How Will Automation Affect Different U.S. Cities?
insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu
insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu
Also in reference to manufacturing processes, it appears that Toyota has learned some hard lessons in automation and is actually moving in the opposite direction: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/02/toyota%E2%80%99s-se...
I personally think that's a good thing because the economy was over-regulated in the 1960s and 1970s. But in some areas, it's arguably gone too far. Judges and legislators are so self-concscious about excessive litigation that they've significantly hampered the ability of claimants to recover when they should be able to do so. E.g. Wal-Mart v. Dukes.
Still, I'm skeptical how they identify automation risk, and I suspect they get it wrong in a way that makes small cities seem more vulnerable.
my rule of thumb is simple, if a job only exists because of some amount of cognition needed with fairly simple decision making it will be gone regardless of the low pay. also, some higher end jobs like investment management are already getting automated given that they follow the same meme. its just that their cognition/pattern recognition tasks involved sifting through balance sheets (e.g. NYSE:AIEQ).
A home robot that can trim trees is FAR more complex. It needs to know about trees and what to trim, and talk to the customer. Maybe doable. It needs to analyze the environment to look for any dangers, fragile things, property lines. It needs to navigate heavy equipment. It needs to make a series of cuts, and make sure nothing too large falls after cutting. It needs to collect and dispose of the waste. This is way beyond any robotics we're seeing.
In a sci-fi world where robots can do EVERYTHING, they can also trim trees.
I totally see this happening and requiring much less human labor. And as with most automation, it will be a gradual process and not a one step replacement.
Once we can build artificial brains more powerful than humans, and artificial muscles more dexterous than humans, almost every profession is at risk. In addition if machines are not made in a factory, but replicated organically like seeds because we figured out the magic DNA, then we've essentially created von-neumann probes and can conquer the rest of the galaxy.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609556/lawyer-bots-are-sh...
I don't know what even more increased pressure on that job market would do to it.
Or do you do unpaid work in the hope that when you finish you'll get a job?
This is automation 101
As far as law in general, I have heard convincing arguments that it would be difficult to make ML for defense and judging, given the tainted historical data (and likely that historical data will always be tainted as our morality and laws change).
Well, today it is parking tickets. Tomorrow it will be something less mundane but still routine, something people do hire lawyers for, such as DUIs.
No profession is in a better position to lobby and pass new regulations requiring human legal services and protecting their jobs.
Except for actual government officials I guess. So A.I. Senator is less likely. But A.I. lawyer is right behind that.
I will be investing in antidepressants.
You could look at those examples to see how society will be impacted...
Australia is a good place to start your research.
(It's not quite UBI because you have to apply for it and do something to get it, but it's pretty close)
You bringing this up at this point in time as if it's relevant almost seems trollish.
The commenter seems to have made this observation in good faith. It seems rude to me that you would insinuate the point is irrelevant and "almost seems trollish" just because you disagree with it, particularly when you did the bare minimum to mount a substantive rebuttal. It's true that we shouldn't conflate the unhappiness associated with welfare with some sort of ennui induced by a lack of productivity; but that doesn't preclude the point you're disagreeing with, which could still be true.
A long term policy of government as a mandatory employer of last resort with make-work jobs doing work for which there is no real demand is a route to creating a permanent underclass. (A short-term policy of government as mandatory employer of last resort in response to an unusual economic disruption where this serves to maintain skills in jobs for which market demand is expected to rebound, to provide bridging income support, and to leverage temporary labor surplus for public infrastructure is a different story. As is a permanent policy of government offering non-universal last-resort employment in regions or industries experiencing short-term downturn without an economy-wide collapse, though that obviously can't replace general universal safety-net programs.)
And it's also why you won't see it when UBI comes in.
People keep predicting this utopia of people sitting around twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do as all basic needs are provided. These predictions go back to the pre-industrial era.
Inequality is the fuel of ambition and simply having the basic needs covered won't be enough for people in the same way it currently isn't for upper middle and upper classes -- they still compete.
