Predictions of massive job losses to automation miss data that show the opposite
foxbusiness.com
foxbusiness.com
Isn't that already the case? I read that most of the jobs created since 2009 are in the low-paying service sector.
The problem is the financial crisis permanently gutted a lot of middle-class professional jobs.
This has less to do with automation and more to do with structural changes in the labor force and economy.
Not just elevator operators and dirigible pilots. A massive chunk of economic activity is going to look silly in a decade. Pretty much everything regarded as a summer job for high school teenagers is game, and that leaves a considerable number of normal, employable adults out in the cold too.
Magazines are pretty much already dead, and everything that went with them shrank. Music and movies have imploded hard enough to show signs of serious stress. Shops, department stores and big box retail are off balance, and will fall over before 2030.
It's going to be pretty rough. Think about your first job, and the summer jobs your high school classmates had. Will your kids hold the same jobs? I doubt it.
Both of those numbers are already creeping up, economically coerced crap jobs aside.
I believe we're already seeing that, with the job markets losing professional jobs but gaining service industry jobs.
I think it's a distraction to talk about employment numbers without talking about the quality of the jobs in question -- sharecroppers and CEOs both have a job, but their lives are radically different.
The simple conclusion is that unless you have something to provide in exchange, no one will give you anything in return.
>He (Amartya Sen) presents data that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at the time, but particular groups of people including rural landless labourers and urban service providers like haircutters did not have the means to buy food as its price rose rapidly due to factors
As long as someone owns the factory or the company, they expect to be paid. Thats not going to go away overnight.
And since robots are not going to be perfect, there will always be jobs that human beings will be employed to do. The employers will in turn expect to get their money's worth for those jobs.
Instead of jobs going away, theres going to be a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
Walking a dog - ain't going to be automated any time soon. Filling shelves in a supermarket - I am not aware of any automation on the way for this, though it may be. Whitewater rafting guide - no chance that is getting automated.
The question is what do those markets offer in return?
Yeah, but it wasn't robots that got us here, it was rather more mundane - union busting, offshoring and outsourcing.
Robots are a rather convenient scapegoat though.
The financial crisis was simply symptomatic of that (middle class households were forced to swap rising incomes for more and more debt).
One other note, while I do believe that automation will cause massive job losses eventually, there exists an alternative narrative. Centered around the knowledge that: 'you don't know you don't know,' we just have no idea which jobs will emerge as a result of new industries powered by automation.
What does seem evident is that concentrated education at the beginning of an adult's life is unlikely to be enough in the future. Investment in education reform and adult education seems critical, whether or not automation causes large scale unemployment.
The question is, if you believe AI will eventually catch up with all jobs that exist today, what skill could a significant portion of the population possibly have at that point, that the AIs would not also match?
Perhaps we'll have social constructs to provide jobs, similar to how people are willing to overpay for designer goods instead of copies (e.g. maybe 'hand-crafted' will take on a whole new meaning). But from a solely economic perspective, it seems like a matter of when, not if, an AI could more efficiently do most jobs.
Companies can talk about cost reducing by cutting their workforce all they want, but I wonder how many stop and think how that would negatively impact the purchasing power of their former employees.
Saying it's only about who pays is not really doing justice to the problems of the American medical system.
everyone will become a youtuber and other "personality" based jobs.
If somebody cherry-picks data to show 'some job growth' somewhere, and claims that disproves that automation is hurting jobs, then they haven't tried to get a job in manufacturing in the last decade; and forget any chance at promotion because there's no path from 'menial floor box-mover' to anything like engineering or management.
Higher wages, god beware!
More generally, the article seems to follow a pattern I've seen in a number of "there is no problem" articles: They concentrate stoically on the present. Maybe we don't have massive job loss due to automation just yet (and even that is disputed), but we also don't yet have self-driving cars in widespread use (not to mention trucks), the retailers haven't yet gotten rid of their cashiers and Amazon's warehouses are still mostly run by people - yet all those things are predicted to happen in a the next decades.
So think a discussion about future developments is more useful than stating that everything is fine right now. (Though even that seems questionable to me. If we're in such a job miracle as the article states, why did so many people vote trump? Mass delusion?)
Ever since, I've stopped believing that we'll have massive job losses due to automation (self driving cars are the only big counter example).
But... will there ever be 'robotics' jobs? I would think most jobs would be really specific like a type of machine learning or computer vision etc.
Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? A "robotics engineer" in my mind is someone who evaluates the problem needing to be automated and then finds a solution to automate it. That solution may include machine learning or computer vision, but not necessarily. There are lots of problems that can be solved more effectively in different ways.
