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Smart Systems Threaten More Jobs Than Outsourcing
fbform writes "A strategy consulting firm called Strategy Analytics has announced that outsourcing to India and other countries is a small threat compared to having IT jobs replaced by 'smart systems'. Quote from a different news-source: 'higher value-added jobs - involving identification, assessment, conclusions, decisions, and recommendations - will continue to be lost to systems with increasingly intelligent capabilities'." Such as this one.
Great. And who will keep these clever systems up and running 24h * 365days? And who will troubleshoot it when it malfunctions?
The more complicated the systems are the more people are needed to keep it running.
It is not a problem that repetitive tasks are being done by a computer. That's what they're for.
In other news, factory robots are a bigger threat than outsourcing. Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic.
The article may be right about call centre jobs; there are some applications where machines do as good a job as people - though this is not true in customer service applications. A good example is the app British Airways uses for flight information - you tell it the destination and approximate time, and it tells you whether the flight is on time - and it works incredibly well. However, this is not a "customer service" application - if you are phoning up with a complex problem, no computer on earth will be able to help you.
From the perspective of the IT worker, I think that the impact on them will only be beneficial - if intelligent machines can be made to work, then they will be based on intelligent software, which someone has to write/maintain.
As an aside, I remember seeing a presentation from Oracle in about 1994-5 about clever automated database tuning technology, and that all those expensive DBAs would be a thing of the past. When I was at work last week, they were all still there, working damn hard too...
From the article:
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm for the U.S. military, is leading a project to develop a vehicle that can navigate a desert for at least 10 miles without a driver. Prototypes have gone as far as seven miles, successfully moving around cactuses, boulders and other obstacles.
Wow! These guys are right, my job is on the line. DARPA's "10 mile desert navigator" (isn't it 100?) got a whole 7 miles. So now the ONLY OBVIOUS conclusion that I'm going to be out of a job??? Geez, this author sure does seem stupid.
What a trashy article. If it's not fit for publication, why is it fit for Slashdot? Oh yeah, this is Slashdot, where we talk about articles that really aren't fit for publication....
We are quickly approaching a point where many jobs could be done by machines or AI systems yet governments refuse to consider what to do with the problem of mass layoffs due to this effect.
If you want to consider what would happen then think of how Saudi Araibia would handle running out of oil or a sudden technology that would allow the world to quit using oil completely. They've already asked what the world would do to help them. I doubt anyone answered though.
The point is were a mainly a capitalistic world and that type of society is incapable of comprehending a world where there's not such things as cost/profit. Europe is transitioning to a socialist type government but still it's inherently based on capitalist's who just wave the banner of socialism.
A Republican or Democrat cannot see past the people financing their elections and it's one of the biggest flaws in our democracy now that the rich and corporations are the only influence in our political system. Our forefathers never envisioned corporations or the super wealthy and thus no protections from these types of influence were built into our government. Thus until we change our ways in the end we'll be stuck with a government that wont go out of the way to help those who lose their jobs.
Just look at how many people the steam engine put out of work! Nobody worked in mills after they were mechanised. Well, apart from all the people who tended the machines of course.
Strange really. The industrial revolution seemed to lead to more employment. Not less.
Must be a totally different situation though. It's a well known fact that the world only has a certain finite number of jobs (which is apparently the same argument used against immigration), and if you create a new piece of technology, then exactly the same work is done by fewer people. As opposed to production increasing.
I suspect outsourcing will only be a short term problem as well. Standards of living in India are going to improve over the next decade, which means that they'll have a high demand for imported consumer goods. Anyone who exploits that market will make a killing.
I think someone's jumping to conclusions.
I think someone is trying to generate hits to their consulting firm's website.
It may not come in our lifetime, or not before we retire, but software creation and maintenance will be fully automated.
But think about the benefits: you can't get a job as a steam engine valve operator anymore, but you can afford a car. Every job that's lost to automation is one more job that people can get done for them at a lower cost.
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic
I'll bite.