The "work" we will be doing will just be different. 3D printing and autonomous vehicles are going to have a massive impact on manufacture and distribution. However people still need to create things -- and AI is currently just good at optimizing things not "new thinking".
Does that sound good to you?
The alternative is what, exactly? Continue having jobs automated out of existence, letting the middle class cease to exist while placing the blame on the segment of the population that has little influence over what trades will be valuable tomorrow? How about we subsidize coal mining jobs long so people can stay busy?
This kind of black and white thinking is pointless. Using this as a justification for ignoring growing problems is negligent. There are a lot of things that people could do, and probably would do voluntarily if they didn't have to do their dead-end retail jobs.
One option is taking care of the planet we are hell-bent on destroying. Imagine if we had potentially millions of people to take care of our forests and rivers? What about taking care of the elderly or teaching or any number of jobs that are practically poverty wages now that would be possible while living a middle-class lifestyle?
That's a far more liberal perspective than the republicans in my family take, unfortunately.
I grew up in an area of questionable safety. There was a woman across the street who spoke to my mother about how she would scam the welfare system to receive multiple payments every month. This was on top of food stamps and child support checks. She was making more than most people with full time jobs in the area while doing absolutely nothing for society with no desire to ever change.
People will take advantage of the system if they can. Spelling out what it is and what it is not would have to mean making people understand that it is only the minimum and somehow encourage them to expand their horizons. That seems like a cultural shift that needs to happen before UBI becomes prevalent.
People on welfare often already treat it that way, doing under the table cash work while receiving benefits (many don't, either for moral reason (it is fraud, usually, both tax and welfare) or fear reasons (the punishments for such fraud can be catastrophic) or availability reasons (they just haven't found opportunities, which aren't exactly openly advertised). But it's still fairly widespread; UBI would normalize additional work and stop punishing it, and allow it to take place in the formal economy, which all by itself would produce exactly the culture shift you refer to.
Because if we leave people to their own devices, they'll burn the whole fucking thing to the ground. Open literally any history book to see examples.
And? People are remarkably good at finding something to do once they are bored.
A lot of people veg out in front of the boob tube because they are so exhausted from working to pay for basic necessities that they simply don't have the energy to do anything else.
I completely disagree. Bored directionless people, especially bored directionless men, are the worst thing a civilization can have. These are the guys that pick AK-47's and join terrorist organizations because they have no direction in their lives and they think they found it.
But if people are given more than the empty prospect of future penury and distress, wouldn't they find values of discovery and creativity to be much more appealing?
Who picks up an AK-47 and joins a terrorist organization just because they have nothing better to do? I think that sort of thing probably comes from a deeper malaise of the soul, and an environment devoid of hope is probably a big ingredient there.
What if reducing routine jobs frees up minds for higher pursuits? In the same way that high level programming languages such as Python have increased the amount of programming jobs, as contrasted with writing in assembly. A quick search on Dice shows Python jobs outnumber assembly 8 to 1.
This might actually lead to a jobs explosion.
While agriculture likely represents the largest shift in labor during the 1900s, there were a huge number of jobs automated away during that time. Assembly lines, factories, and automation have been displacing workers since the dawn of the industrial age.
75 years ago there were basically no information technology jobs, and now it represents nearly 10% of the workforce, or four times the level of agricultural employment.
In summary, I agree with you; freeing people from mundane labor will lead to an explosion of jobs for which people are better suited; jobs which are more engaging and fulfilling as well.
There are always people who fail to adapt and get left behind, but the rest of the world moves on. People like to work.
But looking at the past as a predictor of the future is a very dangerous proposition. We saw that in 2008 when it came to the housing market. Sometimes now really is different from the past. And if we hit that tipping point, it will be much like the posited AI singularity. Vast swaths of humans will become surplus to the most efficient means of completing work. It's important to realize that the people who are talking about this issue as one we need to confront are envisioning a future that is fundamentally different from today or anything that has come before now and they're predicting that for a very specific reason. You can disagree with that reason, but you can't use previous examples of automation-displacing-jobs as a way to dismiss that thinking. Because what's being predicted is fundamentally different from what has already happened.
If a new source of jobs pops up that can employ 50% of the population at higher wages than they are currently earning, no one will complain about it (except maybe for the employers at their current jobs, but they will probably just buy the proverbial tractor).
But wouldn't that make the entertainment industry explode?
I think a lot of people, in the U.S. at least, don’t have that level of financial security (plus the healthcare snafu).
I agree with you about the potential.
Unfortunately though, housing cannot be automated and that is very expensive. Though much of housing costs, at least for new builds, is from regulations and labor. Reduce regulations with better governance, and reduce labor with automation (3D printed houses?), and you’re on your way to part of a solution.
We could have a flood of nice, brand new homes for $300k in Silicon Valley and nice older homes for $200k, in the same way a city like Tokyo or Houston does, if the people of California had not made the deliberate choice to pull up the ladder behind them.
Tokyo isn't a good comparison. The average price for a new home in Tokyo is $600k+ and in the suburbs was almost $400k.(https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/how-much-does-it-cost...)
Houston isn't a good example either. Houston has almost no zoning or building regulations, which was on ample display when entire neighborhoods flooded because developers weren't prevented from building houses in flood basins. (CA allows the construction of residential properties in floodplains, which are flat areas that might get flooded if flood control mechanisms fail. In Houston, houses were built in the flood control mechanism.)
There are also plenty of places in California where houses and residential units are being built. In LA, for example, several ten thousands of new residential units were built in the downtown/downtown-adjacent units in the past few years. In San Bernardino/Riverside counties, they still have housing stock available from the last building boom. It's not that the people of California pulled that ladder up; it's simply basic market forces: too many people want to live in the nice parts of California.
There's nothing stopping people from training to be programmers today and working as a spoiled or fortunate software engineer, just as I am today - nothing other than the challenges of training, the time required, their own interests and capabilities, and possibly unawareness of the opportunity. Maybe a few people would try programming if they suddenly had money and no need for a daily job, but they could also do it today.
But is it true to say that automation would fail to free up higher pursuits because there is a shortage of programmers? What would you be doing right now if there were no electricity?
It's pretty difficult to use your mind for higher pursuits when you're starving.
It doesn't matter how cheap calories are if you do not have the income to purchase them.
If you like, change food to housing in my original comment. The point still stands: Higher minded pursuits require a level of safety and security to pursue. That level of safety and security does not exist if you do not have food security and housing security, and those things don't exist if you do not have an income.
As for "Who in the United States is really starving?" It's a much, much bigger problem than people realize. https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-hunger-us
There were similar claims made during the depression. It wasn't about automation then either - it was about wealth inequality and a lack of aggregate demand.
Roosevelt then spent and invested in infrastructure - building stuff like LAX - until the country returned to full employment.
Ok so tell me more about how building LAX was "make work".
>Wouldn't they use more automation to build roads and airports?
So - if we're looking at infrastructure - there are fewer people fixing potholes these days.
Are potholes currently being fixed more efficiently thanks to more sophisticated automation or are they just not being fixed?
No, I'm asking if that's what you're proposing for the 21st century. What projects would you have be initiated that would fill the gap of some roughly 60% of unemployment, in the case of most cities on that map?
* Other forms of public transport
* Green energy infrastructure - wind/solar farms and the smart grids to support them
* Fixing roads, bridges and dams (all currently neglected).
* Building community centers and schools
* Caring for the elderly and infirm
There's a curiously high number of people who declare the jobs program that built LAX an obvious example of make work yet defend silicon vallley's silly startups and bitcoin mining (the purest example of make work) as "socially" useful merely because they were funded with private dollars.
Tech is a bubble, and we dig ourselves in deep. But you don't need to go to the third world to find illiteracy and ignorance. You often don't need to go more than a few miles in any given direction to find entire populations of doomed people - they have no ambition, education, and most importantly no desire to ever have them. The smart ones leave, go to the big city, succeed in school and go to university and end up successful, but for every capable intellect there is often someone who just can't. Its no different than introversion vs extroversion - some people crave the new and different and some people crave consistency and pattern.
