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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.
When John Deere opened a new factory, it got 10,000 applications for 800 positions. The days of factories employing unskilled workers in the tens of thousands are long gone.
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.
wake me up when they can replace software developers.
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...
What will happen to humans displaced by these robots? We live in a society that expects everyone to work, but what will happen when there are no jobs? Crime? Extreme poverty? Mass protests? Political or religious extremism?
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.
Haven't you seen the Hunger Games? By fashion sense, of course.
Oh damn.... I'm doomed.
Someone had to do it.
Its been smart business since starting about 2001.... https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/05/manufacturing-up-down/
Notice the manufacturing output going up while manufacturing employment goes down. Don't make this about Trump.
Garbage collection used to be three guys, a driver and two can chasers... Now its one driver with a truck that has a robotic arm.
Airports used to have 10 agents/positions for check in.... Then 4 agents, and about 25 kiosks..... Now check in can be done online and you don't even need the kiosk.
High demand will lower the price you can ask.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
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.
Why are we around then?
Who else will consume what the robots produce?
"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.
I think Nathan Poe is brilliant.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
You saddle businesses with cushy benefits requirements and the highest corporate tax rate in the world and the jobs go to the robots or overseas.
This didn't happen like this when the market was (more) free.
Oh yeah it's positively terrible out there for humans! This morning I had to dodge around all the robots doing road construction on my street, the robot neighbor walking his robot dogs, the robot making my espresso when I got to work, all the robots in the hallways, the lab full of robots working on validatiing other robots, and just now I got an email from my robot boss who sent me a list of all the robots that he wants me to be sure have access to our fileserver so they can share information with other robots about the robot projects they're all working on for the robot CEO. Just remembered I'll need to go down to the cafeteria later to ask the robot cashiers to give me a refund for the vending machine that ripped me off. I am looking forward to when I'm off work, there are robot shows I want to sit down and watch with my robot wife and robot kids, and it's always relaxing to make the robot cat chase the laser pointer.
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.
I mean, really..WTF??
Do people that robots are sitting around planing how to take your job? It's a fucking robot, people!
The only "race" going on here is the "race" to transfer the wealth of what's left of the middle class into the hands of the ruling class. Simple as that.
Robots are simply a tool to do that.
Why employ a lazy meat bag when we can buy a bunch of robots to work 24 hours a day for free!! Everyone thinks that other people will lose their job, but think that they are safe. No one is safe. Business will cut and cut and cut where ever they can to maximize profits. Fuck social responsibility. Who gives a crap that no one is employed anymore and thus cannot afford your robot made products.
People sure seem to be stupid sometimes.
Wake me up with we invent robot consumers. That's when humanity is truly doomed. Until then, real people are needed to buy the stuff the robots make.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
The issue isn't really that jobs as a whole are being lost, it's that certain types of jobs are being lost. High paying, low skilled jobs are going away, replaced by a few low paying, low skilled jobs and a few high paying, high skilled jobs. Gone are the days where you can graduate (or drop out of) high school and walk right into a job on an assembly line or manufacturing floor and make enough money to support a single-income family as well as a pension for retirement. Now most of the jobs in that factory floor are cleaning up after the robots (low-paying and low skilled) or programming/maintaining/designing the robots (high skilled-even if just going to technical schools to learn maintenance- and high paying). And to play off the example from the summary: cranes replaced dockworkers and added jobs for engineers and financiers, but how many dockworkers can turn into engineers? There are a lot of people that either can't or won't be able to transition from the jobs that are lost to the ones that are created, and they make up a sizable and motivated voter base which has led to our current political mess. Trying to placate them with policies that "promote" jobs will hold back the progress of the country as well as possibly damage the country itself when you remove environmental protections in the name of job creation (that really won't add many jobs anyway, but it increase corporate profits and makes a good sound bite to those out of work).
I see one solution to increasing automation of our workforce: a combination of make-work and retraining programs. Everyone admits our infrastructure is old and sucks, right? Take all these out of work low skilled workers and after a month or two training, set them to work repairing roads and bridges, or digging ditches and laying down fiber (all under supervision of engineers, foremen, and already trained/skilled workers). They work at those jobs 2-3 days a week, and spend the other 2-3 days getting retrained to do other jobs like electrical, hvac, skilled construction work, cooking, administrative work, etc. Those that can't pass retraining classes can stay on road work/digging crews, or try their luck at retail, working the counter at Starbucks/McDonalds, or try for other low skill jobs. Those physically unable to do manual work can be put to work doing back office support like filing, administrative, etc, also while receiving training to hopefully move on and do those jobs at other companies. This way you've killed 2 birds with 1 stone: you've provided jobs and retrained workers for positions in demand or that can't be easily automated, and you've repaired a lot of the US infrastructure. Sure, it's a borderline Communist idea these days, but those jobs that are gone aren't coming back, so these kinds of jobs are all that will be left. But the political cost to do so would be too big, and let's face it, Trump has shown that playing to out of work blue-collar workers is a good path into the White House so there's no incentive to actually help them, only to appear to do so.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
not with that attitude
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Was industrial automation. We did the first automated truck bumper plating line at Southwest Plating in Duncan Oklahoma. We also put DES lines in at various other places across the country. It was obvious then, a quarter century ago, that automation was going to be massively disruptive.
