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So You Automated Your Coworkers Out of a Job (gizmodo.com)
merbs writes: Automation is too often presented as a faceless, monolithic phenomenon -- but it's a human finger that ultimately pulls the trigger. Someone has to initiate the process that automates a task or mechanizes a production line. To write or procure the program that makes a department or a job redundant. And that's not always an executive, or upper-, or even middle management -- in fact, it's very often not. Sometimes it's a junior employee, or a developer, even an intern.
In a series of interviews with coders, technicians, and engineers who've automated their colleagues out of work -- or, in one case, been put in a position where they'd have to do so and decided to quit instead -- I've attempted to produce a snapshot of life on the messy front lines of modern automation. (Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the automators.) We've heard plenty of forecasting about the many jobs slated to be erased, and we've seen the impacts on the communities that have lost livelihoods at the hands of automation, but we haven't had many close up looks at how all this unfolds in the office or the factory floor.
In a series of interviews with coders, technicians, and engineers who've automated their colleagues out of work -- or, in one case, been put in a position where they'd have to do so and decided to quit instead -- I've attempted to produce a snapshot of life on the messy front lines of modern automation. (Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the automators.) We've heard plenty of forecasting about the many jobs slated to be erased, and we've seen the impacts on the communities that have lost livelihoods at the hands of automation, but we haven't had many close up looks at how all this unfolds in the office or the factory floor.
should be.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Yes, believe it ir not, there are people behind everything. I am so weary of these 'millennial awakes to reality' stories I could spew. It really isn't our fault an entire generation is so slow, it'd be great if you could stop dragging the rest of us backward with your nonsense.
Blaming job elimination on non-management workers is like blaming 9/11 the jet passengers.
>> been put in a position where they'd have to (automated their colleagues out of work) and decided to quit instead
I wonder if this would work on a overly righteous but inept employee. Hmmmm.
>> To write or procure the program that makes a department or a job redundant.
I don't know about you, but automating work that people manually previously had to perform is one of the main reasons I enjoy what I do.
Managers simply tell engineers to do a job.
Within a few years that job will be largely automated, because engineers are lazy.
I've spent a career automating processes. My first such innovation came in my first year and I remember having these feelings when I realized the consequences of my proposal. I spoke to my manager and she said it was our duty to make things more efficient for our customer and that if we didn't someone else would. There is always someone paying the bill whether it's customers, shareholders, private investors or tax payers or maybe in a more abstract way the environment. We always have an obligation to use those resources wisely. In the end these people will retrain and do something else as evidenced by our current unemployment rate.
Things are about to get pretty interesting in this respect. For the last century we've been focusing on automating physical labour and we've made a lot of headway, but automating data oriented tasks has been kind of ignored. Sure we've introduced computers into the workplace, but we haven't done a lot of work to make sure we are using them efficiently.
I've seen countless organizations who had 2 systems that didn't communicate with one another so they just employed a bunch of people to copy and paste data between them, and never thought of whether it could be done better and/or cheaper if they just did a little bit of programming to glue the systems together.
Very few companies realize how much time they are wasting when they don't have a good system that is tailored to their needs. There are so many companies working in an Outlook + Excel + Word culture where they don't have any real processes, nobody knows what anybody else is doing, and they aren't really taking full advantage of the computers sitting on their desks.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I suppose some managers would see automation as a way to slash staff to increase profit. Other managers might see automation as a chance to increase productivity and find other ways to increase profit using the now more available staff. If you boss sees you as a liability as opposed to an asset then they're probably not the right boss for you anyway.
"The ones losing their job due to automation are dumb people, factory workers, people pushing shelves. They truly desrve it."
Big myth, the people losing their jobs are tech workers and most of them automate themselves and their co-workers out of the job.
We all should strive to have a higher standard of living and work less. Automation is not the enemy, bad allocation of resources is.
Just stop it already with this "luddite fallacy" bullshit.
For any job that automation takes away, other technological advances create new jobs that didn't exist, a shift not decrease. This is not about an increase in overall unemployment, nor appy appers Apps!
"If the Luddite fallacy were true we would all be out of work because productivity has been increasing for two centuries."
I know we're all supposed to fear automation, but the fact of the matter is humans respond best to other humans; there will always be work for people to do.
On that note; if I have a good employee, and I write some code that deprives them of anything with which to pay them for, a few things are happening, and will happen:
1) I was grossly underutilizing the good employee to begin with
2) I will find something else for this good employee to do.
Good employees are like gold; you never throw one away, or waste them in such a manner that they'll go looking for someone to better appreciate them. I realize a lot of managers don't grasp this concept, but enough do that good employees will find one if they keep looking.
Mind you; if I automate someone out of a job, and that's all they're capable of doing, they aren't a good employee. At best, mediocre, but probably lower than that. My payroll is more important to me than their want to waste my money.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I automated a bunch of tasks that resulted in us hiring less $10/hr positions, but it created $20/hr positions. I was moved to new projects but we needed jr devs on board to support the scripts I left behind. We need more $20/hr jobs, not more $10/hr jobs. The latter isn't going to pull anyone out of poverty.
Any job that can be automated will be . End of discussion.
And where do all those displaced workers go? Rely on the retraining fairy tale?
For one, everyone cannot be retrained for a marketable profession. And who knows what will be marketable by the time they're done.
And only so many people can work in any profession before it gets saturated.
And it's one thing if someone is in say their 20s, but sending a middle aged person for retraining? Even if they could do very well, employers don't like hiring old (over 40) people.
And in the past when workers lost their job because of automation, they were SOL. If they were LUCKY they got a job lower on the socioeconomic scale. Those weavers who were displaced in the Industrial Revolution became unskilled laborers when they could. Supervisors? Nope - unless they knew someone. Machine operators? Nope - they trained and hired kids to do that.
We really need to think on what to do with those displaced workers because they're all not going to crawl away and drink or do opioids until they die; which is exactly what's happening in much of parts of the country that is being decimated because of our changing economy.
Let's go back to being hunters and gatherers again so that we all can be busy.
I don't understand the fixation on full employment. If a politician makes promises of full employment then that should be a very good reason to not vote for him or her as (s)he obviously does not have a vision of where things should go. In the end the purpose of all work is the abolishment of work.
Deciding whether to have kids. Even if they make it through college they still may not have a job. Especially in 20 years when automation has really progressed.
should be, because they're an asshole.
The other option, of course, is to pedantically document work-around for bugs, create instructions, add a few steps to make sure it won't break and then inform the asshole's manager that this is the process to ensure that a certain business process completes properly. A few of these and the asshole will be begging you to automate their job.
Either way, you win.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
My first job as an ME intern during college was to help design a machine to automate product inspection.
I was present when the machine was moved into QA department ... right in the center of the human inspectors.
They knew what their new co-worker was about to do and they were staring at me. It was awkward but such is progress.
Even if you get automated out of your job plenty of other jobs are waiting to be filled. USA has lowest unemployment in over 50 years. Highest employment rate in 50 years. Companies can't find enough help right now.
Posting anon.
I'm finishing up a project to automate some claims payment processes.
Business benefit is a few jobs gone, reduced expenses.
Technically, it's interesting.
Ethically, it's just the evolution of technology, There are way less farmers than there were 100 years ago.
Anyway, I need to get back to my job of replacing other people's jobs with automated processes (now it doesn't sound so ethical...).
The other way is sad too. Having employees do busy work that could easily be automated is kind of soul-crushing in its own way. It's like watching someone dig a tunnel with a spoon when you're standing next to them with a shovel.
It's sad to see someone lose their job, especially if they haven't built skills to get their next job. But we would never go the other direction and purposely remove automation and modern tools from people so that we could hire additional folks. The fact that we never choose to go backwards means that we should be wary of being too critical of moving forward.
Bears repeating: You will never automate _yourself_ out of a job.
Quitting seems like a Quixotic gesture.... just kinda delays the inevitable while they find a new engineer.
The mentality of those that issue such directives.
CAPTCHA: violins
Multiple times I've automated much of the work that a person or department has been doing. In each case, it made the workers more valuable.
I talked to workers and watched them work. Together we looked at what tasks they spent a lot of time on, tasks that could be automated to help them achieve department goals more efficiently, while removing human error from that task. We talked about what their workflow would be after the automation and what additional value they could add after they didn't have to spend time in $menialtask.
Being part of the planning, they were able to think about how they could more effectively accomplish department and organization goals when they were freed up from the time-consuming task we were automating. There are ALWAYS more things the company or department wants to do, worthwhile things for people to work on, that they don't currently have time to do (unless perhaps the company is headed for bankruptcy).
The people I "automated away" didn't sit there and say "well now that I don't have to copy/paste from system A to system B, I'm useless". They said "now that I don't have to copy/paste from system A to system B, I can do these other important things to move the organization forward".
...than training your Mexican replacements. I used to work in a small town and watched as the town's main manufacturer was sold to a Mexican company, who sent their management to Wisconsin to be trained by the 75 or so employees before the site was shut down.
