Quote :

"are you trying to say boss'?"

actually, it should be boss's boss since the word following the 's does not start with an s. read: boss' sister

4/18/2011 5:44:09 PM

Sucks. Good luck man.

4/18/2011 6:01:06 PM

Quote :

"computers are taking all the jorbs"

9/12/2011 1:28:18 PM

^^^ that's really just a rule of thumb. When it comes to pluralizing singular nouns that end in "s" either s's or s' is actually grammatically correct. The rule of whether to drop the extra "s" or not is more of a stylistic rule or verbal rule than a grammar rule; however, I believe it is more important to be consistent as opposed to using s's sometimes and s' otherwise. Because of this I side with the AP style guide and simply use s' for all cases

IE boss'

PS I just double checked with my wife on this since she does a lot of editing and she agreed

V I actually thought that at first too.

[Edited on September 12, 2011 at 1:49 PM. Reason : ]

9/12/2011 1:45:06 PM

i thought this was about BoA

9/12/2011 1:45:12 PM

read it as

so everyone just got legos at work

i was way off

9/12/2011 1:45:39 PM

I thought this was going to be Novicane bumping this because he was laid off

9/12/2011 1:49:41 PM

^ same, though it was hilarious to see it was bumped for grammar

9/12/2011 1:51:20 PM

It didn't get bumped for grammar. I just saw it on the main page and replied. I had no idea the thread or the grammar post were so old

[Edited on September 12, 2011 at 1:52 PM. Reason : ]

9/12/2011 1:51:54 PM

it got bumped because of my most recent facebook post where i told everybody all the jobs are disappearing because robots are doing more and more of the work now. and that trend is rapidly accelerating

and then kiljadn quoted himself



more to the point, if you're not involved in the ownership and operation of the technology that is creating and enabling the wealth of the future, the state will have no choice but to assume the responsibility of preventing your early death

[Edited on September 12, 2011 at 2:04 PM. Reason : .]

9/12/2011 2:01:13 PM

this thread is now the thread where i will frequently remind you all that robots will soon be taking all our jobs

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/technology/economists-see-more-jobs-for-machines-not-people.html?_r=1

10/24/2011 10:35:11 AM

Every time I hear someone say machines are going to take over all our jobs, I keep thinking about that old Star Trek movie where "V'ger" (the Voyager Satellite) evolved into a machine that wanted to take over everything. Since the Voyager satellite had the memory of my first Nokia cellphone (not even that much), I'll assume that we're intentionally giving all of our jobs to the machines in homage for our new computer overlords.

"All your bases are belong to us", indeed.

10/24/2011 11:41:00 AM

Quote :

"Interests : I like to write software. It won't be long before the robots take my job. "

10/24/2011 11:45:14 AM

So what's the word Novicane? you laid off or what?

10/24/2011 11:47:27 AM

Quote :

"Every time I hear someone say machines are going to take over all our jobs, I keep thinking about that old Star Trek movie where "V'ger" (the Voyager Satellite) evolved into a machine that wanted to take over everything."

1. Voyagers were not satellites... they are probes. The term satellite implies they orbited around a planet.

2. V'ger did not want to take over everything. It wanted to report back to the creator Iper it's original programming) and thanks to some help from (what some folks believe were) the proto-borg, it has "enhancements" and the teeth to report back no matter what (or who) gets in it's way.

10/24/2011 11:54:22 AM

no one can take over his jerb^

[Edited on October 24, 2011 at 12:00 PM. Reason : talk<>take]

10/24/2011 11:59:57 AM

^^ NERD TRAP

[Edited on October 24, 2011 at 12:00 PM. Reason : ]

10/24/2011 12:00:30 PM

It's funny. If more jobs are being taken over by robots, humans should be working less than 120 hours a week and having more fun doing the things they want to do.


Life should be getting easier.

3 people could have jobs if that one person didn't have to work 120 per week.
2 people could have jobs if that one person didn't work two jobs.

10/24/2011 12:11:01 PM

^

also

we got this!!!