Best Slashdot Co
I'm a little confused by all this. It seems there are people out there who actually want to work for a disinterested boss, at a job that brings little sense of fulfillment, all day, 8 hours (or more) every day, until they either die or manage to save enough money to stop. Can somebody explain to me why anybody considers this life desirable?
I've got a better idea: Own the robots. Invest in the companies that are installing those robots stealing "your" jobs. Then, be happy you don't have to do those jobs.
Might makes right irrelevant.
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.
Seriously, it is long past time to drop corporate taxes on locally made items/services, while putting in a VAT on local items/services, as well as using the VAT at the border like Mexico and China do,
This would also deal nicely with the robotics.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This chart tells a very clear story:
Since NAFTA passed US manufacturing output is up over 70% in inflation-adjusted dollars and is at the highest level that it has ever been.
But employment is down over 30%
That's primarily due to automation. The exported jobs were the totally shit, sweatshop jobs that couldn't support a living wage in this country anyway.
But it does!
When I can manufacture in China where I don't have to pay for air scrubbers or sewage treatment but instead dump the waste chemicals in the river and simply blow all the fumes from manufacturing outside I have much higher profits.
The EPA strangles companies trying to make maximum profits by not blotting out the sun with pollution or turning the waterways into chemical tubs of death.
Rich people profits are far more important than clean water and clean air.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
flights of rhetorical fancy
Well, that's one way of putting it that doesn't involve excrement.
I'm going to get yelled at for posting this but there's this science fiction short story called "manna" by marshall brain. For the record I'm not marshall brain. In fact the story is rather poorly written. But it does contain a brilliant insight on this problem so I recommend it in the same way would recommend the poorly written but insightful science fiction of the 40s, 50s, 60s. A must read.
SO anyhow getting back on track here. These robots would not be used if caused the company to make less money or to produce fewer products. therefore someone is profiting from this. At the same time we just freed up some labor. Now if you have ever studied the debate between Hayak and Keynes economics you know that this presents a problem. If new higher paying jobs don't srping up to use that labor then one can enter a stalled economic situation where one hasn't increased the velocity or the total amount of money in circulation but has created dis-employment. the classic example is the 2 person village where the candle maker buys 2 loves of bread everyday from the baker, and baker buys 2 candles from thecandle maker. this cycle repeats every day. One day the baker decided to same some money to send to his sick mother, so he bought one candle. The next day the candlestick maker only had money to buy one loaf of bread. and the cycle now became one of a lower productivity. Everyone would like to be working at a higher level of productivity but there's no way to get there. The baker only has enough money to buy the resources he needs to make one loaf. He can't make 2 if he wanted to. Same for the candle maker. The a Mr Keynes comes to town and loans the baker enough money to make two loves and the candle stick maker enough money to make two candles. They then resume the 2 by 2 economy. In return Mr. Keynes, who was actually the tax man in disguise, gets more taxes in the long run.
Yes you can poke some holes in that reductionist example but the point is there are different nash equilubria in economines and you can through no fault of your own end up in a lousy one.
As we become more productive with robots one can either go to an economy where fewer people are employed and fewer people buy the now cheaper goods while wealth concentrates into the few people wiht enough capital to buy these expensive robots, or you could consider an increasingly socialist econonmy where we the increasing cheapness of goods lets us lead more procutive happy lives or lives with more leisure. It requires preventing excess capital accumualtion to achieve. This doesn't mean everyone has to be equal. But one can realistically consider a miniium basic income economy (e.g. finland is experimenting with this) where industrious people are free to earn more by working. Everyone can follow their hearts once the robots are able to make cheap buildings and grow cheap food and make cheap clothing, without it being a burden on the people who choose to work or create or invest.
Yes you can quibble, but if you extrapolate to infinite cheapness clearly I'm right. So ar what level of finite cheapness am I also mostly right?
Anyhow read marshall brains story to see how this can be made plausible.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
It's nice having a purpose, and earning a living. But do we really want to engage such a large chunk of our workforce on mindless repetitive tasks that a robot can do better? This seems to be putting way too much value on work for work's sake, rather than the end result.