And we might like to think otherwise, but automation replaces the routine, not necessarily the physical. But a lot of people don't have the capacity for boundless creativity, in my experience it actually hurts some people to have to think outside the box that much. Like headache causing stress and frustration. They don't become scientists not because the opportunity is not available to them fiscally, but because they cannot think like that. At least not in a professional capacity with forty hours a week consistency.
I don't think we can eliminate that factor. And I think it is much larger than anyone who promotes UBI as leading to an era of scholars and scientists aplenty gives it credence for. Or for not recognizing that as a species we are barely evolved beyond animals that could only, at most, do simple tool manipulation and use. Who couldn't understand the concept of self. Asking for human brains to on average be innovative, imaginative, and capable of running in the highest states of consciousness we can reach on a near constant basis is asking too much of a lot of people.
It asks too much of me many days where I try to find something rote to do rather than face new problems that can get overwhelming, so from someone not on top of the brain potential spectrum, there is a reason why predatory repetitious skinner boxes work, why addiction is such a big problem, why people get stuck in their ways and why change is hard, and these aren't things we will ever eliminate from the species entirely without a serious investment in transhumanist innovation. These people will not become scholars, creatives, or thinkers.
That being said, I'm not convinced its even a problem. A lot of why people crave "meaning" in their lives is the fear of loss. Having a purpose gives you an anchor to always ensure you never go completely adrift from your life as it is. You can lose your job, home, etc but if you have a purpose and feel like you can do something it gives you the strength to keep fighting to survive.
With a UBI, the fight to survival pushed on pretty much everyone by capitalist economics as a means to spur growth changes fundamentally. I would be interested how societies pressure to have purpose and how we build our self worth would change with it.
I've listened to the national talking heads and political figures, and nobody publicly is talking about this. Not the Republicans, and not the Democrats. However, the Dems seem to have a better idea by bolstering all sorts of subsidy and welfare programs. Those work well and good for keep individuals out of poverty, but falls short when working with communities of impoverished. These end up counting on, and using tax revenues from well-to-do areas. And these unemployment numbers show that there won't be 'well-to-do' areas.
The WPA was one such way out of mass unemployment. But given how effective automation is, I question its use this time around, if the current political atmosphere would even have the stomach to discuss such things.
This is one result from capitalism. Accelerate until we hit the wall. And this wall, is that we will no longer need "labor" provided by humans. So, what do we do with the 95% of people that must work? That's the $64,000 question.
My personal plan: I'm learning electronics from the ground up. I'm teaching myself control systems theory. I'm learning how things are put together - electronics are very similar to code libraries. You do a function block to do something, and you chain them together. This means that I'm untraining specialities, and learning how to analyse and fix quickly. I guess being a sysad also helps in that. I'm not putting much trust in the national or state level government. I see more done at the local levels, but without tax revenue/money, they're up shit's creek as well.
For a business to automate, it must invest substantial resources into the automation process and product. It must work in an industry where consistency is the most important quality customers are looking for.
Automation already affected most of what it's going to do in manufacturing.
Given the capital and talent being deployed, automated driving is on the way. Most other industries are not seeing similar talent and capital being invested into automation. Long-haul trucking is the industry I have the greatest concern for. Most of the others (e.g. short order cooks) will be fine for quite some time.
Automation is we got a new machine in the shop that increased throughput, and we never replaced Betsy and George when they quit. It's getting that new cashier system that is idiot-proof and has pictures to tap of dollar bills vs. a keyboard or requiring any sort of math skills. It's redesigning the bathrooms to make cleaning take 30% of the previous time using basic automation and techniques.
It's a long slow reduction and dumbing down of the workforce that won't happen overnight, but has already been happening and on an accelerating pace for 20-30 years or so now.
Compare the skills needed to run a short-order cooking station 30 years ago to today - it's not even comparable. We would call such a position skilled or semi-skilled this day in age, as the average kid off the street couldn't be up and running in 6 hours of training. It would take months to replace that worker with someone in-kind, where now your labor pool for such jobs is basically "anyone who can show up on-time and sober" which of course pays considerably less.
