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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.
I'd love to work on my little projects all day long, but nobody's going to pay me for that - at least not enough and not long enough to earn a living from it.
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.. 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...
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.
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. This is nothing new and has been happening continually for the entirety of the industrial revolution. The more things get automated the more we can accomplish. A lot of progress is held back simply because humans are stuck doing work that we don't yet have a machine for. A lot of dangerous, tedious, wasteful jobs will disappear. A lot of extra capability will be available for jobs that don't. New jobs will emerge that nobody even considered before. (How many web developers did you know circa 1985?) 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).
All this sturm und drang about robots taking all the jobs and killing us all is mostly about as realistic as the latest zombie movie. It makes for good entertainment but it doesn't have much to do with reality.
What folks are saying is that it will cause some serious social upheaval as people adjust and some folks won't be to adjust - they'll be permanently booted out of the workforce; like what happened with the weavers during the English Industrial Revolution*.
Nobody is "permanently booted out of the workforce". Some categories of jobs disappear but that's not a bad thing. Those displaced have to go find something else economically valuable to do. We know this happened. It wasn't comfortable in the short term for some but there was no class of people unable to find work for the rest of their lives.
*When the weavers were displaced, they did not become machine operators they were left out to starve or demoted to unskilled labor. One machine replaced about 27 weavers and one person operated at least 3 machines. Automation has always been a net job destroyer.
If automation was a net job destroyer then society would immediately collapse. Your argument makes no sense. Automation is a net job creator. Automation and it's positive benefits are all around you. The house you live in, the car you drive, the roads you travel on, the food you eat. All results of automation being a net job creator. The internet is a perfect example. The internet is a form of automation and it has created FAR more jobs than it has eliminated.
And folks make the mistake of looking at TOTAL employment and jump to the erroneous conclusion that the displaced workers got retrained and just moved to another job of equal pay.
What happened is that overall people got retrained and eventually ended up in BETTER paying jobs. Standards of living have increased more or less steadily (even with some down times) for centuries now globally. Your argument that we aren't better off than we were 50 years ago is belied by the flat screen tv on your wall and the car you drive and they computer you are staring at now. People are better fed, living longer, have more income, travel more, and are more comfortable than they have been in the entirety of human history. Your argument is quite simply not supported by actual fact.
It is not impossible, it is impossible for many. The world only needs soo many dead house-pet taxidermists. Yes the world will adjust. Society dosen't have a choice. But these periods of adjustment are historically rife with massive swings in wealth disparity, human suffering, and civil war. Being flippant to the chances that, we could all be eating out of dumpsters in 5 years or killing each-other in a massive rich/vs poor conflict, isn't proportional promotional to the urgency the issue deserves.
People should technically get paid more as their productivity increases, because as I have heard many times on Slashdot, people get paid according to their profitability to the company. But this increase in productivity has NEVER been shared with the worker. Most people barely get raises that keep up with inflation.
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Since "social media specialist" is an actual thing, I do have a lot of faith in our ability to invent new jobs, lol
Of course automation has increased productivity – but, in the US, ALL of those productivity benefits have ONLY benefited the top 1%. Workers wages have stagnated since the 1980’s, benefits have been slashed, infrastructure crumbles , pensions are the thing of the past, yet at a time of record corporate profits, CEO wages have shot up from 55x an average worker’s salary in the 1980’s to 350x an average worker’s salary. Multiply the inequitable distribution by orders of magnitude so yes, automation on and unprecedented scale will bring about massive societal change. There will be a few who live lives in wealth beyond imagination – and there will be starving masses barely scraping by. Unless you think that the oligarchy will be willing to share. Has that EVER happened without a bloody revolution?
The US workforce has been on a downward trajectory for the last four decades. Not just because of automation, but it sure hasn't helped. The auto worker that loses his job to a robot isn't moving to a higher plane of enlightenment designing self-driving cars for Uber, he's going to be an Uber driver for far less money than he was making before.
