SHOCK - 75% unemployment is coming

75% Unemployment in the new robot-computer economy

• The politicians are clueless  (What else is new)  -  The political elite works to "reform" immigration and legally import even more workers into an economy that no longer needs them. 
• What political unrest will occur when people cannot earn a living and they live at a subsistence welfare level existence with no hope of a better life?

SHOCK  -  The will be no long term economic recovery.

Robots.  Computers.  The Internet.  What was once Science Fiction is now a science fact that is slowly imploding the economy through job elimination.

Jobs are permanently flooding out of the economy.  Millions have left the U.S. for low wages in Asia, but millions more jobs are simply being abolished by robots, computers and the Internet. 

Those jobs will never return.  But it gets worse.  As millions of people continue to lose their jobs to technology there is no tax money coming in to support schools, police or social security.

At MIT, a management robot is learning to run a factory and give orders to artificial co-workers, and a BakeBot robot is reading recipes, whipping together butter, sugar and flour and putting the cookie mix in the oven. At the University of California at Berkeley, a robot can do laundry and then neatly fold ­T-shirts and towels.

A wave of new robots, affordable and capable of accomplishing advanced human tasks, is being aimed at jobs that are high in the workforce hierarchy.

The consequences of this leap in technology loom large for the American worker — and perhaps their managers, too. Back in the 1980s, when automated spray-painting and welding machines took hold in factories, some on the assembly line quickly discovered they had become obsolete reports the Washington Post.


Andrew McAfee:  Are droids taking our jobs? 
Robots and algorithms are getting good at jobs like building cars, writing articles, translating -- jobs that once required a human. So what will we humans do for work? Andrew McAfee walks through recent labor data to say: We ain't seen nothing yet.

The Droids are coming for our jobs
George Lucas forgot to mention that his droids were taking jobs previously held by tax paying human beings. How do you feed your family or purchase cars or TVs when human workers are no longer needed?  But worse, how does the government pay for police, schools, roads, health care or social security with no human workers paying taxes into the system?  Robotics could collapse the entire economy. 

Today’s robots can do far more than their primitive, single-task ancestors. And there is a broad debate among economists, labor experts and companies over whether the trend will add good-paying jobs to the economy by helping firms run more efficiently or simply leave human workers out in the cold.

“We’ve reached a tipping point in robotics,” said Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The possibility is to run a factory, she added, “all while you are sleeping.”

U.S. firms have already begun deploying some of these newer robots. General Electric has developed spiderlike robots to climb and maintain tall wind turbines. Kiva Systems, a company bought by Amazon.com, has orange ottoman-shaped robots that sweep across warehouse floors, pull products off shelves and deliver them for packaging. Some hospitals have begun employing robots that can move room to room to dispense medicines to patients or deliver the advice of a doctor who is not on site.

The Associated Press has a three-part series on one of the biggest questions business and society will face in coming years.

Are we prepared for a world where 50 to 75 percent of workers are unemployed?

It's something economists and technologists say we seriously need to think about. It's just math.
Rice University computer science professor Moshe Vardi says that in 25 years "driving [done] by people will look quaint; it will look like a horse and buggy."

So there go many of the approximately 4 million driving jobs out there. Same for sanitation, and those are just a couple examples of how physical jobs will be replaced.  A smarter computer  means that any mid-paying job that involves a routine: data entry, number crunching, operations, and so on, will be replaced as well, which will remove a big piece of the approximately 7 million business and financial operations jobs that exist in the United States.

 

 

 

American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas

When you add all of that up, some think 50 percent unemployment is optimistic. Software entrepreneur Martin Ford predicts something closer to 75 percent unemployment by the end of the century. "The vast majority of people do routine work," Ford says. "The human economy has always demanded routine work." And eventually, that work won't be done by humans.

Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolffson argue that the trend is rapidly accelerating. What's left are extremely specialized new digital jobs, like people who create apps, and the jobs that robots can't yet replace, like restaurant busboy and other high-touch service jobs. 
 
There aren't enough of the former jobs, no matter how we're educating people. Our new industries simply aren't labor-intensive. And those lower end jobs are low paying, and may also end up being replaced as robots get better at specialized tasks, So income inequality will rise as unemployment increases, further slowing growth.

At the very height of our recent recession, we had unemployment of around 10 percent. The economy and safety net could barely deal with it. It helped rapidly grow the debt, and we've yet to deal with that or other lasting consequences. A 10 percent unemployment rate is a mere fifth of what some experts predict we'll see in the future, and we won't be able to count on changing business cycles to lift us out.

Read more:   Business Insider.


DARPA - AlphaDog Legged Squad Support System (LS3) Field Testing
Attach machine guns and you have a battle droid.

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The time is rapidly coming when human soldiers will not be needed.