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Job Automation and the Minimum Wage Debate
An anonymous reader writes "An article at FiveThirtyEight looks at the likelihood of various occupations being replaced by automation. It mentions President Obama's proposed increase to the federal minimum wage, saying big leaps in automation could reshape that debate. '[The wage increase] from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour could make it worthwhile for employers to adopt emerging technologies to do the work of their low-wage workers. But can a robot really do a janitor's job? Can software fully replace a fast-food worker? Economists have long considered these low-skilled, non-routine jobs as less vulnerable to technological replacement, but until now, quantitative estimates of a job's vulnerability have been missing from the debate.' Many minimum-wage jobs are reportedly at high risk, including restaurant workers, cashiers, and telemarketers. A study rated the probability of computerization within 20 years (PDF): 92% for retail salespeople, 97% for cashiers, and 94% for waitstaff. There are other jobs with a high likelihood, but they employ fewer people and generally have a higher pay rate: tax preparers (99%), freight workers (99%), and legal secretaries (98%)."
I used to work in the IT dept. for a company that replaced forklift drivers with highly automated forklifts Vimeo: (http://vimeo.com/75513911) that were able to load trucks. The justification was never the cost of labor, but the increased accuracy in the supply chain, the ability to "house keep" (i.e. moving product bound for shipping close to the dock door it was headed out of, to increase maximum warehouse capacity by reducing average trip times); during the slow hours, as well as reduced damage to product, equipment and the facility. Automation is not about cost, its about having a machine do some work BETTER than workers. Arguing the cost is like arguing that cars are better at moving goods than humans because it costs less per mile to drive a car than it does to pay someone to carry your good. It does cost less, but thats not the point. Automation can scale much faster and increase accuracy, without increasing costs. Thats the point of automation. The benefits were obvious to anyone who had ever seen a mis-ship report or calculated the % of accidents involving a forklift. These units delivered
With the vehement anti-socialist thread that weaves throughout the American culture, the US will be one of the hardest hit by the coming automation age.
More socialist countries will have a chance of moving to the age of leisure, while America, god bless her, will move to the age of the gutter.
So it is about costs.. just the reduction of costs from increased efficiency and production rates caused by the automation
"at some point we're going to end up with a civilization like in Star Trek TNG"
First --- I wish, that would be an incredible and ideal future.
But society is based on power and control, both in government and private industry.
Government and private industry simply isn't going to say "Dear commoners, robots will do everything and you don't need to work and you get a free ride" --- will never happen!
And --- even if it did, look at what people with too much time on hands do to this world: crime, gangs, terrorists, cults, drug users --- most of societies ills are AVOIDED by making these people have jobs so they don't have free time.
I'd love to get to a Star Trek TNG future, but the vast majority of the populace isn't going to start creating and researching or coding solutions to the world's problems in their spare time, which is why it won't work. And the power and authority would never support a free ride of "their creations" or their use of their power.
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Well if you ignore the fact that the project didn't save money-spent overall, then yes, its about costs.
What you are forgetting to take into account is that you get significantly more production, at a higher rate of accuracy with machines. In some cases (not all), the accuracy and production increase is simply unfeasible with a human workforce.
Its like asking how many postmen would it take to deliver all the world's email. There simply wouldn't be enough resources to do the job, regardless of cost.
I don't think you understand "cost" - if the increase in production and better accuracy didn't make the program cost effective, then they'd dump the smart forklifts and bring back the humans. Few businesses can afford to turn the core part of their business into a speculative testbed for technology that costs more to operate than the human workers it replaced. The project may very well have cost more than the human workers it replaced, but that expense was made up by the factors you just mentioned.
This doesn't take into account the one thing that most futurists never take into account. Maybe I'm not the only one who wouldn't enjoy going to a restaurant and not being served. Maybe I'd see that as a low-quality dive, and wouldn't be interested in a steak from a conveyor belt. Maybe the reason that I often go out to restaurants is specifically to be served by someone else. Maybe that's half the value.
Would an abundance of goods with no requirement for people to work their butts off making them would be considered a problem. What is wrong with just letting people enjoy fruit of the modern civilization without considering our collective wealth a downside? Plenty of people will still find a way to work in order to afford more exclusive stuff line posh houses, luxury vacations or whatever. Lots more would find something productive to do just out of boredom. For everyone else, we should just encourage responsible birth control in the sense that if you can not even find your own place in society you are not in the position to teach your children to do the same.
Every time I hear someone claim they're "creating a job" when they hire someone I cringe. You're not creating the job. I create that job when I buy the good or service you offer. That's the only reason why you can even "create" that job. Because someone else is buying what you can offer due to this job existing. And that's also why it's not the employer but the consumer who needs the money if you want to create jobs.
