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Robots Will Eliminate 6% of All US Jobs By 2021, Says Report (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That's just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week. These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars. The Inevitable Robot Uprising has already started, with at least 45% of U.S. online adults saying they use at least one of the aforementioned digital concierges. Intelligent agents can access calendars, email accounts, browsing history, playlists, purchases and media viewing history to create a detailed view of any given individual. With this knowledge, virtual agents can provide highly customized assistance, which is valuable to shops or banks trying to deliver better customer service. The report predicts there will be a net loss of 7% of U.S. jobs by 2025 -- 16% of U.S. jobs will be replaced, while the equivalent of 9% jobs will be created. The report forecasts 8.9 million new jobs in the U.S. by 2025, some of which include robot monitoring professionals, data scientists, automation specialists, and content curators.
We'll all look like the lazy fucks stuck on the spaceship in WALL-E.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor. Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs. Many times getting new jobs with less incomes. The past recession has taught us that. A participation rate at historic lows, and a U6 number which is people under employed or eligible workers who have stopped looking.
Is still at anemic highs. Unless we can improve overall educational achievements and skills for these alternative jobs. Many underachievers or low skill people will begin to see less and less opportunities. This poses a serious potential of increased demand for government assistance.
This will disproportionately affect minorities, especially blacks, who tend to work in jobs that are candidates for replacement by robots. This definitely is a racial issue, and it's really disappointing that a little extra profit is worth further disadvantaging minorities.
It's sad to watch division of labor and industrialization slowly deliver on its long standing promise: at last, having to work less and less for survival, and our society incapable of coping with that: no decent survival without a job (except for the small rich minority, that is).
We as a society need a plan for that, and those in power (or with near access to it) just keep repeating, sheepishly, the mantra "moar of the same".
Ideas?
By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers.
Bullshit. I work with robots and automation in my day job. This is a complete fabrication. We are not going to eliminate truck drivers within 5 years. End of story. Will not happen. The technology just isn't even close to being there yet. Even if it was ready today (which it isn't) it would take a decade at minimum to roll it out. No business is going to throw out a perfectly functional truck to buy an expensive self driving truck just because one became available.
The notion that Siri is going to supplant customer service representatives in any meaningful way within 5 years is just stupid. Siri can't even deal with very basic questions that any human would easily understand. And yet they are basically arguing that it will be a substitute for a human within 5 years? Not buying it outside of some corner cases. I can't imaging an automated attendant being able to deal with a screwed up credit card statement. And let's say that somehow they magically pull that trick off. They think that will replace 5%+ of the workforce in under 5 years? Hogwash. Just complete nonsense.
Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.
Umm, what? Some idiot thinks Siri has anything remotely to do with the technology in self driving cars? That is the biggest hand waive I've seen in many a year. We've had Siri and similar technologies for about 5 years and they are no where close to being ready to replace humans in any meaningful numbers. And those technologies have essentially nothing to do with the technologies that would be involved in physical automation.
most of us will laugh at how wrong this article was.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor. Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs.
Sometimes they do but sometimes automation replaces skilled labor. To use a simple example, welding is a job that requires considerable skill and training to do well. You can replace a welder with a robot in cases where the economics make sense. You could in principle replace something like a radiologist with a computer program that reads xrays or replace a paralegal with an expert system. Vulnerability of a specific job to automation has less to do with skilled vs unskilled than it does the economics of that particular job. Automation comes into play when there are opportunities to decrease the unit cost of production. The limit on automation tends to be more economic than technical in a lot of cases.
Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs. Many times getting new jobs with less incomes. The past recession has taught us that.
In the short run this will be true for any job at any time. The entire industrial revolution has been people being pushed from jobs that were no longer necessary into new ones. That's been a good thing for over 200 years and there is no reason to believe that it will cease being a good thing any time soon. Yes sometimes this involves some near term difficulty for some of the work force. In places like the US that have enjoyed higher than average incomes for several decades it might involve a reversion to the mean on incomes compared with global competitors.
