Another day, another autonomous project to remove humans from the picture !
Last month I wrote 2 articles asking "How future proof is your job?", which focused on how artificial intelligence and automation is continuing to make humans of the not to distant future obsolete.
We have all heard of autonomous cars which will one day take the jobs of taxi drivers, delivery drivers and many more.
Then theres Dubai's autonomous flying taxi's which are active already and their robot police (not quite at Robocop level I might add)
Now a Norwegian fertiliser company and Kongsberg Gruppe, who are a technology company have teamed up to create what they call the worlds first fully electric and autonomous container ship.
The ship is scheduled to begin transporting fertiliser in late 2018, with the costs of the project at $25 million. This is roughly 3 times the cost usually associated with a vessel of this size, but when fully operational it is believed that due to the lack of human employees and need for fuel, operating costs will be cut by 90%
As with all these projects the initial phase will be ran by humans, then is 2019 the ship will be run via remote control and by 2020 the ship will be fully autonomous removing the need for humans all together.
Is it just me or are we going to see at least 90% of all jobs ran autonomously very soon?
Autonomy is all well and good but as more and more jobs are replaced like this, then human unemployment will only become greater.
What would be the point in all these cost savings by the 5% if the other 95% have no job and therefore no money to buy these products?
A lot of people would argue that in the past when jobs have been replaced by a form of automation people have survived. For example there use to be jobs where people would manually light a candle in street lights before electric lights came in and automated this.
The problem I see is there are now more people on the earth and this number is only going to grow, meaning the competition for jobs is only going to increase. Add to that the speed at which these projects are being implemented and this is where the issues arise.
What are your thoughts? Is automation going to make finding employment harder for future generations? Or will we simply adapt?
Thanks for listening
Happy Steeming Steemers and Steemettes.
If you like this you may like my other recent posts:
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https://steemit.com/technology/@somecoolname/would-you-upgrade-yourself
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https://steemit.com/technology/@somecoolname/would-you-choose-to-live-in-the-matrix
5 old forms of technology that would confuse kids today
https://steemit.com/technology/@somecoolname/5-old-forms-of-technology-that-would-confuse-kids-today
Karl Marx would call workers displaced by robots "surplus population". I suppose automation fits in with the depopulation plans of some elite. Malthus said we would run out of food. It is ironic technology to displace people is given the green light while other technologies, such as vertical gardening and clean energy are suppressed. I suppose there will be a few jobs created to service malfunctioning robots, however.
Thanks for the comment. Sadly I don't even think robot repair is safe, as they are already developing A.I that writes other A.I programs. So robots fixing other robots is not beyond the realm of possibilities.
I was reading an article on vertical gardening on here the other day, it's fascinating stuff.
That's an incredible ship and the numbers work really well to justify the initial high cost. Looks like AI is not going away and it seems to me the smart thing is to embrace it and find ways to capitalize on it's growth. Thanks for a great post!
Thanks for the comment. Yes A.I is definitely here to stay.
Interesting thoughts
robots will make the majority of humans jobless sooner or later
It definitely seems that way.
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