Why the tech sector may not solve America’s looming automation crisis
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
Let's look at actual measures of automation - productivity growth. It's been very low over the past decade[1] when compared to decades past. Prime age employment has been returning to pre-crisis highs[2] - despite people claiming that the old jobs were gone and new jobs wouldn't replace them (the machines were supposedly going to take them all).
[1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm [2] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060
1) As has been shown time and time again, the rewards of productivity gains accrue to the owners of capital far more than to the workers who are more productive. The result is widening inequality on many levels, which extrapolated a few decades into the future ends up looking... not great. I hope we can agree that de facto serfdom is a bad thing.
2) You can't just look at the number of new jobs when making employment generalizations - you have to look at the quality and type of jobs that were created to replace the ones lost. It's like if you took away someone's house and then gave them a tiny apartment a year later, then claimed "Look, they got housing back! Everything's great again!". In the case of employment, the vast majority of jobs created in the last decade have been contract positions and low-end temp work [1]. If you look at the sectors where employment has grown when new jobs data comes out, low-end service jobs continuously top the list (ex. [2]). We can debate whether or not people actually want these types of new jobs as opposed to traditional real estate/financial services/salaried construction/etc. jobs that were lost in 2009-2010.
3) We haven't hit the automation crisis yet in any meaningful way. When autonomous trucks and warehouse robots become prevalent, then we will be in an actual crisis.
The automation crisis right now is not that everyone is going to lose their jobs overnight, but that automation is exacerbating big problems in the jobs market that lead to massive inequality, the prevalence of underemployment, and the trend towards bad jobs with few or no benefits and workers needing to work gigs on the side to make ends meet or afford the things that their normal job would have provided in decades past. When large swathes of workers lose their jobs to automation in the future, these problems are going to continue to compound unless we start making big policy changes. Yes, people will likely find new jobs to replace the ones lost, but will they actually be better or worse off than before?
[1] https://krueger.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/akrueger/f...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/business/economy/services...
Trains also took away long distance horse buggie jobs. They were largely automated too. And finally, if you think driverless cars are nearby, then so are completely humanoid robots who can do all the work a human can do.
You seem to be arguing that the issues I brought up are tied only to globalization and outsourcing when they are, in fact, tied to underlying economics that strongly favors automation in the long run. Over the next 10-20 years as automation becomes cheaper and more practical, it makes sense that the same problems will accelerate, even as globalization and outsourcing decline.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2016/12/08/news/companies/carrier-jobs...
Automation is global reduction of available jobs, which we might be doing (with agricultural mechanization mostly). But nowhere are we close to a mass change in society worldwide, not due to AI, and specially not to be given the blame of rising inequality, wages, debt, and unemployment.
Actually, I can agree that there had been reduction in global jobs as world gets slowly automated. But there won't be a sudden takeover of all jobs by some super sentient AI leading to mass unemployment. And neither are the current problems of inequality, debt, low wages a result of an increasing productivity, but rather increasing globalization.
No shit. There's fewer typewriters these days too.
There is actually some evidence that what we currently have is already worse than serfdom [0] in many ways. I don't think this is a crisis which is about to occur, but one which has already started, is currently ongoing, and will probably get much worse.
[0] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
As for self driving trucks, I remember people telling me a decade ago that they would have lead to mass unemployment by now. The predictions of an impending automation crisis haven't had a great track record.
As for self driving trucks, who told you that? Per my prior comment, we're not there yet, but it is definitely coming. Automation hasn't reached driving yet and it won't in any significant way for at least another 5 years, but as soon as the tech is ready, adoption is going to be rapid. But saying "it hasn't happened yet, so clearly it's bogus" is like building a cabin on an active volcano and saying, "they said it would erupt within the last 5 years and that didn't happen, so clearly it's not going to erupt ever". Just because a predicted timeline is incorrect does not mean the predicted event won't come to pass.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/3/28/15094424/jobs-eliminated-ne...
[2] http://evonomics.com/productivity-is-slowing-inequality-is-g...
Betting on widespread automation of trucking is probably one of the safest AI-related bets you could make right now.
This looks much more like the real problem to me. The solution: Make it much easier and less bureaucratic for such people to invest their money.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
Unless you believe more people are wealthy enough to live fine without needing to work (the opposite seems to be true[1]), what matters is not the employment rate, but labor participation rate. That's not even considering whether average wages for those who are employed are are keeping pace with rising living costs. The good news is that, eventually, automation will reduce living costs. The bad news is that fewer people will have jobs enabling them to afford even those reduced living costs.
From the BLS website glossary: '"Productivity": A measure of economic efficiency that shows how effectively economic inputs are converted into goods and services.'
I don't see why productivity as an economic measure would increase in the early stages of a process where narrow AI and robotics start to take over human jobs. Until costs come down, when AI software and robotics becomes more generic, and standardized, and adopted outside of narrow industries, the economic effects won't be as dramatic.
The only escape from narrow AI and robots taking human jobs is the creation of more bullshit jobs (see: Graeber), or genuinely new job sectors, but I have yet to read any compelling predictions of new job sectors that will employ large numbers of people and can't be automated.
Creator jobs? How many people on youtube, or patreon, or self-publishing books, earn even minimum wage from the time they put in? If you dumped 1 million, or 10 million, additional people onto those platforms and told them their new job is to create full time, how many of those additional people could make a living wage, or even minimum wage, for the time they spend?
