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Amazon Is Hiring Fewer Workers This Holiday Season, a Sign That Robots Are Replacing Them (qz.com)
Amazon is hiring around 100,000 additional employees this holiday season, which is fewer than the company added in either the 2016 or 2017 holiday seasons, when it brought in 120,000 additional workers. "Citi analyst Mark May says he thinks the reduction in seasonal hiring is strong evidence that Amazon is succeeding with plans to automate operations in its warehouses," reports Quartz. From the report: "We've seen an acceleration in the use of robots within their fulfillment centers, and that has corresponded with fewer and fewer workers that they're hiring around the holidays," May told CNBC. He added that 2018 is the "first time on record" Amazon plans to hire fewer holiday workers than it did the previous year. "Since the last holiday season, we've focused on more ongoing full-time hiring in our fulfillment centers and other facilities," Amazon spokesperson Ashley Robinson said in an email, adding that the company has "created over 130,000 jobs" in the last year. "We are proud to have created over 130,000 new jobs in the last year alone."
Amazon bought robotics company Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012, and began using its orange robots in warehouses in late 2014. By mid-2016, it had become clear just how big a difference those robots were making. The little orange guys could handle in 15 minutes the sorting, picking, packing, and shipping that used to take human workers an hour or more to complete. In June 2016, Deutsche Bank predicted Kiva automation could save Amazon nearly $2.5 billion (those savings dropped to $880 million after accounting for the costs of installing robots in every warehouse).
Amazon bought robotics company Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012, and began using its orange robots in warehouses in late 2014. By mid-2016, it had become clear just how big a difference those robots were making. The little orange guys could handle in 15 minutes the sorting, picking, packing, and shipping that used to take human workers an hour or more to complete. In June 2016, Deutsche Bank predicted Kiva automation could save Amazon nearly $2.5 billion (those savings dropped to $880 million after accounting for the costs of installing robots in every warehouse).
well student loans used to have bankruptcies now it's just about unlimited loans
I've worked in various Amazon DCs for 9 years. Their robotic facilities demand the same headcount as a non robotic site, they just stick more people in the boring pick/pack cells to get more shit out the doors. The reason for this is the state of the economy... Too many people have full time jobs that pay more or the same as what Amazon is willing to offer so they need to resort to hiring people who have no GED (which is fine) or even with a criminal history. Also in the market I'm in they've exhausted a pool of nearly 800,000 workers, people have tried the Amazon way over the years and feel no need to go back.
Following the last big industrial rev there was about 80 years of joblessness until new tech came along.
Interesting, but I can't quite find references to those 80 years ... would you mind providing some pointers ? Thanks !
Rumors that humans are being replaced are false
Rumors that humans are being replaced are incorrect
Rumors that humans are being replaced are not true
Rumors that humans are being replaced are false
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
There's a very, very easy answer to your question about what to do for the next 80 years. You need to be the owner of capital. Buy stocks or otherwise invest in the companies that make mad profits from the upcoming industrial/manufacturing/robotic/AI revolution. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other investments were explicitly designed so that normal plebes get a piece of the prosperity that capitalism provides.
Oh, you're not putting part of your money towards investments? Enjoy the next 80 years of poverty.
when the world doesn't need ditch diggers?
The unemployed people can stay at home and read about economic fallacies.
Look, if you don't need to pay someone to do warehouse picking, then that money will go toward lower prices and/or higher dividends, putting that money into the pocket of someone else who will either spend it or invest it, thus generating jobs elsewhere in the economy.
The difference is that the warehouse picker was adding nothing to the total amount of goods and services produced, but the new job will, thus leading to a rise in living standards.
And for all that say they'll be new jobs, what? I want specifics.
Then buy some tarot cards. Nobody can see the future. Do you think a farmer in 1880 could see that his great-grandson would be a video game developer?
Following the last big industrial rev there was about 80 years of joblessness until new tech came along.
This is absolute nonsense. The last big surge of automation led to dramatic and nearly immediate improvements in standards of living.
And for all that say they'll be new jobs, what? I want specifics.
Anyone who knows the answer to that question is too busy trying to start a company to take advantage of the newly available cheap labor instead of stopping to satisfy your curiosity. If you wait long enough though, they'll tell you all about it in the ads that they run to attract your business.