10/24/2011 12:17:10 PM

the only way to beat them

is to become them

10/24/2011 12:27:54 PM

I, too, have gotten legos at work.

10/24/2011 12:29:41 PM

Quote :

"1. Voyagers were not satellites... they are probes. The term satellite implies they orbited around a planet. 2. V'ger did not want to take over everything. It wanted to report back to the creator Iper it's original programming) and thanks to some help from (what some folks believe were) the proto-borg, it has "enhancements" and the teeth to report back no matter what (or who) gets in it's way."

See qntmfred's response below...

Quote :

"^^ NERD TRAP"

There always has to be one "well, actually..." person in every crowd.

[Edited on October 24, 2011 at 1:13 PM. Reason : ]

10/24/2011 1:09:11 PM

Sorry some people try to keep others from looking like fucking imbeciles any more than they already have and that it annoys you.

[Edited on October 24, 2011 at 1:38 PM. Reason : *]

10/24/2011 1:38:05 PM

...I guess I just don't have the same issue with feeling like an imbecile for not remembering Star Trek movies.

10/24/2011 1:42:35 PM

I was speaking more on the probe vs. satellite part.

10/24/2011 3:46:59 PM

...and I wasn't trying to make a post (4 posts up) about whether Voyager was a satellite or a probe. My point still stands that there is always that "well actually" guy.

10/24/2011 3:50:07 PM

My point is that you're a douche.

10/24/2011 3:59:06 PM

...so....

...what happened?

10/24/2011 4:56:24 PM

I am now working for a new company, i get paid 10k more, more vacation, better benefits, some travel, more opportunities for advancement.

10/24/2011 5:31:47 PM

Delta: cry about it.

Joshua: just smile a nod.

Novicane: It's crazy how that works out. Sometimes people are freaked out that everyone around them is getting fired when in reality people are getting fired because it's a sh*tty company. Glad you found something better.

10/25/2011 10:22:45 AM

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/11/02/when-machines-do-the-work

Quote :

"Ever since machines came on the scene, humans worried they would steal their jobs. They did. But humans adapted. Found other jobs. My guests today, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT, say machines are now moving into the workplace at such a pace that humans can’t keep up. Not even in many white collar settings, where subtle new machine intelligence is now challenging pedigreed human professionals. Plumbers, you’re going to be ok. But what about the rest of us? "

and you think the job market is tough for us?

http://www.cringely.com/2011/10/how-to-get-a-job-after-the-singularity-comes

Quote :

"That young man with the waxed mustache and gallic countenance is my son Cole, age seven. We’ve been studying division, going on long walks with Sadie the dog, and thinking about walking together all the way across the USA, which would require by our calculation 138 days of walking with no days off. This has made Cole very sad because he’s done a further calculation and concluded that he is unlikely to have 138 consecutive days available until he’s well into his 20’s and by that time he figures I’ll be dead. Kids have a thousand ways of breaking your heart. Sentiment aside, Cole might well be correct. He’s a busy kid and I’m an older father. When he is 25 I’ll be 76. And while I don’t expect to be dead at that age, Cole quite pragmatically looks at my father — Grandpa Ray, who died at 70 — as a pretty good predictor. Cole actually thinks about this stuff. And it has made me do some thinking, too, like what advice I can give Cole and his two brothers should I be unable to guide and protect them as long as I have been planning to? Our society, culture, and economy have turned to quagmires all at the same time. Nothing is as it was nor is anything even like it appears to be, so how does a seven year-old prepare for the future? “What will you be when you grow up?” is a much harder question than it used to be. There are near term and longer term implications to this question. In the near term how do we creatively respond to jobs going overseas? In the longer term what happens if Ray Kurzweil is correct and the Singularity rolls along in 2029 or so and humans suddenly become little more than parasites on a digital Earth? The easy answer to this problem has been the same since the 1960s — become Paul McCartney. But how many Beatles can the world sustain? My friend George Morton has a daughter (I know nothing about those — wrong datatype) facing the same quagmires as my sons, so here’s a synthesis of our thinking. Remember the old Robin Williams joke about his son’s future: “Hello Mr. President” or “Do you want fries with that?” Career planning at this point probably requires a combination of serendipitous opportunity plus being curious. This in turn requires an educated mind that allows for serendipity to play a large role in discovering opportunities and staying just outside of your comfort zone. We start with a Catch-22: You can’t get a job because no one will ever hire you. Now what are you going to do about it? The answer is of course everyone works for themselves, there are no employees, and everyone is just a subcontractor. There are two times this really sucks — when you don’t have a job and when you see your current job going away. Many of us are in both situations nearly all the time. I know I am. How do you educate yourself to deal with the changes in your business knowing that whatever you do is going to be replaced by a computer sometime in the future? First concentrate on the structural parts of any enterprise that are likely to never go away, computers or no: 1) finance; 2) marketing; 3) production or service. The key change in any industry is the delivery method. Change the method of distribution and you change the business model. iTunes destroyed record stores, digital cameras destroyed Polaroid and Kodak; the list goes on. The key change was distribution. Look, for example, at what’s happening to Electronic Arts (EA). It was pinball versus Pac Man, then PC’s with retail distribution, then Internet distribution, now smart phones. Every time the distribution system changed so did the price point, which is now down to 99 cents. EA still doesn’t know how to build Angry Birds. iTunes changed the distribution system for users and developers so now it doesn’t look good for EA at 99 cents. Note on my EA crack from an EA employee — “Battlefield 3, an ‘old school game’ retailing at $60 just broke records and sold 5 million copies DAY ONE. FIFA 12 did 3.2 million end of September. There is plenty of life in the old dogs yet.” I’d note, however, that they are old dogs. Change like this is rapidly coming to every industry. Talk to book editors, as I sometimes do, and hear the terror in their voices. What if books simply go away? Getting, keeping or making that future job starts with understanding the distribution system and your place in that process. And to survive even mid-term the key is to position yourself as the linchpin. Your knowledge has to be critical to the success or failure of the process. That would seem to call for specialization but specialists often don’t see the ball even coming. You need a broader view. But not an MBA. Those will go away. So will MD’s, CPA’s, and even CCIE’s, replaced with new acronyms for new certificates, so be ready to get a new label every few years. Where you live counts as much as anything else, too, so position yourself in a city that has high serendipity. Any kid living with his parents in Palo Alto can get a job today simply because he already has a place to live. No skills required. If you want to be in finance, going to Alabama is not going to help you develop the next big financial idea, but Boston, New York, London, Chicago will. If you want to play with new business opportunities in IT, you get the picture. So for an education; are you going to a school that helps you to develop serendipitous opportunities for your lifetime? Go to a second or fourth grade teacher or even a high school guidance counselor with these ideas and they think you are crazy, but that’s part of the problem — the educational establishment is as reactive (and sometimes as reactionary) as any other government agency. They have no better ideas than we do what to do with our kids. Jaron Lanier once told me that you can have enough money, enough power, but you can never have enough experience, so I plan to give my kids as much experience as they can handle, keeping in mind the fact that even post-Singularity it may still matter more who you know than what you know. Live in the coolest place, I tell Cole and his brothers. Have the coolest friends. Do the coolest things. Learn from everything you do. Be open to new opportunities. And do something your father hasn’t yet figured how to do, which is every few years take off 138 days and just walk the Earth."

[Edited on November 2, 2011 at 7:08 PM. Reason : PLEASE WON"T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN]

[Edited on November 2, 2011 at 7:10 PM. Reason : the only constant is change]

11/2/2011 7:07:32 PM

INRATS

11/3/2011 5:58:03 AM

if robots are taking all the jobs

then go work for the people who make the robots

worked for me

11/3/2011 8:13:55 AM

^Until the robots start making themselves. Then they won't need us anymore.

11/3/2011 8:27:59 AM

So should we just start destroying robots??

