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Robot Workers' Real Draw: Reducing Dependence on Human Workers
HughPickens.com writes: Zeynep Tufekci writes in an op-ed at the NY Times that machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who's in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. It turns out most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data. "Machines aren't used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a "good enough" job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans," writes Tufekci. "Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."
According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers' dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we've been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills. Tufekci points out that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."
According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers' dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we've been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills. Tufekci points out that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."
He may well believe that past results are no indication of future results, there's one overwhelmingly important fact that comes to mind: noone will be able to buy the stuff made in the robot factories if we're all unemployed or minimum wage serfs.
And if noone can buy the stuff, the owners aren't going to get rich selling the stuff. Which means THEY won't be able to buy stuff either....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So... who exactly is going to buy all of these things when no one has any money because all the jobs have been replaced by robots?
As an automotive engineer, we "employ" hundreds of robots at different points of assembly to replace people but the cost of anything hasnt really gone down. A car used to take 12 years to design from scratch, then 7, now 5, because we simulate most of what we're doing and machines are just so much faster than humans when it comes to manufacturing things. We use palletizer robots to stack things, transport bots to send parts from one department to another, painter bots that simulate their own paint path and are self-optimizing, and of course armies of welders that never get tired, or sick, or bored, or angry. the result is a better product and our average vehicle can routinely last 500k or more miles without any problems that would constitute buying a new car. Heck, our door lock motors will outlast the owner.
so for me, robots mean the death of not just work, but commerce and capitalism as well. our rework and repair department is one guy. What is there left to buy? who is buying it? if endless consumption just leaves peole feeling hollow and everything we have works just fine, then gains from efficiency aside you're still faced with rampant unemployment and a nonexistent place to sell a product that isnt needed. Sure, we sex up our products all the time with girls in skirts and some deadpan guy mumbling neurotic platitudes in the rain, but does anyone really buy into the idea that a sixty grand car is going to get them laid? We've become desparately predatory such that selling an SUV pushes so many unconscious buttons for ones safety and security that we're practically insisting anything less is suicide when all our vehicles are nearly identical in crash ratings.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Everyone has this odd fantasy where robots replace all our jobs, so we all learn to be machine workers and maintain the robots. 10,000 jobs lost to robots means 10,000 new machine worker jobs; or, even better, 20,000 new engineering, machinist, and so forth jobs.
That would be expensive. Cheap, unskilled labor replaced by robot labor requiring the input of twice as much expensive, skilled labor? The whole premise is that you're replacing 10,000 $8/hr sandwich makers with 10,000 robots each supplying $25/hr to engineers, maintenance people, and so forth. 10,000 x $8/hr = $80,000/hr; 10,000 x $25/hr = $250,000/hr. We're imagining robots will cost less than humans, so obviously there must be less human labor involved in the building, operating, maintaining, and fueling of these robots.
The truth is robots will take our jobs, just like in the Industrial Revolution. 10,000 workers will become 10 robots supported by 100 workers who each make twice as much: 10,000 workers become 100 workers at the cost of 200 workers. Of course, that means your goods and services suddenly carry 1/500 of the human labor cost. Now, let's assume food becomes 20% cheaper--this is a poor assumption, based on fast food service labor being rated at 14% (at McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, and so forth, 14% is a common number: if the wages of your floor staff exceed 14% of your revenue for the hour, you start sending people home early), which is wholly unrelated to most food purchase. Still, let's use that for a base assumption and see what happens.
Well, first off, the average middle-class person may spend $300/month on food; it's possible, with discipline, to get down as low as $35/month, and in fact $100/mo is a good target, and I've personally eaten lots of sushi and chicken and bacon and eggs and mushrooms at $120/mo (dry beans and ramen diet be damned). Let's use $300 and $100. a poor person suddenly spends $80, and a middle-class person spends $240 on food. Food being 20% cheaper, there's $60 more in each middle-class pocket every month, and $20 more in the pockets of the poor.
Propagate this out to other goods and services. If, on average, you save even 10%, that's a good $800 billion extra in people's pockets. There's room for another $800 billion luxury industry--video games or smart phones, for example. These industries may or may not automate well, and so you will find new jobs to create, and possibly a lot of new jobs where automation hasn't caught up. These jobs only require some cheap human labor that's difficult to automate, and so your basis of unemployed McDonalds sandwich makers becomes your new basis for the next new product or service.
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Also in headlines "Tech Worker Shortage Just Ruse to Get More Indentured-Servant H1B's"
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
We will have to rethink how our economy works. Present consumer spending-driven 9-5 5 days a week until 65 system won't work when there is no need for that much human labor. History showed us that at around 20% unemployment systemic societal unrest starts, and at around 30% unemployment radicalization and regime changes happen.
Maybe unwanted labor will establish new markets for creative process. I see this as very unlikely scenario, since average person isn't that creative. Plus whole 'starving artist' does not scale up to population levels. Alternatively, we can go down to 4 days a week or 10-4 days or all have 3 month per year vacations.
This has long been one of my predictions with robots; that when they are actually good at something they will be awesome. So many of our manufactured goods are becoming fantastically reliable because of the reduced reliance on humans. When you buy stuff it just rarely comes broken anymore. Also if you look at the failure graphs on many goods the graph is becoming less and less a bell curve and just a giant spike at the point where some critical part will just wear out due to physics rather than sloppy manufacturing.