Although the fact that you point to founders here, and echoing that there is little viability in a career as a "robotics" engineer, emphasizes the earlier comments.
The OP said something to the effect of: I don't see jobs for Robotics engineers. (as evidence that robotics is not an expanding field).
I said something like: You won't see jobs for 'robotics engineers' you will see jobs for specific purposes.
> They are going to hire an automation firm staffed with "robotics engineers".
Exactly. If a company doesn't know how to solve their problem and all they want to do is automate stuff, they will hire a consultancy to tell them who to hire. The consultancy will hire specialists (i.e. not 'robotics engineers') and the large company will hire specialists and project managers. There will never be job postings for robotics engineers, all while the number of people working on robotics increases dramatically.
The thing that can still happen is an inflection point, where the up front capital investment needed for automation becomes low enough that hiring any labor stops making sense.
But food and shelter aren't the only costs. Healthcare keeps getting more and more expensive, and that can't be automated. If for no other reason than liability concerns. Any industry that can't' be automated will become disproportionately more expensive relative to everything else.
Houses don't get more expensive, not in proportion to wages. And the costs of urban housing is land costs, which are dictated by government policies driven by NIMBYS. Cheap robots can build cheap apartments a thousand feet high to save on land costs, or cheap houses on cheap desert land.
The coming robot apocalypse is actual nirvana.
Also, it's not just robotics but machinery - the coal mining jobs in Appalachia disappeared to lessened demand but the number of jobs would have gone down severely in any case due to mechanization made possible by mountain top removal. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/coal-co...
Automation and moving to surface mining (probably because it was more automatible so basically "automation") account for most of that change.
>“Robot” is shorthand for any device or algorithm that does what humans once did, from mechanical combines and thermostats to dishwashers and airfare search sites.
"Software engineer" counts in some ways too, and that's sure growing.
From personal experience, I can tell you that transitioning from software to robotics is not trivial. It's also very frustrating. Software is typically much faster and cheaper to debug and fix than anything hardware related...
This trend has been hard on farmers; I happen to know several. But I don't think we want to return to that time.
Nor do I think basic income/farm subsidies is a good answer.
The trend didn't stop in 1920. It's necessarily slowed in absolute workforce percentages of course, but even now agriculture is becoming increasingly mechanized (requiring massive capital investment).
Of course, they were mostly replaced by other jobs. But the jobs still disappeared.
[Assuming the number of jobs is constant]
[edit] Apparently the population grew massively over this period. From about 23 million to about 123 million. So there was actually an overall doubling of the total number of farming jobs. Just not proportionate to the population increase. http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html
But some combination of "keep farming like I always have" or "grow up keeping farming like Dad" wasn't supported by economic realities.
(FYI, farming automation was much of the reason the population was able to grow by that much.)
Bigger populations always require more food, child care, accountants, etc.
From 1840 to 1920 farmers per-capita shrunk immensely.
The environmental cost of modern agricultural approaches is very high and is having knock on effects, food quality isn't always of the highest nutritional quality and crops will suffer as dead humus from petro-chemical based fertiliser retains no water, more water means higher food costs as it grows more scarce due to climate change and over population.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt society if a few more "skilled farmers" worked with/closer to the land.
In my ruralish community, irrigation water is less than 1/10 the price of potable water, because it is so much easier to produce.
Do civil wars[1] count as "free markets"?
My great-grandparents were homesteading in the 1900s.
My grandfather was still using some horse drawn equipment in the 1940s-1950s, to farm on maybe 110 acres.
So the barriers to farming for survival didn't go up very fast.
So activities that provide needed social capital aren't going anywhere. In fact, some may become quite more valuable. Things like white water rafting or fashion consultant. Things that involve the rote production of life-sustaining products? Sure. If your job can be replaced by a robot, it will be. There are many, many jobs that can't -- and my money says there are a lot more of those kinds of jobs coming down the pike.
If that doesn't persuade you, imagine a world with strong AI where robots can produce anything you like. Would humans suddenly stop trading for things or collecting things? Of course not, in fact, it would become highly more nuanced. We're going to see industries emerge that seem incredibly stupid by modern standards, but which will be immensely influential as time goes on. The fact that we can't predict the future is a feature, not a bug of our existence.
Having said all of that, it's certainly possible that we'll see a lot of economic stress in the coming few decades. Just like in the previous few decades. Perhaps even as much stress as we had during the Great Depression. But it's always been like that.
