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  1. #101
    Quote Originally Posted by mvallas View Post
    That's money... not just America. Eventually those Immigrants will discover they will find the most efficient way to make that money with doing the least amount of work.

    Oh, and by the way, those "immigrants being given our jobs" are being given to them by employers who can maximize their profits by no longer paying people, but paying slaves. You think they're sending that work out to have them be coded EFFICIENTLY?! HAH!

    I knew one guy who worked at an electronic toy manufacturer... they had a whole department who's purpose was to DE-BUG and fix what their outsourced labor screws up... and they screw up a TON!
    I was talking about highly educated (US) immigrants living in the US but OK, lets bash foreign countries who's workers get paid little to nothing because us Americans are clearly better in every aspect and they should just give up.

    You do know that the reason American designers are 'better' is because our training is better right? Higher education is the very thing you're arguing against.

  2. #102
    Quote Originally Posted by yurano View Post
    A person who programs for employment has much higher productivity and is more focused than a person who programs for enjoyment.
    Quote Originally Posted by obdigore View Post
    Utterly the other way around. A person who is programming because it is their job will do just enough to get by. A person who does it because they want to will go above and beyond that level every single time.

    Actually, you're both wrong (or right, if you prefer that)...

    I choose wrong, because you're fixating on one or two facets of a very complex situation... Doesn't help that neither of you can back up your statements... Doesn't help that many people fit into both categories... Comparing hundreds of thousands of people in one, to hundreds of thousands in the other doesn't really offer a right and wrong answer ; )

    In short, people are motivated by different things... Outside of merely money vs pleasure/innovation.

    -Alamar

  3. #103
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    Quote Originally Posted by mvallas View Post

    ...I think there's a smaller step from Milkman to Grocery Store worker than Grocery Store worker to Computer Programmer. :P
    Not the point. There are tons of jobs that no longer exist due to technology advances.

  4. #104
    Quote Originally Posted by AlamarAtMMOC View Post
    Actually, you're both wrong (or right, if you prefer that)...

    I choose wrong, because you're fixating on one or two facets of a very complex situation... Doesn't help that neither of you can back up your statements... Doesn't help that many people fit into both categories... Comparing hundreds of thousands of people in one, to hundreds of thousands in the other doesn't really offer a right and wrong answer ; )

    In short, people are motivated by different things... Outside of merely money vs pleasure/innovation.

    -Alamar
    I like how you criticize us for being hand wavy by using a hand wavy statement.

  5. #105

  6. #106
    Quote Originally Posted by yurano View Post
    I like how you criticize us for being hand wavy by using a hand wavy statement.
    Something we can agree on.

    Come, yurano, let us enter this new era of peace and forum prosperity, hand in hand.

  7. #107
    Rather interesting how a topic on technological advances making jobs obsolete shifted into a topic on motivation for money or for shits and giggles.

    OT: It's rather odd to sit at a computer to talk to people all across the world and discuss the evils of technological advancements. As technology advances certain job sectors get closed up, certain ones open up, but that's far from the only effects of advancing technologies. It is quite worrying to see people afraid of the idea of technology advancing our society and world as a whole because they'll need to find a new job.

  8. #108
    Quote Originally Posted by Xenofreak View Post
    Rather interesting how a topic on technological advances making jobs obsolete shifted into a topic on motivation for money or for shits and giggles.

    OT: It's rather odd to sit at a computer to talk to people all across the world and discuss the evils of technological advancements. As technology advances certain job sectors get closed up, certain ones open up, but that's far from the only effects of advancing technologies. It is quite worrying to see people afraid of the idea of technology advancing our society and world as a whole because they'll need to find a new job.
    I always found the general complaint about technology to be quite amusing...

