What Amazon Teaches Us About AI and the “Jobless Future”
medium.com
medium.com
They mention clothing too. Clothing is an incredibly harmful industry for the environment and don't forget how it affects workers - be they seamstresses in unsafe factories in Bangladesh or inmates in cotton fields in Louisiana. I don't know why we should be happy how many clothes we can all wear now.
The big problem with automation is the trend of who really benefits most. The point is made in the article that the consumer will experience massive benefits. And this is true if you are a first world professional, like people working in silicon valley. But how much of the new employment in Amazon is in fulfilment centres? Those don't sound like the kinds of jobs we should be happy that automation is creating and they are hardly going to last long either.
I'd love if all vehicles became smart electronic driverless miracle machines and getting blood to dying mothers sounds great. I just can't support these shifts if there isn't also a big change in the class structure of the society that these changes are happening in. The wealth this creates should be less concentrated and the benefits and TRUE costs (incl. Environmental) shared more equally.
Get rid of the unsafe factories and poor people won't be able to afford clothes anymore. And the workers of those unsafe factories won't be able to afford anything.
There is no easy answer.
Even if they can, the extra money they would have to spend is money that they won't be able to spend in food and other essentials. Time they spend making clothes is time they can't spend making money for buying other things, or in education.
Replace or just wash? The latter has been absolutely common across many cultures that had access to water and hot enough climate to dry clothes quickly.
Sturdy cotton lasts 10 years or even more.
poor people have always been able to afford clothes, it was called saving for a while to buy a good pair of pants and mending it for many years until it pretty much fell apart.
Poor people would not be able to afford new clothes all the time, sure, but clothes in general most certainly.
And let's not forget about thrift stores, go into any goodwill and you will be able to buy plenty of good quality extremely lightly used clothes for very little money.
Ever heard of a thrift shop? Hand-me-downs?
There are plenty of ways for poor people to get clothes that don't involve buying stuff produced in a Bangladeshi sweatshop.
The benefit they gain through slightly cheaper clothes is more than offset by the benefits from the jobs they could have had if the manufacture of clothing (like everything else) was not offshored.
The real winner is Stefan Persson and the $28 billion he made from H&M's sweatshop labor arbitrage.
"There is no easy answer."
There is. Make trade deals contingent on good labor and environmental conditions and ruthlessly enforce that. That will bring jobs home and improve working conditions in 3rd world countries.
Then, deal with the fact that that new top is going to cost $4 more and Stefan Persson won't be quite so spectacularly wealthy.
Most people ignore this subsidy from poor countries to rich.
Just yesterday I drove 20 minutes to home Depot to buy a saw blade, which their website listed exactly how many were in stock(16) and where to find them. I go there and they're no where to be found, so I ordered one for next day delivery on Amazon while standing at the aisle where the product should have been. Events like this make me much less likely to go out and buy specific items. Generic items I will still get in person where their specifications aren't too important.
Buses are generally considered efficient, but items are often vastly smaller than people which shifts things again. Moving 100+ pound people is simply less efficient than moving sub 1 pound objects.
It may come down to packaging which seems to be in favor of going to the store. But, Amazon packaging does not need to look good or be tamper resistant and can thus often avoids using a lot of clear plastic on some items etc.
In the end it's a surprisingly complex optimization problem. Made worse when you consider the vast overhead of physical stores which must be cooled/heated/cleaned and have a wide selection on hand etc.
Listened to an engaging interview Jason Calacanis had on TWIST with Ryan Carson from Treehouse. He said that our universities are graduating 400,000 programmers a year but we need over a million. He's arguing that education needs to change.
http://thisweekinstartups.com/ryan-carson-treehouse/
There are plenty of people right here in America that are either unemployed or under employed that can take those jobs. But it's going to be with $8000 for a developer bootcamp or if you're able to learn online for $1200 with Treehouse.
Someone has to service the robots of the future and the driverless car software. Just like Twilio allowed even average developers to create telephony apps a future company will allow smart people to knit together expert systems with API calls to a framework with something like Google's TensorFlow on the back end.
Sorry @sama but I just don't see a need for basic income, the jobs will be there but they just haven't been invented yet.
Meanwhile have you seen the bloodbaths going on at IBM and HP? This is not a field I could recommend in good faith to any young person. Go into something that can't be offshored, without the rampant ageism...
Don't be mislead by Silly Valley - most working programmers sit in cubicles cranking out code for the same salary as any other office worker while their managers plot and scheme day and night how to offshore their jobs.
I have two kids under three. My mindset is not to advise them towards a particular profession but to teach them how to learn, explore, fail safely, and get back up again. When they start thinking about jobs in 12+ years, hopefully they'll have a variety of skills and understanding and a willingness to experiment to find something that fits.
