09:11 – The mainstream media are finally starting to notice what I’ve been talking about for 20 years. Ten million jobs at risk from advancing technology: Up to 35pc of Britain’s jobs will be eliminated by new computing and robotics technology over the next 20 years, say experts
What they don’t mention is that the vast and fast-increasing majority of the remaining 65% of jobs aren’t really jobs at all, but government payrolls, regulatory-compliance, and other make-work “jobs” that contribute little or nothing to the economy. The truth is that 70% or more of the adult population is already useless in an economic sense and that percentage will continue to increase as automation continues to take over the economically useful tasks.
From the article:
“However, Mr Knowles-Cutler said that as well as jobs being eliminated, the survey found that new jobs will be created as new industries and positions spring up, along with jobs requiring the skills that machines are unable to match.
This job creation has the potential to outnumber the losses, he said: “We’re currently losing about 2pc to 3pc of jobs a year in London but these are being replaced by higher skilled jobs.”
etc etc etc.
There will be jobs, if we can find people with the right skills and knowledge to fill them.
Not only to most people lack the specific skills need for working in an automated environment, they are utterly lack in necessary background to learn the skills they need.
You can teach the illiterate or innumerate to program robots or service complex electromechanical equipment.
robots today, and for the foreseeable future, don’t know how to do a damn thing. The cells they work in must be designed and built by humans, they have to be programmed, by humans, they have to serviced, by humans, they need to be taught, by humans, and when things don’t work right, they have to be corrected by humans.
If you want to have a robotic welding cell, you had better have a good welder available to run the robot. What robots and automation do is make the welder very efficient and productive. Instead of a single welder manually doing a a couple of hundred welds a day, they can run robotics cells that will do ten thousand welds a day. However, if I don’t have a welder, all the robot will do is turn our ten thousand scrap parts a day.
New jobs created will be a tiny percentage of the old jobs lost. Actually, Jim is being very optimistic. To use his numbers, the 1,000 welders that used to be needed to run 200,000 welds/day will be replaced by 20 computerized welding machines, all of which can be supervised/maintained by one guy and his dog. Sure, those machines have to be designed by engineers, but that’s a one-off job. That one engineering team designs the automated welders, of which any number can then be built, probably using mostly automated equipment to do so.
I’m not saying that there won’t be any jobs, just that the vast, vast majority of them will be economically useless. As I’ve said before, ultimately labor and capital costs make up nearly 100% of any manufactured item. The actual cost of the steel and other materials that go into a car, for example, is nearly zero once you’ve factored out the direct and upstream labor and capital costs. If you eliminate the labor costs, which is happening now, you’re down to only the capital costs, which are typically a tiny fraction of the labor costs. Those capital costs are increasing as automation takes over, but they’ll still end up being a small fraction of what total costs are now. As that happens, you’ll see the manufacturing costs for a new car drop from $25,000 (or whatever) now toward zero (i.e., the capital cost alone). As we build billion-dollar factories that can turn out 100 million widgets a year with essential no labor or material costs, the cost of those widgets begins to approach zero.
This is essentially what happened with agriculture. Before the agricultural revolution, each farming family produced enough to feed itself with a small surplus that went to feed the aristocracy, the clerics, and the artisans. As modern agriculture developed, we quickly got to the point where one farming family could feed itself plus another family, then itself plus another ten families, then itself plus another hundred families. In the US, IIRC, something like 1% of our population lives/works on farms. Those farms feed not just 300+ million Americans, but a huge number of people in the rest of the world as well.
As you drive the rural highways in Kansas you’ll occassionally see billboards on farm land that say, “One Kansas farmer feeds 128 people + you!” Though, some Googling shows that number is now closer to 155. In 1960 is was supposedly just 25.
I imagine most of this has to do with the size of farms and machinery allowing farmers to farm larger and larger acreages as well as crop hybrids, fertilization, soil analysis, and GMOs allowing for much higher yields.
I always found it funny how farm size perception varied by region. I have a friend that lives in Maryland where they consider a 200 acre farm to be large. Meanwhile, in Nebraska you’d have to have closer to 1,000 acres to be considered large. Ranches are probably similar.
Exactly, and we’re watching the same thing happen with manufacturing. It’s happened and will continue to happen in phases. The industrial revolution did not have a catastrophic effect on employment because those people who were no longer useful on farms moved to the cities and got jobs in those new-fangled factories. The Luddites famously vandalized automated looms because they feared becoming economically obsolete. But the huge number of out-of-work weavers ended up with manufacturing jobs in other types of factories, or indeed in the newly-automated textile factories.
But the movement has been constantly toward minimizing and then eliminated labor, which as I’ve said is actually a good thing. As manufacturing has become more efficient, there are no longer anywhere near as many manufacturing jobs as there used to be, and just as farming jobs aren’t ever coming back, manufacturing jobs aren’t ever coming back either. We’ve reached the end of the line in terms of usefully employing people who are less than extremely bright. We need only so many scientists, engineers, physicians, etc. etc., and we have more than enough extremely bright people. That leaves below-average, average, and even most above-average people as economically useless. We are, as I’ve said repeatedly, in a post-employment society.