11/3/2011 8:34:05 AM

Quote :

"FANUC, the Japanese robotics company, has been operating a "lights out" factory for robots since 2001.[7] "Robots are building other robots at a rate of about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time. "Not only is it lights-out," says Fanuc vice president Gary Zywiol, "we turn off the air conditioning and heat too.""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_%28manufacturing%29

[Edited on November 3, 2011 at 8:41 AM. Reason : ^^]

11/3/2011 8:35:49 AM

but there are still humans that program the robots for specific applications (like building other robots)

for now anyway

also, lol:

Quote :

"At Fanuc, the bot invasion is already moving beyond the factory floor. In 2001 the company opened an automated kitchen center that preps 2,000 meals for the human rank and file. The bots cook rice, pack lunch boxes, and wash dishes. They even wear rubber gloves."

11/3/2011 8:44:50 AM

bump

12/28/2011 11:07:29 AM

wut happen?

12/28/2011 11:13:43 AM

someone set us up the bomb

12/28/2011 11:17:14 AM

just your friendly reminder to be kind to the machines

12/28/2011 11:24:29 AM

12/28/2011 11:26:47 AM

i wouldn't do that if i were you

12/28/2011 11:31:42 AM

i look forward to the day machines take over everything!

12/28/2011 11:42:15 AM

Hello Dave

12/28/2011 12:01:30 PM

I'd like to think that I will be safe the day that happens living out at sea on a sailboat but those god damn machines will probably just drone strike me or cause a satellite to follow out of orbit and hit me with extreme accuracy and precision.

12/28/2011 4:55:02 PM

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/39319/

Quote :

