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sl4shd0rk writes:
"Bill Gates says everyone needs to prepare to be out of work in 20 years due to Robots/software taking over most jobs. In preparation for this, Gates recommends people 'should basically get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans' and reduce operating overhead for businesses by 'eliminating payroll and corporate income taxes while also not raising the minimum wage'. Bill Gates, you may recall, is the former CEO of Microsoft whose business acumen has brought the technology sector such things as Metro, Windows Phone and Xbox One.
BusinessInsider took a similar theme earlier this year."
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Bill Gates: Prepare to be Assimilated
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 2, Insightful) by prospectacle on Monday March 17 2014, @10:02PM
Firstly, most jobs that exist are completely unnecessary. You can tell because humanity existed for hundreds of thousands of years without them. Most jobs exist because someone with money thinks it will help them to make more money if they hire someone to do this job, or because a politician thinks it will help them keep their job. As a result, most jobs are about providing luxuries, and the demand for luxuries is effectively infinite.
Secondly, you'll always need humans to tell the robots what to do. Someone needs to interpret the will of the boss, to make sure the computers are performing as desired, and to instruct them when they need to change what they are doing. For a small enterprise this can be done by the boss alone, but for anything larger, the boss will need to delegate. Already most jobs involve telling computers what to do, at least some of the time. The bigger the enterprise, the more people you'll need to perform this function.
Thirdly, if robots ever become more accurate and reliable at understanding our requests and intentions, than other humans, then we'll just vote for whichever political party promises to build us all free robots. You may say that's not sustainable, but it will only need to be done once. After that our robots can build us new ones, or whatever else we want.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 2, Insightful) by codepigeon on Monday March 17 2014, @10:55PM
The problem with that common rebutal, humans will be needed to watch/maintain the robots, is that a single robot is used to replace several humans. A business may only hire a couple humans to maintain several bots; which replaced dozens of humans. Its still a net loss.
(Score: 1) by prospectacle on Tuesday March 18 2014, @12:45AM
Your scenario is only a net loss if you assume the amount of production stays the same. Generally that's not the case. If producing X gets cheaper, more X will be produced, and more companies can enter the market to compete to produce more X, or better X, or more customised X.
Look at any consumer product that's gone from hand-made to mass produced, and ask yourself if more people work in that industry now, or fewer?
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic