Rise of the machines: Automation reshapes job market
"Looking at a map of California on a projector screen, Johannes Moenius, an economics professor at the University of Redlands, hovered his mouse over the Inland Empire, which glowed with a splotch of red pixels. The colored dots signified how susceptible an area would be to job losses caused by automation. And the alarm-bell red that covered Riverside, San Bernardino and Ontario signaled high risk — roughly 63 percent of tasks performed by workers in the area could be automated in the future. To Moenius, the rise of robots in warehouses, factories and fast-food restaurants presents danger for places like the Inland Empire, where most residents work in logistics and the service industry and just 21 percent of adults have four-year degrees. As technology transforms the nature of work in California, how do people most at risk find their way to new jobs? “We’re facing a major challenge,” Moenius said. “If we don’t do anything, then it will turn into an apocalypse.'" One would think an economics professor might know something about the history of jobs if he is to speak on jobs, but no. Jobs are a new concept which came about because the industrial economic model needed people to work in factories. The result was that people who had previously lived on farms and who did not know what the word job meant were pushed out of their farm positions and forced to seek work for pay in city factories. Jobs were created to allow the industrialists to accomplish their goals of building autos or laying rail for trains and to attract men to work the new jobs they had to redistribute some of the wealth they were creating. Before the industrial period, there were few jobs; wealth was redistributed in other ways, people were poorer, had less liberty, and poorer health, and a lower standard of living. During the industrial period, massive wealth was created, and jobs and ownership of assets were used to redistribute that wealth. One might think an economics professor would know all of this. Nope. So, today we are facing a new socio-economic model change just as we did when we moved from the agricultural model to the industrial model. People like this professor are incapable of looking at history for guidance. While the transition from agriculture to industry was rough at times, the results are stunning. We are wealthier today than ever in history. Why would he believe that the next socio-economic change will not move us forward to an even more prosperous world? All of economic history shows this is the outcome, more prosperity over time. Here is a good video which shows how the infantile beginnings of the industrial model triggered a profound redistribution of wealth making us all far more wealthy than any man who lived even 100 years before us. Don't believe me, give up sewage sanitation, garbage sanitation, our knowledge of food handling, refrigeration, and medicine. But remember, of those, medicine is the least important. In 1930, life expectancy was about 56 years. Today life expectancy is about 80. Most of that was due to all of the above except medicine which only accounted for about 5-10% of the total improvement. Medicine was important, but refrigeration was more so, as was sewage sanitation, garbage sanitation, and many other simple but powerful improvements. Give those up, and your life expectancy drops - a lot. If we are willing to rely on history to suss out what is most likely to happen as we exit this model change, we find that we should expect the new socio-economic model is highly likely to create and redistribute wealth in mind-boggling amounts. You must either rely on history for the roadmap if offers or you must rely on fever swamp beliefs and neurotic dystopian fears. History may not hold direct answers, but it offers at least an understanding of how humans handled these problems in the past the outcomes they generated. I fully expect that jobs will disappear within the next 50 to 75 years. The shift from agriculture to industry took about twice that long to get fully underway, and it seems clear this change will be much faster (other historical experience would be the shift from hunter/gatherer to agriculture which took millennia so arguably we are speeding these changes by order of ten each time). If that is true the first change took millennia, the second took a few hundred years, meaning this change should take a few decades. I think this is probably right but sticking to 50+ years is a more conservative estimate. Progressives need to be charged for false advertising. They are regressive, not progressive; they are neo-victorian, neo-Malthusian, and neo-Luddite. They live in terror of change, and this drives them into a dystopian madness. Remember the Population Bomb or Soylent Green? These were the dystopian fantasies of the 1960s, and Earth Day. Global Warming is a modern dystopian fantasy designed to assist the progressives as they stand athwart the engines of change screaming STOP! This fear of a lack of jobs is one more way the progressives stand athwart the engines of change shouting stop. They wish to keep these changes from happening. They wish to make the progressive socio-economic model permanent even if that means they have to turn you and billions of other humans into serfs, or corpses. The one thing socialism/progressivism does well in democidal mass murder. No political model has ever come close to the mass murder efficiency of socialism/progressivism. There will be problems which arise from this dramatic and unsettling change. We should do what we can to help people who are injured by the change, but we cannot try to slow or stop these changes. If we do, we are cutting off our leg to spite the body. If anything, we should be attempting to smooth the way to allow these changes to occur unleashing rapid wealth creation and more efficient wealth redistribution. An election looms. If you wish to keep the current low prosperity progressive model we saw under President Obama, vote for Democratic candidates. If you want something better, you need to carefully find the candidates who will pursue these changes and help usher in the dawn of the new socio-economic model. The establishment Republicans will not do this, and they will need to be voted out of office just as will the Democrats. Sadly, it is time for Americans to turn away from the three pillars of America - Family, Friends, and Work/leisure. We need to turn our attention to politics and reduce the malign political system created by the progressives. If we don't our children and grandchildren will pay for our foolishness. "Since the 2007-09 recession, the prospect of getting a well-paying job with just a high school diploma is dim." Of course, it is but this is because our K-12 schools are designed to create factory workers, and college to create factory managers. FYI, there are no more factory jobs and what few remain will disappear soon. We need to change our educational system to match the needs of the new socio-economic model but because the progressives are holding back the dawn of the new model we do not know what it will look like and cannot recreate our schools. The first thing we do, we get rid of all the progressives! "But there’s no consensus on what the future will look like. One 2013 study, which Moenius used to build his analysis, estimated that 47 percent of American jobs were at risk of being automated. A 2016 paper put that figure at only 9 percent. A study in 2017 posited that 23 percent to 44 percent of work hours in the United States will be automated by 2030 — particularly in jobs with a high degree of repetition such as machinists, office support and retail sales. But that study also said jobs would be added, especially among care providers such as surgeons, nurses, and construction workers." Good, humans should be freed up to do things robots cannot do. If a robot can do the job, it is not something we should have humans waste their time doing. Every single human has skills and talents which allow them to act to make the world a better place, let's get them out of jobs and doing more productive things. "Virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa are being used in hotels, standing in for concierges or front desk assistants. Self-driving vehicles could upend the country’s transportation and logistics sectors, but it’s not clear how quickly those cars and trucks will be widely deployed." Thank you for making my argument. Do we need to waste people driving taxis when a robot can do it more safely? No. Free the human to do something more useful and necessary. "'Generally speaking, our academic institutions feel reluctant to place a high value on employability. Traditionally, our attitude has been: We prepare students to be better citizens, deeper thinkers,” said Oakley, the community college chancellor. “That’s all very true. But we have also become a proxy for employability, so we have to realize much more acutely the importance of job preparation in our curriculum.'" It took me a minute, but this has to be a comedy bit. Universities believe they "prepare students to be better citizens, deeper thinkers ..." In reality, they are indoctrinating the students outside of the STEM fields to be progressive zombies who cannot think at all. They are not making "better citizens" or "deeper thinkers." That is a joke. I could go on, but it is midnight, and even I need to sleep on occasion. Read the rest and marvel at the progressive nonsense and drivel.
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