I see automation as the long slow destruction of semi-skilled labor. You either are effectively a cheap very flexible human robot, or you get paid well in a highly skilled position. The middle is being hallowed out rapidly.
Those kiosks are very slow and a bit cumbersome to use, and they put them smack in the middle of the waiting area in the restaurant. Huge waste of space.
Whenever you see a tablet on the table, that's their way of automating staff on various levels at a restaurant's level. They sell it as a way to play games tableside and to request server assistance...
In reality, its so they can hire even less servers, have push-demand by customers when they wanted waited on, and sell more stuff quicker. It's also a way for management to ascertain actual engagement levels along with sales data.
It's another case of short-sighted automation segmenting out under management in low end sit down restaurants. You certainly don't see high end restaurants engaging in these shenanigans... yet.
Our (wife and I) decision is we place them face-down off the table. We prefer to engage with humans, not a idiot-box upper management dictates.
It's already happening in some cases. A former colleague who is working in China (and I'm sure doesn't regularly eat at low-end restaurants) was telling me how in a lot of places you order from your table by scanning the QR code at your individual seat and pulling up the menu.
How many people are going to decide they don't need to buy a new car, they can just sell their old one and have a fleet pick them up and drive them to work. Driving as a subscription. Then you lose car dealerships, and car manufacturing jobs, because we'll need fewer cars. Parking lots will become less necessary as the cars can just continuously drive around anticipating the next customer.
Of course, that is all assuming full autonomy, which I think we are still pretty far away from.
Car dealerships should have been disinter-mediated long ago. In my opinion, they add no value to the process of purchasing a car/truck; except for unnecessarily driving up the price. If i want expertise on which to buy, i wouldn't want the person whose incentive it is to get me into their most expensive car...i want advice from a neutral third-party who knows cars/trucks. I'm not an expert on capitalism, but it seems to me, that car dealerships - at least in this modern era - have been held up to exist in such an artificial way, which distorts pricing for me as a consumer. If car dealers failed to exist, yes, i would feel bad for the low-level car salespeople who now have to find another, different livelihood...but honestly, isn't this like trying to keep the jobs of the telegraph operators in our information age? Car dealerships should be left to go extinct.
> they add no value to the process of purchasing a car/truck
Unless you get a new salesman they typically are experts on the cars themselves. Yes there are exceptions but especially if you're shopping at higher end dealerships (think Audi and higher, basically) they're going to know everything about the car and be able to tell you exactly what model fits your needs.
> the person whose incentive it is to get me into their most expensive car
Car salesmen are paid on gross, and the dealership's profit on a $120,000 7-series is not going to be twice the profit as a $60,000 M2. In fact, highest gross is on used vehicles, and those are the hardest to price shop since every one is different.
> car dealerships have been held up to exist in such an artificial way
That depends on your definition of artificial. Audi isn't allowed to sell me a new Q3, by law. If you change the law and get rid of dealerships, guess what happens? Audis are now available at MSRP only. No haggling, no getting a good deal because something's been on the lot and is a prior year model.
The part you don't mention is the used car market. What happens to that when dealerships disappear? You can buy one from a private owner but then you get no warranty at all and you have to trust that they're not trying to screw you. I hesitate to draw a finance comparison, but don't dealerships offer some form of liquidity to the used car market? Audi corporate does not want to manage the trade in inventory. Won't the value of trade ins (and therefore used cars) drop like a rock at that point?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair.
The few truck drivers I've spoken with all seem to think that autonomous trucks are going to arrive just after they retire. Similar stories come from nurses, fast food workers, and construction folks like drywallers. They all say "oh, that won't arrive for at least another 30 to 40 years!" I don't belabour the point because that just makes people fearful and angry.
In the USA there's a huge amount of people in depressed rural areas already. Their fear at being left behind by society has been manipulated into keeping the Republican party in power by various hatemongers. Now imagine the fear and anger they and many more will feel when 95% of the jobs disappear. What sort of person will rise up and lead this vast angry mob? How many of them will claim disability? Imagine 200 million people potentially starving and angry, many of them with firearms? (NB: I make no statement on the ethics of firearms!)
I am deeply worried about the era my teenage stepdaughter will live through.
