Slashdot Mirror
Number of Workers in Jobs That Can Be Automated Falls (ft.com)
Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation. From a report: Statistics from the Office for National Statistics published on Monday showed that in 2011 about 8.1 per cent of workers were in jobs with a "high" risk of automation, but by 2017 that had fallen to 7.4 per cent. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source and original study.] The ONS report highlighted that fewer workers remain in areas that can be easily automated, such as dry cleaning and laundry jobs, which fell by 28 per cent between 2011 and 2017, and retail cashier work, which fell by 25.3 per cent over the same period.
Since the financial crisis the UK has enjoyed rapid growth in employment combined with one of the lowest rates of investment spending of any large rich country. Many economists have suggested that hiring cheap labour instead of investment in new techniques is behind the country's weak rate of productivity growth. Policymakers had hoped that increasing the minimum wage would spur companies to replace low-paid jobs with machines, in turn boosting growth in productivity. [...] But the ONS analysis suggests the increase in employment over the past decade has not come from jobs that could easily be done by machines. Instead, since 2011 the UK lost jobs with a high or medium risk of automation, like shelf fillers, but gained them in areas with a low risk, such as physiotherapy.
Since the financial crisis the UK has enjoyed rapid growth in employment combined with one of the lowest rates of investment spending of any large rich country. Many economists have suggested that hiring cheap labour instead of investment in new techniques is behind the country's weak rate of productivity growth. Policymakers had hoped that increasing the minimum wage would spur companies to replace low-paid jobs with machines, in turn boosting growth in productivity. [...] But the ONS analysis suggests the increase in employment over the past decade has not come from jobs that could easily be done by machines. Instead, since 2011 the UK lost jobs with a high or medium risk of automation, like shelf fillers, but gained them in areas with a low risk, such as physiotherapy.
This makes me think of a robot pushing a human worker off a cliff.
Have you read my blog lately?
Yes, jobs that can be automated will be replaced by automation. There is a reason why we no longer have a lot of jobs (outside historical reenactment, or custom work) like Type Setters, Black Smiths, Weavers...
Being that companies can now automate a lot of their entry level jobs, this means over time a companies competitive advantage would be lessen (as all the machines will make the products the same way and at the same quality) That means they will need to put resources into Support, and Client Relations, and general people skills. So the new entry level worker will be more support reps, and they will need to be paid higher prices because there will be more competition to get the better ones.
Where today I may have lousy support but my product is Top Quality, or it is normal quality but I sell it for cheap, All the products will be costing the same to produce with automation, so I will need to find a way to differentiate myself. If I have better support then people will like me more then the other competitor. Who may be cheaper because their support sucks.
However right now in America, Automation isn't the problem, but the lack of investment in companies that produce goods and services. Other then selling stocks to the common man to help the company to invest into more people and more machines. The stocks are mostly shared in high amounts with other wealthy people who only care for the short term gain. The income they make from these stocks they put into buying back their own stocks to raise the prices to sell later. This is a bastardization on capitalism, where businessmen found a loophole in the system, and are abusing it.
I don't see socialism as an answer, but right now our capitalism system has some major problems.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It takes 15% as much human labor to load and unload canned goods when using wooden shipping pallets versus when just stacking them directly on the truck.
Pneumatic construction tools.
The hot-blast furnace (86,000 hours of labor became 200 hours of labor).
Intensive agriculture.
Computers.
Could you imagine digging out a basement with only hand shovels?
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All it says is that (like automation in the Industrial Revolution) one type of job disappeared and another (less automatable) job sprang up. Companies are now choosing to employ this “cheap” available labor (people that were previously in lower-paying, now automated jobs) and paying them a premium over spending the investment in automating a more complex job.
Automating is a risk, there will be people that do it, there will be those that don’t and rather try the true and tested method of just employing people. The availability of labor, makes both decisions competitive until you run out of people willing to do the job for a certain cost.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I read Slashdot all day long. Good luck automating that!
Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation.
It's been this way since the start of the industrial revolution and even before. Some jobs get automated by new technology and those people have to find or create new jobs. As a species we're quite good at that. Generally the automation enables jobs that didn't exist previously. If you need evidence look at the very device you are using to read these very words. Smartphones are a multi-billion dollar business that didn't even exist 20 years ago. The web didn't even exist 30 years ago yet you'd be hard pressed to argue it hasn't been a net creator of jobs and prosperity. (note I didn't say a uniform creator of prosperity) That's not to say there aren't some bumps and bruises along the way for some people but in the end our society ends up better off pretty much every time.