I'm more worried about our teenager who will be considering college in the next couple years.. I suspect this transition will be painful.
If you wait too long, a kid can get listless or behind (I did) and it is then harder to figure things out. If kids are not taught the concrete realities of adult finances and vocations when young, it tends to never really stick.
Obviously none of that is relevant to a 3 y/o, but I so wish my mother would have repeatedly explained some of these things when I was younger. Even teenagers understand the benefit of earning six-figures, and can it light a fire under their asses if they appreciate the value of that. And the freedom it provides.
I don't think it is happenstance that all my (mostly Indian and Asian) friends whose parents pushed them to be doctors... are now great doctors, and doing financially well. While many of my (Caucasian) friends languished in their family wealth and are still listless in their mid-thirties.
/end anecdotal directionless rant.
> If kids are not taught the concrete realities of adult finances and vocations when young, it tends to never really stick
citation needed.
Engineers were being laid off in droves and I was actually counseled to study journalism instead of engineering because there were no jobs. Newspapers were creating jobs faster than available graduates.
Four years later when I graduated with a degree in Journalism there were no jobs and engineers with a 2.0 GPA were fielding multiple offers. The young should not listen to anyone advising them to go into one field over another because they're more likely than not to be receiving bad advice.
A huge chunk of routine legal work is going to be automated, similarly to how millions of people use TurboTax for their taxes.
There's a reason why so many banks are investing in blockchain technology: they'll be able to eliminate many thousands of humans currently involved in clearing and settlement in financial institutions.
There is a saying: Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. It is especially pertinent when it comes to jobs. Things can change very quickly, as many people have learned over the years. When there is a concerted effort to push people towards a certain career, as we are seeing with software engineers right now, one should be especially leery about the future.
But at the same time one may as well capitalize on these careers while they are viable. Flexibility allows that and readys one to move into the next big thing when the shift comes.
If I wanted to advise young people in such a way that they'd be secure, I'd tell them to (a) go into trades and (b) study some of the entrepreneurial types but apply it to marketing their merits as a tradesman, not as an 'inventor' or 'programmer'. Some of Guy Kawasaki's stuff is quite good that way, generally useful.
Anything with 'upside potential' is balanced by a very real risk of getting gruesomely hosed through pursuing that bait. It seems like 'being a human' is one of those 'upside potential' things, and on the whole we're set up to fail.
Absolutely. A plumber is never going to see business dry up, if you'll forgive the pun.
"Unlimited upside potential" is another thing said by people who want to hire engineers for less than they're worth...
The lack of salary rise disagrees with this.
You've hardly given an argument to support these hand wavy claims.
Yes, _some_ people will have jobs servicing "the robots of the future and the driverless car software" but that hardly means full employment.
> Sorry @sama but I just don't see a need for basic income, the jobs will be there but they just haven't been invented yet.
The jobs will be there, the climate mess will be fixed and structural economic imbalances will all be corrected.
The future sounds awesome.
(Don't get me wrong. I'm an optimist but this kind of miracle thinking that avoids acknowledging the issues raised by GP is kind of disturbing.)
Bootcamps/Treehouse can be a thing, but while you do that bootcamp, you still have a mortgage to pay, a family to feed and clothe, etc. Where's that money gonna come from?
Basic income is going to be required in the future. Otherwise we're going to be in an Hunger Games dystopian future.
This has its own problems, but the ideology isn't really as dependent upon each person serving a necessary role inside the 'production of goods' system as you think. It's as if power was generated only by exercise bicycles hooked to dynamos, and then solar was invented. Or if transportation was powered only by humans and animals such as horses, and then the internal combustion engine was invented. We literally don't even have as many horses living in the world as we used to: no need for 'em. And those that do live, live under generally better conditions, because their labor is worthless and they're valued for other reasons (and in smaller numbers).
The future might look more like that. Steady attrition of humans, and improved conditions… but as pets and exotic animals, not as beasts of labor.
"This sucks, it makes my hooves hurt!" um, it's kinda not meant for you, Dobbin…
My point is that it's fun to think about, but I think we're many decades away from having to worry about robots replacing a majority of minimum-wage jobs, and it might not even be worth it to automate some of these things until minimum wage is much higher. Another example I can think of is a table busser at a restaurant. It'd be hard to make a robot who could operate as smoothly in tight quarters as a human, not spilling stuff everywhere and making lots of noise. You'd basically need design a restaurant around automation, not the other way 'round. You could also just design a counter-service restaurant where people take their own dishes to a tub, which is a lot less involved than maintaining a fleet of dish bots. Diners might also scoff at (or be amazed by, or both) robots cleaning stuff around them while eating.
