It came to me, as it comes to all

[Slutty Rimmer]

Originally Posted by ex nihilo

Pretty soon retirement or lack of a job will come to practically everyone who does not play an active role in the knowledge economy. Artificial intelligence whether through the robotisation of manufacturing processes , 3-D printing and automation of the service industry will simply crunch jobs. The problem is that longevity will continue to push up the age when a person becomes entitled to state retirement benefits and unemployment makes no provision for company pensions. So, a lot of folk might have to make do with universal basic income (a la Finland) if that is affordable public spending. Not likely in high population countries, though.

Basically, if you are not working at the coal face, developing innovation, treating patients, cutting hair or preparing food etc you might soon be on a down ride. Spending all day sitting in offices, peering at screens, answering irrelevant emails and attending so called meetings is not productive, does not add value and is not going to cut it going forward.

We are entering a time where everything is possible but little is affordable. Think NHS. But there will be plenty of scope for being happy in our own skin, but probably in a less is more doable fashion…

Is it that simple, do you really see it so ?

And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts ?

These predictions of human redundancy due to the rise of the machines have been around since the time when human endeavour first created the machines of IT from bits. It still has not happened.

I am a firm believer that all futuristic predictions will be wrong by their very inherent nature and that change will come out of the blue. If you can predict IT then IT isn’t going to happen. Think back to the 70’s when we were all sold the lies by Michael Rodd on Tomorrow’s World (and else where by other futurologists of the day) that ‘electronic computers’ would displace humans in the work place and we would all have more leisure time whilst the computers* did all our work for us. It never happened and we now seem to spend much of our working life struggling with the limitations of the machines and actually spending more time maintaining and servicing the machines. You said it yourself “sitting in offices, peering at screens, answering irrelevant emails“, which is something that never occurred before screens and machines came along. We have not become freed or redundant as predicted by Mike, but rather we have become both equally enslaved and equally hard working, with the same level of ineffectiveness.

It was always going to be, and always will be. The competitive nature of market economies cannot support the inefficiency of idle human resource when pitched against a neighbouring economy that seizes the opportunity of exploiting the wasted time and ability of it’s own human resource in supplementation to the IT machine resource. This I think has always been the future. If we cease to do the ‘stuff’ ourselves then we will unavoidably be required to do a new sort of ‘stuff’ that assists the machines in doing their now old ‘stuff’. There is no escaping it, we are bound to keep working because the incoming energy of the Sun incident upon the Earth needs processing by life into entropy by the inefficient process of work. We are always the work part of that equation, and the incoming rays combined with the mineral resources of the Earth should always be able to sustain a given population-activity for a given inefficiency. The distribution of this work across economies may well change though, which is why it is important to keep working and not wallow in the unsupportable indulgence of retirement.

I have in the past riled against this over promoted myth that AI is about to change our lives. No it isn’t.

http://uk-mistresses.com/vBulletin/s...69&postcount=9

There is nobody alive today who will experience a journey in a truly driverless car as we conceive them now. A train, yes, but a car, no**.

Think of it this way. In the past 25 years the Internet along with Apple and Microsoft have totally changed our user interface with reality, and yet we are still doing pretty much the same things as before***. Reality has received a new skin, but the same old bones remain underneath, and even if everything looks to have changed nothing fundamentally has^. We still sleep and eat and shop and work and f*ck in roughly constant proportions, albeit in slightly modified ways. Although for me as I get older I seem to be doing more of the last four at expense of the first.

Which reminds me; by jings is that the time ? I must away the noo to my wee beddy.

Kind Regards,
Page 130.

* Which were always helpfully described as being like an ‘electronic brain’ that will do our thinking for us. Here we are, over 40 years later and still waiting.

** Assuming that GS stops digging up the ballast and leaves it alone for a moment. Now there’s another social computer, the railways. With the hardware of Civils, the architecture of P-Way, the power of OLE, and the software of Signalling...what is it all actually computing ? At what point do the trains all stop running and we finally get the answer to the original question, which presumably was “Excuse me Mr Stephenson, next time would it be possible to travel from Darlington to Stockton a bit quicker, cheaper, and more reliably, in something that doesn’t involve sitting uncomfortably in the pissy rain for an hour getting covered in sutty shit ?”. There is more computing yet to be done on that one.

