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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.
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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>> 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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
It's hardly a paradox, it's just an observation of supply and demand in price-based market economies in that as something becomes less expensive more of it is consumed. People have always wanted more consumer goods and services, it's simply that they weren't as willing to pay for more of them at the previous higher prices.
However, this doesn't really address the original point. Automation is slowly eating away at the edges of unskilled labor. Couple this with a minimum wage and you have a situation where there are going to be a large number of people who are incapable of selling their labor because no one considers what they can offer a fair trade in exchange for their money. Removing the minimum wage probably means that there's always something that (almost) anyone could do for pay, but even that is going to be eroded slowly as well.
I suspect that over the long run the issue solves itself. People who are incapable of getting work are likely to end up less likely to reproduce as they make less attractive mates, so any genetic factors reducing the ability to provide valuable labor in a modern economy are going to be selected against. To some degree I think this has been slowly happening over time and may be a partial explanation for the Flynn effect. The only real question is what to do with the people who have nothing to contribute to society in the meanwhile. I suppose you can go full-blown Randian objectivist and let people starve on the streets, but I don't see that ending well. I'm personally in favor of a UBI because it's probably less expensive than dealing with people turning to crime.
The 'burger-flippers' are always the first threatened by advocates of automation, but in reality they'll be the last jobs to go.
Think about the last 40 years of automation; which jobs were replaced? The low-wage, part-time, menial jobs like sweeping up and serving food? Or the higher paying, more-skill-required positions such as machinists and equipment operators?
It may be fun to pick on the low-skilled worker, but realistically, those aren't the jobs the owners of production want to get rid of. They want to automate you out of a job. Me too.
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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.
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.
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.