What will be the effect of ultra-cheap SBCs on work world and wages in 2020s?

[cdev]

What do you think the effect of ultra-cheap computers will be on workplaces, will they replace all the rooms full of chair-warming people with rooms full of air warming machines by the mid 2020s?

What will Americans, Europeans and Australians do with all the spare time?

[ataradov]

What are you talking about? What SBCs have to do with workplaces? And how exactly they will replace humans?

[cdev]

It all depends on the job. Many jobs can't be done by machines for perfectly valid (like politics) or sentimental reasons.

[ataradov]

Are you drunk? What sort of jobs CAN be replaced by SBCs?

[igendel]

Are you drunk? What sort of jobs CAN be replaced by SBCs?

In my country, sports reporters. I don't usually watch sports, but in the last Olympics, what they said was so arbitrary and pointless, I am sure a Raspberry Pi with a decent speech synthesizer and a simple random() function to select strings from some Google search will do the job just as good.

Now, usually I'd put a smiley here, but seriously, it was that bad.

[ataradov]

There is no value that SBC adds here. x86 computers can be obtained for $200 and they will outperform any currently available SBC.

It is rarely a question of money for things like this.

Today, you have a computer assigned to each worker. If you could eliminate the worker and have computer do all the work, it would have been done long time ago. That computer costs less than a week worth of salary, so peanuts.

[T3sl4co1l]

FWIW, the average commodity news report is autogenerated, these days.  They're coming.

SBCs certainly aren't displacing humans any time soon.  Making their jobs easier (and also more frustrating, IoT-everything for instance...), but no way nearly powerful enough to replace people.

Desktop and server (cloud) computers will be doing that first.

Tim

[Karel]

They have a point...

[igendel]

SBCs certainly aren't displacing humans any time soon.  Making their jobs easier (and also more frustrating, IoT-everything for instance...), but no way nearly powerful enough to replace people.

This reminds me, about 12 years ago I was working at a marketing research company as a "research assistant" doing statistics and reports. A very large portion of my time (and the time of others in my position) was dedicated to rote work of drawing and formatting tables in MS-WORD for the raw output from the statistics software. So, to prevent my untimely death due to boredom, I started writing a BASIC program in MS-WORD that will take the raw output file and format it automatically. When it reached a presentable level I showed it to my direct boss. He blinked at it like a lizard, then said "nice but no" and that was it.

Considering the time we humans invested in those stupid tables, that program alone could make an employee or two redundant, but 

[ataradov]

I call BS on the 99% number. Weapons for this war will be created out of nowhere? Or it is included in the 1%? It will be a long time (never?) before manual labor can be replaced.

There will be endless whining from useless snowflakes with gender studies degrees. That's guaranteed.

And also, who cares if nobody has work, if computers do all the work for you. Especially this is cool for growing produce. I want to see RPi planting corn and potatos

[RoGeorge]

There will be a point (which we might have already reached) that big capitalists and their equity as well as a small fraction of population (elites) can replace all human labor in 99% of the fields.
When the time has come where the interest conflict between the above mentioned elite and general public has reached a certain, destructive, irreversible point, there will be wars between them, and the war might be disguised as a common war between countries to reduce population.
Eventually, population will go down and average living quality will increase, creating laziness and lack of competition, and further level separation, and this cycle will repeat itself every tens or hundreds of years.
The story of Mission Impossible 4 is bound to happen, just the time has yet to come, and the tool may not be a nuclear bomb.

Why such a dark prediction blueskull?
Instead of a war between classes, better educate people as much as possible.

By the way, there was such a war between the working class and the intellectuals, and the Comunist Party started to fight against elites. Guess what, elites and rich people lost. Uneducated people are not necessarily stupid, and they are many. Simple people are incredibly resourceful at destroying. I don't want to live again in a populist era, so please stop being a dark prophet.

[hans]

I think the "robot will replace all humans" thought is extremely pessimistic.

IMHO if someone is so close minded and short sighted that they will keep doing the same job for the rest of their life, unwilling to train themselves into something new, then I think it's almost certain they will end up unemployed.
Sure we have a large portion of engineers or other high educated people on this forum and that may seem like an unfair position, but IMO thinking that we are 'safe' is a disillusioned thought. In the end many engineers are also just cogs in a workplace, the cog is just a bit more complex to make and more expensive.

Thought experiment: what if an engineer is so cocky he does not want to design transistor audio amps, but only valve amps. Not because of any project or cost reason, but just because he likes valves. Likely he/she doesn't have a job by now anymore. The world has moved on. Sure there will be some niches doing it the old way, but good luck finding those. If this engineer wants good job prospects, then he/she must educate on transistors...