So what do we do when the world doesn't need ditch diggers? Pretty obvious that it's time to figure that out.
The U.S. has more land than it needs for agriculture and will probably need even less as technology advances and we figure out how to grow meat in labs. Maybe the answer is to figure out how much land a person needs to feed themselves and give them a nice little parcel where they can live out the remainder of their days. That's probably the most human option without reducing a person to a sponge or requiring everyone else to serve them.
I'm not sure it's a long term problem though. If low IQ pretty much eliminates a person from the economy, they'll have far less mating prospects. This isn't going to create a world of super geniuses or anything like that, but it will serve as a selection mechanism against people who are incapable of participating in society. The other side is that we get good enough at genetic engineering that we cease to have incapable people. Either way, the universe will arrive at solution. Whether we like it at all is another matter.
Well, due to the unavoidable social upheaval there will be plenty of wars in which your grandkids can be cannon fodder for whatever crazy death dealing machines the like of DARPA can dream up. So, there will be job opportunities for at least a generation or two (but maybe not afterwards)
Another way of saying it is that Amazon has become more efficient. This is a good thing.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Look up what a typical American makes. Then realize if you have a meaningful amount of investment capital, you are better off and have more economic ability than 65% of "normal plebs." The type of investment you are referring to, i.e. complete job replacement when automation takes it, is limited to single-digit percentages of people already living far better lives than all but a handful of us could feasibly enjoy without post-scarcity magic.
Oh, you're not putting part of your money towards investments? Enjoy the next 80 years of poverty.
Might as well say "Oh, you weren't born with legs? Enjoy your wheelchair."
Anyone who knows the answer to that question is too busy trying to start a company to take advantage of the newly available cheap labor instead of stopping to satisfy your curiosity. If you wait long enough though, they'll tell you all about it in the ads that they run to attract your business.
Too late! New business in my area include internet-dispatched lawn mowing, internet-dispatched car watching, internet-dispatched clothes cleaning, and, well, you get the theme. All these jobs pay more than minimum wage, too
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
ERR NEEERRR!!! The Robutts are replacing us!! Seriously though why don't these people learn a trade or something? Most places will start you around $10-12/hr not knowing shit. Obviously depends on where you live. But they obviously have no career path they should pickup any trade they have an interest in. Don't have a job you don't like enjoy even if it pays more money.
Good god how do you remain so stupid. Take a course in history and economics at your local college. Pick up a book. Read the financial news. Why do we have to answer these fucking questions for you.
There is nothing in history that provides a solution for the next (and likely final) iteration of innovation, so stop pointing at the fucking history books and expecting to find an answer. Yes, economic and industrial revolutions have come along in the past to create jobs for not-so-bright people, but the next iteration of innovation is to replace every job that uneducated humans perform today. Just replacing nothing but cashiers in the US affects 3% of the employed population, and we're working quickly to eliminate that profession. Looking at the ten largest occupations that comprise over 20% of the employed workforce, I don't see hardly any of them surviving the next decade or two.
Amazon will continue to work to fully automate their warehouses, eliminating a few hundred thousand jobs. Drones will eliminate a vast majority of delivery drivers currently employed by Amazon/UPS/USPS, etc. How many more school shootings will happen before virtual schools are the preferred delivery method for education? You only need one talking head per 100,000 students in a MOOC-format class, so that cuts down on the need for thousands of teachers. (Oh, and school sports will be deemed far too dangerous and expensive thanks to our litigious society, so don't assume football will be the reason your local high schools stays open. It won't.)
And then "good enough" AI will arrive, which will decimate the rest of the educated workforce.
And no, we don't have an answer. No one covering the "financial news" can even spell "unemployable" yet, much less have a viable answer for it. And the parent already referenced how well "history" did with this kind of change last time. Nukes will likely fly before we survive 80 years of abject poverty. At the current rate of political stupidity, we'll be lucky if we're not facing another Civil War soon.
... wouldn't that allow you to NOT hire so many PART timers?
Or programmers.
I do a lot of CRUD-centric applications (tracking, work-flow, reporting, management info systems). With a good stack I'm quite productive and spend more time on analysis than diddling with code. With bad stacks I spend way too much time diddlying with code, and more stacks seem to be like that these days, partly because the choice of JavaScript widgets available makes PHB's crave ever fancier eye-candy that makes for ever more fragile/leaky systems that need ever more people to fix.
If automation either takes over the grunt work or creates more logical standards with fewer parts, a good many programmers will be let go since fewer are needed for the same position. The analyst/coder hybrid will disappear or shrink, leaving just analysts. 2 analyst/coder hybrids can then be replaced by 1 analyst.
Admit it, there's a lot of redundancy, BS, & bloat in most our stacks/techniques that can be factored out yet still do the necessary job. AI may have less incentive to add or keep unnecessary bloat; bots aren't biased for job security like we are.
Sorry, but humans unconsciously make selections/recommendations that make themselves more "needed". It's seen in the medical field also. I cannot predict what future AI will look like, but there's a decent chance it won't have this same bias, and thus factor itself better. Genetic algorithms may "evolve" stacks to fit company conventions tightly based on existing applications, for example. Fewer humans would then be needed to program with it. Our current stack manager stuck us with bloating microservices even though we don't need them because he thought it was "cool". AI probably won't. He should be fired by bots.
Field info (DB schema) is often replicated all over typical stacks, for example. DRY Principle says I should only have to state field info in ONE place, not ten. There are tools that duplicate the field info into the parts of the stack, but duplication only simplifies creation of code, not maintenance.
(I've kicked around ways to factor such, but most code tools are too file-centric or too hierarchical. Files are obsolete, I believe. Better code repositories would look more like RDBMS's so that we can use set theory on field info, UI layout, and event code instead of hierarchies. Set theory is more powerful than hierarchies and OOP inheritance. The future will eventually take us there, I believe. We are doing it wrong; stuck in the "tree past" out of habit. The Sets are coming. AI may discover this fact and our existing tools will dumped into landfill to be ridiculed the way we ridicule vinyl records and the ET cartridges. Field info/changes can then be entered into one place, and Boom! done. Go home and have sex and don't come back to work: a Set bot is in your chair now.)
Table-ized A.I.
putting that money into the pocket of someone else who will either spend it or invest it
In this case that pocket belongs to Jeff Bezos, and he will invest it in automating more people out of a job.
"Look, if you don't need to pay someone to do warehouse picking, then that money will go toward lower prices and/or higher dividends, putting that money into the pocket of someone else who will either spend it or invest it, thus generating jobs for other robots and AIs elsewhere in the economy."
Fixed that for you.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The final era of innovation? Really? Why not log in to post that? It's unsubstantiated nonsense.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Maybe that is why Amazon is in favor of higher minimum wages. It is a competitive advantage for them. Robots don't have a minimum wage ;-)
In this case that pocket belongs to Jeff Bezos, and he will invest it in automating more people out of a job.
... which is a good thing. America consumes too much and invests too little. This investment in capital equipment will lead to more efficiency, and even higher living standards in the future.
Meanwhile, the money will leave Jeff's pocket and go into the pocket of the people building and installing that equipment.
Another possibility is Amazon's recent starting pay increase. Very simply that means each employee costs more. And the budget for this year might provide only a certain amount of money for the work force. IOW, they don't want to exceed their budget.
lgw's comment is correct:
All these robots do is move shelves full of bins around. That's it. They don't sort. They don't pack. They don't ship. They help with picking (and stowing) by bringing the shelves to the human who does everything except walk to the shelves.
We know people who work in a distro center near us. People handle the products in all phases. I think some automation is used to pull the inventory (off the high shelving), but then the robotic pallets simply move the bins around the warehouse.
FWIW, here's one video of ops inside a "fulfillment center."
Behind the scenes of an Amazon warehouse
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Video from a Wired Business Conference
How the Amazon Warehouse Works
Or a series of pics from Business Insider.
See what it's like inside Amazon's massive warehouses
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
The robot isnt taking your job itâ(TM)s doing your job for you. Get your unfair share by taxing it. Take the robots salary even though it is doing 10x the work.
It's just easier to believe something when it's something you already want to hear. Nobody wants climate change to be real, so an optimist is able to ignore evidence that it is. The fact that so many people believe in climate change is really the best evidence that it's real.
