There are glaring flaws in their analysis in all five cases, and no solid connection to the sweeping claim they're baiting peoople with.
E.g. 3D printers are awesome, but they have major limitations. Anyone claiming that they have any chance of wiping out the clothing industry in the foreseeable future has no bloody clue about the topic, or how well people would take to wearing 1mm resolution deposited ABS plastic instead of finely-woven textiles.
The article is making a prediction about the future and technology normally improves with time. Your example implies that you think we'll be stuck with 1mm resolution and with deposited ABS plastic. I think 3D printers of the not so distant future will finely weave textiles. Amongst other things.
"Finely-woven textiles"---this tells me you know very little about the last 150 years of weaving technology. We no longer have such a thing and have not had since the 20th century. The last looms capable of doing that kind of work hit the scrap heap well more than 20 years ago. Closest thing to it (and that's not all that close) are produced on islands off of the cost of Scotland; heavily subsidized and tightly controlled. Google Draw, Dobbie and Jacquard looms, history of. Yes as a hand weaver you can go out and buy one, but forget about commercial production, that day has been and gone.
Hey. What are you talking about? The poster you replied to compares 3-D printing quality to today's textile manufacture and concluded that the latter was too coarse. Does the existence of historical weaving techniques, which may have been superior to modern weaving techniques for those who could afford them, render his assertion false?
If you went back in time 150 years ago you could find the same story in major media - except replace 3d printing with cotton loom, AI with steam engines, etc.
I was reading the comments and someone asked the author about the energy invention he was talking about:
"Since I signed an NDA, I’m not able to give you details. But what I will say is that I’ve looked at hundreds of energy related inventions over the years and none have the potential of this one. Its quite obvious how it works, and operates silently inside a container without the need for any external power, water, or other inputs. There is no pollution. And the best part is that it serves as a mass energy storage system, efficiently storing power from one day to the next."
He really means 2 billion jobs to shift by 2030. Sure, a lot of people will need to learn to adapt and learn new skills, but most of them are not going to be out of work.
Take 3D printers - they're nowhere near as good as everyone thinks. You don't just load metal powder, print your stuff and ship it. You still need to prepare the stuff, treat the materials, color them, do quality control and do other stuff - all of which requires hands (and not the robot kind, either)...
Maybe the mainstream media should be asked to report on some good stuff, too, instead of all the doom and gloom - I'm pretty sure that's a major reason why people are scared, desperate and start rioting in streets...
Greece is an interesting example - those people have two choices - bailout and buy more time for making things better or be out of jobs and with no pension - they choose the latter because they think that the "banker overlords will screw us over" - the heck does that even mean?
"Hands, and not the robot kind either?" Why not use the robot kind? You're already investing in a fair little bit of capital. As a 3-D printing factory scales up, why wouldn't they invest in additional automation for handling materials that may products have in common?
True, it's possible to do it (the ABB Frida is the first thing that comes to mind - it's pretty damn impressive, just needs a set of legs/wheels), but setting everything up will most likely be more expensive than just hiring people, at least by 2030...
The figure of two billion could be an exaggeration, but it may also be true that a big chunk of the employment pie is currently disappearing.
If you're a poorly educated westerner, there isn't much for you to do even now. OECD countries all complain about households in which nobody has ever worked. Given the falling relative and absolute standards of education, it's hard to see opportunities for them.
To my mind, automation and low wages elsewhere in the world have had a big impact on the labour pool. This may be difficult for highly employable folk reading this board to grasp, but consider what folk are doing as they leave college. Sure, lots of them are getting well-paid jobs, but a heck of a lot are interning and struggling along with 10-dollar jobs on the freelance auction sites.
But why is there a general panic when the possibility of the end of work arises? For billions of people it would mean freedom from drudgery and the prospect of doing more fulfilling things instead - looking after families, creating things, learning new stuff and so on.
they themselves will have to produce value - they will just be producing those value not as part of employment, but for themselves (e.g., subsistance living? cottage industry?).
The only way I can think of to pay for this, is for the more productive people to pay, in the form of a citizen's wage. We have the first inkling of this in Britain, in the form of the proposed universal credit.
But it should be borne in mind that stuff is getting cheaper, thanks to automation. The proportion of income spent on food has fallen from 33% to 15% in fifty years.
In any case, I think we have little option. It's possible that current employment problems are a blip, but annual hours worked per person have fallen by around 25% since 1950. And halved since the 19th century. It looks like a trend to me.