Broadly speaking, we have a society that is divided into those who 'own' and those who don't. For the majority of society, that is not the owners, life is structured around working to survive.
When something is done in a new and more efficient way then in a sense, society benefits. However, those who really benefit are 'owning' segment of the population, not the 'workers.'
New technology has repeatedly caused a great deal of suffering as it makes people redundant. So when you say,
Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Well that's exactly true. The problem is not that society is not benefitted by new technology but that the benefit is not shared around.
Modern Western society has long since passed the point where everyone is required to work the majority of their time to survive. The model of people doing this has long since collapsed in terms of essentials and it's only kept going by mass-consumption of goods we don't really need (mostly status oriented) and services.
Nor is this progression at an end. It should be especially obvious to the
Of course, we can't hold back progress for the sake of mass employment. The only good solution is for the profits of innovation to be shared out more easily.
But in the spirit of ending this negativity, which I fully agree with, it seems to me like society might be adapting. Perhaps not in terms of the skills which you meant, but in terms of how people work. For example, people are increasingly opting for less financial rewards in their jobs, such as greater flexibility and increased holiday, and this is a great plus because it means sharing the work out wider. Many more people are working in education too, which is a plus.
I hope to live to see the three-day week become an accepted standard.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
To get a bit serious... there has been an intersection between the upward curve of job distruction by technology and the flattening of the upwards curve (now possibly down) of the generation of new jobs because of computers. Actually the effect has been more profound outside of the EU and USA than inside. It is starting to hit inside the EU And USA.
I could bore with statistics and I am sure no matter what nobody would be persuaded. We have finally reached the point at which large segments of society etc are simply being dumped as obsolete trash at a rate too high for them to adapte to the newer demands if they exist. Even the US Federal Reserve is starting to observe this and getting concerned. It isn't fun!
The rate of productivity rise is now globally at about 14% per year and rising. This is corresponding to an absolute dumping of masses around the world and is a substantial contributor to the issues behind the "War on Terror."
I don't forsee some magical uptick in jobs like the opimistic view holds nor do I see the apocolypse either. However we are faced with the reality that most of human needs and wants will be taken care of without human work. This produces a serious set of issues regards the distrobution of the results of this production and the value of persons in the world we are headed into. It is these last two issues that need the serious discussion and look at.
How do we maintain the value of persons in such a society and not foster antisocial and anti civilization behavior? How do we reward people? Surely it cannot be based on the fact of their grandfather's position. Property rights as important as they are, become a form of colonial hostile government in such a condition. How do we manage these.
One thing that is absolutely certain is that the concepts of the "Work Ethic" and such as well as "Free Enterprise" are not particularly applicable to this brave new world we are building. We are facing a set of descisions that is profoundly difficult and are into what are essentially uncharted waters.
I don't want to hear the ignorant claims of some Libertarian or Conservative or Liberal who takes on their partizan line here. Lets start talking about how we should solve the problems and not arguing that they do not exist or that the old structures are still working. They are not!
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
This is an old fallacy. It's basically the belief that there's a net loss of jobs when something more efficient than human labor replaces human labor. If you're only looking at half of the picture, it looks like there's a net loss. But the mistake is only looking at the immediate consequences and not looking at the longer term consequences. In the long term, efficiency creates more jobs. Don't believe me? Read this. Or this.
If you still believe that creating an efficiency is wrong when someone loses their job as a consequence, then you must also believe that using a computer is wrong, because you could clearly have hired someone (possibly lots of people) to deliver your communications instead of relying on automation. And for that matter, why use a car, when doing so has caused the unemployment of so many buggy drivers and horse . And for that matter, why use buggies at all. A single person can only travel so far on foot before needing rest. To get your messege to the entire world, you could employ many, many more people if you insisted that it be delivered by foot.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
countless millions of plastic toys
Problem is that we have a social model that requires the vast majority to work full-time to survive. And since growing food has dropped from employing the vast majority of people to a tiny percentage, there's very little that really needs to be done. So, to preserve this model, people need to be employed making countless plastic toys (or in the service industry)
Until that social model changes, we are trapped in a cycle of mas-consumerism. When politicians tell you that it's your patriotic duty to buy buy buy, well they're kind of right. But only within thier own paradigm. If everyone benefited from innovation, instead of just factory owners and stock-holders, then things would change. You'd start to see people working fewer hours, taking more time for education or recreation, etc. Which is what you might have expected when the tractor was invented, or factories were automated. Unfortunately the social-economic model wouldn't allow that.
As this process continues, expect the pressure to get worse until the revolution. 8)
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Property rights as important as they are, become a form of colonial hostile government in such a condition.
Oooh, you communist you.
I agree with you for the reason that almost everything you said is logically derived from what we can see around us. What I have to add though, has to do with this:
I don't want to hear the ignorant claims of some Libertarian or Conservative or Liberal who takes on their partizan line here.
Society is dividing up quite unpleasantly into different groups. Tout what you're saying and logically derived though it is, someone will just say 'socialism.' and whole segments of society will immediately become deaf to you. I'm increasingly hearing the words, Liberal, Conservative, etc, thrown around and I still don't realy understand what they mean.
Okay, I'm being willfully ignorant about them, as I know what people mean by it, but I don't think the meaning is remotely self-coherent. Can we really lump lots of complex ideas into a small number of camps and say that we cannot mix and match?
You are calling for a well-thought out, pragmatic approach and I can hear you, but the biggest obstacle is that people will slap a label on you and that will hamstring you in getting people to listen. A lot of good ideas have been tarnished by the failure of groups that promoted them and where there is overlap, you'll have problems.
That said, times are getting more desperate and it's now that new ideas can most take hold. So good luck.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
This is an old argument that history keeps proving wrong.
Using machines on farms put people out of 16-18/hr/day back breaking work. Oh, no, stop the machines.
The cotton gin will put all the people picking seeds from the cotton out of work. Oh, no, stop the machines.
Using machines in manufacturing will lead to devastatingly low employment. There won't be enough employed people to buy the products. Oh, no, stop the machines.
Visual Basic/Smalltalk/Powerbuilder allows non-programmers to build their own applications. This will put all the programmers out of work.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
What you fail to see is that maintenancing a new machine that does some task is almost always more intellectually demanding than the original task. Also, it will never require as much manpower to repair the machines as it would have required to do the task without them. So if ten people are dispensing drinks to customers at some commercial location, and those ten workers are replaced by vending machines, you still need a vending machine repair person, but you don't need _ten_. Also, that person will require some increase in intellectual ability over the average seller of soft drinks, because fixing the machine is simply more complicated a task. Admittedly in this example the cognitive threshold is very low, but where you might be able to hire a borderline retard to sell drinks, you can't hire one to fix vending machines.
Let me put it this way: If the company's implementation of the machine doesn't put people out of work, why are they implementing it? If I'm already paying ten people to do a job, why should I buy a fancy robot and then still be paying ten people to go around fixing it? You can be certain that as machines replace jobs the number of human workers will go down, and the ones that are left will be the ones smart enough to be able to do things that machines can't.
Does anyone think that we should do a harder, slower, more expensive and less reliable way so that more people have jobs?
--
No matter how hard it is for me, being a technology freak myself, I think I am going to have to answer this affirmatively.
Technologists, mea culpa, always have the urge to make 'things' more efficient. 'Efficiency' in the traditional meaning however could be translated, roughly, as 'Try real hard to use as many resources that we CANNOT miss (oil, energy, materials in some cases) to do as much work as possible so resources that we have PLENTY of (people) can be replaced'.
This definition is something that's grown in, but it is not neccesarily the proper definition. I believe that efficiency should include the term 'meaningfully' somewhere. Somehow, we should seek an equilibrium that's not focussed only on automating things at the expense of other things. The SUM of the results should be positive.
Don't forget that having a job, no matter how trivial such a job might be, could give somebody lesser than yourself a very good feeling about himself, being able to support his family, his children. If obsoleting one computer could create 10 such trivial jobs, feed 10 families, increase the wellfare and feelgood factor of 10 or more income earners because they don't have to depend on social services, oil products that get put into that computer's manufacturing get saved, energy bills do not have to be paid, hmmmmmmm, I don't know man.... Perhaps I'd say that computer deserves being obsoleted, no matter how efficient it was.
I'm aware that this is a recursive issue; the worker's employer would no longer be as competitive, couldn't price his articles as low, would eventually go under, the electricity company wouldn't need to employ so many people, the oil business as a whole would suffer etc. etc.
Give the definition some thought though. I think it can be done somehow. We technologists and scientists COULD lead the way into a more sensible society.
Everytime someone tries to implement something that is going to automate or improve things you get resistance from a lot of people at different levels who are all paranoid about losing their jobs. Usually these are the same people who are paranoid about losing their jobs in the first place. The same people who do their best to accentuate their strengths and do whatever they can to cut the experts out of the picture completely.
Our company is moving forward with their ideas, but management has decided to cut people like me out of the picture. Not because they don't like my ideas or even that they understand them. They are trying to take their thing and run with it. Everyone has the "look at me syndrome".
The truth is, most people don't look at the big picture or care about saving money or doing what is best technically. Most people just care about taking care of their families. As much as I hate this conflict, I really don't see how you can blame either side for the way they think. Whichever side you may be on, its the guys with the expensive three story houses and sportscars that win in the end. Most companies don't reward talent. They reward management. This is why you have budget incentives and things like that. Management can give you no support whatsoever, sit on their lazy butt and make a bonus. In the meantime you fight to get the job done, often spending your own time or using your own resources to do the job. Is it fair? Hell no. Will it change. Hell F no. Not while the boomers are still in power.
We have all become so innundated with the career path mythos that we forget that the reason that most people work is to pay the bills. Given the choice, most people would much rather sit on the beach than answer phones.
If machines are able to decrease the amount of mundane work that we need to do to generate wealth is a good thing in general. True, in our present system, the people who are displaced by the machines lose financially. But the solution is not to cut off the head of the goose laying the golden eggs but to develop a new model to distribute the wealth more equitably so that we can all spend as much time as we want in front of our PS-2's...
It's true, though.
I work in a job in which, in the beginning, there were many, many mundane tasks.
As I took on those jobs, I worked out little scripts, workflows, etc. to do these tasks in *much* less time if not have them automated entirely.
The result is that I could put in less hours, and my pay got cut. Oops. Worse yet, I was removed from some of the tasks as the proverbial boss' kid could do it now!
However, rather than killing off the scripts/etc. and go back to mundanity, I simply seeked new challenges.
And if one didn't exist, I'd *create* one - and in the process further the company along.
That's why, despite 'smart systems' of my own doing, I'm still working with the same company and am deemed irreplaceable.
So, really, people... move on, find new challenges, or even make them. This extends to general work as well. If you get sacked, try and find a new job, or why not start your own company on an idea of your own ?
I would like to see whether incomes follow a standard Bell curve - I imagine they do, but if not then incomes for such as Gates and Allen, et al. might be skewing the median up
Take a statistics class. The incomes of Gates and Allen would severely skew the mean, but they wouldn't skew the median any more than if they made only half of what they were making.
For the sake of illustration, let's consider a series of numbers and pretend they represent the incomes of everyone in the Unites States: 7500, 12,000, 20,000, 34,000, 34,000, 36,000, 52,000, 52,000. 53,000, 53,000, 76,000, 76,000, 120,000, 300,000, 400,000,000. The mean of that set of numbers is going to be around 27 million, so that income of 400 million severely skewed the mean. However, the median is going to be 52,000. If that 400,000,000 figure was merely 52,000 that median income would be exactly the same .
This is the purpose of using the median. Outliers may skew the mean, but they don't unduly influence the median.
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