Industrial robots I've seen aren't very pretty or clean. Do you think that the Knightscope bots clean and wax their own exteriors? At that point, do you pay someone to clean the robots or just have them clean the tables? Or clean the robot with another robot-washing robot. This might work in Star Wars, but even there, Chewie and Han did the wrenching; R2 just helped them diagnose it.
Again, my point is that I doubt there will be less stuff to do in the future, just hopefully higher-value stuff. If you look at history and as other commenters have mentioned, e.g. the move from subsistence farming to increasingly more automation, workers go from picking vegetables to other hopefully more desirable jobs (maybe driving a fork lift to load the boxes of produce into trucks).
He sells programming education. That's a self-serving claim if ever there was one.
> Sorry @sama but I just don't see a need for basic income, the jobs will be there but they just haven't been invented yet.
There will come a day when faith won't be enough to sell people on this idea. I tremble to think of how bad things will have to get before then, and how many ugly, poorly thought out, desperate "solutions" we will go through before finding something workable.
Wether we use automatiom for that or not will only have a marginal difference. People buy so many clothes because they can (they are relatively cheap now compared to other expenses in our lives).
Lastly, I believe Amazon (or shipping in general) actually brings down the carbon footprint. If you think about it, buying a new cable for me is either: drive about 9 miles to a mall to buy a single cable and drive 9 miles back or shipping it to my address which is bundled with many other and the driver only needs to drive an extra mile for me (at most) instead of 18. sure there is more packaging but there is also a lot of behind the scenes packaging for “in-store” items. Maybe not as much but I believe, in almost all cases, the carbon footprint for driving all the way to the mall for picking up a cubic feet and 1 pound of materials is rather wasteful.
I've come to the conclusion that this is primary issue with a establishing a universal income.
Providing everyone with a means to buy essentials for life would insist that no one overbuys -- which would have the effect of inflating market prices and eliminate any benefits imagined from having such an income.
My own suspicion is that UBI would give policymakers a mighty political carrot-and-stick; debating the morality of certain spending habits, etc., and slowly de-universalizing UBI into something with strings attached.
I prefer the idea of creating our own value for trade, if we could iron out some of the kinks in the system we have already.
I think we will transition over to new more sustainable models. Capitalism just causes too much damage and unintended consequences when it uses the speed and scale the tech sector provides. Just look at the number of followers of that subreddit and the speed at which it is growing.
Here's the crux of the problem. You created value in terms of market economy. That doesn't mean you created any value in terms of human society, or how people generally understand this world.
Hell, in your particular example it's quite easy to argue that alt-coins (if proof-of-work-based) generate lots of negative value (by wasting ungodly amounts of energy), and whether or not HFT is helpful to the stability of the economy is debatable.
Thus, I suggest you read a microeconomic textbook to get some more context on how government wide economic policies (like UBI) will have on individuals.
I may be taking the parent comment out of context myself (as sparse as it is), but I worry about nation-states manufacturing dependency.
Sure, home delivery is probably a more efficient way to consume, but the argument is that people end up consuming more as a result of the convenience. If buying a new cable means you have to drive to the store, maybe you decide you don't need it right now.
- Buy stuff I don't really need when I do rent a car/Uber to visit that store, just in case I need it later.
- Vastly overpay for the same item at the ultra-luxury version of the store located on the ultra-luxury walkable land near my office or a public transit station. (The markup on basic goods for "people who live here don't have cars so what else are they gonna do, starve?" is insane).
Perhaps. But it's also possible I'll go to the store and walk out with ten things I don't really need either on impulse buys or because going to the store is a hassle and I want to make sure I don't have to go back.
So yeah, we need to buy new clothes. And to not spend too much money it's best to buy cheap stuff, right? In fact the more is expensive stuff not only lasts longer but it also looks non-embarrassing in 5 years. Actually I once read that the french (the epicentre of fashion) have only very few clothes.
Actually a year ago or so I watched a documentary about minimalism. So there are people who have like 30 (!!!!) things. Of course they are moderate but there's also a nice technique: writing down the stuff you want to buy on a list. You look at the list one month later and if you still need it, you gonna buy it. Wanna save CO2? You can go every one or two months to the mall and buy the stuff from your list. This also saves annoying returns, buying stuff that instantly breaks because you never had it in your hands etc etc...
In my experience yes, it's best to buy cheap clothes. Brands know this reasoning, and so expensive clothes (and shoes) tend to be of similar quality as the cheap ones. You pay premium for the brand.
That, or I'm such a special person that I can wear down any trousers or shoes in half a year, one year tops, regardless of the price.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri...
The clothes I buy are on the expensive side, but they last me a long time. The trick is to avoid popular, fashionable brands, and go for utility brands instead. I own a pair of hiking pants I bought from REI nine years ago and to this they day are my favorite pair.
Quality clothes are definitely not cheap, but expensive clothes are sometimes not quality.