If a worker only wants to use hand tools and no power tools, IMO same thing.
If a worker only wants to use power tools and  ....

By the capitalistic nature of our (western) societies we always want more. More complex products, quick write offs to buy new ones and new type of gadgets. If this trend (neglecting that it is a bubble..) is anything to go by, new tools will be used to be more productive and efficient. Sure some people will lose their jobs, but I think that's part of yet another shift in the workforce.

[RoGeorge]

I see your point, blueskull. Seems like a wise argument, indeed.

This seems also wise:

Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words.
Be careful of your words, for your words become your actions.
Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits.
Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character.
Be careful of your character, for your character becomes your destiny.

I am no mystic, but I like that quoted kind of wisdom more, so I'll leave this topic.
Thank you for answering my question.

[EmmanuelFaure]

This reminds me, about 12 years ago I was working at a marketing research company as a "research assistant" doing statistics and reports. A very large portion of my time (and the time of others in my position) was dedicated to rote work of drawing and formatting tables in MS-WORD for the raw output from the statistics software. So, to prevent my untimely death due to boredom, I started writing a BASIC program in MS-WORD that will take the raw output file and format it automatically. When it reached a presentable level I showed it to my direct boss. He blinked at it like a lizard, then said "nice but no" and that was it.

Considering the time we humans invested in those stupid tables, that program alone could make an employee or two redundant, but 

So classic!

I have a story of the same kind : A person has been assigned the task to remove the duplications from a list (Spreadsheet file) of ~6000 suppliers. She began with the line number one, and compared it to the remaining 5999, then the line number two and the remaining 5998, etc. She spent an entire month to complete that.

Using some regular expressions, for example you could have extracted the ZIP from the "address" cell, then compare the suppliers with the same ZIP to find the duplications much quicker. Instead of searching among ~6000 lines, you had to search only among something like 10 or 20 lines. 2 days of work and the job was done.

Do your job 10...20% better and you'll be congratulated. Do it 10 times better and you'll be kicked in the nuts. Corporate politics

[igendel]

She began with the line number one, and compared it to the remaining 5999, then the line number two and the remaining 5998, etc. She spent an entire month to complete that.

Wow. Of all the valid ways of doing this (i.e. without repeating comparisons), this one's got to be slowest and the most painful.

Do your job 10...20% better and you'll be congratulated. Do it 10 times better and you'll be kicked in the nuts. Corporate politics

It makes sense though - 10-20% means you're smarter than your peers, x10 means you're smarter than your bosses 

[forrestc]

What do you think the effect of ultra-cheap computers will be on workplaces, will they replace all the rooms full of chair-warming people with rooms full of air warming machines by the mid 2020s?

What will Americans, Europeans and Australians do with all the spare time?

Not exactly what you're saying (I think), but, I'm pretty convinced that many industries are going to be drastically affected by jobs being obsoleted by technology.   

At least in the US there are two items which I'm aware of which I see as likely:

1) Many truck driving jobs will disappear due to replacement with self-driving trucks.   If you think about the long haul trucks which basically just travel from a set location to another set location via a set route on a continuous basis (mail, UPS, Fedex, other delivery services, etc.), there is very little reason why these can't be replaced in the very near future with human-less vehicles.   Many other "paid driving" jobs will likely dissapear as well (taxi, etc).   I see this as inevitable at this point as self-driving vehicle technology has already reached the point that in some driving conditions there are fewer accidents per mile with self-driving vehicles than with humans at the wheel.   The National Highway Safety Administration in the US is pushing this particularly hard to reduce highway fatalities.

2) Longer-term, I suspect self-driving cars will enable such low cost ridesharing services that many people won't bother with owning a car anymore, which may hurt the auto industry.  This is speculation though.

3) Various fast-food jobs will be subject to replacement by machine.  McDonalds is adding ordering kiosks to 2500 stores initially, with 3000 more coming.  They insist it isn't to replace jobs, but instead to free up the order-takers to do other jobs around the restaurants.   But still, fewer cashiers as a result.   

I could think of many other examples.  But they're all very similar - technology has reached the point in many cases where they do at least as good of a job as humans do.   As one more example, I've noticed that speech synthesis has gotten so good that many reputable news sites have switched to having all of their stories read by a computer.  Most people wouldn't even notice the occasional odd inflection - at some point that will go away as well.   At which point the need for voiceover people will be reduced.   

The challenge in this is what to do with all of the dislodged workers.   If you've been driving a truck for all of your adult life, and suddenly you're out of work because there are no more truck driving jobs, what are you going to do?   The number of options available to you is limited, and for many retraining may not be an option.

