Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

Actual OECD study: [1]

The study says that, for the US, 9% of people are at "high risk" of automated out of a job. (That probably means "replaceable right now".) But 38% of people are potentially replaceable.

There's an assumption in the OECD report that the entire job of a human must be replaced. But that's not how automation works. We're seeing this in the more advanced law firms. What used to take a senior attorney, a few junior attorneys, a large number of paralegals, and a big clerical staff can now be done by one attorney, one paralegal, and a lot of software and databases. The OECD study claims that the risk to people with high levels of education is almost nil. Ask any newly graduated lawyer trying to get a job.

That's the fundamental flaw in this study - it assumes one for one replacement. What really happens is that the workflow is restructured so that fewer people and more hardware are involved.

[1] http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/5jlz9h56dvq7...

Sigh. It doesn't matter. People have this bizarre conception of the economy as an exact lock-fit between jobs and work that needs doing, and they have a hard time imagining changes to that fit, even though throughout human history there has been constant change.

In truth there is a nearly infinite amount of work that needs doing. We just get by with most of the work not being done. Just go back in time and think about all the work that wasn't being done before various jobs existed. There used to be a time before the video games industry existed, there was a time before the movie industry existed, there was a time before people could support themselves as authors or journalists or watch-makers.

Are we going to live in some sort of world where there's a pool of unused labor and people just sit around thinking "whelp, it's a shame there's literally nothing, no possible thing, for them to do, oh well"? Of course not, that's a fantasy that's based on a complete misperception of economics. No matter how much we automate there will always be work for people to do. The more important question is how equitably they'll be compensated for that work and whether or not our education system is adequate for the world as it exists.

Hm. The subtitle is "Destruction of large numbers of jobs unlikely, says new OECD Study", but the very first table gives a list of percent of jobs automatable by country. It ranges from 7-12%. That is a HELL of a lot of jobs. The argument is, "have no fear! it won't be 47% of jobs automated!" -- only 10%. 10% job loss is a labor crisis. Of course if you have all of those retrainable as other jobs (including automation supervisor) then maybe it won't be too bad, but that seems pretty unlikely and this article doesn't exactly quell concerns.

"However, low qualified workers are likely to bear the brunt of the adjustment costs as the automatibility of their jobs is higher compared to highly qualified workers. Therefore, the likely challenge for the future lies in coping with rising inequality and ensuring sufficient (re-)training especially for low qualified workers."

Would seem that the 'low qualified' worker is the prevailing demographic. So that alone should make the risk, as an overall percentage, much higher than 10.

FWIW, my employer has been targeting all levels of workers for past several years. HR is gone, warehouse people down 65%, engineering down 40%, logistics down 30%, production down 35%. Mostly through process automation, some through robotics, and some through out-sourcing. And there has been a careful and selective 'firing' of customers. Both Net and Gross have significantly increased for three years. As for me, just sit here and write the code to do some of this. Am I evil?

Honestly, I read these studies and think nobody writing them has any idea of what these jobs actually entail. Driving a truck is not the be all and end all of being a truck driver. The driver covers a great many tasks, from admin and security, to safety inspections, to dealing with law enforcement and boarder guards. I see no talk of how the robot is to replace those functions.

I do see sweeping statements about rebuilding entire infrastructures in order to accommodate robots (ie doing away with roadside safety inspections or eliminating boarder crossings). Every day I see ships come into harbour. Creating an autopilot for a ship is simple compared to one for a trucks. Yet every day a speedboat heads out to deliver the harbour pilot, and tugboat captains stand guard as tankers approach the bridge. Automation has failed to remove any of those jobs. The engine room crews may be a little smaller than in days past but the bridge crews, the drivers, are still there. We wouldn't have it any other way.

And aircraft ... and trains ...

The actual study is a bit more detailed and it suggests some interesting things.