They are classic American shoes, solid build, excellent leather. Unlike fancy Italian shoes, they last forever with care and maintenance.
I will never, ever, buy another brand of shoes. And I really don't care how much they cost because they are clearly worth it.
I have to say, it's fun getting compliments on shoes and then seeing the look on someone's face when they hear the shoes are a quarter century old. :)
It's a direct result of clothing deflation (clothing deflation is 2nd only to electronics deflation).
That in turn, is a direct result of pushing manufacturing to the cheapest 3rd world sweatshops (e.g. Bangladesh & Vietnam), not automation.
I don't mean to sound inflammatory just focusing solely on the negative impact to mum and dad shops that Amazon can cause.
Large American based organisations have been hoarding an extreme amount of cash. Why is this allowed? Why do they feel the need to "give back" and engage in philanthropy?
Can't we just stop them from using tax loopholes and re-invest it in society with new preemptive educational programs and universal healthcare?
Seriously now, why do I keep seeing examples of corporate America outdoing themselves on Corporate Social Responsibility?
Why is it not just about applying special taxes on the mega profitable monopolistic entities?
Why do you believe that the state (with its lifetime employeed mediocraties or venal politicians), with no competition itself to always be improving, would or could be a better steward of resources than a corporation?
Because as an abstract entity, a corporation doesn't give a damn about the society beyond ensuring it has market opportunities to exploit. A state, on the other hand, will redirect those resources towards social good.
At least that's how it happens in the ideal world. Our world is a bit more messy, but the base argument retains some merit.
A state is also an abstract entity. Composed of people with a range of incentives based on their positions. Elected representatives offer us a fine view into what economists call "The Agency Problem" [0][1]
Pournelle's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists, and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
In both cases, the "state" is less benign than what one might suppose. But, because we are all (mostly) taught by agents of the state from childhood - this is never really brought to our attention during our early indoctrination process.
[0]: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/agencyproblem.asp
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
The difference between a corporation and the State is that the State has the final say, and thus, the ultimate power.
Keep in mind that a corporation can't kill people without consequences, while a State can. That alone should be enough proof of the power they wield.
East India company lasted 175 years - but the British govt is still going.
Erin Brockovich won.
Your point is?
However, in capitalism money agglutinates, and thus it has a natural tendency into this direction.
Also don't forget that capitalism works until it doesn't, at which point a revolution may take place, and then anything can happen.
I did a survey of national and local monopolies a while back, and I couldn't find many sustained ones (in the US) that weren't sponsored by the state.
Oligopoly is another matter entirely.
> Also don't forget that capitalism works until it doesn't, at which point a revolution may take place, and then anything can happen.
Revolution may occur when the peasants feel injustice hard enough (the starvation poverty kind - not the poorer than Bill Gates kind) - but are there any examples of this happening in a more-or-less Laissez-faire market system? [I seriously don't know - could well have been]. Do you think that (for example, in the US) that we have enough mass of discontent to build up revolutionary momentum, given that the poor are (on average) fat, dumb and happy? For example, the driving force behind the French Revolution wasn't simply that people wanted social justice (although they wanted that too), but that they were hungry. And, in Venezuela, where there may be revolution soon (or simply escape), it isn't driven by a paradise of low-priced veggie options at every supermarket supplied by capitalism - it's desperation driven by hunger caused by extreme corruption that have gutted the country in the name of equality.
For myself (and I realize that opinions vary), if the government keeps a light hand on making sure that people don't lie, cheat and steal as people engage in day-to-day commerce in the marketplace (as humans are wont to do - we like to trade, it seems), that generates "plenty" -- which we have seen from the kingdom of Lydia to the present day.
EDIT: Where I come up a bit baffled is where people got the idea that government is here to serve them? [1] Where did that idea come from? They clearly (the people, generally) understand that corporations (say, Walmart) are here to serve themselves, and maybe as a by-product offer low-cost goods to people who want them, but they don't understand that bureaucracies have their own incentives that also don't exist to serve the people. With Walmart, I get what I pay for. With the government, I don't - and they spy on me on the side.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Decisions-Thomas-Sowell/dp/...
I'm not a huge fan of the state myself but it for sure helps people that corporations never would (because it's not profitable to do so) so in many ways they are better custodians of a society's collective wealth.
Now, I understand how it is supposed to work. But I am asserting that this is not how it does work.
But why are you just focusing on the negative effects? If I can buy something cheaper on Amazon, it leaves me more money to spend on something else, creating jobs. The problem with this kind of thinking, pace Bastiat, is there are things you see and there are things you don't see. If you make policy based only on the things you see the effects of your policies won't be what you intended.
Now we have a warehouse (which the brick and mortar stores had anyway) and instead of millions of individuals making trips alone, we have delivery van that is driving around anyway bringing things to whoever needs them that day. Overall, I think we've gained a lot of efficiency and reduced the amount of resources necessary to get goods to people who need them.
I agree that this type of rampant consumerism is an entirely new (and disturbing) thing, but there is an enormous surivorship bias in a statement like "a single kettle could last generations." All the kettles in the world today that someone inherited from their great-grandparents were extremely well made, but it does not follow that all the kettles that generation owned were well made.
I cannot follow this argumentation. A kettle lasted to generations (assumed working) -- isn't that 'well made'?
In reality we're making them possibly better than we were earlier.
One driver for globalisation has been to evade regulation, whether that is the globalisation of money with tax havens or hands off supplier networks that don't follow even local labour law in pursuit of higher margins.
Governments have not figured out how to deal whith this. Regulation could drive automation so that long working hours in dangerous conditions were not necessary. Or incentivise products that made in ways that don't damage the environment (see German vs Chinese solar panel manufacture).
But they don't. As long as African children are cheaper than robots and no one is saying no, we don't get no robots.
What could help with this? Possibly international systems like TPP, possibly better informed consumers. Ultimatum I dont think either of these are enough abs don't know what is..
But the bigger question is whether the Amazon job increases offset the jobs that are lost elsewhere, as retail outlets close, Amazon's direct competitors fail, etc. Amazon and its satellites are growing, but is the job market as a whole?
I don't know the answer, and it might be hard to estimate. But the optimism of the article requires a leap of faith without that information.
Amazon might be a little bit like that: a fountain of wealth for Seattle (and check out real estate prices there if you think that's an exaggeration), but pumping that wealth out of all the rest of the globe.
But I see a weakness in this argument: Wal-Mart mostly displaced existing chain stores, which had similar wealth-pump effects -- and which had much higher prices than Wal-Mart, partially because they wanted higher prices but mostly because they didn't have Wal-Mart's hyper-efficient supply chain. And the old corner groceries and general stores had supply chains that were even worse than the previous generation of chain stores, and therefore even higher prices and even smaller variety...
So: you hear the wealth-pump argument, wealth pumps do sometimes exist, and I'm pretty sure the previous poster was accusing Amazon and Wal-Mart of both being wealth pumps; but I'm not entirely sure that that's what's going on with either business. If it is going on, of course, it's a problem. (Have there been any studies on Wal-Mart's effect on areas where it opens?)
This has always been a silly argument. Locally-owned businesses tend to be in the service industry. Their primary expenses are wages, paid to people living nearby. This is also true of internationally owned service-industry businesses.
Retail businesses tend to sit at the end of a long supply chain. Their primary expenses are the goods they buy from upstream. Local staff are a minor bit of overheard, like the air conditioning or the internet connection for the credit card terminals. This is true whether the retail business is locally or internationally owned.
To the local store owner, or to remote owners/shareholders?
The point of the local argument for me is that local owners are more likely to invest in locally owned businesses and create more local owners, whereas remote super-owners are more likely to create remote super-owners who further create more remote super owners, the net effect being that the ownership within the local community over time erodes.
The concrete facts of walmart et al as an example only support this argument..
Growing up, we had some family friends who were local business owners, albeit in the service industry.
The first place money will go is the local housing market. As a renter, this is incredibly destructive. If shopping at national chains reduces what my competitors can bid, all the more reason to do it.
The next place it'll go is luxury SUVs. As a (sometimes motor)cyclist, it might help me to get more drivers into Volvos with their safety sensors, though I do prefer to share the road with smaller vehicles. Neutral on this one.
Then it'll go to international travel. None of that money is local.
Then it'll go to investment accounts at national brokerages into multinational stocks on New York-based exchanges.
As far as I know, there is no forum where the local computer parts store proprietor and grocer invest in each other. Maybe some local philanthropy - they might be at Rotary together - but most of the philanthropy around me was driven by the handful of national companies headquartered locally.
Next, it'll go to Geetika Miller, formerly known as Karen, who went to India to study and came back as an enlightened yoga instructor :D
Come on, you're being a bit disingenuous. Keeping money local isn't some BS concept that has no history or evidence of success, it's how certain immigrant communities have thrive in a new country. I've seen this personally in the Detroit with the Chaldean (Iraqi Christians) community but you can also look at the history of Jewish immigrants in the US and Chinese emigrants anywhere really.
It's the same broken argument that people make all the time by pointing to som factory that automated and had to hire new people.
What people tend to forget here is by automating that company is gaining and advantage over others who aren't and will ultimately drive them out of business. So while the individual company might see an increase in jobs the industry in general doesn't necessarily.
It's way more complex than even this as you can be in industries with growing demand ex due to globalization.
