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> Social changes, trodes, drones and other stuff
Serbitar
post Aug 6 2006, 10:28 AM
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When I look at the price tag of drones and trodes I get to the following conclusion:

- lots of the jobs out there are not what they used to be

- practically all the heavy duty work is done by drones with workers piloting them

- lots of jobs have gone extinct (taxi driver, window cleaners, postmans)

- secretarial work is done via VR from home, no need to leave for work any more. same goes for drone pilots

- nobody is piloting vehicles manually anymore

- most people talk per transducer and matrix not vocally (too much of a hazzle)


Comments and other points?
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Samaels Ghost
post Aug 6 2006, 01:46 PM
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Trendy bastards probably roll their eyes and scoff when they have to talk to a non-AR user vocally. :beret:
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Brahm
post Aug 6 2006, 02:28 PM
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The chic people arrive by limo with a real driver (although the driver is using VR) to order from a phyisal menu real meat and fruit, and casually chat in person to person, and served by real people . Because it is stupid expensive and not what everyone else is doing. On the other hand something similar to Serbitar is what your runners are likely to experience, although I'm not sure that administrative assistants are right out. Because, at least in my mind, anthropod robots haven't taken over yet.
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booklord
post Aug 6 2006, 05:49 PM
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QUOTE
- lots of jobs have gone extinct (taxi driver, window cleaners, postmans)

Debatable on the taxi driver and the postman. Let's handle each seperately.

Taxi driver - What does a living taxi driver provide? Theft insurance. If you run a taxi company keep in mind that a few well trained and equipped hackers can drive you right out of business if you go fully automated. The average device rating for a cab would be around 3. Easily hackable. Put a living taxi driver in front and he can take over with the flick of a switch.

Postman. Written Correspondance is pretty archaic at this point so the post office mainly deals with packages. Packages that sometimes carry valuable items. Not only are there postmen. They're armed. As with taxi drivers anyone who relies solely on drones is asking for their business to be taken away.
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Cheops
post Aug 6 2006, 07:30 PM
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Taxi Driver: don't use as theft insurance because if something happened to him the insurance will cost you more than the theft. Where I live there were a rash of murdered taxi drivers and the companies started doing everything they could to try and separate the driver from the passenger and to limit the amount of money they carried. In the dystopic future you are much better off with an automated cab because they don't need time off (except for maintenance which is less than actual sick and vacation days), they can't get "killed," and you can keep the whole thing fairly secure. Sure the cab only has rating 3 (which is good enough by canon standards to keep out most hackers) but it doesn't hold the funds. You probably pay up front and it gets sent to the bank ASAP.
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knasser
post Aug 6 2006, 07:51 PM
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QUOTE (booklord)
Taxi driver - What does a living taxi driver provide? Theft insurance. If you run a taxi company keep in mind that a few well trained and equipped hackers can drive you right out of business if you go fully automated. The average device rating for a cab would be around 3. Easily hackable. Put a living taxi driver in front and he can take over with the flick of a switch.

Depends how common hackers are. But I'd say that a living driver has two effects. One - dead taxi driver if there's a theft. Two - a way for thugs without hackers (probably way more common) to steal the taxi ("Take us to the Barrens or we blow your brains out").

Best response of a taxi firm is
(a) limit resale value, e.g. the taxis are distinctive vehicles that you can fence.
(b) limit usefulness, e.g. no manual drive or interface.
© alarms that trip when taxi goes somewhere off its submitted route. This means that a hacker must deal with the taxi companies central node / system to fake a route. It also means that a company hacker can enter the taxi cab's system to do battle.

I suppose © could be defeated by hacking the taxi not to broadcast its location to the company or wrapping the whole veichle in aluminium, but I expect that to entail a host of problems, the least of which would be lone star drones despatched to the last recorded location and the worst of which being the local traffic guidance system not being able to tell you were there. :D

It all depends how it were set up.
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kigmatzomat
post Aug 6 2006, 08:23 PM
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QUOTE (Serbitar)

When I look at the price tag of drones and trodes I get to the following conclusion:
- lots of the jobs out there are not what they used to be
- practically all the heavy duty work is done by drones with workers piloting them


Most heavy duty work is done by equipment now. The difference is that drones have limited dex and too low AI; any unexpected situations are beyond their capabilities. Assuming the unions have been broken by the Corps, people are cheaper than drones. Trolls are treated as 2nd rate people anyway and are far cheaper than a drone of equivalent strength, dex, and AI.

