What will happen when automated manufacturing, automated service, and AI become sophisticated and cheap enough to replace 80% of jobs?
What will the billions of people in manufacturing and the millions in service do after they are replaced? Who will buy the products after nobody can afford them? I'm scared famo.
We will design and maintain robots.
Yeah sure some of us will but not billioms of Chinese, Indians and Africans.
What happens when AI becomes sophisticated enough to design on its own. This will happen this century.
>this century
You know Moore's law isn't a thing anymore right?
I don't want to sound too reddit but quantum computing will make thw AI more than possible
It sounds scary, until you look at history, and realise that this happens every century.
These aren't totally accurate figures, but I have read a few times that something like 80% of jobs from the last century are mostly obsolete, but that 80% of the jobs created over the last 10/20 years didn't exist.
And that is accelerating, so there are another 50% or more job titles that didn’t exist 5 years ago.
SEO consultant? Social media manager? Bloggers? That wasn't a thing 5-10 years ago.
Yes, that's job titles, not jobs, but still. The learning curve gets shorter too.
It's easier to predict jobs that will be obsolete, it's impossible to predict all the new jobs and job titles that will exist.
Nobodies getting a pedicure or haircut or massage from a robot anytime soon. Some things will need a personal touch.
law of economics will prevail-- order out of chaos.
If 80% of people lose their jobs, then who's going to buy those products? no one, because no one will have money.
The good news is this: as someone said before, you will maintain robots, and come up with new service sector jobs. Also those products you're talking about will be a hell of a lot cheaper since the number 1 expense for any company is human resource.
These are my thoughts.
80% of people will starve to death
State given allowances, in the end everyone will be a NEET.
lol retards, when machines replace most jobs the price of most commodities will crash, the amount of money required to feed the 80% will be peanuts. Just think about this, the average neet welfare queen in USA today has five times more calorie intake than the average king in the bronze age. Technology will always make things better, those 80% will be fed the peanuts of the automation complex which will be more than enough to keep them happy until they slowly extinct themselves. Machines will always increase the surplus production exponentially while the basic demands of a human are constant.
Gee I wonder who is behind this post.
They die simple as that. This is how democracy works
Then prices will fall until people can afford them. That's how the free market works. No good saying 'price is firm' while your customers starve. Prices of raw materials will fall until there's a margin at prices people can afford.
>SEO consultant? Social media manager? Bloggers? That wasn't a thing 5-10 years ago.
Yeah, if AIs take over and make up a big part of the population, i am pretty sure they won't need any of those.
As you can see OP, there are severly less babies being born in developed countries. Nature sees that we won't need as many people in the future, and starts "forcing" people to make valuable humans instead of tons of invaluable humans.
I'd like to think that inevitably we're moving towards a post-capitalist society. Robots do all menial labour, provide us with all necessities like food, shelter and transportation for free. If there even is money, it's only for decoration, status symbols, culture, non-essential services, etc.
That's already pretty far out, but I'd also like to think there is a way to get there non-violently. After all, at some point it is the reasonable choice not to resist progress. Realistically there will be bodies in the street though. The rich have no incentive to tear down the capitalist mouse wheel. But the poor will revolt at some time when the pressure becomes unbearable. And it's probably not going to start in the US where the lower class still believes the lies about how poverty is their own fault and how anyone can make it from rags to riches if they just work hard enough.
200 years ago something like 90% of people worked in the agrarian sector, providing food. What has happened to our society recently is mind-blowing! And we're still under the mindset that everyone has to work. Robots make most manual workers obsolete. AI can make a good chunk of white collar workers obsolete. And then? We all become artists, poets, painters? But if food made by robots still costs money, why should a robot buy something from a painter to close the economic loop? In 30 years there will be no jobs for uneducated workers left (at least not in the West). *Something* has to drastically change, and like all revolutions, it won't be pretty.
>SEO consultant? Social media manager? Bloggers? That wasn't a thing 5-10 years ago.
That's a bit of a fallacy. Those are incredibly tiny markets. That's like 0.01% of the jobs available.
If you close down a company that makes gear shafts you lose 200 blue collar workers, 40 white collar workers and maybe (!) 1 social media manager.
Also, you mentioned mostly complementary jobs, they don't provide their own value. Consultants need something they can provide consulting for.
We're talking about far bigger shifts. For starters, we have 5x as many people on Earth as just a mere 100 years ago. If we assume that transportation and logistics-related jobs comprise something like 15-20% of all jobs, that's hundreds of millions of employments threatened by the self-driving car. You think we can just stick them into a crash course and they'll become SEO consultants?
I've worked in both law and accounting. Classic white collar jobs. I don't think it'll hit me, but I couldn't advise my children to follow my footsteps. You only need these jobs because our rules are shitty and full of loop holes to creatively exploit. If people got their shit together (and maybe fucking lobbying would stop) we could easily draft a tax code right now that's 100% comprehensive. I'm talking strict rules, no vague words requiring interpretation. Treat it like software and actually *code* the law. Then 99% of accounting could by done by computer programs right now, no AI needed. The same with law, although there you'd probably need a bit of AI.
What's left? Google has AIs that immitate creativity, compose new music and paintings humans find pleasing. I just don't see what's left for 80% of humanity to do in 100 years.
That would be true if we maintained the population, but as an increase in population growth continues there is less farm space and lawn space for each human to have. We've already doubled the population in the last 45 years.
And that King comparison is absolutely false. Kings did not eat 500 calories a day, they would wither and die. Kings were historically fat.
Everyone here is failing to realize the population:resource issue. We won't switch from what we have now to 80% automation over night. It'll take decades of steps during which there will be plenty of we'll paid people who can afford the high price of goods and plenty who cannot. We'll see 30-50% unemployment and companies will still have a sufficient amount of clients.
We're not 80 years away from that step, we're 10.
The free food would be shitty
Trust me
It doesn't matter. Now it's not about density of transistors, it's about software design and AI. Also new paradigms, such as quantum computing.
>less farm space
>what is vertical farming
>The free food would be shitty
Why? There'd still be groceries and cooking. You just tell your robot kitchen what you want to eat and it orders the necessary ingredients and prepares them just how you like 'em.
That'd probably be better food than what most people get with all those microwave "meals"...
Bump
Enter an age of post scarcity, focus on space exploration. Now if we do get to space and set up colonization, we will probably be asked to breed more humans. Over population could be a myth. Look up the zeitgeist on YouTube it interesting