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from the ya-tvoy-sluga-ya-tvoy-rabotnik dept.
regift_of_the_gods writes:
"A study that was published last year by two Oxford researchers predicted that 47 percent of US jobs could be computerized within the next 20 years, including both manual labor and high cognition office work. The Oxford report presented three axes to show what types of jobs were relatively safe from being routed by robots and software; those requiring high levels of social intelligence (public relations), creativity (scientist, fashion designer), or perception and manipulation (surgeon) were less likely to be displaced.
This further obsolescence of jobs due to automation may have already begun. The Financial Times describes an emerging wave of products and services from algorithmic-intensive, data-rich tech startups that will threaten increasing numbers of jobs including both knowledge and blue collar workers. The lead example is Kensho, a startup founded by ex-Google and Apple engineers that is building an engine to estimate the impact of real or hypothetical news items on security prices, with questions posed in a natural language. Specialist knowledge workers in many other fields, including law and medicine, could also be at risk. At lower income levels, the dangerous are posed by increasingly agile and autonomous robots, such as those Amazon uses to staff some of its fulfillment warehouses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:22PM
Honestly, and I know how dangerous it is to say it, I wonder when the revolution will start.
Just how hard does it need to get, and just how fantastically unfair does it need to be, before the educated in this country start getting together in meetings and rationally discuss how to retire this government and start another.
I could have never even conceived of this level of corruption, theft of wealth from the poor and middle classes, absolute havoc WRT civil rights and freedoms, and complete one-sided representation 25 years ago.
We LIVE in a dystopia, and all the most frightening elements authors wrote about least century are being rapidly implemented.
Even as a peaceful person, I honestly question myself, and wonder at just which point will I be swept up with the masses in a new civil war.
That's not histrionics or cynicism. I sorely wish it was, I promise you. I wish to hell it was.
(Score: 1) by HiThere on Tuesday March 04 2014, @04:39PM
How bad does it need to be? It needs to be bad enough that you're willing to die uselessly rather than continue to live in the current system. And there needs to be support from some group among the privileged. And the military needs to have lost loyalty to the current government. There are a few other requirements, and even then a successful revolution is as likely to make things worse as to improve them.
But long before that happens the government will be experiencing a series of "coupe d'etat"s. (And what *is* the proper plural of that?)
Put not your faith in princes.
(Score: 1) by metamonkey on Tuesday March 04 2014, @04:54PM
To be honest, I don't understand why the next revolution would need to be violent, or need people taking to the streets. When I said "man the barricades" I was speaking figuratively. I imagine today, smart people would hold an online Constitutional Convention, come up with a new system of government and promote it online. Run it like a wikipedia/sourceforge for laws, funded via kickstarter and promoted via social networks. /b/lackup to stifle sockpuppets.
I don't see why anybody would need to get off the couch to revolt these days. It's sad that all of these unemployed, college educated people sit in front of the most powerful communications tool, the most powerful weapon in human history, with access to all the world's knowledge, and they use it for cat pictures and jacking off instead of organizing.
Left a beta website for an alpha website.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:40PM
Because all the constitutional conventions and so on in the world don't mean anything if nobody gets off the couch.
Let's say you live in a suburb and you get everyone in the suburb to agree on a new constitution, which is ratified, and you declare your independence, and your first actual step (because you're not big on getting up from the couch) is not to file taxes.
A bunch of letters get sent, which you use as firestarters.
A bunch of guys with guns get sent, and kick you out of your suburb because they're taking your stuff.
Revolution over, because nobody got off their couches.
(Score: 2) by jcd on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:46PM
Crane Brinton, is that you?
You are right, though.
I'm no French expert, but wouldn't the "coupe" be plural, since it translates to blow to the state?
"What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:35PM
I wouldn't bet on physical meetings. Not many, anyway. I'd bet on electronic meetings - which as a prerequisite have electronic systems which are a lot more secure than what we have now, to be successful.
That said, don't bet on unfairness being a driving factor either. Justice and equity are matters of opinion to at least some extent.
How hard it needs to get: people need to feel that they are effectively disenfranchised (i.e. that the current system is not addressing their complaints, regardless of whether or not voting is part of the system) and that a way of life they hold to be valuable is being withheld. This can be as stark as starvation, or as abstract as a government which shows every sign of impoverishing their children. Obvious corruption and other abuses can act as goads, but not every revolutionary army is emaciated and shivering.
