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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.
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
Also, it is the easy, brain-dead jobs that are gong to go out of existence. The jobs that support the automation? Robotics engineers, software engineers, mechanics. These are higher end jobs that require education and training.
Sure, there's always going to be menial labor jobs, but they'll be fewer. Look at what is poised to happen in the fast food industry.
Essentially, if you are not reasonably intelligent, you are going to have some serious issues getting employment within 20-30 years. Maybe even sooner than that.
The GOOD thing is that with lower production costs, it will become less costly to live so maybe these things will balance out as they always have in the past. The future economy, though, looks like it will be vastly different than what we have today.
But, then again, to be fair... People said the exact same thing about the Industrial Revolution. Machines are going to take over! No jobs for anyone! But what really happened was jobs for everyone and things were great.
Based on history and evidence there isn't much to fear, but I just feel that things aren't quite the same this time around...
Love sees no species.
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.
The EPA didn't put them out of work. That five hundred ton truck that hauls away the coal after the five ton bucket loader fills it up did.
You don't need ten thousand schmucks with picks and shovels when you have twenty thousand horsepower of machinery operated by three guys and a fee spotters.
They could offer to work for room and board and still not have jobs in the coal industry, unless its driving the trucks and those jobs are on their way out too. They still need one guy to take the blame for the coal ash and mine tailings spills, but Trump gutting the EPA will kill that job too.
"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.
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
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.
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.
Why do steel workers who build skyscrapers want to keep building high rise skyscrapers?
I bet a lot of steelworkers might ask why do people want to sit behind a computer screen all day typing code, or work in an office all day? Construction may be one of the most rewarding professions, as you can see the fruits of your labor every single day.
Robotics engineers, software engineers,mechanics
Until they automate those jobs, too. I mean, why would you use a human engineer when you could get a robot to the same thing with far greater precision, speed and no bitching about pay-rises?
Basically, any job you think of could be automated/roboticized. This includes teaching, child-rearing, musical composition, interpretive dance, cosmologist, explorer, judge, farmer...
People said the exact same thing about the Industrial Revolution
We are still in the industrial revolution and it seems to be playing out exactly as feared.
"The same thing I want with the Kremlin. I'm bored with corporations. With the information I can access, I can run things 900 to 1200 times better than any human." - MCP
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'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, ...
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.
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.
But, then again, to be fair... People said the exact same thing about the Industrial Revolution. Machines are going to take over! No jobs for anyone! But what really happened was jobs for everyone and things were great.
Based on history and evidence there isn't much to fear, but I just feel that things aren't quite the same this time around...
Of course they're not the same. The industrial revolution gave us carpet factories and fully carpeted homes. It made production cheap enough that we stopped gluing broken plates together. Over the last century, production has ramped up to the point that we have to be actively coerced to consume past satiation point -- your sports team's strip is updated every season so you'll replace something with several years of useful life left in its fabric.
We've displaced workers from job to job, rendering them more productive, but we've passed over the optimum of productivity vs population. There's nothing that we need all these people for.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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!
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.
The problem is not that he/she can't learn. Its that he has zero confidence that "retraining" (to do something he already knows how to do) will get him a job when the actual problem is ageism.
I have learned to do several new jobs after the age of 50. The jobs are either unobtainable due to ageism, or the rate of pay has collapsed. (I am still doing another course - but expecting to work for myself this time).
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Human thinking is now being replaced. This time it's different.
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.
Yes, because this time will be the same as all other times... we've got anecdotal proof!
Excuse me, I'm going to become rich on the stockmarket, I saw a pattern.
Your analysis ignores a whole lot of things for wishful thinking.
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?
Why would a for-profit corporation decide to fix this problem? They would automate and sell 100 fancy gadgets to the wealthy. Laying virtually everyone off and thus exacerbating the overall problem.
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.
The people losing their jobs do not have the wherewithal or genetic luck to be in fashion, entertainment, and most non-essential businesses. They would already be doing that work because it pays so much better.
Yet those worthless people have the annoying problem that they need to eat regularly.
We have plenty of extinct jobs that were replaced by some degree of automation these days, and transitional periods will always happen.
The problem is a general-purpose AI and sophisticated robotics mean those new jobs will also be automated. We're left with "what can a human do that no AI or robot could ever do", and that is a very, very, very small set of things.
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.
You're thinking about an individual driver replacing their personal vehicle. We're talking about a corporation replacing it's fleet. The latter can happen very quickly, especially when you remove the expensive drivers that require unprofitable things like "sleep".
But that's always been the case. We'll have displacements, we'll have disruptions, we'll have extinction of jobs
And those workers will be displaced into........? You have to come up with a job that can not itself be automated.
You're also thinking about automation as only robots in factories or similar. But we already have massive automation in "knowledge" industries.
20 years ago, the software I am writing at work would have required a team of about 15-30 people. But we've automated a lot of software in the intervening decades. I don't have to write a network stack. I don't have to write a web server on that network stack. I don't have to write the code that parses the input JSON and formats the output JSON. I don't have to write a database engine. I don't have to write a GUI engine. And so on. So the code I have to write is very small compared to 20 years ago, and it can be done by one developer.
And we're rapidly approaching the point where a typical CRUD business application could be made by dragging-n-dropping boxes in a GUI. Meaning someone like me is not needed at all.
This time is not the same as the previous times.
A person with an average intelligence can never be educated to become a scientists, programmer, or an engineer.
Bullshit. You can train a monkey to do these things, even if it takes a while. It is true though that they won't be a brilliant scientist / engineer / programmer they can still be competent to do research ( and understand ) work at various lower levels.
And measuring intelligence is extremely difficult. Someone who is street smart, but didn't finish High School ( and maybe could even score extremely high if they had access to more education while getting by in the world), probably wouldn't score well on a test measuring how much you have learned. Yet that street smart person would likely be able to look at an experiment and see where real world interactions would be happening, and even explain what is going on... all without knowing the technical terms and what the designer of the experiment is actually doing ( on the learned level).
In a similar vein - someone who is extremely good at rote book learning would score really well on the IQ test, but be completely worthless in the real world because they just plain can't read and learn what to do in every single different situation. They may be good at solving the various bits and pieces of a problem, but then someone else has to come in and put everything together into a cohesive whole.
As an anecdote, and even a car one for /. , one of the absolute best mechanics I have ever met couldn't even read. Despite that, you could take your car to him and he could tell you exactly what was wrong with it, tear it down, and rebuild with the replacement parts even if he had never worked on that specific model / type of car. I would call that having a high specialized intelligence, even if there was no way he would score even close to average on a standardized test ( can't read the test = can't do the test pretty much).
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
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.
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.
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.
Twice in the last week I have been in the presence of politicians saying how "1/3 of new housing is going to be affordable" and they have looked baffled when I explain that this means 2/3 of it will be unaffordable.
I look forward to automated politicians. THAT will be an improvement.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.