Slashdot Mirror
Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs (nytimes.com)
Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they've declared a different winner: the robots. From a report on the New York Times: The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots. The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs. In a paper last year, they said it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually return to their previous levels. Just as cranes replaced dockworkers but created related jobs for engineers and financiers, the theory goes, new technology has created new jobs for software developers and data analysts. From a report on The Verge, which looks at another finding in the study: They found that each new robot added to the workforce meant the loss of between 3 and 5.6 jobs in the local commuting area. Meanwhile, for each new robot added per 1,000 workers, wages in the surrounding area would fall between 0.25 and 0.5 percent.
Before an hour has passed we'll see half a dozen posts by people saying "they'll never take my job". A dozen people pointing out examples of how they are, or they have the technology to do so soon... and half a dozen people whining about "the media doesn't know what AI really is.
I feel like we've had this conversation a lot lately.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Few places investigate robots until it's easier than hiring meat, which usually means they're thinking of an 8 hour shift.
Once they get a robot and realize that (excepting maintenance) it can go 24/7 and doesn't need vacation, sick time, it turns out robots are around 6.5x more productive than a human (at a task a robot can currently perform). The fact that they don't need benefits either makes them even more cost effective.
And that's just uptime. Robots - for a lot of tasks, at least - have the capacity to be much, much faster than humans, with a much lower error rate if the task is sufficiently standardized.
If Robots take away jobs from humans, the (Robot "employee") work need to be severely taxed and the tax income put into a fund to support humans loosing their income.
This will take away the incentive to prefer and use robot work over humans and help the transition to a workable solution..
Will this fly - nope because the system is purely profit-driven and humans are just a means to create more profit for the "higher cast" and dropped when a cheaper method is available.
This is seen by outsourcing jobs and production to cheaper wage and production environments.
Are there laws to hold corporations socially responsible? Sure not in the USA, maybe somewhere in North-European countries where people live a happier life and people think more about common well being affecting everyone as compared to regular capitalistic or totalitarian structures where the "right" religion is instilled from birth on and every change brutally repressed and eliminated.
Well, the reason this is about Trump is because he has created what is clearly a set of unachievable expectations. Health care is only the first of many failures; where his flights of rhetorical fancy hit cold hard reality. When it comes to manufacturing, even a repatriation of manufacturing capacity is simply not going to deliver the expected significant uptick in employment. In fact, I'd go further as to argue that with increased automation, it makes less sense to locate manufacturing thousands of miles over an ocean from the market, and I imagine what will eventually happen is a good deal of manufacturing happening closer to major markets to bring down distribution costs, but you're not really going to see any significant increase in jobs.
Trump promised a lot of uneasy Rust Belters that the the good times would return, that China and Mexico would be forced to hand back all those jobs, when in fact the only reason many of the jobs ended up in places like China and Mexico was simply due to costs, and as automation increases, not even the lower wages in these countries will be enough to keep manufacturing there. In five or ten years, you'll see a lot of angry and frightened workers in the rust belts of India, China, Mexico and other countries who had been able to supply cheap labor.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Whether enough new jobs will open up to replace the quantity of jobs lost to automation and outsourcing, one thing is certain: many people will get displaced and hit hard times. Going from a $25/hr factory worker to a $10/hr Walmart greeter will NOT make for happy citizens, especially when they have a family and mortgage to take care of.
Most "new" jobs are given to young people, not to somebody who has been doing the same thing for 20+ years. Agism is real, even in IT; I've seen it myself.
Politicians ignored or downplayed the displaced and look what happened: they elected a human monkey-wrench in protest to shake things up. The lesson: ignoring the displaced will backfire. We may have only seen the first wave of rebellion; much more can happen.
Table-ized A.I.
the deplorables absolutely deserve to be out of work.
Sadly they will blame it on obama due to their incredibly low IQ and education level.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.