better.” Hear that? Without all those cumbersome human workers, your hamburger will be twice as good. For the same cost.
Today there are a number of companies working to automate food production and serving. There is an automated restaurant and a pizza making robot.
Bots (robot with out arms) are Everywhere! It is not the robot that will make the biggest difference, it’s the intelligent bots which have already wiped out millions of jobs. Today, one drives into the filling station, slide a credit card into the pump, and then the ‘bot’ validates the card, turns on the pump, and when finished, it bills the credit card. Twenty years ago, it took a human to sell gas today millions of ‘bots’ are doing the job. E-commerce, ATM’s, ticket kiosks and intelligent vending machines have also taken away millions of other jobs.
Artificial worker (AW), for our purposes it’s a more useful concept than artificial intelligence. The big difference is focus, artificial workers are highly specialized computer systems that do one job exceedingly well. For example AW are better at laying out electronic circuit boards then humans. They’re also better at flying advanced aircraft, and filling out tax returns.
Language understanding
In the last 5 years advances natural language understanding have wiped out some of our highest paying jobs. The first is language understanding, which was demonstrated publicly when the computer WATSON easily won on the US quiz show Jeopardy. Computers like WATSON can read and understand several million books an hour. They also can ingest the vast amount of knowledge that’s available in blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines. There is a big shift, for example
If you ask Watson the question "what is the initial doses of antibiotics for a seven-year child with a history of asthma?
Watson on the other hand will come back and say, three teaspoons two time a day with and 82% confidence level.
Here are 42 sources supporting this. And some of these sources indicate that asthma goes by 7 other medical names. You will find all of my sources in the attached references file.
No human doctor can do that because they don’t have the time needed to read the thousands of medical and pharmacological books, millions of scientific papers, some in other languages.
Move over, Einstein:
It is not just about sorting through big data sets and finding answers. The headline in The New Scientist magazine reads: “Move over, Einstein: Machines will take it from here.” The article is about Eureqa is a program that makes basic scientific discoveries. The goal of the program is to discover a mathematical formula that describes the real world. If you feed the program data from the motion of a pendulum. It will guess at a formula, then test it and guess again and again until it zeros in on the answer. Using genetic algorithms it is able to examine billions of possible answer every minute and so quickly discover the formula. The amazing thing is that sometimes when the problem very complex, the answers it finds can be beyond human understanding. Yet when we can test the answer it works! yet it’s still too complex for human understanding.
Another example of the power of our new cognitive machines is the ediscovery program that searches through all legal case histories looking for presidents setting cases. When the program was tests against 500 legal researchers ediscovery produces more accurate and relevant material then highly trained lawyers. As a result over 100,000 lawyers have lost their jobs.
WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is based on Wolfram's earlier flagship product Mathematica, a computational platform that encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. Because of it’s wide base it often outperforms graduate degreed mathematicians.
There are several hundred cognitive programs in use today, many of them moving onto the cloud and so will be free or cost very little. There are also thousands more being developed. Some futurists predict that in the next 10 to 15 years, they will take over 70 to 80% of our traditional jobs. It is the entrepreneur who has the safest occupation, at least for now.
Heads up!
If you are in any way dependent on SNAP and other forms of government assistance the future looks bleak. The middle class is in trouble, and this is dangerous because the middle class provides over 70% of federal tax revenues. Clearly as millions more lose their jobs, many government programs like social security, food stamps, unemployment insurance and medicare, etc. are being forced to cut back at the very time when they will be most needed. Already in the last budget passed by congress and signed by the president, 800 million dollars was cut from SNAP (formerly called food stamps). Also farm subsidies were cut which will mean increases in food costs. And even the military and homeland security budgets were cut as well as hundreds of other programs. It’s simple a shrinking middle class means less money for the poor.
Self-employment
While cognitive machines are wiping out millions of jobs that are also creating more opportunities for self-employment than at any other time in human history. see: http://gedsmentorism.blogspot.com/
GEDS
No comments:
Post a Comment