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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 There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored.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.
If you do anything on your job which you can be automated, which is repetitive, those tasks will eventually be automated.
This does not automatically mean your job will be automated completely, but your job will change.
Or as Edsger W. Dijkstra said: higher level programming languages: People thought that those languages would solve the programming problem [make it easier]. But when you looked closely the trivial aspects of programming had been automated while the hard ones remained.
New things are always on the horizon
and prison pop will go way up as healthcare will be much better there with no to very low cost.
Any time you want to be edumacated just visit google and search for something like "prison health care" and then cry and cry as you see prisoners not even receiving treatment for real afflictions, let alone the cosmetic surgery and shit people imagine that prisoners are receiving.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah. If we criminalizing things.
Yeah. If the do-gooders impose higher and higher sin taxes (say on cigarettes) and then wonder why a peaceful transfer of products turns violent as people inevitably try to avoid the onerous tax.
You want a smaller prison population? Do not criminalize everything. Limit as much as possible police enforcement to violence and theft.
The corner stone of a free society is the agreement that:
"I will not try to kill you and take your stuff If you don't try to kill me and take my stuff."
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Any "Objective Repeatable Task" is automatable.
Objective: The goal can be clearly defined in simple words. There are few input parameters to the problem that affect the output. The output is easily measured. The decision process for the input parameters has just a few steps.
Repeatable: The input parameters are similar and the outcome is similar.
Examples: Roofing. Laundry. Cooking. Manufacturing.
I just wonder how long it will take these people to realize that Trump is NOT getting their jobs back.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Once upon a time it took 100% of humans 100% of their time to stay a live and gather enough food. Then we started to specialize.
In 1987 2% of Americans farmed, and that's was the lowest number (total) since the 1800s. In 1820, when they were reported at less than 2.1 million, or about 72 percent of the American work force of 2.9 million. By 1850, farm people made up 4.9 million, or about 64 percent, of the nation's 7.7 million workers. The farm population in 1920, when the official Census data began, was nearly 32 million, or 30.2 percent of the population of 105.7 million, the report said. So we've gone from 100 to 72 to 64 to 30 to 2% of the population need to just make food to keep our species going.
How many people did horses 'automate'? If you look at the cumulative improvements at a single task how many people with sticks can a single tractor replace? Think of how many 'jobs' we could bring back if we outlawed tractors? It doesn't mean that a 'farmer' has gone away, it just means they do something different. An engineer in 2017 has had most of what an engineer did in 1917 'automated'.
Computers have been automating computer jobs since they were invented. Compilers are just "robots" that turn high level C into Assembly. I don't even write my own C any more, Simulink does a much better and consistent job at it. The autogenerated code may be a bit verbose but it's very explicit and bester right
So you're trying to make the claim that globalization has not changed the world's economies in any fundamental way. That companies are run the same way that they were 100 years ago, and boardrooms around the nation are equally as interested as employing domestic workers as they were before. That's a pretty hard road to take but I'm waiting for you to cite evidence to back you claim. For America's sake I hope that you are right.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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".
Except before globalization, domestic workers were automatically the most competitive workers. Globalization has made domestic workers noncompetitive. So your statement supports my claim, not yours, if you are in fact the same Anonymous Coward.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
but even today, robochefs are still a novelty,
Denial denial denial! At one time automobiles were a novelty! Just as they have become indispensable to the needs to society, so too can improvements in robotics become indispensable to the fast food industry. You can't make the claim because it happened happened yet, then it won't. That's just pulling the wool over your own eyes.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So you want to talk about 'the way things were' and yet refuse to look at anything that may have happened along the way that changed things in that time. So you have no idea whether you are making statements that are relevant to today or not. Got it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No, automation is a real observable phenomenon that's actually occurring, more and more so because it's often even more cost efficient than outsourcing. If outsourcing was not happening at all, automation would proceed at an even faster rate, because the benefit of replacing N highly paid western workers with a machine is far greater than replacing N workers of the same skill set working in some less developed country with a fraction of the pay.
No-one's been claiming that. Of course the concept of automation is not new, but the way automation can and is implemented has changed entirely with modern computers and data-driven manufacturing and production optimization.
A lot has been automated already, but it's nothing compared to what can and will be automated. The definition of 'low-hanging fruit' has also changed: data entry jobs were not too long ago considered impossible to automate. That's changed completely, and pretty soon the masses of people whose primary day-to-day work has been copying information from one place to another will be made obsolete by machines.
How many jobs can be automated now != how many jobs can be automated within the next couple of decades. If you told people in 1990 that in 30 or so years self-driving cars will start to emerge and threaten the jobs of drivers you'd have been laughed at by most. Similarly if you told them that call-.center jobs are being replaced by automated speech recognition and synthesis bots. Both are already happening, and are only going to keep going.