"You can be replaced by a small shell script" was a common nerd insult for many years.
Now that it's commonplace, it's suddenly a concern?
Incidentally, I HAVE replaced a coworker with a shell script. The person had a full time job that was nothing but copying numbers from submitted templates to a central spreadsheet. Even then, she regularly screwed it up. I wrote a script that did her job in a few minutes.
I got a $500 bonus. She got "promoted" and later "let go" when it turned out she couldn't do anything useful. And good riddance.
Uphill, in the snow! Just to meet with someone to file a paper.
First you assholes automated it and drove here on your god damn horse and buggy, we couldn't believe that you went so far beyond the bible!
After that you created the god forbidden fax machine, we fought tooth and nail to send all black pages while we lived our private lives the old way.
Now you are telling me you want to just click a button on a website!? Unbelievable! /sarcasm
Automation is fine if the thing you're automating can be done *WELL* by a machine. It's when you start lowering your standards to fit what the machine is capable of that you run into problems. If you approach automation like that, you're just shuffling the work around. I wrote an online system that largely automated the complex back-and-forth of legal documents necessary to hire out commercial spaces in shopping malls. The client was adamant this would save time. I ran an analysis of the extant process and realised the human element was critical to error catching. I informed my client of this. "No, no, no, it'll be fine. Our users are smart." Guess how that turned out? They actually just ended up moving the workers they'd targeted from the admin team into the customer support team.
Refusing to do so will, at best, buy the automatees some time. At worst the whole organization will be less competitive and grow enough drag over time that someone else will take your stuff and you'll all be looking for work.
That's discrimination! We should pass a law to make sure my feelings don't get hurt.
"Paperclip maker" will win, fastest.
What a thermodynamical-to-oblivion stupid path to take...
In the end these people will retrain and do something else as evidenced by our current unemployment rate.
So that's how you deal with your conscious - with a myth and magical thinking.
Most of those people went down the food chain. They are now working the part-time no benefit retail/warehouse shit job. And another job on the side.
Retraining? Fairy tale.
Sure there are some outliers who went back to school and got training for something marketable but for most, that's not an option. It takes money, time, and opportunity. So, someone who has a family and car/house payments is all of sudden going to be able to just go back and get retrained?
And when one is middle aged, even if they did very well being retrained, employers don't like hiring old people (over 40).
Also, there's this myth that anyone can be retrained for anything. Some people do what they do because that's all they can do.
Most people try to initially end up as high on the food chain as they can. How many pre-med "majors" did we see in college only to be weeded out in Organic? Or weeded out in Med school.
No, all these displaced workers are going to be a serious problem in our society - actually they are. Guess why we have such an opioid epidemic? Look at the demographics and areas of the country for where the problem is most severe. Mostly areas that have been hit hardest by globalization and the decline of manufacturing jobs.
There's a very serious problem coming and just burying our heads an spewing trite things like the retraining fairytale is just going to make the problem worse.
And when that happens you get: Nazi Germany, Venezuela, Cuba and every other country that revolted against the rich and establishment.
And in the USA, we have over 300 million guns floating around - more than enough for a revolution.
Have you ever been at a growing company? At some point an entire team gets replaced by a module in software, but that leads to better jobs elsewhere. When a company makes more money, they hire more people to keep expanding. The automation enables scaling up. Someday this cycle may change, but we're not even close yet.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
it is the choice of the upper management, you can say I provided the tool. but, at least in case of the first example in the article. The company should not fire the mold maker. In the article, it mentioned he perfected some tools and processes in mold making in the 30 years or so. The 3D printer is a better tools, it doesn't really replace a human that can improve. What the mold maker need to realize is he/she needs to learn 3D printing related to his/her job.
The idea that people deserve to be unemployed because some keyboard monkey thought of a way to give their job to a machine sounds like a case of kicking the victim. I wonder how those same nerds would feel if a catastrophic solar flare or social upheaval reduced their technological utopia to ruins and they spent the rest of their short lives being brutalized by larger, less intelligent sociopaths who felt that they deserved their plight because they were too weak to hunt or farm?
It would be wise to show some compassion for those you elbow out of the way on your climb to the top of this technological house of cards. You may well meet them again on the way down.
My company will retrain employees or reduce head count through attrition.
But I'm in an industry that can allow this.
The problem is that many companies work on tight margins. So there is a conflict between moral compass and keeping a company in business.
