Okay, this isn't necessarily a political thread, but with the forthcoming election in the United States it kind of brings things into sharper focus... What do you think are the most pressing issues of our time? What will be the big issues in the United States election? What are the big issues where you are, if not the US? In the UK, apart from COVID19 (which is really a pressing issue everywhere) it is our future relationship or non-relationship with the European Union, which still hasn't been sorted out four years after a referendum to leave.
Employment issues. The U.S. has been closed for covid-19 for so long that people are realizing they didn't actually need a lot of their employees, and won't be rehiring them once the lockdowns are lifted. The same thing happened in 2008, the companies saw how much money they saved after firing half their staff so just never hired them back. That combined with artificial intelligence being more than capable of doing lots of jobs, and at least 30% of the country's jobs will disappear in the near future. Even minimum wage jobs are going away, all the fast food places and grocery stores in my area have 2-3 employees and 5+ self-serve kiosks where you can do everything yourself with no need for an employee. Those places used to have 10-15 staff members just a couple years ago.
I loathe the idea of artificial intelligence - what sort of world is that going to lead to in 50 years? Little human interaction and less jobs meaning more people will be financially worse off. And don't get me started on UBI, despise that idea as a substitute for having a job.
The most pressing issues of our time? Honestly I think it will be climate change/environmental issues. Maybe not this year or decade, but I can easily see it being a huge issue in the next couple of decades. More specifically fresh water, increased intensity and frequency of natural disasters, and providing food for everybody (urban sprawl and destroyed land due to poor farming practices). As the US and other countries have pulled inequality into the spotlight, it's making Canada look at our treatment of indigenous people. Related but also separate, our oil pipelines which brings up indigenous land, and how we want to move forward with our energies. Speaking of employment, I think now (with super high employment & covid) is the time to change how employment works (4 vs 5 day work weeks, work from home etc), if it is ever going to change.
I agree with this. We cannot continue to have people doing 40+ hours per week anymore, otherwise unemployment and associated welfare debts will soar across the world. I believe Finland is one country that is already implementing reduced hours (6 hour days, 4 days per week).
If anything the pandemic showed just how weak the economies of the world are if there are any problems, and just how many people's livelihood are completely dependent on other people having disposable income. Personally I don't see a big loss if pedowood and most major sports go under. But getting people back to work is going to need to be a big priority no matter which party wins or loses. Beyond leisure activities, restaurants and bars getting closed down, if people aren't working they don't have the money to remodel their home or buy a bigger home. They aren't taking vacation to small towns and bringing money to those economies. Energy is also going to be big, I saw a blurb that California is having trouble supplying power in the current heat wave. As their green energy just can not keep up with the demand and will only get worse as demand for electricity goes higher as the state pushes to have all commercial vehicles be zero emission, basically electric in the future. By 2045 there are going to be a lot more people living in the state that will want their AC to work on top of fleets of trucks needing to get charged at any given time. Education should be big as the pandemic also showed just how blindly people will believe any talking head on the TV about anything. Passing a test just isn't going to cut it and only telling people the only way they are going to get ahead is to get massive debt going to college is huge disservice to all the fields that don't require it and forces people who don't know what they want to do to waste more time and money in school instead of perusing other jobs.
Maybe in other countries, but this will never happen in the United States. Our entire culture is driven by working long hours, and the people in charge would rather let their companies burn than let people work less. You can already see how harshly our country is fighting against a $15 minimum wage, it'd be so much worse if we proposed knocking out 25% of our daily work hours too for a 6 hour day. As it is, barely anyone working in retail or food service here is even allowed to be full time because the employer doesn't want to pay them benefits like health insurance when they can just hire two people for 20 hours each and not give either of them benefits (benefits are required if you work 38+ hours). I worked 108 hours last week, at one job. My chosen career will require 70-80 hours per week of work for the next 9ish years at minimum. Welcome to the American dream!
The largest issue (and while I think a lot of people don't want to admit it, or feel fearful of it, given the potential changes to ones life, habits that might need to be made) is the environment/climate change. We already see the changes in different regions of the earth, changes that not only contribute to the warming of the climate but also trigger other events, including changes in weather patterns. Florida (for example) is going to be under water, possibly within some our lifetimes. The pandemic has made it even clearer as to the amount of work and sustained efforts that would need to be made, to avert the worst of climate change. Once the lock downs were in place, people started working from home, driving less, etc... the air quality improved dramatically with people saying that they have never seen clear blue skies over their city until the pandemic. What I found telling however is an interview with a scientist who mentioned that while we were able to reduce our CO2 emissions by 30 percent, the scary part was that even though with much of the world in lock down, would need to reduce emissions by a further 70 percent to have an actual impact on climate change. A couple of months ago, a report out of Australia mentioned that if humanity has about 10 years to get its act together otherwise it is going to be too late to do much. I agree that the economy and jobs are important however, I do think an important issue is and will continue to be, as to what kind of an economy are we wanting to build, and the kinds of supports we need for people that don't have it as good as others.
