I completely disagree with the article's assertion that 'knowledge professions like ... lawyers' will be relatively unaffected. 'DoNotPay' (the robot lawyer) has already helped overturn millions of dollars of parking fines. NPR article on the subject: https://www.npr.org/2017/01/16/510096767/robot-lawyer-makes-...
The thing about lawyers is that they're often able to create work for themselves. They can lobby for laws that create opportunity if automation affects them too much. They can create class actions out of nothing and recruit their clients. They're also the ones that write the laws, and you can always expect that the rules of the "game" will always favor those with the most input into those rules.
I happen to be watching tree trimmers work on a tree from my office window, so I entered that into their form. Very high automation risk (77%)... but I'm looking at this work, and it's absurd. Automating it would be extremely difficult, and serve no purpose since there's nothing particularly expensive or wasteful about the current process. To be fair, it identifies plumbers as having a fairly low automation risk, which I think is reasonable.
Still, I'm skeptical how they identify automation risk, and I suspect they get it wrong in a way that makes small cities seem more vulnerable.
Its possible that some mundane examples will be automated, but the law is not a deterministic code that can simply be interpreted and executed. Automation may make the job less tedious and might reduce the numbers of lawyers needed (or more likely, paralegals).
I was under the impression that DoNotPay worked well because text is fairly boilerplate (if so can you really call that automation?). Plus, I don't think many people pay lawyers for parking tickets.
As far as law in general, I have heard convincing arguments that it would be difficult to make ML for defense and judging, given the tainted historical data (and likely that historical data will always be tainted as our morality and laws change).
Also, from my (very much outsider) observation of the legal profession there seems to be a lot of boring work that probably could be automated. So maybe not lawyers themselves, but legal helper workers, will increasingly be replaced.
Right, knowledge professions are actually innately geared towards being automated. However its worth noting that the higher levels of these jobs cannot be automated, as well as the human aspect of the courtroom (judges). Whatever algorithm you apply is going to need datasets (i.e) parking ticket cases so it cant operate on the higher end of the legal system. The judicial system also provides a place for the meaning of laws to be decided by humans, you cant automate that.
The legal services industry in the US is around a $250 Billion industry, example of a automation of 0.004% of that doesn’t mean anything. Again the Toyota story doesn’t seem to contain any long term, industry wide statistical analysis. Without that it’s just an anecdote.
Millions will wake up with no goals and no structure to their lives because they have all of their most basic needs satisfied by UBI if the democrats have their way. Republicans will require mandatory public service to obtain UBI. Optimists tend to think this means more time for artistic passions and inventive endeavors. Pessimists think people will spend more time watching Big Bang Theory. Usually and answer is in the middle.
There are plenty of countries that have very liberal welfare payments. They're extremely easy to get and anyone that wants to can live on them for years and years without ever having a job.
You could look at those examples to see how society will be impacted...
Australia is a good place to start your research.
(It's not quite UBI because you have to apply for it and do something to get it, but it's pretty close)
>Millions will wake up with no goals and no structure to their lives because they have all of their most basic needs satisfied by UBI
People keep predicting this utopia of people sitting around twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do as all basic needs are provided. These predictions go back to the pre-industrial era.
Inequality is the fuel of ambition and simply having the basic needs covered won't be enough for people in the same way it currently isn't for upper middle and upper classes -- they still compete.
The "work" we will be doing will just be different. 3D printing and autonomous vehicles are going to have a massive impact on manufacture and distribution. However people still need to create things -- and AI is currently just good at optimizing things not "new thinking".
I'm not sure how you're defining optimists and pessimists, since more time for artistic passions and inventive endeavors almost certainly also means spending more time watching TV or otherwise finding and making entertainment.
That is a pessimistic and simplistic view of a incredibly complex issue, and for millions of poor people antidepressants are already popular, when they can afford them.
The alternative is what, exactly? Continue having jobs automated out of existence, letting the middle class cease to exist while placing the blame on the segment of the population that has little influence over what trades will be valuable tomorrow? How about we subsidize coal mining jobs long so people can stay busy?
This kind of black and white thinking is pointless. Using this as a justification for ignoring growing problems is negligent. There are a lot of things that people could do, and probably would do voluntarily if they didn't have to do their dead-end retail jobs.
One option is taking care of the planet we are hell-bent on destroying. Imagine if we had potentially millions of people to take care of our forests and rivers? What about taking care of the elderly or teaching or any number of jobs that are practically poverty wages now that would be possible while living a middle-class lifestyle?
Any requirement to obtain UBI by definition means it's not UBI. And I've not heard a single proposal for "mandatory public service" in order to receive any benefit. Not to mention that UBI is squarely a libertarian (small l) proposal and neither the Democrats nor Republicans want it. Republicans only want it if it means slashing public services (one of only two ways it is even fiscally possible, which is a nonstarter for the vast majority of Democrats), and Democrats either don't want it or want it as part of a huge tax increase (the other way, which is - surprise! - a nonstarter for the vast majority of Republicans).
> Millions will wake up with no goals and no structure to their lives because they have all of their most basic needs satisfied by UBI if the democrats have their way.