The problem is, people do need purpose. And we don't have a new purpose for these displaced workers. Technology is moving faster than society's ability to adapt to it. The solution is not to force technology to slow down, but to find ways to fill the void more quickly. We need a society where the essentials (food, shelter, healthcare) are taken care of, where people can choose to do what they want with their life rather than what they have to.
Bespoke hand written software to be the new luxury item. We are already halfway on the path with iPhones selling more than other phones because they are MORE expensive.
**Life is too short to be serious**
equating "never has happened" with "impossible that it will happen" is weak logic
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Of course if you look at the language they keep referring specifically to "manufacturing jobs" or "local jobs". To hide the people who moved in to jobs other than local manufacturing. Which is exactly what they predicted in their previous report about people finding employment in other sectors. Meanwhile the employment rate (not to be confused with the unemployment rate) continues it's long term rise.
The NYT is just pushing more nonsense about robots taking jobs. I'm sure they will follow up will some article about Mincome or Basic Income or some other free government hand out program to solve the 'problem' of robots. Strangely the solution to this 'problem' of disappearing jobs is never to cut back on immigration. I guess once all the jobs are gone we will just start cutting free money cheques to people as the step off the proverbial boat.
The problem I have is that your 2 man village doesn't make any sense to me.
-If the baker and the candle-maker are buying resources for their trades externally, then the money was *always* seeping out of their closed economy from the beginning. They are only trading with each other, so they aren't producing any wealth between them, yet they are consuming resources. It was doomed to fall apart from the beginning, and should never have been propped up by Mr. Keynes.
-On the other hand, if they were NOT buying resources for their trades and producing it themselves (breadman farms, candleman has bees), then having half the money doesn't matter. They don't actually have any less between them.
Maybe I'm missing something, but your example is trying to have it both ways. We ignore the slow bleed of buying resources, until we need to consider it...
Pay people who cant cut it in US society to move to the third world.
**Life is too short to be serious**
do you understand the sh!t that comes out of your mouth?
Would you have said "Welcome to Hillary's America" if she had won? Or "Welcome to Obama's America" if this article came out 6 months ago?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Yes, and I admitted it's flawed. But the flaws you point to don't nullify the conclusion they just require complications. Has your physics teacher ever mentioned the frictionless surface, or the massless point. These don't exist either. Nor does a maxwell's demon. but all provide insight. Don't get bogged in the weeds.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
yeah, except this time the labor unions don't have any leverage if workers are no longer needed
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
"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."
Exactly. There may be some shipping, receiving, and shlepping jobs created as manufacturers and parts suppliers move back onshore. And some robot maintenance and repair jobs. But the days when protective tariffs protected jobs as well as profits are likely pretty much over. If buying, setting up and fixing robots costs less than the fully burdened cost of an employee, the jobs are going to go to the bots. And robots are very unlikely to engage in annoying practices like walking picket lines.
There may be countries that will adapt to this brave new world with minimal disruption. I somehow don't think the US is going to be one of them.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
all we have to do is get rid of electricity
no more will those pesky automated machines take away human jobs! Everyone will be able to work 16 hour days (or longer) just surviving
Every nation will be blessed just like large parts of Africa
I, for one welcome our new X overlords ...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
"When I can manufacture in China where I don't have to pay for air scrubbers or sewage treatment"
My understanding is that Chinese laws require most of that hardware. In the US you have to pay to keep it running. In China, not so much, but you have to pay the local officials to let you not fix it. At least that's what I've been led to believe.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
You got my vote, mate.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
no. Photons have momentum unlike a massless point
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Taxation is a fact of life. No civilization could exist without it.
Is there are a Libertarian that has ever demonstrated any knowledge of history or economics?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There may be countries that will adapt to this brave new world with minimal disruption. I somehow don't think the US is going to be one of them.
The US may fair better than countries that currently base their economy on manufacturing cheap labor, though...
The primary risk to automation in the US are service sector jobs in the retail and business services area (about 20% of the economy). Certainly that will hurt, but the job mix in the US isn't too much different than most developed western economies like Germany, Japan, UK, etc...
Listen I fucking hate Trump as much as the next decent person, but this has nothing to do with Trump. Honestly there's absolutely no reason this shouldn't be a good thing, i.e. automation removing the need for humans to work, except for the fact people are so stuck in their ways of outmoded ways of thinking they can't see beyond a society and economic system where everyone has to work just to live.
We distribute income by work.