"The United States faces a protracted unemployment crisis: 6.3 million fewer Americans have jobs than was true at the end of 2007. And yet the country's economic output is higher today than it was before the financial crisis. Where did the jobs go? Several factors, including outsourcing, help explain the state of the labor market, but fast-advancing, IT-driven automation might be playing the biggest role. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people have feared that new technologies would permanently erode employment. Over and over again, these dislocations of labor have been temporary: technologies that made some jobs obsolete eventually led to new kinds of work, raising productivity and prosperity with no overall negative effect on employment. There's nothing to suggest that this dynamic no longer operates, but new research is showing that advances in workplace automation are being deployed at a faster pace than ever, making it more difficult for workers to adapt and wreaking havoc on the middle class: the clerks, accountants, and production-line workers whose tasks can increasingly be mastered by software and robots. "Do I think we will have permanently high unemployment as a consequence of technology? No," says Peter Diamond, the MIT economist who won a 2010 Nobel Prize for his work on market imperfections, including those that affect employment. "What's different now is that the nature of jobs going away has changed. Communication and computer abilities mean that the type of jobs affected have moved up the income distribution." Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee study information-­supercharged workplaces and the innovations and productivity advances they continually create. Now they have turned their sights to how these IT-driven improvements affect employment. In their new book, ­Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and McAfee, its principal research scientist, see a paradox in the first decade of the 2000s. Even before the economic downturn caused U.S. unemployment to rise from 4.4 percent in May 2007 to 10.1 percent in October 2009, a disturbing trend was visible. From 2000 to 2007, GDP and productivity rose faster than they had in any decade since the 1960s, but employment growth was comparatively tepid. Brynjolfsson and McAfee posit that more work was being done by, or with help from, machines. For example, Amazon.com reduced the need for retail staffers; computerized kiosks in hotels and airports replaced clerks; voice-recognition and speech systems replaced customer support staff and operators; and businesses of all kinds took advantage of tools such as enterprise resource planning software. "A classically trained economist would say: 'This just means there's a big adjustment taking place until we find the new equilibrium—the new stuff for people to do,'?" says McAfee. We've certainly made such adjustments before. But whereas agricultural advances played out over a century and electrification and factory automation rolled out over decades, the power of some information technologies is essentially doubling every two years or so as a consequence of Moore's Law. It took some time for IT to fully replace the paper-driven workflows in cubicles, management suites, and retail stores. (In the 1980s and early 1990s productivity grew slowly, and then it took off after 1996; some economists explained that IT was finally being used effectively.) But now, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, the efficiencies and automation opportunities made possible by IT are advancing too fast for the labor market to keep up. More evidence that technology has reduced the number of good jobs can be found in a working paper by David Autor, an economist at MIT, and David Dorn, an economist at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid. They too point to the crucial years of 2000–2005. Job growth happened mainly at the ends of the spectrum: in lower-paying positions, in areas such as personal care, cleaning services, and security, and in higher-end professional positions for technicians, managers, and the like. For laborers, administrative assistants, production workers, and sales representatives, the job market didn't grow as fast—or even shrank. Subsequent research showed that things got worse after 2007. During the recession, nearly all the nation's job losses were in those middle categories—the positions easiest to replace, fully or in part, by technology. Brynjolfsson says the trends are "troubling." And they are global; some of the jobs that IT threatens, for example, are at electronics factories in China and transcription services in India. "This is not about replacing all work, but rather about tectonic shifts that have left millions much worse off and others much better off," he says. While he doesn't believe the problem is permanent, that's of little solace to the millions out of work now, and they may not be paid at their old rates even when they do find new jobs. "Over the longer term, they will develop new skills, or entrepreneurs will figure out ways of making use of their skills, or wages will drop, or all three of those things will happen," he says. "But in the short run, your old set of skills that created a lot of value are not useful anymore." This means there's a risk, unless the economy generates new high-quality jobs, that the people in the middle will face the prospect of menial jobs—whose wages will actually decline as more people compete for them. "Theory says the labor market will 'clear.' There are always things for people to do," Autor says. "But it doesn't say at what price." And even as it gets crowded and potentially even less rewarding at the bottom, employees at the top are getting paid more, thanks to the multiplier effects of technology. Some 60 percent of the income growth in the United States between 2002 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent of Americans—the bulk of whom are executives whose companies are getting richer by using IT to become more efficient, Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out. Dramatic shifts have happened before. In 1800, 90 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture. The figure was down to 41 percent by 1900 and stands at 2 percent today. People work, instead, in new industries that were unimaginable in the early 19th century. Such a transformation could happen again. Today's information technologies, even as they may do short-term harm to some kinds of employees, are clearly a boon to entrepreneurs, who now have cheaper and more powerful tools at their disposal than at any other time in history. As jobs are lost, Brynjolfsson says, "we will be running an experiment on the economy to see if entrepreneurs invent new ways to be productive equally quickly." As examples, he points to eBay and Amazon Marketplace, which together allow hundreds of thousands of people to make their living hawking items to customers around the world. The problem, he says, is that not enough people are sufficiently educated or technologically savvy to exploit such rapid advances and develop as-yet-unimagined entrepreneurial niches. He and McAfee conclude their book by arguing that the same technologies now making industry far more productive should be applied to updating and improving the educational system. (In one promising example they cite, 58,000 people went online to take an artificial-intelligence class offered by Stanford University.) IT-based entrepreneurship isn't the only potential technological driver of new jobs. Revitalizing manufacturing (see "Can We Build Tomorrow's Breakthroughs?") could also help. But automation has made manufacturing far less labor intensive, so even a manufacturing revival is not likely to mean a great many new jobs on balance. Likewise, anyone whose hopes are pinned on "green jobs" may be disappointed. Though jobs will be created in the switch to cleaner energy sources, jobs tied to traditional energy will be lost in the same process. Many economists are not certain what the net effect will be. And in any case, these days manufacturing and energy account for small slices of the U.S. economy, which is now driven much more by the service sector. That's why fast-advancing information technologies, with their pervasive reach and their potential to create new services and satisfy new niche markets, may be a better bet for job creation—though the tumult IT is causing in the labor market isn't necessarily going to resolve itself quickly. Peter Diamond says that one of the most important things the government can do for employment is to take care of basics, like infrastructure and education. "As long as we have so many idle resources, this is the time when it's advantageous—and socially less expensive—to engage in public investment," he says. Eventually, he believes, the economy will adapt and things will work out, once again. "Jobs have been changing and moving around—within the country, out of the country—for a very long time," he says. "There will be other kinds of jobs that still require people." "

1/5/2012 4:29:55 PM

words... nothing but sweet, sweet words that turn into bitter orange wax in my ears

1/5/2012 4:35:09 PM

back on topic

Was browsing the web yesterday and found a job posting for my old position on a korean website. Not only do they want to replace the guy who replaced me; They want to replace him with someone who speaks korean/english fluently from another country.

