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.

Comments

Race implications

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Race implications

[Z80a]

So, will all those millionaire rappers etc get replaced?
It's a poverty issue, not a racial one.
Yes, there is some bias caused by the actual racism of the past, but you will not solve that with quotas or any stupid racist measure.
Just fight poverty and watch your "racial issue" evaporate.

Re:Race implications

[Mashiki]

So, will all those millionaire rappers etc get replaced?

Considering what's done with vocaloid? Yes.

Re:Race implications

[Ogive17]

What percentage of the black population in the US do you feel are millionaire rappers?

You're right, it's a poverty issue but that hits minorities much harder. The problem continues to get worse because we cannot address the disparity in schooling for wealthy districts vs poor districts.

And I don't have an answer, so I'm not trying to play this off as if it's an easy fix. My personal experience with being a mentor shows me the lack of emphasis poor families typically put on education, the parents pass along their negative attitudes to their kids.

Re:Race implications

[Opportunist]

It's an education issue. Yes, there is a correlation between poor skills, poor education and it all leading to poor job prospects, but in the end, that's what we're facing. The jobs for people with low skills and low ability to gain any due to a lack of intellectual condition to acquire more (read: too dumb to learn) are the first to go, as we have already seen. And this development continues.

And we, as a society, will have to find a solution for this problem. Intelligence is distributed on a Gauss bell curve. So far we have been "lucky" that all we have eliminated are the people whose intelligence is SO low that they are few. So far we have eliminated the jobs that require an IQ of less than about 70 or 75. That affects about 5 percent of the population, that's something we can compensate. Eliminating jobs under 80 will affect more than 20% and if an IQ of 90 becomes the limit, a third of the population will already be unemployable. With 100, of course, we reach about half of the people.

And no later than that we have a HUGE problem at our hands. Though it is likely that the problems will start way earlier than this. Imagine: You realize that you have NO chance to get a job. Ever. Any job you could do, any job you're capable of, can be filled by a robot that is cheaper. Nobody will EVER employ you. And that't not just you, that's a fourth of the population.

How long do you think such a person would hold still?

Re:Race implications

[Mashiki]

You're right, it's a poverty issue but that hits minorities much harder. The problem continues to get worse because we cannot address the disparity in schooling for wealthy districts vs poor districts.

And I don't have an answer, so I'm not trying to play this off as if it's an easy fix. My personal experience with being a mentor shows me the lack of emphasis poor families typically put on education, the parents pass along their negative attitudes to their kids.

We've been "fighting poverty" for nearly 90 years at this point. But you're right it's a harder problem, but there's a lot of simple fixes that can be found. Those are mainly as partially pointed out, education for one. The other is family structure. You can even plot the downward trend when blacks(in the US) started abandoning family structures and single parent welfare households became the norm. If there isn't a strong family structure, everything else simply causes a self-fulfilling problem. No one pushing for better education, poorer education. Support for gangs/criminality, generational and cyclical self-reinforcing negative culture. Canada sees the same thing with native culture and again you can plot out nearly to the year it started to happen. The two groups are fundamentally different, but the solution that government has applied has been the same: Take kids away from their families(in the past), or apply forced abortions/eugenics, break up families, then throw money at the problem for decades and hope it goes away. This has been followed by openly supporting "alternative" schooling that has no structure on focused learning and now you've got the start of a collapse of an entire segment of the population. That know next to nothing, feel they have nothing they can do, and look for what everyone else is doing to survive.

The same solution has been used for education, simply throw more money at it. Now we're seeing the same alternative types of schooling happen in the general population of people, funding in many cases has never been higher. And grades, basic skills are falling through the floor so hard that it's scary. Here in Ontario for instance, over 50% of children failed the basic math and literacy testing for grade 6(even in higher ed like high school). In the 1980's when I was in school that number was around 20%, and being held back a year for failing a single subject was the norm. You can read a couple of articles here on it if you want.

