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The Robot Revolution Will Be Worse For Men
Recode's Rani Molla shares the findings of a new study from the Brookings Institution, which finds that automation will impact men at a higher rate than women. Here's an excerpt from the report: Young people -- especially those in rural areas or who are underrepresented minorities -- will have a greater likelihood of having their jobs replaced by automation. Meanwhile, older, more educated white people living in big cities are more likely to maintain their coveted positions, either because their jobs are irreplaceable or because they're needed in new jobs alongside our robot overlords. The Brookings study also warns that automation will exacerbate existing social inequalities along certain geographic and demographic lines, because it will likely eliminate many lower- and middle-skill jobs considered stepping stones to more advanced careers. These jobs losses will be in concentrated in rural areas, particularly the swath of America between the coasts.
However, at least in the case of gender, it's the men, for once, who will be getting the short end of the stick. Jobs traditionally held by men have a higher "average automation potential" than those held by women, meaning that a greater share of those tasks could be automated with current technology, according to Brookings. That's because the occupations men are more likely to hold tend to be more manual and more easily replaced by machines and artificial intelligence. Of course, the real point here is that people of all stripes face employment disruption as new technologies are able to do many of our tasks faster, more efficiently, and more precisely than mere mortals. The implications of this unemployment upheaval are far-reaching and raise many questions: How will people transition to the jobs of the future? What will those jobs be? Is it possible to mitigate the polarizing effects automation will have on our already-stratified society of haves and have-nots?
However, at least in the case of gender, it's the men, for once, who will be getting the short end of the stick. Jobs traditionally held by men have a higher "average automation potential" than those held by women, meaning that a greater share of those tasks could be automated with current technology, according to Brookings. That's because the occupations men are more likely to hold tend to be more manual and more easily replaced by machines and artificial intelligence. Of course, the real point here is that people of all stripes face employment disruption as new technologies are able to do many of our tasks faster, more efficiently, and more precisely than mere mortals. The implications of this unemployment upheaval are far-reaching and raise many questions: How will people transition to the jobs of the future? What will those jobs be? Is it possible to mitigate the polarizing effects automation will have on our already-stratified society of haves and have-nots?
You need to get out of the bubble of the Bay, millennial. Can Slashdot sink further? Apparently, it can. Remember, before the acquisition, when this site was useful, and dare I say it, entertaining? Boy are those days gone.
That's why I have started to identify as a woman. So far so good.
They could just learn to code. Or be robotics engineers.
Iâ(TM)m sure the ratio of engineers to replaced coal miners will be 1:1 and everybody will have a place at the table.
They're not counting sexbots, are they?
When women lose economic opportunities, marriage rates go up. When men lose economic opportunities, rioting rates go up.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
For once, bwcause, you know, women are banned from those jobs or something.
I'm 40 and never once in my lifetime has it been illegal for a woman to do a job in my lifetime. At 40 I'm at the age where whatever experience I've had is AVERAGE.
Stop pretending it's 1950.
Because it's the oldest profession in the world?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Because they break women's absolutely necessary monopoly.
I've been hearing robot talk for over fifty years. I'm numb to it.
So I just gave a talk at LCA2019 on precisely this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I also thought about arguing in this direction, but then I didn't want to open the gender debate, and so I left it at "humans".
Enjoy.
echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
the problem is that the jobs men traditionally do are most likely to be automated. That's it. That's all there is to it. You can't really automate watching kids, for example, because kids are emotional and except a parental figure to be near. So short of perfect androids that ain't happening. People want nurses still. And yes, they want doctors, but there are a lot more nurses than doctors.
Also, to be blunt, women do better academically than men. The reason's really simple: girls calm down and start studying and an earlier age than boys so they get an extra year or two of education.
Yes, this does mean we're going to eventually need to start shifting from helping girls catch up (necessary because they were discouraged from doing anything short of having babies for hundreds of years) to helping boys catch up.
The trick is doing this rationally and without it devolving into identity politics from both sides used to distract us all from economic issues. Right wing Dems like identity politics because it lets them pretend to be progressive while supporting the same supply side/trickle down economics as the GOP does. Meanwhile the subject is so emotionally charged it's easy to rile people up and point them at the polls to vote for whoever without considering the economic factors involved.
The solution is a) more education for everyone (if nothing else it'll help absorb some of the unnecessary workforce) and b) be wary of anyone who talks identity politics without also talking sound, demand side economics.
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Pretty sure women are going to be affected just as badly as men.
Imagine, hundreds of single men with bad game just stop feeding the egos of all these women on social media and instead buy a robot that looks like a straight 10 that will cook, clean, and well **** without complaining.