One is the evolution of work and jobs over time. As a pretty relevant example, the migration of shopping to "online" vs in store means two things; First you don't need the goods in a metro area, and second you need to get them to the customers. If you replace all current "shopping" traffic with "delivery" traffic it really cuts into the buyer's experience (waiting for delivery) but drone delivery allows the delivery component to scale. Of course drone delivery has to be reasonably local, but needn't be closer than a 10 miles or so, that means a "town" outside of the city that is well served by cargo container delivery can then provide the point where bulk delivery switches to individual delivery. That implies a economies with the movement of containers above and beyond the current system of trains and trucks. Either additional rail networks or lots more trucks. If those trucks are automatable, well that helps as well.

So if we imagine some "delivery only" roads where only robotic trucks are allowed, that lead to warehouses where end product dispersal is done, to smaller warehouses where local delivery can be queued/expedited. Walk that backwards to figure out the things you need in order to deploy that.

At which point it would be interesting to evaluate the energy efficiency of that system over the current one to make sure what you get back in efficiency by automation you don't spend on additional energy.

Their conclusion doesn't follow from their numbers.

> Overall, we find that, on average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 % of jobs are automatable.

As in, right freaking now? Blimey, what about the next few decades, then? Not to mention that 9% is already a big number.

That being said, the more automation the better. We just need something better than punishing the jobless with poverty.

OECD deemed wrong. Replaced by robots.

We have seen exactly the same fear with the appearance of machines and automation in the industry after the war. Look at historical news footage and people were concerned that this would lead to massive losses of jobs. And it did, the industry is a lot less labour intensive today, at least in the western world. But jobs were created elsewhere and the economy adapted.

Beside, with outsourcing to China, there aren't that many manufacturing jobs left in the US and Europe for robots to take anyway. I think where robots will have a huge potential is for domestic tasks: cleaning your home, taking parcels while you're away, preparing food, doing the laundry and ironing. A home robot that would do all that would have a huge market. But they are not going to replace an existing workforce, rather free up time for women (who still predominantly bear the burden of these tasks) and enable them to focus on their career.

I think there could be another wave of automation in the service industry, but it wouldn't be robots, just software. Today there are a huge number of manual tasks done in the service industry: processing invoices, preparing financial accounts, payslips, paying a lawyer to rewrite the same contract over and over, etc. Some of that can be automated by outsourcing it to a provider who has the means to automate it, but a huge fraction is just too specific, customized to a business, to justify paying for an IT team to build software for it. The way to automate it is for business people to build their own automation. In a way Microsoft Office has done partially that (an accountant with Excel has the productivity of 50 accountants from the 50s) but I think we can gain another order of magnitude of productivity by enable people to code. For that, basic coding skills should be widely deployed, in a very simple and highly productive language. And I am not convinced this language already exists.

Nitpick :

>OECD Working Papers should not be reported as representing the official views of the OECD or of its member countries.

And yet they always are.

Numbers wise, even if Frey and Osborne's supposedly apocalyptic numbers are correct that's 47% job destruction over 20+ years, or roughly 2.35% per annum. Since we already destroy between 10% and 15% [0] of jobs annually (depending on where you are and who's doing the measuring) this really doesn't represent that big a shift. Given some of this is likely due to automation anyway, the lower figures given in this paper would barely register.

[0] http://econweb.umd.edu/~haltiwan/c12451.pdf

A model of human work:

- The number of people occupied per industry is inversely proportional to the number of industries in existence.

- The barrier to entry is also inversely proportional to the number of industries in existence.

The process for every new industry generally goes something like this:

- Stage 1: mostly makers (100%)

- Stage 2: some makers (25%) + some operators of some tech that raises general efficiency (25%) (50% slowly moves to some new industry)

- Stage 3: few makers (5%) + some operators (10%) + some supervisors of some autonomous tech that maximizes efficiency (10%) (25% slowly moves to some new industry)

Was this process historically painless and ultra efficient? No! Did it do the job again and again with some acceptable level of efficiency? Yes!

The argument that this time is different this will stop working is getting stronger and stronger.

I personally think that is not the case. With some pain that require good policy, up and downs and so on this is the way we operate, we adapt.

Take prostitution (the oldest job in the world!), the next thing is robots yes, but also cam girls. Lower barrier to entry and maybe even bigger industry with lots of specialization.

