Japanese White-Collar Workers Are Already Being Replaced by Artificial Intelligence (qz.com)

Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work is also becoming increasingly competent. From a report on Quartz: One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with "IBM Watson Explorer," starting by this month. The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says.

Comments

As if this is new

[ranton]

As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people. My current company has seen over 10x profit growth over the past five years with a 20% increase in manpower. And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.

People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future. I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.

Re:As if this is new

[unixisc]

I used to be supportive of things like welfare reform, but this is throwing up new challenges that will probably require new paradigms. Since more and more low skilled jobs - including those of CEOs - get automated, there will be fewer jobs for the population

This then throws up the question of whether we should have a universal basic income. But one potential positive trend of this would be an increase in time spent home w/ family, thereby reducing the time kids spend in daycare and w/ both parents - not just mom or not just dad. What needs to be worked in is a mechanism to support their basic needs - home and food. Anything beyond that - they are welcome to do anything that pays them anything w/o having to worry about whether it meets expenses.

Re:As if this is new

[Oswald McWeany]

I completely agree. Even jobs which a decade ago looked irreplaceable, like teachers, doctors and nurses are possibly in the crosshairs. There are very few jobs that AI can't partially (or in some cases completely) replace humans. Society has some big choices to make in the upcoming decades and political systems may crash and rise as we adapt.

Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people? The ultimate socialist state?

Or is the gap between haves and have nots going to grow exponentially, even above today's growth as those that own the companies and AI bots make ever increasing money and the poor suckers at the bottom, given just enough money to consume the products that keep the owners in business.

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

Society has some big choices to make in the upcoming decades and political systems may crash and rise as we adapt.

Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people? The ultimate socialist state?

It depends on the country, I think. I believe many countries, like Japan and Finland, will indeed go this route.

However, here in the US, we are vehemently opposed to anything that can be branded as "socialism". So instead, society here will soon resemble "The Walking Dead".

Re:As if this is new

[Gr8Apes]

All jobs that don't do R&D will be replaceable in the near future, as in within 1 or 2 generations. Even R&D jobs will likely not be immune, since much R&D is really nothing more than testing a basic hypothesis, of which most of the testing can likely be handed over to AI. The question is what do you do with 24B people with nothing but spare time on their hands, and a smidgen of 1% that actually will have all the wealth? It doesn't sound pretty, unless some serious changes in the way we deal with people occurs sooner than later.

Re:As if this is new

[ArmoredDragon]

The problem I see with this is that white collar jobs have been replaced by technology for centuries, and at the same time, technology has enabled even more white collar jobs to exist than those that it replaced.

For example, the word "computer" used to be universally referred to as a job title, whereas today it's universally referred to as a machine.

Re:As if this is new

[EvilSS]

I think even in the US it will hit a tipping point when it gets bad enough. When our consumer society can't buy anything because they are all out of work, we will need to change our way of thinking about this, or watch the economy completely collapse.

Re:As if this is new

[alexgieg]

The problem is that AI is becoming faster at learning the new job opportunities than people are, thereby gulping them before people even were there to be replaced. And this speed is growing. You cannot beat an exponential growth with a linear one, or even with just slightly slower growing exponential one.

Re:As if this is new

[matbury6017]

“Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.” -- Abba Eban

Which is frequently misquoted as, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thingafter they have exhausted all other possibilities."

So when the starving mob are at the ruling elites' gates with torches and pitch forks, they'll surely find the resources to do the right thing.

Re:As if this is new

[unixisc]

My original comment was not about home schooling. It was about parents spending all time w/ their kids once kids are out of school - no daycares. That would include being involved w/ helping their kids w/ both homework and extra curricular activities.

Re:As if this is new

[gtall]

The "misquote" is a phrase uttered by Winston Churchill.

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

I'm going with the latter (complete economic collapse). There's no way, with the political attitudes and beliefs present in our society, and our current political leaders, that we'd be able to pivot fast enough to avoid it. Only small, homogenous nations like Finland (or Japan, even though it's not that small, but it is homogenous) can pull that off because they don't have all the infighting and diversity of political beliefs that we do, plus our religious notion of "self reliance".

