Yep, just watch a few ‘How It’s Made’ episodes. Most factories now have computer controlled welders, assemblers, and cutting machines with the few people doing the menial tasks of loading and unloading.
As a driver if like to add my 2 cents to the “driver shortage”.
I don’t remember the exact number but there are a lot of CDL license holders that aren’t driving anymore. There’s a shortage of jobs with decent pay and tolerable working conditions.
How many people here would want to live in a truck for weeks at a time without getting home? Put up with traffic and weather, lying dispatchers and impossible appointment times? All for 50k a year.
I’ve always been local, home everyday. But I go to the same places the road drivers go. I recently changed jobs because I tore a tendon off my humerus bone and had to have surgery. I was unloading a 2200lb tote at a rural king store. Woman on a FORKLIFT said they didn’t unload trucks unless they were their company trucks. This attitude is way too common.
Road drivers are faced with long hours of waiting to be loaded or unloaded. Short warehouse staff and scheduling too many loads are the main reason for this.
I think the days of robotic driving are coming, but not soon. Too many variables.
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Yeah its those dang boomers again holding up all the progress.
When we set up disaster recovery programs, it was important to have back-up copies of most everything important and off site. Some times paper is the best option, sometimes not, but don’t be foolish.
We cautioned that if you are keeping electronic files, then you’d better also have the software used to read those files and the equipment used to read the media those files were contained in. I’ve got lots of electronic files on disc but have no machine to read them. I might even have a few floppy discs around if I would clean my office. I have no idea anymore what software created them that doesn’t exist anymore. 1,2,3, Wordstar, Wordperfect, Datastar, etc. You get the point. I’m sure the FBI could somehow figure out how to read them but for normal people they are simply lost. The paper back-ups are just fine though as long as I don’t have a flood, fire, or tornado. Oh oh, plan B. You kids think about how you are going to spend all your free time though.
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And I’ve seen the opposite. When my brother-in-law was just a line manager at New Process Gear back in the 80’s he saw many people get laid off who had been working there for decades and they were never able to get steady work after that.
Here’s what it’s like in a Porsche plant. Computer-controlled body assembly/painting, still takes lots of hand work to attach everything to the body:
Yeah let’s be human here. When you have seen grown men crying like babies after losing their 30 year job you tend to reconsider how things work. For me it was exhilarating because I was free to pursue what ever I wanted. My biggest concern was paying college costs.
Kids need to know that in the blink of an eye, things can turn upside down. Having money helps as well as being a little self-reliant. Someone said you always what to have a little screw you money so you are free to walk out the door on your terms.
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Many workers thought they’d be there til retirement. They thought their job was secure and never had to worry. I learned that lesson early enough in my career. And I’m seeing the same thing today. Many young people think they don’t have to worry about their jobs. Wait til reality sets in.
I’m a boomer and I can’t remember the last time I had to handle paper. There are almost no tasks at work that require paper. The only one I can think of is test plans in the Environmental Test Group. Everyone else uses virtual work orders. Even requirements and interface control documents are created, reviewed and signed on line. I think it’s great.
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I wish I could say that.
My third career, after retiring from the field of education, was as a Paralegal for my state’s child protection agency. I was able to compose and edit my Court Complaints via some decent software, but the end result was that I had to print 10 copies of each complaint, and while they tended to run no more than a dozen pages (including copies of police reports and other documentation), there were some Complaints which ran to 50+ pages.
One paper copy was for the Deputy A.G. who would try the case, then there was a file copy for my office, and I had to hand-deliver the other 8 copies to the Court Clerk. Why did the Court require 8 hard copies? Nobody was ever able to satisfactorily explain that to me.
The legal profession is still paper-centric, and I’m not sure when that will change.
The problem is also that it’s not a matter of whether or not you’re willing to retrain.
If you lose your job to a machine at the same time that 90% of other jobs are also being done by machines, where will you work?
I may have said it before on here, but it wouldn’t shock me if at some point in the future, being a theater major will actually be a lucrative career move, only because no one will ever want to see Cats performed by robots. 
When a machine can design equipment, build it, operate it, fix it, and then scrap it when it wears out, there’s not many options available for displaced workers to do instead, because machines are doing those too.
This isn’t going to be anything like we saw in the past. In the past, everyone’s right - new tech might displace old workers, but it would also create a need for different roles. In the future, the same thing will happen, but tech will fill those different roles too.
Obviously, but we were talking about general office work. I don’t need paper backups of every document I ever touch, or even most of them.
Well that brought back some memories. Believe it or not, I still have Wordstar for the Kaypro II on its original 5.25" floppy in my closet of ancient tech. It’s next to the Commodore Vic-20, still in its original box. Nerd hoarding.
