Note the security officers escorting the villain in the picture here...

ALL men.

Because, you need BIG STRONG ARMS to pull the trigger on a recoil-less phaser rifle.

I guess if a woman had been in the security detail, the villain wouldn't have escaped and the movie would have ended too quickly.

Basic answer?

It's too late- we are screwed.

Real answer? Get the human population down to about 3 billion and live with a lot of freedom and prosperity. Continue down the same path and look at rationed water, cramped living quarters, lower quality food. And when we do have something bad, we'll have a tremendous die off.

Look- wind power has now been shown to reduce the winds (and affect the climate). And seriously... DUH? You are extracting huge amounts of energy from the wind- it's going to affect the winds.

Dump huge amounts of heat into the environment (in this case) is just another case of an organization externalizing their costs on the rest of society.

That heat is going to have an effect. There will be a cost. But the company dumping the heat is getting the benefit for "FREE".

Don't sell it as "free" and I won't bitch.

The 40 hours was completely as a result of labor laws. Other than farm work, it had little to do with productivity.

With high productivity machinary, people work 70 hour weeks all over the world today where they lack our labor laws.

Labor scarcity will peak between now and 2030 due to retiring boomers in america, china, and europe. But automation trends will probably counterbalance that trend from 2020 onwards.

If we set hard limits world wide that you could only work humans 32 hours a week, then (short of robots), we would get by on 32 hours a week.

70 hour weeks exist only to maximize profits by the wealthy class.

Upper level managers have a long history of removing lower level managers however. And a lot of it has been technology based.

Managers make more money, so automating their processes results in a higher payoff.

Oh yeh, and keep in mind our tax treatment of human workers vs robot workers.

Human workers == higher taxes. (social security, unemployment, compliance costs, workplace safety costs)

Robot workers == reduced taxes. (capital expense-- depreciate). And down to about $22,000 now. (As little as $2000 for the ones they are going to use at Foxxconn and are using in the noodle shopes).

This!

Been saying this for at least three years. Sort of drives me crazy the willful blindness by people.

1) Modular robots.
2) "Cell phone" model robots (swap the entire thing)
3) Modular modules.
4) Selected offshore repair of modules.

Hoping the boomer (and chinese and european boomer) retirement waves will give us til 2020 but this is coming on faster than people realize now.

Actors are being replaced now.

The first stage will be the same actors having longer careers due to real time facelifts.

However, artificial actors are just around the corner (we already have artificial robotic performers who are popular with humans).

This time isn't luddism. This time, the machines can replace any job which doesn't rely on creativity. And they can do it much cheaper (especially with current tax treatment).

It's already happening fast and it's part of the reason for persistent elevated unemployment rates.

That's a matter of design.

A modular robot would be simple to fix. You either take the modules back for repair or just toss them because fixing them might be too expensive. Think about how we handle cell phones.

Failing that, "fixing" a robot may consist of swapping a new one out and taking the broken ones back to a central location- perhaps even shipped to bangladesh or some similar location.

This isn't true.

Robots are now replacing humans in hospitals, warehouses, fast food restaurants...
They've basically eliminated receptionists and secretaries.

In the last three years, they've perfected robots that can pick parts and assemble items from randomly filled bins faster than humans. They can toss and catch items.

Given external power, they have a robot which has the same form factor as a human and moves with the same speed and agility of a human.

It's happening now. Millions of human jobs are going away every year. I suspect retiring boomers will hide it for another 8 years but come 2020 it should be very apparent.

Part of the problem is the tax treatment. Businesses pay taxes on humans but get to depreciate robots and automated systems as capital expenses. And they get to keep *all* the profit after paying for the robots and a service contract (about $15000 a year to as little as $2000 per year).

We better figure this out fast- hopefully voting humans will react in time. But you have to open your eyes and see that it is happening first.

Don't stick your head in the sand.

I mean, all this heat is just going to vanish into the environment, right?

Or they could set fines and incentives to reduce the size of the problem without violence over a longer period of time.

However- unless we reduce the human population none of this matters.

And the human population is going up at least another 20%.

I think it's going to be very unpleasant sometime in the next 30-50 years for most humans.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2509604/

Our findings add to the literature on child labor violations. In 2003, the US Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division identified 7228 minors employed in violation of the FLSA.37 In the same year, a survey of state labor departments carried out by the National Consumers League identified 4755 minors (in 30 states) who were illegally employed.14 Kruse and Mahoney used data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey to estimate that as many as 295 800 15- to 17-year-olds working in nonagricultural industries are illegally employed annually.4

Our resultsâ"which were derived from self-reported practices that we independently classified as being in violation or complianceâ"revealed that a substantial proportion of US adolescents working in the retail or service sector were employed in violation of the child labor laws. Extrapolating our findings to the roughly 2.4 million 16- and 17-year-old workersâ"a group for which the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports employment data and who mostly work in retail and service2,3,7â"we estimate that as many as 264000 of these youths may be employed in violation of the FLSAâ(TM)s night work provisions and as many as 888 000 may be employed in violation of the hazardous orders each year.

And...

http://stopchildlabor.org/?cat=66

Young Worker Deaths & Injuries

Accidents are the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 10 and 19. Teenagers are particularly vulnerable to accidents at work. A 2006 survey found that 1 in 13 youth had been injured on the job. In 2008, 34 workers under 18 died in the workplace.

This is in the U.S. WITH child labor laws.

And also very hard to see reality when your income depends on not seeing it.

Even with legal constraints companies continue to try to work children. In other countries they do work children (and 70 hours a week and locked in the building) despite access to the same technology which supposedly "freed" the children.

One of the biggest problems at Foxxconn (Apple Iphones) is labor turnover because of crippled and permanently disabled children from exposure to toxic chemicals.

Programming can be crippling if you start it too young. And on my last project (SAP conversion), we had three people die on the project (and a possible 4th who was hauled away but they were a contractor so we never heard about them). One 43 year old just said she felt bad, laid down, and that was it.

We also had 4 heart attacks and 3 cancers. I saw young people walking around with black eyes from lack of sleep. Programming without constraints is horrible and will kill you. Humans are not meant to consistently work 70-80 hours per week for months.

If child labor laws were and are unnecessary then why do we continue to have violations (lots of them) today. Both for excessive work hours and for hazardous violations (including fatalities).

If child labor laws are unnecessary, then it wouldn't matter because businesses would never come close to violating them.

Most people can be evil with very little incentive (Summers experiment, the french electricution torture television show). Unconstrained capitalism gives people a very HIGH incentive. People will behave evilly unless you put in clear boundaries.

It's the difference between sports and war. And we even have rules of behavior for wars. Without them, you end up with genocide and people eating the opposite side's hearts.

You need to read up on Robber Barons and Company stores and then follow it up with some reading on the labor movements of the 1920's which helped stop working 12 year olds 72 hours a week.

Unlimited Capitalism and competition is REALLY ugly.

You need to decide some reasonable boundaries and allow competition inside of those boundaries.

Otherwise you end up with most people basically slaves with shoddy, unhealthy (even poisonous) products that break quickly.

The only thing that makes capitalism and competition work are strong labor laws, strong drug laws, strong warranty laws, strong pollution laws and a government that enforces them.