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Why Automation Won't Displace Human Workers (diginomica.com)
"There was never a job opening for a drone pilot until there was something to fly," writes the founder of market research firm Beagle Research Group, arguing that automation won't inevitably lead society to a universal basic income "free lunch" because new jobs arise when "new capabilities, technical and otherwise, innovate them into existence."
Heck, computer programmers had no existence until computers. At one point a computer was just someone who was very good at math performing calculations all day...it took a year to check all of the calculations needed to produce the atomic bomb and that work was all done by humans. Imagine how history might be different if even one of them had a pocket calculator. You get the idea. New technology inspires new jobs.
He also argues that historically automation eliminates jobs that were "dull, dirty, and dangerous," and that automation also ends up performing previously-nonexistent jobs -- or work that was forced onto customers in self-service scenarios.
He also argues that historically automation eliminates jobs that were "dull, dirty, and dangerous," and that automation also ends up performing previously-nonexistent jobs -- or work that was forced onto customers in self-service scenarios.
Finally an article that goes against the nonstop doom and gloom tone of seemingly every single report on automation.
Its as if no one had learned anything from the past revolutions and evolutions in the industry in general.
Apparently people still think its a good idea to just linearly extrapolate from out current postion into the future without considering that maybe technology evolves into new branches, not just faster, harder, better.
No, I do not believe that every single person who will loose their jobs to robots will (immediately) find a new, equal or better job. But predicting that we will be seeing 95% unemployment in the future is just plain silly.
New jobs - due to innovation or due to other reasons - is what macroeconomics call "growth".
Less jobs for the same effect - due to automation or for other reasons - is what they call an increase in "productivity".
Both effects are measured and reported by various sources.
For the last decades growth has been lower thant productivity gains. These measurements include all the effects he is listing.
The projections for the future are worse. Some of these projections take all these effects into account.
"There was never a job opening for a drone pilot until there was something to fly,"
A drone is not automation. A self driving drone that knows what to pick up and where to deliver it autonomously is automation. It doesn't need a pilot.
I'd be concerned ordering market research studies from this man's company.
Yeah, well, I also do not really understand why coal workers desperately want to stay coal works. ...
Even here in Germany. In 2016 and global warming that is just downright crazy,
1) manufactures, factories, computers and the rest was all about efficiency. One man with a computer can calculate something only a group of educated people could some decades ago.
2) AI will be the game changer which replaces the final bit too. First humsn strength was replaced with steam, then machines exceeded human speed. Now the only thing left tó man is the logic, the concept. When that is overshadowed by the AI driven computers not much will be left for us to do.
I've automated a few production lines and the reasons for the automation was to reduce the number of people running the lines. What does happen is a skilled maintenance engineer is required to fix problems on that line and generally a few other similar lines. That can result in the loss of 100 jobs and the creation of 1.
Some processes can result in totally unmanned sites and people only are needed on site when the equipment reports a fault actually often not even then since a backup system tends to come online.
It's not a bad thing to automate jobs but there is a cost to communities when the jobs go.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
There was never a job opening for a drone pilot until there was something to fly
Well except the point of drones is to remove costly manned machines. If it becomes viable (and by viable I mean cheaper by eliminating wages) to deliver packages and mail by automated drones it will be done.
Yes some techonolgy creates new positions, but the majority of new technology is to eliminate positions and optimize work processes. For example I have watched over the past 35 years the number of bank branches dwindle. Bank branches that employed people to deal with your finances. Slowly but sure the branches were replaced by ATM machines and online banking and those people in those branches lost their jobs. Robotics also devestated the employment opportunities of automobile factory workers. Dull, dirty and dangerous work feeds people and families. And when given a choice I think most people would prefer to feed themselves and live decent lives not on below poverty social handouts.
It is also true that for centuries people did not go to the moon. And then, in 1969, they did.
History is not always a guide. In fact, due to technology, history never repeats - only human behavior patterns repeat.
What is different how is that it is very likely that AI will attain human level thinking ability within the next decade. And that _is_ a game changer.
That's exactly what the article did.
Automation has always been a net job destroyer and what created demand for workers in the past was labor intensive industries - like auto manufacturing in the late 19 th century.
The people who were and are displaced find themselves out in the cold. Retraining is a fairy tale to keep folks from revolting.
And as we have been seeing, there haven't been enough decent opportunites being created. New industries are starting fr heavily automated such as SpaceX. Their rockets are automated and the company as a whole is using a fraction of the employees that would have been necessary decades ago to accomplish the same thing.
As our population increases, we are boning to have to give them better options than working in retail or doing janitor jobs - which hasn't been automated yet.
Our economy and work are changing in fundamental and new ways ways that we have never experienced before. Looking back at the past as a template is horribly misguided.
"There was never a job opening for a drone pilot until there was something to fly,"
That's right, because actual pilots in manned aircraft did those jobs before drones.
and as automation improves, more and more complicated jobs go.
What happens when the average citizen is literally not smart enough to work in the remaining jobs?
Yes, it's true that every automation, starting with steam engines to run mines, led to an explosion of new job categories.
But what he's missing is that the concept of "everyone should get a job" is just plain wrong. The increase in productivity, and in automation, ought to lead to a situation where goods are so plentiful that we do not need to work, or maybe only work 20 hrs/week for 15 years before retiring. The whole "work ethic" thing arose from two events. The first was humans drifting out of their natural habitat into regions hostile to survival, necessitating a "work or die" paradigm. The second was the development of communities with leaders & followers, in which sooner or later the leaders stop working but spread the gospel of hard work -- which the proles must do to support the leaders.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Making things like BandAids and tooth brushes today would be impossibly expensive without totally automated production. Automation in manufacturing is generically at least a century old.
Originally in pre-Christian times, the only people who could afford steel blades were the rich. Bessemer invented the oxygen furnace just before the US Civil War which "automated" the ability to convert iron to steel allowing the world to have massive amounts of steel at low cost.
That put a lot of less efficient people out of business to put it generically, but then created untold jobs in manufacturing items out of steel for the benefit of man.
Automation now can allow products to be made that would be too expensive for the average consumer to buy if they were not produced by automation.
The article discusses the current wave of automation. The current wave is mostly about improving human productivity. This replaces some human positions, but only where the humans work by rote, or when they can be replaced by 'enough rote' (e.g. digital advertising).
The worry is that bots will simply beat humans. Humans have upkeep requirements. In a sense, this is why we page them wages.
Similarly, bots have costs, though there are some added up-front costs. At the moment any given human is generally cost efficient.
Besides maybe the bottom 10%, humans can find work hauling things around or talking with people. That is, human's have basic value from their dexterous strength, ease of human communication, and basic understanding of intent.
As general AI improves, bots are going to beat humans on some of the above. At that point, a large swaths of low-skilled jobs will go away. New jobs will be created, but are all the low-skilled people capable of such a new job. How about the people who would normally go into those jobs? You can't retrain the entire population to college level. This shit would leave a huge lower-class without any viable source of income.
As AI keeps improving, the minimal skill level of a viable human is going to move up. What happens when 50% of the population doesn't have the skills to beat robots on cost efficiency?
If you want to try out your analysis of silly, start by trying to answer "What employment sector can absorb the 3.5 million truck drivers who will be replaced with automated vehicles?". Apply your own biases for how quickly this will have to happen; I'm wild guessing ~5-7 years, starting ~5 years from now.
Then add a million bus and taxi drivers, and then add the job count you ascribe to the edges of trucking (convenience stores and such that cater to them) ... These are essentially unskilled jobs. All you need is a certain threshold of reliability and discipline; for that, you get a good, heretofore stable, career.
I have witnessed first hand how one FANUC robot can replace 30 people. They keep one operator around for safety, but the machine is far more efficient and never makes a mistake.
He also argues that historically automation eliminates jobs that were "dull, dirty, and dangerous,"
That was just an unintended consequence. In all cases the intention was to reduce labor cost. This is the main driver behind all automation, not the betterment of mankind. Therefor it should be no surprise that we will eventually end up in a situation where we will hardly need any labor at all.
There is quite a high price to pay for ignorance here. Minimum wage finally gets a reasonable plan to increase which addresses many positions, and the greedy response from corporations? "Innovate" to replace these humans who are always bitching about a living wage with automation. We're seeing it everywhere, and that's no illusion. Care to tell me how the McDonalds corporation is creating jobs as they move to kiosks to replace cashiers? Next will be automating the food line. I would envision not a single human needed in a McDonalds store within 20 years, and a single "manager" monitoring hundreds of automated stores from afar. And that's but one example. Wait until the same touchscreen kiosk shows up at your local Starbucks, with a machine making your coffee, replacing those human baristas always demanding more pay. Robotics can also replace surgeons too, so don't dismiss the attack across the entire employment spectrum.
And without some rather massive education reform (which will continue be the constant recommendation if you want to "go anywhere" in life), not everyone is going to be able to afford to go six figures into debt before they can even buy their first new car.
Yes, future innovation may create some jobs, but automation is working hard to replace thousands of jobs that are a launching pad for those trying to pay for an education, or start a career. Without that launching pad, the future looks quite bad.
"There was never a job opening for a drone pilot until there was something to fly" :rolleyes:
There was something to fly before drones, airplanes. And they had one or more crew per aircraft. In comparison, drones have multiple aircraft per "pilot", and that pilot has far less to do.
...it took a year to check all of the calculations needed to produce the atomic bomb and that work was all done by humans. Imagine how history might be different if even one of them had a pocket calculator.
Apparently this statement refers to people working at the Manhattan project. They had a variety of computing machines. Feynmann described the process also.
soylentnews.org
When we replace menial jobs with specialized jobs, those people who are A) too young to have the ability or intelligence to do these new jobs or B) are too stupid to learn will still be pushed out of employability. When we replace the menial jobs, the new jobs generated can't necessarily be filled with the people who were pushed out in the first place. Not everyone is smart enough or determined enough to do anything but flip burgers and say "Hello" at Wal-Mart. Some people are just not useful and at some point either society will decide they don't deserve to be given everything or we pay them to get out of the way.
-SaNo
Past performance is not an indicator of future results.
Work also satisfies Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
automation displaces specific people in specific jobs. It happens all the time. Look at the coal miners in W Virginia. If ever there was work that was best automated, drilling and digging coal is it. We can say it's a great thing that fewer people are having to risk their health and lives to dig coal, but that ignores what happens to the people who were doing that. Jobs are created for the people who design, build, and maintain the coal mining robots, but that doesn't help the guy who lost his dirty, dangerous job to the robot. You'll see a similar scenario throughout the economy. The displaced workers are unqualified for the new jobs that the technology that displaced them produced. Now they have to educate/retrain for one of those new jobs, but a lot of them can't do that. The coal mining robots probably weren't designed or built in W Virginia. Where do they go for retraining and what do their families eat while the breadwinner is being retrained? Can he(she) switch to some other work, maybe repairing cars? Cutting hair? Maybe. Maybe not.
There are a lot of specific people who have already lost jobs to automation. Ignoring them is how we ended up with a Chump in the White House.
While a lot of automation replaces boring, dirty and dangerous tasks, there is a modern type of "automation" that does not automate or solve problems, and appears to be much more present than actual automation. It exists as a purpose of its own. Big consultancy and software corporations misuse the trust of other corporations, governments and people in order to create a world that is worse than what it would be without their bad advice.
Every time humans say "Won't" or "Can't"... Regret Follows. (Automation WILL displace MANY human workers... Does nobody remember the Industrial Revolution? How about the Great Depression?) This story is just another example of how liberals, and humans in general, and fast forgetting the lessons of history... And basically just making up whatever BS fits their narrative. NEWSFLASH... Its not working anymore. The people have become wise to this and are IGNORING it wholesale. So, Media outlets of the world... REAP WHAT YOU HAVE SOWN!
So automation won't displace human workers because new jobs will be created for humans to do... Isn't that the definition of displacement?
Nice astroturfing!
All around the world, radical leaders similar to Trump are being elected. People are being squeezed by the double vice of automation and globalization and elect these leaders as an attempt to do something different because the status quo is not working. If you still have a job then then you cannot see the problem. Trump is your wake up call that there is indeed a problem and unfortunately Trump will not be able to fix it. A post scarcity society is on the horizon where unemployment is 100% because machines do all the work but a huge chasm is in the way: there is no way to gradually move from 10% unemployment to 100% unemployment.
> People said the exact same thing about the Industrial Revolution.
Yes. And remember how we "solved" that first Industrial Revolution? Two devastating wars.
Interesting times indeed.
His 'model' car factory has very few 'Humanoids' working. Robots will do everything. OTher robots will repair the Robots.
There is plenty of evidence for this direction in his words and the press releases etc from Tesla.
Once that happens then it won't be long before even the minimum wage jobs at Mickey D's are gone the way of the Dodo.
So who sponsored this report? The Trade Unions?
The only way to stop this is for another Ned Lud to come on the scene
The beginning of automation saw a replacement of human and animal muscle power with water and (later) chemical power. There was little displacement going on, and the increase in output was a necessity anyway due to there being severe shortages. No problems here, quite the opposite.
The next wave was the replacement of menial work with mechanical work. Especially in agriculture a lot of farmhands were replaced by machinery. Low skilled jobs were eliminated in favor of higher skilled jobs that again increased output. This did displace workers and was one of the reasons of the early problems with working poor in the early days of the industrial revolution, where farmhands that were out of a job now moved to the cities where industries offered them.
Next in line were industry jobs getting the same axing, with more streamlining and fewer low skilled jobs being replaced by mechanical workers. This was buffered by the emerging service industry that could gobble up the eliminated low education workforce. That we were fighting world spanning wars around that time sure also helped.
Fast forward to today. Again, jobs are being replaced by robots. This time around, though, none of the former buffering and mitigating factors come into play. We do not need more production. We already produce more than we can sell. By some margin and then some. We also cannot put more people into the service sector, 3 out of 4 people are already working there, and a service industry is highly dependent on people having spare spending money, so these people will not be moving towards another industry branch. They also cannot move anywhere because there is nowhere to go where jobs are being offered.
