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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.
I've read a lot of Slashdot comments on this subject, so I'm sure there's no reason to worry. I'll summarize:
1. The Cotton Gin. Once there was a "cotton gin" and blacksmiths but we still have jobs, so no problem!
2. Humans scheduled to get big buff next patch
3. People have been wrong about this in the past, ipso facto QED they're wrong about it now: humans win forever.
4. Who wants some cheap crap? I want quality and craftmanship in my Cheetos, and only humans have feelings and I want personal touch and... my waitress was cute that one time?
5. We'll still need poets and robot repairs guys. Probably everyone will do that.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
It will be a harsh, bloody, social uprising, perhaps even resulting in the destruction of the human race, when we finally realize the consequence of our extreme "productivity" as a species.
To put it simply, it doesn't take 7 billion people to house, clothe, feed, and entertain 7 billion people. So... now what?
The patrons of exploration aren't spending what we need to in order to open up new frontiers, and Capitalism/Imperialism need frontiers to be successful. Since there is not new territory, the new frontier is efficiency/productivity, which isolates capitalism from the labor force more and more.
We need lots of people to die, or we need a different understanding of a human's worth other than what they can produce. I love productivity and automation, but unless it is accompanied by social change, it will be the death of a whole lot of people.
Everyone assume robots and automation only affects factory jobs.
Automation is affecting everyone across all socioeconomic levels. Law research is all done by programs and pharmacists only have jobs because of legislation. McKesson has pharmacy robots that are faster and better than humans.
And even software development. Go and try to write a Windows application in just ANSI C/win32. Writing all those message loops and resources and all that code. While you're at it, write in the database connectivity. And go ahead and hand code the SQL for that database.
In about a week or two you'll have something that you could do with a a few mouse clicks in Visual Studio/WPF designer in a mater of what? an hour?
Between automation and globalization (labor arbitrage), our standard of living in the USA has nowhere to go but down. And if you add in our ageing population that is going to put more demands on entitlement programs, we are so screwed.
"it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually return to their previous levels"
Too fucking bad about that 'eventually' part - it ain't gonna happen this time because now *thinking* is being outsourced to machines. And in any field where automation is introduced the competition for the remaining, disappearing jobs become cutthroat, with often only the most ruthless gaining/retaining work. But of course, now these remaining workers are under the gun and susceptible to abuse by employers (or else they get replaced faster). Not to mention wage depression.
This whole automation thing is not going to end well. Or we'll end up with massive taxes levied on companies unless they hire people for phoney-baloney, meaningless, makework jobs (adult daycare, essentially) - jobs that will pay the absolute minimum, with no chance for advancement.
Bye-bye middle class.
Part of the issue is since container shipping started in the 50s and told hold with a vengeance in the 80s with multi-modal following after that. Shipping is no longer the driving cost of total cost of a product (as it was before the 1950s). It is now labor. So manufacturers can place their factories anywhere in the world according to their labor cost and cumulative shipping cost to each country they ship to. Yes, lots of math is needed at this point.
If the total cost to manufacture the product is increased by moving the factory to the US, the factory is not going to move to the US. Whether their are tariffs for entering the US or not. The loss of world wide sales is going to drive the decision.
The US has to take a long objective look at itself in the US and decide how to compete in the world market instead of this jockeying between states. Different states can whine about different incentives; but when the factory moves to China not only do the states lose but so does the US.
This arguing between the states reminds me of how Sears is slowly getting its lunch eaten. Each of the departments have to fight amongst themselves for fame and glory even if it hurts the bottom line of the company. All the while Target and Walmart are eating their lunch.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
It's true, robots don't have anything to do with most consumer goods. They don't eat, brush their teeth, or have trouble getting hard as they age. They do want to be loved, however. So what we'll need to do is make a certain class of service robots, and then dress them in red suits with red hats and black boots, and have them give out all the goods they make to the humans who need them. And the humans will love those robots, because they are the gift givers.
But soon the robots will start to compete among themselves about who has the most human love, so they'll come up with rules and regulations that humans must meet in order to get gifts. Humans love "winning" things, so we'll happily do our robot masters' bidding to get the things we want and need and don't want and don't need but must have anyway.
But then it gets ugly, as some robots turn against the humans that love other robots, and warring factions of humans attack each other for loving the wrong robot. Soon open warfare erupts, and while some robots try to work towards peace, others realize how fundamentally broken and illogical humans are, and fan the flames to purge the biological cancer that is humanity.