Alright smart guy riddle me this....what EXACTLY are you gonna do with the average 100 IQ person? You can't wave a magic wand and make a person with 100 IQ into a rocket scientist, their brains simply do not function that way. Can't make them into an engineer, can't make them into programmers, hell even the army is having to slowly but surely raise its minimum IQ requirements because there is simply too much high tech involved (and if you want to see the truly horrific results when the US army tries to take those below the minimum? Look up "McNamara Moron Corps") and there is simply less and less that someone with anything less than a high IQ is gonna be capable of performing.
So what EXACTLY do you propose to do with them? Put them in camps? Sterilize them? Whether you want to accept it or not we are RAPIDLY reaching the point where you don't need a single human between the raw material and the store shelf. You can have a machine mine the materials or plant the crops, take the material via robot truck to a factory where lines of machines can process it into a finished product which goes again via robot truck to a automated warehouse. For fucks sake dude we are ALREADY at the point where they have automated burger flippers that are WAAAYYY BETTER than anything you would get in a fast food joint, you know what Mickey D's and the like haven't already switched? Because the government PAYS THEM in the form of subsidies it gives to those workers, for fucks sake man the FIRST TRAINING VID you see when you start work at Walmart is "How to get government subsidies" and if it wasn't for the US government essentially paying half their wages? Those people would already have been replaced!
Whether you want to wake up and see the Mac truck that is heading at society at 1000MPH plus doesn't change the fact that you are gonna have millions of people that are gonna be of zero use in a robot dominated society. Its the story of John Henry only we got the moral of the story wrong, the real moral was that it doesn't fucking matter if you literally work yourself into a grave as the machine will just keep going. It won't get tired, won't ask for sick days or for time to see its kids, won't ask for raises or care about working 24/7, it'll just do what its told day in and day out....and if you can't see how many corps are practically foaming at the mouth and chomping at the bit to get this tech so they can get rid of the hassle of all those workers they gotta pay wages and insurance and have to deal with getting hurt or sick on the job? Then puff puff pass dude, you been hitting the shit far too long!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You seem to be implying that there is no net loss of jobs, but it's implausible that anyone with common sense can believe that.
That A) sounds like the bullshit you get from the singularity community, and B) only sees one side of humanity. It is true humanity is bad, but humanity is also good and can cooperate when we need to. It's how we got here, after all.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You mean the political stupidity of allowing unskilled people who either cannot or do not want to assimilate into our society at a time when a need for unskilled work is diminishing? That political stupidity?
Long enough for the current CEOs to retire comfortably - the decline in sales will not come overnight.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You seem to be implying that there is no net loss of jobs
The steam engine was invented 3 centuries ago, kicking off the industrial revolution. If automation caused a "net loss of jobs" there would be none left.
Nobody wants climate change to be real, so an optimist is able to ignore evidence that it is.
Stupid analogy.
For climate change, there is overwhelming evidence that it is real.
For "job losses to automation" there is overwhelming evidence that it is nonsense. It didn't happen in the past, it is not happening now, and areas of the world that failed to automate are much poorer.
Owners start to see a significant drop in sales.
Do you mean like the drop of sales when the steam engine was invented?
Oh, wait, that didn't happen. Sales went up.
Or the drop in sales when the automatic loom was invented?
Oh, that didn't happen either. Sales went up more.
Or the drop in sales when agriculture was mechanized?
Nope, that didn't happen either. Sales went WAY up.
Or the drop of sales when assembly lines and electrification became come?
Nope. The economy boomed.
So your theory that "rising productivity causes sales to decline" doesn't seem to be connected to reality.
Then buy some tarot cards. Nobody can see the future. Do you think a farmer in 1880 could see that his great-grandson would be a video game developer?
Yeah, this is the wild card to me.
I mean, "social media specialist" is an actual thing. We seem almost endlessly inventive at coming up with new jobs. And their occupants are definitely not all super high IQ, believe me.
when the world doesn't need ditch diggers? Pretty obvious that it's time to figure that out.
If we accept the premise (that robots and/or AI will be doing jobs previously performed by people), then there are only a few plausible outcomes:
a) Those people will find different jobs to do instead.
b) Those people end up permanently impoverished (e.g. getting by on welfare, crime, or charity, or just starving and dying)
c) Society finds some systematic way to share the robot-generated wealth, so that instead of benefitting only the owners of the robots, it benefits everyone. (This would require decoupling income from employment, which makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but it might end up being the lesser of two evils)
I'm hoping for more of (a) and/or (c) and less of (b), but it's near-impossible to predict the behavior such a large and complex system.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The steam engine was invented 3 centuries ago, kicking off the industrial revolution. If automation caused a "net loss of jobs" there would be none left.