People panic because a society where the majority cannot do worthwhile work cannot continue to function as it currently does. Change will necessarily come about through cooperation or force because people's lives will literally depend upon it. Change is scary, nevermind one that large.
He is predicting that around 50% of all jobs on the planet will be destroyed in the next 18 years. This means that less than 3% of all jobs will be destroyed per year.
Question: How many jobs are destroyed per year normally, just as part of normal churn?
Answer: In the US, around 10%. Europe is broadly similar. Reliable data for China is very hard to come by, but it seems that, if anything, they are experiencing much more rapid dislocation.
In other words, his prediction is probably wildly conservative. Many parts of the world will probably see something closer to 200% of all jobs destroyed, or more than four times his estimate. And that's without postulating anything more radical than what has been happening every year for decades.
(Also: Note that these are all gross job destruction numbers, not net. Probably obvious, but worth emphasizing.)
Jobs are created all the time as well. New restaurants debut, new factories come online, new houses are built. If jobs weren't also being destroyed at a significant rate, then we would quickly have more jobs than people to work them.
Think of it in terms of mayflies. ~100% of all the mayflies in existence are destroyed every three days. It takes about six days to destroy 200% of the mayflies in the world. Jobs are like that, just a little less transient.
One of the main issues to me is that these things keep getting imagined in a vacuum, a place where logic reigns and technology as as perfect as its imagined.
For example this:
>Neighborhoods will be designed differently and all City planning departments will have to rethink their jobs.
This is not much different than today. But, at the same time, you could imagine that sentence to imply vast change. (remind me of the cold reading article the other day)
And:
>One thing I’m not saying is that we will have 2 billion more people unemployed. Rather we will be forced to rethink the whole process of job creation, and we will need to do that very quickly.
How is it that this will be true in 2030 but ALSO happen very quickly?
And:
>Working closely with the inventor community, I’ve had the unusual opportunity to see breakthrough technologies at the formative stages, and there are several around the edges that are now reaching the boiling point.
I mean, it's great to have enthusiasm, but c'mon. We've heard these things over and over --something could finally work out, but the odds are against those techs being the silver bullet in Coal/Petroleum/Nuclear. Lead bullets, yes. But those take many decades.
I mean, optimism is great, but I think he's gone overboard and kind of forgot a bit of skepticsm.
Great, that means 2 billion fewer suckers get to live it up while those who are left have to slave away to bankroll the rest.
I could see this model turning into something which looks like poor nations such as the Philippines. Not that the global economy would go to crap and every country would be poor, but rather that a large number of people in a family either don't work or work very little while receiving food, money and a place to live from the working members of the family. Even those who do work often receive so little for that work that they need a piece of the remittance pie to be able to afford anything more than the bare basics. Despite this (or perhaps because of it) people here in general seem to be very happy.
The major problem I have with this is with "Education". Education does not solely consist of listening to lectures; it's a process that takes place between the educator and the student, and sometimes, you need a faculty member to talk to, simply because you have questions that are different from everyone else's. Khan Academy and similar efforts only go so far—not everyone learns best the same way. Colleges will certainly evolve and change in their methodology, but I don't believe that jobs in academia will change and/or disappear so drastically.
Somewhat accurate. But I don't see why we would need more emergency workers when things go wrong with robotic transportation. We should be needing fewer.
And we'll have more automated emergency workers that can, for example, delivered medical care to someone before they can even be removed from a collapsed car or crushed building.
So here we have a man who bills himself as "Google's top-rated futurist speaker". What the hell does that mean? According to his bio he doesn't work for Google, nor does he list Google among his clients. Oh, I see, he's at the top of the Google search results for "futurist speaker".
Frankly, I'm deeply suspicious of anyone making a living as a "futurist" least of all someone who's claim to fame is to have risen to the SEO challenge. Like all good futurists, his stock in trade is big, jaw-dropping visions of the future that drum up some headlines and grab some attention (not to mention that all important Google rank).
And his view of the future is simply preposterous. That teachers will disappear because now we have computers! Lord Jesus haven't we put that one to rest yet? We've been kicking that idea around for twenty years and we now know for a certainty that computers can be a useful adjunct to learning but in no way can replace the student teacher interaction. Or someday in the near future, 3D printers will be churning out iPads and blue jeans. I'm sorry, but this is a completely crock that defies the laws of physics and the boundaries of common sense.
Who knows? Maybe someday we'll discover some magical way to transform atomic structures within a reasonably small, energy efficient end user device. Some collection of materials, tools and techniques we can't even conceive of today, but for now it IS literally inconceivable (notwithstanding the hand waving of self described "futurists").