Drone pilots with the ability to master construction are better applied to more exotic tasks.



QUOTE

- lots of jobs have gone extinct (taxi driver, window cleaners, postmans)
- nobody is piloting vehicles manually anymore


Taxis in mid-range areas will be replaced with GridGuide vehicles but the upper-class regions will have drivers simply due to personal interaction. Remember, having a person when a machine could do the job is a sign of wealth and prestige.

But I agree that the bulk of urbanites with vehicles will rely on GridGuide+Pilot to get them around. It also eliminates the problems with drunk driving.

QUOTE

- secretarial work is done via VR from home, no need to leave for work any more. same goes for drone pilots
- most people talk per transducer and matrix not vocally (too much of a hazzle)


I dunno about secretaries. Secretaries are public functionaries that can't be VR. At the low end they are receptionists and executive secretaries' data management will probably be in security areas where wifi shielding is in place.

Drone pilots will depend on their role. Security riggers will stay onsite for obvious reasons and any rigger with a drone in a timing-critical job will need to be local to avoid the home-work link being interrupted.
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RunnerPaul
post Aug 6 2006, 10:05 PM
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QUOTE (Serbitar)
- secretarial work is done via VR from home, no need to leave for work any more. same goes for drone pilots

Depends on the task. Telecommuting is inherently less secure than having personnel onsite doing those tasks on a private internal network. Network traffic between your telecommuting worker and the central office can always be encrypted to discourage interception and man-in-the-middle spoofing, however this is only limited effeciveness. First, your encryption can only be as strong as the weaker of the two computers that are on each end; odds are, that telecommuter's home unit is only average horsepower. Secondly, the way the rules stand now, it's comically easy to break even the strongest encryptions. There have been several houserules proposed to fix this, and new rules in the Unwired sourcebook may also address this.

Even if the the corp springs for a private wired network from their central office to each of their telecommuter's homes, to prevent anyone on the general matrix from eavesdropping in, there's still not much preventing someone from breaking in to one of those telecommuter's homes, and gaining access to the network that way.

This is why arcologies, and walled-and-gated corporate enclave neighborhoods are so popular. You can have a private network isolated from the general matrix, and you have your corporate security in close proximity, providing the same level of access control as you would have had, if you had used a traditional office setting.

However, real estate isn't cheap, and the resources the corp devotes to providing housing for its workers are resources it can't invest in activities that are more profitable. Private neighborhoods are a perk reserved for the most valued employees.
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Serbitar
post Aug 6 2006, 11:28 PM
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@King:

Short calculation:

low Level Class worker: 8 hours a day, every day (even on weekends) no holidays needs 2000 Nuyens per RAW. Lets say that to cover all the social stuff and taxes one has to pay 4000 Nuyen to get him 2000.
To get 1 permanent worker (24 hours) one needs 4 of those. Thats 16000 Nuyen per month.

Lets sayfuthermore, that a drone costs about 10% (rigger 3) its price per month in maintainance and fuel if it works 24/7 and is dead after 5 years.The most expensive military grade drone with autosoft and other gimmicks costs 5000 Nuyen, so thats 590 Nuyen per month in maintainance, fuel and price tag.

For the 16000 Nuyen of 1 permanent worker one can afford about 27 Drones.

So please tell me again that human workers are cheaper than drones. They are not, by far.

@Booklord: Drones are perfectly capable todo postmans work, thats why the job has gone extinct

@paul: 90% of the secretarial work out there is not classified and not really interesting for anybody.
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RunnerPaul
post Aug 7 2006, 12:00 AM
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QUOTE (Serbitar)
@paul: 90% of the secretarial work out there is not classified and not really interesting for anybody.

However, you gather enough of the right bits from that 90%, you can re-create the 10% that is, which is why a prudent company takes steps to secure all its data, not just the fraction that is clearly secret and critical.

