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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 There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored.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.
You know what I'm tired of? People who have no sense of scale, like at all.
Yeah, yeah, there will still be niches where people will be needed, but that's just it, niches. In the past one large manufacturing plant could employ thousands, or even tens of thousands of workers. Where do you see all these little niche employers popping up in order to swallow all these people? And note, now the automation is no longer restricted to manufacturing. Now, in fact for quite a while, we've been automating services too, like banking, ticket sales, etc, etc. Where are the "surplus" people supposed to go, really?
Hand-waving does you no good, nor does denial. This is a real problem, and we'd better figure out how to solve it. Because the alternative is going to be really ugly. But then I guess that's what the real purpose for the apparatus which is being put in place to fight "terrorism".
No, you definitely don't get it. Obama didn't have to outrun the bear; he just had to outrun Republicans.
No matter how much corruption you list, he's going to be remembered as a relatively bright spot in between two amazingly incompetent presidents. It doesn't matter if he wasn't any good. He was better.
Voting for Democrats is an extremely bad thing to do, that all voters should feel extreme shame over. Everyone knows that. But it's still not nearly as bad as voting for Republicans. Every time a Republican votes, he's saying that Democrat voters are amateurs at hating and hurting America.
One of my last jobs was a greenfield project for a new manufacturing facility. The old facility employed around 250 people making, moving, cutting and packaging, and shipping the products. This new factor was robot driven with these little robot carts that move the product from station to station where it then worked on by stationary robots. My job was to design a robust wireless network for the project and build out the the datacenter to handle the new software to run the whole thing. In the end, including front office staff the new factory employed 15 people to do the work of the previous 250 people.
How long until they close that other plant and retrofit it?
I imagine that things are going to be very rough once automation _really_ starts cutting into employment in ways that haven't been seen previously. The ironic thing is that the "knowledge worker" is the target for this round, as most large-scale US factory work is offshored or automated by now. All that money people are paying to get themselves the education they need for a job is never going to be recovered if employees aren't receiving salaries to make it worth going in the first place.
I graduated high school in 1993, and even by then, everyone was being told that there was no longer a viable career path that didn't go through college. And this was in the Rust Belt city I grew up in, where just 20 years prior it was possible to guarantee a lifetime of work by joining a union's apprenticeship program and working in a factory for your whole career. I distinctly remember events at the end of high school that were basically send-offs into the "grown-up" world like the prom and a formal senior dinner -- as if to say that for at least a chunk of the graduating class, this was the last time they'd ever see the education system again. Wind the clock forward, and we're requiring college degrees for receptionists and the few factory workers that are left. So now we have a more educated workforce, who may no longer have anything to do that will allow them to make money, start families, buy things, etc.
I've done most of my career working directly for or contracting with large companies -- think companies big enough to have a huge corporate campus, parking garages, etc. Even in 2017, there really are a ton of corporate jobs that could go away in this next round of automation. Lots of jobs we IT people support involve taking input stacks of work, performing some sort of process on them, and putting them on the output stack. Look at how mega-corps lay people off in huge numbers -- HP/HPE just got rid of more than 30,000 people last year. I'm sure a lot of that was just idiotic MBA spreadsheet jockeying, but how many of those 30,000 people were doing one of these easily automated jobs? Each one of those 30,000 people probably owned a house, paid property/school taxes, some of them had kids, they bought cars, and basically contributed to society. Now, we're saying that even high end positions like healthcare workers are in for a big restructuring as more stuff gets automated.
With no way for educated people to make money, what happens to the work-money-consumption cycle we've been used to for ages? Some people propose paying people regardless of their employment status, and I think that's one way to bridge the gap. But what happens on the other side? Will we have a Star Trek utopia where everyone does what they're best at instead of driving to MegaCorp every morning to file papers? Or will we have a Hunger Games style existence or go back to feudal serfdom?