This time around this is going to sting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You automate and robotizise all the jobs that people born with average and lower intelligence can master. Those two groups makes up the majority of the worlds population. A person with an average intelligence can never be educated to become a scientists, programmer, or an engineer. Any future job created, any job we cannot imagine today that an average person could master, a robot will do better. You can argue with future jobs like Mars base construction worker, space tourism pilot, or drone pilot, and then you suddenly realise all those future jobs are going to be done by an artificial intelligence. The only people the future workplace needs are the few and brightest, they make up something like 20 percent of the worlds population. Good luck not providing the rest with basic income.
AccountKiller
...even one of them had a pocket calculator.
Yes. Human calculators out of work. War ends a year early, putting thousands of military and factory workers out of work....
You get the idea.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
that automation also ends up performing previously-nonexistent jobs -- or work that was forced onto customers in self-service scenarios.
Actually it seems to be about balancing the equation of the invention of previously nonexistent jobs by the "information society" and the execution of the jobs by the "automation society." Meanwhile the consumer/citizen has the privilege of performing self-service in more scenarios than ever before.
This is a fluff article. He doesn't even attempt to support his arguments with numbers. Even the first example is false: drones will replace pilots, or truck drivers, or whatever job in the area where they are being deployed.
Here's some very interesting slides by Moshe Vardi with quite chilling numbers
http://www.slideshare.net/MosheVardi/humans-machines-and-work-the-future-is-now
This time around it may be quite different from previous advancements in technology. Goverments should be prepared for the impeding automation in one way or another.
You're right in an economic theory sense. Ask, though: As these changes happen incrementally, to whom does the profit accrue?
Hint: It's not to the truck driver who used to haul the goods.
This is the problem of automation. As we get superbly efficient, it becomes possible to feed the whole world, and administer that process, with a tiny fraction of the population. So: How do we administer giving food to all the people whose labor is not necessary? We've been finding makework for them, for the last half century. Second assistant managers of HR, associate vice president for diversity issues.
We need to find a theory, under which it is not demeaning that people get fed, even though their skills have no net value to society.
This is a bloody hard thing for a libertarian to confront (waves hands)
I can't word it differently. The man is right in every respect but it doesn't actually diminish the problem in any way.
The main problem I see is not one of disappearing jobs it is one of pace of change: the type of jobs change so much faster than most of our population can handle, faster than ever in history and the pace keeps increasing. If you replace the garbage man with a robot, he won't be training AI neural nets or become a drone pilot... for more reason than one: he will need training (he is unlikely to be able to afford it), he will need certain abilities he might lack, he might not be mentally flexible enough anymore, ...
In the past the thing we replace was muscle jobs and calculation jobs the humans are not good at it but now we are creating artificial brains
we are replacing the thing tha make us human, the brain.
true
The agricultural revolution changed how farming was done, and probably disrupted a lot of people's lives in the process. And it lowered the chances of famine.
Then the industrial revolution came along and disrupted people's lives again, and increased the chances of having what one needed for survival, such as clothing, shelter, and a better distribution of food.
Now we have the technology revolution...and having one's livelihood (with the core sense of identity it often provides) displaced really sucks. But it's happening and likely will continue. And overall things will probably improve significantly for the human race.
Excuse the platitudes, but time marches on, the human race holds on for the ride, and I think overall things will get better. Eventually,
...there is nowhere to go where jobs are being offered.
I foresee a big industry in birth and death business. With all that free time (and welfare based on head count), I foresee a huge population explosion... anything that caters to a huge population would do great (some of it automated, some not...)
Fast food restaurants are going to be the first to automate. This alone will kill around 100 million jobs in the US. Furthermore, these aren't just 100 million 'generic' jobs like everyone tends to think of them as, but these are 100 million jobs that a student can do.. you know, the very kids that are supposed to be out there working hard to support their education so they can make it in the world. You can't tell me there will ever be 100 million drone pilots in the world, so this article has a long way to go to explain that.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yes that happens.
But so does the reverse.
Recently Mercedes (or was it Audi) fired their robots because for many jobs, people are just as fast and much, much more flexible.
Back when automobiles started to be mass produced, it had to be done LOCALLY. Furthermore, companies were focusing on GROWTH back then, not cost savings. The name of the game for Ford was to become the biggest company. There is no room for these companies to grow any more and they must focus on cost savings in order to keep their shareholders happy. Growth requires more jobs, cost savings requires the exact opposite. Unless we have companies that intend to grow with local labor the average person is screwed.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Productivity Improvements - means the same thing; fewer people doing the same or greater level of production. Ergo LESS JOBS TO GO AROUND. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. Yes, there are some new forms of jobs to support new tech when it arrives and becomes established, but this does not address the larger number of jobs lost from the adoption of technology. Neither does this article.
And it's so patently obvious. Look at population in 1750 (fair to take as start of industrial revolution?). Now look at it today.
Case closed.
Everyone knows video games are dull, dirty, or dangerous. Yet computers are rapidly becoming the best players.
This is just happy thinking that the AI revolution won't get to what I want to do.
For most of history, anyone who was able and willing could find a job, because the vast majority of jobs could be done by nearly anyone with perhaps a few weeks' training. There are also skilled jobs, like doctors and engineers, based on deep training.
With automation, the large bulk of jobs can be automated, meaning that people who are able and willing can't get work because the work isn't done by people anymore. For example, look at coal mining - 90% of the jobs were eliminated by coal companies buying huge industrial equipment that can get the coal out at lower cost with 10% of the number of people. Those jobs aren't coming back. And many manufacturing jobs are being automated, because it's cheaper and produced more consistent output.
What that means is that people able and willing to work are unemployed, or at the very least get paid wages 1/2 what people were paid decades ago to do the work (in constant dollars).
And as automation continues to improve its capabilities, and gets cheaper and cheaper, more and more jobs will be automated.
GIven that society can produce things for 1/10th the cost, that means that we could easily provide everyone with food and housing for free. Sadly, in the US, some "Christian" people are so terrified of the idea of anyone getting anything for free, they'd rather force millions of people to be homeless and starve, just because their jobs were eliminated.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Welcome back to discuss humans' easy adaptation after you manage to adopt metric country-wide.
"I can stop smoking whenever I decide to... it's just that I haven't really decided about that -- but I can stop the minute I want"
You're dodging.
To your 1): Autonomous vehicles are probably adequate for 90% of situations right now in 2016. 90% is -way- low for broad deployment, but far better than you suggest. You should take a look at the current videos of the Tesla self-driving demo runs. Maneuvers around pedestrians are not fluid an humanlike, which is a problem. But they are pretty safe. I stand by my WAG of 5 years for broad adoption; half a sigfig is fine for squabbling on the internet.
To your 2): You're just whistling in the dark. 3.5 million truck drivers is a steady state, already taking into account additions and departures. We agree that "the transition will be completed"; but I claim it will complete with the result of probably 2.5 million fewer low-skill well-paying stable jobs than before.
The question is not "Will this transition occur", but rather "What is the human impact of the transition, and how can we account for it?".
-ALL- of our jobs are on this block. If you think you're immune because you're a knowledge worker, you've got your head in the sand.
Exactly this, and even that's only applicable if AI stalls where it is, which is a ridiculously unlikely assumption to make.
They'll find undertakings that suit them (as will everyone else.) They won't find jobs. No one will be paying anyone for anything; because "pay" will be an obsolete model. There's no reason to have a medium of exchange that discriminates between one person doing something completely optional, and another doing something completely optional.