And even if it's data that truely isn't worth stealing, it still must be protected from digital vandalism, which could easly disrupt business. Even if you assume that only 0.5% of the global population is: A. Technically capable of fucking up your database of purchase orders or reprogramming your assmembly drone to make sex toys instead of computer electronics and B. Morally Bankrupt and immature enough to do this at random when they get bored; that's still a lot of damn script kiddies on the planet, and at any given hour of the day, some segment of that population is going to be looking for kicks.
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Samaels Ghost
post Aug 7 2006, 12:41 AM
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QUOTE
And even if it's data that truely isn't worth stealing, it still must be protected from digital vandalism, which could easly disrupt business. Even if you assume that only 0.5% of the global population is: A. Technically capable of fucking up your database of purchase orders or reprogramming your assmembly drone to make sex toys instead of computer electronics and B. Morally Bankrupt and immature enough to do this at random when they get bored; that's still a lot of damn script kiddies on the planet, and at any given hour of the day, some segment of that population is going to be looking for kicks.


Which is why you IC your system, encrypt your lines, and patrol access nodes with security hackers. Script kiddies are not going to be able to keep up with that. And all of those measures don't cost that much.

Regarding encryption between two parties. If your secretary doesn't have a computer that is up to snuff, using an agent as a messenger could provide the security you'd need. It can fight back :D

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RunnerPaul
post Aug 7 2006, 01:09 AM
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QUOTE (Samaels Ghost)
And all of those measures don't cost that much.

While the software solutions are cheap and scalable, the personnel to back them up aren't. A security hacker can only cover so much and be effective; IC and other measures can increase a security hacker's area of coverage, but only to a certain point. If the entire company is telecommuting, you are going to need more a lot more security hackers to provide effective coverage. At some point, becomes cheaper to stop paying that army of security hackers, and just lease an office building and tell your datapushers to come in to work.

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m00p
post Aug 7 2006, 06:00 AM
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QUOTE
- lots of the jobs out there are not what they used to be


If most everything is handled by Drones (either with autosofts or a rigger behind the controls) and anything that once required paper is simply replaced with a much faster alternatives, we are not talking about jobs not being what they used to be, we are talking about many occupations not existing.

If the arguement is, that any job that required someone to make a delivery, or drive an automobile, can be replaced with a drone, that eliminates millions of jobs from Postal services, to taxi drivers, to any kind of delivery service, trucking and things like mining, drilling, as previously mentioned window washing, lawn upkeep, Airline pilot, Air traffic control, and even the previously debated secretarial work can all be replaced.

What is the purpose in having a secretary on the par roll if you can simply have a drone preforming the tasks 24/7? Matrix programs and your Comm Link can preform most secretarial duties themselves, and if you ever need something printed or brought to you, why wouldn't the drone do it for you?

Teamsters can tend to be expensive, and what does Ares do when they need to move construction equipment from Seattle to Boston? Stick a drone in it, and let the pilot+Grid guide take it to where it needs to go. Far cheaper than hiring an actual person to do the same task, as the drone has all ready been paid for.

If a large number of jobs can be replaced by drones? Than what does everyone do for a living? Any menial job is basically gone. Not everyone can be a programmer, chemist, physicist or other such thing. Suggesting that drones can replace most jobs would likely cause the game's unemployment rate to be around 80% I feel, that for ease of game play, most menial jobs should still be manned.
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Serbitar
post Aug 7 2006, 08:32 AM
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Low qualified working class people are definately the losers of continous automation.
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hobgoblin
post Aug 7 2006, 09:48 AM
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i think this article will be fitting right about now:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
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Serbitar
post Aug 7 2006, 12:48 PM
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Nice and interesting read.

Sounds much like the singularity thesis

http://www.singinst.org/what-singularity.html
http://www.singinst.org/intro/impact.html
http://singularity.com/charts/page70.html
http://singularity.com/charts/page71.html
http://singularity.com/charts/page77.html
http://www.kurzweilai.net/

My personal opinion is that the "bad part" of the manna story (except of course manna by itself, which is no very realistic) has already started. I just have to look at the evolution unemployments statistics of my country.