But at the end of the day the same rule always apply. Companies in order to survive need to be more productive than their competitors and so technology will be used more and more until there isn't any jobs or only very few left.
Also another thing that is often missed by those who claim new jobs will be created. Even if that was the case those jobs will be easier and easier to fill by AI. So it's not an argument for anything.
All those jobs are poorly paid, very labour intensive have almost zero benefits and usually not full time. If AI is giving us these kinds of jobs for the many for the instant gratification of consumers then we are worse off NOT better-off.
Face it - the Advent of better AI (Robots, Driverless cars, etc) will lead to massive job losses and disruption of (currently) well paying jobs - the technology is advancing much faster than the ability of "blue collar" worker to retrain or adapt.
It is indeed a "massive failure of imagination" - of the author to understand the real world limitations.
The author brushes off the fact that Amazon has caused (is causing) countless retail shops to go out of business all over the world.
As others have noted, 'just-in-time' consumption is insanity - cities are becoming perfectly oiled consumption and garbage making machines. I suspect (just speculating, no numbers) that this efficiency has a huge impact on climate. Similar to cars being 20% more efficient, but increasing number of cars by 50%.
As for the jobs, I wonder how many kids dream of working at Amazon fulfillment centers when they grow up... meaning that it sounds like a pretty bad job - people used as transportation units by the algorithms.
So not everything is rosy and shiny with Amazon. I try to avoid binging on it as much as possible. I applaud the efficiency and the 'You want it, you've got it', but I think the cost of that is hidden somewhere else and we all collectively pay it.
The end result is that businesses are becoming much more risky(over the long term), more hit-driven, and much more hollow(job and knowledge wise).
And it doesn't seem like something good for the economy.
[1]For example, printing a shirt(and owning that printing machine). Or installing servers. Or keeping in-touch with customers and branding.
Those are all extreme low wage jobs. Nobody can expect them to pay any substantial tax. Also jobs like these require little education, trapping children of these workers to do any better than their parents.
The thing about labor is that it's not just any old resource. It's a resource whose price determines consumers' incomes. And consumers' incomes determine how much stuff they buy.
There's a common myth that technology will make everything cheaper. It won't. Some things will get cheaper and other things will get more expensive. Economic policies prevent deflation, and therefore prevent the general price level from adjusting downward. If the price of one good decreases, the price of another good necessarily increases to compensate.
Furthermore, labor can't be one of those goods whose price increases. At least not on its own. As labor becomes more efficient, the amount of money going to labor decreases for each unit of output. If we leave it up to the markets, increased labor efficency would lead to lower incomes and lower output and further lower incomes.
But we have economic policies to address that too. We don't just leave it up to the markets. Instead, we do our best to negate the efficiency (labor productivity) that technology would have otherwise enabled. This keeps people's incomes reasonably high.
Economic policies keep people employed, keep wages high, and keep labor inefficient. The Jevons Paradox doesn't really apply here... at least not in any kind of straightforward way.
Tim O'Reilly -- and many economists (armchair or otherwise) -- seem to completely miss this point.
And no actual horses.
This is exactly the same. In the future, the amount of labor that's done will be staggering, unimaginable, a real Jetsons future. …and no human workers, and no humans being paid to do any of it. Not even management. Think about it: should be equally obvious. Labor == horsepower.
Don't get me wrong companies do a great job of automating things and growing.
And investors do a great job of betting on the things that have the best odds. I don't have a plausible solution. Besides lottery don't have a fair way to invest irrationally.
But, if society doesn't find a way to retrain(invest in) those people that were replaced we lose all the potential they had to offer.
http://clark.com/shopping-retail/major-retailers-closing-201...
Maybe Amazon's new retail stores.
Better still, get a business loan to launch something like that. I'll wait. It's hard to even think of a thing more self-evidently doomed.
So don't do that, open a small convenience store instead. Where else are all those retail jobs coming from? Not a rhetorical question, I really don't know.
Since this article is specifically about amazon and FC employees, I think it's relevant to point out they have a program to do just that. Career Choice pre-pays up to $12k in tuition towards degrees/certificates for an in-demand trade/field, and up to 95% reimbursement on books: https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/fsp92a2bhozr3wj
In the past 200 years there's been a tremendous increase in leisure for most people (except perhaps ironically for the best paid but that's a lot by choice), and also there has to date been no end to human desire. It used to take 80% of the labor force just to create food, now it's around 4%. It used to be 150 years ago the average American had 1 pair of paints and 2 shirts. Today the average American has 20 pairs of blue jeans.
What's creating new jobs is not that a company is trying to create jobs but that human desires keep expanding.
My anecdotal observations don't align with that statement, most people I know work more than ever. It's almost madness. I would love to see some hard evidence to suggest otherwise.