Take TVs. Imagine two manufacturers. Each produce identical TVs in every way. Company A finds a way to reduce the cost of a $1000 TV to $900. They can do this through automation and letting people go. The morally correct thing to do is not let any employees go. But that means the TV is still $1000. If they don't do this and company B makes the same automation change and lets people go, the company with the moral compass properly functioning loses in the market place.
We really need to move to a living wage in the USA. Start small like $100/month for everyone but we need the workflow in place for when this needs to be $1000/month!
"The ones losing their job due to automation are dumb people, factory workers, people pushing shelves. They truly desrve it."
Big myth, the people losing their jobs are tech workers and most of them automate themselves and their co-workers out of the job.
I disagree with who they disparaged, but I also disagree with you too.
I have been doing process automation for 24 years now and no one has ever lost their job because of my work. That was because they were smart enough to not be tied to dead end monotonous jobs and when I presented them with the ability to do a tedious job faster (or not to have to do it manually at all) they used that extra time to perform other tasks.
There is simply always more that needs to be done and automation frees us to work on other things. If someone isn't willing to invest in themselves to learn new skills and find new things to do to stay relevant, it's not the fault of the automation if they lose their job.
I prefer to just accuse them of making some sort of racist, sexist, or homophobic remark.
Much less effort, much more effective.
we need medcare for all in the USA befor the jail fills that role.
I've done this, automating a half-dozen data entry people out of jobs by using clever work* to connect Great Plains to our case management system.
* More specifically using VBScript to read invoice data from our sql database, import the customer and invoice data with Integration manager, and a separate process to record success or failure back to the CMS.
Most of them moved to doing other more interesting work, and a few left the company. I do sometimes feel bad about it, but the work was drudgery. No-one should have to endure years of copy-paste-copy-paste-copy-paste-copy-paste-copy-paste-copy-paste-copy-paste-copy-paste. That's a long slow death.
This.
I automate tasks, I've eliminated or changed a lot of tasks. Elimination of jobs is a management decision. Automating tasks is what I do.
The vast majority of employees I've worked with appreciated me eliminating or reducing the burden of the tasks in question.
I keep hearing that the only solution is to come up with new jobs for them, but there doesn't seem to be much of anything. When I was a kid it was coding and then the H1-Bs and outsourcing took those jobs. Then it was biotech, but those jobs never really materialized in mass (and you need a 4-6 year degree to get them).
I keep saying this on Automation threads, but there was close to 80 years of strife and unemployment following the industrial revolution before WWI & II came alone (the largest government backed guaranteed jobs programs in history, which I could take the credit for that observation but it was Rob Reich who made it). We blew up most of Europe & Asia and killed tens of millions of working age males. The 20th century equivalent of Aztec sacrifice to cull the population.
Are we gonna do that gain? If not what are we doing to do with all these people? Look at the American Indian reservations before the Casinos if you want to see what life is like for people who aren't needed by anyone. Do we want large masses living like that? If not do we have a solution besides "Wait 80 years for a technological revolution to employ everyone"?
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Physical automation of specific tasks has been around for a long time, starting with the industrial revolution 250 years ago and leading up to today where more than 99+% of jobs no longer employ heavy labor and this number is steadily falling. Weak AI and smart algorithms are just starting to replace jobs within the last 50 and over the next 200 will likely migrate to strong AI and even more capable weak AI/algorithms which sure is on track to replace 99% of all mental labor. Within this same timeframe, humanoid android systems are also on track to become far cheaper and far more capable than humans for 99% of all jobs. How can a human compete with a humanoid android capable of doing the job better, but also working 23.5 hr days every day, but also works for far cheaper? People forget simply automating some labor screwed working class people for 70 years, probably for the same reason they are in denial that eventually virtually all human labor both mental and physical could be automated.
Considering these technologies came from and are likely to continue to be created by large portions of the population through mental labors it sure would be nice to have everyone eventually benefit from this to the point of having universal incomes and social safety nets. Because the direction it's headed today is for all of these systems to be handed over to a few people who will then exploit the rest of humanity.
I built Crystal reports and InDesign templates that made my job easy. Then I got fired due to a conflict with the staggeringly incompetent it manager who was the son in law of the acting CEO, who was actually the CFO. Then they wound up hiring two people to replace me. Acting CEO guy is now gone, of course, he doesn't work there at all any more.
Cluster fuckery abounds
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Time to lower the full time to 30 hours and up OT pay. So that 80 hour weeks come with an BIG OT payout.
It's not just about automation.
Consider improvements in unique proposition (a hard job you automated well may be a unique proposition. Secondly, think of improved quality (Automation should result in more predictable behavior. If a fully closed loop is implemented then you actually improve quality.) Thirdly cost reduction is not to be frowned upon (Save on personnel cost and move that into innovation of your product. Doing nothing with savings is really bad.)
"I automate tasks, I've eliminated or changed a lot of tasks. Elimination of jobs is a management decision. Automating tasks is what I do.
The vast majority of employees I've worked with appreciated me eliminating or reducing the burden of the tasks in question."
Yes that is my experience as well both the workers reaction and the management decision. In my experience you usually automate a piece at a time here and there and it ultimately culminates and people get happier as their jobs get easier, clients get happier as response times get faster and easier. However you can't just pretend that needing less hands doesn't lead to the management decision and that the workers are thinking in terms of having an easier job not losing their job at some point.
If your job can be replaced by a shell script, you are due for a skills upgrade.
As a SDET, my job is literally to automate people (including myself) out of a job, and that is the goal of most programmers. Just what do people think happened when a secretary was no longer needed to draft a letter, and calculators replaced dozens of engineers computing figures by hand?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
folks who can do cryptography, AI math, complex mechanical and electrical engineering, etc.
The key here is these are highly skilled and creative people. They're not just workers, they're creators. When you've got people literally making new things for your business yeah, they're gonna be worth while.
This is not to say you can't make money off good employees. But you're going to run into margins at some point. Like the classic pizza example of economics. That first slice is great, and second might even be better, by the third you're pretty much done and you're probably not gonna make it to the crust on #4. Diminishing returns.
The key here is your good employees are "doers". They aren't making new things for you and opening up new markets, they're just servicing the existing markets.
Most of us are "Doers". Some of them are even very, very good at it. But there just aren't that many "creators". Especially in STEM fields. If there were we'd already have flying electric cars and no disease. You're expectations are too high, which sadly is pretty common among small business employers. You want the world, but you don't want to have to pay for it.
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I have several coworkers I want to automate out of a job.
Lots of smug arseholes here who think they'll never be automated out of a job.
When I was writing software, I was keenly aware of the possibility of putting people out of work. What I did was focus my efforts on helping them to do _better_ work. Part of it was that I wasn't going to put people on the street so the CIO/governor could squander more money on idiocy. Part of it was that I didn't want to leave behind systems that the CIO/governor could ruin with Indians. Nothing's worse than a system that's clearly broken with no recourse (like when anything goes wrong with a Google account).
You qualify as a dumb person.
I've automated many jobs, including my own job several times. Almost every time it freed people up to do new and creative things because they suddenly had time they didn't have to devote doing something repetitive or menial.
There is a human cost and like it has always been humans have to adapt or fade away. Whole towns die off when the main industry that the town was founded on goes away. The people either stay in the town and die with it or move on and learn a new trade. It's hard and sad.
Humanity overall always has to move to more efficient processes otherwise it can't sustain itself and we don't have enough control to not overrun our resources. Automation is the only way humans will survive (at least until we can leave the planet en masse).
We had a similar discussion back in October about people coding themselves out of a job, and the morality of not telling your employer if you've done that: The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job.
I feel like this is going to be a rehash of the same arguments.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
I just install and fuel the ovens. Putting people inside is an officer-level decision. Generating heat is what I do.
Justify it however helps you sleep at night, but you're just as responsible.
Was for a company that sold and repaired tractors. They had a 30 admins (secretaries) that worked on transcribing the time/notes from the mechanics into two other systems (one for their accountants, and one for the actual manufacture that required the information...neither system was optional). Wrote a wrapper app that the mechanics could use that dual entered the information into both systems for them. Once I was done they fired almost all of the admins.
At the same time, this was right before the last big recession, and that company almost went bankrupt. Me reducing payroll (I was a contractor) helped keep that company alive. All those people would have been fired anyway, I got them out early to go find a new job before things got really bad.
Bad User. No biscuit!
In my line of work (Software QA), automation is a looming, slowly encroaching beast that most people are afraid of. I've automated 1 or 2 folk out of a job however, I don't feel bad. Why? Because these people had no desire to learn HOW to beat automation. Had no willingness to improve, all they did was bitch about how automation was going to put them out of a job yet when offered the chance to learn how to automate things, often replied with "That's too hard and I have no desire".
Well, your lazy ass, "no desire" to learn automation, regardless of how hard it is, is why you now don't have a job and I still do. You either do it first or someone else is going to beat you to it. Unfortunately, tech is extremely cutthroat and automation is an inevitable future. Learn how to automate and stay relevant or...well, don't and find yourself out of a job.
