Six of ten of you reading this story will be permanently unemployed by 2022. 80% by 2050. It’s much easier to dump on Donald Trump tweets and rip Roy Moore, but, while we’re busy distracting ourselves, the other reality far bigger than global warming, even, has no champion, no voice.
You are going to be useless to the working world.
You will have no purpose as we’ve defined ourselves for generations, by our employment, from Mark the Miller’s Son to today’s forty-hour workaholics.
As I’ve pointed out, Robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will claim your jobs, and sooner than you think. Lawyers, Doctors, Pharmacists, and other professionals who think that somehow it won’t touch them are just delusional.
IBM’s WATSON AI is already working into dozens of fields. Deep Mind and other AIs are not far behind.
Think lawyers are safe? Think again. ROSS writes better contracts, does research, and pretty much, other than law where one appears in court, will replace most of the tasks done by humans in a law firm.
AIs can reduce physicians in surgical sweets by making robotic systems more efficient, and providing far more real-time, in depth information to a handful of surviving physicians.
Cashiers will be gone from most stores within the next few years, as Amazon and others roll out this kind of technology derived from pilotless cars:
We know pilotless cars and trucks are coming within the next few years. Pharmacies will be automated, as will many fast food jobs.
So what are we going to DO about millions of people who are never going to be needed to work again?
Republicans’ darker view is to get rid of you. They seek to gut the social safety net, and thrash the Affordable Care Act because they know that, if they succeed, millions of vulnerable people die prematurely. Even worse, AI experts like Robert Mercer can program the tech to get you to slit your own throats.
Democrats, talking about strong unions and jobs are totally clued out. They’re hype and what little non-reactive policy they generate looks more like it’s 1917, not 2017. Unions are not the solution to automation. In fact, repatriating jobs and unionizing them only speeds up the automation process.
New jobs created don’t keep up with the ones lost, and the kinds of jobs created need education that most folks who lose their jobs not only don’t have, but often lack the skillsets to get. Can you turn a Chiropractor into a Coder? Possibly, but many will simply be left behind.
Robots and AI don’t eat, sleep, need breaks, maternity leave, workers’ compensation, pensions, and all of the other nattering costs that employers of humans face.
This is NOT an anti-technology rant though. Tech was designed to free humanity from a lot of day-to-day drudgery and dangerous jobs. It makes the world safer and healthier.
That, however, is a two-sided coin. Improving safety and longevity increases the planet’s population. We’re not having any good discussions about population control either.
So we have to stop acting like a bunch of ADD puppies responding to a madman with a cellphone and a Twitter account’s childish rants. We need to demand that our elected leaders start dealing with this issue, which is going to be as impactful to the world as Global Warming.
I wrote about how we can solve some of the problems created by our bigger, better, more comfortable world, but it is a big, broad topic.
If you worry for your children, for yourself, about what might happen when your job goes away, and there is no clear pathway for your survival going forward, then you better get focused, and get talking.
The computers control the clock, and it’s tolling for thee...