We've quite literally lost 95% of all jobs before. That part is nothing new. However, what we found was that when people were jobless and bored, they found new things to do. Things that nobody ever imagined people doing when they were busying doing other jobs.
It is not like human-level robots are anywhere on the horizon. At best we have simple pattern matching machines that can be trained to do certain tasks. But they cannot cross tasks. A self-driving car robot cannot start becoming a self-practicing doctor robot on a whim. A self-practicing doctor requires building an entirely new robot specialized to do medicine.
Up to this point, each time we lose jobs, the new jobs people invent have become more and more diverse. At one time, 95% of the workforce all did the same job. Now the largest industry employs something like 5% of the workforce. The numbers are getting smaller. And are trending to be even smaller still. It is not difficult to imagine a time when people will all have distinct jobs, that no other human does. The economies of building a robot to replace a single person starts to diminish quickly.
To dig deeper: If we look at the fastest growing jobs, according to the BLS, there are very few on the list that are not primarily physical jobs. Of the top 10, there are only three that I would consider as being more mental than physical.
If this is what a post-industrial revolution that replaced physical laborers looks like, I'm not sure why we're worried about some future information revolution. And that's without even accounting for the fact that the information industry itself is tiny.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-...
If we combine automation with climate change effects it seems that in the next 20 to 30 years humanity will have to face some very serious problems.
Automating nurses seem very very far in the future though.
Automation isn't about saying one day "Whoop, youre through. This robotic maid will do everything you can do and more."
That doesn't happen. Instead, its computerized tools that "allow" you to do 1.2x more work. And 5 nurses means the owners get rid of the 6th nurse.
Then a new comprehensive patient device comes out, and can act like a .5 nurse. The owners buy 2 of them. And then they get rid of another human, or fail to hire when one leaves.
By the end, you have only a small handful of people, with technology as multipliers. And if that single person doesn't show up, then "bad happens".
That bad, with many instances, is the justification to finally depend on full automation.
Once everything is automated, that means owning stock in those companies automating everything.
Marx's dream is available to nearly every single American. Have at it.
Automation's effects on the economy larger depends on the pace it is achieved. If someone released a box that replaces truck driver's tomorrow and sells it for $1000 then there will be huge disruption. If drivers are replaced with automation slowly over 30 years the impact will be less because the rest of the economy will have time to absorb the impact.
Increased wealth is expanding the service industry, with petcare being a prime example. This will create more jobs, but those jobs are both at risk of being automated and might not be enough to replace automation.
Decreased good costs works for some things like toothbrushes and iphones, but they don't work so well for limited resources like gold jewelry or real-estate. It might improve quality of life in some ways, but it cannot help with everything.
Thats not to say that you cannot make housing and healthcare dramatically cheaper and more efficient, but we simply are not doing it, and there doesn't seem to be nearly enough momentum to see change happen in that regard. Lives rarely get better without a good protest, but there is no uniform movement with only big wig opposition to fixing zoning laws or socializing medicine. Its all working class vs working class infighting between haves and have nots.
By contrast, in a larger city there will likely be some much larger restaurants that require more specialized knowledge and skills—perhaps a marketing team, or a lawyer who specializes in the restaurant industry—that cannot be easily automated."
I have a small factory, we use a fair bit of automation. I disagree with the above quote - I think that the larger restaurant will be more likely to automate first, and arguably the franchise restaurant model is automated marketing and business management. The larger places will go full robot in the kitchen sooner, the smaller places will continue to have one person wearing many hats for a long time. Larger places have more budget, can afford more automation, and the smaller places would have a harder time justifying a burger cooking robot if it would only be in use a small fraction of the time.
My welding robots are super fast. I have two so that I can reduce setup and changeover time. The robots are so fast, the main headache is feeding them enough jobs - selling the work. The setup and changeover is very slow. I spend 5-10 hours getting a new jig built, programmed and tuned up.
This setup time is never discussed in the media. Sure the robot will be amazing and fast and super productive - once you spent 10 hours programming it to do so. If the task is a 'once-only' and it only takes an hour, who in their right mind would automate that? This setup time will be the biggest impediment - humans are pretty quickly adapted, autonomous fleshy robots, that outperform the best automation when it comes to setup time.
