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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.
Blaming job elimination on non-management workers is like blaming 9/11 the jet passengers.
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.
Give it time. A few more rounds of automation and the average minimum wage person will be able to do the job.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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".
When considering IT efforts I like to ask people: "What do you do that makes you feel like a robot?" and/or "What sucks the most?"
That's where efforts should mostly be focused when not purely focused on revenue generation.
There is no shortage of answers to these questions, in any organization.
BlameBillCosby.com
Rely on the retraining fairy tale?
Yep.
For one, everyone cannot be retrained for a marketable profession. And who knows what will be marketable by the time they're done. And...
And those are all strawman arguments.
Automation doesn't happen overnight. If I automate a production process, it's just one small part of the industry. There are still jobs available for the displaced workers on other lines production lines or in other departments. As an example, they might not be holding the meter, but they would be reading the test report. In the time it takes to automate a whole industry, the oldest workers usually retire, the mid-career ones head toward management, and the youngest (who started their career when automation was starting) are easily able to move, because they're grown alongside the new automated processes.
It's a common fallacy to think that someone like me (occasionally an automation specialist) will come into a factory in the morning, and put a thousand people out of work by evening. The reality is it takes about 20-30 years to fully automate an industry. Automation just shows such promise that most industries (even those that were reluctant in the 1980s) are about halfway down that road now, so people look around and see automation everywhere, and get worried, even though the unemployment rate has actually dropped, and workforce size has stayed relatively flat.
Now, I'm not saying automation isn't disruptive, and in the short term and small scale it can indeed be devastating to a local economy, but at a national scale it isn't going to lead to any major economic collapse.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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".
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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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.
> There's also other professions like the traditional trades (carpentry, plumbing, electricians, etc) that can't be easily automated away.
Sure, but how *many* carpenters, plumbers, etc are needed? Just one sector that's going to be automated to hell in the next 5-10 years is self driving vehicles. In the US alone that is projected to put 4 million drivers out of work. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers. Is there really enough work in trades that 1 in 50 working age adults becomes another one? To put that in perspective there are ~430,000 people in the US with a job that matches the category plumber/pipe fitter/steamfitter, 600,000 electricians and just under a million carpenters. So about 2 million of those 3 trades. If all the displaced drivers took up those trades, there'd be 3x as many of those trades. Do you think the current demand could support that kind of explosion of the workforce? Not from where I'm sitting...