Let's imagine I build a feature that makes it twice as fast for us to close a sale in our pipeline. Do we cut half our sales force? Of course not--we would rather keep all the people and make double the sales. This brings us even more revenue, which we use to hire more sales people and more software developers, growing the company and providing more jobs.
Perhaps this simple logic can't apply to all cases, but I've certainly seen it apply a lot!
Automation is not something that happens slowly in this context. Self driving car research has no impact on the auto industry until the moment tremendous savings can be had in this financial quarter at which point we see the destruction of millions of jobs.
Cell phones were not a slow burn advance. The Internet did not slowly take off. These things exploded in (economically speaking) blinks of the eye, and the same happens in every other industrial capacity for automation.
The barrier is the up front opportunity cost to bring down the wall and take the costs to that short term economic projection - as long as it costs $150k to replace a $50k truck driver, no publicly traded company is going to do that en masse. It hurts this quarters results too much to accept.
The fervor is not about slow burn automation. That has been happening since the industrial revolution, but it is important to not conflict role optimization with role obsolescence. We don't have elevator operators anymore. We still have farmers. The foresight is to see that we will have innovations that eliminate labor classes overnight, that they won't have an impact until they are deleting industries, and that the opportunity cost to get there is a pill few are willing to swallow so the outcomes get delayed. But we can see they are inevitable, in the same way climate change is an inevitable catastrophe that to many seems not to matter until New York City is under water and we have a billion humans dying of famine in a desertified equatorial region.
We are very good at creating bullshit jobs[1] to fill the gradual innovative automation. The job optimization that creeps through every domain constantly pounds us so we create more bullshit jobs to keep the economic system afloat. Instead of looking at statistics relating to peak employment, look at worker satisfaction and confidence that what they do actually means something. Those numbers are telling on how many people actually feel like they are making a real economic contribution[2].
[1] http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...
[2] https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningles...
I just want to postfix this with anyone can make up numbers or just use the numbers out there to rewrite history into their favor. You can make a legitimate argument that automation is fake, that worker satisfaction is high, and that this is all fearmongering. If so, I would ask why there is so much civil unrest surrounding it globally. The statistics and numbers might all be bullshit commissioned by biased interests, but the macroscopic behavior of people can reflect the reality. The entire global movement towards isolationist nationalism and totalitarianism is centralized on the obsolescence of people and the rise of bullshit work. People feel abandoned, unfulfilled, or forgotten. It is a growing trend. It is valuable not to ignore why that might be.
Isn't this what VC money is for?
> We are very good at creating bullshit jobs[1] to fill the gradual innovative automation.
Midnight pizza deliverymen and administrators who decide how to spend resources are not bullshit jobs. They are both helpful and useful.
> The entire global movement towards isolationist nationalism and totalitarianism is centralized on the obsolescence of people and the rise of bullshit work. People feel abandoned, unfulfilled, or forgotten.
Your post doesn't make sense. The people doing the "bullshit work" aren't the ones feeling abandoned and unfulfilled. The ones promoting isolationism and nationalism are the ones lamenting the loss of their coal mining and steel production jobs, for example, which employ workers who are confident that what they do means something. Perhaps you mean that they lament the loss of these jobs? That would make sense but it doesn't seem to be very highly connected to the "bullshit jobs" argument- only the loss of satisfying jobs.
I appreciate the recognition as a pizza deliveryman. It's actually my dream job. It took me a decade of searching for work that made me happy to find it, and I was as surprised with were I found it as you (and my friends and family) are.
Every day its like I'm food Santa Claus bringing joy and happiness to the whole city. Every day is food Christmas. Everyone is always so pumped to see me when I show up, and that pumps me up. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
Every other job I had I had this sense of dread going to work. Hating being there, hating a large portion of my life and wishing for my life to go faster.
Granted I'm still a corporate wage slave, don't have health insurance/care, and prison is my retirement plan (healthcare/housing/food all free, and its not like the old folks home lets you leave whenever you want when you're old and senile anyways). But at least I can be a happy pizza wage slave.
The fact is on the human lifetime timescale, jobs go away (farming from 1900-1940; various factory jobs in the late 1980s, coal mining 1970s-2000s etc). People with decades in these jobs may not be able to move into equivalent (in renumeration & status) replacement jobs as their skills are likely not transferable.
Thus to the tractor manufacturer in her 50s it is irrelevant whether there is high demand for experienced web designers or not. Perhaps her kid can go into the job, but she very likely can't. This is part of the reason for the demand for low-skill (and low paying) jobs.
So either way we have to plan for rolling mass unemployment. The only question is the shape of the derivative.
Interestingly, each time we have lost jobs, we have diversified into many more types of jobs that cannot be swept away with a single automation breakthrough. ~90% of workforce were once farmers and almost every single one of them lost their job when mechanization came. Now, with self-driving cars, we are worried about the ~2% of the workforce who drive for a living. That is already a big change from the past, and each iteration how shown that a smaller and smaller portion of the workforce will be affected by automation at any given point in time. That is not to say that everyone will go unscathed, but mass unemployment becomes less and less likely.
It was very easy to go from one job to the other. weather it needs to be required or not, many jobs today effectively require 20 years of education (12+ school, 4 undergrad, 2 masters, 2 years experience).
we talk about coal mining jobs going away as if they should have seen it coming, but tech can also be vulnerable. people forget what it was like to search for a tech job even years after the 2001 bubble burst.
also, the reason why people are worried about automation isn't the number of people effected by each iteration. it was widely accepted automation would destroy jobs and more than what was destroyed would come.
the 2001 and 2008 recession seems to indicate that is becoming less true. i would categorize those recessions as mass unemployment, thus mass unemployment is not becoming less and less likely.
A great way to spend more money on education would be to target lowering high school graduation age to 17, with at least a year of training oriented education for students that weren't interested in an academic track and a faster academic track for students that did want it. The idea that everybody gets value out of Algebra II is pretty confused and at my Big 10 university, I often knew more history on days I hadn't done the reading than most of the people in my discussion class (that is, our "well prepared" high school students aren't coming out of high school well rounded anyway, lets drop the pretense).
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/266610-sho...
(and of course it isn't necessary to immediately double the number of slots in order to soak up the extra MDs)
That in no way suggests that there isn't a role for the hyper-educated / trained doctor, or for even more highly trained specialists. The point is just that not every situation requires them.
When I started I thought it'd be fairly short. It wasn't, and much of the difference wasn't theoretical CS stuff—it was "stupid computer shit". Tools, the command line, daemons, implementation details for a dozen key technologies, debuggers, and on and on and on.
I think I'd underestimated how much all that time I'd spent futzing with DOS to make my games work, or playing with operating systems, or running a message board for my friends, and so on, had provided the foundation for my success as a developer. The hours weren't spent optimally, but they were spent in great quantity, and most people didn't grow up with that kind of running head-start into the industry. It's a giant hurdle to overcome.
I'm tired of hearing this argument again and again. It amounts to saying this...
> I did a thought experiment and in that experiment is was theoretically possible to replace humans with AI in any job. Therefore we're all fired!
This is not far from saying in a Universe containing 100 billion galaxies there are probably aliens out there willing to work for less than the minimum wage, just dying to make us all redundant! It's also theoretically possible.
But just because something is theoretically possible, doesn't mean it will actually happen. Most jobs won't get replaced with AI because humans will remain the better economic option.
The automotive industry is an exception for economic not technology reasons. There are a small number of car makers making enormous revenue selling cars that are vastly under utilised. Grabbing a share of the revenue by disrupting that industry with self-driving cars makes economic sense; the massive investment required to develop (and maintain!) self driving cars.
Right now researchers are demonstrating AIs that can learn to play video games vastly better than humans. There's not a huge leap between that and learning to control a robot. Hell I'm watching a video series right now where a random programmer builds a self driving car in GTA.
A robot I can call about a plumbing problem, that can realize it needs to dig up a pipe in the front lawn, successfully dig up the pipe in the front lawn and fix a leak. Not to mention the rest of the things a plumber does. Now that is hard task and I can't see it being solved any time soon.
Any job that has difficult "IO" is a long way from automation in my mind.
Even more, there's no definite proof (yet) that self-driving cars will even "catch on" and replace traditional human driven cars at all. OK, for shipping / transport and what-not, the economic drivers are pretty clear. But considering that at least some personal driving is actually recreational and that there's no super-strong economic incentive to favor self-driving cars, it's hardly out of the realm of possibility that the self-driving cars will just be a passing fad, or will never amount to anything but a niche market.
Note that I'm not saying that things will necessarily play out this way. Just pointing out that it is a realistic alternative to the prevailing "self driving cars are the future" narrative.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/robots-arent-destroying-eno...
as in
fetch -4o 0.htm https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/10/robots-arent-...
We also changed the title to the subtitle, which is less baity. The text itself is pretty substantive.
Such as...Obama's reports... Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/12/20/artific...
Or bill gate's ridiculous suggestion to tax robots.