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Walmart Is Cutting 7,000 Jobs Due To Automation (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo: The clairvoyant folks over at the World Economic Forum warned of a "Fourth Industrial Revolution" involving the rise of the machine in the workforce, and the latest company to lend credence to that claim is none other than Walmart, which is planning on cutting 7,000 jobs on account of automation. But the Walmart decision may be a bit more alarming for those in the workforce. As the Wall Street Journal reports (Warning: may be paywalled), the most concerning aspect of America's largest private employer might be that the eliminated positions are largely in the accounting and invoicing sectors of the company. These jobs are typically held by some of the longest tenured employees, who also happen to take home higher hourly wages. Now, those coveted positions are being automated. The Journal reports that beginning in 2017, much of this work will be addressed by "a central office or new money-counting 'cash recycler' machines in stores." Earlier this year, the company tested this change across some 500 locations. "We've seen many make smooth transitions during the pilot," said Deisha Barnett, a Walmart spokeswoman.
The sooner robots replace the workforce, the more leisure time we will have to enjoy life.
Automation: Taking all the lower to middle class jobs (soon to be upper middle class jobs like lawyers/doctors).
Illegals: Taking all the lower class jobs
Insourcing: Taking all the lower to middle class jobs
Outsourcing: Taking all the middle class jobs
Face it, if you're not making millions because you were born rich and/or know the right people, you can and will be replaced by one of these methods soon enough.
Save your money. Diversify. Prepare for a forced early retirement.
There are many bromides applicable here ... too much of a good thing, tiger by the tail, as you sow so shall you reap. The point is that too often Man becomes clever instead of becoming wise, he becomes inventive and not thoughtful, and sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Whipple, he can create himself right out of existence. As in tonight's tale of oddness and obsolescence in the Twilight Zone.
closing narration, The Brain Center at Whipple's
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The sooner robots replace the workforce, the more leisure time we will have to enjoy life.
Uh... no.
The measure of the US is its economy. So long as the corporations are making ever more profit, so long as GDP is on the rise, then we're doing great and nothing needs to be changed.
The people's needs count for nothing, it's the corporations and only the corporations that make our country great!
Everything is not rosy with Walmart's penchant to do away with workers. One thing is an exploding crime problem at their stores because there is not enough personnel around. Who wants to go shopping in a crime zone? That and a popular local Walmart has an extremely hard time keeping the store shelves stocked. It's wonderful to have low prices, but I usually am wasting my time going there only to see empty shelves.
So disposing of workers only goes so far. I simply do not believe that our android workers will arrive in the near future to mitigate these problems created by lack of workers.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
That store is really unpleasant to enter. Be great if robots could be sent in to do the shopping....
Oh, wait, that's amazon....
And there is no economic model to tell us how that is going to work. But, not far in the future - many of us will see it, if we don't kill ourselves off first, all manual labor will be automated. And soon after that there will be no labor required to produce any products - production and distribution will be totally automated. At that point labor will have no value and our world economy will cease to exist.
Speaking of Henry Ford - a couple of posts above did - the Ford Motor Company many years ago "automated" it's accounting system that required very low level personnel. It was determined that an average debit statement was for a certain dollar amount and the same for credit documents. They also knew the number of documents in a pound of them. The "accountants" simply weighed stacks of the two kinds of documents to determine their respective values. No computers, no thick books of records (spreadsheets) requiring meticulous data entry, just weigh stacks of sorted papers occasionally to determine income and expenses. Walmart could do the same thing, though it would require a lot of paper.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Yes, the benevolent, all-knowing central planners have signaled the following over the past three decades: the central banks will collude to keep interest rates extremely low, and minimum wages will continue to increase in many jurisdictions. After all, these planners are more qualified than market participants to determine who should get paid what.
Regardless of one's political inclinations, I find it interesting how these factors (along with the ones you mentioned) interact to move the goalposts, i.e., when automation makes financial sense. Money is cheap and labor, especially at the low end, is comparatively expensive, assuming it's on the books. (To your list I would also add licensing requirements for all sorts of professions and trades.) But at the end of the day, if you use the power of the state to make it difficult to hire, employ, and fire people, enterprises will just figure out how to avoid employing them in the fist place, starting with the bottom of the ladder first. Then everyone can be on the dole and vote for the politicians that keep the handouts flowing!