I don't think it's all doom and gloom though - in sectors which humans work alongside (or on) technology, things are looking up.   The challenge will be how to move the non-technical workforce into the technical jobs.   I know in some parts of the US there is a problem where you have a large number of unemployed workers in exactly the same spot as you have companies which are trying desperately to find skilled workers.

[forrestc]

I want to see RPi planting corn and potatos

Not exactly a raspberry Pi, but, this is already done:



My understanding is that any reasonable sized operation already uses GPS and autosteer in planing (and harvesting, etc) their crops.   The operator is simply in the cab to act as an emergency stop and to keep an eye on things.  At some point the operator is going to become wholly unnecessary. 

[cdev]

Iconic scene:

[cdev]

The impact of trade in services agreements on this future work-sparse world will be substantial. But no, "robots" (all computer containing devices) and "cross border data flows" (fast global networks and remote work) won't replace all humans in the high wage countries nor will they only replace the most expensive or cheapest ones. Generally they will replace the ones its most profitable to replace first.

Society will still expect a high level of cultural and technical literacy in the core cities.

Trade agreements which have already become a de-facto world government, will rapidly, reduce the inefficiency of profit earning enterprises by liberating them from the high costs of labor in developed countries using global subcontracting.  It will be a great time to be an oligarch. The longtime goal of business ever since Taylorism of replacing once "irreplaceable" skilled workforces with a commodified workforce, interchangeable cogs in a standardized, global machine, will be here.

https://wikileaks.org/tisa/document/20160621_TiSA_Core-Text/20160621_TiSA_Core-Text.pdf


Service exporting firms will locate in countries with favorable levels of non-regulation and deregulation and will attract starving workers from the developed countries around the world, who want to keep working, not see their careers end early in their working lives.

Quote from: hans on Today at 02:20:02>I think the "robot will replace all humans" thought is extremely pessimistic.

....

Sure we have a large portion of engineers or other high educated people on this forum and that may seem like an unfair position, but IMO thinking that we are 'safe' is a disillusioned thought. In the end many engineers are also just cogs in a workplace, the cog is just a bit more complex to make and more expensive.

[hans]

I want to see RPi planting corn and potatos

Not exactly a raspberry Pi, but, this is already done:



My understanding is that any reasonable sized operation already uses GPS and autosteer in planing (and harvesting, etc) their crops.   The operator is simply in the cab to act as an emergency stop and to keep an eye on things.  At some point the operator is going to become wholly unnecessary.

These products still do not have the main goal of automating away the driver though. I'm sure we will reach that point someday, but precision farming is about higher density crops, more efficient farming, etc.
Any business that is serious about their time and investment (i.e. crops planted) in NL uses one of these systems. Even if a few % more crops can be planted, that is still a decent amount of kg's and $ farmed. Especially considering the land sizes and dimensions we have got.

In EU I haven't heard about automatic headland turning, mainly because most headlands here are so small that tractors have their implement half buried in the nearby ditch to make the turn. US is a better prospective for that case, certainly JD looks very close in achieving that.

But.. the drivers job gets simpler to the point where it's probably abundant at some point in the future.

[cdev]

They still need a licensed driver when moving the tractor between fields on public roads, until autonomous driving is available..
I am pretty sure there are a substantial number of farmers who have abandoned the proprietary RTK solutions (which are still pretty expensive and of course the manufacturers are doing their best to trap farmers who buy some of their hardware into a walled garden forever) and instead are using open source (and cheap!) RTK to control their tractors instead.

Actually there is one guy in the UK I am pretty sure who for some time he has been putting together packaged solutions and selling them to farmers. he was using old Ublox LEA-4T modules which can do raw data mode, with RTKlib, and a home rolled choke collar for the patch antennas (a trap for RF to reduce multipath from ground reflections) . Using RTKlib if you have a good sky view you can steer a tractor with 2 cm accuracy. Now (several years later) there is no need to rely on old discontinued hardware, there are a number of current modules from mainstream manufacturers that will do RTK for $50 or less. (Navspark, for example)

To get really top levels of accuracy you will need a better than average antenna too but even just a cheap puck active antenna with a decent ground plane under it on the topmost part of the vehicle should be able to get you under 10 cm.

Newer flavors of GPS are also in the pipeline which will eliminate the need for a separate base station and generally make pro level GPS as accurate as RTK or more (millimeter level precision)  This will make it possible to automate almost any outdoor activity to a level better than even the most expert human could ever achieve.

So for now, to get cm level accuracy you need some form of RTK or DGPS..

