deadduck wrote:
If your job is so basic that it can be replaced by a machine, it probably should be.
There will have to be a change in the way kids are educated so that they have more transferable skills in a fluid job market
The bored favourite Jordan Peterson has a good line on the problem of the complexification of the modern world, and what that means for future (and present even) job opportunities. His essential point being that even when there were manual jobs aplenty, there was a base minimum IQ you'd need to complete that work (he uses American Army experience, which is based on the fact that the army will take anyone as long as they have just enough education to perform, which eventually led them to working out that 10% of the population is simply too stupid to do even do the most menial of tasks).
The issue being, (and this me speaking now and taking that theory forward) that as the world gets more complex, and computers take up all the 'simple' jobs, the IQ level at which you are intellectually priced out of the job market is ever increasing...and will only carry on increasing.
As such, it doesn't matter what you teach the kids of the future, you'll need to rocking a 100+ IQ to just be able to get a foot in the game, then a number of years from then, a 115 IQ, then 130, so on and so forth. You'll end up at a situation where the intellectual requirements of the remaining jobs will end up out of the reach of a significant proportion of the population.
That, in my opinion is the issue. Neoliberal free market economics will surely start to breakdown some point when computer/robots do a shit tonne of the work, and only the very smartest still have jobs...simply put, if there aren't enough people out there to generate the demand, then the supply will dry up and it'll all go tits up from there.
We really need to start seriously thinking about how we structure a society when robots/computer can do most of the jobs a human can do. To that end, I've become a fan of the notion of taxing 'robots'. All that mechanical/AI based 'efficiency gains' gets you is corporations producing their wares for ever greater profit while simultaneously laying people off. Some sort of metric would need to be put in place that quantified how many 'man hours' a robot is taking, and then tax the company appropriately.
Yes, the wares are then more expensive as that cost is passed onto the consumer, but you can funnel that tax money back into society so more people have money to buy said wares (Universal Credit maybe?)...and, importantly, because you've managed to preserve the market, you can still get the benefits its supposedly meant to bring, i.e. competition so that if Company A hike up their price in defiance at being taxed for the amount of AI/Robots they use, Company B can come in and undercut them.
Right, that's the next few hundred years sorted...what' the next question?