And? People are remarkably good at finding something to do once they are bored.
A lot of people veg out in front of the boob tube because they are so exhausted from working to pay for basic necessities that they simply don't have the energy to do anything else.
I've spent a lot of time building automated assembly lines and I think the writers of the article (and the underlying research) gets a lot wrong. I doubt the smallest cities will be prime automation areas since areas with high degrees of automation require a few highly-skilled robot babysitters that are unlikely to relocate into the provinces. I think large cities are much more likely to see high automation rates due to economies of scale and small citiies will either stay the same or businesses will simply leave.
I think you'll find enough highly skilled baby sitters in the provinces living there for personal reasons. McDonald's shouldn't have any problem finding someone in a city of 50,000 to watch their burger flipping robots machines.
There is a presupposition in this article: The automated jobs will leave a vacuum. That is, routine jobs will be taken away with no other jobs to replace them.
What if reducing routine jobs frees up minds for higher pursuits? In the same way that high level programming languages such as Python have increased the amount of programming jobs, as contrasted with writing in assembly. A quick search on Dice shows Python jobs outnumber assembly 8 to 1.
You only have to go back a little over 100 years to a time when agriculture accounted for over 50% of human labor. Now it's under 2%. Yet unemployment is still under 5%.
While agriculture likely represents the largest shift in labor during the 1900s, there were a huge number of jobs automated away during that time. Assembly lines, factories, and automation have been displacing workers since the dawn of the industrial age.
75 years ago there were basically no information technology jobs, and now it represents nearly 10% of the workforce, or four times the level of agricultural employment.
In summary, I agree with you; freeing people from mundane labor will lead to an explosion of jobs for which people are better suited; jobs which are more engaging and fulfilling as well.
There are always people who fail to adapt and get left behind, but the rest of the world moves on. People like to work.
Interesting :). Though, this sort of presupposes that the people whose jobs are automated away have the financial security in order to take the time necessary to create a new job/career.
I think a lot of people, in the U.S. at least, don’t have that level of financial security (plus the healthcare snafu).
This idea that automation will free up others to perform "higher pursuits" (especially programming) seems completely wrong. The reason is that we have a tremendous shortage of programmers, at least in the largest cities but in a lot of smaller towns too. These jobs pay much more than truck driving or burger flipping. If people could do these jobs, they'd be paid tremendously more with better job prospects right now.
There's nothing stopping people from training to be programmers today and working as a spoiled or fortunate software engineer, just as I am today - nothing other than the challenges of training, the time required, their own interests and capabilities, and possibly unawareness of the opportunity. Maybe a few people would try programming if they suddenly had money and no need for a daily job, but they could also do it today.
This is why when economists blame lost aggregate jobs on automation they are being disingenuous. If the government thinks that there aren't enough jobs they can just raise the minimum wage and increase fiscal spending, creating jobs until there are.
There were similar claims made during the depression. It wasn't about automation then either - it was about wealth inequality and a lack of aggregate demand.
Roosevelt then spent and invested in infrastructure - building stuff like LAX - until the country returned to full employment.
I used to be pretty big on the UBI bandwagon but I've come back to Earth recently and the reason is pretty simple - while we certainly do not take advantage of the total sum of intellectual talent available today - we squander a huge amount of it to poverty and cultural isolation - even with global UBI and universal access to education there will never be a population where even the majority of people can do those jobs.
Tech is a bubble, and we dig ourselves in deep. But you don't need to go to the third world to find illiteracy and ignorance. You often don't need to go more than a few miles in any given direction to find entire populations of doomed people - they have no ambition, education, and most importantly no desire to ever have them. The smart ones leave, go to the big city, succeed in school and go to university and end up successful, but for every capable intellect there is often someone who just can't. Its no different than introversion vs extroversion - some people crave the new and different and some people crave consistency and pattern.
And we might like to think otherwise, but automation replaces the routine, not necessarily the physical. But a lot of people don't have the capacity for boundless creativity, in my experience it actually hurts some people to have to think outside the box that much. Like headache causing stress and frustration. They don't become scientists not because the opportunity is not available to them fiscally, but because they cannot think like that. At least not in a professional capacity with forty hours a week consistency.
I don't think we can eliminate that factor. And I think it is much larger than anyone who promotes UBI as leading to an era of scholars and scientists aplenty gives it credence for. Or for not recognizing that as a species we are barely evolved beyond animals that could only, at most, do simple tool manipulation and use. Who couldn't understand the concept of self. Asking for human brains to on average be innovative, imaginative, and capable of running in the highest states of consciousness we can reach on a near constant basis is asking too much of a lot of people.
It asks too much of me many days where I try to find something rote to do rather than face new problems that can get overwhelming, so from someone not on top of the brain potential spectrum, there is a reason why predatory repetitious skinner boxes work, why addiction is such a big problem, why people get stuck in their ways and why change is hard, and these aren't things we will ever eliminate from the species entirely without a serious investment in transhumanist innovation. These people will not become scholars, creatives, or thinkers.
That being said, I'm not convinced its even a problem. A lot of why people crave "meaning" in their lives is the fear of loss. Having a purpose gives you an anchor to always ensure you never go completely adrift from your life as it is. You can lose your job, home, etc but if you have a purpose and feel like you can do something it gives you the strength to keep fighting to survive.
With a UBI, the fight to survival pushed on pretty much everyone by capitalist economics as a means to spur growth changes fundamentally. I would be interested how societies pressure to have purpose and how we build our self worth would change with it.
No matter how you shake this, we're looking at 60+% additional unemployment for every city. Some fare much worse. And I remember from my history studies that the Great Depression was officially around 33% unemployment.
I've listened to the national talking heads and political figures, and nobody publicly is talking about this. Not the Republicans, and not the Democrats. However, the Dems seem to have a better idea by bolstering all sorts of subsidy and welfare programs. Those work well and good for keep individuals out of poverty, but falls short when working with communities of impoverished. These end up counting on, and using tax revenues from well-to-do areas. And these unemployment numbers show that there won't be 'well-to-do' areas.
The WPA was one such way out of mass unemployment. But given how effective automation is, I question its use this time around, if the current political atmosphere would even have the stomach to discuss such things.
This is one result from capitalism. Accelerate until we hit the wall. And this wall, is that we will no longer need "labor" provided by humans. So, what do we do with the 95% of people that must work? That's the $64,000 question.
My personal plan: I'm learning electronics from the ground up. I'm teaching myself control systems theory. I'm learning how things are put together - electronics are very similar to code libraries. You do a function block to do something, and you chain them together. This means that I'm untraining specialities, and learning how to analyse and fix quickly. I guess being a sysad also helps in that. I'm not putting much trust in the national or state level government. I see more done at the local levels, but without tax revenue/money, they're up shit's creek as well.
60% is unrealistic. It's still very expensive to make anything as reliable as a human being if we're talking about anything other than pick-and-place (and that was really expensive the first time around).
For a business to automate, it must invest substantial resources into the automation process and product. It must work in an industry where consistency is the most important quality customers are looking for.
Automation already affected most of what it's going to do in manufacturing.
Given the capital and talent being deployed, automated driving is on the way. Most other industries are not seeing similar talent and capital being invested into automation. Long-haul trucking is the industry I have the greatest concern for. Most of the others (e.g. short order cooks) will be fine for quite some time.
My anecdotal experience is that people can't wrap their heads around such an enormous, complete, shift in the way labour and capital will work.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair.
The few truck drivers I've spoken with all seem to think that autonomous trucks are going to arrive just after they retire. Similar stories come from nurses, fast food workers, and construction folks like drywallers. They all say "oh, that won't arrive for at least another 30 to 40 years!" I don't belabour the point because that just makes people fearful and angry.
In the USA there's a huge amount of people in depressed rural areas already. Their fear at being left behind by society has been manipulated into keeping the Republican party in power by various hatemongers. Now imagine the fear and anger they and many more will feel when 95% of the jobs disappear. What sort of person will rise up and lead this vast angry mob? How many of them will claim disability? Imagine 200 million people potentially starving and angry, many of them with firearms? (NB: I make no statement on the ethics of firearms!)
I am deeply worried about the era my teenage stepdaughter will live through.
I have always wondered how automation will adapt to things like ice on roads/parking lots/equipment, or salt everywhere like in Minnesota/Wisconsin. Is this being considered in sunny California/Texas?
I would love to see a breakdown by country. Given the endless rhetoric around manufacturing reshoring/offshoring/etc., it would be great to see if thats even something we should care about given how much automation already exists and how much more is about to come online. Owning the robots and supply chain will obviously have some value, but politically speaking, the value is often measured in jobs which seems like its minimally shortsighted if not downright disingenuous.
There is a lot of confusion between "automation" and "artificial intelligence", I believe that automation facilitates, and modifies the professions in the short term. AI is something that should be discussed in a broader sense.
I used to believe that automation will lead to greater unemployment. Now I think that two things happen: goods get cheaper which lowers the minimum amount someone needs to earn for a job to be acceptable. People who still have a great job have more spending our. This unlocks new jobs that previously nobody would have paid for and nobody would have accepted. But both maximum price somebody would pay went up and minimum price someone wants to perform went down. Recent examples are all these delivery services and obviously Lyft and Uber, although the car services are a little more complicated since there always were taxis.
I think there are three forces discussed here. Automation (removing work). Decreased cost good (reduced labor costs). Increased wealth (those with it spend more on goods and services).
Automation's effects on the economy larger depends on the pace it is achieved. If someone released a box that replaces truck driver's tomorrow and sells it for $1000 then there will be huge disruption. If drivers are replaced with automation slowly over 30 years the impact will be less because the rest of the economy will have time to absorb the impact.
Increased wealth is expanding the service industry, with petcare being a prime example. This will create more jobs, but those jobs are both at risk of being automated and might not be enough to replace automation.
Decreased good costs works for some things like toothbrushes and iphones, but they don't work so well for limited resources like gold jewelry or real-estate. It might improve quality of life in some ways, but it cannot help with everything.