Re:As if this is new

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, the economy won't completely collapse. Here is how things will play out:

1) Labor automation continues to make the teeming masses of poor people obsolete.
2) Unemployment continues to rise due to this.
3) Crime rates continue to rise due to unemployment.
4) Incarceration rates continue to rise; the prison industry continues to grow and thrive on tax dollars paid by rich people.
5) An entire generation of poor people dies off in prison.
6) The population shrinks back down to a workable number due to this.
7) The rich families thrive in an interlocked economy of ownership of labor automation, while everyone else dies off in prison.

so you see. we will have something like a living wage, but it will actually be residence in prison where you are not allowed to breed.

The end.

Re:As if this is new

[HiThere]

AI's are already improving their own code. That's what "learning" means. It's just that it's more difficult to apply that technique when the satisfaction constraints are so vague. That's why the early AIs specialized in games. It's easy to specify what satisfactory performance is. Driving is more difficult, because you don't want to *ever* experience an unsatisfactory outcome, but at least you can tell when one happened. Other skills are more difficult.

Then there's the "world complexity" where the conditions of the world are an orthogonal measure of the difficulty of the problem. AIs had already handled simple abstract problems in the early 1970's. An AI came up with quite original geometric proofs. Simple world, easy determination of success. These days mathematical proof checkers are pretty much regular tools in standard proofs. (The well validated ones, however, haven't been adapted to uncommon tools.) This isn't what we normally call AI, it's validation of logic, but it's an important *part* of a good AI...in certain fields. And programming is one of those fields.

The reason that an AI programmer has been slow to show up is because the problems are usually posed in a manner that's, at best, sloppy, and the satisfaction criteria are not easily judged. But AIs are making continual in-roads on handling both of those constraints.

Re:As if this is new

[Hasaf]

Stagflation is not the coexistence of deflation and inflation. Stagflation, as coined and seen the late 70's; it is the coexistence of high inflation and high unemployment. This is something that traditional economic theory considered to be impossible. It was the condition that saw the success of the supply side theories that were the core of Thatcherism and Reaganism. The trouble with supply side isn't that it doesn't work in specific circumstances; it is that its adherents try to apply it to all circumstances.

Re:As if this is new

[mikael]

Everyone tends to forget the jobs that have already disappeared over the decades:

elevator operators - a person who would start and stop a vertical elevator of a high-rise office block manually. Would have the experience to anticipate when an important person would need to use the elevator.
telephone operators - people who would connect long distance and international phone calls manually. There is a mp4 file of a dozen or more operators all contacting each other to connect someone in Los Angeles to New York
traffic lights - these replaced the need to have a police officer at every junction and crossroads
automated digital textile looms - these replaced the need for manual operators and allow a digital design artist and a technician to operate 15 multi-color textile machines
print workers and the Wapping Street dispute - this is the classic case of what happens when unions refused to accept gradual change. Print workers were employed to place metal typeset onto giant barrel drum printers. One group would create the typeset from shorthand notes made by journalists. Another would strip it down and put the letters back into their relevant pigeonhole boxes ready for the next print. When digital technology came along with WYSIWYG workstations and laser printers, both groups of people wanted equivalent jobs (typing in the shorthand notes into the computer), but that was going to be done by the journalists. If the internet had come along first, they could have moved gradually onto HTML design.
work processors and PDF files - these have replaced the need to hire a typist or print shop to do small or medium runs of printing documents
servers and mainframes - these replaced the need for large rooms filled with senior and junior clerks who would spend all day operating electric calculators
More reliable hardware has eliminated the need for large pools of technicians to maintain IT departments (running around swapping coaxial cable when the flash memory of a network card has a melt down).
Fly-by-wire avionics replace the need for a flight engineer
Modern navy ships (missile ships/destroyers) have more automated systems, reducing the crew size by over a half

Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

People that do trivial tasks like looking at numbers on documents, something a computer can easily do, are prime for getting replaced.

Face it, if you aren't creating new things, you're the first to go. Maintaining a process is basically pattern recognition.

Re:Obviously

[kwerle]

SInce this is very very similar to what my partner does, I feel like I'm a little qualified to speak on the subject at hand.

Yeah, pattern matching should nail this - but pattern matching only works if the patterns are reasonable/logical/consistent. Yes, I'm a little familiar with advanced pattern matching, filtering, etc.

Here's the thing: doctors are crappy input sources. At least in the US medical system. And in our system they are the ones that have to make diagnosis (in most cases). They are inconsistent from one doctor to the next. They are inconsistent from one day to the next. They are inconsistent from one patient to the next. They are inconsistent *within a patient* when the original diagnosis was wrong. And what's possibly worst of all: they disagree.