...up for replacement soon. It's not just the manual laborers that are on the chopping block. We need to be preparing for a world where there is literally not enough work to go around.
#1 Walmart employs around 2 million people worldwide. This does not even move the needle. #2 This has been happening for years. First it was the adding machine, then the electronic calculator, then the big computers, then the smaller ones. This should not come as a shock to anyone.
Hopefully you are arguing for a guaranteed income in that case. Because of course, someone needs to buy the goods that walmart resells, or "middlemans".
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Automation is inevitable as the capital cost falls. But increasing the cost of human labor accelerates the process significantly. Creative destruction is a good thing, but it does hurt individuals temporarily who will need to retrain and adjust. So the pace is no small thing, and accelerating the transformation is not benign.
That's the usual march of progress, as long as people find new jobs that's fine. If everyone were fit for higher education as doctors, engineers, lawyers and so on we'd not mourn the loss of taxi drivers and burger flippers. Not everyone is looking to solve hard, creative problems at work. Me, I'd probably get bored otherwise but lots and lots of people just want to be trained in a task, do that task and collect their paycheck. Those kinds of "doer" jobs are the prime targets for automation and disappearing across the board.
Every time they list a position with hardly any education or experience necessary, there's a massive number of applicants and it ends up a game of musical chairs where most people don't get the job. I know a few people on disability benefit, I'd say for a century ago they'd be deemed "simpletons" and had some basic menial labor. A few hundred years ago most people were illiterate but they still had jobs, today I'd say an illiterate person is mostly unemployable so it's already happened a bit. But now it might start eating into a significant fraction of the population.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
where everything, including housing is free = jail / prison. And they have doctors that do more then the ER and don't say we don't take Medicaid
Industrial Revolution counting is a bit of a problem. The first two Industrial Revolutions are pretty much agreed on. The First (of course) from 1770 to 1850, when factories and steam power revolutionized the textile industry and transportation, and the second with the rise of the chemical industry and assembly line production from 1870 to 1914. Widespread use of electricity and the internal combustion engine after 1920 is often considered the Third Industrial Revolution, but some people consider it an extension of the second.
Then we have the advent of computers, the "Digital Revolution." It seems clear that this was, indeed revolutionary, but this is not usually called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, because while important, it seems less profound than the first three which utterly transformed civilization beyond recognition. So just giving it it's own name seems appropriate.
Similarly, I think we should call what is happening now the "Cybernetic Revolution", rather than trying to decide whether this the Third, or Fourth, or maybe even Fifth IR. It is truly revolutionary, harnessing the cumulative power of the digital revolution to bring about truly unprecedented levels of task automation. And it will, I believe, resemble the First IR more than the other two in a very important way - large numbers of jobs are going to be eliminated rapidly, with nothing to replace them. The FIR threw almost 20% of Britain out of work between 1770 and 1800, creating a wave of petty crime, a huge population of paupers, Dickensian slums, and poor houses - essentially prisons for people who had committed no crimes. The new industrial economy did not provide enough jobs to restore full employment until 1840, or even later, 70 years of destitution.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
will the "spokeswoman" position become automated?
This is what's going to happen as people try to force $15 for bottom-rung unskilled jobs.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Doing my part to be a good corporate citizen, I recently agreed to be the "independent" member of a recruitment panel at my organisation, for some mid-ranking accountant positions. I'm not an accountant myself, but our HR rules dictate that one member of any recruitment panel must be from outside the area of the business that's hiring.
To be frank, I didn't really have the best idea of what accountants did with their days, but over the course of a week of interviews, I started to pick some of it up. And the first thing that crossed my mind as I did so was "oh wow, these jobs are going to be done by computers within a few years". So much of it wasn't much more than interaction with already highly automated software tools. It was clear that it would only take one more, fairly thin layer of automation on top of this, combined with a bit of automated business information gathering, for the human role at this grade to be eliminated.