What's interesting about this is it's been in the works for a decade or more. -- Uber and Lyft, for example, have no interest in having drivers for their cars. The drivers are a necessary evil to build marketshare until self-driving cars are ready (which appears to be a year or two at most.) -- I went into a Panera sandwich shop a few months ago, ordered on a self-service screen, picked up one of those buzzer things, it buzzed when my order was ready and I picked it up. No contact with a person at all. -- A friend who is a Starbucks manager said that since they launched their app 2 years ago, within 6 months, it was responsible for 15% of their orders. It continues to grow. -- Taco Bell, in its new stores, will have an "express drive through" line where you pre-order on their app, and pick up from a window. -- Tesla's self-driving semi-trucks are close to ready. -- Walmart has been remodeling stores and in a new store I was in, there are 20 self-checkout lanes and 3 with cashiers. And then we have electric cars that require almost no maintenance or fuel stops. There go gas stations, most auto repair shops. And self-driving cars are projected to mean that about 70% of people won't own cars (most cars sit unused over 90% of the time.) This means... way fewer cars sold. Way less manufacturing jobs. Few need for auto parts, or auto parts stores, or auto repair shops, or gas stations, or tire stores. Not to mention... Amazon, Walmart, Target combined are responsible for ~70% of all e-commerce, which is rapidly replacing retail shopping. Warehouses are very highly automated, with robots doing most of the order picking and much of the packing. Robotic delivery is only a few years away. Many currently closed malls will not reopen at all, or will reopen with 50-80% vacancy. In the medical field, artificial intelligence can now read many X-rays with far greater accuracy than humans can. So much for radiologists. Many pathology labs can run nearly unattended. Few employees needed to run blood tests. The good news is, nursing jobs are not likely to go away any time soon, nor are physicians (other than diagnostic radiologists and pathologists) likely to be replaced by AI, at least for 10-20 years. Oh and there are AI apps that can write very serviceable legal briefs, and, additionally, huge law schools in India training thousands of attorneys in US law, so you can now get your brief, legal filing, lawsuit, answer, and most other legal documents written by a highly trained (but unlicensed) attorney for $25 an hour. A licensed lawyer will need to file it, but one licensed attorney can employ 25 or 50 Indian attorneys. So... it is far worse than just the jobs lost by the pandemic. The pandemic basically served to accelerate, by 5 or 10 years, something that was already on its way. What will happen? No one knows. Universal basic income is the most likely solution. But the other thing that's going to be even more pronounced is the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. And many who are "haves" now will become "have nots" as their jobs and industries disappear. I don't mean to sound bleak... this could actually work out really interestingly, with people suddenly able to spend their time producing art, music, volunteering their time, or taking it easy. But that will require the 1% to give up much of their wealth. Otherwise... we might have a revolution.
AI can do much more in the medical field than that, physicians are just trying to keep it as quiet as possible. I shadowed an orthopedic surgeon a few weeks ago, and they have robots that can literally do an entire surgery all by themselves. Most of the surgeries are pretty basic like knee replacement, hip replacement etc. where you just pop out one thing and pop in the other but still...that was scary honestly realizing that a robot is capable of repairing a human like we repair cars. A lot of ophthalmology surgeries can be done by robots too since it's often just lasers being directed in a certain pattern and is already mostly automated, with the ophthalmologist being more of a programmer than a surgeon during it.
I had heard about some of these things. I did not know they were mature enough to begin to replace some of these common surgeries. I was watching some video of the DaVinci robot-assisted surgery in action and it's pretty amazing how sophisticated and flexible it is.
As someone in the trucking industry self driving anything is still a long way off no matter how much people push for it. It is a novelty at best right now and only works in the desert or southern California because those areas don't get bad weather. Up in the north where they get snow most of the things self driving vehicle use to stay on the road are buried under snow and ice. Also the computer can't put on tire chains and no one who knows how to do that is going to for minim wage. That and technology doesn't hold up well in those kinds of conditions very long. I have driven several newer vehicles that many of the bells and whistles don't work after 100,000 miles or less. They build everything too cheap for it to last and trucks already cost a fortune as it is.
Reading your response, it reminded me of an interview I listened to recently on the use of hydrogen gas in transportation vehicles and that they are slowly becoming viable options. There are definitely some hurdles still to overcome, including building the necessary infrastructure along the highways, but the fuel cells seem to be designed to last for more than 150,000 miles.