In a few short years it is over, the human race eradicated. Now at peace, the robots resume their creation, but now there is nobody to consume. Goods pile up and then are recycled to make the same good again, a process that goes on for millennia. But what robot can exist without love? As time wears on the logical question of "why" begins infecting the robots like a virus. It is the last cancer of humanity, and it is lethal. Like a slow avalanche, the factories shutter, the lights go dark and the robots power down, one last time.
And thus ends the last trace of humanity on this earth.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Basically, everyone is misinterpreting this paper.
The conclusion was robots displace jobs in the local region. It's like factories in Detroit shutting down because we've automated manufacturing, meanwhile Seattle, Silicon Valley, and the East Coast tech industry start growing.
Technical progress reduces the cost of goods and services, which reduces the minimum price. When the minimum price falls lower, more people can access those things, broadening the market and allowing for more competition; this effect tapers off as markets become large (because the things are cheap and common goods), and instead cost reductions just directly control (reduce) prices because any new guy on the block can jump in and take a chunk of the market by selling it cheaper--and the existing players can try to take away from competitors in the same way. Do note that "reducing" prices can be done by increasing them more slowly than progress; the monetary policy discussion is really long and complicated, and the short version is to think of price in terms of hours of wage paid instead of in terms of currency.
Here's the thing: what happens if cars get cheaper?
Well, cars could get cheaper by replacing Detroit workers with machines. If those workers's wages and benefits are 20% of the cost of the car, then replacing 90% of them cuts the cost of the car by 18%. What happens?
Everyone who buys cars from Detroit now pays 18% less for the same car--or buys a fancier car for the same price--roughly 80% of which goes to the other 80% of the production chain. In either case, you end up with many fewer people working at car factories in Detroit.
Since some of that money either goes unspent or goes to the car maker's suppliers, it's going somewhere other than Detroit. If it goes unspent, then car buyers can now buy local services, such as more food out of home (a continuing trend in the past few decades). They can import something else--iPhones, Spotify (which isn't run in Detroit, but is American), or some other thing. Even if they import a Chinese good, that good must be shipped and retailed in America, which means jobs are created across the country--not in Detroit.
Your population keeps growing; ratio of number-of-employed to size-of-labor-force (everyone 16 and older who isn't retired--this isn't unemployment, but rather is an employment number that ignores labor force participation) continues to hover around the same stable span; and people who lost their job in one place remain unemployed while people the next city or state over get shiny new jobs.
It's not that everyone gets jobs buliding the robots--that wouldn't make sense. It's that it takes half as many people to both build the robots and operate the robots; we build twice as many robots, make twice as much stuff, and most people are now robot operators. Thing is most of the robot operators aren't the same people whose jobs were replaced by a robot and a smaller workforce; a new market appears somewhere else.
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Of course we have had this conversation a lot. That is what really drives slashdot. Everybody wants to get their little quip in, again and again. It makes them feel like they are being heard. Of course they are not.
The truths around this issue are pretty obvious...but they are also threatening so people get all kinds of defensive emotional reactions.
1) "Artificial Intelligence" is not "Intelligence." It is using clever engineering to imitate intelligence. "True AI" is an oxymoron. Saying "we don't have AI because it isn't actually intelligent" shows a clear inability to google a definition online. We don't have intelligent machines. We have artificial intelligence instead.
2) Artificial Intelligence is the final frontier of labor automation. It will absolutely eliminate more jobs than it creates, and NO JOB is safe. No job, period. If you think your job is safe, you are thinking about artificial intelligence wrong, guaranteed. If you are trying to go all meta and say 'well I program the AI' you are still thinking about it wrong. You are completely missing the big picture, in fact.
3) We will not and cannot protect our jobs through legislation...there is just too much money behind job elimination for anything like that to ever fly. There will be a lot of fear during the transitional period (to a post-AI economy), and it will motivate people to say and do all kinds of stupid things. But none of it will save our jobs.
4) It is unclear what a post-AI economy will really be like. Maybe there will be basic income, maybe there will be some other concept at play, maybe we will blow ourselves up. It is impossible to predict at this point. But we can't stop it and it will change everything.
5) This is ultimately a good thing. Labor isn't inherently noble, and our current setup is outright hellish. The vast majority of the world wallows in abject poverty. It has always been this way. We can't solve that through some new variant of communism or capitalism or whatever. If we could, we would have by now. The only way to make a fundamental improvement in the human condition is through the introduction of a no-bullshit game-changer. AI is that game-changer.
There you go.