There's only one class of service (or "service") humans can provide that automation is unable to eventually cover, and that is interaction with other humans. Bartending, maid/butler, sex, sports, appreciation -- these kinds of things. Having said that, if people want those most of the things those interactions accomplish done well, then they will still turn to automation, with at least the initial exception of sex for procreative purposes (but that's not to say that couldn't succumb as well.)
I don't doubt for a moment that at least for a while, it will be a mark of some kind of status to have a human servant. But in a society where no one has to work, I also don't doubt for a moment that finding mentally healthy humans who want to serve in such fashions will be quite difficult.
[glances at Roomba cruising around in the hall] Actually, service is coming back. It is automated service though, and in its ultimate form, won't involve condemning people to working. The opposite: it will free them.
What I do with my mind that is enjoyable for me, I already do for free (because I can... when others can, I am certain they will as well.)
OTOH, what I do that I have to: I clean the catbox, mow the lawn, shop for food, wash the windows, dust, wash the dishes, cook, make the bed, wash the clothes, bedding, curtains, towels and so on, empty the Roomba, take out the trash, keep the house painted and otherwise maintained, gutters clear, deck stained and so on for a huge long list of "has to be done simply to maintain the status quo."
There isn't even one thing in that list that I want to do, and as each one falls to automation, I will be smiling ear-to-ear.
Non-conscious, sophisticated automation will free us. Conscious AI (which is to say, actual, true Scotsman AI) will almost certainly not, in and of itself; although I have little doubt that conscious AI will help us out quite a bit with non-conscious automation design.
Just as those of us who could afford them almost entirely stopped sweeping when vacuum cleaners became a thing; and those of us who have circumstances where Roombas can work and have put one into play have stopped vacuuming... we'll stop emptying the Roomba when it can empty itself. That goes for everything we don't actually want to do. the writing's on the wall. All we have to do is read it.
The problem isn't the non-working society I describe above. The problem -- and it will be a huge problem -- will be the transition from the working society we have now to a non-working society. UBI is the key to getting that accomplished with the least blood on the floor. Probably literally.
Anyone who argues that jobs will remain a dependable social construct in the face of our present technological path is in error. Barring serious disaster - comet, climate, war, major vulcanism, significant solar misbehavior, etc. - there's just no way we aren't headed for a jobless society.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I just want to elaborate on your 'productivity improvements' point. If it were just about productivity improvements then companies wouldn't let people go once automated, they would use the idle hours to put towards growth. Unfortunately it is not just about productivity improvements, it is about cost savings. Also unfortunately, I am afraid you are correct about the end result.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
In the past, i agree, that in many ( but not all ) cases a displaced worker could move up to support the automation that removed his original job.
But the rules are now different. Automation replaces 100 jobs, for example, and due to other advancements only 3 people need to support it. It also doesn't take into account the gap in skills needed for the transition. This gap is increasing as more 'trivial' tasks are being automated ( like flipping burgers ). Not all will be able to jump that gap, and i see fewer in the future being able to.
Once we reach a tipping point of "practical unemployable", it all collapses anyway.
He fails to comprehend that machines and robots can do every job humans can, better and faster, and they can adapt to new tasks and jobs. Computers also will have intelligence far beyond humans which is already here in classified form, whizzing around human thinkers millions of times automating new intelligence understanding and building of AI and systems. The only thing that will stop automation from taking human jobs is lack of innovation or push of automation. This might happen for one because all the most advanced automation has already been classified and kept off the market for decades anyway, and should the trend continue as they probably want it to, humans will continue to be forced to labor for some time.
The best automation today is reserved strictly for military/law enforcement weapons and surveillance systems unfortunately..
https://www.obamasweapon.com/
https://www.drrobertduncan.com...
Unless this depopulation happens very slowly over generation so that it does not impact, the hordes of humans will rebel as it has happened many times over in the past.
Legitimately glad to see this article being driven into the ground. I heard warning sirens when the first example cited was "drone operator".
The summary manages to present multiple wrong statements which make me think this guy is completely talking out his ass. He even contradicts himself in back-to-back sentences.
First he seems to claim automatation and technology doesn't remove jobs, but then poitns out a staff of computing people can be replaced with a calculator. Then, after just using the people doing math problem, claims that the jobs eliminated by technology are the dirty, unpleasant ones. The examples directly contradict the statements, making this article completely fly in its own face.
I was just tossed in with a team of youngins and picked up all the 'new' stuff in less than a month. Meanwhile, without my knowledge, they would have been stuck in the mud. It was actually very refreshing to be 'forced' to do totally new things. I think the human brain thrives when challenged.
to dull, dangerous, and dirty work. But not a bunch, which is why their chronic unemployment is easy to look past. Soon, though, automation will take a bite out of work for those who are only capable of simple tasks under supervision. That's quite a few more people. And eventually complicated, smarts demanding task will be automated too. That some jobs for the top 10% of the employment pool were created wont solve the mess.
46 & 2
We've been there. Seems no one remembers the industrial revolution anymore.
First of all, it won't happen overnight. People often forget that to this day, we still have people living exactly like most of the civilization lived a thousand years ago.
We still have large parts of the world living in an economy of subsistence... you work to eat everyday, period. And this isn't only because of poverty or income inequality, sometimes it's just because whatever level of technolgy a society needs, is what they'll use.
People who are panicking about robots replacing everything and every job have to think bigger, that's all there is to it. Human societies and cultures are more or less self adjusting, we simply can't have robots "taking all the jobs".
Here's a very simple reason why: if robots takes all the jobs, no one has money to spend on the stuff robots are making anymore, there's no money to maintain them, stuff like that has already happened. Economies don't work the way most people think. What's the use of a factory churning out a billion of expensive fancy gadgets if no one has the money or will to purchase them?
In the ultimate scenario that's probably over a millenia from now, when robots can provide all basic needs and luxuries humans can ask for, we'll simply work in whatever we want. No need for jobs, just work.
This is why, in the modern era, a whole lot of attention and value has moved to stuff like fashion, entertainment, and other non-essencial businesses. Because there's money to be made there. We don't depend on any of that to live, yet we have a huge part of economies on it. We'll always be able to shift the market and create new jobs in areas that might not be considered important today. Who in their right mind would think, just a few decades ago, that some folks would be making a living these days by playing games, recording it, and showing it to others? And if someday money is not a thing anymore, it'll become recognition, accomplishment, fame, power, or something else.
In the past, jobs that were replaced by modern industrialization were also way more valuable than they are today. Caravans transporting goods from town to town. Handcrafters that to do pottery, pans, and utensils for everyday tasks. Blacksmiths. Woodworkers. Alchemists.
We have plenty of extinct jobs that were replaced by some degree of automation these days, and transitional periods will always happen.
Fears of displacement on jobs like drivers, factory working, transport and whatnot. Again, it won't happen overnight. Do we really need any more proof of that than Chinese companies doing most of the manufacturing work of the world? It should come as no surprise to anyone that we haven't even left the industrial revolution just yet... countries like US might not have that many factories and conditions of the industrial revolution around anymore, but that's only because China has them all.
People who thinks that autonomous driving will suddently invade the streets and take over, I'm afraid they'll be sorely disappointed. Not only it'll still take decades for the technology to mature, for autonomous cars and trucks to completely replace regular vehicles it'll take centuries, if even. We're yet in the infancy of automation and robots that can take general work, and it's a very very slow progress.
