techxplore.com
A central theme at the Manna Project is that automation is going to destroy so many jobs in the coming years that society will not be able to adapt quick enough. There are a number of studies that are predicting the loss of tens of millions of jobs in the United States alone. Countries like China and those in the EU face similar percentages of losses.
This is one of the main reasons we believe a basic income is going to be necessary. This is purely a technological move that is going to destroy the jobs. It will be global in scale, affecting the third world nations first, before moving to the more developed ones.
Sadly, there are many who tend not to follow what is happening. We all lead busy lives so not spending one's day reading about technological innovations and how it will affect society is understandable. This is, however, a necessary part of the educational process that must be carried forward.
Each Wednesday, we are going to compile a few stories that show what is happening in this area. They will be linked to the original source and contain information about part of the oncoming technological boom.
We hope this helps each reader to garner some idea of the potential that is ahead of us. The studies done that conclude tens of millions of job losses is made real when one sees the research that is taking place.
Here is a few to get everyone started:
Everyone heard of self driving cars. The more immediate threat is in public transportation. It is far easier to automate this since buses tend to follow a similar path.
NYC just got the first test candidate in this area. How many NYC bus drivers are there? Do you think they are nervous after seeing this?
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/coast-autonomous-shuttle-demo/
Deep Learning is something that has the AI people going crazy. The advancement in this field is amazing. Not to be left behind, the evolutionists (one branch of machine learning), had a major breakthrough. The essence of this approach is to write a few basic algorithms and then turn the computational power loose. By creating hundreds of thousands of random algorithms, eventually you arrive at one that makes sense. At that point, that one is split and combined with another (like two people reproducing), to spawn more algorithms. Over time, this mimics the evolutionary cycle that the brain went through.
There was a recent development where 1980s video games were learned via this process. The computer only watched what was going on before eventually figuring out how to play the games. This could have incredible impact on the ability for machines to learn human tasks.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/solving-problems-computer-just-got-lot-faster
Many fear robots taking jobs. The issue with this area is that robots are very hard to build. We take for granted how easily we can navigate through areas. At the same time, we tend to forget how hard it is to build something to pick things up of different shapes, sizes, and weights. Programming a robot to pick up the same type of object each time is rather easy. It gets very difficult when varying objects are coming down an assembly line.
That was until now. Researchers figured out a way to create a robotic hand that mimics a human one. The ability to grasp items like a human does means that a lot of "line" jobs especially in warehouses are at risk. We can also see the threat this could have to those in the fast food industry.
https://mashable.com/2018/07/17/robot-fingers-mimic-human-hand/#tpWuMnzmXmqf
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