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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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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.
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 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.
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.)
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.