The trick will be to keep those average (give-or-take) people (a) from rioting with torches and pitchforks while (b) simultaneously preventing them from breeding too many more average (give-or-take) babies. That’s why I advocate the Basic Income with one minor modification that no one talks about. Everyone gets the basic income. It’s not means-tested. If you’re a citizen, you get it, period. But each person, male or female, is limited to having two children. If you father a third child or give birth to a third child, your Basic Income amount is cut significantly, say by 50%, permanently. No appeal, no reversals. (Vasectomies and tubal ligations are free.) That should limit population growth effectively. And anyone who doesn’t care about the Basic Income check every month is free to father or mother as many children as they wish.
Not only are larger machines able to farm much larger acreage in a day, automation and technology make the ground more productive. Along with the GPS guidance systems there are yield monitoring systems that track the product being harvested. For areas that are lower yield information is fed to a system that controls the fertilization system. Those areas will then get more fertilizer spread all under machine control. Areas that prove to be non-productive (costs to fertilize, harvesting costs, etc.) are excluded from production.
With large land leveling machines much of the ground can be optimized for irrigation and harvesting operations. Computer generated planting and harvesting routes all supplied to the GPS controlled machines farming can be done more productively with fewer people. Many of the large (and expensive) machines are basically hands off operation. The guidance is done by GPS. Head cutter adjustment for grains are done by yield sensors as is the combine leveling.
Back when I ran a combine you had to do all that yourself, in an open operator platform. Adjust your cutter height, level the cutter to the slope while keeping the combine level, adjust cutter height to reduce straw but get as much wheat as possible, adjusting your speed to match the other combines in your group, etc. You sat for 11 hours, peeing in a bottle when needed. Machine stopped for an hour while maintenance was done, fuel added, filters cleaned or replaced, belts checked, bearings greased, etc. Next operator got on the machine for the next 11 hours. Face and clothes were caked in dust except where the face mask went to keep the dust out of your eyes and lungs. It was a horrible job that I would never have done had I known the requirements.
Now maintenance information is collected and sent to a central source. When the machines stand down for maintenance any necessary parts and supplies are on the service vehicle. Problems are identified by the systems on the machines so that most of the pending failures will not be catastrophic and are caught before the failure occurs.
Agriculture has come a long ways since the middle 60’s.
The outfit I worked with for a few months had several such combines. One job we had 20 combines. The machines were too expensive for a farmer to own. So they instead contracted with this company to bring in their wheat. The fields were planted on specific dates so that all the farms would not need harvesting at the same time. Farm B may delay his planting by two days after farm A. Farm would get his wheat harvested first and then we moved to farm B. How they agreed I don’t know. The arrangement also minimized the travel time between farms.
I have an IT friend that worked on some GIS software for some AgriBusiness firm in Western Iowa. They could pull up a computer map of farmland with different map layers for average soil moisture, density, various minerals, nitrogen levels, historic yields, etc. and the algorithm would tell them precisely what to plant where for optimum profit per acre.
“That’s why I advocate the Basic Income with one minor modification that no one talks about. Everyone gets the basic income. It’s not means-tested. If you’re a citizen, you get it, period. But each person, male or female, is limited to having two children.”
The current population increases in Europe and North Murka are from masses of immigration every year and these people may or may not become citizens but they still have to eat, be clothed and sheltered, etc. Apparently we and the Europeans have opened our borders to all comers and devil take the consequences. Do these many tens of millions also get the Basic Income? They’re on the way to drowning the rest of us out; by 2050 we’ll have half a billion people here, and more than half of them will have origins in the southern hemisphere countries. Camp of the Saints writ large.
I agree that manufacturing jobs are gone and not coming back; but there will always have to be a cadre of filthy human animals to service the machines, whether robots or data center server farms. That’s been my gig off and on since the late 70s, with breaks for cop work, grad skool, stuff like that. But now I’m too old, I guess, so let the youngsters compete for those positions and have at it.
I still think, though, we have so many dire vulnerabilities in the economy, the national infrastructures, and environmentally, that any major disaster or series of them can make all this moot.
Speaking of filthy human animals tending the machines, I finally got a job description for my upcoming interview next Monday:
Network Engineering
a rack and stack data center installation cabling role LAN WAN CISCO
· LAN/WAN
· CISCO
· Rack and Stack installation
· Cabling
· Network Troubleshooting
· Routing Protocols
So there I have it; rack monkey. Hey, whatever; I prefer working with the machines anyway, and the less user contact/help desk chit, the better. I did this exact thing at the IBM data centers up here for two years. Just need a little breathing room for the holidays and winter months.
Rack monkeys need love, too. Seriously, best of luck. Being able to say “yep, been there, done that” ought to be worth a lot.
I have an IT friend that worked on some GIS software for some AgriBusiness firm
I was talking to some folks at John Deere about some of their plans for new automation for their large combines. Absolutely stunning what they are now doing. It is to the point where operators are merely monitors. They basically can get by with three controls. One to start the machine as it can now drive and operate itself, another control for the climate system temperature and an emergency stop button. Satellite entertainment systems, USB connectivity for iPods, seats that are pneumatic for maximum comfort. Some slick stuff.
The operator does have ultimate control over all aspects of the machine with multiple touch displays for each major section of the machine. There are displays for the GPS system, cargo system, engine systems, head assembly, a couple of remote cameras.
Multiple combines in a line and all support equipment all communicate with each other to keep their spacing, control their hopper dumps, which field transport machine goes to which combine, automatic load balancing when dumping the hopper, etc. Even the unloading of the hopper is optimized to minimize the distance the transport vehicle has to drive. So say a bin is only half full, the software calculates an unload will be required two miles from the current transport vehicle whereas an unload now would only be 200 yards, an unload will be scheduled for the combine.
Will I be able to get robot sex in the future? Gotta use my time productively to prevent rioting. RoboBullock please! Twins if possible.
“EIA: Gas storage levels now within 7% of 5-year average”
http://www.ogj.com/articles/2014/11/eia-gas-storage-levels-now-within-7-of-5-year-average.html
“Working natural gas in storage ended October at 3,571 bcf, a record increase of 2,734 bcf during the Apr. 1-Oct. 31 injection season, and within 7% of the average of the last five end-of-season storage levels, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.”
We are ready for winter! Bring it on!
“Rush Limbaugh Threatens To Sue Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee”
http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/10/rush-limbaugh-threatens-to-sue-democratic-congressional-campaign-committee/
Looks like he has a case of defamation to me but I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on tv or the internet. However, as an very public figure, he does have a high hill to climb.
“Will I be able to get robot sex in the future? Gotta use my time productively to prevent rioting. RoboBullock please! Twins if possible.”
Good luck with that, youngster!
Robo twins on that level would kill me but what a way to go.
I think Pournelle has said something similar, but new jobs will be created to absorb the redundant welders and the like, so long as the free market is allowed to do its thing.
My ex-brother in law was a bank worker, then bank manager and when he was laid off, age 44, started his own garden maintenance business. My uncle worked on repairing telephone equipment in the Sixties, then became a computer programmer and data centre manager. All we have to do is let the system adapt. I’m not saying every laid off welder or bank worker can do anything, but they can do *something*, given the right motivation.
I do very little of my own garden work, I pay a guy to do it every month or so. There are many other jobs I am capable of doing but don’t because I don’t like them and/or am not very good at them. I let a specialist do it, freeing up my time to do the stuff I like and am capable of.
People have been pessimistic like our host for thousands of years. Every innovation resulted in structural changes, but society coped.
Dave, did you ever read Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn? A lonely woman uses a humaniform male robot for sex and almost brings down the Auroran government.
No, Greg, that’s the point. Society coped with past changes because there was always more that needed to be done than people to do it. Things have changed fundamentally now that we no longer need many people to produce not just what we NEED (food and so on) but what we WANT (manufactured items). The great masses of people are now in the category of surplus to requirements. We no longer have enough real work to keep many people busy productively, so we put them to work on make-work jobs with their salaries paid, directly or indirectly, by the net taxpayers, which is to say those few who are actually productive.
I actually had this discussion with Pournelle many years ago, and at the time he conceded the point. You are suffering from a logical error called Normalcy Bias.
Will I be able to get robot sex in the future?
I am sure when the time comes they will have micro-bots in your size.
“Dave, did you ever read Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn?”
I stopped reading scifi in high skool.
Reading is amusingly different as the decades pass. I was skimming through some H.P. Lovecraft just before All Hallows Eve and that night I had vivid and disturbing nightmares that woke Mrs. OFD. That never used to happen. Sorta related to that, a while back I started watching a based-on-real-life flick about the supernatural and the lights flickered here in this office and a few seconds later the glass ceiling lampshade came crashing down on top of the computer monitor and desk, with the bulb hanging by a single filament. I stopped watching the flick and never went back to it and also left off reading any more Lovecraft for the time being.
Stuff I thought was interesting in books and movies forty or twenty years ago isn’t anymore. Re-reading certain books has been a meh experience and I wondered what I saw in them back then; ditto movies and tee-vee shows.
Sci-fi has generally just sucked over the last twenty years. It used to be thoughtful and full of ideas and speculation, now it’s all rayguns and space opera; or worse yet, fantasy. I’ve given up trying to find anything good, but open to suggestions.
Bantam used to have a division called Spectra whcih would publish the good stuff, but they went the path of the dodo. I miss them. I believe they published Neuromancer, one of the last decent sci-fi novels. Gibson went downhill after that.
Neal Stephenson is good; _Cryptonomicon_ was a page turner and OFD, I would particulaly point you to Dan Simmon’s Hyperion trilogy.
http://www.amazon.com/Hyperion-Dan-Simmons/dp/0385249497
Yes, loosely based on the poem by Keats. John Crowley is also literate, but tends to the fantasy side. _Little, Big_ is five stars in my book.
Don’t understand all the hoopla surrounding ingestion of detergent pods by kids. I’m sure the feds and ancillary bureaucracies are working feverishly to “do something” when all that needs doing is coat the pods with something that tastes absolutely awful, like that stuff for nail-biters.
I’m glad RBT enable editing comments for for me. Here’s a handy link to bypass Amazon’s front page and just look for books:
http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Search-Books/b?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0&node=241582011
I am sure when the time comes they will have micro-bots in your size.
The Tennessee robots will of course be cheaper. No need for teeth to make them look normal. Well, the occasional tooth I suppose.
I didn’t make any change to comments, so I’m not sure what the problem was or why/how it fixed itself.
Thought I would let you know I visited ma Brower today had a pleasant conversation with her knew me at times but not the entire time she spoke a lot about Michigan Alfred coming home from ww2 him going to school and her as well also remembers fishing in Canada with all etc I guess she is doing well for 91
Sci-fi has generally just sucked over the last twenty years. It used to be thoughtful and full of ideas and speculation, now it’s all rayguns and space opera; or worse yet, fantasy. I’ve given up trying to find anything good, but open to suggestions.
I disagree, I consider myself a reader of large quantities of SF (science fiction has been renamed speculative fiction). My primary love is Space Opera but I have been reading a lot of crossover space opera and fantasy lately. Such as
http://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Duty-Theirs-Not-Reason/dp/0441020631/
And I have been reading a lot of dystopian SF lately. There is a lot of good stuff out there nowadays (and a lot of crap too). You can see my reviews at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2P5WAAF0R125O/
@jim`
I read the earlier books by Gibson and Stephenson and liked them a lot; sadly, many writers shoot their wads at a young age and don’t get any better after that or may do actually worse. Your mention of Keats is a good example among many. For popular fiction look to Joseph Wambaugh’s “The Onion Field,” a masterpiece, and then “The New Centurions,” downhill after that. Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” downhill after that as he decided to be a chic tee-vee celeb on the social party circuit. Norman Mailer’s “The Quick and the Dead,” yet another example. These writers were all done after those first efforts. Excellent flicks were made, however, out of “The Onion Field,” and “In Cold Blood.” Recommended, both books and movies.
However, based Mr. Jim`’s recommendation and those of several commenters at the Amazon link, I will give “Hyperion” and “Fall of Hyperion” a try. Mrs. OFD also dug Gibson and Stephenson and I’d sorta like her to step up her reading choices a bit; she tends to go for chick-lit mass-market paperbacks she gets at the thrift store. We both dig Alan Furst and James Lee Burke.
” (science fiction has been renamed speculative fiction).”
See, that right there is a problem. When literary poo-bahs, nabobs and self-appointed language police make up new names for literary genres and historical periods, I smell something rotten in the state of Denmark or whatever that phrase is. Probably Shakey from “Hamlet.” To me this is akin to what the smartypants libtard neo-Marxists in academia did when they renamed “Renaissance” to “Early Modern.” That’s straight-out bullshit, their reasoning being that “renaissance” implies some sort of triumphalism (another fave buzzword of theirs) forced on poor suffering humanity via racist patriarchal hegemony, etc., etc.
“Speculative fiction” does much the same thing; they clearly don’t like science so that has to go and “speculative” can cover a whole ton of what we would otherwise call utter rubbish.
The Tennessee robots will of course be cheaper.
And look like meth heads.
Well, I still don’t agree/get it.
Firstly, there will be lots of work for people that highly intelligent people couldn’t do or would disdain. How would you like to work at gardening, truck driving, childcare, and so on?
Secondly, the price of labour can only be driven down so far before it stops being economic to replace people with robots.
Thirdly, some/many jobs are simply not amenable to robotic labour.
Fourthly, as you’ve said, it’s in no one’s interest to have hordes of unemployed roaming the streets. “The devil makes work for idle hands to do.” And I don’t know why people, especially smart ones, should be limited to two kids each. I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned that before. Just the basic income.
Well, let’s see. All those things you mention will be automated. Gardening? We’ve been talking about how automated farming is. Truck driving? There are already self-driving cars out there and the technology already exists to eliminate truck drivers pretty much entirely. Child care? Who needs it. Most people won’t have jobs to go to.
As to your second point, the breakeven between paying a person and buying a robot is already so low that many minimum wage jobs have been automated out of existence. And the cost of technology continues to fall. Yeah, there may be a baseline level there, but it might amount to buying a robot unless you can get someone to work for you for, say, $0.01/hour. In today’s dollars.
As to your third point, again you’re falling prey to Normalcy Bias. How many jobs can computers/robots do that required humans 30 years ago? 20? 10? 1? If you look, you’ll see that even what were formerly known as “skilled” jobs are now being done both better and cheaper by machines. I suspect that within five years machines will begin to replace physicians. (Actually, they already have. It’s possible that the top 100 diagnosticians on the planet are human, but I promise you that an average doctor doesn’t come close to diagnosing as well as machines do.)
Smart people aren’t limited to two children each. As I said, anyone is free to have more than two children as long as they don’t care about having their Basic Income reduced or eliminated. Smart people, by and large, won’t care because they’ll be too busy doing things that earn them real money.
As to why the limitation to two children per person, the “why” is readily apparent to anyone who’s watched a bacteria culture consume all the available resources and then die off.
Ever heard of the logistic equation? Populations typically reach a steady state before your scenario. And the last thing First World countries should be doing is limiting the growth of their own people. Italy, and I think Germany, are already into this death spiral.
That’s why I advocate the Basic Income with one minor modification that no one talks about. Everyone gets the basic income. It’s not means-tested. If you’re a citizen, you get it, period. But each person, male or female, is limited to having two children. If you father a third child or give birth to a third child, your Basic Income amount is cut significantly, say by 50%, permanently. No appeal, no reversals. (Vasectomies and tubal ligations are free.) That should limit population growth effectively. And anyone who doesn’t care about the Basic Income check every month is free to father or mother as many children as they wish.
Playing devil’s advocate here:
Don’t you mean “each couple is limited to having two children. “? Even
then, what’s to stop a man or woman being serially married to multiple spouses, with each of whom they have one or two kids? It might be more feasible to mandate that each recipient has a right to one child to replace them.
When does the Basic Income begin? At birth? If so, who administers the money until the kid is old enough to handle it himself? The parents? What’s to prevent the parents from having multiple kids after the first two and sponging off the cash until the kids reach their majority?
Details, details ….
(Not the the Basic Income has even a snowball’s chance of becoming reality.)
