Dev.SN

Bill Gates: Prepare to be Assimilated

posted by janrinok on Monday March 17 2014, @08:03PM   
from the borg-revisited dept.

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."

• Re:no physical labor, eh? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:14PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:14PM (#18168)

  Not even remotely accurate. With no due respect, you guys need to get out and see the real world. AI has nothing whatsoever to do with it. And I say this as someone who's worked with robotics. Among other things, I repair CAT scanners. Some of my customer sites are in the middle of nowhere. It is never going to make financial sense to get a robot out there instead of me. These are places that lease their CT because buying one doesn't make sense. OK, so they won't buy/lease the repair robot. My employee will, and replace me. So how does that work? They put it on a plane and fly to the nearest city? Coach or in the main baggage compartment? If coach, how are they getting to the airport, through ticketing, through security, down the concourse, onto the airplane, securely fastened in a seat? How do they get out again once they arrive? What about travel from the airport to the site? You need a pretty autonomous robot for all that, and a lot of people to handle it, or a lot of additional robots to handle it. But really, you're not going to have an iRobot. You're going to have something specialized. A lot of somethings specialized. Who's going to set them up and make sure they're calibrated to they're locale? Plus the logistics mentioned above? For the work itself, there are fasteners spaced high and low, all around. There are covers that need to be pulled up, out, then lifted, then braced. Others where the rails need to be pulled out, then apart, then out, then lifted completely off. That's just two of the five covers that HAVE to come off on any job and ignores the other nine (major ones) that might have to come off. Again, just outer covers. What about routing signal and power cables? Things that are behind things? Again, either an iRobot, or a bunch of specialized robots. There's a huge difference between a robot doing this on an assembly line and it doing it in the field. And if you'd ever actually been in a factory, you'd see how much work is still done by meat sacks because the robotics required would be overly cumbersome and costly to do it. Sorry, but that HDD comment was just plain...wrong. The machines I'm talking about are closer to a car in complexity than to a PC, except that they're not mobile. So, yes, that $30K board will need to be replaced and no, you're not going to replace the entire $2M system because of a bad board (which would take an additional week, at least, to get the old one out and the new one in and won't be done by robots either). Sure, someday there will be a robot (and it might need to be humanoid shape to have the range of motion, balance, reach, etc for these jobs) that can handle some of this. It sure as hell will not be in 20 years. Frankly, I doubt it'll be 50 years. Get off your Mom's couch and walk around her house. Refrigerator, microwave, stove, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, TV, HVAC. Who's getting all this stuff to your house? Sure, a robot could load them up onto an AI-controlled delivery vehicle. How are they getting off the truck? Into the house? Into the proper location? Hooked up? It's just plain wishful thinking to believe that THE VAST MAJORITY OF JOBS will be taken over by computers and robots, especially in 20 years.

  Parent