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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.
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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...
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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'
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.