    It's really just about lack of flexibility or desire to learn, as 'technology' is just whatever comes out after you're young... I always wonder if those that 'hate technology' or similar, ride their horse, bareback, to the farm they plant and harvest crops with their hands... And how it is they're even talking to me when I'm not within walking/riding distance in the first place ; )

    And yes, I'm using exaggeration : )

    -Alamar

  9. #109
    Quote Originally Posted by vindicatorx View Post
    Not the point. There are tons of jobs that no longer exist due to technology advances.
    There are also tons of new jobs because of technology advances. People are going to have to move even further away from manual labor jobs or jobs that dont require much critical thinking that robots can do. Weve been doing it for hundreds of years and its going to keep happening, although maybe faster than before.

  10. #110
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    Quote Originally Posted by vindicatorx View Post
    Not the point. There are tons of jobs that no longer exist due to technology advances.
    Very true. However, the whole point of the article is that currently we are losing more jobs than are being created. This is all compounded by the current recession.

    This is not a US issue. This is a developed nations issue. First world problems.

    Yes, we do need more programmers to adapt to the changing market. That has been known for years. That does not mean that everyone can just go out and learn how to program, or even operate, a computer. People have different skill sets and many people will not be able to understand it no matter how hard they try or how long they study. I made A's in every class I took except physics. Then again, hard to do well in physics when you suck at math in general. Just like how some people could not write a coherent paragraph if their life depended on it.

    We need a wide array of skilled and unskilled jobs available or we will have a ton of unemployed people. That is reality.
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  11. #111
    Quote Originally Posted by mvallas View Post
    Thereby they'll do the MINIMUM effort to get the MAXIMUM reward. World of Warcraft (particularly honor points in PVP and exploiters in PVE) should teach you that lesson! :P
    Think of it like this. Honor grinders are blue collars, robots are, well, robots.

    Which one is more effective? Bots can grind 24/7.

    On topic, if you happen to be a good programmer you don't necessarily need the highest of educations to make some reasonable amount of cash, because an academic person is not necessarily the best programmer.

    For many other CS related work you probably will want some level of education and some certificates to stand out, especially if you don't have anything to show off (which hobbyist coders usually do).

  12. #112
    Quote Originally Posted by Rukentuts View Post
    They can work fast food.
    http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...rgers-per-hour

    Not for long.

    With which I follow it up with...

    http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/01...dle-class-jobs

    So tell me, when we have machines that require 10 people to run and maintain it and replace 1,000 jobs, were do these displaced workers go to when there isn't any more open jobs to take?

    Edit:

    For most of us, it isn't the advances in technology we are fearing, it is how the benefits of the technology are not benefiting us as a whole compared to how much it is benefiting the small few at the top.

    If they would reduce the hours we had to work and increase our pay to make up for the increased productivity so we could all live better that would be great. But doubling your production only to fire half the work force and make the other half do it all while using the newly unemployed people dying for work as leverage to lower or stagnate the wages of the ones you do have is were we have the problem.
    Last edited by Fugus; 2013-01-24 at 01:19 PM.

  13. #113
    The government did a study and projected that robots will begin to severely and noticeably impact the number of jobs available by 2025. They predict it will have some interesting effects.

    1. Illegal immigrant workers will reverse course and flee to Mexico to find jobs, because manual labor jobs will be done by robots instead of people.
    2. Unemployment will rise tremendously.

    The sociopolitical factors are interesting to speculate on. I do not believe socialism can function in a world with robots. Socialism requires that the common man has value to society. The common man leverages that value for rights and benefits from the elites. The traditional social contract is that, if the elites want goods and services, if they want armies, then they need to give the common man rights and benefits.

    Robots will destroy the traditional social contract. The common man will have zero value to elites. The elites can wipe out the common man and suffer no penalty, because the robots will provide everything they need. It may not happen right away, but its just a matter of time before the right combination of uncaring elites attain power to do the deed.

    The only option is to ban robots from the workplace. That means the left has to become anti-science. It also means that if its not a global ban, the countries that don't ban robots will move ahead of everyone else.

    ---------- Post added 2013-01-24 at 05:35 AM ----------

    This is still trickle-down economics at work. I know the left likes to say trickle-down is a stupid, discredited notion, but its very real and still happening. To understand trickle-down economics, it essentially tells us that, in the long run, EVERYTHING becomes a commodity. The most famous example of trickle-down economics at work is the internet itself. The internet used to be the playground of elites, but eventually it trickled down to the masses. The same for cellphones.

