When Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg sound the same dire warning about jobs, it's time to listen

[yallerdawg]

Source: MarketWatch, by Quentin Fottrell

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At his Harvard University commencement speech on Thursday, Facebook chief executive Zuckerberg, had some tough words for the Class of 2017. “Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks,” he said, adding, “When our parents graduated, purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community,. But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void.”

Gates, the founder of Microsoft earlier this month, sounded the same warning. Gates said he didn’t want to sound like the guy from “The Graduate,” which celebrates 50 years this year. In that movie, old Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) was given this very famous piece of advice: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word…Plastics,” And today? That word would likely be “robots.” Gates took his 34.8 million Twitter followers by the virtual shoulder and said “artificial intelligence” would have a huge impact. In other words, why not join the revolution? After all, that’s exactly what Zuckerberg and Gates did with social media and computer software.

But that’s not the only response to the robot revolution. Last February, Gates also told Quartz that robots should free up labor “and give graduates an opportunity to focus on jobs that only let us do a better job of reaching out to the elderly, having smaller class sizes, helping kids with special needs. You know, all of those are things where human empathy and understanding are still very, very unique.” Gates said there is a counter-intuitive way of approaching the rise of robots. “So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces ...then you’re net ahead.”

Zuckerberg too spoke about finding meaningful jobs and purpose in this new automated economy. “Class of 2017, you are graduating into a world that needs purpose. It’s up to you to create it,” he said, adding, “Taking on big meaningful projects is the first thing we can do to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose. The second is redefining equality to give everyone the freedom they need to pursue purpose. Many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers.” Today’s graduates, he said, will need to carve their own path, but have the freedom to fail and to try again.

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Read it all at: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bill-gates-updates-the-plastics-advice-from-the-graduate-for-2017-2017-05-16

[OrwellwasRight]

1. Great.

But how today's graduates are going to get the money to "the freedom to fail and to try again"?

How are they going to afford creating "a world that needs purpose"?

How are these two CEOs creating the well paid jobs for the American graduates in the numbers that corporations of comparable size made in the US 50 years ago? How are they contributing to the future they describe except by creating a very few good jobs for mostly male, mostly white and Asian workers with elite educations?

How is the government going to pay for smaller class sizes and more senior care when giant corporations like theirs and their major shareholders and CEOs keep hiding their money offshore to avoid taxes, and keep lobbying for lower tax rates?

Hmmmm.... we need a plan. The market doesn't fix itself.

[Historic NY]

2. Robotics..........

There was a show on TV about a small car restoration place that had a side line tire rim business. The side line took away from the main business because they had to devote man power to do welding. The welding was repetitious, they scraped & went out to buy a used robotic welding machine. The machine doesn't need coffee breaks, doesn't call in sick, doesn't need a retirement or benefit plan, does the same job over & over w/o complaining, in the end it did a better job.

People don't seem to realize that the majority of assembly line jobs today are done by robotics with little human intervention. Those thinking that the "populist bullshitter" is going to bring back these jobs are going to be disappointed.

[yallerdawg]

5. Effing robots!

Taking OUR jobs!

You think this will be the next 'populist' message?

[NCjack]

3. Trump is bring back coal mining jobs. If you are unemployed,

perhaps West Virginia is the place to be.

[democratisphere]

4. Robots don't buy homes, cars or need to go eat at McDonalds.

No jobs. No money. No commerce. The USA is a 70% consumer based economy which means that 70% of our economy depends on someone going to buy something from someone. With less and less disposable income and fewer and fewer jobs, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where our country is headed. I don't believe robots, automation and artificial intelligence have the solution to this Armageddon.

[gtar100]

6. The problem is income inequality, not technology taking over jobs.

If more people had living wages, there would be more activity economically speaking. People still need to eat, sleep, wear clothes, socialize, raise their children, be creative, and generally be human. There is so much potential that could be tapped into if more people had the resources they need. Instead our resources of both time and money are concentrated on a smaller population and the great majority fends for itself on an inadequate apportionment.

We live with artificially induced stresses, one of them being an inadequate number of jobs. And out of that pool of limited jobs they then talk about automating them and replacing them with machines, robots and artificial intelligence. Until we actually do something about the root of our economic problems - income inequality being the more direct symptom of that root - we are going to be left playing an elaborate game of musical chairs.

[jalan48]

7. Back in the 60's when I was young there were millions of good paying manufacturing jobs

for those who didn't go to college. Those jobs started disappearing in the 70's leaving millions of Americans scrambling for "starter" jobs at fast food restaurants and other low paying service jobs. Automation seems to be the latest blow to the American worker.

[killbotfactory]

8. It's not just going to replace burger flippers and truckers.

Our country will happily watch people with low skill jobs suffer and have their lives and communities devolve into a dystopian hellhole. It's their fault for not getting better educations and whatnot.

But soon, and probably before anyone is prepared for it, Automation and AI will eat into jobs that require a lot more training and expertise.

I hope we choose to make everyone's lives better at that point, but I'm not hopeful.

[andym]

9. If specialized AI could beat the best humans at Go by out-thinking, not out-calculating humans

then any job involving specialized thinking could be in theory replaced by AI-laden robots. That means many intellectually based jobs are at risk in addition to jobs easily robotized like checkout clerks or now driving vehicles. Robots could be better doctors than human doctors, better lawyers too (especially if they build more human-like robots)...The question is, when these jobs are all gone, how will our economy work? No income means no sales etc.