The up-front and maintenance cost by themselves are irrelevant. What mattes is how much performance you can get from the system per hour compared to humans. If said machine replaces 10 people working around the clock at 8 dollars an hour it will have paid for its acquisition in less than a year. After that at 40 000 a year it's massively cheaper than having all those people there.
You seem to be under the deluded impression that humans can somehow compere with increasingly efficient automation, even though said automation is the result of millions of hours of human engineering and designing with the specific intent of making computers that are more cost-efficient than humans at performing tasks..
It's not a meme, it's an undeniable reality of modern day life, and it doesn't have to mean the '1 % will grind us to paste', that only happens if we don't implement political changes that address the effects of increasing automation and decreasing employment, namely systems like basic income, changing taxation so that the 1 % making billions on their automated manufacturing will provide the rest of the society with money to be able to live and buy their products. Without consumers with purchasing power the consumer economy collapses which is not good for anyone, including the ultra-rich.
No, you seem more like someone sick from cognitive dissonance: on one hand recognizing the fact that increasing automat
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
You want a smaller prison population? Quit being a thug. Quit pushing a culture that values violence, lack of education, and laziness.
cut full time down to 32 hours short term with an road map to making it 20 longer term
A $50,000 robot uses maybe $5,000 in parts and electricity annually. Compared to a worker earning $50,000 a year and needs vacation time that robot can work 24 hours a day 6 days a week every week and be maintained by 1 guy(who does a dozen other robots too.
I sell the robots the best business case for robots is two fold. First while upfront costs are higher maintence and long term costs are way down, and a robot can scale production up and down as a business needs it to. This month you need 5000 parts daily. No problem. Next month you need 500 parts daily no problem.
Being able to ramp up and down according to sales is the future.
The future is a combo of 3D printing and just in time manufacturing keeping humans out of the production loop.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
so in the usa run up an 100K loan to get an masters. While an overseas guy's has and masters with only an 5k-10k loan that can be discharged.
I think he had an invisible /sarc at the end of his statement. :)
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Automation isn't the enemy it's a very helpful tool. Unfortunately, this tools is displacing people significantly faster than new job opportunities being created. The industrial revolution had this problem and many farmers faced near starvation while the rest were forced to survive working in factories. People seem to think it was a time of great progress but the truth is that it was a time of mass exploitation. We are going to have a similar outcome if we do nothing to prevent it. There are people who balk at the very idea of Universal Basic Income in a heartless manner because they do not grasp the breadth and level of widespread suffering that is coming. I hope that humanity has the wisdom to understand what is happening but I fear that our selfish tribalism is going to leave tens of millions to die.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
This could only possibly be true if one utterly fails to recognize the difference between labor intensive manufacturing and capital intensive manufacturing. Labor intensive means that labor costs are a relatively high proportion of the total cost of the product. Capital intensive is the converse. The vast majority of job losses for labor intensive products (textiles, basic assembly, etc) are entirely due to production moving to low labor costs locations. For capital intensive manufacturing, automation is the big driver. US manufacturing has been capital intensive for several decades now so further job losses will often be due to automation.
Any time you hear a politician talking about "bringing back manufacturing jobs" they are almost always talking about bringing back labor intensive production. Problem is that unless US wages fall by a LOT, production of those products is never going to come back to the US. They will be made wherever labor costs are lowest and no amount of politician's promises will change that fact. The days when someone without a college degree could go straight from high school into an assembly plant and make a big wage are long gone.
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?
How about...
...we try to do both?
Why the hell do so many people believe every political issue has precisely two sides, and only one side has merit? In the real world we tackle difficult problems by relying on a number of solutions, and we care more about what works than about ideals.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
There's a simple solution: Boycott buying food from farmers that use them.
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?
The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs hovered in the 17-18 million range for about 30 years, 1970-2000. NAFTA was signed in 1994, GATT/WTO treaty was signed in 1995. Five years later, the number of people employed in manufacturing in the U.S. started a precipitous decline, going from ~17 million to under 12 million in the course of the next ten years.
It's hard to believe that only 650k of those jobs were lost because of the trade agreements and the other 4.35 million were lost due to some huge wave of automation.
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.
And people looking back at history seem to gloss over the number of niches that have always existed. How many niches existed at the height of steam power to keep a locomotive on the tracks and running?
With respect to the trades there wasn't just one type of woodworker unless you lived in a small town. A person that specialized in cabinet building would have a completely different set of tools and skillsets than someone that built homes. One person could probably do both but would do neither as well as the people well trained to do one.
100 years ago a small town doctor was the Ob, Surgeon, General practitioner and mortician. I'm amazed at the number of sub specialties my wife works with. You have people that specialize in pediatric nephrology. They spend their entire career ONLY working with kids kidneys. Other than med school they have none of the same training as a orthopedic sports surgeon. And for each of those doctors there are dozens more specialized supporting staff. Directly you have nurses and the such.
