Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Part of the discussion that stuck in my mind: "As all the people who left being blacksmiths, and stable boys, and equestrians and carriage drivers ... However, the birth of the automobile industry also gave rise to an industry constructing roads, it also gave rise to the motel and travel industry. It also gave rise to the fast-food industry. And so even though, in fact, net employment in personal transportation declined with the advent of the automobile, it gave rise to a whole bunch of new things that weren’t really on anybody’s list that we could do now that we that we had this additional leisure, additional wealth, and additional flexibility that came from not having to spend so much of our time on transportation."
Thats a lot of faith to put in an idea that dosent even have an actual conclusion.
In the past when automation happened and jobs kept rolling it was due to the invention of new industries. So of course no one can say where the jobs of tomorrow will come from. Then again no one can really adequately explain why "this time it's different" with automation. Ever since the luddites, people have been projecting the death of work due to automation. Every time they're positive that this time is different.
History suggests though that new industries will pop up to provide goods and services that no one had the time to make in our pre-automation state of toil. Human beings aren't going to stop being inventive, or stop wanting cool new stuff.
Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900's talking about technology. One horse worries all these new mechanical muscles will make horses unnecessary. The other horse reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier. Remember all that farm work? Remember running from coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding into battle? All terrible. These new city jobs are pretty cushy, and with so many humans in the cities, there will be more jobs for horses than ever. "Even if this car thingy takes off," he might say, "there will be new jobs for horses we can't imagine."
But you know what happened: There are still working horses today, but nothing like before. The horse population peaked in 1915. From that point on, it was nothing but down.
There isn't a rule of economics that says "better technology makes more better jobs for horses." It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud. But swap "horses" for "humans," and suddenly people think it sounds about right.
Besides that of course, horses were valued for their muscles and not for their smarts. For as much as we as a community go on about AI, the robotics community hasn't even cost-effictively automated washing, drying, and folding laundry. To say that they're going to automate most knowledge work seems to me to be beyond grandiose. Not saying it's impossible, just not on any near-term timeline.
Until and unless they are completely and utterly without alternatives most humans will not look to be creative, plan for the future or look for work. Even when they don't have a choice, look at the amount of work government puts into helping them do so, and for how little result. When it comes to living among 20-30 year olds, they simply recently were without alternatives, and were creative and looking. But only for a short while. Some of them for a few years, but those are exceptions.
I would even go further. In regions where an economic collapse utterly devastated the local economy and completely wiped it off the face of the earth, there are plenty of humans. There are such regions in Africa and in Asia (requirement seems to be that a human must reasonably be able to survive the winter there, so they are located close to the equator). The humans living there are not looking to improve their (very, very, very bad) situation.
I disagree with the point you're making as well. You have to go back some ways, but essentially from the peak of the Roman Empire, at least until the renaissance (we're talking about a good millenium here), unemployment (non-subsistence labour) was going up. Well, it was going up for a few hundred years until it got deep in the 90%, and then it remained there for the rest of the millenium. Obviously, local huge swings were common (e.g. wars). Some say that entire religions (ie. islam) are essentially the result of the employment situation at the end of the Roman Empire (and specifically the raiding in that religion). The economic story of the world is very much not a story of continual improvement.
So that humans do not try to improve their situation even goes down to zero. Even when the economic situation gets so bad that you're unlikely to survive your twenties (well, technically you're unlikely to make it to 1 year old, but if you get to 1 year old, odds are good you'll make 25, not much more though). Even under a situation that bad, the incredibly trivial efforts needed to improve that are not getting done (mostly basic sanitation). I am not talking about regions with famine, quite the opposite. I'm talking about regions where humans can survive growing zero food, so there never is any famine, never any need for anything but the most basic amount of work. You get basic shelter, you eat berries and you on occasion make a fire and roast some small animals.
So no, it is very much not a given that the economic situation recovers. Not a given at all. If you take the total amount of time that the human race existed and you take the years where recovery "always" happened, and you compare with time where the economic situation allowed for nothing other than subsistence farming, you will find that subsistence economics doesn't just dominate, everything else is so small that you'd better use a log scale and even then ...
We live in a period that is incredibly, incredibly much better than any other period in history, but it's duration (so far) is utterly insignificant. Is it the beginning of an open-ended incredible period of history ? Could be. Seems like a long shot when you look at the long term though. A very, very, VERY long shot.
Many animals have had such periods. Periods where economics made so much sense that they utterly dominated the world for a short while. Some even used tools, though of course we do it quite a bit more. None of those animals' golden ages lasted. Are we truly sufficiently different ?
You're saying that it's not a given that the economic situation will recover. That's clearly true -- but it's not evidence of the contrary -- that the economy won't recover.
Horses (tame horses) are another example of cultural adaptation. Those have very different behavior from wild horses, and certainly haven't evolved differently (well, only certain breeds, and not that much).
Animals making behavior changes based on whether they're the dominant predator or not are a dime a dozen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_dam
Another spectacular example of an animal building can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySXCdcnKBgg
Note, no that spider did not just dig himself in. He dug a hole first, then took a piece of wood, arranged surface stuff on it and then used a spider web to attach it to a "heavy" (relatively speaking) branch he dragged on top of his hole. The result is a trapdoor. And a heart attack.
Other kinds of buildings and infrastructure animals build so they can live further away are of course burrows and holes of all kinds. They protect animals that otherwise would not be able to find shelter from predators during the night (or in cases, during the day), and massively expand the areas where these animals can survive. In many cases those burrows are a conscious choice. If enough easy shelter is available they do not build burrows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structures_built_by_animals
Termite mounds are another example of structures that can be baffling in size (the above ground portion can be as big as a house, the underground portion can be bigger than an aircraft carrier). These structures come fully loaded. They have nurseries, food storage, "farms" for other insects, entrances and exits complete with checkpoints, army barracks, contact points with water streams (quite ingenious ones I might add, you'd think that water would flow in and destroy the whole thing), internal highways, ... Some papers allude that quite a few of them even contain underground trade routes with neighboring termite camps along which they trade commodities.
Ants are well known for selectively breeding both the plants needed for their cattle, and their cattle. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant#Relationships_with_other_o...
Animals cooperate to achieve common goals. The obvious behavior that gets that is reproduction in solitary species. Hunting in packs. Trekking in packs (from wolves to birds). But I guess you'd want something more "economic" for an example. Ok, let's see. How about Weaver nests ? They're a pretty fucking direct example of building something with -and at least partially for- your neighbor.
None of these publications ever run with a solution to the problem. How about increased funding for employee retraining programs? I could see high ROI from that.
This is a good thing, and I agree with it. But, you are assuming an axiom that is breaking down:
There are enough jobs for everyone at a wage capable of supporting a family.
That is no longer true.
Watching the current kerfuffle in the Central Valley of California has been constructive. "We can't get people to do back breaking labor at $12 an hour now that they got rid of the illegal immigrants! WAH!" Well, at $12 an hour, which is below the official poverty level for a family of four, you are probably better to work at a fast food restaurant which is less work and not seasonal. So, nobody will work those farms.
Funny how shortage always seems to go hand in hand with below average pay. Funny how if the wage rises enough, there isn't any shortage anymore.
I guarantee that $20 an hour will find people to pick those fields.
> they shift the vitriol from foreigners who took our jobs to machines who took our jobs.
Your rhetoric is exactly the same as 100 years ago. I prescribe a trip to the Johnstown Heritage Center:
http://www.jaha.org/attractions/heritage-discovery-center/ http://www.jaha.org/attractions/heritage-discovery-center/hd...
The real problem is that the gains from automation have flowed to a very small number of people. If we don't figure out how to reverse that, we're going to be in very big trouble.
On the other hand, if we survive the worst effects, the world might come closer to a post-scarcity society.
Once we escape the notion that working is necessary to be a member of what is now called working-class society, we'll be better off. Those who want to live on little can live on little. Those who want more can learn a trade to get more. And those who have the most will support those who have nothing, because the alternative is worse.
Normally, it's easy to dismiss statements that are all-or-nothing propositions. Usually the person making the statement lacks imagination. Isn't there some alternative?
Unfortunately, there seems to be a >90% likelihood that the answer in this case is no: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Once you accept that there is no choice other than giving people money to survive, the focus can shift to accomplishing that goal rather than dwelling on whether it might lead to economic collapse.
http://blog.samaltman.com/technology-and-wealth-inequality
> However, if we cannot find a new kind of work for billions of people, we’ll be faced with a new idle class. The obvious conclusion is that the government will just have to give these people money, and there’s been increasing talk about a “basic income”—i.e, any adult who wanted it could have, say, $15,000 a year.
> You can run the numbers in a way that sort of makes sense—if we did this for every adult in the US, it’d be about $3.5 trillion a year, or a little more than 20% of our GDP. However, we’d knock out a lot of existing entitlement spending, maybe 10% of GDP. And we’d probably phase it out for people making over a certain threshold, which could cut it substantially.
What makes you say so? Consumer surplus has been enormous, hasn't it?
Arguing against robotics is the same as arguing against computers and it is the same as arguing against assembly lines and it is the same as arguing against electricity.
You are arguing against the entire industrial revolution. On a website powered by the Internet and electricity to talk about technology.
So many people have some kind of unshakable faith that millions of new jobs are going to materialize once a huge percentage of the population has been made redundant by automation.
Can you name any, even in theory? What happens when a machine is better than a human in almost every conveivable occupation? Nobody has any good answers as to where these millions of jobs are going to materalize from.
This time is going to be different.
You can't demonize robots, they are non-living. If anyone is being demonized, it will the corporations who are moving from human to automated labor in order to cut costs. If 670,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990 have been shifted from humans to robots, it seems only fair to point that out.
> None of these publications ever run with a solution to the problem.
Probably because it's hard and involves ideas like guaranteed basic income and 'robot taxes' that are very unlikely to be popular in the US due to social attitudes. Perhaps such articles will lead to the change of those attitudes.
I'd say the real problem is a massive defect in what we imagine the goals of education should be. I read a novel once, I can't remember the name, but basically the galaxy-wide standard for being considered an adult us building your own spacesuit.
Step 1: tax all income equally (not flat rate, just not favoring particular forms), rather than having disfavorable taxation on labor (which basically amounts to a "robot tax subsidy".)
Step 2: if step 1 isn't enough, and you need to encourage hiring human labor more than eliminating the tax disincentive does, provide favorable tax treatment for labor income. (Which isn't exactly a robot tax, but has the same practical effect between robots and human labor.)
I do agree, taxes on labor income should be lower than capital gains, rather than higher as it is today. But the division is between those who own capital and those those who don't. The lower capital gains tax favors those who make money by investing, rather than producing. Laborers are producers, but so are manufacturing companies. A person who buys himself a robot or two and produces more with it is more productive, but he's still going to pay the labor tax rate, not the capital gains rate.
IMO, the answer to taxation is to tax capital gains highly (significantly higher than labor), and also have very strong progressive tax rates for both labor and capital gains. So, some laborer saving his money in an IRA will (eventually, when he withdraws it) pay taxes on the capital gains, but not that much because he probably didn't save that much anyway. Some laborer investing a few $k into some stock and doubling his money will pay higher taxes on that gain, but again not that much because it's still not that much money. A billionaire making a huge gain in stocks OTOH will pay a much higher tax rate on that gain, and a lot overall in taxes. A millionaire who owns a privately-held manufacturing company will pay a much higher rate than one of his laborer employees, however he won't pay as much as a millionaire who just lives off of investments (unless he sells that company).
Did any tasks have to be performed with the suit worn?
Was there a bonus for including a "head" in the suit, at least for the shorter term functions?
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For a generally less risk filled and short term exposure environment, a skin tight pressure suit with a helmet might work out. I recall reading about such a suit in one short story, but I don't know if an actual engineer has commented on it. It could be useful as an emergency life support suit.
It would have to be a balancing act. My guess is "probably not", because mass-producing modified photos wasn't a big source of jobs done by humans in the past.
Manufacturing industries where you could show a direct "1 robot replaced these 200 humans" causal relationship would (hypothetically) be the ones to be taxed.
Many "Job Killers" include retraining programs. Eg, Nafta, and proposed Coal -> Green energy jobs. I think Obama proposed some others as well in 2010.
Two issues.
1) Some subset of people see these as 'handouts' and want 'their job'. Additionally, if you've been doing X for 20 years the pay is always going to be lower to jump to doing Y now.
2) Training can be crowded. Beyond a waiting list. If a town of 10k loses 500 factory jobs and they go to a training program to be an HVAC tech, the town will be unable to support all 500 new HVAC jobs.
The near term mitigation is stop taxing labor excessively making it more expensive to hire workers; preferential taxation of capital income and funding social programs by payroll tax (and, as in the case of health insurance, employer mandates, which amount to the same thing as payroll taxes on the employees of covered employers) rather than general revenue combine to form a strong disincentive to get work done with human labor when there are alternatives.
