Practically human: Can smart machines do your job? (Spoiler alert: yes)

[No Elephants]

Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?

By PAUL WISEMAN, BERNARD CONDON and JONATHAN FAHEY
AP Business Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Art Liscano knows he's an endangered species in the job market: He's a meter reader in Fresno, Calif. For 26 years, he's driven from house to house, checking how much electricity Pacific Gas & Electric customers have used.

But PG&E doesn't need many people like Liscano making rounds anymore. Every day, the utility replaces 1,200 old-fashioned meters with digital versions that can collect information without human help, generate more accurate power bills, even send an alert if the power goes out.

"I can see why technology is taking over," says Liscano, 66, who earns $67,000 a year. "We can see the writing on the wall." His department employed 50 full-time meter readers just six years ago. Now, it has six.

From giant corporations to university libraries to start-up businesses, employers are using rapidly improving technology to do tasks that humans used to do. That means millions of workers are caught in a competition they can't win against machines that keep getting more powerful, cheaper and easier to use.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Second in a three-part series on the loss of middle-class jobs in the wake of the Great Recession, and the role of technology.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_THE_GREAT_RESET_TECHNOLOGYS_ADVANCE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-01-24-06-36-22

[Enthusiast]

1. This is why the government must exert

more influence on the private sector. To insure valuable jobs are created. If it takes tax incentives or whatever. It must be done.

[No Elephants]

2. Their motivation is maximum greed. Government gives plenty of incentives for that.

That allegedly includes tax incentives to offshore U.S. jobs.

Now, Republicans are talking about immigration reform in terms of giving citizenship to foreign nationals who come to the U.S. for education.

And you know Democrats will talk bigger and more democratically, but will end up "compromising" by taking almost 100% of the Republican plan, as usual.

So many of the seats in our institutions of higher learning are already reserved for students from other nations--and that even includes West Point. So, put the two things together and the job creators can get plenty of cheaper labor right here in the U.S., saving all the inconvenience and expense of taking jobs out of the country to save money.

[Enthusiast]

3. We must stop this, mostly GOP idea, of a race to the bottom.

Their desire to make us into a nation of third world style workers is insane. But, in all honesty, that is where they want to go. This appears to be a kind of extension of a "plantation mentality" for the nation. They lost the America Civil War but seems to want to impose that old time philosophy on all of us. Wall Street and corporate America are all too happy to go along. We are at a crossroads of history.