Many underachievers or low skill people will begin to see less and less opportunities. This poses a serious potential of increased demand for government assistance.
Umm, why do you think this is something new? That has ALWAYS been the case.
Robots? 6%? Phhh. Small stuff.
100 years ago, tractors eliminated, like, 80%-90% of all US jobs.
Boy, I miss the farm. Plowing, hoeing, raking, weeding; day after day, year after year, endless hard manual labor. Yeah, those were the days....
The US labour force will increase by 6% and provides increased GDP without the extra mouths to feed, infrastructure to support (roads, water, sewage), people to house, etc.
There's some value in that.
Never happened. True story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
By 2005, robots have already replaced SAP consultants. Which is easy, to be honest. They could get away with repeating 3 sentences over and over:
That cannot be done in SAP.
That wasn't specified.
That has to be done on your end.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The article makes a lot of assumptions about security and reliability that it shouldn't. I see a very different future...
The doorbell rings, and itâ(TM)s the delivery of a new pair of running shoes, in the wrong size and in a style and color you hate. And you're a double amputee who doesn't have feet. Hereâ(TM)s the kicker: They were listed for $3,000 on eBay and you didnâ(TM)t order them. Your intelligent agent did after being hacked by the guy in Nigeria who placed the eBay listing.
But hey.. shipping was free, so at least you've got that going for you.
However, most of the low-skilled jobs are getting machined out of existence.
Demonstrably not true. WHICH jobs they do changes but there so far is no evidence of an end to low skill jobs. Unemployment rates are well within historical norms for all types of jobs even allowing for higher numbers of folks not actively looking. Which jobs low skilled people do is changing but they aren't going away. The problem they face is not automation but competition in a global market. If someone in china is willing to do the same job for half the price someone who hasn't learned any skills is going to have a hard time.
Even Chinese companies are moving towards robotics.
That's because Chinese wages are rising fast. It is exactly what you would expect to see happen. Automation makes sense once labor costs hit a certain tipping point for a given product. The average wage of a Chinese worker has been rising ridiculously fast so it should surprise no one that automation is starting to appear in places, specifically for high volume or high precision production. But China still has a labor surplus so jobs that would be automated in the US will not be automated anytime soon in China. Some business that formerly would have gone to China is not going elsewhere (like Vietnam) to places with lower wages. It's not a bad thing - it just means our friends in China are doing well for themselves.
We already see this in the U.S. Companies are complaining they cannot hire machinists or tool and die makers because those are not low skilled jobs any longer.
Speaking as someone who hires machinists semi-routinely, those NEVER were low skilled jobs. That is skilled labor and always has been. Perhaps you are confusing machinists with machine tenders (people that just load and unload parts). The reasons we sometimes have trouble in some places finding those people primarily is two fold. One is that in the US our education system tends to emphasize college instead of skilled trades and so their is in places a dearth of trained individuals. In places like Germany where trade schools are more well regarded this problem is substantially less. The second is that for certain labor intensive (as opposed to capital intensive) industries much of the labor has gone overseas. US manufacturing is alive and well but the sorts of products we make domestically are different than they were 40 years ago. That means the skill sets of the remaining machinists has had to shift somewhat. Some made the transition just fine, others not so much.
Now where I live (midwest) it isn't generally terribly hard to find a competent machinist. In other parts of the country it can be more challenging. Conversely where I live good programmers are a comparative rarity but in Silicon Valley you trip over them constantly. Various places enjoy a comparative advantage for particular skill sets.
Where they would have hired 5 workers in the past, they only need 1 to run the machines because the machines they use are so much more efficient now, but they also require higher skill levels
You don't work in a lot of machine shops do you? I have yet to be in a machine shop where one person is managing 5 busy machines simultaneously. Even two is often a stretch if they are reasonably busy. Machine shops where one person can juggle 5 machines are either doing parts with VERY long cycle times or the machine shop simply isn't very busy. Yes productivity has improved in manufacturing but let's not overstate how much.
Your argument sounds like the argument against cutting down a tree limb over a house. Gee, it's never fallen in the past 200 years, it won't fall now. Economic conditions fundamentally change over time.
Your argument presumes there is a tree there in the first place and I disagree with how you frame the is
This is a first. There's never been a situation previously where a significant (and likely unlimited and continuously, and rapidly, growing) wave of higher-qualified workers who did not require wages entered the workforce.
Workers that never cheat, never steal, are never late, very rarely "sick", have no unions, no wages, no insurance, no internecine or even trivial conflict, are unfailingly polite, are immune to office romance, gossip, corporate espionage, complaints of mistreatment, have no interest in and do not require promotion, will never misuse company time, and are replaceable the very moment something more effective is available without any consequences to social security charges, unemployment tithing, legal costs, or need for security personnel to walk the previous "employee" to the door.
Whatever ideas you have of re-employment absorbing the displaced workers need to factor in all of the above.
Here's how it'll go: as soon as the cost of putting automation in place drops below the cost of keeping a human in place, the human will lose their job. The only way to slow this down is to artificially raise the price of letting the human go, which has very rigid practical limits related to cost of product and the nature of competition and will consequently peter out very quickly in any case where it is attempted. Transition to this brand new form of automation will naturally tend to accelerate to whatever degree said automation can be made more sophisticated. That, at present, is looking quite open-ended. If that's true — and we have no significant reason to think it isn't at this time — then the entire process is also open-ended.
At some point in such a process, society will have to formally change its economic structure. This is for the simple reason that large numbers of unemployed citizens will eventually constitute a critical mass of opinion and potential independent action. Either that, or the displaced workers and therefore the cost of supporting them will have to be outright eliminated from society. There are no other paths. Something will have to be done to effectively deal with the former workers. Currently, there is no such accommodating mechanism in place. The closest thing to it is the Basic Income idea; but as yet, that's not a government process, at most it represents tiny experiments, and usually nothing more than unimplemented ideas entirely within the bounds of citizen groups.
Those that persist in viewing this particular technology as highly similar to previous introductions of machinery are not going to be able to anticipate the changes that are coming. It's inevitably going to be a very challenging time for society, and a very, very ugly time for many individuals until the economic and social structures can effectively deal with a non-working populace.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
More typically, they surface as increases in the wealth of the 1% and corresponding increases in financial influence on politicians and regulators that tilt the playing field ever more towards that 1%.
There are exceptions, particularly in computing technology. But generally speaking, almost anyone with a blue-collar job used to be able to afford a decent house, a car, an education, and a stay-at-home spouse. That's no longer typical. That's your blazing red flag, right there. It speaks the truth louder than anything else. The fact that someone has a very powerful computer in their phone won't do much, if anything, to enable the owner buy that house, or stay at home to raise their 1.88 children at the same level as was previously possible. Real income has not kept pace with real costs — and that's pretty much the deciding factor, right there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Capitalism relies on a basic priniciple that all actors have needs that outweigh supply. As an employee I need to have more work than I have employees to hire more employees. I need raw resources to be abundant enough to be cost effective for me to build my product/service. As an employee I need to have a larger desire to have money to be conivnced to work. The amount I get paid also has to be at a level to afford a life style that I'm OK enough with to spend X hours working for someone to do. As a consumer the product has be priced at such a price to be affordable.
Automation is making it so that, as an employer. At some point automation will make it so that I won't need to hire people as I simply won't have enough work to justify hiring them. As material sciences advance the materials the machines are made out of will become more robust, needing less maintanence, and simplier to repair/replace. This completely fractures on of the core pillarstones of capitalism and leads to the employee segment becoming significantly weaker. In turn this means that consumers (who are, largely, the same people as employee class) will have less money and in turn that will force employers to do more to minimize costs.
At some point the capitalist economic system cannot sustain itself. It may happen in 50 years or 500, but I cannot see how it won't happen.