And there you are; there's the trigger. You see yourself living in what you consider to be a dystopian, borderline kleptocratic society, and you could see yourself, maybe not today, but in the fairly near future, standing together with millions of others who feel the same way even if you do not specifically share every detail of ideology (because it's a cinch you wouldn't).
I see a couple of preconditions:
Coordination. If the Microsoft Militia of Redmond arise, they'll be squished flat in a month or less. If the Sagebrush Militia of Howling Madness, Wyoming, arise, their lifespan will be pretty similar. If every town and county from Redmond to Yellowstone rises at once, it won't be just a month (and it's pretty darned sure that a lot of the rest of the country will rise too, and I don't just mean three rednecks in Talking Cactus, Texas).
Basic consensus. Everyone doesn't have to agree on everything, but certain basics need to be agreed upon. It could be pretty abstract (a balanced budget and banning lobbyists) or relatively concrete (secession for Cascadia, Texas, and Dixie). Whether the Independent Republic of Texas is pro-choice or pro-life is not important to the Redmond Revolutionaries any more than the question of whistleblowing laws in Free Cascadia is to the Dallas Brigade.
Mutual support. If the cadres in Montana are taking a beating, folks in Spokane should be willing to take action, whether remote or local, to support their fellows. This might take the form of blocking roads to inhibit logistics, or riding over to Montana to shoot at the Great Satan from DC.
Strategically I would see the Bill of Rights as written in the current constitution as being a critical element. First because it has been so shamelessly, progressively trampled in wars on stuff, and second because a large number of soldiers, currently serving and inactive, actually care more about the constitution than they do about Washington DC's dictates. There are, last I heard, roughly 20 million veterans in the country and based on those I've met, I'd expect that about 15 million of them would support a movement for the bill of rights over Congress.
Also, even if 1 million folks stand up with rifle in hand to tell the feds (in whichever form) to get lost, a real deciding factor will be another 10 million who don't fight directly, but support them with caches of food and/or ammunition, medical care (first line or hospital), intelligence on the ground, transport, a warm place to sleep at night, computer services, equipment manufacture and repair, radio services and so on.
I could even perfectly well foresee a bunch of revolutionary supporters in, say, San Francisco, not touching a gun, but designing drones or remote controlled robots or surveillance systems which can easily be slapped together in a machine shop on a farm somewhere. Fifty rednecks with rifles are a minor pain in the butt. Fifty rednecks running drones which can drop napalm and thermite all over valuable equipment are a major problem. Fifty rednecks who have such drones, and also have remote controlled rifles which command a valley have a presence which can tie up a couple of regiments for a long time.
But I'm not a military strategist or a political scientist. Those guys would have much better ideas, which would get a lot fewer people killed than my ramblings.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:12AM
I see that without any doubt whatsoever.
Not because I'm angry (I am), not because I wish for violence (I'm very close to a pacifist), and not because I intrinsically wish to destabilize any form of government (why?), and most assuredly not because I think I know everything, all the answers, and the exact right way to run this country (I know that I know less than what I don't know by far).
It's because I will be forced to act to provide some sort of logistics (which I am good at it) for food, shelter, and clothing. Isn't greatness usually thrust upon the shoulders of someone unwilling? I don't mean that egotistically. Just that I'm confident enough in my skill sets, and confident enough in knowing myself, that I could not sit by with inaction while my brothers and sisters fought for a better world for me and our children.
Why will that happen?
Our democratic process is broken to such an extent that Americans are almost 3rd class citizens in their own country simply because of the inability for our government to fulfill their charter and purpose. That purpose was to provide an EQUAL foundation in which we could all enjoy the ideals of freedom and the benefits of prosperity.
Government doesn't do that. They do the opposite, which is to serve monied interests that are intrinsically evil. Evil not by appeal to emotion or histrionics, but evil by definition; The monied interests only serve their short term goals while being perfectly aware of the harm they cause. The great tragedy is that it is most likely not a singular awareness at all. There is no Hitler. It's mob mentality. Only acting together with cognitive dissonance and the justification that everyone does it, and nothing can change, does the 1% act so abhorrently. It's broken the democratic process with flawed logic, fear, illusions of sustainable growth and wealth, and the more or less direct wholesale bribery of the EXACT people that should be above all that, the people that should know better, the people that should be the smartest and the wisest of us, capable of leading us and protecting us. The 1% has so fully pushed the political process from grace, that it wouldn't know the light if they were on fire.