Some years ago I worked in the sawmill industry using machine vision and automation tooling. There was a sawmill I visited in Arkansas that was eliminating a huge portion of their workforce because of a piece of equipment they had purchased that sorts lumber automatically. Before they purchased the equipment they had 3 shifts of people picking up lumber as it came out of the mill and sorting it/placing it in the appropriate bins - by width and length and grade. Each shift had about 10 people, so over 30 people lost their jobs. This was a big deal because sawmills aren't usually in large towns and this one was particularly rural, so the impact was huge. I asked the plant manager what they do in such cases and he told me that it isn't their responsibility to retrain workers for other jobs if those jobs aren't in their plant (which I understood, but the local government wasn't doing anything for them either).
Do I think that humans should manually sort lumber? Of course not. But there's no denying the impact in cases like this one, which are common in heavy industries, and are now coming into lighter industries and so-called white collar jobs. The people on the factory floor may or may not be rocket scientists (probably not, but one never knows about unrealized potential), but you have to acknowledge a wide variation in abilities and skills across a population distribution. What happens when the line that defines "automatable" vs. "done by human" keeps moving to the right across the distribution curve? What will those people do? This is the reality of things - we either get to the point of a Butlerian Jihad against all "thinking machines" or Star Trek where people just do whatever they want for "the greater good".
Not for a living wage.
I wonder how the idiots who think this is all wonderful will feel when *they* are automated out of a job. Esp. when their job was "automated" by idiots.[1]
In the late seventies and early eighties, there was a lot of blather about how, although factory jobs were being automated and going away, the "information economy" will provide more and better jobs.
These days, there's no blather about anything, because there are no zillions of jobs, other than low-level healthcare assistants who get paid, and treated, like crap.
Ever notice that if you lay people off, they don't buy anywhere near as much as they did before? Can't imagine why....
But those who think it all ought to be automated should be 110% on board with a basic income paid to everyone.[2]
1. Like the idiot "you can check in on the pad" at my doctor's... which is too stupid to tell me "I don't see you scheduled for today", the way the person did, when someone handled me.
2. You're worried about my BI coming out of your taxes? Why - you're not working either. They'd be coming out of Bill Gates' taxes, and Warren Buffet's taxes, and Sen. Mitch McConnell's taxes, and Apples, and Microsoft's, and....
People that seem to have no problem with H-1B Visas holder taking US Jobs, are mightily concerned about those jobs going away due to automation.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
it was a movement started by textile workers put out of work by automation. Their aversion to industry was because they didn't get anything out of it except unemployment.
What new jobs? Be specific? How will anyone buy the things those new jobs product if they don't have money from jobs now? It doesn't take much to get humans to stop progressing. Remember the Dark Ages? 1200 years of no progress and abject poverty for 99% of the population.
It won't be apocalyptic. The world isn't coming to an end. But we're going to have anywhere from 50-100 years of mass unemployment, poverty, social strife and war. This is exactly what happened the last time we had a major industrial revolution. Eventually new tech caught up and employed people, but in the meantime folks suffered. We have history. We know this happened and we know it's happening now. Why not do something about it?
Put another way: When in your life has the solution to a complex problem (mass technology unemployment) been to ignore it and hope for the best (laissez faire)? Because right now that's all I see us doing.
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if they're that inept they won't understand that they're automating their jobs away. Meanwhile the software they eventually write will be so bad you'll probably need an entire department to support it. Finally they'll get a promotion to VP over that department with a huge raise.
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If we were to automate jobs that were really dirty that no one wanted, or automate jobs that yield low profit, we can have more people doing them by owning robots.
For instance, farming requires large land area and has been pretty consolidated. As a result, our food supply is pretty homogenized. If we could automate farming, more people could have backyard gardens that are fully automated.
" it's a human finger that ultimately pulls the trigger. " Yeah, it's called the stockholders & CEO's.
Your reasoning works for jobs whose entirety can be automated - e.g. assembly line worker. The problem occurs when some idiot manager starts trying to apply it to jobs which mostly can be automated. If you decide to eliminate a job because statistically 99% of it can be automated, but fail to account for how to accomplish the 1% of the time which requires human intervention, you're just setting up your business for failure.
IT is a good example 95%-99% of it can be automated by writing a bunch of scripts. But woe unto the manager who decides that once the scripts have been written, there's no more need to pay for an IT department to sit around waiting for a new problem to show up. Or replace the IT guy with his 14 year old nephew who "plays around with computers a lot." You pay IT guys to sit around waiting for a problem when the cost of downtime would exceed their salary.
