> - Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand.
That already depends on the type of skill being taught. Learning a new language, for example, has never been dependent on teachers and I think I've been doing quite well with purely self taught English, and that was before methods like duolingo appeared. My mother is living in retirement and has started learning languages as a way to pass time, she has learned enough English through duolingo to achieve a conversational level and she never had a teacher. Is it really impossible for more sophisticated AIs to truly replace language teachers in schools, and have students do things through a computer? and possibly replace teachers in many other fields of studies too. I'd wager most of the less advanced courses in pre-college stuff could do well with modern, computerized, interactive methods of learning. I don't think you could replace the interaction with a teacher for more advanced studies, though.
> Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it.
> This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be
> In a new report from Digitimes, Foxconn executive Dai Jia-peng has laid out the company’s three-step plan for automating its Chinese factories. The company’s ultimate goal is to fully automate production of things like PCs, LCD monitors, and its most famous product—the iPhone.
> Foxconn makes its own manufacturing robots, known as Foxbots, and has already deployed about 40,000 of them. Some, which the company considers "stage one," assist workers at their stations. Foxconn already has individual fully automated production lines—they're "stage two"—in factories in Chengdu, Chongquing, and Zhengzhou.
> Stage three of the process would be fully automated factories, with only a handful of workers.
Even China with its cheap labor is now willing to invest in that technology.
If Trump ever becomes "successful" at "bringing those jobs back" to the USA, it will be jobs for machines.
> There are mental jobs being created at greater speed
But not of the type that most of the population could ever do, and most of HN, possibly you, seem to think it too because HN tends to support the idea that things like H1B are needed because of a shortage of tech labour. So, there are jobs created, but not the ones the local population can completely fulfill. Do you think that solves the unemployment problem?
And then there is the fact that some forms of work, while they had left developed countries like the US, still existed because they were "moved" and not "destroyed", like many factory jobs that went to China, are actually now going to disappear for good, because even in a country where labor is extremely cheap, like China, automation is now on the verge of being cheaper on the long term, which leads to things like Foxconn planning to fire half of their employees (!) which also leads to the fact that any solution populists like Trump may have presumed to unemployment, like bringing back those jobs that were outsourced, may not actually work in the present age. Building iPhones in the US is not actually going to create any measurable amount of jobs in the future so it's pretty pointless.
The present situation is nothing like the age of the luddites and if people don't become aware of it soon enough we might have large % of the people going unemployed, starving and potential revolutionary climates. Modern job creation is not something that can solve the problem. Ask the people who were laid off in Michigan to all become machine learning researchers?
> Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".
> Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I've also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.
This is with the current comp sci graduates, which are likely to be more motivated by the field than if we tried to make the entire general population attempt this kind of job.
There is no good possible future for some % of the population once we enter the next stage of the automation age and start replacing jobs like truck drivers, taxis, have supermarkets like the planned Amazon Go everywhere etc.
Also, think of the impact the disappearance of some jobs can have on local economies and the dominoes effect. Truck drivers, for example, are essential to many remote places. Without truck drivers stopping there their economy would break and many other jobs would die. Meanwhile large cities have massive rents and ownership costs so it's not like all these people losing jobs and living paycheck to paycheck could suddenly move to the wealthier and more active areas of the country after automation turns their place into ruins, like Detroit (not saying automation was the root cause of Detroit, but comparing the aspect of what happens when the economy of a place turns it into a literal ruin).
You don't need to have the skillset of a programmer to do pivot tables, never mind become a social media manager or a salesperson, so I think we can dispense with that straw man. And the "mental" jobs this discussion speculates about being automated out of existence already have learning curves and some level of intellect/education threshold associated with them.
"Disruption" creates and transforms jobs all over the place: sometimes it's the incredibly specialised jobs being augmented by technology that allows them to be replaced with a below-average graduate using a user-friendly GUI app and sometimes it's incredibly specialised jobs being created because the last generation of analysts that did simple calculations aren't as useful as people that can write algorithms to process bigger datasets than before. Net effect: the middle class mental jobs in "finance, insurance, data entry, law" are different rather than disappearing. One thing companies in these industries certainly don't do is conclude their competitive position is such that after automating part of their work there's no further advantages to be gleaned from throwing staff and technology at solving new problems in their domain.
I've no idea why you're bringing up Foxconn labourers (1.3 million people manufacturing things things for which demand didn't exist a generation ago!) and truck drivers (median age 49 and rising) in a discussion about the supposed hollowing out of the middle class?
Also the transient nature of tv and radio has been changed by the internet. Most tv channels in France, be they private or state owned, give you the ability to watch older airings whenever you want on their websites. Consuming those media for most young people barely differs from a daily newspaper. You don't have to be there and sit when it airs, you do it when you feel like it.
> Actual reporters need to be paid :) The idea of free access to news is relatively recent, since wide-spread web access. Prior to that, people paid for subscriptions, or bought papers at new stands or from boxes.
True for physical media, aka paper news, but not so much for radio and tv. The internet didn't invent anything new here in giving free access to news, it just provides a written form in addition to video and audio forms.
> I think it's becoming increasingly clear that purely ad-based publishing is encouraging an increase in yellow journalism.