There is this fear that somehow this time it will be different. That somehow devices have finally gotten clever enough to replace people permanently with nothing left for people to do. Problem with that idea is that it presumes there is a finite amount of economically useful work which is an idea that has never been true in the history of man. It also presumes that we have no control over automation politically, economically, or physically which also isn't true. One of our defining traits is that we are tool makers. Our tools enable us to do more than we could do without them. Instead of just making a product we use machines to help us make it so we can spend more time selling it or improving it or funding it.
Number of Workers in Jobs That Can Be Automated Falls
This headline is from 1887.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If their job gets automated... they no longer work there.
Here, lemme rephrase that a little: "Number of remaining workers in jobs that can be automated falls."
Policymakers had hoped that increasing the minimum wage would spur companies to replace low-paid jobs with machines, in turn boosting growth in productivity.
And suddenly you have to wonder about all the calls and campaigns for a $15 minimum wage here in the US and if they weren't after the opposite of what was claimed.
Aggressively reduce the costs of people who are raising smart, healthy children and push the burdens on everyone else, particularly voluntarily childless people. The future belongs to those who show up for it, and almost every issue facing our world is telling us that we need to bring our genetic, cultural and technological a game to bear on it.
...Because there will be no jobs left.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Truth, but all of these people were on the chopping block in 2011. The TRL was 6ish and is now approaching 9.
The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge was for autonomous vehicles. This stuff has been a long time in coming.
What I want added to that list are: Lawyers, doctors, pilots, politicians, and program managers.
How does "client support" help anyone in North America. Usually when I call a support desk it is clear the person isn't local.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
A lot of people are still having a hard time finding quality jobs. I know there are a lot of contract positions where I work, but the last regular was hired years ago.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
We really need to start discerning between quality jobs that will pay a living wage and crap jobs. I think most people today are working but there is a huge problem finding jobs that are full time, pay well, and not based on contract. The gig economy is one way where people who used to have normal jobs are working in a very temporary fashion for small money. Gig workers should not even be counted as employed. Seems to be a lot of temporary work out there but nothing stable.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And many of those old jobs that used to be automated also resulted in signficant problems in society, with protests and the rise of the workers movement in general. The word "sabotage" comes from this. It also caused a major migration from rural areas into metropolitan areas. There's no reason to think that continued automation will happen without the corresponding societal problems.
The stocks are mostly shared in high amounts with other wealthy people who only care for the short term gain.
Wrong and wrong. Most stocks are "owned" by middle class workers in the form of pension plans and IRAs. And wealthy people generally don't buy/sell stock very often; they buy and hold for years, sometimes generations.
So? It's still going to be a lot of people out of work and it's not quite clear what will replace them. Soon you can add 'every fast-food worker' to that list.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
and every time he finds something they start moving to outsource him. The only reason the last job he had lasted as long as it did is they first tried to automate, that didn't work, so they outsourced.
And for the record, while the automation didn't work out the door it would have eventually, but it was cheaper to outsource now than wait. The offshore guys who took his last job are all on borrowed time.
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Mueller found some evidence of collusion
Where's your evidence of this evidence?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Resistance is futile.
Why not? They already automated writing it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Assuming they're made to the same design & spec, with the same materials, using the same machines and in the same locations.
Not impossible but very improbable.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
there was decades of unemployment and social strife following the industrial revolution. Long before it was a generic insult Luddites formed their group for a reason. We're pretty terrible at responding to rapid change. Hell, we went through two meat grinders with the automation of warfare and bombed large swaths of the world to the stone age before we backed off a little. And we mostly backed off because the major industrialized nations have nukes.
You mentioned we'll have to find or make new jobs, but what jobs? How will we pay for them when we're unemployed? When the outsourcing started in the late 90s I was told we'd all pivot to biotech. But the mass number of jobs never materialized. When self-driving cars and automatic, no scan checkouts put 2 million folks out of work what do we do with them?
So far the answers I've heard are:
1. Biotech... never materialized.
2. "Learn 2 Code", aka "Go back to school in your 40s for an advanced degree you couldn't hack in your 20s".
3. A list of service sector jobs nobody will be able to afford to pay for when their jobs go poof.
4. "It'll be so high tech you can't imagine it!", which is just kicking the can down the road.
The only real, substantive answers I've heard so far come from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocassio-Cortez. Both of who want higher minimum wages (so the remaining workers can afford services from the newly unemployed), a large scale federal jobs program ("Green New Deal"), single payer healthcare (which might actually result in some new biotech jobs) and massive infrastructure spending (again, New Deal). Basically, they're gonna tax the robots (or robot owners if you prefer) to pay for public works to employ everyone. Maybe it's a bad solution, but it's the only concrete answer I've heard.
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In Robot Maintence!
This summary is weird. It's like they don't realize there are fewer people employed in automatable jobs because those jobs are now becoming automated.
Contractors are cheaper for a company because it is easier to let them go and there are no benefits paid out. That's the only reason why they only hire contractors.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
She's only half-right.
The more we work, the more we produce, so we're effectively trading time for wealth. Without raising the minimum wage, the amount of low-end labor purchaseable by everybody a bit above the lowest-paid worker increases (and this scales at every step, so people a bit above that can buy more of those slightly-more-than-minimum workers's labor). That creates a glut of low-wage jobs.
Most of the money is, in fact, going to those low-wage jobs.
Walmart's CEO gets $4 per employee per year. Home Depot is like $120 among all their executives, and around $20 per employee for their CEO. AIG is ludicrous at $518 including the non-cash perks (usually negligible).
There are few billionaires, and the top doesn't have all of the income. People started massively conglomerating businesses (Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, Kraft), allowing them to take less per employee and still take more in total.
Raise minimum wage and you'll see a redistribution; it won't be from billionaires. Instead of creating 5 $250,000 jobs in the next growth cycle, we'll create 25 $50,000 jobs. There will be less poverty, more productivity, and greater wealth. Job growth will be somewhat slower; unless you jack up minimum wage insanely-fast and to ridiculous amounts (note: it has been 67% of GNI/C for decades up until 1970, and is as high as 58% in some of the best-performing nations today), you won't see an unemployment spike or the related recession.
As for high-poverty areas, those come from structural change initiating a local economic collapse. Such areas stay collapsed. Rural America is an exception: they mainly produce food there, and food becomes worth less and less of our productivity over time; they need the land to produce food, so they can't help but be left behind.
The fix for all of this is a Universal Citizen's Dividend--a form of negative income tax implemented as a social insurance. It doesn't pay an inflation-adjusted cost-of-living stipend; it pays a share.
We need social insurances--universal childcare, universal college, universal healthcare, long-term support services. This means we divert some of our great wealth to pay for these things, which stimulates the poorest areas (who pay the least in taxes) and flows wealth in to help repair them. This is yet insufficient.
Those services become more-productive over time. Healthcare, childcare, college, all become cheaper and more-effective. That means Rural America will continue to decay. The blighted Urban environments will have more success from provisioned-services insurances.
A Universal Dividend taxes a flat percentage on personal income (wage, rents not taxed as profits) and corporate profits, reflecting productive incomes. It distributes this as a flat, twice-monthly payment. The poorest receive a greater total impact, as they pay less into this; and the proportion of their income reflected by that total impact is higher, as they have less income.
While productivity improves and Rural America is bound to the land and the increasing productivity therein, thus receiving ever-less of our great wealth, the Dividend pours a share of our productivity into the hands of rural households. Those provisioned services employ workers who receive a part of this share, along with payment drawn less from the poorest than the wealthiest. This combination helps to hold up even Rural America, the seemingly-doomed corner of our economy.
This is the truth about the economy. Ocasio understands productivity--many don't--but she does miss the larger, more-complex details.
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As long as people are free to work (or not work) and free to choose their professions and education, there will be a disparate distribution of wealth based on demand for their labor and skill.
This seems highly unlikely.
I know not all wealth is stock, but a lot of it is. The top 10% of the population hold 76% of the wealth.
The skew away from stock for the richest would have to be extreme for the middle class to hold 50% of the stock.
The 50th=90th percentile hold 23% of the wealth, so they'd have to be holding 3x as much in stock relative to the top 10% to be holding 50% of the stock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
So it explains why "the number of workers in jobs that can be automated (in 2011) has fallen".
The only silver lining here is that it's been 14 years since they started demonstrating self-driving vehicles so the change might not be that quick and immediate, giving those in the industry time to move away. They've already had 14 years to see the writing on the wall. That said, the time between the first automated commercial semi-truck and 80+% being automated is going to be REAL short. It's going to hit fast as soon as they can make a buck.
Soon you can add 'every fast-food worker' to that list.
There is no soon, they're already on the list. And it's "most" fast-food workers. They'll still have someone that mops the floors and loads the hoppers. We're a long way from having a standardized way of interfacing semi-trucks with buildings and unloading stuff. Automated trucks will likely push that forward though.
(It's pretty clear what will replace them. Did you you mean "It's not clear what they will go do?") I think they're gonna starve. Hoepfully it'll be better than the three generations of soul-crushing 50% unemployment in the weaver's industry that we saw in the Industrial revolution. Yeah, those Luddites had a reason to be pissed. The problem was they blamed the new tech and got violent about it. They smashed looms, burned down a lot of wealthy estates, and the army shot them all up and put down their rebellion. But I don't think the Victorians who were fine with the Opium Wars in China and the Raj in India were going to shed too many tears for displaced workers outside of edinbourough.