Or embrace the future.
"Go away or I will replace you with a small shell script."
Literally. This is not an apocryphal story. Their manual job was completely taken over by computer. I then hired them to run the computer system at about twice the pay.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
I work on tools, for a large tech company that builds software as the core business.
My goal is to automate myself out of a job, every six months, and to enable all my coworkers to do the same, as fast as possible.
We're not building a pizza, and this isn't a zero-sum-game; if my hands are freed up, I can just build more stuff.
That said, when I worked for a company where software was a cost center and not the core of the business? Those places are hell to work on software, because automating myself outta work generally means I'm outta work; they don't work in any sane fashion.
We'll see. People have been saying that for the last 250 years, and it's been partly true.
Things definitely HAVE changed a lot. Most people in 50 years ago did tasks that are automated today. Those jobs are gone, though the job titles often remain, referring to job that is done very differently - entirely different daily tasks.
Because the way of getting the job done (programmer vs calculator-operator) is more efficient, real median household income has increased over the last 50 years (meaning wages have increased a bit faster than inflation). Over the last 250 years, average income has skyrocketed.
So there have been significant changes, and they have been pretty.
One thing that hasn't changed has been change itself - for the last 250 years it's been a good idea to think ahead. It's always been good to plan your career, thinking about what skills will be in demand five or ten years from now. Many people leave their career path to chance, accidentally ending up in a particular job with no direction in mind. That only sometimes works well.
Not sorry about Geoff though, who spread shit about my previous relationships to "get back at me for firing him" when I had fuck-all to do with it, I was just being productive! Management made the decisions, good luck to you wherever you are and fuck off.
are being replaced with low paid service sector jobs. That can't keep up. People won't have the money to shop at those service industries.
More importantly those low skill jobs (cashier, driver, data entry, back office worker, etc) are what's being automated. So there's going to be nowhere left to go.
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feel fulfilled by dull, repetitive tasks (*cough*World of Warcraft*cough*, excuse me).
There's a puritanical idea, hammered into your head from the day you can understand speech, that the only value you have as a person is the work that you do. In the 50s, 60s and 70s there was pushback on this idea with folks looking forward to a time when we work 4 hours a week if that ("Meet George Jetson!") but that all fell apart in the 80s with the rise of neo-Conservatism.
I remember a photo op Bush Jr did with a 60 (70?) year old women who was working 2 minimum wage jobs to just barely get by. Bush was visibly uncomfortable because he knew what was being done to her was wrong, but she was proud as fuck. That's 30-40% of America in a nutshell right there.
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some kind of superman who the world depends on. Well, not everybody, but enough to swing elections.
There's an old phrase: "The problem with the American poor is that they don't see themselves as an oppressed working class but as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires". It's Puritanism, and it's pounded into your skill from the time you can understand speech.
You're up against ideas put into folks heads before they could think critically. It'll be tough to break them out of that bubble....
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6 fucking years? GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE! You're still green, boy, and don't know shit. I've been doing automation for 37 years all the way back when automation was Relay Ladder Logic with real relays and asbestos wire. You've been talking like you're an expert all in this story. You aren't even close. 6 years is in no way an amount of time that you can get significant data points about industry, engineering, or managerial generalities. You've probably only had 2 or 3 managers in that whole amount of time. I'd bet you only know one brand of PLC and it's probably Allen Bradley. Just go learn some new shit or something and stop wasting office hours spamming slashdot.
> One thing that hasn't changed has been change itself
Again though, this time is different because of the NATURE of the change. In days past automation was a dumb system or a purpose built machine. Now we're looking at smart systems, adaptable semi-AI. These are technologies that will both take current jobs and some of the "new" ones too.
And as others have pointed out, the change in the past hasn't been a picnic either. When it's talked about it seems rose colored glasses are passed out by the crateload. The destruction of manufacturing in the Rust Belt in the 70s and 80s, and the Midlands in England during the same time had long lasting, crippling poverty that came from that for entire swaths of the population. The same thing happened during the Industrial Revolution and the Agri revolution.
In fact, the horrific thing that *saved* Western society from massive poverty during the second quarter of the 20th century was WWI and WWII. Both of those wars absolutely decimated the populations in Europe and even took huge divots out of the populations of Canada, Australia, the US, New Zealand, etc. Hard to have a large unemployment problem when a huge chunk of your able bodied working age population was just obliterated and there is an unbelievable amount of work to be had rebuilding.
