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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 There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored.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
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
When did roofing become automated?
It hasn't, but it will. We'll stop building these retarded flammable asphalt shingle roofs sooner or later, and just put up metal roofs which can absolutely be put up by a robot. By modern standards it's not even a difficult job to have a robot do. Everything the machine has to do has been done in the automotive industry for decades. And it's a really smart job to automate, too, because anything done on a roof is among the most dangerous jobs in construction, whether it's roofing itself, or solar installation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
I"m just picturing six people trying to get heavy equipment onto a roof, instead of the two that could do a roof int he morning with shingles like before. Metal roofs are more expensive because steel is expensive and difficult to work with, and I can't see that changing much.
Whenever I see people say "we could never automate this because..." it's almost entirely based on the idea that automation has to do the work exactly as we do it now.
Why would you put robots on a roof to do the job? More likely you'd manufacture the whole roof assembly with robots in a factory, and then just plunk it on top. Sure, this will be difficult for existing buildings, but it doesn't take too much imagination to see how we could shift the way we build buildings to make sense in a world of automation.
We are already moving that way with things like structurally insulated panels (SIPs). Instead of framing walls on site, insulating them, and then putting up OSB/plywood, SIPS are manufactured in a factory and then just trucked to the site and literally tipped up and bolted down. They already have all the channeling for running wires and the like. So has automation eliminated the need for people here? No, but it has greatly reduced the amount of labour needed. No more framers, less work electricians, etc.
If you can't see how something could be automated, you're not trying hard enough.
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?
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