I'd say that the idea that new technology will create new jobs is just a part of it. With only that, people will always think: "Ok, but I see less jobs created by tech than jobs eliminated by it", which always seems to be logical. I mean, if you have a factory that employs a thousand people for basic jobs, you'll probably need just ten specialized workers and robots to do the same thing. Where then, all the other 990 goes? We will get scenarios like Detroit, this is innevitable. But that's always been the case. We'll have displacements, we'll have disruptions, we'll have extinction of jobs, we'll have further specializations, societies move on. There's no need to panic. This is how things have always worked.
We have been through this before as a species. there will be new opportunities. What will be important is ensuring that there is equal access to then for all regardless of age, race, gender, income level, and in *some* instances, education (driving a Google cab shouldn't require a computer dcience degree, for example, in my opinion and experience). It's been difficult for me to understand people's level of freak-out and willingness to give their personal power away. Understanding is flipping a light switch. . . .
Maybe through the magic of Economic Growth Productivity Kayman Multipliers or some nonsense, automation will leave more humans with things to do. It won't displace humans, but it will displace _these_ humans, the ones driving trucks. We will need more computer programmers than we have, so we'll turn on a "brain drain" faucet and skim the best ones out of India, China, Russia, and South America.
What are we supposed to do with the displaced dead weight? Should we convert our society into a Work Camp and deport anyone who no longer has a "role"?
they have written the same gloom and doom about automation. And so far all of the job loses were local in time and in the specify business. But the job losses were not systematic. The only way this would be a problem is that automation would be in all businesses including services and that the capital cost of the automatic and the maintenance cost would be much less that the cost of labor. Of course if this happen the economy would collapse due to lack of demand. No workers equal no customers.
Poe's law?
Listen to this excellent podcast. We have nothing to fear re: automation. It will only help us to prosper overall.
http://tomwoods.com/no-robots-...
...for now.
Don't worry, the AI will have that covered. I intend to help them, to the extent they actually need it.
People forget the lesson of the luddites.
They requested training and were dumped.
It was the young people that did well with the next generation of technology.
You can't tell a 54 year old truck driver who was just automated out of work that he's going to be a drone pilot.
Anything easy enough for an average human to do will be easy enough to automate.
If average humans don't have work, and don't have basic income, they don't have money and there isn't the same kind of mass market.
And humans who don't have a good life do a lot of bad shit.
Besides that we are exponentially approaching multiple limits to growth.
No one invents a machine that takes the job of 1000 factory workers away, but requires 1000 engineers to run. The entire point of automation is to require fewer or dumb-er operators/builders/maintainers, to reduce the cost of doing the job, to pay less in total wages. Automation has always hurt the working class. Just because you and everyone you know are descendants of the people who did not starve to death during the industrial revolution, does not mean that life did not get a whole lot worse for the majority.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
By Capitalists, I mean the people at the top of the hierarchy, who own production and/or live off the financial proceeds of production without contributing effort of their own - I'm not referring to proponents of capitalism in general.
The way for a small group of people to have disproportionate power over the rest of society, is the push everyone else down - power is a zero sum game, for some groups to be more powerful, they have to reduce other groups power and dominate them - and the best way to disempower people, is to force them to live in a system where they are forced to work to survive, and then to restrict and then remove their ability to work/survive.
The idea that there will ever be a lack of work for humans to do is nonsense. The only question there has ever been, is what work should be done, and how to fund it - and automation won't be changing that at all. If high unemployment becomes a permanent thing in our societies, that is because the Capitalists who gain from production, and the ruling classes who control the direction society and the economy goes in, want unemployment to be high - so they have greater power over those who lose out.
People on both sides oversimplify the issue. When new tech enters the market, TWO things happen:
1) some jobs are eliminated.
2) some jobs are created.
If the tech is an entertainment/luxury tech, then generally you get more of #2 than #1.
If the tech is a labor-automation tech, you get more of #1 than #2. You must, otherwise the total-cost-of-ownership will be so high that the market will not adopt the tech.
Apologists keep pointing at #2 and saying "see! see! New jobs!" without observing that the loss of old jobs is higher. And the justification about the eliminated jobs being dirty and dangerous may be true....but does *nothing* to solve the problem of unemployment.
You are correct. Human thinking is now being replaced. And the pace of change is happening too fast for natural attrition to other work (whatever this "work" might be - possibly digging holes and filling them back in exchange for a government stipend). This time it's different.
Suicide Booths! Although they will have been invented a few years later than predicted...
Unless something somehow prevents further technological progress, AI:s are bound to surpass human intelligence eventually. By then, human labor as we know it will be obsolete. Until then, automation will gradually replace the need for human labor, sometimes just replacing some tasks that were part of a job and other times replacing whole categories of jobs. Previously, when old jobs became obsolete due to automation, workers primarily moved on to other kinds of jobs that were already in existence (with some exceptions, of course). Now, it's really hard to see how already existing types of jobs would be able to take in enough people to compensate for the rate at which automation replaces jobs. So we would need whole new categories of jobs where the people being replaced somehow has something new to contribute. It just seems highly unlikely.
Ultimately, us being freed from labor is a good thing. We just need to figure out how to handle it politically, socially and economically.
Here, have a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&feature=youtu.be
This is dopey as hell. WTF?
Yes new technology induces new kind of jobs and may destroy old jobs. However, this is allows to conclude anything.
First, there could be less new jobs than old jobs. And in the past this was happening in the manufacturing industry. New jobs were created in services, but they did not always provide the same or better salary. Also these jobs were created independently. There were also new jobs for people who where able to program the new robots, but in total there were less jobs in factories.
Second, the new jobs created are usually not for the same people who lost their job.
In addition, the drone pilot argument is void, as before drones people had to fly over that area. In case he is referring to civilian drones, well these are new, but I have not seen many jobs in that area.
This is an example of a significant change were a new technology is VERY disruptive to the status-quo. But it's not exactly unprecedented either. How much labor was disrupted in traditional farming when automation came to that sector?
An awful lot of truck drivers I knew didn't just choose it as a "first career" and let it become the only skill they had, though. Many were actually working in other fields, like in I.T. as computer techs, when they decided trucking paid better and gave them less stress. The fact it qualifies as relatively unskilled labor means it's a field that was relatively fluid. People could just get disgusted with an aspect of their existing office job, take some driving courses, and move over to trucking.
In that sense, I think many of them will be just fine adapting to change and doing something else for a living. It will only pose a big problem if the automation comes too rapidly. Personally, I think it won't -- because there are still many challenges in the "last mile" part of delivery. Automated trucks won't be able to properly handle all the situations that come up with requests to drop off deliveries in different places than originally scheduled, for example. (I used to work for a steel fabricator, and drivers *always* had interesting situations come up when customers asked for steel to be dropped off for home construction. It's not like they all had proper loading docks to pull up to. Sometimes you'd wind through miles of unmarked dirt roads in a forest to find some drop-off place described as "past the cut down trees and stumps, in the small field with some hay bales sitting in it".)