I'm sure some retard is going to go hur-dur-dur racism or something. But if you're unwilling to look at the actual problems and start crying "racist" every time someone points out what the actual problems are, they're never going to be fixed. And they're only going to get worse.

This is a Good Thing... and we aren't prepared.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:This is a Good Thing... and we aren't prepared.

[RabidReindeer]

Just out of curiosity, I yanked a copy of the Communist Manifesto off Project Gutenberg the other day and was rather amazed to discover that all this had pretty well been already anticipated by Marx and Engels.

We have been programmed to think of Communism solely in terms of "rob the hard-working rich and give to the useless parasitic poor", but that wasn't the primary focus there. Instead it was based on the idea that industry would become so productive that without communal ownership of resources, we'd ultimately end up with exactly what we fear we're heading for.

Not to say that the Communist Manifesto presents a viable solution to that problem. After touching on the above, it goes on to promote things that have either been demonstrated not to work and/or morally offend, but it does indicate that we haven't discovered anything new here.

Re:This is a Good Thing... and we aren't prepared.

[Anonymous Coward]

> and was rather amazed to discover that all this had pretty well been already anticipated by Marx and Engels.

This is no coincidence. We're living through a "second industrial revolution" of sorts, with many parallels. Some differences:

- globalization is much more advanced now than it was then
- mobility is much higher (people and wares)
- the speed of changes is much higher (compare the time it took to perfect steel making from 1850's to 1900's to the time it takes self-driving cars from crazy idea to marketable)

As the other poster put it, we need (socially) new ideas. Basic income might be part of a solution (I'm convinced, others not), but the details and the political realizability are pretty messy.

We haven't got much time, though.

Re:and before too long..

[ranton]

We'll all look like the lazy fucks stuck on the spaceship in WALL-E.

Considering 80% of jobs are either sedentary or require light activity, it's at least likely that people would get in better shape on average if everyone becomes unemployed. I was in great shape when I had the time to spend 15-20 hours per week working out or playing sports, but now that I have a job with real responsibilities I've gained a lot of weight. I was unemployed for about six months during the last recession and I lost 40 pounds. It only took a couple years of working to put it back on.

Re:Fuzzy math in my opinion

[Daemonik]

You're living in a priviliged bubble where you think because your job requires some skill it can't be automated. Lawyers and paralegals used to think that before advanced algorithms started replacing them too.

Truth is there are very few jobs that can't be automated to at least reduce the requirement for most current employees. Eventually the only people who will be able to get into a field will be the top top performers, the superstars.

This isn't about education either. This is about profit. Current business practices emphasis maximized profit over human presence and with the demand for higher wages to match the cost of living while robotics continue to drop in price, it's inevitable that humans will be replaced (Most 'job creators' have an antagonistic view towards labor anyway). No amount of education will stop this. There will, for a time, be refuge in jobs like repairing the various robots. Google cars won't repair themselves after all. But even that can and will be automated in time.

Re:Fuzzy math in my opinion

[ranton]

I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor.

That has been true for "dumb robots", but as AI progresses even highly skilled jobs can feel the pinch. There are many highly paid professions which require a great deal of knowledge but not much creativity. Many jobs in the law and medical professions come to mind. Software has already disrupted the pipeline between recent law graduates and experienced lawyers making life very hard on new lawyers. Over the next twenty years it will become more common for people who have spent 8+ years of college to join a workforce which no longer needs their profession, even though the job prospects looked great when they started school.

Most skilled work will see more demand because of improved AI (until general AI that is), but very few supposedly skilled jobs will be "safe".

Re:and before too long..

[Big Hairy Ian]

Just wait for the robots to unionize then there'll be 6 times as many jobs for humans as robots refuse to do degrading jobs that violate their inhuman rights

Complete nonsense

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Complete nonsense

[TheRaven64]

We are not going to eliminate truck drivers within 5 years

You don't need to eliminate truck drivers to eliminate most of the jobs. If you can make a truck that can drive in fully automated mode on the interstate, then you can make a truck that has a bunk for the driver to sleep in and can go 24/7, with a driver only doing the parts near built-up areas. That could easily eliminate half (possibly more than half) of truck driving jobs.

