No one is claiming it is a concern for 2017, no? My understanding is that the debate is more what happens in the next 10-15 years and not about the short-term situation.
Some are. If you look at recent-ish job growth you're only seeing part-time and retail growth, or other low paying jobs that have no upward mobility. The good jobs that lead to careers, decent wages, etc have been slowly been made more and more efficient. In the past you'd see a demand for more good jobs but now with all manner of automation its just not happening as much. A IT department just 10 years ago probably needed twice the staff as one does today. AWS/Azure/Whatever cuts out a lot of middle-men, and that's just one example of how things are moving. Every industry is being affected by automation and no, its not going to look like a sterotypical 1950s sci-fi robot.
I'd hate to be a recent grad without a super-marketable skill right now.
Yet every time it happens, there's a reorganisation, and eventually the people (or the kinds of people) who did those jobs are employed doing new things.
Is there some reason why everything is suddenly different this time?
Here's a couple of ways that spring to my mind, for how society could absorb the labor that would be freed up if driver automation happened:
- As increasing numbers of professional people around the world are becoming cash rich but time-poor, there is, and should continue to be, a growing demand for people to provide domestic services like cleaning, home maintenance, personal administration tasks, child-care, etc.
- As the number of machines continue to grow, there will be growing demand for people to work on the machines. Whether it's designing, programming, manufacturing, testing, transporting, fitting, servicing, cleaning, replacing, or disposing of the machines, there will be plenty of work for people of all kinds of aptitude.
We are just now seeing the impact of the introduction of computers into the workforce and that is causing all manner of issues, but the response to that so far is the best case scenario when compared to say the industrial revolutions 300 years of massive change.
No need to be a Pollyanna. Unemployment rallies didn't lead to war, they were just unpleasant.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/081024-great-depressi...
Economies are constantly changing and retraining and job migration are our norm, not our exception. Regardless of the current political climate, the reality is that you're not entitled to keep a job in some dying industry. Change has always been here, as much as we try to deny it. Hence the admission that we can't keep this train running and things like UBI are becoming politically feasible.
They are worried about a systematic removal of jobs at a massive rate, across the spectrum. So for instance, if you look at agriculture workers in the US it took from 1910 to ~ 2000 to get from 30% of the economy employed in farm work to ~2% (which is likely the minimum). Along the way you saw the massive labor unrest, cities had to be completely re-engineered, civil rights and family restructuring, 2 World Wars, etc.
It is a reasonable fear that something like driver-less cars, which could impact a similar number of employees, could have just as big an impact, in a shorter time frame and that might not be all for the good.
Its also possible that it was other factors that led to all that turmoil, or that we are better at societal change now, or that there is some new technology around the bend that gets unleashed due to this that prevents similar problems this time around. All of those are reasonable reasons to be optimistic (Pollyanna-ish if you will), but they don't cancel out the reasonable reasons to be pessimistic.
And the Great Depression wasn't an industrialization-related economic shift; it was more of a hiccup following the tectonic shifts in the nineteenth century part of the industrial revolution.
Again, that's not my point. It was large amounts of unemployment up to 50% in urban areas. If the GP is correct it should have led to a civil war, but it didn't.
Yeah, that's why we call it "The Great Unpleasantness", and not something like "The Great Depression".
It'll continue the "rust belting" of America, where areas that can't compete, won't, and will be dependent on aid from the government. Again, this has been going on for a long time. Just because Millenials have only noticed this recently doesn't change a thing.
This is also why some think some kind of UBI is going to be in the works in the near future. Society can handle x amount of permanently impoverished areas, but when does x become too large? The whole point of things like job tax credits, welfare, unemployment, re-training, local investment, etc is to keep people from civil unrest. UBI is just those things without the pretense that you'll ever get a job. Truck drivers in their 50s who never went to college aren't going to become competitive software developers no matter how much "training" you throw at them.
And there's been all sort of arguments (that I'm not qualified to evaluate) that the US Civil War was a direct result of economic conflict, due to the North being a much more economically productive region than the South.
When all the truckers lose their jobs they will not all suddenly be able to be project managers or accountants.
https://qz.com/879605/mercedes-made-a-crazy-van-with-built-i...
In the case of your delivery example, a person is not necessarily required to drop off the package. A system could be setup where you can request a delivery time frame for your package (e.g. between 7-9pm). When the autonomous delivery van arrives, it parks outside your house and notifies you of its arrival. You go down, scan your card and the van dispenses your package. The van then goes off to its next delivery.
this is easily automatable.