The evolution of social structure in the future will be really interesting.
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knasser
post Aug 7 2006, 02:37 PM
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I'm of the opinion that ever since the development of crop-rotation, mankind's been facing a steadily losing battle to make itself useful. The problem comes down to ownership. Someone invents the tractor and you can do with one person in an afternoon the work of a dozen in a week. Do the dozen farm workers sit back and say, 'Great - we can live off a four day week now' ? Course not - they get laid off and have to scurry round re-skilling, trying to find something else to do before they go hungry or our kicked out of their homes, etc.

The problem is only increasing. And what is the social response to this? Well notice that as it becomes easier to do things for ourselves, with modern communications technology and distribution, programming tools, et al., we see a ramping up of the 'intellectual property' laws - new patent laws, copywrite extensions and insane punishments for circumventing protection. It is critically important that people's dependence on big suppliers should be legally enforceable and self-sufficiency should be prevented.

Right now, at this stage of our technological development, the only real boom industries should be research, education and art.
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kigmatzomat
post Aug 7 2006, 03:03 PM
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QUOTE (Serbitar)

For the 16000 Nuyen of 1 permanent worker one can afford about 27 Drones.


I disagree with several of the assumptions, but not the logic. I doubt the drone pilot will get paid the same as standard construction worker. I also disagree with the concept that one drone pilot can have significantly more productivity than multiple humans. A drone won't match the skills of a person without several Autosofts just to match the typical construction yobbo's 6+ dice and it will still be limited to dog-brain logic system. If the drone can't do much on its own initiative, you not only have a pilot but extra hardware tied up on the job. Drones are also limited in terrain; wheels/treads don't work so well on I-beams and people are far less susceptible to mechanical failure caused by concrete jammed into a joint.

As to the drone price, while the military drones are hardened and armored they are lacking in manipulators. Manipulators with decent dexterity are expensive (see cyberlimbs). Cyberlimbs may have excess cost due to their size, cosmetic features, or medical compatibility, but assuming construction people are stronger than the typical strength:3, I consdier it a wash. Once we see the price of some decently sized biomorphic drones we can start estimating the cost.

Lastly, IMO, anything that can be done autonomously by a non-AI robot (assembly line work) is already being done by a robot. Construction equipment (which is NOT cheap) already does the heavy lifting. You may eliminate a spotter with the use of advanced sensors but that's about it since the rigger will cost as much as the heavy equipment operator.

QUOTE (Serbitar)

90% of the secretarial work out there is not classified and not really interesting for anybody.


I dunno. The companies I work at, the few secretaries are privy to core financial data or know which projects the company is chasing, which should be kept private. (Though I agree it is pretty boring) The ones who have no access to special data are typically referred to as "receptionists," which I doubt will be going anywhere.
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Mr. Unpronouncea...
post Aug 7 2006, 06:11 PM
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Drones are already being used in some applications - at some ports, unloading cargo ships is done almost entirely by autonomous cranes and specially designed vehicles to move the containers around on predesignated paths (in SR terms, using something like a cross between RFID and gridguide.)

I could see specifically designed drones putting up prefabs really well - but just because they aren't listed in the book doesn't mean they don't exist...after all, why would a runner buy one of those?
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kigmatzomat
post Aug 7 2006, 08:25 PM
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I guess the other thing to keep in mind was the VITAS plagues + Crash + Surge + Crash2 has done a lot to "thin the herd." Poor people got the worst medical care and suffered the most so unskilled labor died off in droves.

I dont' remember the exact math but something like 40% of the world's population had died off in the 2020s. The need for automation was high and the world that has formed since has very few people who remember the existence of city-wide taxi drivers, teamsters, longshoremen, or postal workers; they are as gone as milkmen.

The societal changes are extreme from our point of view but will be much more reasonable from theirs.
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RunnerPaul
post Aug 8 2006, 01:34 AM
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QUOTE (Mr. Unpronounceable)
I could see specifically designed drones putting up prefabs really well - but just because they aren't listed in the book doesn't mean they don't exist...after all, why would a runner buy one of those?

To reprogram it, load it up with concealed weapons out the wazoo, and use it to sabotage a construction project with by smuggling it in with all the legit construction drones?
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