(Edit: Apparently others were posting the same questions while I was composing mine! 🙂 )
“(Edit: Apparently others were posting the same questions while I was composing mine!”
I hate it when that happens!
What Greg is alluding to is the rapidly declining birth rate of peoples of European ancestry; we’ve already been limiting ourselves to far less than two kids per couple, for generations now. Russia, Germany, et. al. are watching their numbers drop as Third World immigrants swamp their countries and each couple from that group are having babies after babies after babies. Japan is also declining rapidly; the northern tier countries are looking at a future of aged and aging Caucasians versus hordes of much younger people from other groups, mostly south of the Equator, but also from the Middle East, China and South Asia.
So any Basic Income project is more or less doomed from the start; it’s moot. The people producing and paying for it all are dying off in multitudes, to be replaced by hundreds of millions of others with, let’s face it, lower IQs and zero experience of free and open democratic societies. This does not bode well for humanity’s future. I do not have much hope in a tiny core of super-intelligent people solving all these problems and saving the world; they’ll be overwhelmed.
It ain’t hard to imagine and write about a truly dystopian future that our grandkids will see: picture the Grid mostly down for most of the world; Peak Oil and the final end of Happy Motoring; a collapsed international financial system; agriculture ruined by either climate, disease and/or outright biological warfare sabotage, along with a destroyed potable water system. Martial law in most regions, with some declared no-go areas, as some already are for the cops, except by virtue of close-air-ground support and armor. 80% of the North Murkan pop dead and gone.
Hey, just working up my spiel for my new positive-speaker career. Later I’ll watch the second half of “Hurt Locker” to celebrate Armistice Day. Apparently the “city” up the road is having a couple of thousand skool kidz do a meet-and-greet on the common downtown tomorrow morning with area veterans, so the local Legion motorcycle crew will be there in full regalia, bands will play, parades will march, etc., etc. One of these days I’ll show up with a parade of ambulances and stretcher bearers hauling mangled and PTSD vets up from the VA hospital and we’ll tour downtown. We’ll distribute flyers with pics of all the property and people that have been blown to shit in the world since 1939, no, make that 1898, when this country decided to become an empire. And I’m old enough to remember vets of that earlier war marching in parades. It will be great! Fun times for all!
Viewings on the big screen later of “Hurt Locker,” “Stop-Loss,” “Hamburger Hill,” etc., back to “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
I’ve given up trying to find anything good, but open to suggestions.
Everything by Charles Stross is good. He has two main series: the “Family Traders” is a take on the parallel world walker genre, with an SF bent rather than fantasy. Second is the “Laundry” series: HP Lovecraft meets modern Spy Novel filtered through modern computer programmer culture, starts with “The Atrocity Archives”. (His politics are Scottish Socialist Atheist, but don’t really intrude on the books.)
I also recommend “Old Man’s War” and the sequels – an homage to Heinlein with modern computers and biotech.
Connie Willis has written some really good time travel books. “To Say Nothing of the Dog” is about a near future time travel researcher that gets sent back to Victorian England. A comedy of manners with SF frosting. Very good.
If you liked “Cryptonomicon”, you might like the sort-of prequel, the 3 volume “Baroque Cycle” set in Europe in the time of Newton and Liebnitz.
It ain’t hard to imagine and write about a truly dystopian future that our grandkids will see: picture the Grid mostly down for most of the world; Peak Oil and the final end of Happy Motoring; a collapsed international financial system; agriculture ruined by either climate, disease and/or outright biological warfare sabotage, along with a destroyed potable water system. Martial law in most regions, with some declared no-go areas, as some already are for the cops, except by virtue of close-air-ground support and armor. 80% of the North Murkan pop dead and gone.
Write the book! Make sure that it can easily be a series (yes, cliff hangers are ok if done well). Also make the hero an out of work IT dude just trying to survive cause, you know.
Of the two dystopian series that I like, one is a road IT guy who got stranded 300 miles away from home during the EMP event. The other is a mercenary XXXXXX special forces for KBR at home when the financial system collapsed.
BTW, Glenn Beck has already written a book about our grandkids living in what used to be America:
http://www.glennbeck.com/agenda21/
I just read my first Charles Stross book, “Neptune’s Brood”, and liked it quite a bit. Sadly, he has mankind dying out when we reach the stars because we are so fragile. Something about 50 gravities of acceleration and not being able to take much radiation from cosmic rays and unshielded nuclear reactors.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R25YA5H93JNWVE/
I’ve got “The Atrocity Archives” in my Strategic Book Reserve in one of the near term stacks.
Happy Veteran’s Day from the pricks at salon.com:
You don’t protect my freedom: Our childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes deadens real democracy
The *war* on women didn’t work out too well for the libturds. Next up the military and Vets. Salon is getting blasted good on social media and it is well deserved.
That Salon piece has its points, some of which I’ve made here more than once. That said, the dude is full of shit about WWII being a war for freedom and to protect CONUS. We should have stayed out of that one, too, but no, Pharaoh Roosevelt II and Winnie colluded in provoking the Imperial Japanese and they struck out in desperation. Even their top general thought that was a huge mistake.
Salon itself has gone rad-left in the last several years; from the late 90s into the Noughts I was among the handful of conservatives allowed to say stuff on their Table Talk blog, which ran for sixteen years. Then they dumped TT and the stories they’ve done since are largely like unto Marxist-Leninist cartoons and a combination of National Enquirer and “Challenge,” the organ of the Progressive Labor Party, Maoists.
