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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%)."
The PDF link is 72 pages long and in acrobat... you're welcome.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The higher the minimum wage, the more incentive there will be to automate those minimum-wage jobs. If it'd average out to $11/hr to have a robot do some cleaning, and the minimum wage is $10/hr, then a janitor willing to work for $10/hr will have a job. If the minimum wage goes to $12/hr, the robot will take the job instead.
I read somewhere an essay written around the time the minimum wage was being increased a few decades ago. This was during a time when there were still elevator operators. The author predicted that after the increase, elevator operators would get phased out in favor of automated elevators. That probably would've happened anyway, but raising the minimum wage probably helped speed up that process.
If it gets really bad there will be pressure to illegalize automation of certain classes of jobs.
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
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: 92% for retail salespeople, 97% for cashiers, and 94% for waitstaff...
A few other jobs that were lost to technology:
The knocker-up was a person whose responsibility was to go out to people's houses and wake them up so they could get to work on time. Alarm clocks eliminated the need for them.
Acoustic locators were people who listened to acoustic mirrors to detect incoming aircraft before radar was invented.
And sure, we can talk about buggy whips. The point is, quite a few jobs and entire industries no longer exist as a result of automation. We can start throwing our shoes at the machines like during the industrial revolution, or we can enjoy the benefits they bring us, accept the growing pains, and adapt to the new world. Personally I don't want to have to pay some guy to come knock at my window every morning so I can go to work. I hope I live long enough to talk to the younguns about all the ridiculous jobs that used to exist when I was their age.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
How about Big Rig and cab drivers.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
While the inevitable loss of more "menial" jobs (take no offense; I've had many myself) will suck for those affected, at some point we're going to end up with a civilization like in Star Trek TNG where people choose to work, as the provision of the basic necessities of life will have become largely automated. Of course, something "really bad" could happen before then (nuclear holocaust, plague, asteroid strike, supervolcano, gamma ray burst, etc.), but I hope someday we reach the point where robots handle the ugly bits and we all get to do whatever the hell we please without fear.
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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.
I live in a country where the minimum wage is roughly $15USD. More crucially though, I live in an area with low unemployment so the practical minimum wage is considerably higher.
What we have seen is changes like such as smaller retailers only have a single staff member on during the week. This means that when the staff member goes to the bathroom or gets lunch, the shop closes briefly. For larger retailers there is an ongoing shift towards self-checkouts, but as they are constantly pushing their costs this seems independent of wage levels.
Other fields have seen similar pressure. Restaurants try and make do with less staff, warehouses focus more on minimising idle time and companies may consider how often they really need the bins empty.
All of these are fundamentally positive changes.
So it is about costs.. just the reduction of costs from increased efficiency and production rates caused by the automation
Humans are bad at conceptualizing the very large and small, and the very slow and fast. We are pattern recognizers, but just like we have optical illusions that fool our biological eyes, there are mental situations that fool our inner circuitry.
The tech is advancing faster than moore's law, and we haven't even started using all the new meta-materials and graphene, nanotubes and all the rest.
People like to be the straight man, they like to be no-nonsense - they find comfort in being the reasonable one and enjoy a nice philosophically cul-de-sac where if history proves them correct then they reaffirm their own beliefs and if they are wrong then they still get all the benefits of the tech arriving for mass consumption. They are pleasantly surprised, if you asked anyone about the self driving cars and cellphones in the 1980s they would have said its more than 100 years away - and yet we have them now.
The problem is, with all the naysayers and luddites, their combined negative outlook slows everything down instead of speeding it up by poisoning popular sentiment which is why it takes an Elon Musk to make electric cars and space companies. It's not that Ford could not have done it, it's that Ford and similar companies are staffed by people terrified to make a decision and try anything new unless it's 100% obvious that the time for a thing has come, which is usually when a competitor starts doing it.