*** Except many of us are now wasting an unacceptable amount of time surfing and watching the greater mass of porn which is freely available on the net. This is a truly useless yet irresistible pastime which squanders our energies for nought advancement or improvement of self. Where once a person may have spent perhaps a few minutes a day in the act of ‘self pleasurement’ the addictive dopamine feedback loop of internet wanking now achieves the same result but over hours not minutes. Porn has become a significant inefficiency in the process of life in developed economies. I bet those Chinese and Indian peoples aren’t throwing away their weekends and evenings wanking themselves to a frothy mess over simulated sexual images reconstructed from unsexy binary ones and noughts. It makes me wonder therefore if the Digital Economy Bill might not be a positive competitive boost for our economy as it could reduce the amount of squandered time that is being harvested by the porn pushers. Porn is an inefficiency to productivity, a friction to work.

All those billions of people-hours thrown away wanking could have been spent better doing something creative like learning to play the guitar, or keeping fit, or reading and writing. Essentially, if the youth of the recent past had spent less time internet wanking and more time strumming a guitar we would not now be in this parlous state of having to consider the slim pickings of Ed Sheeren and (the potty mouthed) Adele as being ‘really good music, actually’. There would be no need for the ‘actually’. More strumming and less wanking is required if we are to save future generations from the dross of more Eds and Adeles. We are all wanking ourselves to an artless oblivion, and need to avoid this ‘dangerous and irresistible pastime’ or ‘window watching’ and instead start coming back to life, whilst bending those notes...

https://youtu.be/XAeqBJ7WGa4

^ This Red Queen running to stand still concept is something which caught my interest a while back. The footnote:-

http://uk-mistresses.com/vBulletin/s...77&postcount=6

[ex nihilo]

Originally Posted by Slutty Rimmer

Is it that simple, do you really see it so ?

And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts ?

These predictions of human redundancy due to the rise of the machines have been around since the time when human endeavour first created the machines of IT from bits. It still has not happened.

I am a firm believer that all futuristic predictions will be wrong by their very inherent nature and that change will come out of the blue. If you can predict IT then IT isn’t going to happen. Think back to the 70’s when we were all sold the lies by Michael Rodd on Tomorrow’s World (and else where by other futurologists of the day) that ‘electronic computers’ would displace humans in the work place and we would all have more leisure time whilst the computers* did all our work for us. It never happened and we now seem to spend much of our working life struggling with the limitations of the machines and actually spending more time maintaining and servicing the machines. You said it yourself “sitting in offices, peering at screens, answering irrelevant emails“, which is something that never occurred before screens and machines came along. We have not become freed or redundant as predicted my Mike, but rather we have become both equally enslaved and equally hard working, with the same level of ineffectiveness.

Change is inevitable and as you will appreciate is in accordance with the Second Law. To get to the value of the kernel within, you first need to break the shell of conventional thinking.

Wim, I don’t think going back to the 70’s is all that relevant. The digital economy came into effect much later than that. Very recently in fact.

Do it all machines in banks, online shopping and such have changed the transactional landscape for ever. Banking and retail were traditionally major employers for transactional processes. Not any more.

And now we have the potential for 3D printing, where additive manufacturing processes enabling raw materials to be joined together under computer control for the creation of a three dimensional finished product. Finished objects can be of almost any shape or geometry and all you need is a CAD model and an additive manufacturing file for sequencing material layer by layer. An elderly patient could 3D print a repeat e-prescription in their own home without the need to brave a trip down to the pharmacy in mid winter or reduce their carbon footprint by eliminating the need for a delivery driver. All you would need is an array of mini silos (software locked until prescription release) containing the active and incipient ingredients. Might have a positive effect on stability and shelf life also.

Also in fashion, the value is in the design model (which you would pay for and download) making it feasible to 3D print designer clothes from the basic raw materials using colour chemistry for colour choice and flexing the design model for size thereby offering a complete range for the family.

Pharma, Pharma, Hari, Hari…