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Technologies Like Google's Self-Driving Car: Destroying Jobs?
Nerval's Lobster writes "For quite some time, some economists and social scientists have argued that advances in robotics and computer technology are systematically wrecking the job prospects of human beings. Back in June, for example, an MIT Technology Review article detailed Erik Brynjolfsson (a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management) and a co-author suggesting that the evolution of computer technology was "largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years." Of course, technological change and its impact on the workforce is nothing new; just look at the Industrial Revolution, when labor-saving devices put many a hard-working homo sapien out of economic commission. But how far can things go? There are even arguments that the technology behind Google's Self-Driving Car, which allows machines to rapidly adapt to situations, could put whole new subsets of people out of jobs."
I don't employ any people in my car so you must mean the chauffeurs in the yellow cars who speak only Pashto or Urdu?
Nevermind the increases in safety. Nevermind the new jobs that this will enable. Nevermind the greater standard of living this will bring to all people. We've got to be concerned about potentially lost jobs above all else.
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It will destroy jobs like the farm destroyed the jobs of hunters and gatherers. It happens. If you can be replaced by a cheap machine, find another line of work where the quality that you can produce beats the machines.
So we can free up those people to do things we can't make robots do yet.
The things these articles miss is that in the future you won't ever need to leave your house. People won't own a car much less a self driving one. You won't need a hyper loop because there will be no traffic on the empty freeways. There will still exist a need to move food, water, and air around. But people can stay home. Not like they have jobs to go to. :)
I'm trying really hard to find a way to side with the humans on this one but I'm failing. I simply cannot figure out how to justify opposing this, particularly in reference to jobs like over-the-road trucking and basic shuttle-vehicle jobs such as buses and cabs. I can only imagine how much this would alleviate trafic in cities, cars with no ego behind the wheel, and how many meth-addled over-the-road truckers won't be behind the wheel (and honestly most should probably be replaced with improved freight rail anyway, regardless of robots, but there's no reason this system couldn't include the trucks jumping on rail cars since there's no need to take breaks or plan night stops at that point).
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I think it's very clear that most of the truck drivers will be replaced by autonomous trucks driven by software. Human drivers need to sleep, robots don't. As our storage warehouses are already mostly on the wheels and logistics is optimized that the required goods arrive just in time, all this makes sense. The change might even be very fast. 30% of truck cargo might be driven by robots in the end of the decade.
omg here come the neo-Luddites (again)...
there is just absolutely no way anyone can predict what kind of spin-offs will be created given the rise of autonomous cars...perhaps entire new industries (cough like IT cough) will be created that require real humans to work on and fix our new 4-wheeled overlords. In fact, it's almost a given.
what IS guaranteed, however, is CHANGE...and man is that frightening for some people. i like to remember the old phrase "the only constant is change" at times like this.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
when the last buggy whip manufacturer went out of business because of Ford? What about when computers killed Underwood and the typewriter manufacturers? What about when video killed the radio star?
Seriously, stop holding back progress in the name of the status quo, otherwise things can never improve.
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Lately I've been ever-decreasing in my sympathy for the concept of a "job" or even "full time employment". Both kind of seem like scams at this point. Surely there has to be a better way to make a living than to spend 40 hours a week "working" to get what some recent studies have indicated are more like 15 hours of actual work per week, averaging three hours per workday.
Of course, there are plenty of job-destroying policies out there. It's not just the technologies. I'm not convinced we're any better off than we were as a society before all these technologies.
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This is the old Luddite argument: without technology a lot more effort is required to get things done -- so more people get work. It follows that technology is bad.
In fact, the situation is exactly the opposite: if a machine can drive a car, then having a person drive the car is a waste of the person's time. They can instead do something else with their time, so society get both that and the driving done. In the 19th century, more than 80% of US population directly worked in agriculture. Today, the propotion is 2-3% -- yet we have a lot more food, and many other things to boot.
It's true that in the short term, there is a loss when the specialized skills (say driving) of the people displaced become less valuable, and those people lose their jobs. But this is a transient effect. Some skills were standard 30 years ago, yet rare today.
The more important issue is that technology more easily replaces low-skilled workers. Computers have reduced the demand for secretarial work; robots and other industrial automation reduce the demand for factory workers, and so on. This increases the returns to IQ and education, and reduces the number of well-paying jobs available to less-educated workers. But this seems inevitable, and needs to be solved by changing the attitudes of society toward education rather than by hamstringing technological progress.