We need access to space, AI, roboticized labor, and the endless energy the sun is currently wasting as it goes out into space largely untapped - and everything that makes those things come faster are good things.
The ultimate form of humanity is not toiling away for 40 arbitrary hours a week just because we had to up until now.
Thinking of some 1:1 replacement of a human with a human-shaped machine is too simple. The replacement will be of outdated, job-heavy business models with self-service models.
You know it's time for the next revolution when your rulers' names end with roman numerals.
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.
No, it has never been tried. We haven't sufficient automation until recently. Go take a history class.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...were on to something. Not that mechanization is evil - it is progress. But what we're seeing now that we have not faced in the past is technology and automation advancing faster than society's capacity to restructure the economy so that everyone has an opportunity for some basic livelihood. Extremes of poverty and desperation are not a good alternative.
"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.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Price has nothing to do with cost and everything to do with (perceived) supply / demand.
And unless you live in a dictatorship, you are not allowed to "demand" anything for any price, just as I am not allowed to "demand" you purchase any particular good or servi... oh wait. I forgot we passed the ACA.
Gonna be a long while till robots will be able to do all the shitty things nomadic, entry-level employees do.
It will be a while before robots can do all of those jobs, but many of them will soon be automated. If you go into a McDonald's, half the employees are taking orders, and the other half are fulfilling them. The people taking the orders could easily be replaced: Just turn the touchscreens around so that customers can enter their own orders, and then swipe a card to pay. Grocery stores have already done this, and so have banks. Fast food is next.
I also think the knock-her-up angle is ripe for exploitation, but that witch who listened to mirrors wound up pwned by Snow White.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This would effectively outlaw automation, given that the costs are not zero to operate such machinery. I can understand the argument that prices should be lower, but to say that they should be near zero is to argue that those who use automation heavily shouldn't be allowed to make a profit at all. I can't get behind that philosophically.
FC Closer
Historically, some have speculated that with automation comes more and more leisure time, people not having to work because all of their needs have been fulfilled. What ends up happening in reality however (as we see now) is that productivity gains do end up with fewer people working but instead of more people working fewer hours, there are fewer people working more hours. What happens when there are not enough jobs to go around at all?
People won't have enough money to pay for goods. Will labor be parcelled out so more people work less? Will there be a perceived "non-need" for so many unemployed people? What happens then? I can't imagine it will be a pretty sight.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
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.
What about the impending failure of capitalism? The writing's on the wall, and it will fail for the same reason communism failed: Greed.
Get a handful of selfish sociopaths who rise to the top, change the rules, plunder everything, and ruin the system for everyone else. The only thing that keeps power in check is fear that they will be held accountable for their actions. This is why you see an agenda in the media and in government institutions to groom the public for control. The message is very clear:
Don't question authority.
Conform.
Give up your means of defense and do not attempt to defend yourself against anyone, even if your life is at stake.
Look to the State to find out what you are allowed to do and say.
Corporations and profit are more important than the individual. You exist to serve them.
Possibly sooner than you think; Facebook buying Oculus comes to mind...
That's great though, who the fuck wants to deal with salesmen? I specifically order all my clothes and music gear online because I don't want to deal with either snotty clerks or shady salesmen. Hell, I'd pay MORE to shop without human interaction. The fact that I can get better prices online is just an added bonus.
What about the impending failure of capitalism?
You're confused. Capitalism is doing fine. It's government that's failing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Gonna be a long while till robots will be able to do all the shitty things nomadic, entry-level employees do.
It will be a while before robots can do all of those jobs, but many of them will soon be automated. If you go into a McDonald's, half the employees are taking orders, and the other half are fulfilling them. The people taking the orders could easily be replaced: Just turn the touchscreens around so that customers can enter their own orders, and then swipe a card to pay. Grocery stores have already done this, and so have banks. Fast food is next.
I don't understand why they haven't done so already -- I assume it's because they don't think their customers are ready for touch-screen ordering. Starbucks could do it too -- with their pushbutton espresso machines, they don't really need a human barista for most drinks.