Except it doesn't matter if general goods and services get cheaper if life necessities like healthcare and residence have their costs ballooning out of control. That $8 minimum wage job in ten years might be able to buy you twice as many trinkets at the same price but that doesn't mean anything if you have no where to live for less than $3,000 a month in rent.
Thats not to say that you cannot make housing and healthcare dramatically cheaper and more efficient, but we simply are not doing it, and there doesn't seem to be nearly enough momentum to see change happen in that regard. Lives rarely get better without a good protest, but there is no uniform movement with only big wig opposition to fixing zoning laws or socializing medicine. Its all working class vs working class infighting between haves and have nots.
from the article: "In a small town, there are likely a few small restaurants run by a few people who do many things—cook, clean, manage the books, etc. “Some of these tasks are easily enough defined to soon be automatable,” Youn says.
By contrast, in a larger city there will likely be some much larger restaurants that require more specialized knowledge and skills—perhaps a marketing team, or a lawyer who specializes in the restaurant industry—that cannot be easily automated."
I have a small factory, we use a fair bit of automation. I disagree with the above quote - I think that the larger restaurant will be more likely to automate first, and arguably the franchise restaurant model is automated marketing and business management. The larger places will go full robot in the kitchen sooner, the smaller places will continue to have one person wearing many hats for a long time. Larger places have more budget, can afford more automation, and the smaller places would have a harder time justifying a burger cooking robot if it would only be in use a small fraction of the time.
My welding robots are super fast. I have two so that I can reduce setup and changeover time. The robots are so fast, the main headache is feeding them enough jobs - selling the work. The setup and changeover is very slow. I spend 5-10 hours getting a new jig built, programmed and tuned up.
This setup time is never discussed in the media. Sure the robot will be amazing and fast and super productive - once you spent 10 hours programming it to do so. If the task is a 'once-only' and it only takes an hour, who in their right mind would automate that? This setup time will be the biggest impediment - humans are pretty quickly adapted, autonomous fleshy robots, that outperform the best automation when it comes to setup time.
I love automation. I have 6 automated machines, and a couple 3D printers, that you can push a button and go get a coffee, and there is the part when its done. Sometimes one button push can make a couple thousand dollars in products - that is a great feeling! But the setup time is massive, and this is the greater expense over the cost of the machine.
Its like an algebra equation. y=ax+b where 'a' is the setup time, and 'b' is the time for one unit.
With a human welding a simple part, 'a' would be 5 minutes, and 'b' would be 5 minutes.
With a robot welding cell like a Panasonic PA-750, the 'a' would be 500 minutes, and the 'b' would be 2 minutes.
If you need 100 of them, no sense in turning on the robot. If you need 10,000 of them, the robot welding cell will be done in 20,500 minutes instead of 50,005 minutes for the human welder. My Panasonic costs $2284 a month for 60 months on a lease, $1 to purchase at the end. The human costs $1000 per week in perpetuity, with increasing costs due to inflation if nothing else. The robot is half the hourly, and its paid for in 5 years. The human is never paid for, it always needs compensation. In this example, the human takes 500 hours more to do the task, and that is $12,500 more in wages over the robot. My 7 year old son can run (not program) the welding robot and make parts, which he does for Pokemon money on the weekend.
So where does that leave the human? Doing small runs! Which is better for the human anyway! Welding the same small part for weeks at a time makes you a little crazy. Its like watching the same GIF every 5 minutes for weeks at a time. Welding the same part every 5 minutes for 2-4 hours is quite doable, can be fun to get in the groove. I think in the future that production runs will become smaller as CNC machines proliferate. Everyone will want something custom, which is what humans are best at. High volume will be robot welded, because its boring and machines do it faster and better.
I manufacture in America. Using automation, I am directly cost competitive with China and India in my core products that we have been making (and optimizing manufacturing) for 14 years. Its 1/4 steel plate mostly, and our cost to build is directly in line with the best quotes from Asia. Robot welders are cheaper than any welder in Asia. We loose on thinner stuff, like 16 gauge and lower, and we lose on items that need a lot of hand work. But we are right there for heavier items. We did a large welding job for Chinese factory last year that was for the US market. Our price was the same, but shipping was less since the product was already here. We got the deal over their own factory. 28,000 units.
TL;DR - things are better for humans than these articles would have you believe.
Looks like software application development is listed as having a relatively high automation "risk", around 21%. Anyone know how this was calculated. Doesn't have to be a link for this particular site, just some good reading material.
My initial reaction was that this number is hard to nail down because on reflection, so much of what I do gets automated. That's the nature of software. When I started programming for money in the late 90s, I still managed memory. That's automated now through garbage collection (for me). I also used to do a lot of direct network and socket programming, also automated away. I managed my own database connection and pooling. JDBC came along and abstracted that away, but a decade later, I heard someone who used an ORM say he wouldn't want to write all that "low level" jdbc code ;) I guess you're getting old when the high level leaky abstraction of your youth becomes the low level code for a new generation of programmers.
My whole career has been one long progression of getting automated away, by this perspective. I remember when I proposed getting a web server up and running for a project in college, and a professor remarked on what I was doing. There was a time, he recalled, when doing a "spreadsheet" was fairly advanced and took some serious technical chops. The same would happen to web servers - but for the few years then they required specialized skill and had a big impact on business, this knowledge would be very valuable. The moment would pass, but something new would come up, and that would create all kinds of new apps that require an app developer.
To me, the moment when nothing new comes up - ie., when there is no new moment for human app developers, all software development is now automated - that is the moment when we replaced by automation. I wonder if that's what this article is talking about? If that's the case, 20% might seem high, though not out of the question. But by a more general definition, the one I discussed above, I'd ay the odds that my current skillset will be automated away is roughly 100%. I want to be clear I'm not (necessarily) talking about churn, I'm talking about new breakthroughs that fundamentally change the job. That kind of change I don't mind at all, I enjoy it, it's probably why I'm in this field. Churn, on the other hand, is what makes me want to quit.
I'm rambling on here, but it occurs to me that software development probably isn't that unusual. It's the jobs that don't change as much that are unusual. Lawyers, for instance, have certainly changed over the years, but we expect people to still be lawyers in 100 years. How many horse and buggy drivers expect that job to still be around? How many lathe operators or truck drivers expect this?
I'm thinking, maybe the best metric isn't the odds that a particular job will be automated, since for many (most?) jobs, that's pretty much 100%. The question is, what are the odds that a job will be automated with no path to the next thing. That's the fundamental transformation going on here. And yeah, it actually is happening. A horse and buggy driver can become a bus driver, but what happens when the concept of a drive goes away completely? Will anything emerge?
Another aspect of automation I'm interested in is the complete bindside. Music, I think, was one of the interesting automation stories of the last 100+ years. There were various attempts to replicated the human mechanical process of playing an instrument, and they all appeared very unlikely to do much replacement. Yeah, piano rolls made an appearance, and you could try this I suppose by hooking up some contraption to make a flute play.
But what happened instead was that it turned out you can actually store music physically in various materials and play it back. Music went from 100% live to less than 1% live in about 50 years. But we didn't really automate music, we replaced it with a similar product.
My guess is that this will be the story with software development. It seems absurd to me that this could happen through automation, but that's because I'm locked into one way of thinking about it. Kind of like trying to imagine how a crankshaft could power a bunch of strings tied to a bow and some pegs to try to recreate the physical process of playing a violin. It won't happen like that. Something utterly mind blowing, like storing music in grooves of different depth in vinyl, of all things, utterly unanticipated. Yeah, that's generally how this massive shifts happen.
Yes, I'm right there with you, and the cool part about our jobs being automated away -- besides not having to write all that boilerplate -- is that when the automation takes a steaming shit, we get to be heroes. I'm fine with this. I guess until it doesn't matter anymore, but then I suppose by that time, it won't matter for a whole lot of people, and we'll have something worked out.
I find it bizarre that they single out fishing as a job that's likely to be automated away. I don't see this happening any time soon. Fishing crews are already pretty streamlined, and many things on fishing ships are mechanized. I can see automation replacing more of the post-catch processing on giant factory ships, but I don't see robots costing many other fishing jobs in the near future.
[+] [-] danesparza|8 years ago|reply
Also in reference to manufacturing processes, it appears that Toyota has learned some hard lessons in automation and is actually moving in the opposite direction: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/02/toyota%E2%80%99s-se...
[+] [-] curun1r|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianbicking|8 years ago|reply
Still, I'm skeptical how they identify automation risk, and I suspect they get it wrong in a way that makes small cities seem more vulnerable.
[+] [-] okreallywtf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|8 years ago|reply
As far as law in general, I have heard convincing arguments that it would be difficult to make ML for defense and judging, given the tainted historical data (and likely that historical data will always be tainted as our morality and laws change).
[+] [-] SlowBro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trisimix|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonmoy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justaman|8 years ago|reply
I will be investing in antidepressants.
[+] [-] grecy|8 years ago|reply
You could look at those examples to see how society will be impacted...
Australia is a good place to start your research.
(It's not quite UBI because you have to apply for it and do something to get it, but it's pretty close)
[+] [-] s_dev|8 years ago|reply
People keep predicting this utopia of people sitting around twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do as all basic needs are provided. These predictions go back to the pre-industrial era.
Inequality is the fuel of ambition and simply having the basic needs covered won't be enough for people in the same way it currently isn't for upper middle and upper classes -- they still compete.
The "work" we will be doing will just be different. 3D printing and autonomous vehicles are going to have a massive impact on manufacture and distribution. However people still need to create things -- and AI is currently just good at optimizing things not "new thinking".
[+] [-] dsr_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okreallywtf|8 years ago|reply
The alternative is what, exactly? Continue having jobs automated out of existence, letting the middle class cease to exist while placing the blame on the segment of the population that has little influence over what trades will be valuable tomorrow? How about we subsidize coal mining jobs long so people can stay busy?
This kind of black and white thinking is pointless. Using this as a justification for ignoring growing problems is negligent. There are a lot of things that people could do, and probably would do voluntarily if they didn't have to do their dead-end retail jobs.
One option is taking care of the planet we are hell-bent on destroying. Imagine if we had potentially millions of people to take care of our forests and rivers? What about taking care of the elderly or teaching or any number of jobs that are practically poverty wages now that would be possible while living a middle-class lifestyle?
[+] [-] jjoonathan|8 years ago|reply
That's a far more liberal perspective than the republicans in my family take, unfortunately.
[+] [-] pc86|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|8 years ago|reply
And? People are remarkably good at finding something to do once they are bored.
A lot of people veg out in front of the boob tube because they are so exhausted from working to pay for basic necessities that they simply don't have the energy to do anything else.
[+] [-] zwieback|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lev99|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SlowBro|8 years ago|reply
What if reducing routine jobs frees up minds for higher pursuits? In the same way that high level programming languages such as Python have increased the amount of programming jobs, as contrasted with writing in assembly. A quick search on Dice shows Python jobs outnumber assembly 8 to 1.
This might actually lead to a jobs explosion.
[+] [-] caymanjim|8 years ago|reply
While agriculture likely represents the largest shift in labor during the 1900s, there were a huge number of jobs automated away during that time. Assembly lines, factories, and automation have been displacing workers since the dawn of the industrial age.
75 years ago there were basically no information technology jobs, and now it represents nearly 10% of the workforce, or four times the level of agricultural employment.
In summary, I agree with you; freeing people from mundane labor will lead to an explosion of jobs for which people are better suited; jobs which are more engaging and fulfilling as well.
There are always people who fail to adapt and get left behind, but the rest of the world moves on. People like to work.
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamsea|8 years ago|reply
I think a lot of people, in the U.S. at least, don’t have that level of financial security (plus the healthcare snafu).
I agree with you about the potential.
[+] [-] Latteland|8 years ago|reply
There's nothing stopping people from training to be programmers today and working as a spoiled or fortunate software engineer, just as I am today - nothing other than the challenges of training, the time required, their own interests and capabilities, and possibly unawareness of the opportunity. Maybe a few people would try programming if they suddenly had money and no need for a daily job, but they could also do it today.
[+] [-] s73v3r_|8 years ago|reply
It's pretty difficult to use your mind for higher pursuits when you're starving.
[+] [-] crdoconnor|8 years ago|reply
There were similar claims made during the depression. It wasn't about automation then either - it was about wealth inequality and a lack of aggregate demand.
Roosevelt then spent and invested in infrastructure - building stuff like LAX - until the country returned to full employment.
[+] [-] zanny|8 years ago|reply
Tech is a bubble, and we dig ourselves in deep. But you don't need to go to the third world to find illiteracy and ignorance. You often don't need to go more than a few miles in any given direction to find entire populations of doomed people - they have no ambition, education, and most importantly no desire to ever have them. The smart ones leave, go to the big city, succeed in school and go to university and end up successful, but for every capable intellect there is often someone who just can't. Its no different than introversion vs extroversion - some people crave the new and different and some people crave consistency and pattern.
And we might like to think otherwise, but automation replaces the routine, not necessarily the physical. But a lot of people don't have the capacity for boundless creativity, in my experience it actually hurts some people to have to think outside the box that much. Like headache causing stress and frustration. They don't become scientists not because the opportunity is not available to them fiscally, but because they cannot think like that. At least not in a professional capacity with forty hours a week consistency.
I don't think we can eliminate that factor. And I think it is much larger than anyone who promotes UBI as leading to an era of scholars and scientists aplenty gives it credence for. Or for not recognizing that as a species we are barely evolved beyond animals that could only, at most, do simple tool manipulation and use. Who couldn't understand the concept of self. Asking for human brains to on average be innovative, imaginative, and capable of running in the highest states of consciousness we can reach on a near constant basis is asking too much of a lot of people.
It asks too much of me many days where I try to find something rote to do rather than face new problems that can get overwhelming, so from someone not on top of the brain potential spectrum, there is a reason why predatory repetitious skinner boxes work, why addiction is such a big problem, why people get stuck in their ways and why change is hard, and these aren't things we will ever eliminate from the species entirely without a serious investment in transhumanist innovation. These people will not become scholars, creatives, or thinkers.
That being said, I'm not convinced its even a problem. A lot of why people crave "meaning" in their lives is the fear of loss. Having a purpose gives you an anchor to always ensure you never go completely adrift from your life as it is. You can lose your job, home, etc but if you have a purpose and feel like you can do something it gives you the strength to keep fighting to survive.
With a UBI, the fight to survival pushed on pretty much everyone by capitalist economics as a means to spur growth changes fundamentally. I would be interested how societies pressure to have purpose and how we build our self worth would change with it.
[+] [-] crankylinuxuser|8 years ago|reply
I've listened to the national talking heads and political figures, and nobody publicly is talking about this. Not the Republicans, and not the Democrats. However, the Dems seem to have a better idea by bolstering all sorts of subsidy and welfare programs. Those work well and good for keep individuals out of poverty, but falls short when working with communities of impoverished. These end up counting on, and using tax revenues from well-to-do areas. And these unemployment numbers show that there won't be 'well-to-do' areas.
