President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Government Report Finds Drastic Impact of Climate Change on U.S.

Didn't see this posted yet. Quite the leak and refutes what Trumpy, Pruitt and others like them have spewed. Who would have guessed scientists would know more than them?

 

Rick, RSW or NOT RSW?

http://responsiblerobotics.org/wp-c...eport-Our-Sexual-Future-with-robots_Final.pdf

 

For most Americans, the surgery isn't available in the United States either. Aetna, for instance, "considers vertebral body stapling and vertebral body tethering experimental and investigational for the treatment of scoliosis because its effectiveness has not been established."
http://www.aetna.com/cpb/medical/da...00000000000000000000000000059899a4600fd908e1b
So for someone who has his/her health insurance through Aetna, how are they better off than someone who is covered by the NHS? I assume that's why you posted this story.

 

Oh God ... only you could take the Lump of Labor fallacy and fold it into a broader strawman re: culture.

Automation and robots are responses to labor's increasing scarcity (and therefore rising cost).

 

Isn't it more accurate to say relative cost of labor than rising cost? Even if the labor pool remains the same and costs are stagnant it seems there are economic efficiencies to be derived from automation, no?

 

Thought they're already using low-skill workers, on the sidewalks, anyway.

 

An enormous percentage, like close to 20 , of recent job increases (think the data is 2010-2014) are in food and beverage service (restaurants and bars) jobs that are not readily automated, but which are also notoriously low-paying and unstable. Health and elder care are also not readily automated. Manufacturing jobs are, but then, somebody's got to build and most importantly program the automatons, don't they?

 

Sure. And there are instances in which automation does work better than humans (it's more reliable, more accurate, etc.). But people should never forget that automation is in the main a substitute for scarce, and therefore relatively expensive, labor. And in availing themselves of this substitute, firms ultimately make that scarce resource available for use to meet other (and currently unfulfilled) wants.

 

And even the food and beverage industry can be automated to an extent. You can't order a drink at LaGuardia without using a touchscreen.

 

Preface: This is as anecdotal as anecdotal gets, and I had had a few drinks before this discussion, so apply the requisite grain of salt.

My brother-in-law is partner track at a (non-Silicon Valley) technology consulting firm, and my wife is a technology instructor at a high school. We were discussing the efforts she makes to get coding incorporated into the curriculum, and he shook his head and said that was a bad area of focus. His prediction is that even the coding will become automated in the next 20 years or so. I can't for the life of me remember where he said the jobs WOULD be (again, was drinking), but it's what he would bet on.

 

Well, that's the big question about artificial intelligence. Is it different in kind from all the other technological advances through history that were predicted to destroy employment but didn't do so? I certainly don't know, but in economics, I do know that the burden of proof is always on the side that says "this time it's different."

 

Automation will increase as long as it's cost efficient relative to labor, whether the labor pool is increasing, decreasing or stagnant.