We're generally a long way from the front of the automation curve (that's putting things mildly), so I'm sure things are much further along elsewhere. What's going to make this rough, though, is that these are jobs with a fairly high requirement in terms of education and professional qualification. Moreover, and I admit this may be a UK-specific problem, accountancy is a career that has long been seen as high status in some of our immigrant communities, particularly those from the Indian subcontinent and parts of the Middle East. So if the 20 or so applicants I saw for the posts we were hiring for are any indication (all bar one of whom were either Asian or Middle Eastern), the "costs" of this wave of automation are going to fall heavily on those communities.
This. What did central bankers expect to happen when they started giving away money for almost free? They made it mandatory for corporations to automate everything that can be automated - if you don't do it your competition will.
Accounting and invoicing...
That's the people that sort stacks of paper, that copy/paste numbers from one spreadsheet to another, that have shorter lines to upper management, that are expected to linger around a company as necessary overhead, that have to be wooed in order to get necessary and over due stuff done and that are never targeted when optimizing. Yet now that are.
Seems logical. But I had expected blue collar to be sacked first. And that A&I would have been able to delay the chopping block (most likely that will have.)
Let's face it. Crap jobs will vanish and will be replaced by cheaper and better better machines. The question is how we as a society will adapt to these changes. More people will be affected that we can imagine. Unemployed will become the default occupation. The unemployed will be so of no fault of their own. Letting these people rot is not just immoral but will cause riots and unrest.
I believe in meritocracy and not in utopia. But reality seems to push us towards the latter. Interesting times are a-changin' (but not exactly like Bob intended.)
With so much time on our hands, will we all become enlightened or will we turn into a bunch of feckless morons?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
It should read "Walmart is Cutting 7000 Jobs THANKS to Automation"
Would that be Bernie as in Made-off?
In our time, automation is mostly an excuse for the transfer of wealth and power into ever fewer hands.
I know, I know... I am a communist, socialist and all the rest of it, but it makes sense.
There are 1 basic rule of capitalism. Survival of the fittest.
It turns out, however, that survival of the fittest is not always the best approach when you want to hold a society together. That is why we have things like anti monopoly rules. The "end game" for capitalism is to eliminate all competition so that in the end, there is only one.
This of course is massively short sighted, given that most of the population will won't have jobs and then cannot afford to buy your stuff. Especially since most so many people in the US firmly believe that if you lose your job, you should be homeless and starve to death if you cannot find a new job in time. Being good the Christians that they are.
That is same with automation, It should not be allowed. Can low level jobs be replaced with robots? Of course they can. But what the fuck are the people going to do for work?
Is everyone going to be a manager?
Is everyone going to start their own business?
No, of course not. Instead, those people will go hungry. They will go without insurance. Their kids will not have an education.
This is bad for everyone.
Of course, we all know that we are at a point where most food items and "stuff" can be made nearly with complete automation. We can produce enough for every single person to eat and have a place to live and clothes on their back.
But... We wont. Because those people are lazy, and should die. Right?
Eventually, that will happen. Or at least I hope. But until that time, those people "need" jobs.
You do not "need" a cheaper iphone. You only "want" cheaper stuff.
Next time you shop at a discount store, ask yourself.. why is this item so much cheaper than the local mom and pop shop? What is this really costing me?
So, in the US, we automate agriculture enough to get the workforce down to 2% of the population. Then we automate enough of the manufacturing sector to reduce it to 8% of the population, not including the millions of offahored factory jobs. Then we tell everyone they have to go to college and get at least a 4 year degree to have any hope of a stable future. The vast majority of people at non-top tier universities are doing the minimum required to get a degree, majoring in business or psychology or communications. In the past, all of those people were absorbed into random entry-level positions doing the kind of work Walmart is now automating. It's a ritual - party through 4 years, show up at the campus career center during your senior year, do a few interviews and pick Random Large Employer to work for as a Random Paper Processing Position. What exactly are people proposing that we do with these "C students," who number in the millions and contribute to society through taxes, buying stuff and raising little C students?
- Most of them don't have the aptitude for tech careers (many of which are being automated as well...)