I can tell you why... I witnessed it firsthand. My mall food court had this system in the early 1990's. People would place orders via the touchscreen and then the food would be prepared. I saw the place get trolled (someone ordered 10 large fries at once and walked away). Obviously, this was before credit card swipes were allowed for payment so it was a cash business, and payment was collected when the food was presented. Yeah, that system didn't last long. Now the likely issue would be trolls ordering bizarre combinations and then claiming there was a mistake/demanding a refund.
As for self-checkout, most places I saw experiment with those in the past two years (grocery stores and Costco) has ripped them out and gone back to using human cashiers. The reasons? Fraud/theft and speed (trained cashiers are faster, who would have thought?). Walmart and big box home improvement stores are the outliers still offering self-checkout in my area.
Well, maybe if they get to kill another hundred million people or so it will finally work!
-jcr
Communism just doesn't work. Just look at the shape that the former East Germany was in.
How can you take a nation full of diligent Germans, and manage to make a poor country out of it . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
So...production increased at a rate greater than cost increased?
Yeah, it's not about actual dollars spent. It's about marginal cost: cost per unit of production. Put differently, the company increased in output more than it increased its spending; that means it's now a bigger company, in terms of market saturation, and has a greater profit, both in absolute terms and likely a greater profit margin as well.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
What about the impending failure of capitalism?
You're confused. Capitalism is doing fine. It's government that's failing.
-jcr
Pure capitalism is letting the market decide which leads to the monopolization of industries. This leads to a dearth of choice for consumers. Some government interference is required to keep markets open. The reason why government is failing is because it has been bought by corporations and financial institutions.
Imagine a world where a computer can always do it cheaper than a human. In that case, no humans will be employed. In this scenario, what is the harm in providing people with income via fiat money creation? I don't see much harm as long as it does not spend past the point of rampant inflation, and I sure as hell can see the harm in letting people go hungry without hope of income.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Corporations and profit are more important than the individual. You exist to serve them.
I'd say it's more analogous to the bacteria in your gut and intestines. They don't exist to serve you, but in serving themselves they benefit you.
That's what you call a symbiotic relationship, and to be honest I don't have a problem with it. Capitalism isn't failing any time soon.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
May of them are already automated.
Here are some examples.
Tillamook Cheese.
http://www.tillamook.com/chees...
Wrapping, storing, aging, boxing, processing, cutting, trimming, etc.. all automated.
Much higher production with about 1/3 the workers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
The truth shall set you free!
Funny, it seems that government interference is closing the markets by making it more and more difficult for new companies to enter markets.
Is it not government interference that keeps new ISPs from entering many markets?
As for self-checkout, most places I saw experiment with those in the past two years (grocery stores and Costco) has ripped them out and gone back to using human cashiers. The reasons? Fraud/theft and speed (trained cashiers are faster, who would have thought?). Walmart and big box home improvement stores are the outliers still offering self-checkout in my area.
That's not automation though. Self checkout is just making the customer do the cashiers job for free before realizing that customers suck at doing these things correctly because it's not their job.
just as I am not allowed to "demand" you purchase any particular good or servi... oh wait. I forgot we passed the ACA.
Public indecency laws, which mandate purchase of clothing, predate the Affordable Care Act by decades.
FYI, that is referred to as a "Barrier to Entry". Starting an insurance company these days is basically impossible due to such (for said industry the requirements can vary widely by state, and screw New York).
Another example of a "Barrier to Entry" is the pains the ride-sharing sites are experiencing (by state/local, livery is very regulated and fee-d).
Those past the Barrier have a lot of regulations, but they don't have to worry about the barrier itself.
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Russia? China? They didn't even get close to communism. They were fascists dictatorships and kleptocracies that happen to use Karl Marx's writings for propaganda.
European socialism got pretty close, and they seem to be doing just fine except when they start acting like Americans and deregulating their banks.