That will be a real crisis worth watching. /Sarcasm... Sort of
like brick layer
Moreover if you've been paying any attention there's been massive productivity boosts in all those fields. My company is throwing up a new building for a little over 1000 employees in 10 months. When I was a kid that kind of thing took years. They've had these puppies for at least 10 years now. I'm sure you can find equivalent tech in plumbing if you know where to look.
As for carpentry, I know some blue collar guys pissed because they used to get free wood at job sites when the job was over. That's all stopped. They order exactly what they need and it comes pre cut. There's your automation. It happens at a factory and a computer automatically handles the logistics of getting it there. Before long you won't even need the drivers. Just a couple of day laborers to unload it all and hammer it together...
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The robots are going to be repaired by men.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
There will be no uprisings, gratefully, as we transition from users surfing porn to users ravaging sexbots to exhaustion while surfing porn. Women, well, who knows? Possibly the same.
> I'm not belittling teachers here but it's relatively low paid
Is it? Let's take a state with relatively low cost of living.
Teachers are paid an average of $53,300 salary plus excellent retirement benefit for nine months of work. Summer school pays $30-$50/ hour plus a bonus of up to $10,000. So something like $65,000 in Texas. Texas teachers are required to work six hours a day, 187 days per year. That's not terrible.
The job held by most men in US - Truck driver. Google is coming out with a self driving truck
The job held by most women in the US - Retail Clerk/cashier. Amazon has already brought a cashierless retail store
The rioting is not far away
**Life is too short to be serious**
Was it seriously necessary to single out one race like that? I stopped reading after that, because whoever wrote this is obviously some racist idiot who needs to get a life.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't believe in this motherfucking 'robot revolution', it's all hype and nonsense, and nobody else should believe it either. Clickbait at best, fake news at worst. FUD in any event. Nothing to see here..
That was an excellent talk, containing some really great analysis. The analysis was so clear and thorough though that I was puzzled why it left one very important matter very fuzzy and poorly defined --- the title and main topic of the talk, of all things!
This is the problem: the word "jobs" (or equivalently "work") means two very different things to us, and these two things have been conflated into one single idea by our history over hundreds of years. Those two things are: (1) Doing something useful in a place of employment, and (2) Getting paid for it and using that money as the enabler of our personal survival.
I put it to you that your talk conflated the two ideas as strongly as everyone else does, and used the fear of losing (2) as the basis for examining whether AI would eliminate opportunities for (1). This is a crucial distinction to make, because survival is a non-optional imperative for most humans, whereas having an interesting occupation is merely nice-to-have and can easily bear periodic interruption.
I am an engineer, and as an engineer let me tell you something that isn't a secret among engineers but is rarely stated so directly: the practical purpose of engineering and of the science which underpins it is to eliminate (2) from the burden carried by humanity, and to enable a focus on (1) --- in other words, to give you the time to do something interesting with your life. It is sometimes said that this is the aim of civilization too, although a better observation would be that having to work for your survival is not civilized at all. Indeed, it is barbaric.
I expect that you will be giving that talk again, as the subject is a very interesting one and is highly topical today. I would definitely recommend though that in future you explain its title in more detail, because very few rational people would complain if AI eliminated the need for humans to work for their survival.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Your comment was barely modded into visibility, but I don't see why. I was actually looking for any reference to Player Piano and stumbled across your accidentally relevant "joke".
In 1952 one of the characters in Vonnegut's book threatens to replace a woman by creating a sexbot. Overall the book is shockingly prescient from before I was born... I'm still in the middle, but it's an remarkably plausible dystopia.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Oh noooooo.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
"However, at least in the case of gender, it's the men, for once, who will be getting the short end of the stick."
Setting aside suicide, drug use, drug abuse, being a victim off violent crime, fighting in wars, at-work deaths, shorter life spans, vulnerability to disease, aids, heart disease, yes, "for once" men get the short end of the stick.
-Styopa
> lessons come pre planned and differentiated etc etc etc.
Think about what they teach in public school, as opposed to college. Arithmetic, reading, basic civics like "how a bill becomes a law".
They are teaching the same thing that 100,000 other schools are teaching at the same time, and the same thing they taught last year, and the year before, and they decade before. Algebra hasn't changed. Heck Schoolhouse Rock "I'm Just a Bill" is still better than whatever lesson most teachers would come up with and it's from 1976. So yeah those lessons do come pre-planned. If you're making your own lessons instead of using the lessons 100,000 other teachers are using for the topic, you're doing it wrong.
> assignments just appear and are magically marked
Uhm yeah there's this thing called a "computer". When I was in grade school it was called "Scantron". Now it's called the "form" tag.
Rural Australia is exactly why Martin Dougiamas made the premier open source Learning Management System, Moodle. It's very good.
This statement triggered my BS detector.. "These jobs losses will be in concentrated in rural areas, particularly the swath of America between the coasts"
Isn't -all- of America "between the coasts."