The WPA was one such way out of mass unemployment. But given how effective automation is, I question its use this time around, if the current political atmosphere would even have the stomach to discuss such things.
This is one result from capitalism. Accelerate until we hit the wall. And this wall, is that we will no longer need "labor" provided by humans. So, what do we do with the 95% of people that must work? That's the $64,000 question.
My personal plan: I'm learning electronics from the ground up. I'm teaching myself control systems theory. I'm learning how things are put together - electronics are very similar to code libraries. You do a function block to do something, and you chain them together. This means that I'm untraining specialities, and learning how to analyse and fix quickly. I guess being a sysad also helps in that. I'm not putting much trust in the national or state level government. I see more done at the local levels, but without tax revenue/money, they're up shit's creek as well.
[+] [-] rubidium|8 years ago|reply
For a business to automate, it must invest substantial resources into the automation process and product. It must work in an industry where consistency is the most important quality customers are looking for.
Automation already affected most of what it's going to do in manufacturing.
Given the capital and talent being deployed, automated driving is on the way. Most other industries are not seeing similar talent and capital being invested into automation. Long-haul trucking is the industry I have the greatest concern for. Most of the others (e.g. short order cooks) will be fine for quite some time.
[+] [-] bloopernova|8 years ago|reply
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair.
The few truck drivers I've spoken with all seem to think that autonomous trucks are going to arrive just after they retire. Similar stories come from nurses, fast food workers, and construction folks like drywallers. They all say "oh, that won't arrive for at least another 30 to 40 years!" I don't belabour the point because that just makes people fearful and angry.
In the USA there's a huge amount of people in depressed rural areas already. Their fear at being left behind by society has been manipulated into keeping the Republican party in power by various hatemongers. Now imagine the fear and anger they and many more will feel when 95% of the jobs disappear. What sort of person will rise up and lead this vast angry mob? How many of them will claim disability? Imagine 200 million people potentially starving and angry, many of them with firearms? (NB: I make no statement on the ethics of firearms!)
I am deeply worried about the era my teenage stepdaughter will live through.
[+] [-] snarfy|8 years ago|reply
Once everything is automated, that means owning stock in those companies automating everything.
[+] [-] bytematic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmritard96|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucasnichele|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajmurmann|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lev99|8 years ago|reply
Automation's effects on the economy larger depends on the pace it is achieved. If someone released a box that replaces truck driver's tomorrow and sells it for $1000 then there will be huge disruption. If drivers are replaced with automation slowly over 30 years the impact will be less because the rest of the economy will have time to absorb the impact.
Increased wealth is expanding the service industry, with petcare being a prime example. This will create more jobs, but those jobs are both at risk of being automated and might not be enough to replace automation.
Decreased good costs works for some things like toothbrushes and iphones, but they don't work so well for limited resources like gold jewelry or real-estate. It might improve quality of life in some ways, but it cannot help with everything.
[+] [-] zanny|8 years ago|reply
Thats not to say that you cannot make housing and healthcare dramatically cheaper and more efficient, but we simply are not doing it, and there doesn't seem to be nearly enough momentum to see change happen in that regard. Lives rarely get better without a good protest, but there is no uniform movement with only big wig opposition to fixing zoning laws or socializing medicine. Its all working class vs working class infighting between haves and have nots.
[+] [-] gregpilling|8 years ago|reply
By contrast, in a larger city there will likely be some much larger restaurants that require more specialized knowledge and skills—perhaps a marketing team, or a lawyer who specializes in the restaurant industry—that cannot be easily automated."
I have a small factory, we use a fair bit of automation. I disagree with the above quote - I think that the larger restaurant will be more likely to automate first, and arguably the franchise restaurant model is automated marketing and business management. The larger places will go full robot in the kitchen sooner, the smaller places will continue to have one person wearing many hats for a long time. Larger places have more budget, can afford more automation, and the smaller places would have a harder time justifying a burger cooking robot if it would only be in use a small fraction of the time.
My welding robots are super fast. I have two so that I can reduce setup and changeover time. The robots are so fast, the main headache is feeding them enough jobs - selling the work. The setup and changeover is very slow. I spend 5-10 hours getting a new jig built, programmed and tuned up.
This setup time is never discussed in the media. Sure the robot will be amazing and fast and super productive - once you spent 10 hours programming it to do so. If the task is a 'once-only' and it only takes an hour, who in their right mind would automate that? This setup time will be the biggest impediment - humans are pretty quickly adapted, autonomous fleshy robots, that outperform the best automation when it comes to setup time.
I love automation. I have 6 automated machines, and a couple 3D printers, that you can push a button and go get a coffee, and there is the part when its done. Sometimes one button push can make a couple thousand dollars in products - that is a great feeling! But the setup time is massive, and this is the greater expense over the cost of the machine.
Its like an algebra equation. y=ax+b where 'a' is the setup time, and 'b' is the time for one unit.
With a human welding a simple part, 'a' would be 5 minutes, and 'b' would be 5 minutes.
