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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?
TFA seems to be arguing (not unreasonably) that if you've solved the machine vision and 'coping with surprisingly unpredictable environments' problems well enough to put a car on the road without being bankrupted by splattered pedestrians and next of kin, you've probably also solved the problems that were keeping our robot overlords out of a lot of 'semi-structured' environments that have not previously been economic to automate.
Conventional industrial automation is unstoppably, brutally, efficient; but you pretty much have to build the entire environment around the robots; because they are dumb as hell if anything doesn't go to plan (though, so long as it does, they can stuff boards or spot-weld chassis parts like nobody's business). If you solve the problems inherent in driving a car, you've made substantial progress in attacking environments that aren't built around robots and their limitations, which opens up many more just-sloppy-enough-to-confuse-robots and not-labor-intensive-enough-to-rebuild-for-robots workplaces.
Sure, a few Johnnycabs might be the most visible; but that'll be the tip of the iceberg.
I thought cancer destroyed Jobs. Too soon?
I have a lot of sympathy with this point of view, but there is a problem with it.
George Carlin said, to paraphrase, look at how stupid the average guy is and realize that half of the people are dumber than that.
My point is that we are not going to have a country with nothing but doctors, high-end engineers, programers, and tech people. Not everyone has the brainpower to do that. We have to have something to do or we with have the society in Vonnegut's Player Piano.
That could be the real challenge... what are we going to do when it's not economical for a human to do ANY busy work. Even the not-so-bright need something to do.
Probably none. But I don't think the picture is as dire as you paint it because the change from "driver" cars to driver-less cars isn't going to be instant. It's not like all truckers are gonna lose their jobs tomorrow or next years. It's gonna be a gradual process over the next ten or maybe twenty years.
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.
Nevermind the new jobs that this will enable.
I'm curious - what new careers do you foresee, that current professional drivers would qualify for?
I was a trucker for 20 years. I've just been given an offer of a place at a top 10 university to do a BEng (Hons) in Electronics Engineering. Not all of us do trucking because we're incapable of doing anything else and I find your insinuation that we are quite insulting.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
One nice thing about being a programmer is that if computers ever take over your job then the Singularity has arrived.
Come on, man, Wells explained this almost a century ago. The general busy-working masses that don't have the brainpower to be a "high-end engineer or tech person" live in a leisure garden paradise and do nothing, while the engineers and tech people live underground, keep the general machinery of the world ticking, and occasionally kill and eat one of the those surface-dwelling Eloi for sustenance. Simple!
Yes. This 15 year trend is definitely caused by something that goes into effect next year.
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.
Technology only destroys jobs if you accept that the vast majority of the improvement in quality of life resulting from less labor required for survival should be reserved for a handful of plutocrats. Employment is low. Profits are high. Fewer people work more to get less out of fear that they will be cut next.
What technology can do is increase everyone's quality of life. Lower the work week to 32 hours and abolish the distinction between part time and full time employees and increase minimum wage to a scale that follows the cost of basic food, utilities, shelter and transportation (it would be around $18 an hour if it had been). More people working less and having more time for family or other hobbies that actually make life worth living.
I think you are making a joke but you right.
Once concern is that over the past 50 years the lowest rungs have been knocked out of the labor market. The gas attendant would graduate to the assistant mechanic, to a full mechanic. Now many low skilled entry level jobs lead nowhere.
When robots do all the work, Marx' old question about the ownership of the means of production (and of raw materials and land) becomes acutely relevant. If the top 1% own the robots, the 99% is pretty much useless. Robots will be able to provide the masses with a minimum of housing and comforts to keep them placated, and there will be a small middle class of researchers, technicians and entertainers, but that'll be it. Not a very bright future... When robots do all the work, socialism suddenly starts to look a lot more attractive (I never though I'd write those words).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
If you can only imagine the future in terms of the current economic system, you can't really imagine the future. We don't have the same economy we had 50 years ago, and that one was nothing like those before it. To presume the current model will persist indefinitely is pure ego.
Re:Out of jobs? (Score:?)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 29, 2013 @08:07PM
Minimum wage jobs are not just for teenagers. There just are not enough teenagers to man every grocery store, every restaurant, every retail outlet, etc. Millions of people are attempting to support families on minimum or barely above minimum wage jobs. These people need to be able to support their families just like anyone else.
The only other option to a reasonable minimum wage is a guaranteed minimum income. And we don't have nearly enough automation to deal with the people who would simply choose not to work given the the option.