Another excellent and stimulating article via Dr Alf this time about the effects and impact of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics on jobs and the Economy via Tim Pike and Mauricio Armellini of the World Economic Forum.

The article would be more believable if one didn’t know that the same people who attend Davos, the annual Bilderberg meetings, plus other secret gatherings where AI, robotics, peace, war, recession, recovery and population control also attend WEF meetings.

This in itself gives the lie to the idea that AI, Robotics and Automation will somehow create as many jobs as they destroy and will free people up from boring work, daily drudgery, so that they can then be upskilled into interesting work. The reality is that the majority of people are of average and many below average intelligence and unless their intelligence is augmented with an expert system, all the jobs that they could do can be done by a robot.

With machine learning and AI due to overtake human intelligence by 2019 according to Ray Kurzeweil of Google, their Chief Futurist and CTO we are into Singularity 1, 2, 3, and 4 as the amount of knowledge doubles every 3 years. More and more expert systems will be placed in nanochips and the bodies of those whose intelligence has been augmented will be helped by stem cell technology and techniques from the Geron Corporation of Austin Texas to live for hundreds of years as cyborgs doing the work required from super intelligent people.

3D printing means that manufacturing costs fall with no need for human involvement so an elite few can have everything they need without a large population of factory workers.

Robots are already in Japanese care homes, hotels, supermarkets, petrol stations and doubling up as teaching assistants. They are in factories, warehouses, Amazon warehouses and in the Pentagon’s plans as Terminator style killing machines and fighter pilots. The swashbuckling “Top Guns” played by Tom Cruise in the 1980s film of the same name are destined for the history books just like Biggles the earlier equivalent from England better known to men in their 60’s from their schooldays.

Oxford University puts the rate of global job losses through AI and related developments at 50% within 20 years starting from 2016, others put it at 50% of American jobs by 2033. The implications for countries like the UK which has abysmal worker productivity and far too many lazy, greedy and incompetent bosses is for 75% job losses by 2033.
Politicians are not in denial but are deliberately keeping quiet about this so as not to alarm people whilst the educational establishment are in denial, pretending as we speak that jobs will be there for school leavers just as they always have been. They bleat about “resources”, savage cuts never considering for a single moment where the replacement jobs are coming from.

The WEF article is well-intentioned nonsense of a kind we will see more of as the “frog boiling” of the great unwashed accelerates.

Dr Alf is right, young people need to think out of the box and develop the required survival skills.

John Gelmini