I love automation. I have 6 automated machines, and a couple 3D printers, that you can push a button and go get a coffee, and there is the part when its done. Sometimes one button push can make a couple thousand dollars in products - that is a great feeling! But the setup time is massive, and this is the greater expense over the cost of the machine.
Its like an algebra equation. y=ax+b where 'a' is the setup time, and 'b' is the time for one unit.
With a human welding a simple part, 'a' would be 5 minutes, and 'b' would be 5 minutes.
With a robot welding cell like a Panasonic PA-750, the 'a' would be 500 minutes, and the 'b' would be 2 minutes.
If you need 100 of them, no sense in turning on the robot. If you need 10,000 of them, the robot welding cell will be done in 20,500 minutes instead of 50,005 minutes for the human welder. My Panasonic costs $2284 a month for 60 months on a lease, $1 to purchase at the end. The human costs $1000 per week in perpetuity, with increasing costs due to inflation if nothing else. The robot is half the hourly, and its paid for in 5 years. The human is never paid for, it always needs compensation. In this example, the human takes 500 hours more to do the task, and that is $12,500 more in wages over the robot. My 7 year old son can run (not program) the welding robot and make parts, which he does for Pokemon money on the weekend.
So where does that leave the human? Doing small runs! Which is better for the human anyway! Welding the same small part for weeks at a time makes you a little crazy. Its like watching the same GIF every 5 minutes for weeks at a time. Welding the same part every 5 minutes for 2-4 hours is quite doable, can be fun to get in the groove. I think in the future that production runs will become smaller as CNC machines proliferate. Everyone will want something custom, which is what humans are best at. High volume will be robot welded, because its boring and machines do it faster and better.
I manufacture in America. Using automation, I am directly cost competitive with China and India in my core products that we have been making (and optimizing manufacturing) for 14 years. Its 1/4 steel plate mostly, and our cost to build is directly in line with the best quotes from Asia. Robot welders are cheaper than any welder in Asia. We loose on thinner stuff, like 16 gauge and lower, and we lose on items that need a lot of hand work. But we are right there for heavier items. We did a large welding job for Chinese factory last year that was for the US market. Our price was the same, but shipping was less since the product was already here. We got the deal over their own factory. 28,000 units.
TL;DR - things are better for humans than these articles would have you believe.
Not saying they will be right or wrong, but that's the current dichotomy with US Made / Non US made goods.
The future is high mix short run manufacturing. Just in Time. Anything that has to be shipped and not flown, is never going to be 'just-in-time'. Locally made, custom just for you. This does not mean that automation won't be involved. The automation is the core of it - without the miracle of CNC (praise be!) the local guy wouldn't stand a chance.
My customers don't seem to care if it is robot welded or not, or made in the US or not. I doubt 99% of them could tell me which parts are robot welded and which ones are manually welded. Everyone claims that they care, but the top sellers in my segment are all made in Asia. So the evidence does not match the claims. The customer just cares if its what they want. Thats it. We use the "long tail" strategy in our market segment to differentiate with offshore competitors. We offer 3x the part numbers, and 2x the vehicle coverage, plus we do custom sizes and the others do not.
Automation, and flexible use machines, let me change styles to follow trends, and get low labor costs without resorting to offshore. We can customize parts one a one-by-one basis for clients if needed, and we do so usually once or twice a day.
I view my factory like a breakfast restaurant. I know I am going to sell a bunch of eggs, bacon, potatoes, toast - but I don't know exactly how much, or in what configuration. I have a menu, and I know what is roughly the most popular on any given day, but I never know exactly what the customer will want, and it doesn't matter since we make it fresh for them right when they order. I keep the raw materials in stock, we build about half our units on a fixed schedule based on statistical high movers, and the other half is built to order from the orders that day. There is minimal WIP on the floor, I try to keep it under 2 weeks.
Given the choice, people want to get things personalized just for them, or to have something a little unique. How many t-shirts do you see people wear on any given day, and how many are the exact same? Almost none, yet the basic form is the same for all.