The notion that Siri is going to supplant customer service representatives in any meaningful way within 5 years is just stupid.

I take it you've not used customer support recently. Remember all of those humans who used to follow a script in call centres? Now they're tier 2 support - a chat bot is tier 1 and if you divert from the script too much it will elevate you to tier 2. Again, it doesn't have to be 100%, it even 90%. A chat bot that can help 50% of people will let you halve your workforce (and make customers happier, because 50% of them will never be waiting in a queue).

Re:Complete nonsense

[swb]

Assuming you have a technology so good that it really could allow trucks to run on the highway while the driver slept, it would take at least 5 years to align all the state laws regulating truck highway traffic, change federal regulations regarding the number of hours drivers could be on the road without mandatory stops.

And that's just regulations, even if by magic such an automated truck was available *tomorrow*, you have a capital base of billions of dollars worth of trucks already out there which can't do this. And these trucks are, for the most part, built for extreme long-term durability with useful lifespans of at least a decade. It would take 10-20 years for such an automated truck to replace the existing base of trucks.

I don't doubt such a transformation will happen, but its decades away, not 5 years by any stretch of the imagination. And none of this factors in other potential transformations which might be more appealing, such as hybrid powertrains or even other forms of efficiency replacing long-haul trucking, like further growth of intermodal transportation or other large-scale logistical changes which would compete with automated trucking.

Re:Complete nonsense

[RabidReindeer]

THERE IS NO WAY HORSELESS CARRIAGES will be here soon. A horseless carriage cannot see obstacles and automatically swerve to avoid them - they'd just run right into or over them! Horseless carriages require specialized fuel. A horse-drawn carriage requires nothing more than easily-obtainable vegetable fodder. And there's no way you could mix horses and horseless carriages on today's roads. We'd have to attach noisemakers to the horseless carriages or something to get their attention.

In fact, today's roads are ill-suited to horseless traffic. The expense of bringing all those roads up to that quality would be prohibitive. And it would take YEARS!

---
Percival Dunwoody, Idiot Timer Traveler

Re:Complete nonsense

[wes33]

"And it would take YEARS!"

from wikipedia: The first automobile patent in the United States was granted to Oliver Evans in 1789, and in 1801 Richard Trevithick was running a full-sized vehicle on the roads in Camborne.

So yes, it *did* take years, more than a hundred; self-driving cars at now at the Camborne stage. Things
move faster now - it will only take 25 years to get them on the roads in numbers.

Re:Complete nonsense

[NoImNotNineVolt]

And that's just regulations, even if by magic such an automated truck was available *tomorrow*, you have a capital base of billions of dollars worth of trucks already out there which can't do this. And these trucks are, for the most part, built for extreme long-term durability with useful lifespans of at least a decade. It would take 10-20 years for such an automated truck to replace the existing base of trucks.

Sunk cost fallacy. If the cost savings that result from decreased labor costs are greater than the cost of buying an automated truck and disposing of a manually-piloted one, it's a fiscally sound decision to make.

Nothing new here

[sjbe]

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.

Tractors

[swm]

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....

Re:Tractors

[dunkelfalke]

Except that it has indeed caused massive unemployment. Communist parties didn't appear out of thin air, you know. They have appeared thanks to masses of disenfranchised and angry people.
Hint: Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Human desire is only infinite when all basic needs are satisfied.

Re:and before too long..

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst part is that these will be mostly immigrant robots.

Re:Fuzzy math in my opinion

[RabidReindeer]

Robots have already done a pretty good job of replacing unskilled and semi-skilled labor.

What should concern us more is that they're replacing now.

