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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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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.
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.
.. we either we end up automate everything and become the ultimate slackers
On the contrary.
Just like in the first 18th century (the 20th is so similar I like to call it the 2nd 18th century), easier jobs do not bring more time. Oh they bring more time for a very limited happy few who will show off their happiness (by sending their car to Mars, for example), but for the most of society the pressure to produce just gets harder. Just like with the mechanical revolution, we want handmade quality, but refuse to pay craftsmen.
Their is very little difference between having your products made by a steam-powered machine (that has to be kept going by human operators) or by electric autonomous robots (which have to be maintained by human operators).
That this signifies progress is only partly true. Off course this signifies technical progress, but we can only have human progress if the structure of society evolves with it.
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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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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.
Just like in the first 18th century (the 20th is so similar I like to call it the 2nd 18th century), easier jobs do not bring more time
Actually, we get wealthier. In 1900, 40% of the median household's income went to food; it was 33% in 1950; rapid agricultural productivity increases have this at about 12% to day, although that's a lot of food out of home: you can get by on around 3%-5% if you eat like people in the 1950s (i.e. plan meals, cook at home, thrifty shit).
We funnel all that back into buying more with more working-hours. Sometimes we don't notice: a car from 1970 has a lot less stuff in it than an equivalent income-level car from 2018. I was around to see anti-lock brakes, drive-by-wire, and multi-changer radio in what today is a $50,000 car, while the $20,000 car had a tape deck and standard brakes; now all that high-end luxury stuff--even heated seats!--is showing up in cars that poor people on barely more than minimum-wage might buy (you know, with a $150-$200 car payment). A "car" you might buy at a given income still costs about the same percentage of your income, but has a lot more stuff--things that would have taken more labor, but now take less.
We also buy a bunch of stuff, not just clothes and food. Bigger houses, automatic washing machines, Roombas. Whenever I win the argument about middle-class median income buying these things, the other party starts talking minimum-wage--even though they also use the "cost-of-living" argument (minimum wage raises by cost-of-living will keep that bottom worker just-as-poor as ever forever, so it's a dumb argument unless you want to talk about a growth-based wage instead of a COLA wage).
We could instead work less and enjoy a better, but not as much better, standard-of-living, where that standard is measured by material wealth--both produced per-capita (fewer working hours per-capita means less consumer purchasing power, which means fewer jobs) and actually in the hands of the worker (who works less and so can't purchase as much as otherwise).
The working-hours decision isn't up to a person, but rather up to society. In theory, this means everyone deciding to work 32 hours (4 days) would work (laissez-faire); in practice, nobody individually can get traction, so you can only reduce it by law. Union labor agreements seem like another path, but that doesn't work: unions would also likely argue for the same weekly wages (which is rational), which means those products become more-expensive. They could, in theory, take the 20% pay cut for 20% working-hours cut; but do you really think the 400 unionized workers in your shop are going to bargain for smaller paychecks?
Off course this signifies technical progress, but we can only have human progress if the structure of society evolves with it.
Actually, it's the same structure; it's a matter of modal response. We still behave as if it's 1920; it's just a little tweaking of the knobs, but it's necessary to achieve the gains in leisure time.
We're also at a point where we can provide a universal dividend and a growth-based minimum wage without creating high taxes. The Dividend itself actually doesn't increase taxes in the US, mainly due to the poor structuring of Social Security's retirement and disability benefits: restructuring these and our taxes to make retirement and disability permanently-solvent at their CPI-adjusted levels from now until the end of time can actually achieve an additional benefit that in total produces lower taxes even on the rich. Weird, right?
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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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