Seriously, I know you're trolling, but there's a chance someone out there is taking your seriously...
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Last time I checked, the category you're thinking of was called "Escort".
it's the incredibly high cost of entry (burying lines, running copper) combined the the fact that you pretty much need a gov't mandate in order to get everyone to allow you to bury/run all those lines on their property (otherwise sooner or later somebody either holds the whole thing up because he's crazy, wants infinite money or some combination of the two).
But hey, never let a little thing like facts and reality get in the way of a good right wing rant I always say. How's the joke go? Fact have a liberal bias...
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or Socialism. Or anything other than a fascists dictatorship that just happened to use Karl Marx's writtings for propaganda. They had about as much to do with Communism as North Korea, but for some reason we sorta forget all that. Also, Russia was a _lot_ worse off from WWII than anyone really remembers. They used mules to drag their tanks back home for lack of fuel for God's sake.
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Funny, it seems that government interference is closing the markets by making it more and more difficult for new companies to enter markets.
Is it not government interference that keeps new ISPs from entering many markets?
"Sokath, his eyes opened"
Yeah, pretty much the case. You see, the problem with Capitalism or any other ism, is that unless protected from itself, will lead to one stop ruling.
Because when any group comes into power, it seeks to preserve that power. If a purely capitalistic society were formed, eventually th eindustries that were "best" would grow th elargets, and at that point would shif their goals to consolidation of their power, to use their power to crush the opposition. Predatory pricing, buying competitors simply to shut them down, murder, mayhem, lots of tricks.
This tactic will fail some times, but often will not until the capbloat becsomes so large that it chokes itself.
Certainly at this point, we are on the cusp of a problem, as the economic equation, which needs to be balanced, is dangerously tilted.
This isn't to say that any of the others are better, at least in their pure form. They will all fail
We have to have balance.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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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Gonna be a long while till robots will be able to do all the shitty things nomadic, entry-level employees do.
It will be a while before robots can do all of those jobs, but many of them will soon be automated. If you go into a McDonald's, half the employees are taking orders, and the other half are fulfilling them. The people taking the orders could easily be replaced: Just turn the touchscreens around so that customers can enter their own orders, and then swipe a card to pay. Grocery stores have already done this, and so have banks. Fast food is next.
I don't understand why they haven't done so already -- I assume it's because they don't think their customers are ready for touch-screen ordering. Starbucks could do it too -- with their pushbutton espresso machines, they don't really need a human barista for most drinks.
I can tell you why... I witnessed it firsthand. My mall food court had this system in the early 1990's. People would place orders via the touchscreen and then the food would be prepared. I saw the place get trolled (someone ordered 10 large fries at once and walked away). Obviously, this was before credit card swipes were allowed for payment so it was a cash business, and payment was collected when the food was presented.
Yeah, that system didn't last long.
But if they collect payment at the time of order, that problem goes away.
Now the likely issue would be trolls ordering bizarre combinations and then claiming there was a mistake/demanding a refund.
Seems like if their receipt says "Hamburger with extra strawberries", they'd have a hard time saying that they didn't order that - and really the cost of fast food is so low that throwing away a bad order every once in a while isn't a huge expense.
As for self-checkout, most places I saw experiment with those in the past two years (grocery stores and Costco) has ripped them out and gone back to using human cashiers. The reasons? Fraud/theft
I can see why it wouldn't work well at Costco - lots of incentive to swap barcodes to get a 55" TV for the price of a $5.99 lawnchair, and they can't easily do a weight check like grocery store self-checkouts.
But it seems to work well in grocery stores - to the point that if there is more than one person in line in the staffed line, I'll go to the self-checkout because it's faster - the checkout clerk may be faster at scanning than I am, but I inevitably get stuck behind someone that didn't realize that they'd have to present payment for their purchase and wait until after the cashier tells them the total to get out their wallet and fish around for a credit card.... or worse, a check.