Wild prediction: automated pizza delivery robots will start carrying a cat onboard to incentivize people to not destroy said robots for fun as they whiz by.
Some of the human workers that the author sees fit to eliminate actually provide very useful functions that machines can't.
I can envision how driverless buses and trains could work, but in cities like New York where one hears about crime on public transit all the time, I'm not sure I'd like to be the last passenger on an unmanned bus at midnight. It would be a bit creepy.
How would a driverless pizza delivery truck get my pizza to me if I lived on the 18th floor of a high-rise apartment building? If it couldn't deliver to my door, then it would be quickly put out of business by human drivers who could.
Also:
- Can we really envision being able to print construction materials that have the strength of reinforced concrete at anywhere near the cost of concrete? Could you print the foundation of a house? A road? An overpass? Can you economically replace a wooden 2-by-4 with printed plastic? What would happen to the price of oil if you suddenly started making lots of building materials out of plastic?
- Will an air conditioner-sized power generation unit that you own have the reliability of a large power plant? What will you do if it breaks down and you don't have the $10,000 it takes to buy a new one? Doesn't a centralized power structure bring certain economies of scale? There may be a lot of people working in various parts of the power distribution network, but it's not obvious that you could do it more cheaply or with fewer people if everybody owned their own power generation hardware.
- Those 3-D printed shoes certainly don't look like they'd be comfortable to wear, let alone walk in.
I'm very skeptical about these predictions, given that none of them come with any kind of analysis that compares current and future costs. But I guess that would be the domain of engineers, and "futurists" can't be bothered with those pesky details.
http://matternet.net/ Point to point delivery may not be such a far fetched idea technologically. Quadcopters are becoming more and more common. But legal and security hurdles may slow down the adoption of such services.
More likely is that you'll be expected to pick up the pizza from the street, instead of having it delivered to your door.
Imagine having the choice of two pizza places - both charge the same price for the pizza, and taste just as good. One uses human drivers who drop it off at your door - but expect to be tipped. The other uses robotic delivery trucks; you have to pick the food up at the street, but you don't have to tip. Which would you choose? Or rather, which would the median pizza purchaser choose?
This is analogous to how a lot of automated or "self-service" services work, such as grocery checkouts[1], or petrol stations[2]. The automated service is often inferior in every way but price...but that's usually enough.
[1]: This is a bit of a special case; in my experience the automated checkouts aren't cheaper, so I only use them when they'll clearly save me time due to shorter lines. Still, time is money, so I think it's still an example of an inferior -but-cheaper service.
[2]: I understand that concerted lobbying has resulted in laws preventing people from pumping their own gas in some US states. For the sake of this post, pretend you live somewhere where self-service stations are the norm, as the are in most of the world.
Flying drones (and thus window-level delivery) would be much easier and more effective to implement for a few reasons:
1) Pathfinding is easier as it doesn't have to concern itself with roads or obstacles for most of it's route. Just fly up to a reasonable altitude (just enough to clear buildings in the way) and all the drone has to worry about is adjusting for wind and "last-mile" (your window) navigation. Once they start hitting critical mass we'd start seeing infrastructure to keep the drones moving; homing beacons and landing pads on your window, and drone towers (either standalone or grafted onto existing skyscrapers) to refuel(/charge) drones and hoist them up to a high altitude, allowing them to rely more on gliding vs. their own power.
2) Less of a chance to run someone over. Again; since it's not in conflict with existing infrastructure, it's less likely to suddenly find a 6-year-old in front of it. The flip side is that it's going to hurt if the drone fails and drops out of the sky; this can be remedied by a fail-safe (such as a parachute that physically breaks open at a certain velocity; independent of the nav systems)
3) Commercial advantages: besides the general advantages of a drone-based delivery; a flying drone doesn't get stuck in traffic as it's skipping roads entirely. Thus, using a flying drone will give you a significant advantage over your ground-based (be they human or drone) competition re: delivery times. If they aren't faster; they're at least going to be far more predictable.
What about a pizza hotbox sized robot that can climb stairs. In a place where citizens don't break things on the street that would be a pretty quirky and highly plausible restaurant idea. You wouldn't even need incredible driving AI, you could just outsource the delivery jobs to somewhere cheaper.
42 comments
[ 9.5 ms ] story [ 96.9 ms ] threadE.g. 3D printers are awesome, but they have major limitations. Anyone claiming that they have any chance of wiping out the clothing industry in the foreseeable future has no bloody clue about the topic, or how well people would take to wearing 1mm resolution deposited ABS plastic instead of finely-woven textiles.
