Driverless cars, pilotless planes... will there be jobs left for a human being?

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Driverless cars, pilotless planes... will there be jobs
left for a human being?

Throughout history, economic upheaval has destroyed whole
industries � and created new ones. But now, some fear
automation may mean the death of mass employment

By Will Hutton
The Observer
Saturday, May 18, 2013

The future of jobs? Robots assembling Tesla sports cars
in California. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

Suddenly a robotised, automated economic reality is
moving off the science fiction pages and into daily life.
The growing use of unmanned battlefield drones is
encouraging the growth of pilotless�commercial aircraft��
the first ever flew in British airspace last month.
Google's driverless car is completing ever more trials
ever more successfully: the world's major car companies
are all hot in pursuit, working on their own prototypes
of their own versions. The automated checkouts at
supermarkets are becoming as familiar as bank cash
machines. From staff-free ticket offices to students who
can learn online, it seems there is no corner of economic
life in which people are not being replaced by machines.

This is the "Great Reset" � a cull of broadly middle-
class jobs with middle-class incomes that is apparent
across the west, but with little current sign of what
industries and activities will replace them.

The world has lost millions of jobs before � on the land
or in the old horse-powered economy � but they were soon
replaced by jobs in the car industry or the new service
industries. What worries many economists and computer
scientists is that today's technologies are going to
remove people from economic activity completely. Some
argue that a dystopian world is emerging in which good
jobs and full-time employment will become the preserve of
an educated, computer-literate elite. For example Apple,
Facebook, Amazon and Google are plainly riding the new
wave, but they are not mass employers like Tesco, Ford or
General Motors.�

Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University,
asks if we are ready for a world in which half the adult
population does not work. The Great Reset � the economy
resetting itself, after a major technological shock, to
deliver jobs for all � may never happen.

The omens are all around. The US economy has never
generated so few jobs in an upturn since records began.
In Britain, the Resolution Foundation charts the ongoing
squeeze on low and middle incomes, and observes brutally
that already Britain has the second highest proportion of
low-paid jobs in the developed world. The formal
unemployment numbers, now ominously rising five years
since the crisis began, do not capture the full extent to
which the economy is not delivering good work.

Plainly some of the explanation is that the economy is
still reeling from the effect of the financial crisis and
the accompanying vast overhang of private debt. But
economies have an embedded resilience. Output will return
to the levels of 2008, probably some time next year.
There will be an economic "recovery". But this raises the
question: what happens afterwards?

Think through the implications of the driverless car.
These will be vehicles whose complex sensors allow them
to communicate with one another, so that they know one
another's intended route. One of the reasons Google is
investing so much is that whoever owns the communications
system for driverless cars will own the 21st century's
equivalent of the telephone network or money clearing
system: this will be a licence to print money. The
benefits are endless. Roads will both be able to carry
more traffic and be safer. Personalised door-to-door
transport will become hugely pleasurable: your car will
deliver you to your home or place of work and then park
itself without you. Road accidents will plummet. Energy
efficiency will be transformed. Insurance rates, even the
need for insurance, will plunge. Personalised transport,
ordered by your mobile phone, will gradually replace mass
transport networks.

But the implications for employment are awesome. Thomas
Frey, senior futurologist at the DaVinci Institute, lists
taxi-, bus- and truck-driving as soon-to-be-extinct
occupations � along with traffic police, all forms of
home delivery and waste disposal, jobs at petrol
stations, car washes and parking lots. The cars
themselves will be made by robots in automated car
factories. The only new jobs will be in the design and
marketing of the cars, and in writing the computer
software that will allow them to navigate their journeys,
along with the apps for our mobile phones that will help
us to use them better.

Professor Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary,
thinks that the challenge of the decades ahead is not
debt or competition from China but the dramatic
transformations that technology is bringing about.
Summers believes that the transition to the automated
economy that robotisation implies has only just begun.
The invention of 3D printing, in which every home or
office will be equipped with an in-house printer that can
spew out the goods we want � from shoes to pills �
anticipates a world of what Summers calls automated
"doers". They will do everything for us, eliminating the
need for much work. The only jobs will be in writing the
software and building the "doers", creating a bifurcation
of the labour market that is already discernible.

At least Summers sees some underlying economic dynamism.
For techno-pessimists such as economist Professor Tyler
Cowen the future is even darker. It is not only that
automation and robotisation are coming, but that there
are no new worthwhile transformational technologies for
them to automate. All the obvious human needs � to move,
to have power, to communicate � have been solved through
cars, planes, mobile phones and computers. According to
Cowen, we have come to the end of the great "general
purpose technologies" (technologies that transform an
entire economy, such as the steam engine, electricity,
the car and so on) that changed the world. There are no
new transformative technologies to carry us forward,
while the old activities are being robotised and
automated. This is the "Great Stagnation".

That is a very lopsided view of the future with little
recognition of the opportunities. The growth of
transformative technologies is not tailing off: as
scientific knowledge explodes and crosses new boundaries,
they will accelerate. The 21st century will witness more
technological and scientific advance than in the last 500
years. The pace of change is certainly accelerating �
business models today already become obsolescent in less
than 20 years, and that figure is going to fall further.
But human demands are infinite. Notwithstanding
robotisation and automation, I identify four broad areas
in which there will be vast job opportunities.

The first is in micro-production. There is going to be a
huge growth in micro-brewers, micro-bakers, micro-film-
makers, micro-energy producers, micro-tailors, micro-
software houses and so on who will deploy the internet
and micro-production techniques to produce goods at
prices as if they were mass-produced, but customised for
individual tastes.

The second is in human wellbeing. There will be vast
growth in advising, coaching, caring, mentoring,
doctoring, nursing, teaching and generally enhancing
capabilities. Medical provision will explode, with
replacement organs, skin and limbs opening up new
specialisms and industries. Taste, sight and hearing will
be vastly enhanced. Ageing will be deferred, with old-age
advisers offering advice on how to live well in one's
hundreds. Geneticists will open up a live-well economy.
Instantaneous language translation will break down
language barriers.

The third is in addressing the globe's "wicked issues" .
There will be new forms of nutrition and carbon-efficient
energy, along with economising with water, to meet the
demands of a world population of 9 billion in 2050. Space
exploration will become crucial to find new minerals and
energy sources. New forms of mining will allow
exploration of the Earth's crust. The oceans will be
farmed.

And fourthly, digital and big data management will foster
whole new industries � personalised journalism, social
media, cyber-security, information selection, software,
computer science and digital clutter removal.

Doubtless the futurologists can come up with more: the
truth is, nobody knows. What we do know is that two-
thirds of what we consume today was not invented 25 years
ago. It will be the same again in a generation's time.
What is different is the pace of change, obsolescence and
renewal � and new dangers of extraordinary inequality not
just in wages, but in working possibilities. Firms and
individuals will be on their mettle to open up, innovate
and constantly reinvent themselves. If there is to be a
successful Great Reset, Britain will need the open
innovation structures, financing mechanisms and social
support institutions to capitalise on the opportunities
quickly, rather than be overwhelmed by the risks.

This is what threatens our future, our living standards,
and this is what we should be arguing about �� not the
European Union, despite the efforts of Ukip and the
Conservative party. Those whom the gods wish to destroy
they first make mad.

ROBOTS' PROGRESS

1961 Unimate Believed to be the world's first industrial
robot, Unimate was used on a General Motors assembly line
in New Jersey to move die castings and weld them on to
car bodies, a laborious and difficult job for workers.

1970 Lunokhod 1 The first roving remote-controlled robot
to land on another world, the vehicle was used by the
Soviet Union to explore the surface of the Moon.

1999 Aibo Created by Sony, Aibo was a robotic dog that
could interact with humans. The first models released in
Japan sold out in 20 minutes.

2005 Asimo Built by Honda, the latest version of their
Asimo robots was a human-like android that could push
supermarket trolleys and used voice recognition software.

2012 Curiosity The most complex autonomous craft ever
constructed, Curiosity landed on Mars on 6 August 2012
and has a scoop for digging out soil samples, a
spectrometer, lasers and a weather station, as well as
more than a dozen cameras.

Continues at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/19/driverless-cars-pilotless-planes-jobs-human?INTCMP=SRCH

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj

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[writer]

On May 19, 5:03 pm, use...@mantra.com and/or www.mantra.com/jai (Dr.

> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/19/driverless-cars-pilo...

there are 4 kinds of workers in the world. .1. knowledge workers .2.
security workers .3. supervisors of laborers .4. laborer. whether you
have a lot of automation or a little you will need all these four
types of workers. the first two kinds are in government and the last
two kinds are not in government. i do not see how a lot of automation
with robots would alter this picture of the world. the jobs that
involve security of society or social security are there no matter
what. a lot of people in the united states for example are on social
security. ensuring the security of society. security workers. the same
kind of welfare society exists in europe. india has not yet
implemented a welfare model of government payments for social
security. india has a smaller government model where everyone is not
in government. that means every one is not on talking head radio. or
akash vani. every one is not automated. there is freedom. .end of
message. .when. .date and time. 20 may 2013 mon am
1014am. .from. .where. position. san jose public library. 150 east san
fernando street. san jose. california. usa. ca 95112. .from. .who.
h.s.nair111 at gmail.com .to. .address. usenet newsgroup
soc.culture.indian at http colon slash slash groups.google.com slash
group slash soc.culture.indian slash .also posted to my group
oneworld01 at http colon slash slash groups.google.com slash group
slash oneworld01 slash. .signature is open email identity open phone
numbers is signature.