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Workers: Fear Not the Robot Apocalypse (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: For retailers, the robot apocalypse isn't a science-fiction movie. As digital giants swallow a growing share of shoppers' spending, thousands of stores have closed and tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs. The brick-and-mortar retail swoon has been accompanied by a less headline-grabbing e-commerce boom that has created more jobs in the U.S. than traditional stores have cut. Those jobs, in turn, pay better, because its workers are so much more productive. This demonstrates something routinely overlooked in the anxiety about the job-destroying potential of robots, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation. Throughout history, automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys. The reason: Companies don't use automation simply to produce the same thing more cheaply. Instead, they find ways to offer entirely new, improved products. As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people.
More efficient production makes the economy better? WTF kind of voodoo talk is that?
It is only through economic destruction and regression, that we can get ahead. It is only when we're all not even sure we'll have enough food to last through the winter, that we'll all be secure in our jobs!
If you love America, you need for forsake all technology and economic gain. Only through poverty, disaster and plague can we ever hope to be happy. Anyone who does not crave these things, is an enemy of humanity.
Thank you, mother nature, for the hurricanes. You employ construction! We need more hurricanes. We need more broken windows, pollution, and inefficiency.
productivity gains result in job losses. They have in every industrial revolution. Then in 50-80 years tech caught up elsewhere and there were new jobs. In the meantime there were two or three lost generations living in abject poverty because in America if you don't work you don't eat. And it wasn't the New Deal that fixed that (it helped, but wasn't nearly enough) it was a global war, 80 million dying and basically the whole world getting blowed up and needed to be rebuilt.
History is basically the working class trying and failing to pry money out of the hands of the ruling class. Why the hell people don't see this is beyond me.
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Here's an unencumbered link to the article:
http://www.cetusnews.com/busin...
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
>> Throughout history, automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys
The aggregate job count is rarely the complaint of existing workers and their families. It's that the new jobs get created somewhere else and often require skills that the original workers don't have, and that the workers don't feel like moving, don't want to retrain and/or are considered too old to retrain or hire. See "West Virginia" or most of America's near-inner cities for examples...
When we have burger flipping and order taking, shelf stocking, part picking robots, where do the people who do not, can not, or will not get an education work?
The fact that it all seems to be going in the right way - for now - does not mean it will continue. Many e-commerce jobs for humans will be destroyed in the next few years as e-commerce gets more and more automated. Yes there will be jobs, but for far fewer and better qualified/skilled people. If you are a relatively unskilled worker - in my view - your prospects are not going to be good. And, what is worse, it will be people like us that are facilitating this.
Don't even start me on what robotics are going to do to the trucking industry...
Has led to less overall jobs in the auto industry. I'm pretty sure that the jobs created with supplying and maintaining these automation tools did not completely offset the jobs lost...
Jobs don't matter. Jobs have never mattered. There are, and will always be, a means to an end. That end being not starving to death. In the past, jobs were a means of divvying up the limited resources for that goal, but as the resources become less limited, something like a UBI will become necessary.
This should be a good thing, but we've got such pig-headed ideas about economics that we're taking the blessing of not needing labor and turning it into a curse.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Only if the new offerings are not produced by robots. That's where the breakdown happens, why the advent and adoption of general-use robotics and algorithms isn't another example of historical automation.
Buggy whips went out of demand, so the people went to build cars. Cars started to get automated, so people went to build the increasingly-intricate car parts. But now car parts can crafted wholly by robots (or, for a continuously-expanding class of parts in general, "printed"). Automation in the past was about very specific processes for very specific outputs; you couldn't take a line used to make cars and easily change it to one that makes bicycles (or soup.) But soon we'll have a robot chef that works mostly by mimicking human actions, so if it can cook it can assemble.
The "creative" jobs will hold out longer, but algorithms will replace many of these, too: IBM's Watson has made a movie trailer. A lot of marketing these days are applying set rules to things (certain colors evoke certain responses in certain demographics, etc.) A lot of music is based around similar setups. Hell, Japan has a popular singer who's not even a real person.
The only question I see is: how fast will this happen? If it's extremely slow then make-busy work might fill in the gap as robots and "AI" take over most regular production. If it's very fast then we'll have a lot of robots producing things that most people can't afford to purchase, and "things" will eventually include food.
You may lose your truck driving job today, but many more jobs will be created in Elbonia, for future, far more educated generations of robotruck engineers.
