Reply to: Planning to vote Stay? On the fence? Read this

[Old Greg]

In the 90's I worked at the Mail group for a while. I was putting in some interesting stuff to do with the picture desk systems. At the time the story was when they were in Fleet Street there was over 3000 men just involved in printing the Daily Mail. When they moved to Surry Quays and sorted out their print presses it was down to 1500 in the whole group of companies.

I can tell you there were a lot of very surprised looking middle aged guys left wondering where their union job for life had just vanished to.

In London quite a few of them seemed to end up doing the knowledge from what I can tell. Shame Uber is about to screw them a new one all over again...



The missing part of the puzzle was AI and the fact that machines needed human intervention at certain points. However as an example of where this is becoming less of an issue there is software that can listen to your phone call and provide an accurate estimation of your level of truthfulness based on the way you answer questions.

It is possible to use standard web cams to monitor microscopic changes in your face to note changes in your wellness or stress this too than tell if we are lying

Soon it will be possible to remove call desks entirely, using functionality like SIRI that can listen and respond to commands incredibly well. If you couple a SIRI based machine with business rules and lie detection, it will become far better than a human as it will be able to measure responses and aggregate trending data to effectively game the humans using it...

It will be possible to use web forms together with web cameras to spot lying claimants many miles away. Why would Admiral need a private eye to come and interview you following an accident when its claim form can see that you just turned bright baboon arse red when it asked you a direct question. The changes in colour are undetectable to you but a filter on the camera that magnifies your skin tone many thousands of times will pick it up no problem.

How many use cases are there for spotting people that are lying on forms that they fill in from tax to benefits. Imaging a situation where you no longer sign a tax return but instead make a web filing that includes a web camera statement that your forms are true and accurate. How many call centres will HMRC need to spot the bastard then?

We already know that low latency share trading is making more than the idiots sat on the trading floors and most back office work has been reduced from 100's of clerks to a few dozen at most.

Many of the jobs we have are truthfully non-jobs the gap between employed and screwed has never been so perilously close.

Im pretty sure that it would be possible to use a mix of induction heat and the skin tone camera to cook a steak far better then most of the idiots in a pub kitchen.

Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.

[SueEllen]

Actually my Grandfather was a print setter and it was him that used to go on about "computers putting men out of work" in the 80s. Used to moan about immigrants taking British jobs too. Never seemed to have a problem finding work though.

If there were any truth to this we'd have 99% unemployment by now.

As old jobs disappear new ones appear.

The EU migrants are different from non-EU ones as they can f*** off to another country when there is no work here.

[bobspud]

Actually my Grandfather was a print setter and it was him that used to go on about "computers putting men out of work" in the 80s. Used to moan about immigrants taking British jobs too. Never seemed to have a problem finding work though.

In the 90's I worked at the Mail group for a while. I was putting in some interesting stuff to do with the picture desk systems. At the time the story was when they were in Fleet Street there was over 3000 men just involved in printing the Daily Mail. When they moved to Surry Quays and sorted out their print presses it was down to 1500 in the whole group of companies.

I can tell you there were a lot of very surprised looking middle aged guys left wondering where their union job for life had just vanished to.

In London quite a few of them seemed to end up doing the knowledge from what I can tell. Shame Uber is about to screw them a new one all over again...

If there were any truth to this we'd have 99% unemployment by now.

The missing part of the puzzle was AI and the fact that machines needed human intervention at certain points. However as an example of where this is becoming less of an issue there is software that can listen to your phone call and provide an accurate estimation of your level of truthfulness based on the way you answer questions.

It is possible to use standard web cams to monitor microscopic changes in your face to note changes in your wellness or stress this too than tell if we are lying

Soon it will be possible to remove call desks entirely, using functionality like SIRI that can listen and respond to commands incredibly well. If you couple a SIRI based machine with business rules and lie detection, it will become far better than a human as it will be able to measure responses and aggregate trending data to effectively game the humans using it...

It will be possible to use web forms together with web cameras to spot lying claimants many miles away. Why would Admiral need a private eye to come and interview you following an accident when its claim form can see that you just turned bright baboon arse red when it asked you a direct question. The changes in colour are undetectable to you but a filter on the camera that magnifies your skin tone many thousands of times will pick it up no problem.

How many use cases are there for spotting people that are lying on forms that they fill in from tax to benefits. Imaging a situation where you no longer sign a tax return but instead make a web filing that includes a web camera statement that your forms are true and accurate. How many call centres will HMRC need to spot the bastard then?

We already know that low latency share trading is making more than the idiots sat on the trading floors and most back office work has been reduced from 100's of clerks to a few dozen at most.

Many of the jobs we have are truthfully non-jobs the gap between employed and screwed has never been so perilously close.

Im pretty sure that it would be possible to use a mix of induction heat and the skin tone camera to cook a steak far better then most of the idiots in a pub kitchen.

