how about the service industry? not everyone uses the automated system, and call centers are now larger employers in the us than plants.
On 11/30/07, Jed Rothwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > leaking pen wrote: > > >okay... if robots run everything and everything is abominably cheap, > >then no one will really have to pay much. there would be plenty of > >jobs if the avareage work week is five hours, you know? > > Plenty of jobs doing what? Skilled or unskilled? Jobs that require > skill, such as medicine or flying airplanes or programming cannot be > practiced only five hours a week. The skills rapidly atrophy. That > leaves unskilled jobs such as cashiers . . . which will all be gone > in 5 or 10 years. > > There will be essentially no manual labor left once we develop robots > with as much intelligence as, say, chickens. As I described in > chapter 10 of my book, I believe such robots will be capable of > housework, cooking, driving, most production line work, and so on. As > I said, rfid will soon put most cashiers and stock clerks out of > work. Bird-brain class computers could easily stock shelves and the > other labor in a grocery store or Wall Mart. In 50 years, the menial > work, construction work, and hotel jobs now being done by Mexican > laborers in the U.S. will be done by robots at a tiny fraction of the > cost. There are presently more unemployed Chinese people than the > entire US working population, and manufacturing jobs in China are > disappearing rapidly as the nation automates. > > That leaves only "intellectual" labor. How many reporters, authors or > television producers do we need? How many stockbrokers and lawyers? > Only a handful of gifted people are capable of doing jobs such as > research science, medicine or architecture. We have all the > politicians we need -- there are no empty slots in Congress. > > Even high-tech industries need fewer workers. Back in the 1970s, > thousands of computer engineers were designing many different kinds > of CPUs and computer architecture at IBM, Data General, and dozens of > other corporations. Nowadays just about the only people who design > computer architectures are at Intel. Programming has no long-term > future. Bird-brain class computers will not need programmers. > Applications experts in various fields (manufacturing, agriculture, > nursing and so on) will simply tell the robots what to do, and the > robots will do the job. > > It is not a problem that "no one will really have to pay much." The > problem is that labor itself, which is the only thing most people > have to offer, is rapidly becoming worthless. Many people even today > cannot earn anything, even low wages, because they have no skills or > abilities that can compete with machines. > > In the 1950s, people who have no interest in academics would finish > high school and go to work in a factory, bakery or as a mechanic, and > they would make enough to live a good middle-class life supporting a > family. Now the factories are devoid of people except for a few > highly paid expert engineers. Hydroelectric dams in Georgia used to > have hundreds of employees performing maintenance and monitoring the > machinery. These places are now run with one or two people and dozens > of computers. > > In Japan they have coasted along for years with makework construction > projects for people living in the countryside. They build road after > road that no car travels on, and they destroy vast areas of the > coastline with concrete and dams. The country has been running the > biggest deficit in the world because people have nothing to do, and > no meaningful skills in an automated world. Sooner or later they are > going to have to face reality and restructure the economy to deal > with the fact that labor has no value, and most people are > superfluous by the standards of the past. Why pretend otherwise? Like > it or not, even now we do not need most people to work anymore, and > in the future only a handful of people will be needed to run the > essential purposes of civilization. If that means people have no > purpose, then they must make their our purposes. > > Some people say that excess workers are caused by overpopulation. > This makes no sense. If most of the population magically vanished, > leaving only 100,000 people in the world, 50,000 of them would be > without a job. > > - Jed > > -- That which yields isn't always weak.
