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Technology Invading Nearly All US Jobs, Even Lower Skilled, Study Finds (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: Forget robots. The real transformation taking place in nearly every workplace is the invasion of digital tools. The use of digital tools has increased, often dramatically, in 517 of 545 occupations since 2002, with a striking uptick in many lower-skilled occupations, according to a study released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. The report underscores the growing need for workers of all types to gain digital skills and explains why many employers say they struggle to fill jobs, including many that in the past required few digital skills. There is anxiety about automation displacing workers and in many cases, new digital tools allow one worker to do work previously done by several. Those 545 occupations reflect 90 percent of all jobs in the economy. The report found that jobs with greater digital content tend to pay more and are increasingly concentrated in traditional high-tech centers like Silicon Valley, Seattle and Austin, Texas.
What is a digital tool? Are they talking about computer-controlled equipment?
Around 1920, wooden shipping pallets cut down about 83% of the labor involved in shipping: what took a crew three 16-hour days to load and unload now took four hours. It became efficient to stack goods, wrap them, then transfer them on the truck to go to a port, then the ship, destination dock, back onto truck, warehouse, truck, distribution center, truck, retail center. They might unpalletize, rearrange, and palletize to go to retail so as to tailor from bulk stock to store-specific need.
A piece of wood.
Ikea has changed the shape of one of their mugs twice so as to nearly triple the number they can ship on a truck--cutting out 2/3 of the labor of shipping them.
This is what technology is. When someone says "automation", imagine a wooden shipping pallet. When they say, "It's coming for unskilled jobs!", imagine a dock worker. When they say, "It's coming for smart people's jobs this time!", imagine being a charge authorizor in American Express in 1988 (Authorizor's Assistant), or an accountant, or a market trader (look at all the automatic charting software). When they say, "It's coming for everyone's jobs this time!", look at pneumatic power tools and digital computers.
That's right: it's always coming for everyone's jobs.
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I thought this was a given. Technology has been invading every space from manufacturing to retail to medicine to law....everywhere. It's everywhere. Full automation + robots is just the next step.
Pretty soon, the only thing you'll have to do at the grocery store is weigh your produce and indicate which produce item it is, and everything else will scan automatically and be billed to your bank account or credit card on your way out the door. It's not here yet, but....it's coming.
Republicans are convinced that slashing the US corporate tax rate to 20 percent will be a veritable engine of job creation.
This story would have been blindingly obvious were it published 10 years ago. Today it's more like stating the sky is blue. Water is wet.
Guess someone's getting paid by the word, eh?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
There is anxiety about automation displacing workers and in many cases, new digital tools allow one worker to do work previously done by several.
We are a species of tool makers. That is what tools do - they multiply our productivity. It's what tools have ALWAYS done. This is nothing new, especially since the industrial revolution. You WANT tools that multiply the productivity of people especially in a place like America which has 1/4 the population of China. Those tools (even for low skill workers) are what allow us to enjoy the high wages and standard of living we have. Don't like it? Too bad. The status quo is not an option and you don't want it to be either. If we go backwards that would be a problem FAR worse than any displacement of portions of the workforce that have been made redundant by technology.
"high-tech centers like Silicon Valley, Seattle and Austin, Texas"
So, is that Seattle and Austin, both in Texas or are they being inconsistent with their usage of states attached to the city? (that's a rhetorical question)
-SaNo
Unfortunately (in my opinion as an IT professional) it is scary how much we rely on computer based systems for virtually every job, even manual labor (voice and written communications, status updates, measurement, automation, the list is pretty big .Some schools won't even teach handwriting in favor of "typing" with tablets (?!?). (Why not real computers to give a real education rather than limited, weak, "toy" that is not use in the work place as much as some want to think, because you can't really type well on them). A minor disruption to a few key severs in California or New York, can apparently bring virtually 2/3 of US operations slowing down, or evening to a stop. We probably should be considering how dependent we are on computers and ask ourselves: Should we be?
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
The revolution will come when everyone over 30 is unemployed and unemployable. Social media billionaires will pay taxes for a civil society, or receive a bullet to the head.
This (plus AI, Uber, and less regulation) are how we’re going to get the economy out of the decades-long productivity slump. More economic output per hour worked is always good.
Fight for $15 = I cannot compete with (or barely use) computers and have worked the same entry-level job at McDonalds for eight years, and despite in all those years I have never been able to find a single company willing to pay me more than minimum wage because I am so incompetent, I am going to attacking the one place willing to actually employ me.
Forget about the automation itself -- if there is a sudden massive drop in employment then the economy as a whole is toast. In the developed world, the entire economy is based around the idea that people sell their labor for money, which is then used to buy goods produced by people working for money. Even the Great Depression had unemployment numbers in the 25% range -- that was a mess and automation is poised to put way more people out of work. Deindustrialization has been devastating to parts of the US and Europe, but it's been slow-ish. The next wave of job removal is not just multiple times faster, but affects more of the economy as well. And this time, it doesn't matter how educated you are...doctors and lawyers will only be able to keep their jobs because they have professional organizations that will never allow them to be unemployed. What about everyone else?
I think that if you want to keep the status quo, you're going to have to figure out a way to keep giving money to people via a variety of means. Either you go the basic income route and make work an add-on to the essentials, or you establish a New Deal era program to provide an employer of last resort, or a combination of the two.
A personal example I would like to cite is drawn from my experience doing IT work in large organizations. Even with companies pushing to offshore and outsource everything, there are still tons of full time employees drawing decent salaries doing work that is basically a shell script plus knowledge of organizational politics. What worries me is that we're still pumping out tons of college graduates every year who are going to be expecting a job like this. I got a science degree, but hung out with tons of people in various soft subject degrees in college. Those people did the bare minimum level of work and just showed up to group interviews for large companies their senior year. Those big companies gave them some kind of random entry level job with a career path that might make them managers, directors and VPs someday. If companies don't need tons of C-student psychology or business majors, then the educational system breaks down too.