[darmstadt]

3D printing will be a complete game changer to the world when it reaches maturity.

20 years from now you will leave a machine in a field with a truck load of materials and it will build a house for you.

Robotics, AI and processing power are just about to converge where it really will be mass unemployment.

You can do that with migrants now (and a bung to the planning commission)

[fullyautomatix]

3D printing will be a complete game changer to the world when it reaches maturity.

20 years from now you will leave a machine in a field with a truck load of materials and it will build a house for you.

Robotics, AI and processing power are just about to converge where it really will be mass unemployment.

We can all just sit and relax while machines do the work for us.

[minestrone]

3D printing will be a complete game changer to the world when it reaches maturity.

20 years from now you will leave a machine in a field with a truck load of materials and it will build a house for you.

Robotics, AI and processing power are just about to converge where it really will be mass unemployment.

[eek]

And some of these people changed speciality or started a new company. I highly doubt they were out of work for long.

That wasn't the question. The question was "computers put men out of work". There was a demonstration that they do.

The fact different jobs appear as others disappear is additional information outside the scope of the original question

[VectraMan]

Tell that to the print setters....

Actually my Grandfather was a print setter and it was him that used to go on about "computers putting men out of work" in the 80s. Used to moan about immigrants taking British jobs too. Never seemed to have a problem finding work though.

If there were any truth to this we'd have 99% unemployment by now.

[diseasex]

My software used to remove 1 person from each oil platform it was deployed on. If that's not an argument, nothing is..

And some of these people changed speciality or started a new company. I highly doubt they were out of work for long.

[eek]

I haven't heard a good "computers put men out of work" argument since the 1980s. It wasn't true then either.

My software used to remove 1 person from each oil platform it was deployed on. If that's not an argument, nothing is..

[OwlHoot]

In case it may interest any remaining fence sitters, or (extremely unlikely I know) Remain voters, a distinguished industrial engineer Prof Stephen Bush has written an excellent book explaining just why our membership of the EU has been unfavourable for us in the past three decades and has a detailed blueprint for economic revival should we leave.

Britain's Referendum Decision and its Effects Paperback; Stephen Bush; 2016-05-09

It costs £7 on Amazon (the link above), and will probably also interest confirmed Brexiters. Well worth ordering IMHO, and my copy is on its way.

[bobspud]

I haven't heard a good "computers put men out of work" argument since the 1980s. It wasn't true then either.

Tell that to the print setters....

[VectraMan]

You need to think wider than one argument at a time... 10% unemployment is going to be a walk in the park in coming decades... I work in Cloud architecture and I can more or less wipe out the need for service desks, first, second and third line support just by using tools like RightScale, Puppet or Chef properly... companies like IBM and HP are still talking about cloud with a massive service wrapper around it but the truth is 98% their sorry asses can be lost for ever. Thats not out to india, thats why the **** do I want someone watching a dashboard when AWS cloud formation can just say its not working properly terminate and respawn the service in minutes...

Most of IT can now be automated completely and your average team of 200 will end up as no more than 10. Sod outsourcing ruining your career I can do it from an office in the west country. For those of you sat wondering why its not going that way where you are working is because you are already surrounded by tomorrows losers. Somewhere else there is a team doing better things faster than you can and they will eat your lunch soon.

Count the trucks rumpling around on the M11 and then think about the fact that they are 5 -10 years nearer autonomous trucks than cars now think about the services that support the wetware driving them today.

Uber are in talks to buy S-classes that are autonomous. More people screwed.

I haven't heard a good "computers put men out of work" argument since the 1980s. It wasn't true then either.

[bobspud]

hahahaha "fishing industry"
And what your relatives are doing now , may I ask?

Retail and legacy businesses that they have had for years but whatever it is it can't compete with the rise in house prices and destruction of communities. I find it odd that you think that its funny that the fishing industry has been decimated and reduced by a few big fish, yet you don't see that I can do the same to you with a few well written scripts...
or one more turn in policy locks out your specialist investment vehicle and your plans are decimated in an afternoon.

[eek]

But this time its different. The rich have always regarded the plebes on their land as a necessary evil. After the black death. skilled workmanship was in short supply and it made many master craftsmen rich beyond compare for the time. This was where you start to get the guilds of the mastercrafts set up to protect the newly enriched craftsmen's skills and interests.

It wasn't until the industrial revolution and the destruction of the weaving industry in favour of the factory owners that things were put back in their place so to speak.

This week McDonalds came out and said well if the minimum wage gets much higher it will be cheaper to buy the $35,000 robot as that works full time and doesn't need wages...

Don't for one moment think things are going to end well for you...

+1. Previously its always been the case that as some jobs disappeared, others were created.

I'm not 100% sure that's true anymore. If that machine is $35,000 now it will shortly be $20,000 at which point the only reason for employing people will be because you want to employ them rather than because you have to...