They are a virus, a blight, a pox upon the civilized world. We are not dealing with it properly, and at some point, we either deal with it or perish.
Revolution is not just a possibility, it's an inevitability if we continue to be paralyzed and fail to enact protections, reforms, and a movement back towards the legal embodiments of our American ideals. This revolution has the possibility of being without bloodshed of any kind, and might not even meet the definition of a revolution at all. It could be an evolution.
I sorely wish we did not have to wait 1 minute till midnight on the clock to act. I know from quite unfortunate experience (as do we all) that in the worst cases you don't get to appeal to God to get an extra few seconds. You can't stop your momentum if you try, and as causality is quite a bitch, you die.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @02:29AM
It's because I will be forced to act to provide some sort of logistics (which I am good at it) for food, shelter, and clothing. Isn't greatness usually thrust upon the shoulders of someone unwilling? I don't mean that egotistically. Just that I'm confident enough in my skill sets, and confident enough in knowing myself, that I could not sit by with inaction while my brothers and sisters fought for a better world for me and our children.
If you are a techie, probably the single most revolutionary thing you could do is work towards a truly secure, safely pseudonymous forum with a troll-resistant interface. That is basically what would be necessary to foster the kind of discussion which could bring people together to actually discuss how to fix things. In a perfect world, not only would it be unnecessary, but the duty of guys like the FBI would be to monitor the discussion (you couldn't keep them out, practically) and to inform their masters of why and how the people are truly disgruntled so that they could fix what's broken. In the real world, their mission appears to be to diffuse and stifle dissent rather than address the root causes.
The real problem with this is that the longer they put it off, the worse it gets until you have a truly monstrous situation at hand.
Why will that happen?
Our democratic process is broken to such an extent that Americans are almost 3rd class citizens in their own country simply because of the inability for our government to fulfill their charter and purpose. That purpose was to provide an EQUAL foundation in which we could all enjoy the ideals of freedom and the benefits of prosperity.
I am not disagreeing (although I see room for disagreement around the description of the purpose of government) but I can't really disagree with the observation that the democratic process is showing signs of strain, to say the least. That description matches the sense of disenfranchisement which is typical of revolutionaries. If you felt you had a place at the table, so to speak, you wouldn't be motivated to support the flipping of the table.
Government doesn't do that. They do the opposite, which is to serve monied interests that are intrinsically evil. Evil not by appeal to emotion or histrionics, but evil by definition; The monied interests only serve their short term goals while being perfectly aware of the harm they cause. The great tragedy is that it is most likely not a singular awareness at all. There is no Hitler. It's mob mentality. Only acting together with cognitive dissonance and the justification that everyone does it, and nothing can change, does the 1% act so abhorrently. It's broken the democratic process with flawed logic, fear, illusions of sustainable growth and wealth, and the more or less direct wholesale bribery of the EXACT people that should be above all that, the people that should know better, the people that should be the smartest and the wisest of us, capable of leading us and protecting us. The 1% has so fully pushed the political process from grace, that it wouldn't know the light if they were on fire.
They are a virus, a blight, a pox upon the civilized world. We are not dealing with it properly, and at some point, we either deal with it or perish.
I'm unsure that the 1% is a useful target. Depending on your definition, the 1% could be a fairly prosperous plumber, or a successful farmer after a bumper crop. It sounds to me as if you're more concerned with the political class, and the upper echelons of unelected officials, and the ecosystem of lobbyists and similar folk around them.
Revolution is not just a possibility, it's an inevitability if we continue to be paralyzed and fail to enact protections, reforms, and a movement back towards the legal embodiments of our American ideals. This revolution has the possibility of being without bloodshed of any kind, and might not even meet the definition of a revolution at all. It could be an evolution.
I sorely wish we did not have to wait 1 minute till midnight on the clock to act. I know from quite unfortunate experience (as do we all) that in the worst cases you don't get to appeal to God to get an extra few seconds. You can't stop your momentum if you try, and as causality is quite a bitch, you die.
I've heard it suggested that the revolution will come when the ACLU and the NRA have both had enough. When they make peace, and the NRA becomes the ACLU's armed wing, the revolution will come. I don't know how plausible that is, but it's definitely not a secret that both groups are showing increasing signs of frustration.
The best chance of peaceful evolution is the elected officials getting smart and working to restore civil liberties as written, but I am definitely not holding my breath. The priorities are too distorted.