Robots providing better shareholder value than CdM

[Valmy]

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-rich-and-their-robots-are-about-to-make-half-the-worlds-jobs-disappear

Two hugely important statistics concerning the future of employment as we know it made waves recently:

1. 85 people alone command as much wealth as the poorest half of the world.

2. 47 percent of the world's currently existing jobs are likely to be automated over the next two decades.

Combined, those two stats portend a quickly-exacerbating dystopia. As more and more automated machinery (robots, if you like) are brought in to generate efficiency gains for companies, more and more jobs will be displaced, and more and more income will accumulate higher up the corporate ladder. The inequality gulf will widen as jobs grow permanently scarce—there are only so many service sector jobs to replace manufacturing ones as it is—and the latest wave of automation will hijack not just factory workers but accountants, telemarketers, and real estate agents.

That's according to a 2013 Oxford study, which was highlighted in this week's Economist cover story. That study attempted to tally up the number of jobs that were susceptible to automization, and, surprise, a huge number were. Creative and skilled jobs done by humans were the most secure—think pastors, editors, and dentists—but just about any rote task at all is now up for automation. Machinists, typists, even retail jobs, are predicted to disappear.

And, as is historically the case, the capitalists eat the benefits. The Economist explains:

The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labour's share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. In 2000, 65% of working-age Americans were in work; since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%.

Those trends aren't just occurring in the US, either. That second stat up there is from an Oxfam report entitled Working for the Few, just out this week. It was launched in tandem with the beginning of the World Economic Forum in Davos, in an effort to get the gazillionaires attending it to consider the gravity of their wealth. It finds that "those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1 [trillion], as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population." Yes, you read that correctly: The 85 richest people have $1.64 trillion between them, the same amount of money as 3.5 billion of the world's less fortunate souls.

The trend extends beyond a few handfuls of the planet's most mega-tycoons, of course: "The wealth of the 1% richest people in the world amounts to $110tn (£60.88tn), or 65 times as much as the poorest half of the world." And they and their corporations are building robots that will have the net effect of letting them keep even more of that capital concentrated in their hands.

As the Economist piece notes, there's typically a disruptive cycle when new technologies displace old ones, and replace old jobs with new ones. But this time, that cycle is one-sided—so far, there are a lot fewer jobs being created in the new information-based economy than the old manufacturing-based one: Last year, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook were worth over $1 trillion combined, but employed just 150,000 people.

All of this points towards an uncomfortable prospect: in our globalizing, technologically advanced, and inequality-laden world, we risk becoming the cyber-peasants tending (or loitering on, more likely) the feudal lawn of the machine-owning rich. Oxfam predicts incoming class struggles and social strife, and it's not hard to see why—to ensure that the 99 percent of tomorrow benefit from still-accelerating technology, we're going to have to push for policy adjustments that adapt to our mechanized world. Radical income redistribution is probably in order, even a minimum guaranteed income; ideas unlikely to prove popular to the corporate titans used to reaping outsized rewards.

We already have the agricultural, energy, and consumer technology necessary to recalibrate the world's income scheme and resource distribution to make it more equitable. So as the rich and their robots start vacuuming up the world's jobs, it's social innovation we need now, far more than any technological gain.

Fortunately Communism will save us all!  I guess we all need to get training in building and repairing robots.

Meri and I will be investigating bra construction bots for our new evil corporation.

[derspiess]

So let's speed up the process by increasing minimum wage!

It's all be great for shareholder value & whatnot until the damned robots unionize

[Eddie Teach]

So let's speed up the process by increasing minimum wage!

Or you know, just take more money away from rich people.

[derspiess]

So let's speed up the process by increasing minimum wage!

Or you know, just take more money away from rich people.

Or sterilize the non-working poor.

[Josquius]

I think I posted about this on the OTT a few days ago.
I am increasingly coming around to the theory that Japanese companies purposfully employ more office workers than they need in an attempt to make up for the automisation of factory work.
Its a sort of social-contract thing. Perhaps of the company's own conscience, perhaps, with conspiracy hats on, agreed with the government behind closed doors.
As terrible as sitting around in an office and doing nothing all day is (to say nothing about overtime doing nothing), it is perhaps better than being unemployed; so long as nobody figures out a way to seperate real workers from these paper workers.
I wonder whether it could be the way of the future....
But sadly western companies tend not to take social responsibility so seriously. They will out efficientise those who follow this route.

[alfred russel]

I've never understood why the woman in that picture is topless.

[The Brain]

I've never understood why the woman in that picture is topless.

Really?

[alfred russel]

I've never understood why the woman in that picture is topless.

Really?

[Caliga]

I've never understood why the woman in that picture is topless.

The artist was making a concession to the future me for reasons known only to them.

[crazy canuck]

I've never understood why the woman in that picture is topless.

Really?

I am not sure why Brain thinks she is barebreasted but iirc she is a Goddess figure of Liberty and the style was to paint Goddesses barebreasted.  Also, it was a painting meant to inspire and nothing would inspire men like Cal more (at least in that time period) than a painting like that.

[derspiess]

Then it needs to be modernized with bigger juggs.

[Caliga]

This was before the invention of both implants and HFCS.

[Iormlund]

Fortunately Communism will save us all!  I guess we all need to get training in building and repairing robots.

We desperately need competent roboticians. There seems to be a sort of mini-boom in the automotive industry going on right now and people with the right skills are ridiculously hard to find (ironic in a country with >25% unemployment).

With a bit of luck my employers will see that as an opportunity to pay to train me in the ways of robot-fu, but I'm not holding my breath.

In my current job I'm participating in the ultimate examples of automation. I'm overseeing the commissioning of a high-powered laser worth almost a million bucks. Other than engineers and maintenance folk, just one person is needed to load and unload parts. It can do in minutes a better job than what took a team of experienced welders hours.
My next project involves a press worth probably tens of millions (perhaps over a hundred), that again only one dude operates.

[Malthus]

Fortunately Communism will save us all!  I guess we all need to get training in building and repairing robots.

We desperately need competent roboticians. There seems to be a sort of mini-boom in the automotive industry going on right now and people with the right skills are ridiculously hard to find (ironic in a country with >25% unemployment).

With a bit of luck my employers will see that as an opportunity to pay to train me in the ways of robot-fu, but I'm not holding my breath.

In my current job I'm participating in the ultimate examples of automation. I'm overseeing the commissioning of a high-powered laser worth almost a million bucks. Other than engineers and maintenance folk, just one person is needed to load and unload parts. It can do in minutes a better job than what took a team of experienced welders hours.
My next project involves a press worth probably tens of millions (perhaps over a hundred), that again only one dude operates.

We need robot HR. 

[The Brain]

I've never understood why the woman in that picture is topless.

Really?

Sex sells. Shocking, I know.