- Most of them can't be trained in a skilled trade without asking them to go back through another 4 years of apprenticeship
- Almost none can become doctors, lawyers, etc. because the competition is so keen to get in to medical/law school
- They can't be investment bankers or management consultants, because those professions only recruit from the Ivy League
I know it's no one's dream to process paperwork, but it has traditionally been one of the most stable ways for middle-skilled people to earn a living and have a career. Students starting out as a Associate Paper Processor have the opportunity to become a Senior Paper Processor, then a Paper Processor Supervisor, Manager of Paper Processing, Director of Document Services, and so on. For everyone in corporate IT, think of all the paper processors we directly support, working away in their cubicles. Most are incapable of doing any more than a defined procedure on an input stack of work. If you suddenly say all these people are unemployed, what do you propose replacing their jobs with? When that good salary goes away, the government doesn't get its payroll tax, the unemployed person chooses not to buy a house and therefore doesn't pay property taxes into the system, they choose not to procreate and reduce the birth rate to an unsustainable level. And, they don't buy anything, meaning businesses can't sell the products they make.
I'm not saying we become Luddites and stop the automation, but we as a whole need to think about what we're going to do with a very large disaffected population. Look how much support Trump has among factory workers who are still unemployed or underemployed even though everyone's being told the economy is in OK shape. I'm one of those people who feels that full employment above all else should be the goal, even if we do make-work for some of it. You can't have millions of people sitting around with nothing to do and no purpose -- it will lead to massive crime over the long run as people get bored and tired of being broke.
Ironically, the ones who scream the loudest against helping the "unwashed masses" are the Jesus people. Conservative Christians seem fundamentally not capable of allowing someone else a basic standard of life. And yes, that makes them bad people.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
The first part is a rather depression dystopia. The second part is pure utopia.
I'm seeing this automation trend as well in IT. Cloud and software-defined everything is messing with the clear line between software development and systems administration. Unless it turns out to be just hype, and companies decide to keep their equipment onsite (not likely,) only a chunk of systems people will survive the next wave of automation. "DevOps" may be poorly defined now and the stuff of ironic-moustache, skinny jeans wearing SV startup hipsters, but it's definitely more mainstream now than it was just a couple years ago. It'll take companies ages to fully move to it, but I do feel it's coming. I just got involved in a project being deployed in Azure, and it really is a different world compared to the single-server-per-application universe. You can build an entire solution out, IaaS and PaaS, with a script. Systems guys who will make it to the next level need to be able to be the ones designing these things, and able to troubleshoot the software defined mess when it goes awry.
Jeffrey Snover (the guy who invented PowerShell) gave a talk about the "click next admin" who isn't going to make it to the next era of IT. I still know people who do Windows system administration who don't automate anything because they can't or don't want to learn how. As big companies either deploy their own private cloud stuff or go to public clouds like AWS or Azure for everything, the skills IT guys have learned over 20 years aren't going to cut it except in a very few small niches. Yes, nothing has changed under the hood, but the fact that it's abstracted away and you're no longer hand-feeding the servers configs, etc. means that a lot of people who have lots of knowledge on that front are going to either need to retrain or find something else to do. And with the rest of the workforce being automated as well, that "something else" is in serious doubt.
Walmart, and every other major company everywhere, has been replacing employees with technology at this rate--or more--for years.
As the the other reply to your post said, how are people going to get *any* money if their labor can't be sold?
Face it, the more jobs get automated, the less labor can be sold for. And when automation gets cheaper in terms of resources than maintaining a person to do the same thing, then the people who own capital will do away with labor entirely.
Then, people who own "enough" will be fine, and the people who don't own will not be able to labor to make money.
"But there will always be new jobs" you say? That's been true in the past, but look at what has happened to the earnings of labor in the USA as a fraction of corporate earnings. It has dropped 50% in inflation-adjusted dollars.
And a weak labor market brings down the value of *all* labor. People have been climbing up the skills ladder like crazy in the USA. More college graduates than ever before. Yet the wages are not higher. Why? Supply and demand. More supply of labor means lower wages for labor. More people fighting over the same jobs.