With a robot welding cell like a Panasonic PA-750, the 'a' would be 500 minutes, and the 'b' would be 2 minutes.
If you need 100 of them, no sense in turning on the robot. If you need 10,000 of them, the robot welding cell will be done in 20,500 minutes instead of 50,005 minutes for the human welder. My Panasonic costs $2284 a month for 60 months on a lease, $1 to purchase at the end. The human costs $1000 per week in perpetuity, with increasing costs due to inflation if nothing else. The robot is half the hourly, and its paid for in 5 years. The human is never paid for, it always needs compensation. In this example, the human takes 500 hours more to do the task, and that is $12,500 more in wages over the robot. My 7 year old son can run (not program) the welding robot and make parts, which he does for Pokemon money on the weekend.
So where does that leave the human? Doing small runs! Which is better for the human anyway! Welding the same small part for weeks at a time makes you a little crazy. Its like watching the same GIF every 5 minutes for weeks at a time. Welding the same part every 5 minutes for 2-4 hours is quite doable, can be fun to get in the groove. I think in the future that production runs will become smaller as CNC machines proliferate. Everyone will want something custom, which is what humans are best at. High volume will be robot welded, because its boring and machines do it faster and better.
I manufacture in America. Using automation, I am directly cost competitive with China and India in my core products that we have been making (and optimizing manufacturing) for 14 years. Its 1/4 steel plate mostly, and our cost to build is directly in line with the best quotes from Asia. Robot welders are cheaper than any welder in Asia. We loose on thinner stuff, like 16 gauge and lower, and we lose on items that need a lot of hand work. But we are right there for heavier items. We did a large welding job for Chinese factory last year that was for the US market. Our price was the same, but shipping was less since the product was already here. We got the deal over their own factory. 28,000 units.
TL;DR - things are better for humans than these articles would have you believe.
[+] [-] geebee|8 years ago|reply
My initial reaction was that this number is hard to nail down because on reflection, so much of what I do gets automated. That's the nature of software. When I started programming for money in the late 90s, I still managed memory. That's automated now through garbage collection (for me). I also used to do a lot of direct network and socket programming, also automated away. I managed my own database connection and pooling. JDBC came along and abstracted that away, but a decade later, I heard someone who used an ORM say he wouldn't want to write all that "low level" jdbc code ;) I guess you're getting old when the high level leaky abstraction of your youth becomes the low level code for a new generation of programmers.
My whole career has been one long progression of getting automated away, by this perspective. I remember when I proposed getting a web server up and running for a project in college, and a professor remarked on what I was doing. There was a time, he recalled, when doing a "spreadsheet" was fairly advanced and took some serious technical chops. The same would happen to web servers - but for the few years then they required specialized skill and had a big impact on business, this knowledge would be very valuable. The moment would pass, but something new would come up, and that would create all kinds of new apps that require an app developer.
To me, the moment when nothing new comes up - ie., when there is no new moment for human app developers, all software development is now automated - that is the moment when we replaced by automation. I wonder if that's what this article is talking about? If that's the case, 20% might seem high, though not out of the question. But by a more general definition, the one I discussed above, I'd ay the odds that my current skillset will be automated away is roughly 100%. I want to be clear I'm not (necessarily) talking about churn, I'm talking about new breakthroughs that fundamentally change the job. That kind of change I don't mind at all, I enjoy it, it's probably why I'm in this field. Churn, on the other hand, is what makes me want to quit.
I'm rambling on here, but it occurs to me that software development probably isn't that unusual. It's the jobs that don't change as much that are unusual. Lawyers, for instance, have certainly changed over the years, but we expect people to still be lawyers in 100 years. How many horse and buggy drivers expect that job to still be around? How many lathe operators or truck drivers expect this?
I'm thinking, maybe the best metric isn't the odds that a particular job will be automated, since for many (most?) jobs, that's pretty much 100%. The question is, what are the odds that a job will be automated with no path to the next thing. That's the fundamental transformation going on here. And yeah, it actually is happening. A horse and buggy driver can become a bus driver, but what happens when the concept of a drive goes away completely? Will anything emerge?
Another aspect of automation I'm interested in is the complete bindside. Music, I think, was one of the interesting automation stories of the last 100+ years. There were various attempts to replicated the human mechanical process of playing an instrument, and they all appeared very unlikely to do much replacement. Yeah, piano rolls made an appearance, and you could try this I suppose by hooking up some contraption to make a flute play.
But what happened instead was that it turned out you can actually store music physically in various materials and play it back. Music went from 100% live to less than 1% live in about 50 years. But we didn't really automate music, we replaced it with a similar product.
My guess is that this will be the story with software development. It seems absurd to me that this could happen through automation, but that's because I'm locked into one way of thinking about it. Kind of like trying to imagine how a crankshaft could power a bunch of strings tied to a bow and some pegs to try to recreate the physical process of playing a violin. It won't happen like that. Something utterly mind blowing, like storing music in grooves of different depth in vinyl, of all things, utterly unanticipated. Yeah, that's generally how this massive shifts happen.
[+] [-] fapjacks|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caymanjim|8 years ago|reply