Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: Eventually that will trickle up to everybody (Score 1) 160

There are several companies making really good progress on humanoid robots. Combined with good enough ai, those will be able to fix your toilet or lay mortar at a construction site. When they get good enough, they will be able to do practically any job a human can do.

AI-enhanced robotics will replace humans on a number of manual labor positions, but adoption will be a matter of scale. Because mobile robotics will always be expensive, they'll only be adopted where each can do the job of 10+ humans on a near 24 hour basis. Farming is a good example of where mobile robots will eventually be widely adapted. They'll pretty much pay for themselves on very large farms. But your plumbing contractor will never reasonably be able to afford them considering how much work each employee gets. You can only work on one toilet at a time, one house at a time. The scaling simply isn't there for small businesses with skilled workers. Same thing for small to medium scale construction contractors. You might see robots supplementing men on big city skyscraper projects, but not doing home renovations or pouring a new driveway at someone's house.

Comment Re:Eventually that will trickle up to everybody (Score 1) 160

Companies will find that because they replaced all the younger workers with AI, there aren't enough experienced ones. Unless AI dramatically improves, it's going to be a repeat of what happened with on-the-job training. Everyone needs a degree now because companies decided they didn't want to train them.

Everyone needs a degree now because we watered down high school and made it worthless, then we banned companies from using IQ tests to select workers, and so the college degree became a stand in for "He's probably smart enough to do this". But now we're watering down the Bachelor's Degree, too, because it's unfair if everyone doesn't have a college degree or some nonsense.

Comment Re:Eventually that will trickle up to everybody (Score 2, Insightful) 160

The goal here isnt to replace jobs, its to suppress wages.
 

That is flat out wrong. The goal was specifically to replace human beings in a wide swath of positions.

What makes AI unique is that, unlike say, the spreadsheet, it wasn't created to make workers more productive with some skill training. It was created to completely replace a major chunk of knowledge workers, maybe most of them. And it will. AI is a jobs extinction level event. Manual work will be unaffected... AI can't fix your toilet or lay mortar in a construction site, but it's going to be the asteroid that kills off most coding jobs, financial analyst jobs, and a huge chunk of administrative jobs. The software dev positions that remain will mostly be for maintaining AI. All that "learn to code" advice from just a few years ago? Unless you're going into a hyper-specialized software field, requiring years of education and training, you're pretty much going to be obsolete, soon. And I mean soon as in "this decade", not some ambiguous date down the road. So not only will fields like software completely change, but the education ecosystem that served them is going to undergo a serious culling as well. No more coding camps, boys.

Comment Re: I don't have any sympathy (Score 1) 129

He's had super-model wives

And cheated on all of them.

As if powerful men haven't done this since, oh, Eternity.

Forget that he's Donald Trump for a second. With his wealth alone, he has a status that 99.999 percent of men will never have. And such men have legions of young, hot women just waiting to take the place of the current model on his arm. It's human nature, and it'll never end. High status men will always attract flocks of willing young women that will do anything to be on their arm and in their bed.

Comment My recommendation: suicide (Score 1) 26

For those who are sweating bullets worrying what to do about imaginary boogeymen like "global warmings", and who are now experiencing "overheating" in summer due to the placebo effect and a fevered imagination--my recommendation is suicide. After all, you are releasing CO2 with every breath, thus polluting the planet. Do the right thing: visit your local suicide booth today.

Slashdot Top Deals

Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.

Working...