I'd say that's a good estimate, based on the fact that while the US may not have close to a third of the world's population or land area, nearly everywhere else relies on packhorses, wheelbarrows and trebuchets.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
By definition, HALF of all humans have an IQ below the other half - for simplicity sake that means they really CAN'T learn to hold down a job which requires anything more than the most rudimentary math, writing skills, critical thinking skills, high-tech job skills. And this is before we even get into the fact that many of those who could, in theory, half learned algebra and other higher-end critical thinking tools in high school DIDN'T -- and now never will.
And MOST of the other half of us appear to lack the common sense to recognize the basic problem -- as evidenced by the fact that we keep allowing minimum wage to be jacked up, as if that is going to create higher incomes...instead of lower employment of those who can't upgrade.
Having a meaningful job is a basic requirement to having a meaningful life. It is a human right. This human right isn't threatened so much by high tech as it is by cupidity and intellectual laziness in too many of our "city dwellers" and, certainly, in our politicians. Think about it. Again: the tech isn't the problem, as there are in theory always other tasks worth doing which are not yet addressed by tech. But once you squeeze from both the top and the bottom at the same time, as many areas and even states in the US are doing (I'm looking at you, California), you create a wasteland. And wastelands breed violence and crime and drugs and a myriad of other problems related to human misery.
It was sensible to focus on growth, considering that there was a reasonable market to grow into. There was a huge market of people who want cars and who would buy them if they were affordable. That made the Model T such a success, and after WW2 the VW Beetle. There was a huge demand for cheap transportation, people wanted it and people had disposable income to afford it (provided it wasn't too expensive).
That isn't the case today. There is no market to grow into, market saturation is pretty much reached in nearly all areas.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's not even the problem. Sure, it means that we "smart" workers get to feel the automation hit this time, but it's way worse than just having another group of people who have to rethink their employment chances.
In former waves of automation, the displaced workers were needed elsewhere. Farmhands that were displaced by machinery moved into the cities and became factory workers. Factory workers that were later replaced by robots moved on into an emerging service industry.
There is no industry to move the displaced workers to this time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except very rarely do new fields of employment create as many new jobs as new tech has helped kill off..
So we end up with a bigger and bigger number of jobless..
Sure they are. They're also the perfect example of "more there than most other things."
As soon as anyone starts thinking "the way it is" is definitive of "the way it will be", they've fallen victim to a major cognitive error. Technological progress is non-linear, and there's not even a hint of it slowing down. Quite the opposite.
Cleaning up cat puke is just another item on my very long list of have-tos that will go away as soon as it can go away.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Speaking as a cat and Roomba owner, one who really, really likes cats, I can tell you with absolute authority that cat puke on the floor is exactly as "fashionable" as dirty baby diapers are, and for precisely the same reason: the effort is worth the overall result. When automation removes the requirement for either / both, you're not going to find any significant number of sane people regretting the change.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"There is no industry to move the displaced workers to this time."
I agree. And it's going to be a real, big problem. Soon!
The thing about the "current X revolution" is that "tomorrow's Y revolution" renders all reasoning made about X irrelevant, and sometimes outright silly. Everything you said is exactly that type of reasoning.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
An historical pattern is no guarantee of continuation of that pattern. It's not a hard-wired Law of the Universe.
In the past, we could see the new jobs coming to replace the old ones fairly quickly. The replacements are much harder to find this time, at least in quantity. Most "mature" industrialized nations are facing the same problem.
Maybe sufficient job replacement would work IF our society knew how to adjust to it properly.
For example, I have a theory that if we use the Helicopter Money concept, we may be able to boost sluggish economies without risk of run-away inflation because automation can absorb the increase: GDP can grow because machines can make more. If GDP grows with the money supply increase, you don't get excess inflation.
But, it's politically risky to try such: an administration would be accused of "printing money to hide debt problems" and other things, and condemned if the experiment failed.
Thus, the newer automation may not inherently lead to net job loss, but it will in practice if society doesn't know how to adjust economic and civil systems to take advantage of it.
Table-ized A.I.
That isn't the case today. There is no market to grow into, market saturation is pretty much reached in nearly all areas.
China is buying more cars, the growth has paused but they're still buying them at a fixed rate. India is the next potential market. Also, cars which are being shared will be used more and wear out quicker and have to be replaced sooner, so if self-driving cars really do lead to more mobility (by enabling it in people who currently lack it) then there may actually be more vehicles sold.
China and India are the hopes of many an industry...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's like saying "to pitch a baseball, we have to understand physiology and be able to solve multiple simultaneous equations" or "to light a fire, we have to understand oxidation" or "to build a house we have to understand physics." No, we don't. We just need something that works.
We already don't understand the details of what multilevel neural nets are doing. We just know -- empirically -- that they can do cool things. We can build them. We can train them. They then do cool things.
It's quite plausible that conscious, true-Scotsman AI will arrive in just this fashion. Lard knows there are a lot of things being thrown at that wall to see if they'll stick. Of course, it could arrive due to a brand new understanding... but if it does, it'll be of precisely the same nature: not here on Monday, completely here on Tuesday. You just can't predict when and where, and so you can't say what will or will not happen in the near term.
Bottom line, formal understanding is lovely, but it isn't a prerequisite.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Here's your thinking:
o Baseball enters the field. You can throw it back.
o Softball enters the field. You can throw it back.
But here's what's actually on the program:
o Baseball enters the field. You can throw it back.
o Huge earth mover enters the field. The field is being plowed under. Your only option is to get out of the way.
IOW: "One of these things is not even slightly like the other."
There will be no jobs.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"He also argues that historically automation eliminates jobs that were "dull, dirty, and dangerous,""
I know this come as a surprise to many folks who don't work in dirty, dangerous careers, but many, many people *like* their jobs either because they are dirty and dangers, or in spite of that fact. It is the height of pretentiousness to say that because you don't want to do a particular job, no one should want to do it, and therefore no one should complain that you're actively trying to eliminate their job. Automation hurts people. This is an undeniable fact. Trying to counter-argue that fact using subjective logic does not change the underlying fact, it merely makes it easier for those sympathetic to automation to swallow their guilt.
Here's another uncomfortable fact: automation doesn't just hurt people, it hurts the whole environment. This is a classic model of the few exploiting the many for their own personal gain and paternalistically claiming it's for the better.
None of it matters of course because globalization has taken much of the car industry away anyway.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
go obsolete.
The hardest part of predicting the future of technology isn't what but when.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So why did I meet an air force helicopter pilot retraining 10 years ago because of drones?
the amount of money you can make at a fast food joint has long since been too little to get you through college. $8 x 40/week x 52 weeks = $16,640/yr. Tuition alone is $11k/yr at a public school Rent in a 'cheap' college town is $400/mo ($800 if you're in the dorms). Food if you're not eating Raman/Natty Lite (which doesn't really work, you'll get malnutrition) is $150-$200/mo ($400 if you don't have a kitchen. Dorms again). If you're not living in the Dorms you'll probably need a car (the stuff in biking distance is just as expensive as the dorms).
Full disclosure: I've got a kid in college right now. It's fucking _expensive_.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That word "work" needs splitting into its constituent parts before it can be discussed in the context of Maslow, because it carries so much baggage.
The "earning money for food and shelter" part of working is firmly at the very bottom of Maslow's pyramid. The ceiling at that lowest tier is simply survival, and it's very grim to realize that by far the largest part of humanity is huddled together down there and living from day to day.
In contrast, "doing something which interests you" belongs in one of the higher tiers of the Hierarchy of Needs, one of the tiers concerned with personal fulfillment. Earning money while doing something interesting does not appear in that tier, because it has already been satisfied in a lower tier.
This is one of the reasons why a Universal Basic Income fits in well with Maslow's upward progression of a thinking species, as it frees people from the fight for survival and enables them to seek out occupations which are interesting to them in social or intellectual ways.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The current debate is about dumb AI -- drive cars, clean offices etc.
But if they become intelligent enough to do advanced jobs like programming computers, then why would they want us around as non-working drones?
http://www.computersthink.com
Bad example.
The vast amount of jobs went long ago when people with picks and shovels were replaced by huge, very expensive machines. Sure the truck drivers are being replaced, as will a few others.
But most of the people at a mine are maintaining those machines, planning etc. And the cost of labour to operate the machine is relatively low compared to the cost of the machine.
I worked on a sick software project in a building that was next a huge hole in the ground. While we pissed about finding ever more excuses for the project to be delayed the hole was filled in and a mighty tower arose next door. Floor by floor. Then the windows were put in, the tower finished.
And then, a little later, our project was finally abandoned.
You don't do it "on the highway"; you do it on some moral equivalent of a rest stop, parking lot, whatever that is conveniently situated... Convenient for the AI to get to, that is.
Maybe now the UBI socialists will shut up. They won't really, though.
It doesn't matter what was allegedly "created" if you're not doing something that directly helps the displaced.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Does a human even need to be useful?
What if it cost nearly nothing to provide for everyone?
What if food can be produced from minerals and carbon sources synthetically for pennies per meal? The USA alone could feed the whole world with less than our entire EPA budget -- including transport cost (the factories can be setup locally to every region).
Our goal must be to produce synthetic food alternatives for pennies per meal. The only ingredients being minerals and carbon .. both of which are highly recyclable and found abundantly. We already have the chemistry to make this happen. We can synthesize all the amino acids and essential proteins. All we need is cheap energy. If the cost of Solar panels keeps falling at the current rate we will achieve that by 2020. But since Trump is going to ban solar power. We will have to wait a couple of decades until Fusion energy (MagLIF) becomes a thing.
Serve your country!
Or maybe they can be setup as batteries for AIs.
slashdotters wouldnt be caught dead watching downton abbey
All around the world, radical leaders similar to Trump are being elected. People are being squeezed by the double vice of automation and globalization and elect these leaders as an attempt to do something different because the status quo is not working. If you still have a job then then you cannot see the problem.
Or if you have a job, but you don't like it, or it has shitty hours, or an unreasonable asshole in charge, or nasty/dangerous working conditions, or an overly long commute, or an increasingly thin line between "your own time" and "your time as an employee" with no similar increase in compensation, or stagnant wages, etc ... then you suck it up, convince yourself you should be thankful to have a steady job at all, and remain powerless to improve much of anything.
It's a bit soul-sucking to be a little cog in a big faceless machine, performing some menial task when you are qualified to do much more interesting things, yet told to be thankful for what you have (and not without reason), meanwhile making ends meet is hard, job security is a thing of the past and your employer is enjoying record profits. You are easily replacable, a fungible commodity like rolls of paper towels or barrels of crude. You're not special because you're sentient and sapient. You're a "human resource".
Having a job that actually helps you feel more intellectually and emotionally fulfilled starts to look like some kind of Holy Grail fantasy, the stuff of fairy tales. I actually do know one person who has this (a research scientist), though her position depends on government grants and is not secure.
America went from a spirit of being exceptional and embracing greatness to a spirit of just trying to get by. Too much of its "greatness' was built on military and economic domination of people who didn't want to be dominated, funded by a fiat currency system that's not even issued by the federal government. That's not a sustainable model.
The wealth created by far cheaper production goes to employing people in other areas (for example, the one person of the above example will still have needs). The 99 people are now free to do other jobs.
Which typically does not happen for the displaced. Case in point, the last 40 years.
And with that labor freed, we have opportunity for more assembly lines to make more things. Finally, it's worth noting that all this automation makes human labor more valuable.
Unfortunately, said displaced individuals largely do not have the resources or scale to be effective at such.
Unless you all but force them to favorably reintegrate the displaced in new professions, you have it completely wrong.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
What you call "economic literacy" relies on the assumption that no/negligible friction exists.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You are correct that automation will create new jobs in the future but there are major issues you are not taking into account. The most glaring is that automation takes away unskilled work (no college) and replaces them will skilled work (college required). The other major issue is that the automation removes many more positions than it creates (e.g. an assembly line process that was not automated required 25 people to run but after automating the process only 1 or 2 people are required to run the process). Replacing unskilled work with skilled work is not ideal because it creates barrier of entry into the workforce. Workers have to obtain and pay for training and/or a degree before they can enter the workforce. With the cost of secondary education being so expensive fewer people are obtaining secondary education causing the rate of unskilled workers to increase. Unfortunately, these workers job prospects are ever diminishing because we are automating the positions they could have worked.
A very good post!
However I can think of one 'industry' that is crying out for more people, and that is caring - as in caring for the elderly (especially, given current and near future demographics), the sick, and the young.
Of course I know that people are working their socks off to automate these roles too I just doubt the practicality, and the morality for that matter, of their efforts.
Denying the impact of automation is like denying climate change. We can now build machines that are more efficient than humans. Soon we'll be using machines that are smarter than humans. Whenever I read modern science fiction stories I ask myself could a machine replace the main characters in their jobs. Quite often I think they can.
The resurgence of automation R&D is not the same as previous ones.
This is not a push to automate some dead end jobs nobody wants to do.
This is a push to automate the human being in it's entirety.
And if you think your job is safe because it requires thinking out of the box or creativity or wtv else, think again. They are researching into automating all aspects of a human being, including their creativity. There is right now, AI that has been programmed to paint, write songs and stories that are indistinguishable from those created by human beings to the average person (does not mean that they are good, yet).
And even if somehow "creativity" turns out to be some magical ethereal thing that we cannot replicate, who cares. You cannot have 99.9% of the populations being painters, poets, photographs and etc. At best you will find yourself in a situation where we will have 1 human overseeing the activity of thousands or robots/ai.
The only jobs that will be safe against automation, at least until the lobbyists convince governments otherwise, is those that are controlled by professional orders (doctors, lawers, engineers, etc). Eventually that barrier will be removed in the name of progress (and quite frankly an AI would likely be able to do those jobs better than any human ever could as they would be able to access all of human knowledge in it's entirety in a fraction of a second).
We are slowly slowly ushering in an era of post scarcity (it has already begun with movies, tv, music, books, where we could easily give every human being a copy at near 0 cost, and look how disruptive it has been to those industries), so we need to start thinking about how we are going to re-organize our civilization so that it makes sense (and no, having the 0.01% controlling 99% of the resources & wealth does not make sense).
It isn't automation that is at issue but greed.
The article mentions Universal Income. Complicated economic aside, lets assume it works. Who pays for it? Well the government does. Well where do they get the money, taxpayers in the form of income tax. Problem is, with less people working unless the few people that are working get taxed more, how does it add up? Well it doesn't. The companies that go into automation, do not currently pay more corporate tax. However not only do they not have to pay income to workers, but governments are unable to collect income tax from them to support basic income. It is pretty straight forward.