    Robots will cause many more things to trickle-down because it will make things easy to mass-produce for little cost.

  14. #114
    Quote Originally Posted by Fugus View Post
    So tell me, when we have machines that require 10 people to run and maintain it and replace 1,000 jobs, were do these displaced workers go to when there isn't any more open jobs to take?
    They can go back to school, for one. Thanks to 99 week unemployment we had a bunch of workers half-assedly looking for a job when they should be getting retrained.

  15. #115
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    Quote Originally Posted by Grummgug View Post
    Robots will destroy the traditional social contract.
    How do we support progress in science and technology and oppose technological takeover of our jobs?

    We are trying to create technology that cuts jobs. That is a problem all itself, especially if that new demand does not create more jobs than the new technology destroys.

    I preach trade schools to anyone thinking of going to college right now. It is a better route unless you can do well in IT related majors. However, there is only so much plumbing, wiring, and welding to do. Skilled trades like those also get affected in the recession too. Also, look at the advances in those industries. Technology is also making some service jobs redundant.

    Reminds me of the second season of The Wire when the stevedores were fighting to keep their jobs. Docks that used to employ hundreds are being operated by a few people with computers. All to increase profits. If our goal is to remove human workers from the job market they have to have some other place to go or they become society's burden.

    I think some people here are very out of touch with reality. Going back to school is not some magical process where you are given skills and new jobs. If it was that easy we would be doing it. We can't even get people to finish high school. And there are no magical job creators out there, only job destroyers.

    The second part of the series is out now.
    Last edited by Roose; 2013-01-24 at 06:40 PM.
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  16. #116
    Quote Originally Posted by mvallas View Post
    I don't recal anybody complaining about Horses or Trains taking any jobs... especially since nobody had an invention that can make a person travel faster that the Horse out-did. :P
    I was mostly referring to horses as animals (coupled with some wheels) which could haul a significantly larger amount of... anything an average human. People may not have been outright losing jobs because of that back then (not sure what kind of jobs there were shortly after the invention of the wheel), but it certainly did take away a good amount of labor.
    Something similar goes for the trains.
    And I'm sure there were some individuals who indeed complained about trains taking their jobs, one way or another. They just haven't posted that on MMO-Champion because they've been dead for a while.

    Quote Originally Posted by Methanar View Post
    ...what?
    Name one other time in history where population growth was explosive and many jobs were being automated and stopped requiring human labour. Or at very least cut human labour requirement significantly.
    Why do I need to "name one other time in history where population growth was explosive and many jobs were being automated and stopped requiring human labour"?
    Did I say there was "one other time in history where population growth was explosive and many jobs were being automated and stopped requiring human labour"?
    What I said is that this kind of thing (people losing work because something appeared that did that work much better than them and for a smaller price) has been happening during the whole of the past. No, not the EXACT same thing, as your question would make it seem, but the same concept, principle. The horses and trains bit was supposed to take care of that, but oh well.

    In addition to this, computerization of many trivial tasks has been foreseen decades ago. Not exactly the same way it turned out, but pretty damn close. This wasn't unexpected, no need to act like this news is a proverbial sack of bricks over our heads.

  17. #117
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    Quote Originally Posted by Creotor View Post
    I was mostly referring to horses as animals (coupled with some wheels) which could haul a significantly larger amount of... anything an average human. People may not have been outright losing jobs because of that back then (not sure what kind of jobs there were shortly after the invention of the wheel), but it certainly did take away a good amount of labor.
    Something similar goes for the trains.
    And I'm sure there were some individuals who indeed complained about trains taking their jobs, one way or another. They just haven't posted that on MMO-Champion because they've been dead for a while.