But where I see them really kicking ass and taking names is in agriculture where you could have a robot sweep down a field of fruit and only harvest that fruit that is perfectly ripe, then to come back hours later and harvest the now ripe fruit, and so on for the entire harvest. The same with earlier phases of growing, such as diligently picking the weeds every day, or watering and fertilizing only those plants that exactly need it. Can you imagine some working walking along taking soil samples by each plant and then making the correct adjustments. Or picking the bugs off each plant and crushing them?
Then there will be things like road construction, landscaping, building construction, road maintenance, etc. With these I can see a situation where not only are the robots cheaper at doing these things but they do them with such perfection that people would take any suggestion to use people as just foolish. For instance right now my city is filled with potholes and cracks in the road that will pretty much certainly become potholes. I would love a robot that went around filling these in to perfection. 50-100 of these robots could probably keep the streets in my city basically perfect. The same with sidewalk/park/road cleaning robots as the streets in my city are filthy. The occasional large sweeping machine is just not enough. Again 50-100 machines could make my city Truman show perfect.
The problem is the people with money are only concerned with making more money and having more power. Jobs will go away, and rather than innovate we'll have a very painful growth period in which some people will fall through the massive cracks in the system and be left there.
If we actually care about one another (or more cynically want to avoid the potentially violent unrest that can accompany mass unemployment) we need to do at a minimum make sure everyone is taken care of. I'd say we need to find a way to make everyone feel useful and productive. To do that, we need to rethink how we spend human effort and to what end. If we evolve technologically to the point that jobs aren't about catering the whims of the wealthy or subsistence - why not explore creating an economy of exploration and human evolution? Why not pour our wealth into educating people and increase the number of people who can play a part in helping us live longer, explore the universe, and enjoy life more? Let's replace menial jobs with scientists and artists.
Because left to their own devices, the kings of capital will let the workers replaced by robots starve and rot.
India and China were devastated, they had no clue of what was hitting them, they were reduced abject poverty and penury, to less than 5% of the GDP. The high paying jobs were created in Europe, and the number of higher paying jobs created were far less than the number destroyed if you take a global view. Only if you limit yourself to Europe you would see comparable number of new jobs being created. The Luddites were right.
Now finally it is lapping up the shores of the so called developed countries too. Finally it is affecting the upper middle class. Upper middle class are the real henchmen for the super rich. Without the upper middle class professionals siding up with the super rich, they could not stack the system in their favor. The super rich got too greedy and now they are taking from the 99% to 99.5% too. As long as they took from the bottom 95% and left enough for the 95% to 99.5% they could continue to grow. But when the life time earnings of a surgeon or a dentist or a CPA or midlevel MBA does not put them in the top 1% by net worth, they are going to rebel. And they are the ones who would succeed in such revolution without destroying everything else in the process.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."
It's sounding more like oppression to me.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
if the ultimate capitalist pursuit of removing all human workers results in production without any cost, then they have delivered the ultimate socialist utopia: everything costs $0, no one having to work
all that has to be removed is the mendacity that will still seek rent for the existing machinery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Companies have gotten really good a simplifying human jobs so that new hires with few skills can be quickly trained up to replace underperforming or otherwise problematic workers. There are high paying management jobs (a few of them) for producing and optimizing employment manuals, procedures, performance targets and input kiosks so that the absolute lowest common denominator hire can quickly fill a void.
As an example McDonalds "upgraded" their order taking turrets from using words for each food item to pictures for each food item. That meant they could employ people who couldn't read, because I guess literacy was a limiting requirement in their hiring process. McDonalds employs over 400,000 people. Just a small "savings" across that employment base is worth millions. That millions of savings get's split between shareholders and the top tier of management who designs and implements these "process enhancements".
And the new thing is to order online from your smartphone and pick it up at the counter. That gets rid of the order taker entirely and you can staff with mostly "behind the scenes" worker bees that don't even have to speak English. That is until you can get a robot to make the food too.
Call centers have been doing this for years with average call time metrics, flow charts for addressing caller needs, etc... It's happening in lots and lots of industries now.
As part of the past not being an indication of future results, I think people need to stop looking at the mid-20th century as the only model for an economy.
The 20th century saw the creation of the middle class as we think of it today. The wealthy needed a more skilled workforce to produce the products new technologies had made possible. The middle class was simply a byproduct of this need. Industrious people found a way to benefit from this more affluent working class and an entire new class of consumer was born.
The late 20th century saw the creation of the upper middle class. Additional advances in technology now meant the wealthy needed an even more skilled workforce. The upper middle class was simply a byproduct of this need. This upper middle class has much more disposable income than the middle class, so you start to see a shift in the type of products that exist in the economy. Instead of bargain food and bargain products, you see more fancy restaurants, Whole Foods, iPads, etc. It appears that an entire new class of consumer has been born again.
I see no reason why the economy cannot keep humming along selling its products to the upper middle class. The most profitable company in the world (Apple) sells almost exclusively to the upper middle class. The buzz created by selling to this market also makes the middle class stretch their dollars more to buy these expensive goods and services to "keep up with the Jones-es" (households with $60k income probably shouldn't spend money on iPhones, but they still do). The shrinking of the middle class hasn't seemed to hurt companies at all because they have this new more affluent market to sell to.
Over the next 20 years I expect the top 10% of households to have even more wealth than they do today, and the range of luxury products sold to them will be remarkable even by today's standards. The rest of the population will likely take on service related jobs for very low pay relative to the upper middle class, and will probably be very dependent on society for covering basic living expenses. I don't see this as a utopian world by any means, but it is what I expect to happen.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke