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'Automating Jobs Is How Society Makes Progress' (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz, written by Per Bylund, assistant professor at Oklahoma State University: Analysts discuss the automation of jobs as if robots are rising from the sea like Godzilla, rampaging through the Tokyo of stable employment, and leaving only chaos in their wake. According to data from PWC, 38% of jobs in the U.S. could become automated by the early 2030s. Meanwhile, a report from Ball State University's Center for Business and Economic Research warned that half of all American jobs could be replaced by automation. These prophecies of doom fail to recognize that automation and increased productivity are nothing new. From the cotton gin to the computer, automation has been happening for centuries. Consider the way automation has improved the mining industry over the past 100 years. Without machines, humans were forced to crawl into unstable passageways and chip away at rocks with primitive tools while avoiding the ever-present dangers of gas poisoning and cave-ins. Not only was this approach terrible for health, but it was also a highly inefficient use of skilled human laborers. With machines doing the heavy lifting, society was able to dedicate resources to building, servicing, and running the machinery.
Fewer people now do the traditional physical labor, but this advancement is celebrated rather than mourned. By letting machines handle the more tedious -- and, in some cases, dangerous -- tasks, people were liberated to use their labor in more efficient, effective, and fulfilling ways. Critics of automation miss the point. Nobody works for the sake of work -- people strive to create value, which helps pay our salaries and feed our families. Automation effectively opens the door for more new endeavors that will elevate our species to greater heights. Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
Fewer people now do the traditional physical labor, but this advancement is celebrated rather than mourned. By letting machines handle the more tedious -- and, in some cases, dangerous -- tasks, people were liberated to use their labor in more efficient, effective, and fulfilling ways. Critics of automation miss the point. Nobody works for the sake of work -- people strive to create value, which helps pay our salaries and feed our families. Automation effectively opens the door for more new endeavors that will elevate our species to greater heights. Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
.. we either we end up automate everything and become the ultimate slackers, or we fail to stay on top of the automation so that we eventually will be replaced by machines altogether. I wish I could say that I prefer the former scenario, but after seeing Wall-E I'm not so sure...
I don't think people 'strive to create value' at all - we just go to work to get paid, and while we're at work we basically do what we're told. If we're told "strive to create value", then we'll work like normal and call it "striving to create value". If the boss says "ensure not one of these shell casings can be used to make a bomb, but make sure we make enough of them to fulfil our orders" (a la Schindler), then we'll do that, and we'll still call it 'striving to create value' when the customers come around.
In my spare time I like to be 'productive' by getting tasks off my to-do list (eg. mow the lawn, fix the fence, paint the spare room, etc) - crucially none of these pay any money, although they do 'add value' to me. If I had more spare time, I probably wouldn't be so keen to get those jobs done because I could just put them off until tomorrow in a lot of cases. That's not an option because soon enough I have to go to work.
I don't think that anyone's yet worked out how to keep a certain sense of urgency in people's lives when there's nothing that can't wait until tomorrow, yet not pay them and still have a functioning society. With that in mind, TFA doesn't offer anything new that we haven't heard already.
The problem is not that automation will kill jobs. The problem is with our current economic arrangement - capitalism.
In capitalism, the capitalist class (business owners) get to keep the benefits of increased productivity, while the working class (everyone else) gets to keep working a full working day, and paid their normal wages. With automation, the capitalists need less and less workers, which results in the kind of conflict we have here.
The obvious answer is to change the economic arrangement: make it so that *everyone* gets to keep the benefits of increased productivity, not just the capitalist class. In other words, give workers more leisure time while keeping their salary the same.
Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
Automation is NOT going to result in the Apocalypse. It is NOT going to take everyone's job away. It is NOT going to result in a global financial meltdown. There is NOT going to be a singularity.
Naturally, everyone wants to look at the solutions of yesteryear, back when we just told the unemployed masses to "go get an education!". That bullshit isn't going to work in the future. Automation and good-enough AI is targeting educated jobs, so please STOP with the ignorant assumptions that this change is anything like the previous ones. Put simply, it's not.