I've even gotten pretty good at remembering or looking up produce codes
and speed (trained cashiers are faster, who would have thought?).
I don't think any store exec ever thought that customers would be faster at self checkout than human clerks (especially when the scanners purposely slow you down to verify that you've put each item into the bagging area), but when they can put in 4 or 6 self-checkout lines per human operator, even if the checkout process itself is slower, you can still get out of the store faster.
Walmart and big box home improvement stores are the outliers still offering self-checkout in my area.
Home improvement stores seem like the worst place for self-checkout -- at my store they don't have hand scanners at self-checkout, so you need to maneuver everything over the little scanner window, even large pieces of lumber, unless the attendant isn't already busy, sees you struggling, and comes over with the wireless scanner.
Of course, if products were tagged with RFID chips, then self-checkout could work effortlessly, like in the old IBM commercial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Exclusivity agreements from local governments come about because it would be foolish to have multiple competing companies digging up the roads to lay their own lines, creating constant traffic issues and massive, unnecessary overhead costs.
The solution to this is to have only private roads. If a privately owned utility company wants to run cables in the right-of-way or a privately owned road company then the two entities can negotiate the appropriate compensation. If they authorize too many of these projects and congestion increases as a result then drivers who use the road can negotiate with another road company that has faster roads more to their liking. Of course if only one road company services their property then they will need to sell their property and buy some elsewhere that is serviced by another road company. Hopefully they weren't stupid when they bought their property and have a contract with the road company to allow them to remove their belongings using the road company's road. If the road company tries to deny access to the moving trucks then they can simply seek compensation in a privately owned court. Or they can avoid all that by using helicopters to move their stuff, although first they will have to negotiate with the owners of the airspace between their old home and their new one.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
As for self-checkout, most places I saw experiment with those in the past two years (grocery stores and Costco) has ripped them out and gone back to using human cashiers. The reasons? Fraud/theft and speed (trained cashiers are faster, who would have thought?). Walmart and big box home improvement stores are the outliers still offering self-checkout in my area.
Grocery stores are pushing these. There's one near work that has 20 of the self-check and two regular. The lines for the self-check are huge, and move very fast because there are so many machines (one line feeding all 20, and one employee handling exceptions and problems and directing people to empty machines in busy times, as it can be hard to see them all from the line). People love it. Much faster than the previous setup of 8 humans. This particular chain has had in self-checkers for 5+ years, so they apparently don't mind the theft, if any. It's the super-fast "12 or fewer" line. Some in other stores have no limits on items, and took the place of a regular checkout line
Learn to love Alaska
I see a lot of government-encouraged monopolies. Small players are trying to enter the transportation market by setting up bus services, and are getting hounded out of the market by the government. Uber and the like are fighting against the taxi cartels. New players in telecom are having to fight against old government-established monopolies.
Small players are doing just fine in many markets. There are small credit unions all over the place. I lived for years in Tucson on groceries bought from a local chain (which tended to stock either fresh produce or canned goods prepared by someone other than the big players), plus fruit sold by an old guy and his wife out of a rickety stand and a truck. I bought computer parts from a one-off shop, outdoor equipment from a one-off shop, got auto glasswork done by a garage run by Mexican immigrants (who were professional as hell), etc.
Some things are more efficiently done by big players. There are about seven companies in the world that make cameras (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Pentax, plus some boutique players like Leica and Hasselblad), because the engineering required is specialized and the equipment expensive. Not that many people make CPU's, because it's so hard to do. But even in the virtual duopoly of computer chips (AMD/Intel), I can pay about $100 for a fast-enough quad core CPU with an integrated GPU that performs very well. We live in a world where if you want something, someone will make it for you for a pretty fair price.