Stop thinking about robots as tin-plated mechanical men or blind automated arm-devices. Start thinking of them as disembodied algorithms. Think of them as Watson. Think of them as Siri. Be afraid.

It's been happening for some time now. AI-directed securities trading programs that make decisions at speeds so fast that the SEC has had to take measures just to give mere humans a chance. In the last few years, we've seen AI playwriting, AI recipe-design, and a lot of other things.

Mostly the AI approach to creativity is pretty primitive at the moment, but when it comes to raw decision making, AIs can often do at least as well as humans. Although to be fair, in some cases, dart boards have been shown to do as well as humans. Machines and dart boards don't let their emotions or their greed cloud their judgements.

What happens when the day comes that major corporations can only be competitive when their executive decisions are made by machines? First you clear out the executive suite - who needs all those VPs and C-levels? Then, might as well dump the CEO himself, since he's nothing but a figurehead. The actual decision-making is done on a rental basis from IBM. Sales people? We've been training people to be "self serve" when buying for decades now.

This is the real SkyNet and it's already happening. Hopefully it won't make a computed decision to kill all humans, but that doesn't mean that it has to keep them on the payroll either.

Re:and before too long..

[johannesg]

Those people are being taken care of. What makes you believe anyone will be taking care of you? The unwanted and undesired live like rats. Visit any place in the third world to see the truth of that. You're future isn't WALL-E, it's this: https://d.fastcompany.net/mult...

If you want to avoid that, maybe it's time to start manufacturing stuff at home again, instead of farming all of that work out to China.

Another way to look at this is..

[Mr0bvious]

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.

Re:Another way to look at this is..

[GrumpySteen]

That's not how unemployment works. Unemployed people do not increase your GDP and replacing 20 million people with automated systems does not add 20 million jobs for the newly unemployed people to take.

Re:Another way to look at this is..

[stinerman]

Well, you see, putting long haul truck drivers out of work will allow them to pursue their real passion of becoming a nuclear engineer or neurosurgeon. After all, anyone can do anything so long as they try really hard and get training.

Re:Another way to look at this is..

[Anonymous Coward]

It sucks because you can't retrain. Or rather, you can (and it's expensive and time-consuming) but ultimately pointless because at this point you'll be too old to re-enter the workforce. It simply cannot be done. Suppose you've been a truck driver for 10 years starting at 18. You're 28 now. You'll need two years minimum to re-qualify (if you can afford it which is doubtful because the jobs about to be automated don't provide you with wages that support you beyond paycheck-to-paycheck existence) and at this point you're simply too old. Finished. Over. Back when the Industrial Revolution happened you could retrain people cheaply enough (they may not have been able to read and write but to operate simple machinery it was unnecessary. You could build a horse cart, you could work on a car. Simple mechanical skills. And nobody cared how old you were. Now? After 30 if you're looking for a job you might as well give up. After 35? Pointless. Unemployed at 40 = suicide. So this inevitable revolution is going to leave many, many people broken.

Re:Another way to look at this is..

[Kierthos]

28 is too old to start over? Shit, I wish I'd known that when I changed careers at 40. Okay, sure, I already had the Comp. Sci. degree, but still...

And yes, I know there is a difference between switching jobs when you only have a certain level of training for a specific job vs. having the degree and knowledge, and just finally being able to use a college degree because the job market improved enough.

Re:Another way to look at this is..

[jenningsthecat]

People have been claiming that automation will lead to vast numbers of unemployed since the early days of the industrial revolution - the original Luddites - and, to date, have been demonstrably in error.

The key phrase there is "to date". At one time it was inconceivable that we would ever run out of oil, or forests, or that we could have any significant impact on a thing so vast as our planet's weather. Yet today we recognize these things as real threats to our survival as a species. I would say the idea that "we'll always have jobs for everyone" is a similar fallacy; there may always be opportunity for humans to work and create, but will there always be an economic need for them to do so? When robots do all of the physical work, and Artificial Intelligence makes all of the necessary decisions to keep the supply chains and the factories and the mines running smoothly, and there are robots that repair other robots, as well as maintaining the machines that the AI's run on, and the electrical plants that power them - what need will there be for man to work? Check out Marshall Brain's Manna for a compelling picture of how our advancements in automation and AI might well effect our economy and our society.