To them every Repub is a Nazi, every white male a KKK member. The people who own and run it are leftover has-been commies from the heyday of Haight-Ashbury and the SF of the 60s and 70s. Rich white libturds who hate the country and its ordinary people and who revel in telling the rest of us how we should think and run our lives.
A prime example of the genre would be the President’s late mom; take a look sometime when you have a few minutes into the life of Ann Dunham; what a piece of work she was. Her, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dorhn, et. al.
Just finished “Hurt Locker” for the second time, to get me all primed up for Armistice Day, having also recently watched PBS’s “The Wipers Times,” which was done fairly well; I know the history of that particular Great War vignette pretty good by now.
Saw in the paper today there are around 16,000 ‘Nam vets in Vermont. And smaller numbers of the other wars; pretty soon we’ll follow the Good War guys into oblivion; our own kids already view it as ancient history anyway.
Spent most of the day playing with my new Linux Mint box. Tried my hand at Linux a few years ago but Ron Morse and I could never get dual monitors configured, so I’d abandoned it. I think I’ll like it… I’m already doing stuff from the terminal window, which I’ve missed. It’s so easy to issue just a simple command rather than scroll through an interminable menu of ‘helpful’ icons and now ‘wizards’.
Appreciate the sci-fi recommendations. Am I missing something, or is there a way to save Lynn’s reviews to my Amazon profile? Can I “friend him” for future reference?
OFD, if you haven’t read _Cryptonomicon_ then you’re in a for a treat. His _Baroque Cycle_ is a bit heavier reading, but you may enjoy it because of the history; esp. the economic history which he nails on the head. 400 years later and countries are still playing musical chairs with currency… Santayana was right.
Simmon’s _Hyperion_ will blow you away. I’ve only read the first three; I think he’s continued the saga since then. But he’s a classicist or else knows his history, as does John Crowley. Don’t miss _Little, Big_.
Don’t know why I can now edit comments. Maybe I just need to post more often?
Funny personal note, somewhat relevant. Long before I became acquainted with computers I was a window-washer. Pays really well once you’re good, BTW; so until Roomba comes up with Windaa, there’s still a market for skilled labor. I lived in San Jose at the time and managed to score the phone number 408-WINDOWS. Had I held onto that I wonder how much MSFT would have paid me for it?
Hell, getting dual monitors to work with Windows 7 and 8 is a hassle, too, depending on your hardware and whether Windows will “see” that other screen or let you add it. Haven’t tried it in Linux but may just for the fun of it.
I’ve read the whole Stephenson canon and will look at the Hyperion books next.
Got my PC-BSD DVD in the mail today so I’ll be playing with that and virtualization of the other BSD’s on the former Mint desktop. Putting regular ol’ FreeBSD on the refurbished laptop and building that as a security machine to go with the Santoku netbook. The other two desktops will remain Windows 8 and Ubuntu Studio.
You might try Robopocalypse and Robogenesis for SF interwoven story telling.
It’s a strange world we live in, true enough. Still… The mechanization of agriculture allowed – indeed forced – people to move to the cities to work in factories. The automation of manufacturing has already allowed – indeed forced – people to move into the service sector. The question is: to what extent will automation now take over the service sector?
A few random thoughts and examples:
– Grocery stores offer “self checkout” lanes. However, these are not (yet) more convenient for the customer, at least not the ones I have seen. It is too clearly simply tranferring work from the store to the customer, and few people use them. If they were to truly eliminate the work – for example, through the automatic recognition of all RFID tags in your basket without removing the groceries – then the acceptance would probably skyrocket.
– Hair stylists. While I could imagine a hair-cutting machine, part of the attraction is the personal attention. The alternative here would be to cut one’s own hair (as my older son does – he just runs the clippers over his scalp every couple of weeks). Nothing new coming here, nor likely to.
– In fast-food places, I’ve heard that some restaurants now have terminals where you enter your order. Fine, no problem. But in a nicer restaurant? A professional wait staff is part of the process, and I don’t really imagine that will change.
– Taxi drivers? I detest having to pretend to be sociable, when I’m just tired and want to be home. So, yes, please, a robot. However, robot drivers “en masse” will have to wait for the liability issues to be sorted, particularly in the “sue happy” USA.
– Bureaucrats and middle managers? They don’t need automated, they need eliminated. Not happening, at least, not in our lifetimes. Maybe in a few hundred years, when the current systems of government and business has evolved into something completely different.
– Tradespeople? In production, sure, but that has already largely happened. For repairs and alterations? I don’t see a robot fixing your leaking faucet, knocking out an interior wall, or rewiring that flaky lightswitch. The individual situations are far too variable; you would truly need a semi-sentient robot, which is still a long, long ways away.
In short, I just don’t see that dramatic a shift. We are already well underway along the automation curve. We are just seeing a continuation of the trend.
For employability: You do not need to have an above average IQ to cut hair, or wait a table, or fix a light switch. The problem we have is two-fold: first, a perception (or perhaps entitlement) problem, where too few people see such jobs as desirable. Why shouldn’t waiting tables be seen as something to do well, to take pride it? Second, an education problem: education needs not only to be of decent quality, but also appropriate to the ultimate career prospects of the people involved. The “world class college education” idiocy (thanks, Bill) needs to die.