"Since I signed an NDA, I’m not able to give you details. But what I will say is that I’ve looked at hundreds of energy related inventions over the years and none have the potential of this one. Its quite obvious how it works, and operates silently inside a container without the need for any external power, water, or other inputs. There is no pollution. And the best part is that it serves as a mass energy storage system, efficiently storing power from one day to the next."
Take 3D printers - they're nowhere near as good as everyone thinks. You don't just load metal powder, print your stuff and ship it. You still need to prepare the stuff, treat the materials, color them, do quality control and do other stuff - all of which requires hands (and not the robot kind, either)...
Maybe the mainstream media should be asked to report on some good stuff, too, instead of all the doom and gloom - I'm pretty sure that's a major reason why people are scared, desperate and start rioting in streets...
Greece is an interesting example - those people have two choices - bailout and buy more time for making things better or be out of jobs and with no pension - they choose the latter because they think that the "banker overlords will screw us over" - the heck does that even mean?
If you're a poorly educated westerner, there isn't much for you to do even now. OECD countries all complain about households in which nobody has ever worked. Given the falling relative and absolute standards of education, it's hard to see opportunities for them.
To my mind, automation and low wages elsewhere in the world have had a big impact on the labour pool. This may be difficult for highly employable folk reading this board to grasp, but consider what folk are doing as they leave college. Sure, lots of them are getting well-paid jobs, but a heck of a lot are interning and struggling along with 10-dollar jobs on the freelance auction sites.
But why is there a general panic when the possibility of the end of work arises? For billions of people it would mean freedom from drudgery and the prospect of doing more fulfilling things instead - looking after families, creating things, learning new stuff and so on.
But it should be borne in mind that stuff is getting cheaper, thanks to automation. The proportion of income spent on food has fallen from 33% to 15% in fifty years.
In any case, I think we have little option. It's possible that current employment problems are a blip, but annual hours worked per person have fallen by around 25% since 1950. And halved since the 19th century. It looks like a trend to me.
At least partly because here in the USA (YMMV in other countries) we've spent much of the last century vilifying the idea of socialism.
He is predicting that around 50% of all jobs on the planet will be destroyed in the next 18 years. This means that less than 3% of all jobs will be destroyed per year.
Question: How many jobs are destroyed per year normally, just as part of normal churn?
Answer: In the US, around 10%. Europe is broadly similar. Reliable data for China is very hard to come by, but it seems that, if anything, they are experiencing much more rapid dislocation.
In other words, his prediction is probably wildly conservative. Many parts of the world will probably see something closer to 200% of all jobs destroyed, or more than four times his estimate. And that's without postulating anything more radical than what has been happening every year for decades.
(Also: Note that these are all gross job destruction numbers, not net. Probably obvious, but worth emphasizing.)
Think of it in terms of mayflies. ~100% of all the mayflies in existence are destroyed every three days. It takes about six days to destroy 200% of the mayflies in the world. Jobs are like that, just a little less transient.
For example this:
>Neighborhoods will be designed differently and all City planning departments will have to rethink their jobs.
This is not much different than today. But, at the same time, you could imagine that sentence to imply vast change. (remind me of the cold reading article the other day)
And:
>One thing I’m not saying is that we will have 2 billion more people unemployed. Rather we will be forced to rethink the whole process of job creation, and we will need to do that very quickly.
How is it that this will be true in 2030 but ALSO happen very quickly?
And:
>Working closely with the inventor community, I’ve had the unusual opportunity to see breakthrough technologies at the formative stages, and there are several around the edges that are now reaching the boiling point.
I mean, it's great to have enthusiasm, but c'mon. We've heard these things over and over --something could finally work out, but the odds are against those techs being the silver bullet in Coal/Petroleum/Nuclear. Lead bullets, yes. But those take many decades.
I mean, optimism is great, but I think he's gone overboard and kind of forgot a bit of skepticsm.
I could see this model turning into something which looks like poor nations such as the Philippines. Not that the global economy would go to crap and every country would be poor, but rather that a large number of people in a family either don't work or work very little while receiving food, money and a place to live from the working members of the family. Even those who do work often receive so little for that work that they need a piece of the remittance pie to be able to afford anything more than the bare basics. Despite this (or perhaps because of it) people here in general seem to be very happy.
And we'll have more automated emergency workers that can, for example, delivered medical care to someone before they can even be removed from a collapsed car or crushed building.
And why would we need dispatchers?
Frankly, I'm deeply suspicious of anyone making a living as a "futurist" least of all someone who's claim to fame is to have risen to the SEO challenge. Like all good futurists, his stock in trade is big, jaw-dropping visions of the future that drum up some headlines and grab some attention (not to mention that all important Google rank).
And his view of the future is simply preposterous. That teachers will disappear because now we have computers! Lord Jesus haven't we put that one to rest yet? We've been kicking that idea around for twenty years and we now know for a certainty that computers can be a useful adjunct to learning but in no way can replace the student teacher interaction. Or someday in the near future, 3D printers will be churning out iPads and blue jeans. I'm sorry, but this is a completely crock that defies the laws of physics and the boundaries of common sense.
You don't think this is true? For sufficiently large values of "near future"? 100 years? 50?
I can envision how driverless buses and trains could work, but in cities like New York where one hears about crime on public transit all the time, I'm not sure I'd like to be the last passenger on an unmanned bus at midnight. It would be a bit creepy.
How would a driverless pizza delivery truck get my pizza to me if I lived on the 18th floor of a high-rise apartment building? If it couldn't deliver to my door, then it would be quickly put out of business by human drivers who could.
Also:
- Can we really envision being able to print construction materials that have the strength of reinforced concrete at anywhere near the cost of concrete? Could you print the foundation of a house? A road? An overpass? Can you economically replace a wooden 2-by-4 with printed plastic? What would happen to the price of oil if you suddenly started making lots of building materials out of plastic?
- Will an air conditioner-sized power generation unit that you own have the reliability of a large power plant? What will you do if it breaks down and you don't have the $10,000 it takes to buy a new one? Doesn't a centralized power structure bring certain economies of scale? There may be a lot of people working in various parts of the power distribution network, but it's not obvious that you could do it more cheaply or with fewer people if everybody owned their own power generation hardware.
- Those 3-D printed shoes certainly don't look like they'd be comfortable to wear, let alone walk in.
I'm very skeptical about these predictions, given that none of them come with any kind of analysis that compares current and future costs. But I guess that would be the domain of engineers, and "futurists" can't be bothered with those pesky details.
Since we're talking far-out future anyway, it's not hard to imagine a delivery drone-copter that flies your pizza to you right outside your window.
Imagine having the choice of two pizza places - both charge the same price for the pizza, and taste just as good. One uses human drivers who drop it off at your door - but expect to be tipped. The other uses robotic delivery trucks; you have to pick the food up at the street, but you don't have to tip. Which would you choose? Or rather, which would the median pizza purchaser choose?
This is analogous to how a lot of automated or "self-service" services work, such as grocery checkouts[1], or petrol stations[2]. The automated service is often inferior in every way but price...but that's usually enough.
[1]: This is a bit of a special case; in my experience the automated checkouts aren't cheaper, so I only use them when they'll clearly save me time due to shorter lines. Still, time is money, so I think it's still an example of an inferior -but-cheaper service.
[2]: I understand that concerted lobbying has resulted in laws preventing people from pumping their own gas in some US states. For the sake of this post, pretend you live somewhere where self-service stations are the norm, as the are in most of the world.
1) Pathfinding is easier as it doesn't have to concern itself with roads or obstacles for most of it's route. Just fly up to a reasonable altitude (just enough to clear buildings in the way) and all the drone has to worry about is adjusting for wind and "last-mile" (your window) navigation. Once they start hitting critical mass we'd start seeing infrastructure to keep the drones moving; homing beacons and landing pads on your window, and drone towers (either standalone or grafted onto existing skyscrapers) to refuel(/charge) drones and hoist them up to a high altitude, allowing them to rely more on gliding vs. their own power.
2) Less of a chance to run someone over. Again; since it's not in conflict with existing infrastructure, it's less likely to suddenly find a 6-year-old in front of it. The flip side is that it's going to hurt if the drone fails and drops out of the sky; this can be remedied by a fail-safe (such as a parachute that physically breaks open at a certain velocity; independent of the nav systems)
3) Commercial advantages: besides the general advantages of a drone-based delivery; a flying drone doesn't get stuck in traffic as it's skipping roads entirely. Thus, using a flying drone will give you a significant advantage over your ground-based (be they human or drone) competition re: delivery times. If they aren't faster; they're at least going to be far more predictable.
What about the last passenger on an empty subway car?
As for reinforced concrete and 2x4s, these are already mass manufactured products. There is no reason to 3d print them.
Also, do the 3d printed shoes look worse than these? http://styloot.com/shop/shop/#/category=54cad3dc-1b9c-11e0-8... (disclaimer: link to my startup)
It sounds too good to be true.