You are right - document retention is an issue with the older software because no one was thinking about what happens when new tech replaces old tech. That’s really no longer the case. Backwards compatibility is a real thing now. I can import even old early 90’s Ami Pro files with the modern Lotus suite. You can even use a modern copy of Word to read the text (sadly, not the formatting) of 80’s-era Word for Dos documents.
Losing access to files created today because of new tech created tomorrow is most likely never going to happen again, because at minimum there will be a conversion utility available to import the old stuff into the new system.
Good to hear someone has a floppy drive in case the gentlemen come calling but I think I’ll soon just cut them up. Ya got a cassette player too? Like for stuff off the 1st generation CPT word processors? 
Here’s a little history story if interested while talking cassettes. About 1971 before tape word processors, there were about three of us in our Army Reserve unit trained in teletypewriters. The teletypes used a 5 (whatever you call them now) gang so with the combination of mark and space, you could get all the combinations for the upper case alphabet plus numbers. So that is how the pulses were sent from one another. So we had an engineer in the group, and I don’t remember his name or who he worked for, but he questions us from morning to night about how the teletypes worked. A year or so after that, out came the 1st generation word processors but were using 7 gangs with the 1’s and 0’s to get upper and lower case etc. He was in MPLS and may have worked for CPT, I dunno but I knew a lot of the people there. It was really the same principle and still is. Always wondered if he had something to do with it.
When they first came out my boss sent me to take a look. He didn’t think much of the idea. I came back and went oh my gosh, this is a new era.
I don’t have any paper copies of any work I do. Haven’t had paper copies in over 30 years. Never had a problem.
Yes! The Vic20 didn’t have a floppy drive. (well, I think there was one available but I didn’t have one). Computers in those days were great for kids because you’d go to load a game on a multi-program tape and then have to go play outside for 20 or 30 minutes while the tape drive slowly found the program and loaded it.
They were also great for getting me in trouble, because I discovered you could put those cassettes into my parent’s Sansui tape deck and blast what we now think of as modem noises at ear-splitting volume.
Wouldn’t surprise me. The 7-bit ones used ASCII for character encoding, if I recall. That’s also what the early word processors used - I think the WP “document” was output to what was essentially a Selectric typewriter modified to input ASCII.
Until not all that long ago, I was in television, which is an industry that can be very backward as far as a lot of its tech goes. Colleges were editing video on computers for years before a lot of newsrooms picked up the idea even though it’s quicker, more accurate, and cheaper to maintain. A lot of stations are still holding on to printing everything out. Whole forests flow through a newsroom on a daily basis, even though it’s wholly unnecessary. Just use a tablet.
Now that I’m in a more up to date industry, I can go weeks without even seeing paper at the office.
healthcare too, even with electronic records 
people want to see Cats now??
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Not THIS person!
Many years ago, a friend dragged me to see it on Broadway, and I have to say that it was the second-worst* theater experience of my life. With the exception of one song–Memory–it had nothing of value, IMHO.
*In case anyone was wondering, Starlight Express was the worst.
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Actors are facing the prospect of become voice-only (for a short time anyway)… Computer generated graphics are getting so good you can easily project an end to real-life actors beyond the voices. And even the voices will be taken over by computer generated dialog at some point.
Willing to retrain and the ability to retrain are two different things. It’s a lot easier for a 20 something to retrain then someone who’s 55 and has done nothing but working an assembly line their whole life.
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I’m 50 years old, don’t have a college degree and have been a professional mechanic most of my adult life
Plus I have a disability which complicates many things, including training
I suspect I would also not have an easy time retraining, if my back were against the wall, so to speak
Once a month my wife goes to the theater with a group of woman friends. When they gather at our place I say thank you for not inviting me. Call me a knuckle dragger, but I just don’t like seeing guys in tights, dancing.
Here in Oakland there is still one Ace hardware store that has a big counter when you walk in, and behind that counter are multiple people who ask you what you’re looking for. You tell them, they get it, and ask what else. You might discuss the problem you need to solve, they make suggestions and show you solutions. You pay and leave. It’s the way retail commerce was done a century ago. I never use it.
New York City employed thousands of people to clean up horse manure off the city streets until probably the early 1920’s when cars made horses mostly obsolete. Many of us may have had immigrant ancestors who did that type of work before they learned to speak English.
Many, many assembly factory workers at GM plants in Michigan went from their union jobs to Social Security Disability benefits when GM finally realized people weren’t really interested in buying Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs any more. I was working for Social Security then and watched it happen. That’s one of the ways our country deals with workers in their 50’s who have been surplussed by changing times.
Times change and we have to change with them.