Whichever political party has the ear of working people disenfranchised in meaningful numbers from their jobs, will absolutely consider regulating robots every bit as much as they regulate immigrant workers. Protectionism is a trap every party has fallen into from time to time.
I just purchased my second welding robot. It is a Miller/Panasonic PA-750S with a 92" welding turntable. We make truck accessories with it. I bought a made in Boston laser cutter at the same time, a 4000w IPG LaserCube.
All this new machinery lets us build in one (168 hour) week what we could build in 2015. And it took only one lease payment down to finance - about $8000.00, with another 59 payments of $8000ish to go - so I don't buy the "only the super wealthy can buy robots" idea. Some people on HN have paid that much for an office desk! These machines can make product to completely pay for themselves in one month, if you can get the work for them.
By purchasing these machines, I was able to get some deals that would have gone to China. Then I had to hire 4 new people to run them, and we had to go to working 24/7 from only 40 hours a week before. All of this to make a product that would not sell as well if it had to be priced at human weld costs. The robots are at least 3x more productive than the human doing the same part - if you have enough units to do. 30 minutes of change over time between programs can waste any times savings.
So in my anecdotal experience, everytime I add another automated machine, costs go down, prices go down, sales go way up, payroll goes up a little. I have to keep hiring humans. and I pay them bonuses that they seem pretty happy with. This doesn't count the machine manufacturers, their traveling support staff, the leasing companies who lent the money, etc. etc.
I have friends with manufacturing companies in completely different industries that have the same experience.
If anyone is in Tucson Arizona, you are welcome to come by. I will show you how easy it is to program the robot. It will take me 20 minutes to teach you how to make a basic weld.
I doubt many people on HN have paid $500,000 for an office desk
Robots are for the little people too - not just MegaCorp.
But of course I have chosen the "get a job building the robots" path, so you can apply a bias filter to what I say if you like.
> 'Why Are We Doing This to Ourselves?’ Readers Respond to the Threat of Automation
should be discouraged if the US desires to have any manufacturing capability at all.
Software is no different; I've coded many applications that have eliminated human labor. Obviously I still need to code them but the point is that the overall labor is smaller.
The huge issue is going to be robots displacing the low level human jobs...
* Burger flipper 1000
* Fryalator 950
* Pizza Kiosk 2000
* Johnny Cab
* ConstructUtron (builder of buildings, and welder of many standard joints)How many of you are engaged in providing a product or service that was inconceivable in 1800? I couldn't even describe what I do to an 1800 era person.
I.e. there isn't a fixed amount of work to be done.
Well, training and experience aren't free. You can't just show up and start welding things. There's apprenticeships or union schools or maybe you're lucky enough know someone with a welding kit, but you need to learn how to weld first. It's not entirely one of those artificial market barriers. Bad welds can create structural integrity issues and can be difficult to fix so they've got to be done right the first time. It's skilled labor, and skills take time to acquire.
These newly created jobs require some kind of capital to access. Could be just money to pay for education, or could be social capital of knowing the right people, or time spent learning the skill, but you're not gonna show up for the job. There's plenty of reasons why someone would have trouble finding that capital. Maybe they work to help support the family and don't have the time for education. There could be any number of reasons though that getting new skills is difficult, and there's no mail room for you to start in and work your way up to management. What happens when you can't afford bootstraps?
Also, as industries change or new industries are created, this can make it harder to transition to other industries if your skills don't transfer. You better have some savings or safety net while you retrain for a new industry if yours is collapsing. So, while I'm not sold that we'll have widespread unemployment, but I think it's more likely that social mobility takes a hit and the inequality gap widens.
There's some evidence that this is already happening and while more people are graduating the number of jobs requiring those degrees isn't increasing as fast, so higher skilled workers are pushing lower skilled workers down the ladder.
Not to mention that things are changing faster and faster (that exponential innovation curve), so changes that could wait for a new generation will need to be addressed sooner.
I mean you mentioned the print workers who were hand setting typeface until quite recently.
What did they do after their industry collapsed. Probably a lot of them became taxi drivers or took on other "equivalent" labor centric endeavors.
There might not be a fixed amount of work to go around, but there certainly is a fixed amount of vocations that people are willing to pay money for, and that displaced workers can reasonably be expected to move into... And that bell curve does appear to be being squeezed tremendously.
Of course there will always be people in the supply chain, but fewer. Maybe a lot fewer, in the long run.