In the US we do the same kind of thing - base payouts on what the doctor diagnosed. They need to write specific magic words in the right way. So my partner looks at medical records and then confronts the doctor - somehow trying to suggest what they left out without making a diagnosis (because she's not a doctor, so she's not allowed to).

As you can imagine this is a delicate dance. Some doctors have egos. In any case, many of things she does are fixing errors [of omission, often], but others are a lot more complicated and sometimes very rare (some medical conditions just don't come up very often).

Finally, if you think having a person hound a doctor to get something corrected might be tricky - imagine having a machine try to do the same thing. Some doctors may be more resistant to that...

The easy answer to this is: that process is crap. Fix doctors/the system/whatever.

I agree.

Good luck with that.

Japanese workforce is growing old

[AchilleTalon]

Japan needs to automate as much as it can and robotize to survive with a workforce growing old. Japan is facing this reality as well as many countries where labor isn't replaced at a sufficient rate to keep up with the needs. Older people will need care some countries just cannot deliver or afford.

Re:Japanese workforce is growing old

[avandesande]

Japan is notorious for being far behind on office automation.

Queue the chicken littles

[sjbe]

Calm down everyone. This is just a continuation of productivity tools for accounting. Among other things I'm a certified accountant. This is just the next step in automation of accounting and it's a good thing. We used to do all our ledgers by hand. Now we all use software for that and believe me you don't want to go back to the way it was. Very little in accounting is actually value added activity so it is desirable to automate as much of it as possible. If some people lost their jobs doing that it's equivalent to how the PC replaced secretaries 30+ years ago. They were doing a necessary task but one that added little or no value. Most of what accountants do is just keeping track of what happened in a business and keeping the paperwork flowing where it needs to go. This is EXACTLY what we should be automating whenever possible.

I'm sure there are going to be a lot folks loudly proclaiming how we are all doomed and that there won't be any work for anyone left to do. Happens every time there is an advancement in automation and yet every time they are wrong. Yes some people are going to struggle in the short run. That happens with every technological advancement. Eventually they find other useful and valuable things to do and the world moves on. It will be fine.

Re:That's weird

[phantomfive]

"Watson" is a marketing term from IBM, covering a lot of standard automation. It isn't the machine that won at Jeopardy (although that is included in the marketing term, if someone wants to pay for it).

IBM tells managers, "We will have our amazing Watson technology solve this problem for you." The managers feel happy. Then IBM has some outsourced programmers code up a workflow app, with recurring annual subscription payments.

That is "automation". AI is something else...

[gweihir]

When you have people basically implementing a process without much understanding, it is pretty easy to automatize their jobs away. The only thing Watson is contribution is the translation from natural language to a more formalized one. No actual intelligence needed.

Failure of imagination

[sjbe]

As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people.

You're looking at the wrong scale. You need to look at the whole economy. Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes. Might have taken some of them a few months but eventually they found something else. My company just bought a machine that allows us to manufacture wire leads much faster than we can do it by hand. That doesn't mean that the workers we didn't employ to do that work couldn't find gainful employment elsewhere.

And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.

Again, so what? You've automated some efficiency into an industry that obviously needed it. Some workers will have to do something else. Same story we've been hearing for centuries. It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.

People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future.

Based on what? The fact that you can't imagine what people are going to do if they can't do what they currently are doing? I'm old enough to predate the internet. The World Wide Web was just becoming a thing while I was in college. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, etc all didn't even exist when I was born. Vast swaths of our economy hadn't even been conceived of back then. 40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things you never even imagined. Your argument is really just a failure of your own imagination. People have been making that same argument since the dawn of the industrial revolution and it is just as nonsensical now as it was then.

I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.

Prepare to be surprised then. Your argument has no rational basis. You are extrapolating some micro-trends in your company well beyond any rational justification.

Re:Failure of imagination

[ranton]

It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.

The buggy whip story shows that an entire species which had significant economic value for thousands of years found that technology had finally reached a point where they weren't needed. Instead of needing 20 million of them working in our economy in 1920, by 1960 there were only about 4.5 million. While they were able to take advantage of the previous technological revolutions and become even more useful because of better technology in the past, most horses could not survive the invention of the automobile.

The human intellect has enabled our species to keep up with technology for at least 100 years longer than arguably the second most productive work bearing species in our economy, but that doesn't mean we will forever. Most likely the fate of the horse in the early 1900's gives us a good view of what will happen to human workforce participation in the next 50 years. Around 9 million horses are still part of our economy today, but if horses had kept up with humans in our economy there would be more like 60 million.

Using the automobile revolution as a guide for what will happen in the AI revolution, human working age workforce participation could be at 15% in 40 years.

40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things you never even imagined.

Of this we have no disagreement. But these new companies will continue to need less people to do the work. The oldest 5 companies to be added to the DJIA employ 1900 people per $1 billion in revenue. The newest 5 companies require only 1100 employees. Looking at the 10 largest companies by market cap, the companies founded in the last 50 years require 1270 employees per $1 billion in revenue. The companies founded earlier than that (all three of them founded over 100 years ago) require 1850 employees.

You may not see the people being displaced by these changes already, but we all heard them loud and clear during the Brexit and US Presidential campaigns. Unfortunately their rage is misplaced towards outsourcing when the real culprit is a technologically advanced economy that doesn't need their skills anymore. Not enough to justify living wages in their society that is.

Customer service bots and automated vehicles alone have the capability of displacing 10's of millions of workers in a very short time. Whether we look at 100 years ago or just this century so far, it is clear we won't find new industries for many if not most of these workers.

You may have a better imagination than me, but a belief in Santa Claus doesn't make him real.

Re:Failure of imagination

[fluffernutter]

Were those people able to get hired elsewhere?

Your question is complete. The correct question to ask is if these people were able to get hired elsewhere *at the same salary when adjusted for inflation*. To that, the answer is no. It hasn't been true on average since the 70's. Sure, some people will find equal or better jobs, but salaries have been steadily decreasing since the onset of technology. Given a job for less money or no job, most people will pick the job for less; and that is why we are not seeing a large change in the unemployment rate.

Re:Failure of imagination

[Dutch Gun]

Generally speaking, though, when you see a very consistent trend or pattern over a long time, your best bet is that the trend will continue, not that it will mysteriously veer off because now it's happening to white collar jobs instead of blue collar jobs. I'd say the logical fallacy is to disbelieve that the trend is likely to continue. Technology doesn't invalidate basic economic theory, in which people manage to find jobs and services to match the level of the population precisely because there are so many people to provide products and services to.

Speaking as a programmer who writes rather technically complex software (videogames), I have to say that the notion my job is going to be replaced in my lifetime by AI seems mind-blowingly optimistic (not a new thing for AI proponents), probably made by people who have no clue about how many rather specialized problems I have to solve on a daily basis for which you'd literally need not just human-level intelligence, but highly specialized human level intelligence. That's because a big part of my job is interacting with the artists and designers on the team and helping to solve problems on their behalf.

One of the biggest fallacies I see is automatically assuming that increasingly efficient automation and production necessarily translates into fewer jobs. It often can, of course, but it doesn't necessarily have to. Increased efficiency can also act as a force multiplier, producing more products for less, or perhaps a bigger, better product, only with the same number of people.

To use my own industry as an example, the videogame company where I worked for quite a few years has been hard at work developing new technologies to allow their content creators to be more efficient. Each time we do that, we have a leg up on the competition, because we can then more efficiently create our virtual worlds. We don't fire designers, we create bigger and more complex worlds with the increased efficiency. What would happen if we wrote an AI that could generate content all on its own (think of a radically improved procedural generation algorithm)? Would we fire the game designers and artists then? Nope, probably not. Instead, I think we'd use the AI to create the bulk of our virtual world, and use the human artists and designers to hand-craft the most important bits to the game that really require a human touch.

Re:Failure of imagination

[bluegutang]

Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes.

Actually, the answer is probably no. Labor force participation rates have fallen steadily since about the year 2000. Feminism caused the rate to rise from 58% (1963) to 67% (2000). Since then, it has fallen to 63%. In other words, we've already lost almost half of what we gained from women entering the workforce en masse. And the rate will only continue to fall in the future.

Re:Failure of imagination

[gtall]

There is another effect. When the buggy whip manufacturers were put out of business, there were options for people to switch to and new industries were created. However, if AI gets apply across an entire economy, there won't be options because there is unemployment in every sector. And if AI obviates the need for workers, investors in new industries will build them around bots, so no real increase in employment. That and yer basic truck driver ain't going to be learning how to program.