That is true but that form of mediocre journalism can coexist with alternatives. In France we still have paper news that does not depend on ads at all, and that have healthy revenue, like Le Canard Enchaine. Just because mediocre journalism can be accessed for free on the internet does not mean paper news has to die. Le Canard is one of the most profitable newspaper in France, despite requiring a subscription and having zero ads (None, at all, ever. A great tradition they've always maintained). They also have heavy restrictions on their employees for the sake of objective journalism : they cannot play with the stock market nor can they accept gifts or official honors.
Just the fact that they don't have any ads at all in their newspaper sets quite a different standard from things like the NYT or WSJ.
Those two keep begging for subscribers, but even if you buy their actual paper news, you still have to suffer their ads and wonder how much ad revenue can influence them. Maybe it would be more acceptable and they would gain more subscribers if they became subscriber only in exchange for removing all ads and not depending on ad revenue anymore? As a French Le Canard has proven to me and the rest of us that a newspaper can live without ads at all so I feel a lot less willing to pay for forms of news that compromise with advertisers and pollute our minds.
There is also in France, and accessible through the internet, the availability of state owned media, which is free for the poor segment of the population, and lives through a mandatory tax on the rest. It isn't quite as good as Le Canard, but still a lot higher quality than the average privately owned news. They have written form of news on websites like francetvinfo, radio, tv channels and so on. I'm particularly fond of the tv magazine Envoye Special and its in depth coverage of specific, selected topics during its airings.
Which is not as convenient to use on larger phones, one handed, compared to a gesture that works anywhere on the web page. I have a Honor 8 and while overall I'm very satisfied with the apps, speediness of the phone, the lack of gestures in most Android apps compared to iOS gets old very fast, even more so because 99% of all the good android handsets on the market are much bigger than the iPhone 5s I had before.
Saying you can press the back button located on the bottom left side of the screen really doesn't cut it.
> I thought Chrome was famous for being a resource hog.
That's only in comparison to Safari and Edge. If you open enough tabs to cause memory issues on Chrome, Firefox would have frozen and slowed down to a crawl before filling the memory, anyhow, and electrolysis still isn't in a state where it could change that: there's still one process for the renderer so if enough intensive webpages are run your web browsing experience will still slow down.
> Of course you can continue using Python 2.x after 2020 but you will receive no security/bug fixes.
I keep seeing this irrelevant line all the time from Python 3 Ayatollah and High Priests. Python 2 isn't only CPython. So what if the Python foundation stops maintaining CPython? Dropbox is writing a new, efficient Python 2 implementation to make their legacy Python programs run faster while they slowly port to Go.
There's Pyston, there's PyPy, there's Jython, there's IronPython. We don't depend on CPython security fixes thank you very much. And so far none of them have made an EOL announcement of their Python 2 releases, while in the case of Pyston, being Python 2 is a must, dropbox is never going to port anything to Python 3. If something is worth wasting time with Python 3, it's worth rewriting in Go.
Pyston, Jython, IronPython; they're all esoteric when compared to CPython. And while Pyston or similar may continue their own Python 2 implementation many library/package authors will simply not support it. So your interpreter may not be EOL'd but you'll very quickly find the package versions you rely upon will be.
Film is automatically much worse any time you need higher sensitivity because of low light situations and can't use a tripod or need to capture a more mobile target. 400 iso film in 35mm format is noisier than any modern DSLR used in 3200+ iso settings, any, even entry-level $400 Canon or Nikon.
Also, in terms of level of details it has been possibly a decade since DSLR have become much better than 35mm film. Medium and large format film was still better for a longer amount of time, but medium format cameras are a lot more cumbersome and large format cameras are something only the most dedicated would ever bother to carry anywhere.
This is one of the smallest medium format camera for comparison :
https://melbournestreetphotography.files.wordpress.com/2013/...
And it's a rangefinder, so it's basically unusable with telephoto lenses. Mirror based medium format cameras like the Hasselblad were things that pretty much never left indoor studios.
Correction: 35mm is grainier, not noisier. After staring at grain vs color noise in shadows for hours at a time, the aesthetics of grain are one of the reasons I still shoot film sometimes.
This is somewhat of a good point, I like film's aesthetics too. But, grain and noise are two different inter-related things.
A digital full-frame sensor (vs 35mm film) at the same settings is going to have much less noise. I love film. But the fact is that silver vs cmos is a losing battle of technologies.
Most of the weight is due to the toughened design, not the battery, actually. We are talking about laptops you can use as a weapon to bludgeon someone, then take with you to swim, and they'd still be in a working state.
Actually you can run over them with an SUV and they still work!
Of course, unlike common laptops, they don't need a case or anything. Just carry them as is with their built-in handle.
If they didn't cost so much I would consider buying one. The added weight may make them slightly less comfortable in one way, but in another way, if you think about it, they're not flimsy pieces of denting aluminum you always have to treat with care, put in protective bags during transport and the like. Using a laptop like this must feel.. liberating.
That already depends on the type of skill being taught. Learning a new language, for example, has never been dependent on teachers and I think I've been doing quite well with purely self taught English, and that was before methods like duolingo appeared. My mother is living in retirement and has started learning languages as a way to pass time, she has learned enough English through duolingo to achieve a conversational level and she never had a teacher. Is it really impossible for more sophisticated AIs to truly replace language teachers in schools, and have students do things through a computer? and possibly replace teachers in many other fields of studies too. I'd wager most of the less advanced courses in pre-college stuff could do well with modern, computerized, interactive methods of learning. I don't think you could replace the interaction with a teacher for more advanced studies, though.