The young can retrain. Go do something else. The old can retire, just with less savings than they would have had. It's the middle lot that are vested in the industry but haven't had the decades of payout that are really screwed. In general this is the current predicament that millenails are facing. More job competition for the remaining jobs, older workers not moving out, more debt, lower wages (although that one's likely from the econopocalypse in 2008). The factory jobs aren't there, there's practically no need for workers on farms. A "gig economy" is filling that void and those "jobs" suck. But times are good right now. They really are. The unemployment rate has steadily declined since 2008 and it's at record lows. HURZZAH! (Alas, that rate has never gotten so low without an economic crash following suit. Get ready for that "business cycle").
And guess what - they already automated writing it!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't know where these figures come from, but how do the stats count someone on a zero-hours contract? Employed? Half employed? Depends if they get called in that week?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Technology comes in waves of vast improvements. The notion that a job is not so easy to automate can vanish in a few months when breakthrough X takes place. The greatest buffer to rapid change is financial as the cost of change in investments creates some pain and anxiety. How many machine shops would be so much better off buying a $500,000 five axis milling machine that cuts using water with precise results? The catch is that so far smaller shops just can't buy the good stuff.
"Biotech" is a buzzwordy way to say healthcare. Most of the jobs were going to be lab jobs. Drawing blood and running tests that aren't ready to be automated. Easy stuff with some training and decent, $15-$20/hr work. Plus all the ancillary jobs. Single Payer Healthcare means more people seeking care, especially preventative care where those tests are done. That means more jobs.
I'd love to see the work week dropped, but good luck getting that past American puritanicalism....
And no, we're not going to drain the rich dry. But we are going to bust the ultra-wealthy them down a peg or two. Right now they're not so much men and women as they are God-Kings.
And the New Deal didn't ramp up the debt, wars did. Lots and lots of wars did. We put $6 trillion on the "National Credit Card" for Iraq alone (after interest, everybody always forgets about the interest).
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At age 44, I'm starting the university to work on a Masters and Ph.D. related specifically to applying neural networks to automate the vast majority of tasks related to preventative medicine. This will be done by exploiting full body motion capture ultrasound to identify anomalies undetectable to general practitioners. The entire goal is to make it so people can stand in a booth for 5-10 seconds (similar to the airport nudie x-ray) and have a substantially more thorough check of every aspect of their body as often as they'd like. I hope that companies like mine will install them as devices people will use at least once a week.
I also hope that people like Bill Gates will fund making these inexpensive enough to put them everywhere in the developing world.
The intended result should be that cancer will be treated with noninvasive approaches because tumors will be detected long before a doctor could. Adding an automated blood test system that could automatically perform most lab functions would be possible at some time as well.
I am not the first person to think of this and I know there's already billions being spent on this. It will cut the number of jobs of doctors, surgeons, nurses, etc... substantially.
Then there's adaptation of robotics and AI from boston dynamics that will allow robots to reproduce (often better than humans) many low risk procedures. Possibly even things as complex as plastic surgery. It's even possible that at some point, it would be possible to sit in a photo booth at the mall, choose a surgical procedure and have it performed by a machine there and then. (This is probably a bit too sci-fi for now)
I prepared to go to the university by watching over 1000 videos on Khan Academy. I'll watch at least 1000 more before starting in August (or January depending on the admissions process). I do the assignments and take the exams online with no human intervention and am graded (for my own purposes) on my performance... when I have questions, I comment on Youtube and people answer them. In the beginning I did hire a tutor, but I've long since past her level. I'm working on multivariable calculus and will do linear algebra and differential equations before switching to MIT Open Courseware for Discrete Mathematics, Graph Theory and Number Theory. I'll also study algebra, chemistry, physics, organic chemistry and others on Khan. I'll then switch to Harvard Open Courseware for anatomy, physiology, biochemistry at the rest of pre-med.
My niece is 16 and due to social issues has been home schooled this year by attending remote courses with 500+ students per class. Each class is run by one instructor and a few assistants.
In order to feed my family today, I'm delivering a product today at work which will cut back on hiring 30-40 senior network engineers (Cisco Professionals) because we'll be able to manage the tasks without them. We have pretty much stopped using server, virtualization and storage professionals because we have no need for them since we can do ad-hoc docker in a box on our own... we can buy prepackaged Azure Stack for a full Kubernetes solution if we need something more.
I see waiters and waitresses to be one of the most upcoming positions because we can't replace human interaction. Wait staff is about substantially more than taking orders and bringing food to the tables. I can cook at home... I can even simply order food for delivery and the companies in the local area are already experimenting with drone delivery. I go to the restaurant for the environment and interpersonal interaction. I see the cook in the restaurant as being easier to eliminate than the wait staff.
So, I'm pretty sure this article is a problem.