Even the poorest won't live comfortably when they can't get *any* money. And the USA has demonstrated a deep hostility to providing a decent safety net. People are reverting to subsistence farming in Detroit.
I love The Twilight Zone, but Hollywood comes up with lots of cute but unrealistic stories because almost none of the people who work there came from STEM fields. There are problems which simply can't be solved by a Turing-complete machine. You see, Goedel's incompleteness theorems proved that any logical system is incomplete. There are always problems you can make within that system which cannot be resolved without abstracting your reasoning beyond that system. So until/unless the artificial intelligence folks actually succeed in creating a program which can "think" beyond its programming, there will always be problems which can't be solved by machines but can be solved by people.
So the jobs being replaced by machines are the simpler, more menial tasks which don't require this sort of creative thinking. The sensors at the doors which detect shoplifting don't always work. They're just programmed to sound an alarm if they sense a RFID tag being carried out. Sometimes the cashier forgets to remove the tag. Sometimes a shoplifter figures out a way to bypass the sensor (e.g. wrap the tag in aluminum foil). It takes a human security guard to analyze, judge, and respond appropriately to each of these situations which fall outside normal procedure and expectations. Not saying humans are perfect are what we do, but our ability to analyze situations which fall outside the scope of what we've been taught, judge how the operating guidelines we were taught would be applied to this new situation if it had been known about before-hand, and respond appropriately based on those extrapolated guidelines, is something machines cannot yet replace us at doing.
It already exists. It's called finding a job. Where I live, the SF Bay Area, there is unlimited demand for filling jobs that pay $11-$14 "minimum wage" no skills and $18+ for low-end skills.
And chances are, the cost of living in that area is so horrific that even the $18/hr workers either have to spend the greater part of their free time commuting to and from work, working enough additional jobs so they have a 23 hour work day, or have to find a bridge to live under; because those subpoverty wages are nowhere near enough to actually be the minimal living wage that minimum wage was intended to be.
This space unintentionally left blank.
What about when these automated jobs get outsourced to foreign automatons? Chinese robots probably cheaper than American robots. Soon there will be just one robot doing 90% of middle-class jobs.
There's no reason to believe that automation over the next century will be able to replace ALL human tasks. There WILL be some jobs humans continue to do better than machines. The pay may fall, but automation will cause the cost of living to plummet at the same time. Imagine buying a car for one a day's wage.
Agriculture did this long before manufacturing. That's why people can spend less than 15% of their wages on all the food they can eat. Just try and point me to the 100% automated farms...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That's almost entirely a result of PROPERTY prices in dense cities, and also 50 years of population growth. Even today you can get an extremely cheap house, easily afforded on minimum wage salary, just not in a big, dense city.
People only insist on living in the expensive cities because good paying jobs are increasingly found only there. Once a crummy job will allow you to afford all your necessities, that can quickly change. In fact whenever the jobs market slows down, there's a mass exodus of people away from the expensive cities.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You got to be naive to even make a statement like that. How to respond? Who is going to finance your leisure activities? Rent/Mortgage? What happens when there are a couple of billion (yes BILLION) of these leisurely folks. Maybe, Billionaire Soros will pay for them out of the kindness of his heart? Exterminate the excess?
Time and time again they keep raising the minimum wage, everything goes up and jobs are eliminated. The jobs eliminated are usually at the low end, high school students, minorities. We know this, yet they keep on lying about it. It also eats away at all of our wages.
You appear to have read a lot of words in my comment I never wrote. For example, you are telling me Walmart isn't going to be unprofitable due to the cost of human labor. Well, I never said they would, so that's a strange counter-argument. Your "major insight" is that Walmart is trying to maximize profit. Amazing intellectual contribution!
Maybe you can't follow because I'm too stupid to write at your level.
Wouldn't people move from the expensive areas to the cheap areas?
One of the problems with moving is trying to find an income in the new location. If you are getting an income straight away that is one hurdle down.
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
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Again.
Or some entirely mysterious thing may once again prevent catastrophe.
The same mysterious thing that has been appearing century after century.
Of course, maybe the people who say "This time it's different" will be right this time.
People have been saying that too, century after century.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.