Re:Failure of imagination

[dryeo]

Read some history. The solution to the automation aprox. at the beginning of the 20th century which removed the buggy whip market was political. The government legislated the workforce smaller. Child labour laws reduced the workforce by from 10%-20% (not sure of the exact numbers but call it 10%, all those 5-15 yr olds taken out of the workforce). The they legislated shorter work weeks, from 60 hours a week to 40 hours, another 1/3rd reduction in the work force. They also legislated a minimum wage, which at the time was just barely a living wage, a man could raise a small family and buy a small house working minimum wage. Their was also pensions to remove the oldest workers.
By close to halving the work force, socializing looking after the kids and old people, employment stayed high. We could do the same now. Shrink the work week, socialize keeping kids in school till 25 or so and have close to full employment but the political will is not there. Actually the only reason it worked earlier was businesses realized that the work force needed shrinking. Child labour laws were resisted until automation made it practical and there were lots of studies that showed productivity went up when people worked less.

Accounting isn't what you think it is

[sjbe]

I'm curious what you think you can do that Watson can't.

Seriously? Quite a bit actually. I can handle input streams that Watson can't. I can make tools Watson couldn't begin to imagine. I can interact with physical objects without vast amounts of programming. I can deal with humans in a meaningful and human way FAR better than any computer program. I can pass a Turing test. The number of things I can do that Watson cannot is literally too numerous to bother counting. Watson is really just an decision support system with a natural language interface. Very cool but the notion that it could replace me is just laughable.

Accounting is a very rigidly structured practice.

A lot of people think so but they and you are actually completely wrong. There is a tremendous amount of judgement that goes into accounting and much of it is anything but rigid. Surprisingly few people actually realize how arbitrary many of the choices that go into accounting actually are. For many there is no objectively right or wrong answer - it's merely a question of preference. Even seemingly simple questions like "when did a sale occur" aren't always actually simple questions with a single possible answer or an objectively best answer. There is a lot of judgement and opinion in those decisions and much of that will not be easy to automate. Don't conflate bookkeeping with accounting. They aren't the same thing. Bookkeeping is something Watson can help out greatly with but it is a small subset of what accounting is.

All IBM really needs to do is let Watson sift through the books of a couple hundred companies and it will easily determine how to best achieve a defined set of objectives for a corporation.

See there is your problem. Every company is unique in some way. There are some commonalities to be sure and regulations in many cases to further make things consistent. But it's actually really hard for even the most sophisticated software to adapt to the unique qualities of each company just like not every human can fit into every company. It's depressing how many seemingly bright people think that running a company is something as deterministic as running some data through a computer program. It's WAY more complicated than you think it is. Just because Watson won a few games of Jeopardy doesn't mean you can make the program the de-facto CEO.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[King_TJ]

Yep! I don't even work in Accounting or Finance, but because I do computer support for that department and have to get slightly involved in the bill coding side of the process -- I agree completely.

I'm pretty sure that even if you *could* get a computer to do everything for Accounting automatically, people would constantly become frustrated with parts of the resulting process -- from reports requested by management not having the formatting or items desired on them, to inflexibility getting an item charged to a certain group's cost center when it's an exception to the usual process.

Automation really works best when you have a repetitive, consistent process people have to go through without any creativity or thought involved. In every profession, there's still PLENTY of that required of people each day. Those are the tasks you want to automate to improve efficiency. Attempts to get a computerized system to substitute for human THOUGHT or CREATIVITY is where it quickly falls apart.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[fluffernutter]

Seriously? Quite a bit actually.

Then why don't you give at least one specific example.

There is a tremendous amount of judgement that goes into accounting and much of it is anything but rigid.

And this is where a system like Watson shines. While you may be able to fall back on personal experience to make these judgement calls, Watson can easily run thousands of simulations on each set of numbers, based on real world possibilities. You will always be making a guess based on what might happen, but Watson will come close to knowing what will happen.

See there is your problem. Every company is unique in some way.