There are free providers of data but if the numer of users increased substantially the network topology would also need to change (it would make sense to have base stations every few miles) For now, just make your own base station.. Any cutting edge solution would probably want to include a stationary RTKGPS base station with a real time RF link to your rover (for agriculture or lawnmowing the link doesnt have to be long range, just reliable, so you would likely want diversity or MIMO, this is an ideal application for some of the new IOT boards that include wireless N. Total cost for a setup doing this is now much lower than its ever been and falling quickly.)

With only a single GPS you will know its location but not its orientation in 3D space. If instead you have a boom or place two separate GPSs and antennas at two corners - at two spots (on the rover) to sense its attitude and maybe a dead reckoning module to prevent inconsistent results when you were under trees or power lines or next to buildings where there might be lots of reflected signal. Looking at the typical lawn there are always going to be a few areas where hand touch up is needed, the same probably applies to agriculture.


(To bring the price of all this down, and the quality up, I would also target the suburban lawnmower market.)

A similar solution would find a great many applications in construction, for example, lifting beams into place on tall buildings could be automated if the beams could lock into place on one another when brought to the proper location and pressed against one another.

[vodka]

There will be a point (which we might have already reached) that big capitalists and their equity as well as a small fraction of population (elites) can replace all human labor in 99% of the fields.
When the time has come where the interest conflict between the above mentioned elite and general public has reached a certain, destructive, irreversible point, there will be wars between them, and the war might be disguised as a common war between countries to reduce population.
Eventually, population will go down and average living quality will increase, creating laziness and lack of competition, and further level separation, and this cycle will repeat itself every tens or hundreds of years.
The story of Mission Impossible 4 is bound to happen, just the time has yet to come, and the tool may not be a nuclear bomb.

The Lords of world  will avoid any war , because is too destructive and very expensive for thier interest, furthermore they already had an antecedent with WWII. For reducing the the population is more effective create a pandemia, by two motives:

The pandemia will kill a percent of the population until  the goverments will be desesperated

There will be a point (which we might have already reached) that big capitalists and their equity as well as a small fraction of population (elites) can replace all human labor in 99% of the fields.
When the time has come where the interest conflict between the above mentioned elite and general public has reached a certain, destructive, irreversible point, there will be wars between them, and the war might be disguised as a common war between countries to reduce population.
Eventually, population will go down and average living quality will increase, creating laziness and lack of competition, and further level separation, and this cycle will repeat itself every tens or hundreds of years.
The story of Mission Impossible 4 is bound to happen, just the time has yet to come, and the tool may not be a nuclear bomb.

Why such a dark prediction blueskull?
Instead of a war between classes, better educate people as much as possible.

By the way, there was such a war between the working class and the intellectuals, and the Comunist Party started to fight against elites. Guess what, elites and rich people lost. Uneducated people are not necessarily stupid, and they are many. Simple people are incredibly resourceful at destroying. I don't want to live again in a populist era, so please stop being a dark prophet.

I believe that you are confused. The fight of the communist versus capitalist was a war among the elites, because many  communist leaders and  thinkers were burgueses and middle class people who manipulated to poor people for fighting versus  opposites elites. I tell you, all the populate revolution what had succed at the world and the human history, it alwalys has had someone(ofuscated) who has given financial  and logistic support.

[cdev]

The Lords of War became the Lords of Peace and now the oligarchs all vacation together, no doubt scheming how to stash their oh so hard earned megabucks from their villas on the shores of the Black Sea or Ibiza or the Adriatic or Caribbean or whatever.

To return to electronics, the electronic revolution will mean that the services liberalisation revolution (long promised to developing countries so they would not develop their own services and products to compete with developed countries) may never happen because the long promised high skilled jobs which were supposed to go to the rich people from poor countries likely wont even be needed.

Infrastructure will be built by automation, not by Indian PhDs. Tech support calls will be answered by AIs, not low paid workers in Asia.

 infrastructure projects in rich countries, wont need the poor countries engineering firms and armies of low paid workers, they will be automated with machines from home.

So what will they do then, start a war with us because they fell for different lies from the same people that conned the people in developed countries? (who dont even know these deals have been made, they are still stuck back in the 1980s and early 90s framing, and dont even know about GATS, TISA or the rest - which have changed everything)

Electronics will have changed everything. It can make us all poor or all rich. Our choice.

[Cyberdragon]

TECHNOLOGY ONLY discussion people! Politics will get this thread killed by mods!

[IanMacdonald]

"The fight of the communist versus capitalist was a war among the elites"

Communist regimes are supposed to be run by the people for the people, but always end up with a despotic KING running them. Lenin, Stalin and Mao were kings in all but name. Kim Jong-Un is definitely a king; he even inherited his rule from his father.