English: Logo of the People’s Daily 中文: 人民日报题字 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is an amazing, must-read article published by China’s leading paper People’s Daily. Check it out!
via First unmanned factory takes shape in Dongguan City – People’s Daily Online.
It’s worth reading the article carefully and then reflecting on other industries around the world. Technology and especially robotics is likely to take an increasingly share of the unskilled jobs.
Personally, I still think that there are valuable tasks for those with less skills. Rather than pay unemployment benefits surely, surely it would make sense for governments to harness this resource effectively? Possible options include compulsory national service, social service helping the needy, or environmental service, cleaning up the rubbish blighting modern society. Mumbai provides an outstanding example in mobilizing the poor to collect and recycle rubbish.
There evidence is overwhelming, traditional jobs are disappearing, being replaced by technology or off shored where they can be performed more cheaply or more effectively.
Let me ask an open question:
How should responsible governments respond to the demise of traditional jobs?
Thoughts?
Dr Alf's Blog 
This unmanned factory will be the first of many because Eric Schmidt of Google has already said in 2013 and again in 2014 that 50% of American jobs will disappear by 2033.
He also said that he wanted to put chips in people but that the “technology is not quite there yet”.
By that he meant that expert systems and “Matrix style jump programmes” would create people with “augmented reality and skillsets”(cyborgs),thus eliminating the need to train surgeons, mathematicians, soldiers, engineers, policemen, doctors, teachers, lecturers, call centre agents, or even Doctors in Business Administration, like Dr Alf.
Google’s Chief Futurist and CTO Ray Kurzeweil believes that AI will have caught up and overtaken human intelligence by 2019 and he is a heavy investor in the Geron Corporation and life extension technologies along with people like Peter Thiel CEO of Paypal and Bilderberg steering committee member.
The Bilderberg approach to AI is to augment the skills of workers and people who are wanted and lengthen their lives whilst not bothering with the rest.
Governments should help the rest by using business boot camps to launch the more practically minded into small businesses and greater self sufficiency within co-operatives.
Making individual watches for film stars at £175,000 gbp each,creating individually crafted humidors for Arnold Schwarnegger’s cigars as one craftsman does in Gloucestershire are examples of things which can be done by craftsmen rather than robots.
One of my late uncles in Italy used to make intricately inlaid musical boxes and sell those so with a myriad of craft based skills all sorts of people could after schooling and 2 years of national service become self employed.
Governments have to end the fiction that the only alternatives are university,the professions,work or the dole and that there will be enough jobs for everyone.