Take the average plumber. Or hairdresser. Or janitor. Or, hell, anyone providing a service (i.e. what 3/4th of our GDP producing population does). That plumber will employ someone if, and only if, there is a reason for him to do that. Because if there is no reason, he's better off without that person. Why? Because he costs money, DUH! What reason could he have? Well, of course if there are more people wanting to use his services than he can fulfill himself. Then, and only then, he will be forced to hire someone.
As you can see, "creating" jobs isn't something employers do out of altruistic motivations. It's something that only happens if they're forced to do it. Forced by the very person that wants to use that service provided.
And that in turn will happen if, and only if, that person not only needs that service but also is able to afford that service. And services is the FIRST thing people cut back on when money gets tight. When facing the choice to get some food or get the plumbing fixed because there is only money for one of them, the faucet will keep dripping because I simply HAVE to eat. I don't have to have a non-dripping faucet.
So if you want someone to create a job, make sure people have money to consume. Because that's how you create jobs!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's sorta the argument you'll hear. I saw an interview on Fox News years ago where they brought on an economist who explained he would combat automation by taxing the rich and redistributing the wealth. The host said, "But that's socialism" and he replied "that's right, I'm a socialist". The whole rest of the interview was the Host just trying to come to grips with the fact that the man just admitted he was a socialist. I think if he said he skinned babies for a living he'd have gotten less of a reaction.
After 70 years of being told that Communism == Socialism == Hitler == bad it's just ingrained in American Society. It's really the only answer to automation. There just aren't enough jobs. The world _doesn't_ need ditch diggers, and we only need so many scientists even if everyone was the next Albert Eisenstein. But the notion that a job, any job, is better than no job is heavily ingrained in America.
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"Capitalism" does not mean "free from government interference". In fact, it thrives (and maybe depends on) on certain kinds of heavy government interference: IP laws, a solid banking system, corporate charters, and limited liability spring to mind.
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The fact is that most of the luddites were right-- they mostly died horrible homeless deaths of starvation. The fact is, they asked for training on the new machines and were refused (much as employers are today refusing to train employees). They were not just blindly rejecting new machines. The fact is they could see they were going to suffer terribly if the industrialists were allowed to go to the new technology with no social safety net for the luddites.
I think there are too many people for it to be as quiet this time.
And it is coming- it is unstoppable. It *could* be a utopia but it probably won't.
Space is too expensive to be a realistic proposition for more than a fraction of a percent of humans (a fraction of a fraction of a fraction). It's more about species survival than an SF wonderland of colonies with heavy meatsacks lifted out of the gravity well.
The automation coming on line *right now* is cheaper than human poverty level wages and can duplicate much of their labor. If so- with the exchange of labor for wages broken- you are looking at a fundamental challenge to the capitalist model.
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>People, like dogs, are not ideally suited to leisure and no obligations.
And that's exactly why it will work - not why it would fail. See even such a nearly fully automated world would need new ideas, new technologies and maintenance of the existing ones to stay in existence.
In such a world though - what could possibly be the incentive for anybody (particularly the very smart and highly skilled people who we still need working -the engineers and the doctors) to do anything at all ? The fact that humans are not suited to leisure - they seek out challenge, they seek out meaning and knowledge and this is more common among the smarter ones.
As Buckminster-Fuller put it - the idea that we have to earn our right to live with labour is not just outdated but a ludicrously silly concept. It would take maybe 10% of us, given the initial resources, about 5 years to build the automation to provide abundance to all humanity, and maybe 10% of our future lives to maintain it. What we should be doing with the other 90% (and everybody else with 100%) is simple: learning stuff, solving the riddles of the universe, expanding our minds, spending time with our children again.
There are a billion better ways we could spend our lives than trying to produce wealth (whether for ourselves as businessmen or for somebody else as wage-workers). Instead of wealth, we could be creating actual value - and actual meaning.
The monetary system as a means of measuring value was incredibly useful to build the world we have today - but it is antiquated, the entire *concept* of *trying* to measure the unmeasurable no longer has any use to us -we don't *need* it anymore.
There is, in fact, only one thing to overcome - and it's not a technical or physical obstacle - it's cultural inertia - but every other revolution in how humans lived had to overcome it, and they all did. Some of our ancestors convinced the others that farming was better than hunter-gatherering once, and gradually changed the entire way humans lived. We've made changes on the same scale on average every 300 years since then.
Ironically - this kind of change to a technologically powered epicurean society would, in fact, be among the simplest in terms of what we need to *practically* do.
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