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
Yes, men do the actual physical work, but women more and more have been in supervisory and management positions over those men working in the physical world. In recent years women have come to exceed men in those supervisory jobs. As the physical work disappears, the jobs supervising and managing men in those jobs will disappear, impacting women also.
E Proelio Veritas.
Before any serious automation can take place in rural areas more than it already has.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It looks like we have some different points of view on an underlying principle. That's awesome, I love to hear different viewpoints.
You've also pointed out something I'm doing a bit wrong in a way, maybe.
> I mean, I can make a functional website by cutting and pasting code from the web together but that doesn't make a developer and if it does, not a good one.
Based on my 20 years developing software and web sites professionally, it's been my experience that developers who make full use of well-known, mature libraries and frameworks and both more productive and produce higher quality than those who have NIH syndrome, who write their own libraries and try to make their own Javascript to simulate "liquid" layouts. Understanding how to use a well-written library or framework is a lot faster *and* more effective than writing one. (Obviously using one without understanding it is just lazy.)
My experience, *most* teachers don't consistently produce better learning materials than the best teachers do, so their students would be better served by them choosing already-prepared lessons, rather than trying to assemble something while they're eating dinner. Same with the overall curriculum. Yes, they should *choose* when it's time to move to the next lesson, the next prepared lesson that is freely available to them.
I teach a lot at work. The last series I did was a deep dive into SQL, really understanding what it is about. The next is a CISSP course I'm teaching. For SQL and for most of my lessons I made all of the learning materials. For CISSP, maybe I'd be better off presenting well-made material. Obviously I'll choose which modules to present, and how much time to spend on each.
Good points. I'm not trying to say unless a teacher creates every piece of everything from scratch then they suck, someone who actually insisted on doing that would probably be just as bad. It's all about balance at the end of the day. All I was really trying to say is there's more to teaching than most people give it credit for. As you have some experience of it I assume you know you have to be adaptable and sometimes your lesson is going to go out the window, now expand that to all day everyday lol.
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Productivity will go up but there will be an awful lot of human casualties. Expect Oxy use to rise - it's not quite the Soma we were hoping for but it's close! When the rich can afford machines that do the work of ten or a hundred men, they will get even richer at the expense of hundreds of unemployed. This will even go for Lawyers and GPs and other middle-class jobs though
That depends on how you define "worse". When robots get advanced enough to put most men out of work, they'll be advanced in other ways, too. Out of work because of a robot? You'll have more time to make love to your robot "girlfriend"...
I'd certainly agree that a teacher who always follows a rigid day-by-day formula, always teaching the exact same lesson on day #14, probably isn't doing a great job. (With some exceptions possible).
Also, if you've been teaching trig for 12 years, and every year you make the lesson about right triangles over again, that would be silly. You'd be better off re-using last year's material, and the presenting a well-made lesson from someone who is really good at writing maths curriculum is probably even better. Either way, of course you're going to allot time for questions and make sure that your students are following along.
So like you said, balance.
Seems like they are going to put a lot more women than men out of work! (Does a vibrator qualify as a "sex bot"?_
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
and gets their twisted wood and sends it back. But a computer tells that contractor exactly how often "sometimes" really is. Occasionally they're off a bit in the wrong directly... and modern logistics gets him his shortage in a few days instead of weeks.
Folks really underestimate how tight the supply chain's gotten and what computers have made possible. I think we were expecting flying cars by now. What we got was cheap 2 day shipping. But if you're old enough to remember sending away for something and waiting 8 weeks you understand what a revolution that is...
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Also, to be blunt, women do better academically than men. The reason's really simple: girls calm down and start studying and an earlier age than boys so they get an extra year or two of education.
There are many reasons, but let me point out a couple of glaring ones:
1) There are plenty of "for women" scholarships and numerous women only programs, even though it is at least 55% girls vs 45% boys in colleges (and growing)
2) Strong gender bias among teachers who happen, hold on a second, be mostly women (it gets hilarious at times and she isn't even fired, by the way)
3) Education concept of "listen, remember and do what I say" not well suited for boys and men
4) When girls fall behind, system is being changed to address it vs no fucks given when boys are disadvantaged
The first time "but what about boys" was asked, was nearly 3 decades ago, an equity feminist (rare type), Christina Sommers wrote "The War Against Boys" book calling out lies in mainstream "myth of shortchanged girls".. She predicted the gap will only widen, and, hey, look, we are soon to hit 60% vs 40% "more equality". (UN for Women sounds alarm when there is 5% gap in boys favor (it still happens in crazy places like Sudan).
once the robots come they will replace everybody. everyone's job in a corporation can be replaced. just because you are a senior manager doesn't mean your job is safe. The robots will build better robots and they will eventually not need humans. AI is a very dangerous slipper slope.
Will electricians and plumbers be replaced by robots? I wouldn't bet on it.