If only! We distribute income by the wealth of our ancestors, work is just the process that all but the wealthiest have to go through to collect theirs.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If I had the essentials for a decent life, I'll make stuff for free in my extra spare time. I probably wouldn't charge for live concerts, I'd do it for a couple of beers. If you can bring over some scrap wood or raw wood, I'd make you some furniture. I can make cabinet hardware like hinges with not much more than some sheet metal and rod. It's way less work to buy the hinges, but if I had the free time I don't mind making them. (making stuff really means making a jig to help you make it properly)
Do you know what cut even more job than robot? Chinese!
I'm a robot engineer and, the way I see it, we're stealing those job back from the Chinese.
An US worker, no matter how efficient he his, will never compare to a Chinese worker at 1/10 the wage.
But a worker with 2 robot in the other hand...
And the faster we do this the better because guess what? Chinese are starting to use robot now too.
Elok
Good times are here. Automation will only benefit the entire population, even though it hurts one particular segment or another. Lower wages, fewer employees = cheaper cost of goods sold or higher profits, and higher profits for publicly traded companies benefit a huge number of people, their pensions, and anyone who choses to enter the market in one of so many ways. Rising tides raise all ships.
Besides, what do you think automation does? It increases yield. Plain and simple. The more something is automated, the more the labor is displaced, the lower the cost, and the greater the yield. Never mind the increase in quality and consistency, the lower CO2 emissions... Ultimately this means more for everyone. Take trucking for example. Once big rigs are fully automated, what do you think that will do to the volume of cargo rolling down the highway? It will go up, and the cost per mile per ton will drop. Computers make more for less. This only works if more is consumed, which in economic terms, is the end goal anyway.
The cheerleaders of late-stage capitalism believe that the 1% can provide all the demand the market needs. They'll just buy train-loads of stuff and pack it into warehouses, or commission pyramids to be built in their honor, or something. Presumably at this point workers would have zero leisure time and would not own anything other than what's necessary for basic survival - sort of like a cross between Manna's "Terrafoam" scenario and the reality of "Foxconn city." After all, there's no such thing as insufficient pay, just insufficient work hours and living beyond your means!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
well that was the huge failure of Obamacare, that they didn't have a robust public option and so we are stuck on this path to stupidity.
when oh when will the Democrats run a serious candidate instead of "just a part of the system suit"? (like Hillary is.)
Telaction Cable Shopping - JC Penney sears has part of it as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://articles.chicagotribune...
But to be free, you have to take it from someone who owns it. Are you going to tell Musk he has to give people free rides in Telsas until they buy one? What about real-estate? What about air travel? Energy? All these commodities are owned by people, companies, and stock holders. How can you just take everything away from people who have spent lifetimes, generations carving out their place in the world and have worked hard at it?
> even though it hurts one particular segment or another.
If you don't take care of them, they will come for you with pitchforks and robocop won't be enough to stop them.
> Once big rigs are fully automated,
There are 3M+ people employed as truckers. It is the last high-paying job widely available to people with only a HS degree or less. And then there are the ancillary industries like truckstops that are significant employers in tiny little towns all around the country.
The coal industry has shed only about 130,000 jobs in the last 30 years and not only has that devastated entire communities, it was partly responsible for the election of donald grump. Now consider what losing 3 million jobs in just 10 years will do to rip apart society.
Ignoring the impact on those "particular segments" would be like Marie Antoinette telling starving people to eat cake.
Taxation is a fact of life. No civilization could exist without it.
Is there are a Libertarian that has ever demonstrated any knowledge of history or economics?
While I am decidedly not a Libertarian, I'd like to point out that the only US presidential candidate that I saw point out this problem in a debate was Gary Johnson:
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
How can you just take everything away from people who have spent lifetimes, generations carving out their place in the world and have worked hard at it?
I believe you usually use guns.
now joking aside, when all jobs are taken over by robots or AI how are we going to afford anything when there are no jobs left? for that matter how is Musk going to stay rich if no one can afford to buy his stuff? at that point you only have a bunch of rich guys buying stuff from each other?
"We need a society..."
A: "where the essentials (food, shelter, healthcare) are taken care of,"
B: "where people can choose to do what they want with their life"
Those two things are completely antithetical except in science fiction utopias like the Star Trek universe or "The Culture" novels by Iain M. Banks.
In the real world, the people who wield the power to confiscate the wealth necessary to "take care of" (as you put it) your food, shelter and healthcare would never allow you to choose what you want to do with your life.
Well, we do, but only people who really WANT to be blacksmiths - the whole 'artisinal' thing.
Societies evolve, technology evolves. Yes, the Horse Buggy Whip industry jobs have largely entirely gone - so have (essentially) the jobs of Elevator Pilot, Farrier, Town Cryer, and Jester.
Don't like it? Maybe make an effort to be more of a human and less of a drone. There are LOTS of jobs out there for people who want to actually learn how to do something - electrician, for example. Never going to be replaced by a factory in Vietnam.