One nice thing about being a programmer is that if computers ever take over your job then the Singularity has arrived.
Ok, maybe that was harsh.
Every wonder why there is more and more un/underemployment? It's because we can do more with less. By eliminating rote jobs we gain efficiency. The utopian ideal envisioned in the 60s is that we would all be working 10-15 hour work weeks by the 90s through automation and computer technology making things more efficient.
What they completely missed is that a human will trade roughly 2000 hours per year of their life to make enough money for food and shelter. Computers and robots don't really matter, it's just that each human can produce more stuff for those 2000 hours. There is no need to let them work less or pay them any more. You just need fewer of them.
The thing is, we're still making humans at an accelerating rate. That's great for everyone who sell things to those people, as it drives demand to make more stuff. It's bad for all the extra people who - quite frankly - are not in a position to excel at a job better than a computer, robot, or other machine. For a creature who evolves over a time span of tens of millennia, this kind of change in a couple of decades (two centuries if you want to count the industrial revolution), this poses quite a challenge.
H1B means nothing except a small eddy in the current of change which will see more and more humans become obsolete.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yes. This 15 year trend is definitely caused by something that goes into effect next year.
One of the big ideas behind "modernization" was that, in general, people could work less and enjoy more benefits. Indeed, our per-person output has skyrocketed. The idea that we could get even more productive in the future is a conditionally great one. The big "if" is that right now, in the US, almost all of the benefit is being concentrated at the top-end of the economic spectrum. Indeed, our GDP has more than recovered from the recession even though most people are still suffering because of even more recent wealth concentration.
When normal people receive even half the benefits of modernization, its a good thing, and net job loss will be more than outpaced by work reduction.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Back in 2007 the company I work for (manufacturing) was going to outsource my entire department to a company in Taiwan. The logic was that there was no way we overpaid ($100K+ per engineer), lazy (40-50 hrs/week) Americans could do what the industrious (60-70 hrs/week) and inexpensive ($24K/yr) Taiwanese could do. It was an obvious win-win for the company bean-counters.
However, when I was hired a few years before this, I began implementing a whole lot of automation into our stone-age processes. They were still keeping all production records in Excel spreadsheets and paper notebooks for fucks sake. Bar codes? RFID? What were those? I modernized the place, and after a few years of attrition we had fewer low-paid manufactuing drones working in the department, but we no longer needed them.
SO the bean counters did their cost audit and were shocked beyond belief that the American factory was producing goods WAY cheaper than they could get them produced in Taiwan. Taiwan came back with a cheaper offer, but it was STILL higher than our costs. The bean counters did another audit, because they knew there was NO WAY we could produce goods cheaper than Taiwan. Results: We sure can.
So, as a result of some (admittedly crude) automation, I and those who helped me with the automation, saved hundreds of jobs in the US from being offshored. And now my department is mosty highly trained (and well paid) engineers and technicians rather than mostly low paid people who move stuff from machine to machine. We still have the people who move stuff around, but they are fewer, more efficient and paid more than they were before. And the equipment is better maintained and more productive than ever.
So whenever some jackwit like this says automation is killing jobs, I get to trot out my personal example of automation SAVING jobs and creating new ones.
Self-driving cars will kill some jobs, but it will create plenty of new ones, many we haven't even thought of yet.
I'm a robotics engineer. For me, it's creating jobs.
I like the idea of robots just doing everything for us so we don't have to work. Maybe we can even do away with currency all together.
You need the human touch to grow pot or cook meth. No machine could... Oh dammit! Drug-bot 3000 done took our jerbs, and it don't blow up or burn down no trailers.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to pimp out your ride so you're down wid da' homies out front da sto' where you buy shit wid da' EBT card.
Oh no! Pimp-bot 3000 done took our jerbs. Damn, he fly.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to kill terminators. Oh no! Da terminators are killin' eachother. Look at that. HoneyBadger 4000 is killing that other robot. He don't care. HoneyBadger 4000 don't give a shit.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to choke on burning robot fumes...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think you vastly overestimate the ability of human pilots. We're pretty fucking awful compared to a fully sensored autonomous vehicle.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Maybe even start to move the OT point to say 35-30 hours a week as well upping the ot exempt level to say 100K a year + COL.
Why should BOB be working 60-80 hours a week when jack does not have a job?
The internet put people out of jobs in the newspaper and magazine industry, it also opened up a world of new ways for people to make money.
