OT-Left Behind

Heres the full rant.

And the reality is, 80% of people will be left behind, and it is not the politicians fault. Just a new reality of replacing people with computers. I think that I will be in that other 20%, but I find it frightening.

I don't understand why they are not funding education so people can keep up with current job markets. Continuing education is the key to being employed in our times. What is going to happen to that 80% that are left behind?

Best Regards Tom.

Well, they are "funding education", of course, but education is not the full answer. If you take a dumb person and teach him or her to do arithmetic, that still does not make them better than a computer, at any given job.

So the problem you've identified is not that people aren't sufficiently educated, but rather that most of the good jobs are for people who *are* educated, and there are enough such jobs available to employ around 20% of the population.

Is that it? (I'm not disagreeing, just trying to identify what you see as the problem.)

They will all vote Democrat and get paid by the taxes on the other 20% :-) ...lew...

I wonder if any of the idiot CONgresscritters actually believe any of the shit they spout.

OH NO! Not yet -another- insufferable Jesse Fookin' Jackson! That bastard (Sr.) had 5 children. God help us...

-- Accept the pain, cherish the joys, resolve the regrets; then can come the best of benedictions - 'If I had my life to live over, I'd do it all the same.' -- Joan McIntosh

That's odd. If _I_ had to do _MY_ life over, I'd change the things I did wrong, which, as it turns out, is essentially _everything_.

Thanks, Rich

Right up until the Golden Goose bleeds to death.

Thanks, Rich

If 80% are unemployable - the golden goose will have no blood to bleed.

Remember all those predictions that almost everyone would have plenty of leisure time in the future? Well, the future is here.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

What I am saying is that most people (70%? 80%?) can be replaced by computers. Just making them more educated and able to do, say, arithmetic, would not really make them less replaceable.

Ok, that's another way of saying the same thing. We have a structural economic problem. You're just a tiny bit more pessimistic than I am. d8-)

Ed, my son goes to a elementary school. My impression is that the kids are learning something useful, but at the same time, I would not call it super great either. At least my son is in advanced placement, and they get a little bit of extras that they learn. Altogether, it far from horrible, at least in AP, but I would not truly consider it very rigorous and excellent schooling. I am "satisfied", but wishing for more. At the least, I wish they had more homework and they were asked to put solutions on paper, not just answers.

I heard about religious kooks trying to dominate school boards. Apparently, locally that is not a problem, where I live.

That is the opinion of a lot of managment these days but I am not sure it is really the case. As an example, I had some dealings with Comcast recently where I wanted to turn-off TV cable service and sign up for new internet service. Apparently my mistake was doing it simultaneously. It seems the computer system never anticipated such a situation and, without going into details, it became hopelessly confused. The comcast people on the phone (BTW they were not from India) understood my problem and they tried to be helpful and fix my situation, but they kept running into a stone wall with the computer. The more they tried to fool the computer and work around the problem the worse it became. I ended up abandoning Comcast completely. The point is these ordinary people were much smarter in many ways than the computer system. I think It will be a long time before computers (or perhaps computer programmers) can handle unexpected situations better than a normally intelligent person.

It's not too late to take some responsibility for yourself, get a job and live the rest of your life right.

That's part of it. The other part is that the availability of universal higher education doesn't change the bell curve.

Exactly. You can get 90% of work done through computers (website), and for the remaining 10%, even people cannot do it.

The flaw in your argument is that 70-80 percent can be replaced with a computer. They can't, at least not in a society that wants or needs a modern infrastructure in order to prosper. What computers can improve on are things like design models. Building things takes people using technology.

The "Left Behind" thesis implies a static environment, something that just doesn't exist. Never has and never will.