Consider that a middle-class person (wage $20/hour or $40k/year) can, by working ten hours, buy a handheld computer, and with three hours per month of labor, pay for a cellular connection that will let her access essentially any information known to humanity, or communicate with nearly anyone on the planet in realtime. It wasn't that long ago that my father only called his father on Sundays when long-distance rates were cheaper. Now I can have a video call in 720p with someone in Japan or Germany at the drop of a hat. We are doing pretty well.
The market system, overall, does a very good job at enriching folks -- and not just wealthy folks. Mexico has made huge gains in the last few decades by making stuff and selling it to folks who want it. Brazil was once a third-world country; now they make airplanes.
Do people sometimes game the system and get things through ways other than mutually beneficial trades? Sure. But that doesn't mean the system's broken.
Betcha if there is a pretty little girl in a short skirt at the checkout, next to a self serve, then you would happily stand in the 50 person line-up...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
So what's the cashiers' excuse for not doing it correctly? :-D
No, seriously. I tend to order things with various customizations (e.g. no [insert ingredient]). I haven't done the math, but I suspect that I have at least a 10% return rate at many businesses. How hard is it to push "Only" followed by the ingredients that the customer specifies? Point-of-sales systems suck, but at least if I'm in control of it, I can see that the order is right, and if it is wrong, it's my fault.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Some places do this already. There's a chain in Pennsylvania (and elsewhere) called Sheetz; they are gas stations + fast food places, and they have little touch screens. You type in what you want, you pay for it, someone makes it and gives it to you. It's very well done; the folks are friendly and the food not bad for what it is. Other places have little paper tickets: you write down what you want (ticking boxes for things like "no cheese") and give it to someone, who takes three seconds to clip it to a rail where the preparers will see it and make your food. Then you take your ticket and pay.
Greed
I'd rather have millions of corporate overlords than 1 government overlord.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Pure capitalism is letting the market decide which leads to the monopolization of industries.
Nope.
Nobody's ever succeeded in establishing a coercive monopoly without government backing. In a free market, monopoly is a non-issue. For example, when Alcoa was the only vendor of Aluminum in the United States, the pricing of aluminum fell continuously.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Communism has never been tried on a large scale.
Bullshit. It's been tried many times, and its body count is pushing a hundred million.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Note that the prime weapon against any populace is secrecy. Secrecy yields ignorance. Slaves were not allowed to read. Employees are forbidden from informing others of their earnings -- WTF? The governments all now have secret agencies. Actions can be dismissed as necessary for some other secret cause. Corruption requires power and secrecy, for without the secrecy the power soon fades.
Thus, those with power should be forbade secrecy of action when they wield it. Accountability depends on awareness and is inherently anti-secrecy. We should be able to prove our rulers are not working against us. Education is key in this regard and that of dealing with automation.
Let's face it: The more dangerous menial jobs are wasting entire human brains worth of potential. Eliminating the drudgery need not result in joblessness. Someone will be needed to design and maintain the automatons. Even simply expressing your humanity is rewarded by society in the arts. Teams of researchers will be needed to run experiments -- The problem is in underpaying researchers for their research. It takes the same effort to produce a success as to rule something out as a failure, and many discoveries have come by accident from mostly unrelated research.
The copyright and patent system are futures markets for ideas. Instead of marketing that which is scarce -- the effort to crafting and testing ideas -- these systems leverage artificial scarcity against humanity and the creators themselves. Corporations are thus able to cherry pick the individual products of creators to reward them. This is the Information Age! Your are on The Internet! Where is the Wikipedia of freely accessible Scientific Studies that the web was created explicitly to facilitate?! Hidden behind paywalls of Journals, and duplication forbidden to create scarcity of otherwise infinitively reproducible bits.
Instead of hobbling ourselves with artificial scarcity, we should market what is scarce and simply require the capitalists to pay the price that our efforts are truly worth. Enough secrecy in our salaries and governments; Enough artificial scarcity. As a cyberneticist I see secrecy and artificial scarcity as two sides of the same coin: Evil is Information Disparity.