And next thing for cam girls? Is of course virtual cam girls but also avatar builders/modelers/players even lower barrier to entry and potentially bigger industry and so on.

Let's see if a deep learning system outperforms OECD economists on this question.

We should also be asking, who owns the robots? If companies like Foxconn go robo-conn and move to 70% automation [0], that's not only a million people being fired, it's a business owning an automated labor force that doesn't employ people, yet produces goods. If we can calculate how much labor these robots do compared to humans, one solutions would be for the government to tax the fuck out of robots to protect jobs and to compensate for rising social service costs (assuming the paranoia over job growth has merit). Of course, that's also what they could have done to counter the market dumping by overseas outsourcing, but they didn't give a fuck. Much automation has also happened in US factories a while ago with bottling and food and high-tech. To the government's credit though, we survived.

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[0] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2941272/emerging-techno...

The most imminent threat to jobs that I can identify is drivers. Taxi's, trucks, delivery vehicles and buses.

We can see rapid improvement of self-driving technology. For sure, tech moves into mainstream more slowly than we generally imagine it will, but the sheer numbers of persons who could be displaced make even a relatively protracted implementation a big problem. Drive through Mountain View, Ca. on any given day and you'll see multiple Google autonomous vehicles. Uber, Apple, Tesla, GM, Volvo, .. most major auto companies, some minor companies and even non-auto companies are working on it with a high level of focus.

Two aspects of this movement may inhibit widespread deployment and slow the rate of robotic vehicles subsuming human jobs:

- The pace of legislation and the attending regulatory infrastructure. Governments are cooperating for the most part, likely attracted by the prospect of safer transportation in general. So I think this will not materially delay the roll out.

- The dilution of talent as these efforts compete for technologists may slow the progress of all of them, unless individual engineering leaders can attract and retain the top people.

The numbers look like this (2014), [1], [2], [3], [4]:

233,700 Taxi

665,000 Bus

1,797,700 Semi/Tractor-Trailer

1,330,000 Delivery

In 2014, that was roughly 4 million people who make a living driving. And the 2 most valuable companies in the world, Google and Apple, are working very hard to put these drivers out of work. What makes it particularly difficult is that these workers are typically uneducated and will have no place to go except minimum wage service jobs. Moreover, many former manufacturing workers took these driving jobs as a downgrade to income. And it looks like they have another target on their back.

Where do they go from here? Speaking for myself, I think the country has a moral obligation to make some accommodation and not just wave our hands a bit and say 'oh, they'll be fine'.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/ta...

[2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/bu...

[3] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/he...

[4] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/de...

Find it entertaining that a GLM is the best method to detect whether a job or job class is at risk.

Tell that to horses?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Nobody has commented on that Russia only has 2% of jobs that they see are easily automated. That feels utterly ridiculous

OECD Study recreating easy says Neural Network

I'm just going to have to build better robots then, aren't I?

I'd say it's inevitable. The actual important question is when.

9% is a lot. Globalization is the biggest problem though. Also, I think, is the realization that consumption is destroying the planet. This leads to higher consumption taxes (thank god) and more bartering via things like craigslist.

This piece is utter trash founded on baseless assumptions.

>Arntz, et al. argue that the estimated share of “jobs at risk” must not be equated with actual or expected employment losses from technological advances for three reasons.

So in other words, the title is false. Actual employment loss is what is at issue here.

>The utilisation of new technologies is a slow process, due to economic, legal and societal hurdles, so that technological substitution often does not take place as expected.

The first ridiculous assertion. Jobs wont be destroyed because it will take a long time to destroy them!

>Even if new technologies are introduced, workers can adjust to changing technological endowments by switching tasks, thus preventing technological unemployment.

Asinine assertion #2. People will just get new jobs when robots take their jobs! (of course what new jobs will be available is left unsaid).

>Technological change also generates additional jobs through demand for new technologies and through higher competitiveness.

Asinine assertion #3, virtually the same as #2. What new jobs will be created by the automated vehicles that put tens of millions of drivers out of work?

This article reads very much like the tripe offered by those who continue to argue that NAFTA and related "free trade deals" are actually good for workers.