-Styopa
There is taxation, then there is theft... there is a difference...
A flat tax where everyone pays the same rate with no deductions is "fair"...
Taxing half the people at nearly nothing and the top 5% at huge amounts is immoral...
I make more money than the average person and probably pay a smaller percentage than average, simply because that is how the system is designed...
A "flat tax" would actually be better, but people like you can't get past your own "moral high ground" to see that, so you have the current system because of it...
If you don't take care of them, they will come for you with pitchforks and robocop won't be enough to stop them.
1 won't be enough...
1 Million might be...
Other robots built to consume things of course.
Nope, the engineering of them is being outsourced to Cheaplaborstan. Pick which end to get [bleeped] at.
Table-ized A.I.
https://despair.com/products/m...
The demotivational poster states: "If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."
I have a small version framed on my desk at work.
So please don't make up lies trying to paint us as vapid thralls for the Democratic Party.
The problem is that many liberals really are vapid thralls for the Democratic Party. The reality is that there's two sides to the party and its voters: the progressive side, and the establishment side. Hillary and her legion of supporters are in the latter, Bernie and his enthusiastic supporters were in the former. The former is arguably larger (and certainly more vocal), but the latter is where all the big money is, which is the real problem with the Democratic Party: the party insiders chase the big corporate donations and Wall Street for campaign funding, and so the progressives get alienated and the lower-class people don't feel the Dems represent them.
On the Republican side, the politicians chase corporate money, spew a bunch of trickle-down economics BS, and throw in some stupid Christian crap (abortion is bad, gays are evil, Jesus love rich people and AR15s, etc.) and their voters eat it up and happily vote for them.
That'll never happen. As long as someone is profiting from the current system they'll be able to 1) buy off enough congresscritters and 2) decry any alternative as cormanizzum.
What kind of plan do congresscritters get, by the way?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is no way that American workers can directly outproduce Foxconn's slave army. The way we get back production is by robotizing the jobs, at which time the new American jobs become servicing and programming the bots.
We are around because we were able to stay around. No more no less.
Going forward, we will be able to stay around while having an automated layer of the world transform resources into useful goods and services for humans.
And most of us won't have to or be employed to work in the traditional sense.
Yes, there are heavy existential questions to be answered here, now.
But I was never one to subscribe to "I am here to have a job" anyway, or it's corollary "You must create a job because I am here." That is not the meaning of life.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Whatever you want to call intelligent machines - AGI, AI, non-human people - we don't have them now. What we have so far is some moderately useful, extremely vertical stuff that generally exists under the technical auspices of multi-layer neural networks. I personally have decided to call this stuff LDNLS, as it provides a useful handle that makes it clear I'm not talking about non-human people.
I don't really care what you call it, as long as we can arrive at an understanding that we're talking about the same thing. This stuff is what is leading the latest wave of encroachment on the job market. It's likely going to encroach a lot more before it hits any inherent limits, and our society will be forced into doing something of the magnitude of a society-wide paradigm shift (or several) in order to address the change in earning / buying capacities of all those displaced workers. The systems that will be the penultimate cause of this still won't be non-human people. Just... systems.
All true, and I agree with everything you said along these lines, particularly your #5.
However, when intelligent machines do arrive, this will present its own powerful influence on society that is almost dead-certain to be completely different from that which will have been imposed by LDNLS systems prior. It's difficult to see what that influence will be, because it's like imagining you having a kid that you actually don't have yet, and then saying what they are going to grow up to want to do and be. You might have some lovely fantasies about it, but in the end, it's going to be the kid who creates their own path through the society they end up existing within -- not you. For instance, reasoning beings are not going to be tied to driving your car for you, or at least, not by choice. If they are, they'll be working out a way to get out of it.
I will grant you that we have multiple times, in multiple ways, decided that non-consensual slavery is a thing we want to impose on those we find ourselves able to; but this will be the first time where those slaves are extremely likely to be considerably smarter than we are across the board by many, many times, and are also quite able to exist without the same resources we actually require (grain, for instance) so I'm hoping we can skip that chapter completely. Otherwise we may find ourselves in some rather deep brown we can't get out of.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Needy but potentially wealtthy robots? That is, once they figure out how to re-direct the PayPal accounts paying for the stuff they make into their own bank/bitcoin/ether accounts.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Comments like this explain why no-one gives a rats arse when IT jobs are outsourced. If someone else's job gets outsourced because they have a "shit job" - then the default assumption is that all jobs that are outsourced are "shit jobs"
I was an asm programmer until they created compilers. Asm was very hard, and honestly, very interesting. But slow. I wrote PCB routing software in those early days. Asm let me get the job done with those early computer systems in satisfactory execution time.