Self-driving cars will have a lot less impact than the internet. A handful of cab drivers, whoopee do.
It's going to be awesome seeing self-driving cars assign red light camera companies to the scrap heap of history...parasitic bastards.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Read Manna by Marshall Brain. It's an interesting view of two potential post-labor robot-driven economies. I hope we end up in the robot-driven paradise instead of the everyone-on-welfare dystopia, but I'm not convinced we will. I'm crossing my fingers for a Star Trek economy in my lifetime.
(Of course, given that we're looking perhaps a bit beyond 30 years in the future, it'll probably look very similar to today in a lot of ways with some changes that nobody predicted.)
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Self driving cars will cost jobs, as will eventual moves towards automation, telecommuting &c.
The increasing role of technology in every sphere of life will eventually rule out all but very skilled, specialised jobs in small numbers. This is a trend that started in the industrial age, and no amount of legislation will stop the fact that we simply don't need to employ as many people as we used to.
I've advocated on here before the role of a guaranteed minimum income, and this could be an opportunity to create the first real leisure society. Consumerism as we more or less know it would fund economic development still, as it does now, except the source of our income wouldn't be our increasingly obsolete labour but a guaranteed disposable income, rising gradually ahead of living costs over time.
The amount of creative works, open source projects, general hackery &c. that'll spring from having a majority of people free from having to be employed will be mind boggling.
The biggest stumbling block to this in my mind is the dismantling of "trickle up" neoliberalism and the replacement of a brain dead political class.
I saw this on the Jetsons. George Jetson goes to work, pushes three buttons, and goes right back home.
What we've seen over the past 50 years is a growth in per capital GPD, much of it due to automation. This should have led to more pay for less work, or same pay for less work. However: the median income has held steady while the "top 0.1%" has taken off. Instead of everyone working 10 hour days and getting a livable wage as the efficiency would indicate, we have people working 40-50 hour weeks for less money, while a select few get a LOT more for it - effectively getting thousands of hours of income for each week of work. The tying of insurance and other benefits to a floor in minimum hours of work made this condition worse. I know of many people, parents and artists mostly, who would LOVE to have a professional job of 20-30 hours/week and are even willing to take proportionally lower pay to get it, but our current (US) system doesn't allow it.
Robots taking jobs isn't a bad thing - there's less work to do overall. If there are fewer hours of work to go around, then either everyone works fewer hours for the same pay, or... a few people work "full-time" and everyone else gets shafted.
Quite a few sci-fi books have looked at this. I think Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" visited a future where our protagonist worked at a junkyard where they took brand-new, off-the-lot cars and crushed them. The car builders had full-time work - the crushers had full-time work, too. That's messed up.
Eventually, almost everything will be done by technology. Even maintaining the technology will be done by technology. While it does mean more will be done, and more will be produced, this will collapse if there is not more of a market to consume it. Otherwise we will eventually get to a point that the 0.001 percenters will own all the production, and no one else will have anything to buy it with. So even the 0.001 percenters will end up losing. But how will that even be solved if there is nothing left for humans to do? Either we will have a world where no one has anything unless they have machines (and all they can produce for is themselves), or we will have socialism where the government provides everything ... so the 0.001 percenters will have a market to sell to.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
he truth is that the amount of work will expand or contract depending on the resources and opportunities available.
"opportunities available"
That's the key right there. It's one thing to spout economic theory; it's another to apply it to reality - hence the complete failure of the economics profession.
As we shrink the need for labor one way or another; whether robots or importing cheaper labor from overseas or sending the work to cheaper countries (Programming and other high skill work included); there aren't enough opportunities being created for those displaced workers.
So, what are we seeing? Massive underemployment and massive increases into the disability programs. We the US are becoming a nation of retail, fast food, and medical workers - the rest are too old to do anything. We are becoming a nation where one part of the population is serving food and cleaning the bedpans of the other part.
The signs of an over supply of workers and decreasing opportunities are all over the place. Sure there are very few bright spots, but the thing is, there's are more than enough people going after those few positions.
Am I suggesting that we eliminate automation or purposefully make ourselves more unproductive?
Absolutely not - even if that were possible.
We have a systemic problem - too many people and not enough opportunities or resources for that matter. Commodities of all types of been increasing over the long term for over a decade and when more supplies are found, it does nothing but slow the increase - see oil.
While it is true the normal view is that 40 hours a week is 'full time'... Obamacare actually treats anyone working 30+ hours as a full time employee (ditto 2x people who work 15 hours each a week).
When you get into these well meaning but poorly thought out attempts at social engineering, you often find such 'unexpected', but entirely predictable results be it companies cutting staff, hours, kicking spouses off of plans, dropping insurance all together.
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Yes in the short term. Less truck drivers, less cab drivers...
No in the long term.
The real thing hurting the job pool is the dilution by H1-B.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The real thing hurting the job pool has nothing to do with H1-B. That might impact certain jobs, particularly the IT sector, but doesn't explain the high unemployment. The real thing hurting the job pool is that over the past 40 years we have pretty much decimated the middle class and it is the middle class that controls the economy. Without a strong middle class, to keep the economy going, we have relied on government spending.
What happened to the middle class? It's easy, since the 1970s there has been a massive shift of wealth concentrated at the top. What happened to the middle class? We decided unions were bad and have done whatever we can to get rid of them. What happened to the middle class? We outsourced all of their jobs so our corporations could pay their executives more and more and pay out more dividends, thus shifting wealth upward (see the first what happended).
It's not technology that has killed jobs, it's plain old greed.
You are probably correct. Technology does create more jobs than it destroys. The problem is it destroys good paying middle class jobs and creates a lot of minimum wage jobs. That's not a very good tradeoff.
Frankly said I'll take that over drunk drivers. A failing self-driving car will, presumably, do as much as possible, given the nature of the failure, to protect everyone involved.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
But a societal one. Just like the industrial revolution put a lot of manual labourers out of work, the digital revolution will do the same to the vast majority of low-and-no-skill labourers.
The moralistic notion that necessities, and even some small luxuries, need to be earned is starting to become antiquated. We need to begin seriously considering things like basic income if we are to transition without a whole lot of bloodshed. Good luck convincing the X%.
All of us benefit from being the heirs of the industrial revolution. Even the poorest of us have better health and nutrition than before. We all have better healthcare than the mightiest king did 300 years ago. Yet for the average person who lived during the industrial revolution life was poor hell. Craftsmen and herders were sent into Dickensian factories and mines. I hope we can live long enough for the majority of citizens to see a benefit from our present computer revolution.
I'm not sure that it's a hard and fast rule that more technology necessarily creates more jobs. We know that that has been true up to this point. However, a lot of those new jobs were for maintaining and supporting the new technologies. When your technology develops to the point where it supports and maintains itself, I'm not sure that will be true any longer.
For example, when I first started working in IT, at a medium sized mainframe installation you needed a staff of about a dozen operators per shift to perform manual tasks such as fetching tapes and running printers, and recovering and restarting failed jobs. Now that you have automated tape libraries, outputs are now directed to online archival systems, and you have software that can correct and restart failed jobs with little or no human intervention, most of those jobs are gone.
Also, robotics technologies are now becoming sophisticated enough to perform tasks such fruit picking and other manual labor which was previously impractical to automate.
So I think the question is still on the table. Is there an inflection point where technology will begin destroying jobs on net? I don't think we really know that yet.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Maybe we will have societies where people can relax all day because there is no need for them to work. Maybe one day the most intelligent people will be offered a chance to live in luxurious accommodations that are not available to the rest of society, in exchange for working -- while everyone else can spend their days relaxing sans luxury.
Already here. Welfare - where no one is hungry, but the poor are over-weight because they cannot afford health club memberships, and just 42 inch flat screens, not 60 inchers. How many people do the police pick up off the streets any day because they have starved to death?
If you look at it from a global perspective, by automating the factory you allowed X people in the USA to produce a certain amount of goods. To produce that amount of goods in Taiwan would take X*Y people. Therefore globally you actually destroyed jobs via that automation.
Robots will replace every human working in fast food eventually so what do you do to employ tens of millions of people put out of work? Look at the millions without jobs now. Even in IT a lot of automation has reduced the need for more IT engineers and to save money they are making us do more with less which forces is to rely more on automation. Robots will also evemtually replace surgeons and could replace lawyers too and so you and up with a broad swath of skill levels without jobs or money. Some sections of our society will just decide to kill the constitution and lock people up in dorms to keep these jobless out of the eye of those or we can free people to turn their attention to things that interest them. Things that they could not focus on before. Think scientist who did not have to worry about money or resources. Google manna chapter 1 and read it.