As productivity soared, production met all domestic demand very quickly. At that point it would have resulted in enormous unemployment and social unrest. The Luddites and the Saboteurs (sabots are wooden shoes, people who threw it into weaving mills were the original saboteurs) would have won and the industrial revolution would have been snuffed out in infancy. But...
When they ran out of colonies, they fought for 40 years, from 1900 to 1940 all the wars including the world wars were fight for exclusive rights to drain the last remaining wealth from the colonies.
The destruction of ways of life, cultures, livelihoods, pre industrial technical knowledge were incalculable. And actual deaths, by millions and millions. So many died.
So yeah, Automating things is how societies make progress if you carefully exclude the devastated societies from your sample space.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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.
I wholeheartedly disagree. It's basically how Freud put it: We want to feel competent and loved. Which are two sides of the same coin. To feel competent means to do work you yourself deem useful and makes you feel that you deserve the love you get or at least expect from society and the people around you. And it means creating value or at least feeling that way.
This is the actual job crisis buy all-out automation.The thing bugging the now useless coalminer the most is his loss of sense of value and usefulness to society.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
there were decades of unemployment, social strife and wars following the industrial revolutions. They don't teach this in school unless you get to the 200+ level history courses in college. They kinda just gloss over it.
It takes a long time for other tech to catch up and replace the jobs automated by an industrial revolution. That shouldn't come as a surprise. It's much easier to automate an existing process than to create entirely new lines of work.
It's also _hard_ to retrain existing workers. Those workers are older, so they learn slower, they're typically working full time to support the families they had before their better paying jobs were automated and above all nobody wants to pay high taxes so somebody can get a free ride to college in their 30s or 40s
Automation fueled unemployment is a complex problem. To suggest otherwise is childishly naive. Let me put it this way: When in your life has the best (or even a good) solution to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it sorts itself out?
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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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Also, business plans are designed to eliminate workers from the beginning.
Ha! Good luck running a business with no people. That is one of the most self defeating arguments I've read in a while. Every business plan requires people. There are precisely zero businesses that exist with no people.
The problem is two fold:
1) not all things that entertain you can be monetized.
2) often times the risk of failure is high enough that the individual is logically better served by the less fulfilling Job that is much more likely to pay more over the long term.
The math might looks something like this:
Choice 1: Follow your dreams invest 1 - 5 years of time with a 90% chance of meaning $12,000 a year then failing. A 9% chance of earning $20,000 a year that becomes $300,000 and is sustainable and a less then 1% chance of making $15,000 a year and after 10 years making millions.
Compare too:
Choice 2: Find a nice steady job where you earn $50,000 a year for the next 30 years with a 90% certainty.
The choice is often made by the fact that you need more or less then the expected $12,000 income to live. A single person, it works, so what if you fail or starve, a parent has a different obligation to their children.
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For many people, attempting to make a living off a hobby ruins the hobby. For example, I love working on my vintage car. Solving mechanical problems and upgrading its performance it is very satisfying for me. However, if I tried to open a shop, it wouldn't be fun any more. I'd be dealing with deadlines, customer complaints, and jobs I don't find fun or interesting. Better to keep my hobby a hobby.
How many families have more than 1 car, 1 phone, 1 computer, 1 tv, washer/dryer, and how big are their homes... compared to the 70's? People forget that as recently as the 90s most families not only had ONE car, but pretty much had that car for decades.
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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I know I know, the green energy revolution will save us, BUT green energy will never be as plentiful or cheap as fossil energy. As the total energy available to society is reduced, regardless of the fossil renewable mix, we will have to continuously re-prioritize its uses. At some point the energy needed to automate a process will be greater than that required to do it by hand, given that we have to feed all those hands anyway. For example, think of the energy required to build and then run electric hair dryers versus just using the towel you use to dry yourself with anyway. The electric dryer is definitely more convenient and faster, but think of the energy cost.
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