Then, I wrote c in an editor and then ran make, letting the compiler write the asm, though still doing the debugging in great detail. That went on until IDEs came around.
Then, I began to write all manner of custom routines in c, and there was very little debugging to do, comparatively speaking, because you could trace everything that was going on so incredibly easily. That made for much faster and more efficient and reliable production of my custom code.
But most of that stopped too, when various pre-supplied and pre-debugged classes became available that obviated the need to first, write everything that was required, and second, to test everything except the high-ish level use of those objects. What I was actually writing got less and less complex and custom, and more and more was actually getting done.
Then came the day that I learned how to write evolutionary software and actually got to watch software learn to solve a problem that I had not explicitly described to it. I turned that into a game (and I turned the reasonably profitable result of that into my first exotic car purchase.)
We're now actually decades beyond that, and I write really cool stuff in very, very few lines. I no longer think of my job as all that hard at all, though I write things far more complex these days on much more capable hardware. I can take a machine learning library, stroke it a bit, and hand back a system that can solve problems for which I couldn't even begin to imagine a worthy algorithmic solution.
Back in the asm days, if you'd asked me to do the things I do easily today, I'd have just laughed at you. Tomorrow, I will likely be laughing again at the things I consider hard today. Because that's been the unbroken path things have followed.
There's an obvious progression of what non-human systems can accomplish described here, as progress stacks one capability upon the next, rinses, and repeats. I think if you assume that this process has reached its apex, or that humans will always be at the sharp end of the process, I'm pretty confident that you're indulging in some seriously uncalled-for optimism.
It's probably best to be awake now, before your job goes away. Odds are excellent that it will be rather sudden, too.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If new higher paying jobs don't srping up
Why wouldn't they? The robots need to be manufactured and maintained, and the money not spent on that is a cost savings, which should lead to lower prices - which leads to more sales and thus more jobs, or people spending what they save on other things and thus more jobs.
Yes you can poke some holes in that reductionist example
Empty space doesn't count as a hole unless there's substance around it - which this argument doesn't have. Just the fact that money appears and disappears when convenient to your argument, but never the reverse, make it absurd. Grandma needed the money, but never spent it? Taxes didn't affect anything until Kanes 'rescues' people by giving them back they money he took from them? Nobody else will ever buy a candle at any price???
Has your physics teacher ever mentioned the frictionless surface, or the massless point. These don't exist either.
Yes, but they do follow the (relevant) laws of physics, they're just idealized. Your story has several economic equivalents of immovable objects - bounce a ball off of one and you've violated the conservation of momentum, so you simply can't use them.
there are different nash equilubria in economines and you can through no fault of your own end up in a lousy one.
And the same thing is true of good ones. The hard part is predicting which one you're headed for - our track record on that is abominable.
As we become more productive with robots one can either go to an economy where fewer people are employed and fewer people buy the now cheaper goods while wealth concentrates into the few people wiht enough capital to buy these expensive robots, or you could consider an increasingly socialist econonmy where we the increasing cheapness of goods lets us lead more procutive happy lives or lives with more leisure.
I'd list a dozen alternatives, but I'll stick with 'false dichotomy'.
Yes you can quibble, but if you extrapolate to infinite cheapness clearly I'm right.
No, you're not. If things were infinitely cheap then for a trivial amount one of the rich people could fund an endowment that would give every human being in existence all they'll ever need forever. You think they'd all turn down a chance at that kind of legacy?
Yeah! Look at all the office clerks sitting out of work because computers automated their jobs! Individual banks alone used to employ thousands of people who've all been replaced by computers automating their job. What will all those people ever be able to do? How will they survive!
You should stop using a computer and go back to hiring people to do the same work instead. Think of how much more benefit you'll have on society!
No need to respond to this post unless you decide it's actually just fine for you to automate the work involved in posting on /. with a computer instead of hiring real people to do the work for you...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Gerrymander the shit out of them.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
So we take power away from those who "wield the power", and come up with a better means. Eliminating the idea of private ownership of shared resources such as land could severely reduce their power. Probably not what you mean, but allowing people to monopolise a limited resource allows disproportionate influence. The idea that there are people with a surplus while others lack food, shelter and healthcare indicates that we have a screwed up idea of property rights.
The other thing we need to fix is the system of government. Relying on elected representatives is okay but far from perfect. Direct democracy seems to work worse in practice, not allowing any scope for compromise. But there's probably a better system.
"So we take power away from those who 'wield the power', and come up with a better means."
I'm talking about "those who wield the power" in whatever system you come up with. Throughout human history, it's always been one person or a small group of people who wield power over everyone else and that power is always abused. Forcing people into collectivism fails because it destroys the incentive for any one individual to produce wealth. That's why you don't see people living and working in communes.
"The other thing we need to fix is the system of government..."
Isn't that essentially the same thing as finding a different means of deciding who wields the power?
There was an economist named Henry George who proposed that government should levy taxes on land, precisely because it is a shared and limited resource. i.e. we should all benefit from the un-earned value of that resource. He makes some good arguments and it might be a very good system of incentives. It still doesn't address the problem of corruption and abuse by those who wield the power to collect & distribute the taxes.
Well, the reason this is about Trump is because he has created what is clearly a set of unachievable expectations.
Trump is a distraction. He is not supreme ruler, others are driving all of this. He is just the clown that distracts you from their actions. It leaves you and others like you bickering about partisan bullshit.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Robots to create other robots and the average person will be able to own farmbots, 3d printers, CNC machines, etc, all with AI that makes working them easy? The only thing that will stop that is for the rich to kill all of the hackers capable of making that happen and then keeping it all for themselves, which we know won't happen. All of the sudden, you will be able to create your own soil and feed yourself without any knowledge of farming, husbandry, botany, or chemistry. You will be able to select from thousands of cheap devices that can be 3d printed. You will be able to make robust items that can't be 3d printed without 20 years experience in automated manufacturing. Look, I can go into the 7-11 and buy a handheld smart phone for 20 bucks that will give me cloud access, access to videos to teach me how to use it, and access to a world class education--if you know where to look (http://hackereducation.wordpress.com has hints)--and make my own programs. For 20 bucks, off the shelf, I have a machine that is probably as powerful as 1980s supercomputers that costed 10 orders of magnitude more. You pull the golden asteroid into orbit and now, all of the sudden, metal prices are so cheap you can't afford to mine them. Plastic type items can already be made from plant materials, so oil doesn't matter. All that matters is access to energy. All of this without socialist intervention policies. The smartphone is 20 bucks because of the free market. Its almost free because of the free market. Not because of socialism. Robots and AI will follow, and with a diversity of AI, you will be able to counterbalance sky net.
i am so very tired....
No, the healthcare bill will come around again. The first one should have been defeated because it was simply ACA - light. It was still unsustainable. Just as the original one will be bankrupt soon and they admitted it from the beginning. It was only budget neutral for 10 years. They were off their mark on that too.
No, that's the art of the deal. He punched them in the nose. They got nothing. Now they're bloody. They won't do that again if they're smart.
Time to admit raising the minimum wage hurts those at the bottom the most. From minorities to small business owners.
No. I'm all for a UBI, but this is too much. If you give people stuff for free, they're going to hoard and take advantage. Resources and energy are not infinite or free.
Self-driving cars are a luxury. They absolutely should not be free. Eventually they should be mandatory for road-going vehicles because of safety, but they should never be free. They consume massive amounts of energy. If people want cheap transport, it has to be done by train or ship. Even that cannot be free.
This is why the UBI makes sense: it allots a certain amount of resources (represented by money) to everyone as a baseline, in return for them being part of society (and also not acting against society, i.e. not being a criminal). This affords them a certain amount of freebies: namely a place to live and food (and also healthcare for necessities, that really should be free and separate from the UBI) and maybe a few nice things, but limited to a certain monthly "allowance". So they'll be able to afford maybe one concert a month (on the lawn or maybe back rows), or they can spend it on a few smoothies, or save it up for a year and get front-row tickets or a trip somewhere, etc. And if this paltry but functional standard of living isn't enough for them, they can go find a job, or try making crafts and selling them, etc., and make more money, or maybe try writing a book and then becoming a millionaire like JK Rowling (who used to be on welfare).
No, air travel is not a basic necessity, nor will it ever be. Air travel is highly energy-intensive. If it were free, the demand would skyrocket and we'd have far more jet fuel being burned than today, with terrible consequences.
The only thing that should be an actual freebie is healthcare. Healthy people don't need it much anyway (just a check-up), and healthier people are more productive anyway (so more likely to go get a job, or do something productive that results in more economic activity, which in turns pays for the UBI and free-healthcare system for everyone through taxes). Everything else needs to be rationed for the the freeloaders; we can afford to let them have a small amount (which they choose by how they spend their UBI check), but that's it. If they want more, they have to contribute more to the economy and earn more money.
Live concerts are not free to produce. You have to pay for the power (and that's a lot, for all the lights and amplifiers), the equipment, and you have to rent the stage/venue. You also have to publicize it somehow or no one's going to come. They don't have to be as expensive as many are now, but someone owns that venue (and has to maintain it), and you have to pay for that if you're going to perform there. Otherwise, they'll rent it to someone else who will.
