How realistic is "Global Peak" series now?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

The adaptability of humans is overestimated. Conveyor belt workers, packaging line workers, etc. are basically living machine appendages who execute the same simple operation repeatedly from start to finish. Who is next? Translators, I think, or at least the vast majority. All restaurant menus are translated by Google translate nowadays. You can't help but notice it when traveling. It looks funny and often has horrible mistakes. But the small diner does not care if it does not translate well enough; it just needs a very basic service that the machine offers for free. Eventually, as machines move on to more complex texts, the next tier is out of jobs, until only the best and brightest remain in very specialized areas. Tour guides. Who needs them when you can download a bunch of MP3 with information which let you explore the town, museum etc. at your own pace? And so on.

You've chosen a few easy examples. What about plumbers? When will a machine be able to look under a sink at a piping setup that is laid out slightly differently in every home using parts that might have been produced at any point in the last 100+ years and then proceed to diagnose and fix the problem? No one can answer that because it's so far into the future. Yes, mindless jobs that a monkey could do will go away, but we've had similar shocks like the elimination of jobs related to caring for horses that were just as big in the past couple of centuries and didn't result in mass unemployment. As automation increases, the productivity of human workers will also increase and companies will be able to afford to pay a living wage to people to do the tasks that robotics haven't yet mastered. Eventually we'll hit a point where an 85 IQ human can no longer contribute, but that's a long way off and will not be a sudden transition. That's unless the technological singularity theory is proven right in which case all predictions about the future go out the window.

[K. A. Pital]

Um... Most certainly I chose no easy examples. I find - from a professional perspective - you comparing translators to monkeys mildly insulting, but that aside, it is also stupid. These jobs required a lot of creativity, but they are under threat. The factories of yesterday required more and more workers until over 2 billion rural dwellers were finally absorbed into the industrial worker class by the end of the XX century. Latter part of it was more of a redistribution, where the service sector absorbed most of the labour market newcomers. But what about now? I personally have repaired and replaced the pipes in my house; I even understand welding, and the standard metal and plastic parts I can handle with ease. But can I say a machine cannot do that? No. It can. For example, I can remotely control a robot who could do that. It is only partial automation, but it means I can have one person sitting in a service center quickly fix pipes as several locations. At the cost of greater strain, perhaps, but I can easily see such a future happening way faster than I die.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

In our lifetimes, sure, I wasn't arguing that the transition was going to take that long, just that human labor isn't suddenly going to become obsolete once we have self-driving cars and an Amazon drone can deliver our 4K bukkake. The first phase will be the elimination of professional drivers (sorry Raw Shark ) with self-driving cars and trucks, technology that costs very little compared to paying a living wage. I suspect that Uber is planning to fire all its drivers within a short period of time after the technology becomes approved for public roads, and trucking companies won't be far behind. After that, though, the next large shifts toward automation are a long way off, even for professions that everyone thinks are easily replaced by machines, but actually aren't. Until the uncanny valley can be eliminated, for instance, people are still going to need a human financial advisor to talk them out of dumb shit like buying at the top of the market and raiding their investment accounts to buy a nightclub.