Sure this is obvious. If every company were not unique in some way, then Watson would only need to learn from one company; thus the need for Watson to learn off of several hundred companies. The reason why the case for AI is hard to understand is because we are not able to fathom remembering every detail of every company and being able to isolate what was done differently in company 237 that allowed it to prosper versus company 938. We would have trouble even comparing two companies down to the detail that Watson would be capable of. Given 1000 companies, Watson will know what every single one did right and wrong. Watson will know where mistakes were made simply because it will be able to find another couple companies in its dataset that did better or worse in a similar circumstance.

This all said, I am far from an AI believer. I don't think AI will really be able to drive a car in the near future, at least not as dynamically as a human. However, most professions will benefit from Watson's ability to understand huge datasets down to excruciating detail and freely be able to pick out specific scenarios that worked in the past. This isn't really even AI, it is just a very organized search engine. The human mind almost does these things backwards through necessity, because we cannot process such large datasets.

Re:I'm not worried

[Waffle Iron]

He's hired primarily free market people as opposed to corporatist

Free marketers don't generally campaign on a platform of protectionist trade policies and direct government intervention in job markets.

Humans stopped writing computer code after Fortran

[raymorris]

Until Fortran was developed, humans used to write code telling the computer what to do. Since the late 1950s, we've been writing a high-level description, then a computer program writes the program that actually gets executed.

Nowadays, there's frequently a computer program, such as a browser, which accepts our high-level description of the task and interprets it before generating more specific instructions for another piece of software, an api library, which creates more specific instructions for another piece of software, such as a graphics library, which generates instructions for a graphics driver, which generates code used by a microcode implementation, which is the actual machine code that runs on the processor.

ALREADY the programming for the machine is produced by software, running code produced by software, which runs code produced by software. That's been true for 60 years, so pardon me if I'm not too concerned about the idea of a software program that creates software programs. Those are called "interpreters", "compilers", and "microcode", and they are exactly the tools that allow software engineers to be so productive.

Re:The problem is?

[Anonymous Coward]

The GP is likely referring to the conservative Christian homeschooling movement who homeschool their children explicitly to avoid exposing their children to a common culture. The "mixing pot" of American culture may be mostly a myth, but some amount of interaction helps understanding and increases the chance people will be able to think of themselves as part of a singular nation.

I believe in freedom of speech and association, so I do not favor legal remedies, but it is a cultural problem that may have social/cultural remedies.

Don't worry, Trump has the solution

[Jeremi]

Turns out it's rather simple, really --- just ban computers. He's going to start by replacing computers with human couriers for the secure-messaging market, and move outward from there. By 2020 we should have most of the Internet replaced by the (now greatly expanded) Post Office.

Re:Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[GameboyRMH]

It's not Parkinson's law, it's runaway inequality. The workforce continues to be more and more productive as it receives an unchanging or decreasing amount of compensation (in absolute terms - or an ever-decreasing share of the profits in relative terms), while the gains go to the 1%.

Re:Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[avandesande]

The wealthy have been pocketing all the productivity gains.

Re:How is this new

[HornWumpus]

It's socially, very hard to eliminate a job in Japan. Jobs there are often still for life.

Getting a HAL-9000 is about saving face. If you 'replace someone with a very small shell script', you have to say it took massive group effort, strong AI and a decade of work.

Re:This is not news or new

[djinn6]

I think you've been drinking too much Ayn Rand Coolaid.

As people are freed from jobs that are highly repetitive, there are always more complex, less repetitive jobs out there because the consumer is always looking for the next big thing to improve their lives/increase their free time/reduce their work load.

And everyone has both the talent and the initial capital to create that next big thing?

Entire multi billion dollar industries have been created after the introduction of the ATM and will continue to be created.

Why does it matter if a dozen people made all of those billions?

If we get to a point where there are 10x more job seekers than jobs, then we can revisit the issue, but right now there are about 5.5 million job openings in the US...

And there are 7.4 million unemployed people, and that's not counting people who want full-time employment but only found part-time work.

The Obama economy was of his own making after the first 2 years due to the ACA and excessive regulation, and, like the Carter economy, it will be unleashed with the next administration.

Yeah and Bush did a real great job...

Denial Looms

[JimSadler]

Many people in white collar jobs or professions do not yet realize that automation may actually replace them faster than manual trades are reduced to near zero human employees. Those that are aware generally think this massive displacement is decades away. Meanwhile real solutions are not put into conversation as politicians dare not admit the massive changes that must take place and therefore we are not preparing and the suffering will be amplified.