The increased use of robotics in industry, manufacturing, and other sectors, is almost certainly just the latest change that will ultimately just result in another redistribution of the labour pool to areas that have not been automated.

"areas that have not yet been automated". FTFY

It still sucks if you are one of those put out of work by a robot and have to try and find employment elsewhere, but doom and gloom on a national scale is just FUD.

It shouldn't suck, and it doesn't have to suck. If the benefits of automation and increased efficiency were spread around as they should be, instead of being the new currency of the hoarders in the "point-one-percent" class, we could all have better lives.

Re:Another way to look at this is..

[Maxo-Texas]

I know right? A potential ballet dancer was dropping off a pallet of canned goods at the store last week. I thought- just a little training and he'll be dancing in tights in no time.

---

By definition, half the people are below average intelligence.

Being more honest, about 1/6 of the population is 1 standard deviation lower than normal. That's about 1/6 of the population who literally won't be able to work for less than the cost of the robot that replaces them.

Many of the new jobs require you to be close to 1 standard deviation above normal. That's about 1/6 of the population.

It's not just about intelligence- it's also about drive. And with a labor glut, compensation for labor (has been) and will be depressed. Over time- without higher taxes on those earning outsized compensation you'll see societal unrest and instability.

Re:Would anyone be able to tell at first?

[Opportunist]

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.

Overly optimistic

[GrumpySteen]

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.

Re:and before too long..

[thinkwaitfast]

I own a small machine shop's worth of tools in my garage. I can manufacture almost anything in my home. Including a larger machine shop if need be.

I'm waiting for a machinist robot and blacksmith robot (I'm not talking about cnc) so I don't have to do anything.

This is a first

[fyngyrz]

But labour[sic] most certainly gets reallocated/redistributed, history has shown this.

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.

Real costs are gaining on real income

[fyngyrz]

Those lost "proceeds" surface in the form of cheaper products and being able to buy more things with the same amount of work, not necessarily higher wages or higher revenue by itself.

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.

Re:Fuzzy math in my opinion

[ranton]

I've been hearing that since the 1970's. Like the Great Earthquake that supposed to send California into the ocean, I've been waiting for that one too.

They have been working on speech recognition since the 1950's, and only in the past couple years have these system reached human level accuracy. Neural networks were created in the 40's, were thought to be on the brink of usefulness in the 90's, but only in the past five years has deep learning really made neural networks useful for many real world problems.

The nature of exponential growth, which we have seen in both computer hardware and algorithm design for over half a century, is it will seem like no progress has been made until mere moments before past predictions become a reality. Put another way, if you started filling up Lake Michigan with one fluid ounce of water in 1940 and doubled that every 18 months, in 70 years you would only have a few inches of depth. But wait another decade and it's 40 feet deep, and five years later it is filled (max depth: 922 feet).

There is plenty of room for debate on this topic, but complaining about a lack of tangible progress over the past 50 years is not a relevant topic.

Re:Fuzzy math in my opinion

[Enigma2175]

Another option is that if a company produces a lot of money with just machines, then the government need to tax heavily that company for one of two things: to decide to hire some people, or to collect the money for them to pay the people with intellectual or artistic based professions. And, to make a cultural revolution increasing the quantity of people on that area instead of promoting jobs that could be easily improved with machines.

But if the people who would make the laws to "tax heavily that company" are basically owned by that company (or at least "very good friends" with the company owners) then why would they make such a law? In the US, unless the campaign finance and voting laws are changed this will never happen -- the rich will keep getting richer and the poor will keep getting poorer.