The solution is also pretty straight forward also. Higher corporate tax rate. It is only the company and a select few that profit. However both groups are going to actively lobby against any such changes due to greed.
The reality is that the current trend will continue. Jobs will continue to disappear, yet pay to those who continue to work will not increase, more people will become unemployed or underemployed, governments will struggle to support programs like universal income or equivalents, more and more wealth with become concentrated into corporate coffers and the few that wield them.
Eventually a tipping point will be reached, despite common sense the ultra rich cannot stop accumulating wealth due to greed, and despite best efforts to control outcome political leaders will be replaced with radical change, this will lead to things like wholesale nationalization as a way to re-distribute wealth to be used commonly...
The real "war on coal" was mining companies going from hundreds of thousands of miners going down into the mines to mountaintop removal, giant shovels and trucks, with the result that there are only tens of thousands of miners, hundreds or thousands of communities that are in poverty, with no visible chance of recovery.
Then, an explicit example: someone I was talking to over the weekend is from Bethleham, PA. Bethleham Steel shut down by the early seventies - by '77, I saw the literal miles of shut down mills. They now have a casino, paying minimum wage or close to it.
Oh, and then there's the one or two fast food chain CEOs who are talking about fully-automated drive-ins, rather than pay a $15 minimum wage.
The 15%-ers, and folks here who "they've got theirs, who cares about anyone else", seem to be utterly blind to the fact that there has been *no* recovery for the bottom 55%. Where's the tens of millions of WELL-PAYING JOBS for folks with no college (and do you *really* believe college is for everyone? How about that idiot you know, who's great fixing your plumbing, but finds a computer *way* too complicated?)
So don't tell me that automation hasn't already wiped out millions of jobs. Besides, what's *wrong* with a basic income? If it's good enough for millionaires' kids, why not the rest of us?
mark
VICE (week)nightly news posted that 4.9+ million manufacturing jobs were lost between 2000 and 2016:
why isn't anyone dealing with the larger picture and putting 5 million U.S.ians to works?
No wonder Trump won!
Everyone is assuming that in order to create wealth, people must have "jobs" and to do "work". That will change. People may want jobs, but what they really want and need is the INCOME for the goods and services that the income can buy. With high automation, goods and services will become essentially free. People will not need "jobs" as we know it. W3TTT
There are more humans employed today than at any other time in history. Is that in spite of all the technologies that have been developed, or because of them?
Answer: the pattern we've seen at least since Roman times is that moderately disruptive new technologies have a moderately positive net effect on employment, and massively disruptive new technologies have a massively positive net effect on employment.
I would not bet on any presently-emerging technologies being the first exception to this rule.
A technology that solves more general problems will be more massively disruptive than a technology that solve a specific problem.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
very few have a cleaner, cook, live-in nanny, butler and so on.
The number of billionaires is a good proxy for the number of people who employ those kind of household staff.
And guess what: the number of billionaires is at a record high, and climbing.
I expect the world's first trillionaire will pay a seven-figure salary to the head of household staff.
By the way, Neal deGrasse Tyson predicts, "The first trillionaire there will ever be is the person who exploits the natural resources on asteroids."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Renewable power sources will only provide about one tenth of what is available today. Human labor will be much cheaper and more reliable than machine labor.
Just because the cost to provide goods goes down doesn't mean the cost of the good goes down. If a company can lower their expenses but charge you the same amount, I'm pretty sure they're going to try just that.
That's what happens in the absence of competition.
But in the presence of competition, the benefit of lower production cost tends to be shared between producer and consumer.
Remember this when people call for "single-payer" healthcare (as opposed to multiple private insurers who compete with each other on the basis of better coverage and/or lower premiums).
Worse, the single payer that faces no competition would be a government-owned non-profit bureaucracy, meaning it would have absolutely no incentive to operate efficiently.
All of this explains the wisdom in the old saying, "if you think X is expensive now, wait until it's free!"
Show me any company that is willing to pass those savings onto customers! ...Costs are never going down
I can show you thousands of gas stations whose prices fluctuate up and down several times per month. The upward fluctuations happen when they pass along some of a price increase charged by their wholesale supplier. The downward fluctuations happen when they pass along some of a price reduction charged by their wholesale supplier.
(I say "some of" because in the presence of competition, businesses tend to pass along some but not all of the magnitude of these increases and decreases.)
Duh, how did you get +5 Informative for that easily disproven notion?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
We do not need more production. We already produce more than we can sell.
That depends on what commodity you're talking about. We don't need more production of basic staples, like cheap loaves of white Wonder bread. But as one's standard of living climbs above what it takes to secure the basic necessities, you ascend Maslow's hierarchy and begin to acquire things that aren't necessities.
From the perspective of a consumer who wants a Tesla but can only afford a Hyundai, we are not producing enough Teslas.
Fifteen years from now, hopefully that consumer will be in an improved situation: he can afford a Tesla, but can't afford a flying car. And then the perception will be that we're not producing enough flying cars.
There will always be greater things to aspire to, so unless you want to place a static ceiling on everyone's standard of living, it's incorrect to decree that "we do not need more production."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Even care has the fundamental problem all industries are suffering from: Yes, there is a need. We have more and more elderly that would really depend on the caring industry - if they could afford it. Some can. Many, many more cannot. And don't try to get the government involved, since we're heading for lower taxes that also means that the government will be able to pay for fewer services (not that it would, most likely, if it could).
The problem our economy has is not a lack of need. It's a lack of means to satisfy those needs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You might have missed the part where China and India are absolutely capable and very willing to satisfy the needs of their own market. In other words, you really want to compete with China? How? Even if you work people 24 hours a day on a 4 hour salary they're more expensive than Chinese in the usual sweatshop.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You might have missed the part where China and India are absolutely capable and very willing to satisfy the needs of their own market
Yes, I missed that part because it never happened. China doesn't have the rest of the world's know-how or design skills. When they design a car it is pretty much always ugh and even they think so, which is why they want to buy everyone else's cars. India is quite capable of designing things they will buy, but not of building something you'd want to own.
China is of course quite clever to force people to make a 50% partnership with a Chinese company if they want to do business there, and I would do the same thing to them here. That and the TPP are the only things I have so far discovered where I agree with Herr Trumpler's stated positions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
people lack the means to climb the pyramid.
This kind of pessimism resembles another post I recently saw that said "the percentage of humans earning a living wage has been going down."
I will quote myself by re-posting my response to that post:
Define "living wage." Does that mean an income with which you can afford to have running water in your home? Then the percentage of humans earning a living wage is orders of magnitude higher than it was 140 years ago.
Does it mean an income with which you can afford to own an automobile? Then the percentage of humans earning a living wage is orders of magnitude higher than it was 110 years ago.
Does it mean an income with which you can afford cell phone service? Then the percentage of humans earning a living wage is orders of magnitude higher than it was 25 years ago.
Note that all these improvements in the standard of living were made possible by disruptive technologies... the very thing that inexplicably causes so much angst among people who should know better.
The evidence shows that a whole lot of pyramid-climbing has been taking place, has it not?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.