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.
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.
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