Indirectly you have the people that built the tools used in the specific industries. The medical hardware and tools that a surgeon uses are different than those that a nephrologist uses. There are hundreds if not thousands of engineers building, testing and working on each of the respective tools.
As the world becomes more diverse the number niche of jobs increases dramatically. It's not like you go to college, become one of 5 professions and do that. I'm one of 50 engineers at a single facility making a single product for a single industry and only 10% or so of my job may overlap with all of those other people. We have cleaning people that support the office building, mowers that mow the lawn, cafeteria workers, the guy that runs the on site gym, the marketing people to sell our product.
And this is for a boring every day product that you wouldn't think twice about. That single device in a single niche industry pays the salary of easily 1000+ people. Multiply that by every little thing out there and it adds up quick. So no, there aren't a TON of a single profession out there but the workforce is made up of a ton of little professions that add up.
That extends to the modern trades as well. I have friends that are plumbers and electricians. 90 years ago there may have been one type but you have people that specialize in residential vs industrial vs medical.
What do you have against Trump voters?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
That's a good point... I recall reading something about how a while back congress was trying to keep the M1A1 tank manufacturing lines going, not because we needed more, but because if we did then ramping up would be possible versus if there weren't trained staff ready to go. (Well, and pork/jobs, too, but anyway...) With a robotic line, the overhead for them idling is going to be much lower. I hadn't considered that side before...
We'll just move from being a service economy to being a robot service economy. Someone will have to supply the services to the robots. So most people will get jobs in the robot banks, robot pubs and restaurants, robot shops and giving massages to robots that are tired after a hard days roboting.
Once you include the displaced, the involuntarily retired, and unsuccessful new entrants, you get a number more in line with reality - especially with regions that have seen consistent decline.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
My job is to write code that can be used 24hrs a day forever by machines. These machines and computers are already taking the place of human workers, never need to sleep and don't falter when tired like silly humans. I guarantee that I will be replaced at some point by a script in the next 10 years. We meat sacks are screwed.
This is true to an extent, but the jig is up once a robot can be programmed to learn. CGPGrey said it best. Humans will become like horses. Employable mostly for recreational and ceremonial purposes, but replaced with machines for getting real work done. And in general, populations decreased precipitously after they were no longer as useful... Luckily this appears to be somewhat self correcting as wealthier populations tend to have less children and even an apparent negative growth rate.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Yes, yes they do. Currently around 90 % of people gain their income primarily as wages. These people already gain the bulk of their money from corporations and the spend that money on products produced by corporations. The bulk of the money in circulation in the consumer economy alrteady moves from pockets of one major company to another via the hands of consumers.
If the 90 % of people are suddenly made obsolote as factors of production and they have no other source of income, the consumer economy as we know it will collapse. The companies will lose their ability to play the game they're currently paying if people have no money to spend.
If I run a company selling a product, I do not care if the money someone is using to buy said product comes from wages or income transfers. Put simply: if you abolish wages entirely and replace them with an equal amount of income transfers, the game is still as valid as it is now. That is, there is still just as much profit to be made for said companies as there is now, even if the money is moved from the corporations to the consumers in taxes instead of wages.
The alternative is that large consumer companies (think coke, walmart, mcdonald's, nike, adidas, car companies, etc.) ie. the bulk of the entire economy will collapse if there is no money for consumers to spend, which will make the situation worse for even the people that own the productive capacity, because owning vast automated factories meant to produce consumer goods does not benefit you one bit if 99,99 % of all potential consumers have starved to death.
Automation by its very nature means if we want to maintain economies in their current fashion we cannot continue to measure the worth of an individual in terms of productivity, because eventually all of us (including the very top managers in charge of overseeing production) will be outperformed by machines, and in that stage no-one should be paid anything if we keep using this metric.
This is not a realistic alternative. The idea that the 90 % (or more) of people who will be made unemployed by automation will just all start companies of their own and sustain themselves that way is flawed in mulltiple ways: first, without income they have no capital to start companies. Second, the vast majority of people do not posses the skills to run a company that's capable of efficiently competing with large corporations that can take advantage of sheer scale of production (and hence, automation) to keep prices low. Thirdly, even if all of them started companies, without income from labor, these companies still will not have any customers and hence no revenue. Good luck trying to start your own company with next to no money and trying to compete with multinational manufacturers. And as for the service side: it doesn't help if I start a bar if there are no people with money to spend in said bar.
The logistical chains involved in current global markets simply do not support the idea that we can suddenly transform our economies to such that 1 % are running multibillion dollar global megacorps, while the rest 99 % are all somehow running small corporations and no-one (or nearly no-one) is paid in wages.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead