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Vanishing hope
In 2002, Jason, and his girlfriend Ashley, graduated from high school. They were intelligent and ambitious graduates. Their student counselor told them that college graduates earn a lot more money, so they postponed their marriage and went to college. They worked hard, and earned good grades. To meet the ever increasing cost of college, they had to take out large student loans.
After 4 years of hard work, Jason received a degree in chemistry, and Ashley, an accounting degree. They immediately sent out their resumes, but no job offers came their way. To make the large payments on their student loans, Ashley started working full time at McDonalds, and Jason got a job as a forklift operator. Because of the large student loan payments, and their low paying jobs, they have been forced to move back in with their parents, and once again, postpone their marriage.
Today, Ashley says, “College has really hurt us emotionally, for instead of marriage and family, our lives are on hold. I’ll be 38 by the time I pay off my student loans. Jason may be even worse off, because there installing robotic forklifts where he works, so he will soon be out of work. I may be next, because there are rumors that McDonald's, is testing robotic burger machines. The school counselors are not doing a good job, it is not just Jason and I that are suffering. Today there are over 4 million other college graduates who have been forced into a dumb job or are unemployed.
Note: The school counselor probably didn’t lie, however, sloppy work and ignorance, was present. Counselors typically tell students that college graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates which is a deceptively true statement. If you add up the earnings of all grads, many of them graduated before the paradigm shift. And have years of seniority with earnings of 60K to over 100K. Then, you add in the millions of young people, like Ashley and Jason, earning 15K or so, and you divided then the average comes out 40K+. This is the number the counselors present to high school students. If counselors did there job, there's another important number. According to government statistics, 48% of college freshmen drop out before they get a degree, and of the ones that do get degrees, 53% end up unemployed, or underemployed, like Jason and Ashley. Do the math, and you find that going to college will financially harm 76% of todays entering freshman.
In 2002, Jason, and his girlfriend Ashley, graduated from high school. They were intelligent and ambitious graduates. Their student counselor told them that college graduates earn a lot more money, so they postponed their marriage and went to college. They worked hard, and earned good grades. To meet the ever increasing cost of college, they had to take out large student loans.
After 4 years of hard work, Jason received a degree in chemistry, and Ashley, an accounting degree. They immediately sent out their resumes, but no job offers came their way. To make the large payments on their student loans, Ashley started working full time at McDonalds, and Jason got a job as a forklift operator. Because of the large student loan payments, and their low paying jobs, they have been forced to move back in with their parents, and once again, postpone their marriage.
Today, Ashley says, “College has really hurt us emotionally, for instead of marriage and family, our lives are on hold. I’ll be 38 by the time I pay off my student loans. Jason may be even worse off, because there installing robotic forklifts where he works, so he will soon be out of work. I may be next, because there are rumors that McDonald's, is testing robotic burger machines. The school counselors are not doing a good job, it is not just Jason and I that are suffering. Today there are over 4 million other college graduates who have been forced into a dumb job or are unemployed.
Note: The school counselor probably didn’t lie, however, sloppy work and ignorance, was present. Counselors typically tell students that college graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates which is a deceptively true statement. If you add up the earnings of all grads, many of them graduated before the paradigm shift. And have years of seniority with earnings of 60K to over 100K. Then, you add in the millions of young people, like Ashley and Jason, earning 15K or so, and you divided then the average comes out 40K+. This is the number the counselors present to high school students. If counselors did there job, there's another important number. According to government statistics, 48% of college freshmen drop out before they get a degree, and of the ones that do get degrees, 53% end up unemployed, or underemployed, like Jason and Ashley. Do the math, and you find that going to college will financially harm 76% of todays entering freshman.
The above 2 charts show that we are dealing with a long term trend in jobs.
What is happening, and will it continue?
Smartphones are great because they do so much. Five years ago one would have had to buy a cell phone, a camera, an mp3 player, a GPS, an ebook reader, an alarm clock, a flashlight, and a computer and one still would not have the power of one smartphone. Buying all of that stuff created a lot of jobs for assembly line workers, truckers, shelf stockers, and cashers. Tody camera stores are going out of business, or cut back on staff. All in all smartphones have caused the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Internet power, has wiped out thousands of newspaper, magazines, TV and radio stations have gone out of business, laying off thousands of educated and skilled people. Ebooks are taking away the work of loggers and paper makers. In hundreds of other arias jobs are vanishing, get a dental or medical x-ray and most likely the image will show up on a computer screen, no more film or chemicals needed, and the image can be viewed and interpreted by a radiologist thousand of miles away, maybe even in another country.
Free stuff has wiped out millions of jobs. It is estimated that over a billion dollars worth of free labor has gone into the development and maintenance of the Linux operating system. And that is just the tip of the free software phenomena for there are thousands of applications from word processors to esoteric math routines, all free and all wiping out paying jobs for college grads.
3D printers are wiping out thousands of jobs, printing dolls, toys, working guns, bones, kidneys, ears and other body parts, houses, industrial buildings, automobiles, and even turbine blades for jet engines. Today 3D printers are capable of manufacturing object too small or complex for traditional manufacturing. 3D printer are opening up the nanotechnology world which will reduce the cost of many things by one or two orders of magnitude. As 3D printers print both 3D printers and also robots.
Singapore skyline
Jobs are moving to China, Mexico and other third world countries. The factory closings get the publicity but they’re only the tip of the iceberg; it is the outsourcing of professional jobs that is growing the fastest. Thanks to the high speed internet, companies can save more than $35,000 a year by outsourcing the work of engineers, programmers, accountants, writers, architects, scientists and other professionals. This is possible because some third world nations have made education their top priority. Their goal is not just to catch up with America, but to surpass us academically. Many of their professors have earned their doctorates from Harvard, MIT, and Caltech. These Third World Universities are very demanding, with more work and less social life than most American schools. It is this growing abundance of low cost, high quality knowledge workers that has Boeing Aircraft employing 800 Russian engineers, working on the design of their next airplane. Microsoft has a rapidly growing and very successful software research center in China. General Electric is operating a major research center in India employing over 1,700 scientists and engineers, many with Ph. Ds.. Also in 2008, Indian accountants prepared over one million U.S. income tax returns, outsourced by U.S. accounting firms. With little publicity, thousands of companies are moving their intellectual jobs offshore. This shift is happening quietly, almost secretly. The only visible sign is a growing glut of empty office buildings, as some of America’s best paying jobs silently vanish.
Robots are Coming! Yes, I know people have been predicting robots taking over for the last 30 years, and yet, it has not happened. The sales rate of robots has grown slowly because robots have been too expensive and stupid. This is changing as computers are getting cheaper, smaller and much more powerful; while robots are getting a lot smarter. Thanks to the U.S. military which is spending billions of dollars on robot research and development, to create fast, deadly robot soldiers. The result is that robots have become cheaper and much smarter than ever before. In November 2011 Foxconn announced that it intends to add over 1 million robots to its Chinese factories. What does it mean when it’s low cost Chinese workers who are losing their jobs to robots? When one robot can replace four to five workers whose jobs are safe? Robots work 24/7 and many robots now move faster and with greater accuracy than humans.
Bots are Everywhere! It is not the robot that will make the biggest difference, it’s the ‘bots’ which have already wiped out millions of jobs. Today, one drives into the filling station, slide a credit card into the pump, and then the ‘bot’ validates the card, turns on the pump, and when finished, it bills the credit card. Twenty years ago, it took a human to sell gas today millions of ‘bots’ are doing the job. E-commerce, ATM’s, ticket kiosks and intelligent vending machines have also taken away millions of other jobs.
Artificial worker (AW), for our purposes it’s a more useful concept than artificial intelligence. The big difference is focus, artificial workers are highly specialized computer systems that do one job exceedingly well. For example AW are better at laying out electronic circuit boards then humans. They’re also better at flying advanced aircraft, and filling out tax returns.
In the last 5 years there have been two advances that are wiping out some of our highest paying jobs. The first is language understanding, which was demonstrated publicly when the computer WATSON easily won on the US quiz show Jeopardy. Computers like WATSON can read and understand several million books an hour. They also can ingest the vast amount of knowledge that’s available in blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines. Then looking for and testing ideas that for example relate to making money in the stock market. Today computer are initiating over 80% of the triads and making billions of dollars for their owners.
The second breakthrough is even more impressive. The headline in The New Scientist magazine reads: “Move over, Einstein: Machines will take it from here.” The article is about Eureqa is a program that makes basic scientific discoveries. The goal of the program is to discover a mathematical formula that describes the real world. If you feed the program data from the motion of a pendulum. It will guess at a formula, then test it and guess again and again until it zeros in on the answer. Using genetic algorithms it is able to billions of possible answer every minute and so quickly discover the formula. The amazing thing is that sometimes when the problem very complex, the answers can be beyond human understanding. Yet we can test the answer and it works but it’s just too complex for us to understand why. These AW’s outperform humans because they're highly specialized, fast and able to work on a problem 24/7.
In the last 5 years there have been two advances that are wiping out some of our highest paying jobs. The first is language understanding, which was demonstrated publicly when the computer WATSON easily won on the US quiz show Jeopardy. Computers like WATSON can read and understand several million books an hour. They also can ingest the vast amount of knowledge that’s available in blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines. Then looking for and testing ideas that for example relate to making money in the stock market. Today computer are initiating over 80% of the triads and making billions of dollars for their owners.
The second breakthrough is even more impressive. The headline in The New Scientist magazine reads: “Move over, Einstein: Machines will take it from here.” The article is about Eureqa is a program that makes basic scientific discoveries. The goal of the program is to discover a mathematical formula that describes the real world. If you feed the program data from the motion of a pendulum. It will guess at a formula, then test it and guess again and again until it zeros in on the answer. Using genetic algorithms it is able to billions of possible answer every minute and so quickly discover the formula. The amazing thing is that sometimes when the problem very complex, the answers can be beyond human understanding. Yet we can test the answer and it works but it’s just too complex for us to understand why. These AW’s outperform humans because they're highly specialized, fast and able to work on a problem 24/7.
What about tomorrow?
Predicting the future, is a big challenge because of humanities linear bias, rooted in millions of years of human and pre-human evolution. Exponential rates of change are counter intuitive. To get a sense of the size of this problem give your friends and acquaintances the following two tests.
Test 1: If a person gathers 20 handfuls of firewood, each weighing one pound, they end up with a pile that weighs 20 pounds. On the other hand if their handfuls each increases in weight exponentially, 1, 2, 4, 8... pounds then gathering 20 times will result in how big of a wood pile?
Answer: 1 million pounds of wood, and a denuded forest.
Test 2: If a person is striding along taking one yard long steps. After they’ve take 30 steps they will have move 30 yards further along. But if the strides lengthen exponentially, 1, 2, 4, 8 yards then how far will they have traveled after 30 strides?
Answer: They will have travel as far as to the moon and back and then 8 times around the earth.
Humans misjudge both ends of the exponential curve, not only does it fare exceeds our expectations, it always starts out so slowly that it seems benign and non-threatening. Because traditional job destruction lags behind advances in technology, it is safe to predict that much greater and faster job loss in just around the corner, as current advances in nanotech, biotech, and artificial intelligence move from the laboratories into everyday usage.
Test 1: If a person gathers 20 handfuls of firewood, each weighing one pound, they end up with a pile that weighs 20 pounds. On the other hand if their handfuls each increases in weight exponentially, 1, 2, 4, 8... pounds then gathering 20 times will result in how big of a wood pile?
Answer: 1 million pounds of wood, and a denuded forest.
Test 2: If a person is striding along taking one yard long steps. After they’ve take 30 steps they will have move 30 yards further along. But if the strides lengthen exponentially, 1, 2, 4, 8 yards then how far will they have traveled after 30 strides?
Answer: They will have travel as far as to the moon and back and then 8 times around the earth.
Humans misjudge both ends of the exponential curve, not only does it fare exceeds our expectations, it always starts out so slowly that it seems benign and non-threatening. Because traditional job destruction lags behind advances in technology, it is safe to predict that much greater and faster job loss in just around the corner, as current advances in nanotech, biotech, and artificial intelligence move from the laboratories into everyday usage.
The Good News
While the digital age is wiping out millions of traditional jobs it is also creating more new opportunites that at any other time in human history. For those people who are willing to let go of the often boring traditional jobs and move into the future fun, love, happiness and a never ending abundance is possible.
For geniuses who have gone to college and majored in computational systems, networks, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, bioinformatics, nanotechnology, human-machine interfaces, and biomedical engineering, etc. there is the Singularity University. Whose stated aim is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges."
For the non-geniuses, and people with little or no money, there is the Green Entrepreneur Development School. (GEDS). A student owned and run school whose stated aim is to “Promote fun, love, and entrepreneurial success by providing people, who have little or no money, with sufficient training, venture capital, and marketing support, to start and build their own successful businesses.”
For geniuses who have gone to college and majored in computational systems, networks, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, bioinformatics, nanotechnology, human-machine interfaces, and biomedical engineering, etc. there is the Singularity University. Whose stated aim is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges."
For the non-geniuses, and people with little or no money, there is the Green Entrepreneur Development School. (GEDS). A student owned and run school whose stated aim is to “Promote fun, love, and entrepreneurial success by providing people, who have little or no money, with sufficient training, venture capital, and marketing support, to start and build their own successful businesses.”