The truth is unemployment levels will never return to the 4 and 5 percent levels regarded as healthy before the crash of 2008. In fact, the new standard is likely to be 6 or 7 and this is without considering workers left behind and no longer in the statistics. Sadly, we are likely to have an even larger and permanent underclass, and this underclass will be not only from the poorly educated or from blue collar workers. It will be a mixture of mid level executives now flipping burgers, construction workers emptying bedpans, and executives put out to pasture. Not to mention farm workers replaced by Japanese robots capable of picking and selecting ripe strawberries. Yikes, oh well too bad, time to become a politician where few job skills are required except disingenuous deceit.
Add to this mix Watson, IBM's super computer. You know, the machine that just defeated past jeopardy champions in a special jeopardy version of John Henry against the pile driver or Paul Bunyan against the chain saw. And like the chain saws destruction of the ax, or John Henry's loss to the machine, the implications of this new contest are just as bad for mankind ( as in workin for a livin) . In fact IBM's goal was to make a machine capable of stealing jobs from humans.
"I.B.M.’s executives have said they intend to commercialize Watson to provide a new class of question-answering systems in business, education and medicine. The repercussions of such technology are unknown, but it is possible, for example, to envision systems that replace not only human experts, but hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs throughout the economy and around the globe. Virtually any job that now involves answering questions and conducting commercial transactions by telephone will soon be at risk. It is only necessary to consider how quickly A.T.M.’s displaced human bank tellers to have an idea of what could happen." see New York Times
Meanwhile Martin Ford writes in Fortune Will IBM's Watson put your job in jeopardy?
"The technologies that power Watson will likely find their way into a variety of software applications and robots that can compete for both high and low skill jobs. As artificial intelligence software improves and hardware becomes dramatically faster and more affordable over the coming decade, job creation in both low and high skill occupations risks falling short of expectations. And employers in a wide range of industries may increasingly choose technology over people. Few, if any, economists seem willing to acknowledge that scenario, but if it does come to pass, what we consider unacceptable levels of unemployment today could become the new normal tomorrow."
Fortune Magazine.
Time to call on Arnold... or Terminator anyone?