And we're on the cusp of another work revolution. Are we going to have 10s of millions of newly idled people, or is there another "correction" on the horizon? Neither option is very palatable.
during the .com boom. Better software is killing those consulting gigs. Used to be a company needed a consultant 20 hours a week to keep a 20 computer NT domain going. Now you wouldn't bother with that for less than 200.
There's jobs for data scientists because that's high end math. Not a lot of folks can do that. There's very few grunt work jobs created in that space because, well, it's mostly being done by AI scientists, you know, the kind that are automating all the jobs away...
Did you know 86% of the US manufacturing jobs lost in the last 20 years were to automation, not outsourcing? You're not going to see a bunch of new hardware installs here. Also, materials have gotten better. Car engines that died at 60k miles go 200k+. And those are ICE engines. God help the auto repair industry when electrics take over. The can seriously hit 1 million without breaking a sweat.
It's not just automation, it's better tech all around. We just don't need all these people anymore. Maybe in 100 years some tech we can't imagine, like the internet, will exist.
Support all the retraining programs you want, they won't work. There aren't any jobs you can retrain these folks for. Again, they're not going to go off and be data scientists. If they had the capacity to do that they already would. Retraining programs are a cop out. They're a dodge. It's like handing a bum a dollar bill. It might make you feel better in that moment but it doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't do any good to teach a man in a desert to fish.
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to say you can't retrain folks. Multiple studies show people learn more slowly or not at all past the age of 25. And the jobs people keep saying we should retrain for are high end computer, biotech and data scientist jobs that most people simply don't have the capacity for. They just don't have the math chops for it.
You're asking people who couldn't get through college in their 20s when they had access to grants and loans they don't have now, didn't have families to support or children to care for and had the malleable brain of a 20 year old to somehow pull it off now. That's disingenuous at best and an outright dodge at worst.
And if you're not going to tell them to get advanced degrees then what specifically do you intend to retrain them for? We're about to put 7 million cashiers and drivers out of work in the next 20 years tops. Hell, just tell me what you're gonna do with the 3.5 million cashiers. They're probably 10 years out from unemployment. From an economic perspective that is overnight.
And please, don't say welder and HVAC repair. Everybody I corner on this question says welder and HVAC repair. What do you think adding 3.5 million welders and HVAC repairmen in 10 years would do to their wages?
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I haven't heard anyone give a viable answer. Most folks aren't good enough at math to get the jobs in demand (computer, data and biotech sciences). That leaves tens of millions of people who aren't smart enough to go back to school but are smart enough to hold a gun. If we don't do something with them it'll end badly for everyone except the 1% (who'll have automated killbots to keep them at bay).
So I'll ask again, what jobs will they retrain for? Can anyone be specific?
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However you can't just pretend that needing less hands doesn't lead to the management decision and that the workers are thinking in terms of having an easier job not losing their job at some point.
In my time I have yet to work in a situation where there was an adequate amount of manpower to cover the needed work as currently implemented where automation would thus reduce the need for manpower. Every group I have ever worked in has been so far under water with what they need to be doing vs the resources they have to do it.
In fact quite the opposite my automation work has actually added head count to 5 of the groups I worked for. This was because we had good management who made sure it did not go unnoticed that we were getting more done and made us the "go to group" for getting shit done.
I have always heard stories about over staffed groups, but I will go so far as to say that if someone has part of their job automated and decides not to productively use that newly freed time, then they do deserve to have their job disappear. That they are opting not to contribute is not the fault of either the person doing the automation or management that terminates them.
the Data analyst jobs are too complex for the majority of workers to do, let alone people displaced by your work in automation.
If somebody with a high school diploma and a copy of excel can do these new jobs then they're ripe for automation or that person just happens to be a math wiz who had something go terribly wrong in their life that prevented them from finishing college (happens, my bro is pretty smart but his wife decided it was kid time while he was in school and stopped taking her pills).
As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data. Go talk to some economists about automation. They're even less rosy about it then I am because I'm a Democratic Socialist who grew up watching Star Trek and think folks like Alexandria Ocassio-Cortez will eventually move us to the Nordic model and solve these problems. But I realize I'm being almost childishly naive believing that given our country's puritanical history.
And history is the problem. It shows that when we don't have enough work for people to do we traditionally let them starve. Then they find an army to join and we get a Junta.
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When you are young, your time costs nothing; you spend it a lot! When you are older, your time costs a lot!, you spend less..
That greatly depends of an age and experience.... That is slippery question, who earns what, and when...