Apple
Microsoft
Google
Facebook
Amazon

Forward 10 years to the present and you find a common theme among all five of them - "While the market cap of the top five has grown by 30% since then, the number of employees has been cut nearly in half. “Getting bigger by market cap — and by revenues — with less people is the new normal,” Brown said. “It’s not going back the other way. The only escape for our children is to join the education arms race and hope they choose the right major — or to embrace
entrepreneurialism and create their own jobs.”

The age of automation is not slowing down but only accelerating especially with AI on the horizon.

This is really common knowledge for anyone who follows financial/business news at least on a weekly basis.

The simplest way I can put it is that the demand for labor in many industries is decreasing due to increases in workflow efficiency and automation and also more and more business going online.


At the same time, we have an ever increasing population. If you look at it in purely economic terms, we have a surplus of people. More and more people competing for fewer and fewer jobs.


And sure, you can always try the entrepreneurial/self-employed route but let's be honest, how many people have the necessary drive, vision and brains to be a successful entrepreneur? It's a very small percentage of the overall population.

Self-driving taxis for general public - trials underway in Phoenix, AZ. This transportation could be available to the general public in 2018.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...with-no-human-behind-wheel-idUSKBN1D72BU

Self-driving cars means companies like Uber and Lyft would have to buy and maintain their own vehicles but they wouldn't have to worry about paying drivers. In the long run they would come out ahead with that arrangement.

One day there will be television shows called:

"Dancing with the Robot Stars" , "American Robot Idle", and "So You Think You Can Compress Data". Of course, they will only be watched by other robots.

All hail our robot over lords.

Idle robots will not be stars.

what's the world coming to

Don't despair Haggart. In a few centuries humanity will stage the "Butlerian Jihad" and will overthrow the robot masters and impose a ban on all AI technology!

War.
Global unrest and uprising.
They many with nothing will make the huge piles of money among the rich worthless.

You and CyBerkut are younger than I am - when i go it will be up to you guys to deal with our new robot world


"Panzer you sure are cute!"

Is that a robotic version of Scarlett Johansson?

She looks confused. Does she know her prime directive ?

Can she text and drive at the same time ?

If you know anyone working for Amazon they seem to be treated as literally nothing more than drones anyway.

The day is coming somewhere in the near future where arrogant, egotistical software developers are replaced by self-writing code.

Never mind those things. I just want to know how good its suction mechanism is.

Who's going to write the code that writes the code that writes itself?

Your scenario is probably not going to happen anytime soon...
https://mortoray.com/2017/03/22/programming-wont-be-automated-or-it-already-has-been/

As someone summarized...

• Programming involves a lot of skills beyond raw coding, including many soft skills and people skills.
• Programmers already try to automate as much as possible and it there always seems to be more to do nonetheless.
• The type of AI we have now is very limited. The type that could program would be at a human level sentience, at which point there are bigger concerns than just my programming job.

++++++++++

Personal thoughts...

Self-modifying code is kinda neat and maybe useful in a specific controlled environment but programming requires too much abstraction, ugly hacks and thinking outside of the box. OOP especially (supposedly the solution for spaghetti code) can get really hairy if you don't carefully plan ahead your object trees. Too many constant advancements, all with imperfections, in the mix as well. No compiler is perfect, coding often requires unconventional workarounds and streamlining, and even clever programmers don't always understand exactly how their code works, just that it does, usually after multiple attempts to solve a problem (in Masters of DOOM, John Carmack mentions hacks he used in the original DOOM to fix wall polygon clipping, also that he's constantly finding new innovations).

Soo...I don't think programmers are losing sleep over robots taking their jobs.

You can't create real sentience out of only hardware and software.

It would be like giving a dictionary and a thesaurus to a college student and then asking them to create a novel on par with "Dune" or "War and Peace".

Eh...looks like she has teeth. The fine line between teasing pleasure and pain, can we trust a machine?!

Then once the machines become self-aware and turn on us...ouch.

Not only can most not handle being a small business owner, but they often fail even if you CAN handle it. That and they create jobs devoid of benefits for the employees and without competitive wages.
Small business isn't really the answer many out there seem to think it is.

Corporations are beholden to shareholders, not employees. So when profits go up, they don't filter the success down to the employees, they use it for growth and perhaps automation.

We can't win. LOL

In Star Wars terms, the Empire doesn't give raises and will work you to death building their Death Stars. The Rebels don't pay for sh1t to begin with and have no insurance for your robot arm.

small business was the only kind of business for most of humanity

to think that it can't succeed is rather extreme.

we've experienced a bad cultural shift where children are not being taught the skills of running a small family business by their parents.

small business can succeed as well as it ever did, but the business must be very quick to react to market changes and needs to find a niche that cannot be destroyed by economies of scale.

also remember not all businesses are on the stock market or owned by shareholders. it's not always about shareholder value.