While technology is supposed to be making things more efficient (and sure it can do that), it's also making certain things more complex, and I'm not sure most humans have the desire to cope with the complexity very well (nor should they). This can create a time consuming quagmire of technical debt, I deal with it daily.
A simple example of this growing complexity in society is food and beverage packaging. It's become too complex for most people to know how recycle things properly, and it's not really something people go out of their way to understand so it rarely gets done correctly, thus creating new problems.
Apart from being less materially well off, there are a lot of happy people in the third world who seem to be living a way more relaxing lives then people I know in the developed world who are up to there eyeballs in debt and working for high profile tech companies.
But I think people just see what ever they want to see to justify their views and beliefs.
I can't find it right now but I did see a paper recently that showed a correlation between wealth and hours worked, rich people really do work the longest hours.
Mmm, I'm sorry but how is the example of Amazon's productivity gains from technology that uses ROBOTS in a lot of places (and not people), putting people to work?
Some of my friends worked at fulfillment centers, and if most of these 100,000 new hires mentioned are headed to those places, the author fails to mention a very important part: retention. Since he seems very impressed by wheels, one could also compare the fulfillment centers to a gristmill, where people are ground up and discarded. Ever seen an ad for an Amazon fulfillment center hiring event? It's akin to seasonal hiring, where everyone who shows up at event is hired on the spot, knowing a lot of them will quit early on. If a job isn't retained past a certain point, it can't really be seen as a win. It would be interesting to see data about how long the average fulfillment center worker stays in a fulfillment center position.
Many of us have read about how grueling it is to work in an Amazon fulfillment center, and after hearing my friends' stories I agree.
The good thing for Amazon is that the customer never has to see this. They don't have to feel bad seeing what all went into getting them that tea kettle in under 6 hours. Sure, there is a lot of amazing logisitics and technology involved, but there is also a human element that is hidden. In Wal-Mart, you can walk right into a store and see the effects & signs of mass consumption, cheap products, and cheap labor. I think its visibility has driven a lot of the protests and blowback against Wal-Mart, successful or not.
I think not being able to easily see the dark side of Amazon plays into Amazon's customer satisfaction in some ways. You order something and a box arrives. The only interaction you see is the one you made with your computer.
And as Amazon grows, percentage of tasks done by humans shrinks. In this case and time amazon grows faster enough to employ more, but with a bit less growth and a bit better AI this caculation might be totally different.
(and as others mentioned, one has to look at the net jobs beyond amazon)
The people working in sweatshops start as young children, often sold by their parents to pay debts. Often pay is withheld and they just become slaves or they are fed just enough to keep their fingers moving and their brains starved. The sweatshop may provide enough income for that child to grow up to produce more children, who then become sweatshop workers themselves, child prostitutes, or slaves, or they may just die on the job.
Nutrition deficiencies and stress get baked into their genetics: congratulations you now have a permanent underclass living worse than some animals, and similar to livestock, crowded populations, poor medical administration, and hellish living conditions result in festering and evolving pathogens that you and Paul Krugman may soon be more interested in. The result of providing just enough for them to survive to make children is not "less poverty", it's more poverty, more death, more child slavery or prostitution, and if emotional arguments don't register with you, exotic pandemics coupled with antibiotic misuse just might.
Secondly, America does not have a clothes shortage. The unfathomable amount of (often expensive) clothing thrown away by both consumers and suppliers in disgusting. Shrewd families from the lower income to the middle class buy used or keep hand-me-downs. Once or twice during move out season on campus my partner and I raid the rich dormitories and find upwards of thousands of dollars worth of designer clothing among other things. Many stores throw their out of season clothing straight into the dump.
The defense of a situation where hundreds of millions live in hell to produce mountains of goods that end in landfills, on an economic argument, is absurd.
Yet, they keep on doing it. It sounds like the alternative is worse.
I'm sure that came off wrong. I guess, you meant the abortions, which is, to me, slightly less controversial than suicide or worse. Death by abortion might be a conflation of terms, in some value system, so the comment is confusing. I guess it's provocative on purpose. I agree, there must be better alternatives to sweatshops.
Landowners needed armies of peasants to till their land, because argiculture was very inefficient, and you needed the labour of five farm workers to grow enough food to feed 7 people.
Now that even a third-world farmer can produce enough food to feed many, many people, those farm workers have been pushed to try to find work in the cities - hence, factories and sweatshops.
You are looking at the tail end of the problem, as opposed to the root of it. The core of it is that the vast majority of people in the world need to work for someone else (Who reaps the majority of the economic windfall) in order to survive. This used to happen because a small minority of people owned most of the land - it now happens because a small minority of people own most of the capital needed to run a business.
Employee-owned co-operatives are a solution to the problem of both jobs, and working conditions. Since co-ops don't pay dividends to non-working shareholders, this is generally unpalatable to capitalists.
