RE: Why should my hard earned money go to those less fortunate?
December 11, 2016 at 4:59 pm
(This post was last modified: December 11, 2016 at 5:00 pm by JuliaL.)
We're in, and have always been, culture in transition. Now it's just happening faster.
Up until recently, the dictum, If you don't work, you don't eat, was beneficial for the perpetuation of society.
Then came the (probably temporary) era of cheaply available energy.
The first to lose their positions were the manual laborers; the ditch diggers and smallholder farmers.
Their jobs were taken by steam then diesel engines.
The displaced concentrated in urban areas and found work in factories as assemblers and machine minders.
I personally threw hundreds or perhaps thousands of such out of work in 20 years of mechanical design in factory automation.
Soon self driving vehicles will take the jobs of thousands of taxi drivers and over the road truckers.
Is everybody here too young to remember when every executive had a small army of secretaries and clericals?
In the not so distant future AI expert systems will outperform in what are currently protected occupations,
Physicians; x-ray interpretation by radiologists, differential diagnostics by internists.
Actuaries (legal bookies) will succumb to systems deep dredging big data.
Creative designers will get laid off by systems that can optimize their own designs entirely internally and that don't need health benefits or sleep.
Eventually there won't be much left humans can do better and only those who can artificially inflate their self worth will be able to claim jobs.
Culture sucks at making rapid changes. LPW looks like someone who cannot see much beyond his cartoonish biases.
It's possible that technological civilization will crash (pick your favorite apocalypse; biodiversity, climate, nuclear) and 'you don't work means you don't eat' may make a comeback. But it will be in a much less pleasant world.
I wonder how close Loading Please Wait's job is to being taken by a machine. Unlike the people he's bashing, it just hasn't happened to him....yet.
Don't worry about the underclass or underpaid Chinese.
Worry about guys like me.
Up until recently, the dictum, If you don't work, you don't eat, was beneficial for the perpetuation of society.
Then came the (probably temporary) era of cheaply available energy.
The first to lose their positions were the manual laborers; the ditch diggers and smallholder farmers.
Their jobs were taken by steam then diesel engines.
The displaced concentrated in urban areas and found work in factories as assemblers and machine minders.
I personally threw hundreds or perhaps thousands of such out of work in 20 years of mechanical design in factory automation.
Soon self driving vehicles will take the jobs of thousands of taxi drivers and over the road truckers.
Is everybody here too young to remember when every executive had a small army of secretaries and clericals?
In the not so distant future AI expert systems will outperform in what are currently protected occupations,
Physicians; x-ray interpretation by radiologists, differential diagnostics by internists.
Actuaries (legal bookies) will succumb to systems deep dredging big data.
Creative designers will get laid off by systems that can optimize their own designs entirely internally and that don't need health benefits or sleep.
Eventually there won't be much left humans can do better and only those who can artificially inflate their self worth will be able to claim jobs.
Culture sucks at making rapid changes. LPW looks like someone who cannot see much beyond his cartoonish biases.
It's possible that technological civilization will crash (pick your favorite apocalypse; biodiversity, climate, nuclear) and 'you don't work means you don't eat' may make a comeback. But it will be in a much less pleasant world.
I wonder how close Loading Please Wait's job is to being taken by a machine. Unlike the people he's bashing, it just hasn't happened to him....yet.
Don't worry about the underclass or underpaid Chinese.
Worry about guys like me.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