As people continue to be displaced by automation, I just expect more service jobs to be created. Maybe, in 30 years, it will be normal for everyone to receive a massage just as often as they get a haircut? Or to have a personal trainer in the fitness studio.
Automation increases per capita productivity. Society must find ways to distribute this to the population at large – anything else leads to disaster. But: you cannot solve this with welfare, not even in the form of “basic income”. There is a very basic human need to feel useful, to feel needed. If you have this, poverty is secondary. If you don’t have it, having enough to eat, and your Obama phone, and your wide-screen TV still won’t make you happy. I am reminded of an African ambassador being given a tour of government housing in England. The welfare that the layabouts in England receive would be wealth in many African countries. Nonetheless, after seeing the housing projects, he came away saying “this is inhumane”, because the people had no purpose in their lives. That is far, far more important than money.
Hell, getting dual monitors to work with Windows 7 and 8 is a hassle, too
Never had a problem. Install the video card, start Windows up, let the drivers install, restart, dual monitor support. Most new machines will support video out of the VGA port and an HDMI port as dual monitor support is built into the motherboard. Hook a display up with HDMI and W7 knows and configures everything, restart and you have dual monitors without having to add a video card.
One system at the church we are running 4 monitors. That system is used to control the primary and secondary projectors along with a monitor system for the choir. Really easy to setup.
I completely agree with Brad. I’ll take it a little bit further. It’s not just purpose to their lives, it’s also the ability to change their lives. My wife and I were the typical middle class spend 105% of our income couple. We wanted to retire in 15 years, and to be able to afford to send our daughter to college at the same time. We decided to do something about it. We now have a plan. The plan requires some small sacrifices. I get up earlier to cook breakfast rather than eat from McDonalds. We eat healthier and spend less. It’s a small change with a small inconvenience, but we are slowly changing our lives.
Ditto: Two monitors are easy, both with Windows and Linux. For Linux, if you have an Nvidia graphics card, likely you will want to install the proprietary drivers.
Three or more monitors can apparently be difficult, at least, I have seen qualified people try it and give up. I would suggest a single graphics card that supports 3 (or 4) outputs, rather than trying to work with two graphics cards each with dual outputs. That would eliminate at least one potential problem. I just read a good review on the newest Nvidia 970/980 cards, which support 4 monitors.
I guess I should have qualified my mini-rant with the fact that I tried doing it with older machines at my last gig, where everybody absolutely insisted on having two monitors, whether attached to desktops or laptops. I just couldn’t do it with some older boxes, using Windows 7. I have yet to try it here but will double down and attempt it with Linux. That’s just the way I roll.
In some cases here Aborigines receive additional royalties from mining companies that they themselves call “sit down money”. It’s destroying their culture and they don’t take care of stuff like cars and houses because they don’t earn them. Some of their more enlightened leaders realise this and are calling for the abolition of sit down money, or at least not handing it directly to people.
I’m dead set against giving money to people for nothing: I consider it to be soul destroying. And I don’t think it will be necessary, we just need to let the labour market adjust.
Like the rest of what you said Brad and Dave B.
I agree in concept. I hate the idea of giving anyone anything. But practicality mandates the Basic Income or something similar. The problem with your scheme is that the labor market will indeed adjust. It’ll adjust right down to the point where all but the most highly-skilled people are worth the $0.10/hour they pay in Sri Lanka or whatever.
I suspect it will all be moot in just a few more years’ time anyway. The market is the market and whatever the national and international circumstances, it will adjust accordingly, as most of us here know full well. For example, if a true Grid-down dystopia goes into effect, retail store managers and fossil fuel distributors won’t be pulling down top dollar. On the other hand, someone who knows how to safely shut down a nuke reactor will.
Mrs. OFD had to take the red-eye flight last night from Phoenix and is just now arrived back in VT, at her mom’s for a nap before attempting to drive back up here. She said the plane bounced like crazy, worst she’s ever seen (in countless tens of thousands of miles of flight time over the years) as they came in over Lake Champlain to Burlap International Airport. We have 50-MPH gusts, and the passengers could see the whitecaps and surf below. The lake really looks like the ocean at these times, and peeps in the summuh who come from somewhere else have no ideer; they go out there in their little Sunfish or kayak and find they may as well be on the north Atlantic.
“It’ll adjust right down to the point where all but the most highly-skilled people are worth the $0.10/hour they pay in Sri Lanka or whatever.”
Not happening, I think. There are many types of work that don’t require very high intelligence but which can neither be done by a robot nor outsourced to Bangalore. I and the others have given examples before so I won’t try your patience. Stuff that you might think can be roboticised would need extensive testing and programming, it is the cost of doing this that will be prohibitive. It may be possible to construct and program a robot that correctly distinguishes between weeds and flowers and acts accordingly, but is it worth building one when people are available to do the job cheaply. Brad gave some good examples of what would be difficult to automate. Sure, automate car production lines, but other tasks requiring judgement would be more difficult.
I remember flying into Sydney in March 1988. I was pretty much convinced that the plane wouldn’t get down in one piece.
Mrs. OFD had to take the red-eye flight last night
Just dropped my wife off at the aeroport. She’s keynoting tonight for the Texas Superintendent Certification Program in Dallas. Then on to San Antone, OH, NE and back next week.
It’s pretty easy to use multi-monitors on Macs with Thunderbolt. You can daisy chain them. Or use the HDMI ports. I tried a HDMI monitor on my Macbook Pro. No problemo.
Hey MrAtoz, as much as your wife and mine are gone all the time we oughta see if we can time it for a week when they’re both gone and then link up and grab a chopper and a couple of M60s and tour Mordor and Babylon-On-The-Hudson; we’ll top it off with a little sweep of downtown Lost Wages before I drop you off. That’s right, drop YOU off; see, you’re gonna teach me how to fly one of them buggers during that week. I need a new trade, man.
re automation, I’m with RBT on this one. Automation will take over more and more of human work, or at least the economically valuable part of human work. Humans will still be needed for “the personal touch” where that’s a large part of what’s being paid for (eg, as mentioned, waiters in swank restaurants). For the foreseeable future humans will be needed for non-logical creativity in arts and STEM and what-not. Everything else is up for grabs.
Naysayers are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history and human ingenuity. Automatons may not be able to (economically) do specific tasks that are identified, but sidestepping the specific task and focusing on the overall goal is likely to suggest solutions. The canonical example is Rube Goldberg-esque machines for ironing shirts. The better solution was materials development so that shirts which don’t need to be ironed could be sold. Other examples I’m personally familiar with are redesigning some hand-assembled consumer product so it could be robotically assembled; the consumer didn’t care how it was held together.
Regarding the non-economically-valuable jobs, I actually have less hope that they’ll go away. Middle managers, bureaucrats, lawyers, and politicians (some overlap may be noticed) are going to hang on tooth and claw, insisting that their positions are much too vital to be automated away. They currently have disproportionate power, so getting rid of them will be a long time coming.
“The canonical example is Rube Goldberg-esque machines for ironing shirts.”
Every time I see that bit in “Take the Money and Run” with Woody Allen’s character trying to use that machine to press shirts in the prison I fall onto the floor crying I’m laughing so hard. His early flicks are gems; later on he got more weird with each one.
I agree with Mr. SteveF on getting rid of the parasites; it will take some genius with a knack for developing selective targeting of the current crop and then another one to ID the DNA that predicts future turds like this and nips them in the bud, so to speak.
Ah, yes. Take the Money and Run. To this day, I refer to guns as gubs.
Editability is powered by a script file loaded from the server. I sporadically see problems with not getting the edit/delete links below my comments, but reloading the page sometimes gets things going again. I don’t know if the problem is a transmission glitch giving my browser a bad script file (which is then held in cache), or if there’s a problem on the server side, or, for all I know, I had my chair leaned back at the wrong angle.
“…for all I know, I had my chair leaned back at the wrong angle.”
Yeah, probably leaning to the hard left, which always causes problems.
No, if I was going hard left, I’d be sure not to accept any responsibility for anything going wrong. I’d be looking for someone to blame, and someone to give me reparations.
Hater.
Not hating the hateworthy is treason to the non-hateworthy.
(Go ahead. Parse any useful content out of that. I dare you!)
Hey MrAtoz, as much as your wife and mine are gone all the time we oughta see if we can time it for a week when they’re both gone and then link up and grab a chopper
I used to give my crew chief stick time when I was flying Kiowas. That didn’t sound right. I shall teach Mr. OFD how to fly the Hubschrauber. Perhaps a mini gun instead of the M60?
“Not hating the hateworthy is treason to the non-hateworthy.”
Aiyooo! Make it stop!
I used to have a little pamphlet on how to diagram sentences. Luckily, I learnt the rudiments in 4th grade, but still wish I could find it because sometimes I construct sentences like that which boggle my own mind.
I agree that old hardware is more likely the problem with difficulties in multiple monitors. Could not get that to work on my 8 year-old laptop with ATI Radeon video running XP (capable of multiple monitors, but not for me), however no problem whatever with my Asus Zenbook running Linux Mint 17. Plug a monitor in anywhere (nVidia on this one with VGA and HDMI) and they can be assigned quite easily, including the laptop screen as a third, if desired.
All the time, I see guys on the radio automation forum, trying to use some ancient computer, and cannot get things working. Being only slightly behind the curve is so much easier than being with it or way behind. Ultimately, one of the senior forum members tells them to stop fighting the old equipment and just get something more up-to-date that is known to work. Strange how there is this magnetic attraction to using really old computers. Just because it will work on a P4 and only needs 500mb RAM does not make that the easiest platform to get working.
On the automation front, one of the things I learned sitting through testimony in lawsuits, is that up to now, machines that manufacture stuff have been custom-built. That is changing. Processes are being standardized. Sizes of things — like wires — are being made uniform and machines built around them. I think what we will see in the future are manufacturing machines that accomplish various things reduced to a few different processes, and those processes will be plugged together by design engineers, rather than making an entire assembly line by designing each step with a machine made from scratch by hand. Probably, 3D printers will turn out stuff that is then picked up and assembled by robots. But one thing is for sure: experimental or trial products that require labor-intensive crafting of a spec product is already a thing of the past. Product designs are going to be gradual improvements on previous ones, not a generational jump into something entirely new. We are already seeing that now with cell phones.
My chair is adjustable to tilt right or left, lean forward or back, and I have no trouble with the editing function.
“Perhaps a mini gun instead of the M60?”
Oh for sure! Why not both? I fired expert with the M60 but hey, miniguns are groovy.
“…lean forward or back…”
Well, if you watch MSNBC all the time you gotta lean forward, amirite? Whatever the fuck does that mean, anyway?
I don’t watch MSNBC, so I don’t know.