Slashdot Mirror


The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com)

Alana Semuels writes via The Atlantic about the parts of America most susceptible to automation: Much of the focus regarding automation has been on the Rust Belt. There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored. While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to trade, and the rest to automation. A new analysis suggests that the places that are going to be hardest-hit by automation in the coming decades are in fact outside of the Rust Belt. It predicts that areas with high concentrations of jobs in food preparation, office or administrative support, and/or sales will be most affected -- "places such as Las Vegas and the Riverside-San Bernardino area may be the most vulnerable to automation in upcoming years, with 65 percent of jobs in Las Vegas and 63 percent of jobs in Riverside predicted to be automatable by 2025. Other areas especially vulnerable to automation are El Paso, Orlando, and Louisville. Still, the authors estimate that almost all large American metropolitan areas may lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs because of automation in the next two decades.

3 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Re:All of them. by fluffernutter · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually apparently your first statement is a misnomer. Farming communities would have a crunch around harvesting time, and of course they could starve if crops were mad, but most of the time they only did a. couple hours of work a day. Cars and tractors actually created work when they were invented, because people on this side of the ocean were needed to build them.

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
  2. Re:All of them. by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Once upon a time it took 100% of humans 100% of their time to stay a live and gather enough food

    Nope. Hunter-gatherers had more free time than you do. Medieval serfs did get fucked over pretty hard, though. They did what they were told from sundown to sunup, and they only got time off for religious ceremonies. Even pyramid builders may have been better-paid.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Re:Useless article, half baked.. by apoc.famine · · Score: 5, Informative

    robochefs are still a novelty, at best making a "custom" pizza.

    Yeah, you're not aware of how automated food production is, are you? Sure, that hand-tossed, wood fired pizza you're getting is not going to be done by a robot anytime soon. But Tombstone and Red Barron pizzas haven't been hand assembled in decades. The same goes for all the processed food you find in the store. Bread, pasta, frozen dinners, anything that comes in a cardboard box, can, or jar probably has never been touched by human hands. The only exception is that some of the veg might have been picked by migrant workers.
     
    Now, what does the vast proportion of the US population eat? All that stuff. Maybe you're like me and have the money, skills, and time to buy fresh ingredients and make stuff by hand, or go out to nice restaurants. But nobody is filling frozen burritos by hand, stuffing cheap sausage or hot dogs, or hand making 99% of the bread that gets eaten.

    There is still a future of places where people are needed.

    I'd like to know where/what that that is. Because everything I can think of our truck drivers, cabbies, food service workers, warehouse workers, service industry folks, and office drones doing instead of their jobs is also getting automated. What can't be done better and cheaper than automation and machine learning that can employ millions of people?

    --
    Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor