One thing I didn't quite realized needed teaching until I taught my daughter: how do you tell when a screw is going in right? It might have resistance because of gunk or rust, or it might be misaligned. Determining the right action is incredibly sophisticated, the difference between the slight easing of resistance with old oil or the springiness when the threads are pushing against each other and deforming. In response you might draw out and try again, or push harder, all while still trying to feel out what's really happening. Automation is great for screws in factories.
We don't have anything on the horizon that has the physical flexibility and power of a human. To the degree we can reconfigure problems to match a robot's capabilities, then yes, automation may be inevitable. A lot of problems aren't like that.
but i'm skeptical; it would be more convincing if GP/GGP provided some of the rationale for why middle managers would be automated away rather than simply referencing a book.
those kinds of jobs would have to be coercive in nature (desperation qualifies), and would be beyond the threshold of autonomy that most people will tolerate. most jobs, even those rigidly regulated, have enough latitude that workers can find some level of esteem in it, enough to create the intrinsic motivation to keep doing it.
people wouldn't tolerate such jobs without extreme coercion, implying nothing less than a collapse of our democratic republic to achieve.
Billions of dollars are invested annually in technologies with marginal productivity improvements, and it looks like there are more and more diminishing returns.
If there was any indication that automation would 'eat everything', unemployment would be high (corona-pandemic aside), and labour productivity would be growing fast, none of which is happening.
Robert Gordon gives an expansive, evidence-based account of the development of American economic development in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, and there's virtually no evidence for the grandiose claims made by the tech industry that we're living in some sort of era of rapid change. That for the most part ended in the late 70s.
I think it's inevitable that the "junior" office jobs (where many get their start) will be/are replaced by scripts & API's.
like fraud detection. before, you just accepted a 3% fraud rate as a cost of doing business and left it at that. now you get that down to 0.5% because the tools let you do it in the same amount of time, and the owners want that sweet, sweet cash. you still want a second accountant to double-check the first, so you expand the work to fulfill that need. it can still be worth it, even so.
Automation - handles deterministic situations.
Autonomy - handles uncertain situations.
In my industry (ship design, construction and operation), based on what I'm seeing and have seen evolve over the past 20 years, it feels likely that this paradigm shift to a majority of ships being autonomous will probably happen in the next 50 years. This is my gut feel, not a scientific conclusion, so take that for what it's worth. I also don't see why other industries will be any different. For my money, reinforcement learning (in some form) appears to be the key enabler.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'circlular', but I think it's safe to assume you mean a circular hull cross section vice a round circular deck (like a floating helo pad or SpaceX launch barge).
First, there have been some examples of surface ships that transition to submarines (e.g. 1). China is apparently working on a large Surface ship/submarine for their Navy.
Surface and submersible vessels have very different hydrodynamic and hydrostatic properties and forces to contend with, which drive them to have different shapes. I actually did work on a recent project that explored this topic a bit. Generally, for any vessel, the shape depends on what you want the ship to do and hull form/type selection is very much a science-backed art form of Naval Architects.
You can certainly build a ship to fully submerge, the question is, particularly at larger scales, is it worth the added cost, risk, and hydrodynamic compromise - or are you better off just building two different vessels that are specifically designed to operate in one domain (I.e. on the surface or submerged). That answer is highly dependant on what you intend to use the vessel for. It may be worth it for your application, but in general the answer has been that it's more cost-effective to just optimize vessel design for one operational domain rather that two.
Regarding hydrodynamic trade, while both ships and subs strive to minimize total hydro resistance (drag), hydro resistance has subcomponents that affect vessels differently when operating on the surface versus submerged. Surface ship shapes strive to be hydrodynamically 'optimized' to minimize form, skin, wave (critically), and even air resistance, whereas submarines aren't generally subject to wave action or wind and thus typically focus on minimizing the dominant form and skin drag forces. Surface ships are generally more power efficient than submarines at equal displacement and speed through water.