I.e. NET jobs are NOT necessarily your jobs.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Let's just take a look at Amazon for a moment. I watched some news articles about them. Their warehouses already feature a lot of automation.
The only thing they need humans for is to take stuff off shelves (that robots bring to them) and put in boxes to fulfill orders. And you can bet your wallet as soon as Amazon figures out how to automate that, those jobs are gone. Poof. And yes, they definitely do intend to automate that, they're working on prototypes and ideas as I write this.
Automation is going to be a very huge disruptive force, and as it starts to happen, it will accelerate ever faster, just like computers did from 1980's to now.
Right now, we haven't reached that critical point where automation is going to displace workers. There's enough 'other' jobs to offset what automation replaces. But you're kidding yourself if you think that's going to hold. It's going to flip to the other side very soon.
Jobs and technology are mostly independent issues in the big picture. An economy is basically systematic bartering: you want stuff I have/produce, and I want stuff you have/produce. We trade to get what we want. Money, banks, etc. are simply tools to make such trades easier and scale-able.
The problem is that politics, geopolitical complexities, and herd mentality create boom and bust cycles, and inequality where the winner takes all and the losers get tossed. These boom and bust cycles are probably as natural as the spiral arms in the Milky Way galaxy. Capitalism bubbles have been occurring for at least 400 years, long before the USA and the Federal Reserve existed (since many blame the FR).
And capitalism does NOT guarantee reasonable equality. For the past the 40 years or so, the rich have got much richer while the rest mostly stagnated. E-commerce hasn't reversed this trend. The economy produces much more, but it's not trickling down. There seems to be a feedback cycle where the owner of machines and real-estate get yet more machines and real-estate, creating a winner-take-all economy. (It's similar to Marx's prediction.) Automation may be part of that, but it's also because the rich can buy up land and companies during slumps. The middle class is usually trying to make ends meet during slumps and so don't have enough spare cash to play that game nearly as much.
The article is paywalled so I cannot see it, but I am skeptical of claims made by the WSJ. They are often biased.
Table-ized A.I.
CGP Grey disagrees.
Just want to say that I think his video by that title, "Humans Need not Apply," is worth watching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
love is just extroverted narcissism
All those workers have to live close to the shipping warehouse, meaning the workers have to move in order to work for the big corporations and/or the death of stores in small towns.
#DeleteFacebook
The last mechanical revolution automated manual labor. The coming will automate intelligence. I tickles me to see ignorant pie-in-the-sky morons crowing about what they don't understand.
Not exactly surprising that the WSJ is not thinking terribly far ahead on this.
The issue is not what has happened up until now. It is what happens in the decades to come. Because we do not have general-purpose AI yet, nor do we have sufficiently advanced robotics yet.
The agricultural revolution displaced massive numbers of workers, but they could be employed by the industrial revolution.
Now, let's try to apply that to a post-general purpose AI and advanced robotics world. You're a farmworker, and your family has been farmworkers for generations. Someone builds a new device, and you are now redundant. So you move to the cities....and there's no industrial revolution work to be done because its being done by general purpose AI and robotics.
"You could get a job building the robots!!" No, why would you use a human to build the robots? You'd use another robot.
Getting through this is going to require a lot of rethinking how society works. Since the dawn of civilization, we have defined and supported ourselves via work. Work will no longer be possible for a very, very, very large portion of the population. We need to start talking about this massive transition now if we want to make that transition without massive bloodshed.
People to not peacefully starve to death.
We had a lot of technologies established supporting the human work and employment, agreed. But if those next-gen machines (AI+robots) are suddenly more intelligent, faster and stronger, on the the other side don't need sleep, don't get sick and don't earn a salary - what is left there for us to do except for writing poems?
Fireman rescues kitten, film at 11
You can't sensationalize a headline like that. It fades into the background noise.
Fireman indicted in string of arson fires causing $100,000,000 in damages, film at 11
That gets peoples attention. This is why people need to learn to IGNORE MEDIA HYPE.
Eventually there will be just two 'productive' people in the world. One will own all the farms, the farming robots and the food delivery infrastructure and will charge the other person trillions of dollars just for simple food to stay alive. The other will own all the construction robots and pharmaceutical companies and will charge the first person trillions of dollars for home repairs and the prescription drugs they need to stay alive. Everyone else will be unable to afford trillion-dollar robot-farmed groceries or trillion-dollar robot-made mobile homes and will have nothing of value to offer the only two productive people in the world other than entertainment. They will have turned to crime and been efficiently incarcerated by robotic police officers and thereby forfeited their right to vote and possibly hunted for sport.
This is a wonderful observation on the problem of automation and a service economy. Sure automation creates new jobs, but it raises the skill floor with every step that gets automated. That means we need more specialized workers, and less unskilled workers.
This sounds like a good thing, but what about the people who have difficulty with complex tasks? What about when we have automated all of the unskilled jobs? The trend will continue, and each time it takes a step it will require a more skilled and educated worker to take that new job the it replaced. With no unskilled jobs, there is no way to "earn" your way through college. This means that people will have to fund their education from family wealth, or finance it, only to have the job be automated and their qualifications become useless (at least a fraction will have this happen, which will be complete financial ruin). Eventually there will be no place for unskilled labor, and that anchor will grow in size until it sinks us. The problem isn't the number of jobs available, its having the right people available to fill them.
The prevalent mindset is "I work hard for my lifestyle. It's time for those lazy SOBs to get to work!" But, as the post above states, we no longer need to work hard for our lifestyle, and a little income redistribution will solve a lot of problems.
There are other predictions to an upset to our society by a rapid increase in automation:
I think we hit the peak usefulness of the "retrain for a better job" advice back in the early 90s when large corporations got around to destroying their "legacy" white-collar workforces. This was driven by computerization of clerical office work finally reaching a point where permanently fewer humans were needed. Back when I first graduated from college (around 1998), one of my first IT jobs was with a huge life insurance company. According to some of the old-timers I was working under, the then-sparsely populated headquarters was jammed wall-to-wall with various clerical workers up until the 80s or so. The HQ took up two Manhattan city blocks, plus a huge tower uptown, plus they had tons of large regional offices around the country. It was apparently so full that the company staggered start times so that crowds didn't overwhelm the elevators and escalators in the building. Maybe some of those clerical workers got better jobs, but I don't think that's going to happen this time around.
The fundamental problem that needs to be solved is this: If you want to continue with a consumer-based society, you must find some way to allow everyone to sell their labor for a price that allows them to continue consuming and keeping businesses alive. This includes everyone -- not just STEM graduates, CS people, programmers, data scientists, etc. The economy only works when the majority of people can afford to participate at a level appropriate to their skills. Large fully automated cloud data centers employ 20 security guards, HVAC techs, disk-pullers and rack-and-stackers...not 5000 system administrators. Automated warehouses employ a couple of robot-minders. Automated trucks employ zero truck drivers.
If we still have to cling to the idea that everyone has to have a job and earn money to be worth anything in society, how do we avoid nasty problems that crop up when the majority of people are unemployed and desperate? Technology people tend not to understand this, but look outside the tech bubble and see what kind of work the vast majority of people do all day. It's repetitive, automatable and may go away very soon.
USA has high retraining costs with loans that can't be easy gotten rid in bankruptcy and most college credits don't transfer
https://www.usnews.com/news/na...
The "robot apocalypse" has been threatened for a long time, but deploying robots increase complexity, which usually means they need trained people to keep them going. This is not necessarily what TFA is talking about, but to me the reason not to fear the robot apocalypse is, robots don't fix themselves.
At least, not yet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Workers are hired until the marginal value of their labor equals the marginal cost of that labor. You hire Alice at $50,000 salary because she'll bring in $100,000. Bob, because of diminishing returns, will only bring in $75,000, but at $50K hiring him is still a no-brainer. But if Carol will only bring in $50,000, you won't hire her unless you can get her for less than that.
What this means is there is no general economic law that connects changes in worker productivity to a particular kind of change in employment levels. It depends on what you do with that productivity.
Imagine a world in which computers were laboriously assembled by workers on breadboards using prototyping techniques. Let's say it costs you $10,000 to assemble a computer this way. In that case you'd only sell a small number of computers because they'd be highly specialized machines. Now suppose you introduce modern assembly techniques, with printed circuit boards and wave soldering. Now the computer which cost you ten thousand dollars to assemble can be made for well under $100.
If you continue to sell a very small number of computers at high prices, you'll lay off most of your workforce. On the other hand if you start selling your computers for $180, you'll end up adding to your workforce. Both scenarios turn increased worker productivity into increased profit, but in different ways.
Now let's imagine an entirely different scenario: a fast food restaurant. It's hard to imagine selling a lot more Big Macs because you drop the price. Nonetheless the same principle applies. If you can find a way to make money off the newly surplus labor, employment wont' go down. If you can't, you'll let people go.
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There are always larger factors at work than Automation. Its just one of many ingredients in the mix.
What drives making 'profit' is someone else somewhere has to spend more than their income. Spending creates savings. Ultimately this question makes its way back to who is issuing the currency, their spending decisions that drives aggregate profit.
The private sector always looks to maximise profit. A market entirely left to its own devices Iteratively Revises Down the amount of profit it makes because of changes in wage bargaining power, automation. Reduce workforce with automation and you're reducing someone's paying customers somewhere. So its self-sabotaging. However this dynamic is continuously changing(never static) as innovation creates new products, regulation and protections demand higher levels of quality and currency issuers get to work in Congress/Parliament and conduct discretionary spending which raises aggregate wealth for the private sector.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Robots (broadly automation over last 250 years) always changes the mix of how many people are needed to manufacture X in industry Y. But that's just a subset of what's going on. If we look at 'work' that is both profitable and not profitable its immediately obvious that there is more work than at any point in human history that needs to be done. eg: Today's displaced retails workers could become tomorrows electronic repair technicians if regulations are introduced to reduce e-waste. Manufacturers are required to make stuff that can be un-made, fixed, recycled.
Ageing population suddenly stops being a problem if you introduce the right level of technology and job creation for instance.
Also Jobs that stick around are the ones that have a contingent element of responsibility attached to them. Its easy to automate a Lawyer but hard to change a system that demands a human accountability in the process. That is a big part of why so many jobs are not being automated but others are: A coordinator who is legally responsible but not human? How do you sue that?
I dont buy into 'robots are here so work has ended' it never will and the people selling this idea well meaning or not don't see the whole picture.
You're saying that things were just rosy during the Dark Ages when there were no productivity gains for hundreds of years? I don't think so.
The Great Depression wasn't caused by productivity gains, and the Soviet Union collapsed because productivity was too low, not too high.
As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people.
s/hire more people/buy more robots/g
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I should be able to press a button and have my robot read my email, author my semi-anonymous slashdot trolling, and enjoy my beer for me, so that I don't have to.
Hint: If you can't get into a college with credits that transfer, you don't belong in college, at all.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The ATM graph doesn't appear to show what the author claims it shows. It looks like ATM's greatly delayed the growth of bank teller employment. Without ATM's, it looks like the total tellers would be roughly more than double the current quantity (although the chart doesn't cover enough years to get a good feel for the pre-ATM rate). The rate of teller growth may be finally going up again, but that's probably despite ATM's if we look at the pre-ATM rate. Using that chart, it appears ATM's indeed did take a big bite out of overall teller jobs.
Table-ized A.I.
Imagine you are a Roman in the Second Century BC; over the past 500 years Rome has grown from a village to the dominant force on the peninsula, to a pan-Mediterranean power. It would seem to you to be a kind of iron law of history: expansion is always good for Rome.
What you don't know is that you are approaching a kind of inflection point -- several inflection points actually. Despite the enormous wealth expansion is bringing into the city, you are reaching the point where Rome can't pay for expansion by taxes and do it with volunteers. The adaptations Rome will make to deal with that will fundamentally alter the character of Rome's cherished institutions, and Romans themselves.
My point is that there are limits to the power of experience to predict the future. Sometimes circumstances which have remained unchanged for centuries evaporate overnight. So while our experience since the Industrial Revolution tells us not to assume that technological innovation will result in net job losses, we shouldn't be to quick to jump to the opposite conclusion either. We should always keep an eye peeled for things we have always taken for granted that might not be so certain.
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Throughout history technology and innovations have solved specific labor problems and opened the way for more relatively unskilled labor to be done. The wheel meant it was possible to carry heavier things and people were free to work on other things. The cotton gin required less work to process cotton, opening more jobs for relatively unskilled work. Same with the printing press, etc.
What we have here is different. Cheap automation, over the next 100 years, will be able to do any work a human can do, but far more cheaply and 24-7-365 (366 on leap years). AI will be able to replace every white collar job, from help desks to engineers to lawyers - and do it far cheaper and 24-7-365.25. They will be able to be trained quickly and efficiently should a new task be desired and the way it's going only a few people will reap thier rewards. Please explain to me how even skilled workers are going to be able to compete with this because soon we will have AI and generic robotic automation, deployed rapidly to novel situations and its like nothing this world has seen before.
" Despite the enormous wealth expansion is bringing into the city, you are reaching the point where Rome can't pay for expansion by taxes and do it with volunteers."
Problem with that logic on just this specific point is that in Rome as with modern economies today taxes don't pay for spending. Its the other way around you have to issue a currency BEFORE you tax it back. Do this over X iterations and as long as issued/spent/created unit of account is greater than what is taxed back your civilisation remains solvent.
In Rome they understood this as in the archaeological sites in Pompeii some of the accounting is preserved. Roman one such example in a book the brief history of money: A governor asking for an expansion of credit tallies or minted coin to employ for more labour resources to expand the city. What it brings into focus is the point: If money is a soft constrain then what are the hard constraints? Eg: how many people, resources that can be brought to bear to make something. Taxation is for subservience and to keep people operating under the empire/country that they live in: sovereignty that's how the British colonised so many places they make people work for some form of legal IOU else they put law enforcement/the army onto you.
Of course they understood they had money problems. What they didn't know was the consequence of their solution to those problems, which was essentially to privatize the army.
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Forget everything we taught you in 101. In the real world, business owners barely know what they are doing and will instead do whatever they think will meet their personal goals. There is no economic law that connects business behavior and rationality or forethought. You can generally bet though that productivity gains will be more likely funneled into owner profit while employment grows as slowly as possible.
Exactly. The Roman empire collapsed a few hundred years later under very similar mechanics to what's happening around the world now. Call it artificial scarcity of money/keystrokes. Rome had many factors that caused its downfall but as soon as you start privatising armies and running the empire under basically austerity forgetting how money works it becomes brittle and unable to respond to challenges.
Even the 'dont panic' automation articles are not comprehensive. They ignore the larger context if you're sitting in an artificial non-optimal domain because there is not full employment + looking at automation and then narrowing it based on what the private sector sees as 'profitable' work (Marx was empirically right about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time). We can be led to believe robots will utterly take all the jobs and miss the causation/loopbacks in the system.
Hint: If you can't get into a college with credits that transfer, you don't belong in college, at all.
You must be far, far out of the loop. Even basic courses like calculus or English composition don't necessarily transfer between schools of equal merit. It's a way to force "lock-in of students" as they say.
Choosing to not cooperate with other institutions with transfer credits has been used as an intentional method ensuring that you only need to court students once: upon registration. After that, there is no worry in cutting costs, having bad advisors, or raising prices. The students can't leave and take their credits with them.
The technique is quite old but really exploded about 20 years ago. Now there aren't any reputable North American colleges left that don't do this scummy practice.
If you did not know this you really should not be giving any advice about modern education.
It is unwise to apply historical precedent when the difference may be qualitatively profoundly different.
Robots with AI are not mere machinery, they are much more like slaves. And there were serious problems economically for non-slaves because of competition from slave labor. This was a big deal in the Roman empire.
As usual, the elites owned almost all the slaves---and one reason Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated by the oligarchy was because he favored restrictions on slavery in order to benefit the wages of free Romans.
Now robot AI slaves are unlikely to spontaneously revolt, and a major category of these will of course be armed guards, Unsullied Machines, who will prevent democracy from imposing restrictions on the elite's slavery.
No I don't 'know this', because you just made it up. It's bullshit. Nationally Accredited colleges still accept transfer credits from other accredited colleges (some limits, fairly recent or testing required).
You are thinking of places like 'University of Phoenix'. Which is what I was talking about, if you can't get into a college with academic admission standards, you don't belong in college. Start at a Jr college, their first 2 years of credits transfer too, (but generally not the remedials).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, a lovely chestnut, this history thing.
For example, throughout history, the American housing market never went down. (2007 just called: they want their barm back.)
Like Moore's "law" (not so much in evidence lately), these are not laws but inductive extrapolations.
In particular, the assumption is that you won't run into a motivated reversal.
This would be where an entity—let's say Goldman Sachs—doesn't find a way to cash in on mass populations lulled into treating inductive extrapolations as blue chip gold bullion.
This would be wary you should be.
Like it or not, the future is without jobs. We must think about the legal / ethic issues and we must think about The Universal Basic Income. Technology is ahead... Politics and ethics need to catch up.
Henry T. Ford.
Yes, U got the jest of it.
In The Big Short the two young guys explicitly state that their business model is based on the observation that people prefer sunny thoughts, so they bet on big payoffs when sunny thoughts mushroom cloud (while loosing small when daisies reign).
The movie doesn't have a collar wad at Goldman swivel-face toward the camera to make the same statement, so let me do it here:
Time after time, a capricious, long-dormant tail slams down ruin and wreckage, and afterwards Goldman emerges from their sagacious tail-proof tail-packed den of stout timber iniquity tens of billions of dollars wealthier still.
For my money, you can bet large that Goldman is presently eyeing up the looming robot apocalypse as a convenient compass-spinning cover story for some devious underlying snookery even as we speak.
Now if I could figure out what this angle would be, they'd be making a movie about me, and not those chumps from The Big Short.
But unfortunately, induction interruptus resembles a Romulan bird of prey.
Generally speaking, once seen, twice fried.
Oh oh, look out, another new innovation from California... San Francisco City Supervisor Pushes State Tax On Robots To Slow Automation http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...
If this were true, then a large cataclysm would create more jobs, both from new construction, and by replacing inefficient buildings and energy systems with resilient ones.
Provided people learned from the mistake of building on a flood plain, or siting a nuclear reactor next to a city instead of on an island.
(object lesson: this is happening in Japan, where reactor impacted regions now have solar and wind farms, and in China, where industrial impacted sites now have solar farms, but to date has not happened in the US, other than due to fires in SF and Seattle and other major cities, which caused rebuilding which adressed the primary risk factors (wood in SF in a quake zone, buildings on a flood area in Seattle))
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No ! Companies do not have to hire more employees due to more products being sold. They simply need more automation and also need to get rid of employees as human workers are cost negative. Further, when the company makes more money that have no reason at all to spend or invest it in the US.. In other words the notion of trickle down economics is a sick joke.
If I already own everything I really don't give two shits whether there's anyone to buy it from me. That's how ruling classes work.
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unless you can convince Americans and people in general that taxation without a direct benefit to yourself isn't theft. Note I said 'direct'. Not getting threatened with violence from poor people doesn't count. Most folks would prefer to counter those threats with greater violence if history is any indication.
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Now... with what money and/or time will the displaced workers retrain and relocate to where these jobs are?
"... As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people."
The author of this statement assumes that there will never be a point at which every job in a given company can and will be automated.
When they don't need you anymore, they won't feed you anymore.
See, that's a not a problem to that logic. The posters point has nothing to do with what you seem to want it to be about which seems to be conservative monetary policy issues and everything to do with just pointing out that one cant predict the future based on the past. Poking holes in the metaphor doesnt mean the point is false.
Basically, you're ignoring the point and running on an unrelated tangent.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Removing minimum wage until that person can barely pay enough to eat in spite of working their number of hours, while not having UBI or a safety net more or less means you are creating a class of indentured or downright enslaved people, and in the end run you STILL have to have a replacement for job as otherwise such people will sooner or later find out that violence is a better solution to quasi slavery. On the contrary I think to avoid that scenario it would be MUCH better to have a high minimum wage, have a QUICK robotization, and then have politics and rich folk confronted with the problem quickly rather than slowly, thus forcing the same end solution (UBI+ safety nets) with far more minimal pains.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Can you point me to the law that says for a Virginian tech job you have to be from Virginia, or even IN Virginia whilst doing it?
" As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people."
As customers flock to these new offerings companies have to reprogram their robots.
The new McDonalds ordering terminals seem to make sure the restaurant is FULL all the time of people waiting now. It's more convenient and you confirm your own order, so you know it's not going to be screwed up. (At least the order, who knows about what they make to fill it.)
All this is to say the actual purchase experience is better. So more people go, and the staff seem to have increased in number in the kitchen. (You can see right into the kitchen.)
Data point of one, but it seems at least in this case automation reduced the annoyance with low-wage workers taking your order correctly, and increased staff and volume.
Someone who actually works as a manager for one of these places can probably elaborate.
Those jobs do not last long enough to make an entire economy. Also they are far too few disasters, especially if you actually do learn from them.
I went to two different colleges a few years apart.
At the second one, I had to retake CS freakin' 101 because it wouldn't transfer! *ALL* of my other math and CS classes transferred - but not Intro to Programming.
Careful about calling bullshit on the other AC's claim that basic courses don't necessarily transfer.