Well stated.
Moreover, as soon as you can do the work in half the time, you get handed double the workload. People see work as going away and becoming scarce but in reality there is more work being undertaken as we become more efficient at it. To expand on the parent post, once we figure out how to ship packages more efficiently, we now have time to track each package as it travels, something that would have been impossible 100 years ago. Once that is fully automated with zero human involvement, there will be some other type of work undertaken that was previously thought impossible.
There is always more worthwhile work to do, automation and technology just changes the nature of the work.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
is a digital tool
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Trump will appoint him to the SCROTUS
build a wall! a technology wall! And let the digitals pay for it.
"Let's eat, grandma"
vs.
"Let's eat grandma"
Well, have you seen the number of "Calle" signs in the Google's reCAPTCHA service? Now you know why. Learning English is not the issue here though, as people usually want to go cross the Channel to the UK, literally by any means necessary. Now, if only I too could afford to have a smart phone as well.. But I'm not bitter, I just expect them to conform to local customs, laws and principles of the society, and become productive members of the it. One way or the other. Unlike some other people.
That get created as a result of automation and technological improvement. Yes, that happens, but the last time it did was after the industrial revolution. 80 years after it. It took that long for tech to catch up and employ the people put out of work. We had 80 years of social strife and rampant poverty in the meantime. They called it the guilded age. It lead to to world wars.
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state laws like you can't pump your gas in some. Will make this easy self check die for age controlled stuff that need id checkers. Also easy self check out = easy shoplifting.
Micro Markets have shoplifting issues.
Where is the Apps Guy?
I saw an interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson discussing the employment of people based on their intelligence and personality. Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, university professor and researcher, and more recently a speaker on social norms because of his stance on some Canadian "hate speech" laws. I suspect many readers of Slashdot has heard of this man.
The interview went into some detail on that there is a portion of the population that have been finding harder and harder to get a job. This 16% of the population have an IQ of 85 or lower. By definition we will always have 16% of the population below 85 because we define an IQ of 100 as average, but what an IQ means in intellectual capacity can shift in time as the average of the intelligence of the population shifts.
The reason these people find getting, and keeping, a job difficult is that the jobs we have rely more and more on being able to handle complex information. People don't pick cotton by hand any more, for example. Even flipping burgers means being able to read orders, manage numbers, and interface with electronic timers and intercoms. Dr. Petersen related his experience with trying to get people with an IQ of 85 to manage living on their own. Just being able to manage a budget, pay bills, and so forth, can be a problem for such people. Will increasing automation make life easier for these people or more difficult in time?
Shortly after seeing that interview I was listening to the radio where there was some group, a government office of some sort I recall, wanted to see more people get education beyond high school. They said that there was about 10% of the adult population of this city, state, or region (I'm not sure which) that did not have a high school education, or equivalent. I did a quick Google search and people with an IQ of 85 have a 50/50 chance of graduating high school. If there are 10% of the people that did not have the equivalent of a high school education then that seems to be doing pretty well, perhaps better than the statistics might lead. Or, alternatively, the graduation rate was marginally higher than statistics might lead because the high school education was sub-standard.
Trying to get better than 90% of people with a certification or degree beyond high school may simply be an impossible task. Doing that would mean a shift in human genetics where an IQ of 85 is now intelligent enough to get a post-high school education, or lowering the standards of what these certifications mean. I'm pretty sure that lowering the standards of what a high school education entails is not where they want to go. If we hand out certifications for welding or forklift driving to people that cannot actually perform those tasks helps no one. Giving out certifications for being able to tie shoelaces helps no one either.
Perhaps automation means this 16% of the population will be able to find work due to much of the thinking being removed from what they need to do. This will be interesting to see how this is resolved.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Anyone that has had to do a lot of driving and address hunting knows how much waste and error occupy your days. Now a simple GPS system in a car makes a driver so much more efficient that it clearly would allow companies to lay off staff members. It is such a shock to see how well these systems can work in high density, urban environments.
You must live in either Oregon or New Jersey, the only two states that don't allow you do fuel your own vehicle, if you don't realize how rare that type of law is in the USA.
Raising the minimum wage destroys jobs; that is what.
Potential employee: I am a low-skilled laborer who cannot find work.
Potential employer: I am willing to pay you
$X to do this work.
Potential employee: I accept that deal.
Government: No! You cannot take the deal. You must remain unemployed instead.
Care to tell us all about the business that you ran?
I'm expecting you to be another joe the plumber passing off his fantasies of the future as facts today. Voting accordingly and urging the rest of us to do likewise.
You temporary embarrassed millionaire who is just a few pesky regulations away from reclaiming his rightful place in the world. I've lived in low wage shithole cities as a highly skilled worker. Believe me the only people in the whole town who weren't getting the shaft were the fat cats who constantly promised me I was just a little hard work away from the big time.
American tax policy gives an advantage to automation over labor. An employer must pay payroll taxes, maintain unemployment insurance and workers' compensation, and might have to offer health insurance. Employees are also protected by very strict rules on overtime. Meanwhile, machines are not subject to any of these taxes, rules, and regulations.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Everyone is dancing around the real issue. We only need jobs because we need money.
What if we didn't need money? Isn't that the real promise of automated labor?
We have certain material needs that require energy and raw materials. There's so much waste in our society, most of those raw materials can be recycled from what we throw away, and it just takes energy to transform them.
What if we had free energy?
People are working on that now. Solar, wind, wave power, geothermal, even fusion. Someday energy may be so abundant as to be cost-free. But it won't work if a select few own all that power generation capacity and others are denied.