If you want to make a ship submerge, you also need to add significant structure to withstand hydrostatic forces at depth. Submarines are inherently structurally sound enough to operate at the surface, but function hydrodynamically poor at the surface because of their shape.
Surface ships and submarine shapes primarily differ in structure due to the significantly different pressure forces they need to contend with. Submarines have a circular cross section because, next to a sphere, cylindrical hulls are the most structurally stable pressure hulls. Surface ships can actually have relatively structurally 'weak' main decks, operating almost like floating buckets that are mostly designed to stay right-side up. The weaker main deck makes the ships cheaper to build, but probably more critically, allows easy access to whatever payloads the vessel is carrying.
1. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/9726/the-usmc-is-inter...
In general it's measured something like increase in $/employee.
But let's say you're a commercial printer. The industry is moving to new printers that print double the amount, per employee hour.
If prices stayed the same, you'd see double productivity.
But because every company has the new, fastest machine , prices greatly reduce, and stop reflecting the fact that a single employee can now do 2x the work.
this phenomenon (price deflation) can exist but we can actually measure deflation/inflation, so there's no need for a hypothetical, and there is no widespread deflation, or put differently increase in consumer purchasing power due to increased production.
There's actually very limited sectors where this dynamic exists (think the costs of a GB of data), but healthcare, construction, education, infrastructure all have not been automated, and hence aren't any cheaper.
In fact there's actually a decline in producitivity in US construction, as decades of erosion and retiring of experienced workers leave the industry in a bad shape, the US has started to lose manufacturing knowledge.
Whatsapp messages and tweets may have gotten a lot cheaper, but it's worth remembering that 'tech' is only 10% of the US economy, employing 3-6 million people depending on how you count. The overwhelming majority of the physical economy and service sector is still practically untouched by it, despite many claims to the contrary.
Just physically you can walk into a retail store, which is the most common place of employment around the world. It's got a Square Stand on the desk maybe, but otherwise, not exactly a lot of things have changed. Same thing in the classroom or a hospital ward.
That's true. But it's a bit more complicated.
In construction for example, there's the new prefab sector, which uses a lot of robots, growing nicely. It's a bit challenging to open such expensive factories with boom/bust cycles in construction, but they might figure it out.
As for infrastructure, we're starting to see companies working on robotic heavy equipment.
As for healthcare, that's an industry I don't understand. It's a very innovative industry. And some of the treatments and the medtech should have created efficiency gains, while not looking like robots. For example: curing hepatitis or cnc for dental crowns. But we don't seem to measure that efficiency. Weird.
As for retail, with e-commerce, some of our transactions have surely became more automated. And we chose to convert some if the efficiency gains, into comfort, to receive things at our door. But delivery robots might automate that part too.
Yes and no, people are predicting that for 70 years, if not more. It seems that once you automated all the easy things it gets exponentially harder and more expensive to pursue automation.
> does not come across as a massive problem
Sounds like Musk telling you "self driving cars will be there in 6 months" every 6 months since 2013. Nothing is as easy as you think it is, even more so if you have 0 experience in the domain.
And then you have to solve all the societal issues. If everything truly gets automated at some point, who will benefit from it? how do you remunerate all the people who used to have low skill jobs? &c.
"Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities."
- Guy Debord, 1967
> Platitudes like these give false hopes to workers who should be training and preparing for the next phase of industry
These seem incompatible to me. If automation will eat "everything," what exactly is the next phase of industry that we should all be preparing for? What's left after everything has been eaten?
My resolution to this conundrum is: automation will not actually eat everything. It's not like automation is a new concept; we started automating things over 100 years ago, and contrary to fears back then and along the way, automation drove tremendous job creation. There are far more human beings with well-paying jobs (even in May 2020) than there were 100 hundred years ago.
Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand.
Platitudes like these give false hopes to workers who should be training and preparing for the next phase of industry, and IMO serves people like the author who need complacent workers to give them time to come up with their money-making solutions.