1/5/2012 6:13:26 PM

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/disruptions-at-amazon-the-robot-world-comes-a-little-closer/

Quote :

"Last week Amazon, the online retailer, announced it was buying a robot maker called Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash. Before you get excited that Amazon may offer a robot that can tuck you into bed at night and read Kindle books to you, this isn’t that kind of robot company. Instead, Kiva Systems’ orange robots are designed to move around warehouses and stock shelves. Or, as the company says on its Web site, using “hundreds of autonomous mobile robots,” Kiva Systems “enables extremely fast cycle times with reduced labor requirements.” In other words, these robots will most likely replace human workers in Amazon’s warehouses. Is this one more step, a quickening step, toward the day when robots put many of us out of work? Most roboticists don’t see the coming robot invasion that way. Michael Kutzer and Christopher Brown, robotics research engineers with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, explained that current robots are being designed to work alongside people, not replace them, in the work force. For example, the researchers are working on miniature robots just a quarter of an inch wide that could help doctors go inside bone during surgery, and another robot, about the size of a deck of cards, could help in hostage situations by allowing police to inconspicuously scan a room. In each instance, humans are still needed to control the robots. The two engineers believe Amazon’s new robots will do the same thing: helping speed things up in the warehouses. Robots have been in factories for decades. But increasingly we will see them out in the open. Already little ones — toys, really — sweep floors. But they are getting better at doing what we do. Soon, if Google’s efforts to create driverless cars are successful, cab drivers, cross-country truckers and even ambulance drivers could be out of a job, replaced by a computer in the driver’s seat. We are starting to see robots on the battlefield. We could eventually have robot police officers and firefighters, robotic guides, robot doctors, maybe even robotic journalists. When I asked Mr. Brown if robots would eventually take on a broader role in the work force and possibly replace workers, he said, “It is much more likely, for now, that robots will help augment people’s abilities, allowing us to use robots for things humans can’t do.” Even if that changes, he added, “you’ll have to have someone who builds the robots.” But Mr. Brown and Mr. Kutzer have advanced degrees in engineering. They will most likely never struggle to find work. The guy in the Amazon warehouse with a year toward an associate’s degree at a community college is a different story. It is unlikely that he is going to build robots if he is put out of work. Yet those who are paving the way to a world with robots don’t see it that way. “Those who lose jobs to robots will have an incentive to acquire skills that are currently beyond the skills of robots — and there are many human skills that will not be surpassed soon by robots,” explained Colin Allen, co-author of the book “Moral Machines” and a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University. These experts believe that jobs in creative fields, including musicians, writers and artists, will never be replaced by robots. No matter how smart robots are, they will also never be better than humans at physics or psychology. Lawrence H. Summers, the economist, former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president, explained that society has been down this road many times before. The rise of the industrial revolution gave way to fears of extensive job loss, as did the automation of agriculture. But, he said, although these “adjustments were in some cases painful,” people always find new work. “There has long been a mentality that we’re going to run out of work to do and there is going to be an absence of work for people,” Mr. Summers said. “Both have been asserted in every generation and always historically been wrong. In reality, if people are freed up from one thing they are able to do something different.” Technology tends to make people optimistic. But are the scientists being realistic about people without the mathematical, scientific and engineering skills, that are highly valued and compensated in today’s economy? What happens to people without those skills? If I were a worker in Amazon’s warehouses and could eventually be given a pink slip and replaced by an orange robot, I don’t think I would be so cheerful about this new work force. "

They said a computer could do my job better than I could damn do it!

[Edited on March 27, 2012 at 3:59 PM. Reason : BOOM]

3/27/2012 3:58:27 PM