You're a human being with a reasonably competent understanding of basic technological concepts. There is a LARGE portion of the population who does not meet this criteria. [/understatement]
There are people who cannot grasp the concept of putting 3 color coded wires from one box into the back of another box. There are people who cannot understand the difference between their tv remote and their cable remote, and are probably the same people who need someone to clearly show them how to use their remote even though the purpose of each button is clearly labeled. Switching inputs on a TV between a cable box and a DVD player is a challenge to these sorts of people. And these are some examples of a technology (the tv) practically everyone is familiar with, the examples I've given are not new technological developments for TVs, these sorts of capabilities have existed on TVs since the 90s, giving roughly 2 decades for people to become familiar with them. But it still confuses the heck out of a good 20% of the population.
These are people who have trouble working their microwave and you expect them to suddenly work a touch screen order taker, and not screw it up? Not likely. And guess who these people are going to blame for their failure to operate? I mean it obviously wasn't their fault that your machine didn't understand that when I said only ketchup, I meant I didn't want mustard, I still wanted the pickles and onions.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
If nobody values it, why are they paying at all?
If we want to just go with basic income, that's one thing, but otherwise, I don't care to subsidize some cheapskate's payroll. I would actually rather see someone 100% supported by public funds than doing work for someone paying starvation wages. This is for the same reason I don't care to pay their power bill for them or the repair bills on their machinery.
Arguably, the bare minimum worth of a person's time is the cost of a living (at least a minimum living). There is a certain element of ethical sickness to using desperation to cause someone to work for less than it costs to keep them and their family alive.
I'm guessing that about the time the stench from the restrooms starts driving customers away, McDonald's will discover a way to hire someone to clean them at the increased minimum wage at least. The same will be true of many jobs.
While it is tragic, I agree. Many low-paid jobs are low-paid because many people that do them do not care about the quality of their work. It is incredible what mistakes are made, products damaged and destroyed, customers made to suffer damage. This costs a lot and decreases service quality to a degree that you may lose customers. And you cannot use people with a passion for these slots, they will just leave again after a short while because they are bored.
Incidentally, a lot of outsourced programming suffers from the same symptoms: Code produced without understanding or interest in the matter. The few that care in outsourcing move rapidly to better jobs. The ones that stay are the dross and what they produce has negative worth.
On the side of how these people can participate in the economy, quite frankly paying them a stipend they can live of reasonably to _not_ work would be economically beneficial. It may sound harsh, but not working is the point of maximum productivity for them. And while we are at it, all bureaucrats should go the same way, the very core of what they do is destroying the productivity of others.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
>Yes, this approach has been tried. It's called the Labor Theory of Value as per Marx. It's been a disaster everywhere it's been tried
You have no idea what you're talking about. The Labor Theory of Value was written by John Locke and pre-dates Marx by nearly 2 centuries ! It also is not communist - in fact it's the basis of BOTH capitalism AND communism (and a few other economic philosophies as well) - they all use Locke's labour theory of value as their starting premise - they differ in what they subsequently conclude we should *do* about it and how society should be structured *because* of it. Locke's labour theory of value is cited with equal frequency by Marx and Adam Smith, by Lenin and Murray Rothbard, by Milton Friedman and by Che Guevara. It is the basis of all property laws everywhere in the world today.
Worst of all - the labour theory of value is *not* what the parent described - what he described is a conclusion one may *draw* from the labour theory of value in certain contexts - but it is not the theory itself. The labour theory of value instead dictates that natural resources have no economic value and cannot be property, they gain economic value only through the addition of human labour and only when this addition happens can they *become* private property (of the person who mixed his labour with it).
A piece of land is economically worthless, but plow it and plant corn (or dig it up and build a mine) and you're extracting value from it through labour - what used to be public since it couldn't *be* property can now be justly defined to become property because it gained value from labour.
That is the labour theory of value - nothing more, nothing less - and it's not communist nor is it capitalist - it is the inspiration of BOTH and the foundation of all modern property laws.