TL;DR - things will be fine. Humans will have jobs. Have robots, hire humans.
My initial reaction was that this number is hard to nail down because on reflection, so much of what I do gets automated. That's the nature of software. When I started programming for money in the late 90s, I still managed memory. That's automated now through garbage collection (for me). I also used to do a lot of direct network and socket programming, also automated away. I managed my own database connection and pooling. JDBC came along and abstracted that away, but a decade later, I heard someone who used an ORM say he wouldn't want to write all that "low level" jdbc code ;) I guess you're getting old when the high level leaky abstraction of your youth becomes the low level code for a new generation of programmers.
My whole career has been one long progression of getting automated away, by this perspective. I remember when I proposed getting a web server up and running for a project in college, and a professor remarked on what I was doing. There was a time, he recalled, when doing a "spreadsheet" was fairly advanced and took some serious technical chops. The same would happen to web servers - but for the few years then they required specialized skill and had a big impact on business, this knowledge would be very valuable. The moment would pass, but something new would come up, and that would create all kinds of new apps that require an app developer.
To me, the moment when nothing new comes up - ie., when there is no new moment for human app developers, all software development is now automated - that is the moment when we replaced by automation. I wonder if that's what this article is talking about? If that's the case, 20% might seem high, though not out of the question. But by a more general definition, the one I discussed above, I'd ay the odds that my current skillset will be automated away is roughly 100%. I want to be clear I'm not (necessarily) talking about churn, I'm talking about new breakthroughs that fundamentally change the job. That kind of change I don't mind at all, I enjoy it, it's probably why I'm in this field. Churn, on the other hand, is what makes me want to quit.
I'm rambling on here, but it occurs to me that software development probably isn't that unusual. It's the jobs that don't change as much that are unusual. Lawyers, for instance, have certainly changed over the years, but we expect people to still be lawyers in 100 years. How many horse and buggy drivers expect that job to still be around? How many lathe operators or truck drivers expect this?
I'm thinking, maybe the best metric isn't the odds that a particular job will be automated, since for many (most?) jobs, that's pretty much 100%. The question is, what are the odds that a job will be automated with no path to the next thing. That's the fundamental transformation going on here. And yeah, it actually is happening. A horse and buggy driver can become a bus driver, but what happens when the concept of a drive goes away completely? Will anything emerge?
Another aspect of automation I'm interested in is the complete bindside. Music, I think, was one of the interesting automation stories of the last 100+ years. There were various attempts to replicated the human mechanical process of playing an instrument, and they all appeared very unlikely to do much replacement. Yeah, piano rolls made an appearance, and you could try this I suppose by hooking up some contraption to make a flute play.
But what happened instead was that it turned out you can actually store music physically in various materials and play it back. Music went from 100% live to less than 1% live in about 50 years. But we didn't really automate music, we replaced it with a similar product.
My guess is that this will be the story with software development. It seems absurd to me that this could happen through automation, but that's because I'm locked into one way of thinking about it. Kind of like trying to imagine how a crankshaft could power a bunch of strings tied to a bow and some pegs to try to recreate the physical process of playing a violin. It won't happen like that. Something utterly mind blowing, like storing music in grooves of different depth in vinyl, of all things, utterly unanticipated. Yeah, that's generally how this massive shifts happen.
Regulations limiting catches and seasons to try to preserve the fisheries in some state of production have already driven many people out of fishing.
The problem is the same one as self driving cars on a more massive scale - accountability. When you have human bodies at every step of the process you have someone to blame if you "accidentally" kill a protected species, overrun your quotas, put tainted meat in the market, etc - if everything is operating on its own you get the same situation where self driving car operators are going to try to blame the software engineers if something goes wrong, while the company gets to take the fallout.
And the fines on illegal fishing are actually legitimate compared to the token paltry fines in other industries (depending on the country, of course).
The economics are completely on automations side here, you could get 97% good fish for a tenth the price with some substantial up front investments today. But that 3% false positive / sorting error case with the inability to blame line workers kills the business.