Maybe I am just an idiot...but I don't understand what the fuss is. Through 1870-90, the economy went through a similar phase and the world didn't end...and this was with no unemployment protection. If anything that period was more severe than anything that can happen next: productivity in some industries went up more than ten times pretty much overnight (cigarette production is the archetypal example).
The only thing that doesn't appear to function well now is education, which appears to be stuck in the post-WW2 mentality of a job for life and which the author does identify as a problem. That doesn't seem like a particularly big deal however (at least half of the problem is convincing people that they need to keep learning).
The real concern for me is people constantly predicting the end of the world. Politicians are taking it seriously and they will inevitably fuck it up. Also, the world that journalists seem to live in has pretty much never existed. The only reason a "job for life" occurred after WW2 was because of the huge barriers on trade/capital that were put in place around this period. No competition, high prices...yes, the true glory days.
"That doesn't seem like a particularly big deal however (at least half of the problem is convincing people that they need to keep learning)."
Once you get older you quickly learn that constant learning doesn't necessarily help you that much on the job market. And most of us need a job with income for most of our life. Add the trend towards income inequality where most of society's economical progress goes to the top and I think people should be concerned about their future.
It's easy to imagine a future where a lot of work is automated but instead of making life better for everyone society is split up in a few "haves" and a lot of people who are viewed as "useless".
>The only thing that doesn't appear to function well now is education, which appears to be stuck in the post-WW2 mentality of a job for life.
I would say education is stuck in a pre 1980s paradigm of prepping 80% of the population to be nothing more than warm, wet, expensive robots - - in other words, conventional blue collar workers. Humanity can be so much more...
I think that they have moved on and are still in the "everybody should go to college and get a bachelor's degree" mode. Which leads to a lot of people without the intellectual tools for knowledge work flunking out with huge piles of debt and no marketable skills. Arguably many people would be better served if the older system of tracking into voc tech/business/college prep levels was more in vogue.
I'd push for mandatory shop, home economics, and financial literacy training.
I agree. The issue, to me, seems like there isn't a particularly good relation between supply and demand for skills. Stuff like financial literacy is maybe something separate but is also obviously necessary (not just in terms of personal finance, but understanding business).
I would be hesitant to frame it in terms of something that already exists however. In terms of function, the outcome should be skills that are applicable to business so vocational. But it needs to be more distinct. For example, more vocational education should have significantly greater links to business than already exists (not research but training).
How about we spend enough time and money to give all citizens the same "intellectual tools" that upper middle class parents provide for their children?
My theory is that writing articles about "the robots commin' to get ya" is someone's business model. Exactly how that works I can't fathom. But there have been so many articles like this in the past couple of years (vs the actual probability that robots are really coming -- which is pretty low) that I have to believe there's a command center somewhere where someone is running some kind of disinformation operation against us..
...we are talking so maybe that it is proof that the business works...maybe the author is a robot preying on human weakness...is this how they get us?
Srs though, ppl aren't particularly interested in being told that stuff is okay or even learning from past experience. The present is always extremely unique and very dangerous.
For example, I am not from the US but follow US politics...as far as I can tell, every election over the past ten years has been "the most important election there has ever been". I remember 2012 specifically: it was hyped into oblivion but was totally inconsequential.
The fuss is over whether one of these phases will be the last for human workers.
Education is an extremely hard problem to solve because it doesn't seem to be working in general. That is, the effects of shared environment are small and completely dwarfed by genetics and sheer randomness.
I don't understand...you are saying the problem is everyone stops working? If that happened then none of this would be a problem. The point of production is consumption, if no labour is required to subsist then work has no function, production has no value, and none of this matters...that isn't going to happen, and it isn't what the author is saying will happen.
I am not sure what you mean about education (I don't know what "shared environment" or "randomness" means in this context). I am sure everyone here knows there are tons of issues...it comes down to: if you had to build the education system today, would it look like what we have now? No, quite clearly not. The situation in every country is obviously very different but that is what it comes down to: inertia. There is nothing intrinsically difficult though, we have got this far after all.
If schools don't do much beyond warehousing kids, which seems to be the case, then one room schoolhouses are just as good, if less comfortable, as multiroom schoolhouses.
I believe the issue is the number of ppl affected by change. Remember the population has increased from 38,555,983 (1870) to 328M+ today. Thats a lot of lives affected, no matter the industry, plus the subsequent affects.
As long as technology marches forward and evolution creeps forward at a snails pace, there will be a point in the future where robots are better than humans at doing any job, not just repetitive manual labor. That point of singularity has not occurred previously in human history.
The only real debates to be had are when that will occur, a thousand years? A hundred? Ten?
The only thing that doesn't appear to function well now is education, which appears to be stuck in the post-WW2 mentality of a job for life and which the author does identify as a problem. That doesn't seem like a particularly big deal however (at least half of the problem is convincing people that they need to keep learning).
The real concern for me is people constantly predicting the end of the world. Politicians are taking it seriously and they will inevitably fuck it up. Also, the world that journalists seem to live in has pretty much never existed. The only reason a "job for life" occurred after WW2 was because of the huge barriers on trade/capital that were put in place around this period. No competition, high prices...yes, the true glory days.