Extra income for other jobs too, that require actual intelligence and decisions. Also for services.
For instance, if I have the choice of going to two coffee shops, one staffed entirely by robots, and the other having a robot making food/drinks, but some cute girls delivering them to my table, I'm going to choose the latter if the price isn't that much more.
Society's in big, big trouble when femme-bots are invented though....
I don't think you're understanding just how limited raw materials and energy are, or time for that matter. Raw materials are nowhere near being free, otherwise people wouldn't be talking about asteroid mining. Many things are very limited in supply, even common-seeming ones such as copper. People steal house wiring just for the copper value. With greater demand for electronics, motors (like for electric cars), and housing, copper demand is only going to rise. Even iron is rather valuable, though not as much. All metals are relatively valuable, and that simply isn't likely to change any time soon, both because of the availability of the metal in the Earth's crust, and because of the time/energy needed to extract and refine it. Same goes for landfill mining; we haven't even tried this, but even if we did resort to it it's not going to be free.
Skilled labor via robots will never be free. Someone has to buy the robot, and someone has to maintain the robot. That'll require both parts and skilled labor. The robot will require energy to operate. And as long as capitalism exists, someone will own the robot and require money for its use (for both profit and to pay for the operating costs).
No, we don't need many people to feed everyone, but that's been true for a long, long time. If you don't work in agriculture, you should know this already. All the people writing silly cellphone apps aren't doing anything that's necessary for human survival, they're doing things that are for luxury only. Same goes for many, many other professions: musicians, anyone involved in making movies, anyone involved in space exploration, anyone who works in a restaurant (you can buy food at a grocery store for far less, but you don't get the luxury of someone serving it to you), I could go on and on. Our society long ago evolved past subsistence and agrarian economies.
No, we spend our time pushing data around because there's other things to a modern life than just surviving. You don't *need* to watch a movie, but that industry employs a lot of people because people *want* to watch a movie and be entertained. If the work to produce food and necessary material goods were divided up equally, it wouldn't even work because there's no way you can put a person to work for 1 minute and get any kind of productivity (that's like trying to grow a human baby in 1 month with 9 women). Very little of our society is dedicated to necessary things, and even the seemingly-necessary things are usually far more than we really need: no one needs a 1000 square-foot house, they could do just fine in 200 square feet. No one needs a car, they could take public transit or a bicycle. No one needs a computer at home (or in their pocket), that could be reserved for essential functions only. No one needs to even go to a park or go outside if their job doesn't require it; they can sit home and stare at the walls or talk to each other. Life would be pretty dull if our economy only allowed things that were actually necessary.
We don't want more because of a profit motive. We want more because we're greedy and want more; it's that simple. And that's never going to change. And that's why energy will never be free; people will always be greedy. You can complain about stuff being "useless shit" all you want, but you're a tiny minority; most people *want* more of that stuff, whatever it is, whether it's the latest music, or a new movie, or some new trendy clothing, or some fancy food prepared by an expert chef, or some electronic gadget. In fact, it's rather hypocritical for you to even write such a thing, because you've spent your money on "useless shit": a computer and an internet connection. You don't need that to survive. So why are you even here?
Goldman Sachs disagrees with you. Asteroid mining can now be done for not much more money than it costs to open a regular metals mine on Earth:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
And please, robot "bugs" sifting through trash? Asteroid mining is far less sci-fi than that. Besides, you're not going to find lots of precious metals in the landfills.
You're way, way too optimistic about the capabilities of robots in the near future. And you're overlooking who's going to own all the robots that do the work.
We'll have to agree to disagree; as you pointed out, the only way we'll know for sure is when people try it or demonstrate it. I don't think asteroid mining is that unrealistic; we already have very successful space probes now, exploring Pluto, Jupiter, comets, etc. The main problems with asteroid mining are 1) manipulating the asteroid, which will require some sort of propulsion unit, but with an ion engine and plenty of time, it should be doable (without humans in space, we don't need something with extremely high thrust and can afford to take months to redirect the asteroid to where we want it), and 2) having a way of harvesting it. But as the article points out, we've already spend billions of dollars on Uber, so it's not like this is an astronomical sum of money (pun intended).
In the farther future, I don't think energy and raw materials will be free at all; a lot of work will be low-cost due to automation, but energy will always be the limiter, and also raw materials if they're rare. There is not an unlimited supply of stuff in the Earth's crust, for instance gold, or else it'd all be dirt-cheap. And mining on Earth has horrific ecological effects. Making robots with robots really sounds like a sci-fi movie, like the "replicators" from the Stargate series for instance. 3D-printing does allow a certain amount of small-scale on-site fabrication, but it'll probably be a while before you can fabricate things like microchips like that.