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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.
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.
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.
We have H-1Bs for that. No worries.
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.
"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.
Sorry, crime has been outsourced to foreign hackers. Besides, prisoners get free food and shelter, we just can't afford that kind of socialist welfare state any more.
Check. Check. Also a mass exodus of refugees heading to robotless countries.
OR? We should be so lucky to have only one or the other.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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 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
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: civil war, for starters. If things get too out of hand, world war. Governments (well, 1st world country governments, at least) see these things and will take steps to prevent a crisis on the level that produces conflict on that level. The rest of the world? Places like China, that don't particularly value human rights? Maybe not so much. People will not sit quietly and starve to death. If it got bad enough, they'd turn to crime to feed themselves and their families. Gets worse, there starts being armed conflicts, first on small scales, then more organized. You let it go far enough, you have civil war.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Your ignorance blinds you. The fact is damn near every fucking example you've brought forth here is at risk within the next 15 - 20 years.
Think about that before you rant again, because much like the rest of society, you have no solution for it.
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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no. Photons have momentum unlike a massless point
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.
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.