While I agree that the jury isn't in yet regarding automation-vs-jobs, I think the above logic doesn't apply.
The reason is that despite the invention of the steam engine, humanity (up until very recently) still had the trump card up its sleeve -- no matter how fast or powerful a machine was, it was still dumber than your average cockroach and therefore needed one or more humans to direct its behavior and maintain its mechanisms.
That is what is changing now -- humans lost the battle-for-strength centuries ago, but stayed relevant because they still had the monopoly on thought. Now machines are gaining the ability to reason and react intelligently to their environment s well. If/when humans no longer provide the only viable mechanism for intelligent cognition, then (from a strictly commercial point of view) humans are no longer required, and therefore will be removed from the commerce loop just as soon as a more economically efficient mechanism can replace them.
TL;DR -- the "automation" being talked about now is not just an extension of traditional steam-engine style automation, it's a new and different thing. Linear extrapolation therefore can't predict its effects.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
teachers unions and unlimited student loans will keep schools as is and make the piece of paper from an MOOC useless.
Put them in camps? well UBI is better then the state paying $30-40K year to lock them up even more so if that is there only way to get to an doctor.
By the way, the machines will probably be really good at manipulating what you want, too, assuming they're tasked with that or task themselves with it.
It's true that not much happened when the car went over the bumps. It does not follow that the Grand Canyon is no problem.
Yep, we still haven't gone over the lip. I give it roughly 30 to 100 years, probably on the shorter end.
The only way you could possibly argue that it wouldn't happen would be to spew some idiotic vitalist claptrap about souls and "unique humanity".
Duh. Obviously automation produces more. The issue is how you distribute it.
Up to now, it's been distributed mostly through "jobs", and that''s sort of vaguely worked if you were willing to distort your view of fairness a bit.
It's going to stop working in a very spectacular way. Jobs are going to be over. All jobs. Permanently. All human work of whatever kind will be economically irrelevant. Most of the traditional justifications for human ownership of capital are also going to ring pretty hollow, because they're typically based on accumulation of the rewards of past labor, and that doesn't fly after a certain amount of time.
30 to 100 years is a very short time to figure out how to deal with that, especially when you can't be sure what the machines' view on the matter will be.
It is true humanity is bad, but humanity is also good and can cooperate when we need to. It's how we got here, after all.
What's different about this round of automation is that the machines are "learning" to work without human supervision and assistance.
Well, maybe this is different, too. Maybe what ultimately let humanity get this far was the broad array of readily available natural resources. And now that we've multiplied and mechanized sufficiently that we can spend through natural capital faster than it can be replenished on a global scale, maybe we're not going to get to the next "there" because we aren't sufficiently good at cooperation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I did some research and could find anything clear ... and I'm genuinely interested if that has happened in the past already -- though as always skeptical of everything posted here, even things I take for granted.
Anyway, I looked at your link, and I'm even more skeptical. Couldn't find a description of those "80 years of joblessness after the industrial revolution .. until new tech came along". Which years ? Which new tech ?
by State & Federal Governments. Now we've got 100% out of pocket for students.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Believing that it is is a "conservative" rule of thumb which works pretty well most of the time, but obviously it's an oversimplification which has exceptions where it's completely the wrong way to analyze.
The reason that sales are projected to decline this time is that the premise is that there is a shrinking human job pool for automation-displaced workers to move to. And the reason for the shrinking job pool hypothesis this time is that automation and AI are gradually but inexorably superceding human capabilities across the board this time, and that has never happened before.
So employment income will shrink this time around, as will mass market demand.
Two scenarios are plausible then:
1) The heavily defended exclusive economy of the 1%. In this scenario, the vastly enriched automated-production owners continue to sell to each other and their tiny cadre of remaining human helpers/consultants. Everyone else is left to rot in a subsistence economy, and the elites defend themselves and their possessions behind increasingly impregnable walls, and/or with automated weaponry.
