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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.
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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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.
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.
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!
I'm not sure i agree with that. First, any business who can't afford to pay an employee $15 an hour shouldn't be hiring employees...let the owner do all the work if they don't want to cut into their profits. Second, outside of the technology bubble live millions of people exactly like you describe. Don't forget that IQ is normally distributed and even people with potential for intelligence grow up in some really crappy circumstances that interfere with their ability to succeed.
Seriously, low-end employers make enough to pay a decent minimum wage. A pizza place can charge $15 for a single pizza and makes hundreds a day. McDonald's takes in tons of money every day and only a fraction of that goes out as labor costs.
And as soon as the robots get good at rapidly doing the fine positioning, that guy is going to be out of a job. Right now the robots do almost all the work, and the humans assist them. They're literally just lining things up for the robots that do the actual work. How much longer do people imagine those jobs will be necessary?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What is a digital tool? Are they talking about computer-controlled equipment?
Look at your hand. That's a digital tool.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
What store do you shop at? The ones around here tend to go along these lines.
Tap "Start" and then tap "I dont have a store card", tap "I do not want to sign up for a store card", tap "I do not want to give money to XXX Charity", tap "produce", search through the produce screen tell you find bananas, tap "bananas", Put bananas on the scales, system gets weight and tells you to bag the bananas, place bananas in the bag and the system alerts "Extra item in bag please remove the item.", you take the bananas out of the bag and the system tells you to bag the bananas, place them back in the bag and the system alerts "Extra item in bag please remove the item.", get attendent over to tell the machine it is wrong, select "Finish and pay", tap "Use card", system instructs you to use the card reader, swipe card (sometimes multiple times for it to read), tap "Yes $xx.xx is correct", tap "I dont have a store card", tap "I do not want to sign up for a store card", tap "I do not want to give money to XXX Charity", System prints a receipt, Attendant checks your bag to make sure you did not put anything in it that you did not pay for, you go home.
I may be misremembering from when I was in school, but I recall that labor was the biggest cost at the fast food places I worked. The food itself was about a dime per meal, and most of the cost of a drink was the paper cup. It could go upside down pretty quickly if there was a big sports game on and foot traffic dried up during what was normally a rush.
Tightening bolts sounds boring- he would have much more fun as web developer!
love is just extroverted narcissism
And, sadly, most people don't understand that corporate taxes are taxes on YOU, not the companies. The CBO says corporate taxes mostly affect the employees of that company; but corporate taxes are part of doing business, and thus passed onto their customers. Even if the customers are other businesses, those costs all eventually get passed down to retail. Period. But if it makes you feel better, keep complaining.
I wouldn't argue that cutting it necessarily helps job creation, only time will tell if that would really happen, but if you don't think companies compete on prices (*), and that prices would come down through competition (and you realize a lot of products have razor thin margins already - because of competition), then tell me what you're smoking.
(*) yes, some companies do things like collude and do other anti-competitive things, but that's already illegal.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
When I worked at McDonald's four decades ago, minimum wage was very close to $15 in today's dollars, adjusted for inflation.
They also had more workers at the average store than today because almost every process was 100% manual (they even had the cashiers scribble out totals and tax by hand arithmetic for some reason, even though cash registers had been able to do that for about a century).
Somehow, McDonald's managed to survive. (I'd bet that getting real cash registers had more to do with McDonald's subsequent success than lowering workers' wages.)
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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The price of the actual food is generally around 30% of the menu price.
As I said, even the CBO stated the primary loser in corporate income taxes are the employees. Taxes are an expense of running business; companies get their money from their customers. Q.E.D.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Robots are already good at fine precision. STEMs can position within nanometers
Why not?? Not every job is supposed to be one you can live off of. Low wage jobs are often a way to break into the labor force and gain some experience, perfect for kids and students.
Trying running your own small business, I think your attitude would change quickly, once you see how labor costs stack up quickly, but have to deal with responsibility of handling x number of customers, managing inventory, managing the books.. one person can only do so much; then there's paying lease, heat, electricity, water/sewer, worker's comp, business tax, inventory tax, etc..
It's especially hard for small businesses because many of the federal regulations that are no financial obstacle for MegaCorp are quite difficult for Ma and Pa Corner Store. On top of that, because they tend to be smaller, when they order wholesale, they don't get the quantity discounts that MegaCorp gets.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Oh, so McDonald's isn't exploiting its workers for profit, it's doing it to teach precarious workers what it feels like to be exploited and give them valuable experience and skills in that. How generous of them! BTW, the vast majority of McDonald's workers are single parents and college dropouts with crippling debt who can't find a better job. How's this 'experience' supposed to help them find 'a job they can live off of'?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
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.
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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.
Having mcdonalds or wal-mart on a resume would hurt you on all but the most menial positions.
You'd be literally better off lying that you mowed lawns and shoveled driveways.
Basicly your employer gets your labor power with a subsidy, because he hasn't to pay full for its upkeep. Everything else is burdened up to the taxpayer.