    Why do I need to "name one other time in history where population growth was explosive and many jobs were being automated and stopped requiring human labour"?
    Did I say there was "one other time in history where population growth was explosive and many jobs were being automated and stopped requiring human labour"?
    What I said is that this kind of thing (people losing work because something appeared that did that work much better than them and for a smaller price) has been happening during the whole of the past. No, not the EXACT same thing, as your question would make it seem, but the same concept, principle. The horses and trains bit was supposed to take care of that, but oh well.

    In addition to this, computerization of many trivial tasks has been foreseen decades ago. Not exactly the same way it turned out, but pretty damn close. This wasn't unexpected, no need to act like this news is a proverbial sack of bricks over our heads.
    Unfortunately though its my generation that needs to deal with it. Not those who were first observing it decades ago. They've all retired and are busy claiming their pensions by now.

  18. #118
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    Quote Originally Posted by Creotor View Post
    What I said is that this kind of thing (people losing work because something appeared that did that work much better than them and for a smaller price) has been happening during the whole of the past. No, not the EXACT same thing, as your question would make it seem, but the same concept, principle. The horses and trains bit was supposed to take care of that, but oh well.

    In addition to this, computerization of many trivial tasks has been foreseen decades ago. Not exactly the same way it turned out, but pretty damn close. This wasn't unexpected, no need to act like this news is a proverbial sack of bricks over our heads.
    The difference with now is that now we are actually seeing in the horizon the point where machines move up from menial, repetitive labor to skilled labor. We can see it's going to happen. Not just robots doing the work of waiters, manual workers, cleaners, etc... but machines doing the work of surgeons, engineers, economists (they are already starting to do it).
    And why would it stop there? As machines get more complex, and with more capabilities, and become more adaptable and able to treat with humans, they can do the job of teachers, of PR, of customer service... of artists! Machines can phase out entepreneurs, and i would like to see a company led by a human trying to compete with a company led by a machine.

    Anything a human can do, a machine will eventually be able to do. And this "eventually" is ever closer.
    What will we do then?

  19. #119
    Quote Originally Posted by Roose View Post
    Some people were born to dig ditches. Where is this world that you live on where every person has the ability to learn how to program computers?
    No one is born to dig ditches.

    Altought the fear of technology is not anything new. The machines will take our jobs complaint has existed since the early industrial revolution period. They where called Luddites, workers of the textile industry of Great Britain that complained that the newly developed machines and steam power was pushing killing their jobs. They where known for rioting and breaking machinery.

    Anyways there is this thing called the Luddite Fallacy. It treats the idea of Techonological Unemployment. Technological Unemployment exists altought it cannot cause and will not cause systemic unemployment. As new technologies and machines are developed certain professions, jobs and even companies are phased out and become obselete. But the main thing of technological progress is that it will ALWAYS push prices lower and lower creating aggregate demand. More people will be able to buy more products at lower costs generating more demand of products and services. With other words the more and faster you make things the more demand you generate due to falling prices and the availability of exess liquidity the more jobs you create trough products and services.

    The only issue is that new jobs will require new skills and new types of workers. It is true that it is hurtfull for those who are being Phased out, but macro economically speaking it is beneficial.

    The clear exemple of this is the rising quality of life in the western world since industrialization coupled with a spike in population sizes. We have more people then ever in history having higher standards of living.

    If you visit places where automation is not widespread such as India, you will notice people working in labour intensive jobs for horribly low wages. Exactly because of these low wages they are unable to generate local demand (India and China) maintaing their wages low.

    It is cold hearted to the individual and can be very painful for people or even communities to be phased out by technology, but macro economical speaking it has proven its benefits.

    This is why whenever I hear bashing of public education or even hear the mention of home schooling I facedesk. Unless you intentionally want your offspring to struggle finding a job and don't want him to reap the benefits of advancing technology there would be nothing more important than education to prepar the next generation for a changed future.
    Last edited by Mihalik; 2013-01-25 at 11:11 AM.

  20. #120
    So Mihalik you wrote this entire post after ignoring the rest of the thread, and why the Luddite fallacy may not be appropriate at this time? Awesome. A giant wasted post.

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