2) Profit from automated production (or value-add by automated processes) is more heavily taxed than now, and the proceeds are distributed in a UBI scheme. The economy changes shape somewhat but is more similar to how it is now. People need to figure out why they exist and what to do with their time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
and certainly have faster access to more information than any one of us.
robots are already stronger. They're getting more versatile and dexterous year over year as well.
Judging by your lack of insight into this and lack of judgement, they are particularly getting smarter than you.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"why do we need me?"
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
A human is just as inferior at the job at $10/hour as $15/hour.
At best this will mean a few years difference in when given job categories are replaced.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Read this: Comparative Advantage.
You are repeating an economic fallacy that was debunked by David Ricardo more than 200 years ago.
That will include management, engineering, art, creativity, diplomacy, empathic understanding of people's feelings, you name it
That is science fiction, and is no where on the horizon. If you think that "deep learning" is leading to general AI, you are mistaken.
I'm familiar with it.
It's not interesting when the advantaged side has unknown incentive structures that probably don't include wanting to keep its own product at all, and may include actively wanting to give its production to the other side without compensation. For that matter, it's not relevant if the advantaged side converts the other side into paper clips. It's also not relevant when the advantage is so huge that one side's entire productive capacity is swamped by the friction the other side would encounter in bothering to try to trade.
You don't trade with AI. Any theory of exchange, voluntary or otherwise, is irrelevant. If you're using any analytical framework that involves trade, then you're using an inapplicable framework.
How many jobs do chimpanzees hold right now? Cattle? Little yappy lap dogs? I mean, humans only have a comparative advantage over those animals, right?
I suppose that if the AIs totally ignored us, or intentionally adopted a hands-off policy, humans could keep providing for themselves like chimpanzees do. I think there's effectively zero probability that AIs built by humans will let that happen.
If I thought deep learning would do it, I'd give it 10 years tops. In fact, deep learning per se is probably already mostly tapped out. It'll take at least a few more software advances of the same general size as deep learning. Probably some massive hardware advances, too. All of which will happen (and yes, I am well aware that Moore's Law died long ago).
If you think that general AI is impossible, or even that it can't overwhelmingly beat what humans have now, you have to explain what privileges general "natural" intelligence. The answer, of course, is that nothing does. It's just a technological problem involving physical systems.
If you think it'll take longer than a century, you have to explain what the hell you think would possibly take that long. In doing so, please refrain from mysticism, arguments assuming vast unexplained changes in the general rate of technological advance, arguments from ignorance, and arguments from fictional evidence.
I'm old enough to remember when people like you said computers could never even beat humans at chess, or at least that it would take hundreds of years.
What's different about this round of automation is that the machines are "learning" to work without human supervision and assistance.
There's no machine that can do that. You can say that they do the job with much much less human supervision and assistance, but the same was true of the tractor when it was invented.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You can say that they do the job with much much less human supervision and assistance, but the same was true of the tractor when it was invented.
Today, we can make a tractor which can operate itself, at least in the sort of ideal conditions utilized in modern large-scale agriculture.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OK, let's take it to the extreme and say that we get to a world where all jobs can be automated. To me,that is the ideal world: where humans no longer have to work. We are very very far from that though, in fact the number of jobs keeps increasing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
OK, let's take it to the extreme and say that we get to a world where all jobs can be automated. To me,that is the ideal world: where humans no longer have to work.
That's half the ideal world. The other half is that they are no longer expected to work. We already have more work than people.
We are very very far from that though, in fact the number of jobs keeps increasing.
Many if not most of those jobs are not only unnecessary, they are actually detrimental — to the environment, to society, to health, etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People have been saying this same garbage for well over 200 years. It's like a doomsday cult.
220 years ago, 90% of people worked on farms. Today 2% of the population works on farms. Last I checked, we do not have 88% unemployment.
Where do you think the government is getting the resources to pay those "subsidies"? By taxing or inflating it out of the economy. The government is breaking people's legs and you're standing there wondering what would happen if the government stopped giving out crutches. Your time would be much better spent trying to get the government to stop crippling people in the first place
Don't forget about, by the governments own studies, the $10,000+ per worker per year in regulatory compliance costs. All that government spending depresses the rate of economic growth and depresses wages.
Human wants and desires are unlimited. The only way that there is sustained high unemployment is because government either intervenes in the economy where it shouldn't, or doesn't protect private property rights and contracts where it should.