Improved agriculture required fewer people to generate the same amount of food. We were lucky that industrialization happened at around the same time and could provide work for the displaced farm workers. There isn't any guarantee that some new type of labour-intensive job will be invented just at the point that AI becomes widespread.
I don't see how co-operatives help if there isn't any demand for their output.
The system that moves clothes from rich Americans to third world stores could be more efficient, but it does exist.
Hopefully robots will eventually become cheaper than feeding slaves.
We also used to have a huge industry of exporting cotton to countries with sweatshops, but nowadays soy and meat are more profitable.
Speaking of wrong... Suicide rates per capita are also higher in many rich countries than in many poor ones. It's the "per capita" part that people don't understand. Foxconn literally has 1,300,000 employees. At the standard US rate of 13 suicides per 100,000 people per year, we should expect 169 suicides at Foxconn per year. But people see a headline about a dozen suicides at Foxconn and think it's a crisis, because math is hard.
Despite your disgust with the poor, no major pathogen of the last few decades has been traced back to sweatshops. AIDS and Ebola came from people interacting with apes, not from factory workers. Bird Flu came from birds. So I call bullshit on your claims that the poor are breeding super-diseases.
We can all agree that capitalism has some bad aspects and maybe the governments in these countries should be doing more to help. Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than animals is just that, ridiculous.
Although you're being dismissive, your math and intuition is a bit off. Workplace suicides are rare in places like the US and make up approximately 1% of all suicides. That one company has a number of suicides all at one facility known to have poor working conditions does indicate a trend. So, it's not 13 out of 1.3 million, it's 13 out of 230000-450000 (estimates). Not only that, but the company adapted by implementing suicide prevention measures.
You also neglect to mention that around 150 people at Foxconn threatened to commit mass suicide in protest of the working conditions.
If there were a rash of suicides at Ohio State University and they all were freshmen or transfer students, and they all jumped from buildings, that would indicate an alarming trend, not some statistical anomaly.
Math isn't hard. We would expect the suicides to be more random. Also, and I'm just speculating, it's not crazy to think some others were covered up.
> Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than animals is just that, ridiculous.
I'm not the OP and that is a bad comparison. Treated worse than dogs is perhaps a better one.
> So I call bullshit on your claims that the poor are breeding super-diseases.
I wouldn't call it complete bullshit. Poor people in India who bathe in the open sewer known as Ganges, one of the most if not the most heavily polluted waterways, is a recipe for breeding a super disease. Though, this is caused by lack of education, it is not entirely, completely disconnected from poor wages.
> We can all agree that capitalism has some bad aspects and maybe the governments in these countries should be doing more to help.
Yes, we agree. We tolerate the profit off of human misery and suffering. Progress has almost always been driven by misery and suffering. And we are all responsible for it.
This might be true, but Foxconn employees mostly live at their workplace, so all suicides of Foxconn employees are technically «workplace suicides». That doesn't really tell us a whole lot though.
In the US it's not fashionable to kill yourself at work, but people jump from bridges a lot, so lots of bridges have safety nets. They don't just delay suicides, they outright save lives.
Cholera, to be specific
Also, no one argues that sweatshops doesn't bring money into the country. They can trap poor people in poverty and still bring in money. That would look like widening gaps between poor working class and lower middle class. Which is exactly what we see.
Most of the countries that have moved from 3rd to first world status have done so only after a massive wave of strikes to improve pay and working conditions in sweatshops (usually brutally suppressed).
"The countries which didn't, like most of Africa"
Correlation != causation and yes, there are sweatshops in Africa. Africa's struggle to escape from poverty is hampered by a lack of good governance and infrastructure - coincidentally two things sweatshop owners also want.
Who would open a sweatshop in a place where the government could expropriate it, organized crime could take it over, or a simple rain could make the workplace inaccessible and the merchandise stuck in a warehouse?
> Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than animals
How the hell did you turn "living conditions for the poor are appalling and must be improved" into "the poor are disgusting"?
> Despite your disgust with the poor
> Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than animals
... you're pouring fuel on the fire. Please don't do that, regardless of how correct your underlying argument is.
But the argument about sweatshops is pretty settled:
* These people are not stupid, they would not work in sweatshops if sweatshops weren't the best alternative available.
* The existence of sweatshops doesn't, in any fundamental way, prevent the development of more advanced and dignified industry. Many industrial countries have a history of slavery (eg, America) and poor working conditions (eg, England) that they levered themselves out of.
* Bootstrapping an economy starting with cheap, unpleasant labouring appears to have worked stupendously well for the Chinese.
>hundreds of millions live in hell to produce mountains of goods that end in landfills
Is it better to have hundreds of millions live in hell doing subsistence agriculture? Or is that life actually less hellish?