Yes, some people will be displaced out of some jobs and have to find something else to do. No this will not be easy for some of them but it will be good for society overall...A lot of progress is held back simply because humans are stuck doing work that we don't yet have a machine for.
Uh, some people? Just replacing cashiers with automated checkout stations (which is happening everywhere) targets 3 million jobs just in the US. Forget AI, automation will make a LOT of people unemployable. Mental capacity is often the reason a LOT of humans are employed in tedious, boring, easily automated jobs. Put simply, not everyone can be valued in future jobs. In fact, the vast majority cannot. And "go get an education!" isn't the answer.
...If automation progresses faster than we can handle it then we will pass laws to slow it down or in extreme circumstances revolt (possibly violently).
Because we've been so successful in managing the balance of wealth and power in the world so far? That gap between the world's billionaires and their insatiable greed and the other 99.9999% of the population isn't shrinking. You will have as much chance of slowing down insatiable greed tomorrow as you have today. A violent revolt will likely be the solution as our economy starts to die as millions join the global welfare state.
This is an utterly ahistorical argument. Economists have long argued, on mere speculation, that pre-industrial revolution everyone worked like a dog. Anthropologists and historians have shown that this is not true--there are certainly times in the crop calendar (in temperate zones) when everyone has to work long days for weeks at a time. But these are the exception, and most of the year was spent with lots of free time (see Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life), much of it devoted (in Europe and elsewhere) to ritual and celebrations. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism fundamentally changed our conceptions of time and work (see, e.g., E.P.Thompson, "Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism"), effectively ending the autonomy of workers and tethering them to the boss's time-clock. This was and always has been a contested process.
The larger argument made in the original post is also utterly ahistorical: there is no essential "progress" that we are working towards, and the notion that some tasks are "higher" (or worse, marks of an evolution of the species) have been used for centuries to prop up illegitimate hierarchies of power and compensation. The notion that automation has made people "liberated to use their labor in more efficient, effective, and fulfilling ways" ignores all the many ways that our advanced capitalist society is DEEPLY UNFREE, and an increasing amount of our labor is deeply unfulfilling. Efficiency for me the worker is not fulfilling for my own purposes--it's only fulfilling to the capitalist who profits from my labor. I don't give a damn how many widgets I sell. Social psychology has time and again reaffirmed that a sense of fulfillment is gained by healthy personal interactions, not by mere productivity--as shown by studies that find people in jobs with more (conversational, not power-laden) human contact are generally happier than those with less.
Note that Per Bylund is a professor of entrepreneurship, not a discipline known for being aware of its place in history or society so much as its ability to extract value from others' labor.
But this increase in productivity has NEVER been shared with the worker.
Nonsense. Since the start of the industrial revolution, the purchasing power of the median family has gone up twentyfold.
the 70s. Around that time the manufacturing base was shipped overseas and with it the power of Unions dwindled. Also political wedge issues (abortion, guns, identity politics) divided the working class into easily manageable voting blocks who could be made to vote against their immediate and long term economic interests.
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And how much has the cost of living gone up? There's a reason why families need two income earners to keep their heads above water or, hell, just to be able to save for that retirement that seems to be on the ever receding horizon (if the current crop of batshit insane millionaire politicians have anything to say about it). Increases in incomes have not kept pace with increases in productivity since the latter half of the 1970s.
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Sorry I just don't think is very realistic. People are talking about factory work and manual labor... most of that was automated in the 80's and 90's. The automation wave coming are the skilled and educated jobs, specifically very expensive and increasingly impossible to find (due to needing a resource with a nearly unique and non-existent combination of already existing skills from day one).
The jobs being most heavily targeted are technical jobs. Artificial neural networks are becoming extremely effective as the new class of computing architecture which is self-programming and improving. What is being worked on is training the neural nets that efficiently train other neural networks including themselves, and producing a new generation of hardware to host them.
Why bother spending billions to eliminate low paid menial jobs when you can automate the expensive jobs related to advancing automation and have the machines do most of the work for eliminating the low paid menial jobs? Actually those jobs are more difficult to automate anyway... you have to interface these new self-programming logical systems physical systems whereas the technical work IS entirely in the logic space.