Rothbard uses the labour theory of value to argue that American settlers gained proper ownership of the land through "homesteading" (of course - in Rothbard's mind -what Native Americans did on the land for ten thousand years before wasn't "really" labour or something ...), Marx used it to conclude that the workers of a business are the only ones who deserve to gain profit and there should BE no "owners", Lenin decided the only way to achieve THAT was with a state with absolute power and fucked the whole thing up (I don't think he is right actually - I actually think Marxism would be MORE compatible with anarchism than authoritarianism and if that was tried it may actually *work* - we have enough examples that prove authoritarianism never works, I'm not convinced the failure of the communist states could not be entirely attributed to the results of dictatorship rather than economic failure)
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You know what else! Buggy whip manufactures are all out of business as we speak. Oh wait we don't want those anyway. Ah, i got it. Potato pickers are all out of work. Work where they would intereact with each other and have income. And now all replaced by a few machines. Rise up and, wait what?
The idea that we need to keep menial unsatisfying jobs around to "keep people employed" is stupid. Seriously stupid. If your version of human interaction is ordering a bugger at McD's you are a sad person.
If this is what you want. Join the Amish.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Right, in a holistic sense, everything a company does is about maximising money in, and minimising money out.
However, the point the OP is making is that this isn't a simple case of how much a computer/robot costs per hour or per unit vs the human cost of doing the same thing. Such that a change in the minimum wage would in some elastic way change the number of jobs that are automated.
His point is that automation is typically a fundamental change in the way of doing business, and will be driven by considerations far bigger than cost per hour or per unit.
In fact it may be that a business would automate even if staff would work for free. That may be the only way to compete. He gives the example of the inability of postal workers to compete with email for example, regardless of pay rates.
Yes. He had good argument.
No, he had shit argument. Here it is again, since you apparently failed to understand the ramifications the first time: "A handful of people that cannot feed themselves simply IS less important than keeping a whole society functional." Guess what? If your society can't feed its people, it isn't functional. It is, in fact, dysfunctional by definition.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A lot of Made in America clothing was actually made in the Northern Mariana Islands which is a US Commonwealth like Puerto Rico. The minimum wage from 1997 to 2007 was $3.05 making it cost effective to produce clothing there. The minimum wage was raised in 2007 and is currently $5.05 with plans to make it equal with the US federal minimum wage by 2015. Unfortunately when the minimum wage was raised, the Northern Marianas were no longer able to complete with China and by 2009 the island's garment industry went caput.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
I used to work in the IT dept. for a company that replaced forklift drivers with highly automated forklifts
An aside: From what I've noticed, it's not the 'low-wage/no-skill' jobs that are being automated out of existence, but more the mid-range work in both terms of skill required and pay rate: Forklift operators, machinists, welders, et. al. are the ones losing jobs to robots, not fast food workers.
We can fantasize all day about minimum wage based myths of automation, but the reality of the matter is that it's not the poor who are being automated out of work, it's the middle class.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
A major grocery chain where I live brought in automated checkout machines. So instead of having by shopping scanned in by a trained professional, I was expected to scan in items myself in a poorly designed working area while a computer with the voice of a calm genteel London accept patiently and repeatedly insisted I scan the items again and again as the queue grew longer and longer behind me.
So, I started going to the shop down the road with people still behind the tills. The food is generally better there too.
May the Maths Be with you!
You're confused. Capitalism no longer works if the workers can be replaced by machines. We'll have to shift to a more socialist system of we don't want a dystopia where a very few hold all the wealth.
Or the hurdles Tesla is facing trying to sell their cars without conventional 'dealerships' in several states...
Ken
I'd be surprised if those guys don't have hobbies or knowledge that could benefit others. From running a youth sports team, to gardening or habitat renewal. Their are all sorts of things people will do if you remove the financial incentives.
But, go ahead, toss that human on the trash heap...
Cheap storage VM.