From: Walter Miles <waltmiles at comcast.net> To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net> Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:39:05 -0400 Subject: [WSFA] Re: AP IMPACT: Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net> Hello Mark, Thanks for this article, and the Facebook one as well. On 01/24/13, mark wrote: > Ok, every so often, I keep trying to start a serious conversation on > what comes next. Here's a AP article, and it's saying that what I've > been saying is under way. ... Meaningless rambling with me agreeing with you: As a teenager, I read speculative articles (and SF of course) that led me to believe that machines with very little human supervision would do essentially every task, and probably relieve humankind of nearly all burdensome labor, *someday*. When word-processing and spreadsheets were the highest broadly used tech, just before the internet "explosion," I remember reading expert judgments that technology would /forever/ create more jobs---we would all do more in far less time, but there would always be far, far more to do (more detail and data in everything, previously impossible jobs enabled by technology, etc.). Somebody had to type all those WP docs and enter data into all those spreadsheets, right? I thought "And this is axiomatic, and can never change?" I came late to the John Dvorak singularity stuff, but by that time it seemed evident. Unless you could declare "The Future stops HERE!" (which may not be an uncommon attitude in broader society), jobs that were better done by humans would be vastly fewer in my lifetime. > ...Now, what *happens* to all the rest of the > people: the ones who aren't a good fit with college, and don't really > have what are considered salable skills *now*... and it's not going to > get better. As a longtime worshipper of Moloch the Incontinent, I much prefer a solution that involves rivers of blood and mountains of filth. In reality I expect it to play out in ways that are far less mild. On the other hand, I occasionally read articles (one by Martin Ford through Huffington Post, some maybe linked from Avedon's blog???) that suggest that we can adjust our economic and welfare systems so that everyone can be secure and perhaps even work at things they want to do, and in ways that are mostly beneficial to other humans and the environment that includes us. I suppose these changes would primarily have to do with the definition of and rules governing property. Gollum. I think it's gonna be a tough sell. "What Comes Next?" SOMETHING is going to change in a big way. The fundamental organization of society will almost certainly change, perhaps in ways alluded to in the previous paragraph, perhaps in ways more authoritarian, possibly in ways more "libertarian." The population of the planet may decrease drastically (fewer people to hold fewer jobs). There will be changes I don't have a clue about. It could be that climate change will intervene sooner than I expect, in ways that make machine intelligence issues seem irrelevant, just as those will soon make outsourcing and even immigration look like minor problems. End of humorous aside. There's gonna be an inch of snow and I hafta go buy 14 gallons of milk, a three-foot loaf of Wonderbread, and enough toilet paper to wipe out the Wehrmacht! Be seeing you, -- ==================================================================== Walter A. Miles, Jr. waltmiles at comcast.net (301) 891-2815 217 Spring Avenue, Takoma Park, MD 20912