Service jobs? While the wealthy (let's say, upper middle class and above) might want human waiters, human voice support on the telephone, etc., I think that's vastly overplayed as an opportunity for human labor. I don't think that many wealthy people would prefer to deal with humans over good AI, and I don't think it would create that many service jobs even if wealthy people did mostly prefer to pay a premium for human service.
[1] With increasing numbers of people working beyond retirement age, more debt, and more couples both working (I have nothing against that, I'm just pointing out the labor statistical reality that families' standard of living requires that more, now).
Here's labor force participation for prime age workers[1] (which is similar to the prime age Employment-Population Ratio I posted above). The problem with your graph is that it's including everyone 16 and over - so baby boomer retirement makes an impact, as does the ACA (college students not working a job for benefits because they're covered by their parents, people who are retiring earlier because they don't have to wait for Medicare).
Though it's worth noting that even if, for some reason, you wanted to look at everyone over 16, the participation rate is still well above anywhere it was in the 50's, 60's, and most of the 70's. If you're looking at prime age, we're only a couple of percents below the highs in the 90's (and much higher than other periods).
> but I have yet to read any compelling predictions of new job sectors that will employ large numbers of people and can't be automated.
I'm always confused by this argument. Practically every day on HN there are articles about problems that it would be great if more people were working on. Replication crisis? Aging infrastructure? Global warming? Cancer research? Environmental destruction? Food scarcity? Documentation and bug hunting in software? Taking care of frameworks? Early childhood education? Heck, even beyond all the problems on Earth, there are plenty of people who want to work on things like sending people to Mars.
I just can't fathom how people can look at the world and say, "Yep, we don't really need to do anything more than what we're already doing."
So while there is lots to do, it seems hard to think of huge numbers of jobs being created.
Because women entered the work force. Compare your linked chart to the same chart for women [0] and men [1]. It's an important dimension to the discussion, I think, since non-working women are generally socially respected, while non-working men are not.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25FEUSM156S [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25MAUSM156S
Almost everything you listed there requires high skill/education levels. What about service workers/low-skill jobs (y'know, the things that would be replaced by automaton)? I'm pretty sure they're the people GP was talking about.
I’m not sure even this is true because of the degree of hyper-financialization and rent-seeking in areas like housing and healthcare. For example, with housing, even assuming we clear the zoning barrier, you still run into the problem of housing being an investment vehicle for global Capital. They’ll let it sit vacant or be consolidated into rental conglomerates in exchange for a relatively secure asset with marginal returns.
It’s possible that systems in Europe with a greater degree of decommodification will benefit from automation (e.g. easier to build public housing and easier to administer socialized medicine), but this seems unlikely to hold true in the American context, barring some massive political change.
You claim, that the "Automation crisis" isn't a real problem either, because apparently employment is almost back to pre-2007 levels. This may well be true, but a significant factor that has to be analyzed is: what jobs are being taken. I have no numbers only anecdotes [from UK/Europe, not US], and there is a pattern where low paying service jobs are replacing jobs in the manufacturing industry. This is a direct consequence of automation in the manufacturing industries, and these jobs are not very secure / automation-safe either. Also, this problem is way older than you or me, the first Luddites were smashing machines in the 1810s. The history of the 1800s show that automation (with lots of other factos in conjunction) can lead to societal upheaval and severe economic problems.
As for productivity growth, I concur that by the numbers in your first link show a stagnation in the past decade. That does not mean that this trend will continue in the future. When AI/ML Technologies become mainstream (this is already the case) and receive widespread adoption in several industries (this is not the case by now) productivity growth will increase once again.
If we don't we will have to reduce consumption considerably and there are several ways to achieve that.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060110135409/http://www.theoil...
It's kinda more related to that "Made in China" sticker that appears on most manufactured things you buy these days.
No shortage of manufacturing jobs in China. Or Germany (which has also enacted economic policy to keep manufacturing at home), for that matter.
So The marginal choice is known - perhaps the easy wins to be won from human productivity increases have been achieved?
That's false. Firms have been spending more on expanding capex investment than stock buybacks. There's a capex boom going on with the S&P 500 right now.
Year over year capex growth was up 15.6% in the first quarter, and 18% in the second quarter.
By contrast, capex growth for the S&P 500 was flat to negative for most of the prior five years, and was negative for nine straight quarters prior to 3Q17.
We haven't seen that kind of capex boom since the initial bounce out of the great recession in late 2010-2011. And that was massively juiced by the Fed, whereas we're in a very different Fed environment now.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-26/trump-tax...
Plus more recent news is this: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/capex-is-starting-to-ramp-...
This shows that capex investments are only starting to ramp up, are unevenly distributed.
In general it supports the position that stock buy backs are the preferred route of money use given the current monetary scenario. Especially since stock buy backs are at record highs.
This helped me find another point of interest - that 10% of households hold 86% of stocks. Meaning that the gains to shareholders will only re-concentrate wealth.
That was supposed to be impossible. It was seemingly universally claimed by economists, industry pundits, stray talking heads on TV and armchair experts that manufacturing jobs were in permanent decline.
Instead, the US is in the middle of a manufacturing boom. That looks set to continue with at least three factors in the US favor: cheap, abundant energy; the cost of manufacturing in China continues to climb and has made the US a lot more cost competitive in contrast; a slowdown in the DC regulation monster; corporate tax cuts are a big deal for domestic manufacturing - as profit margins in manufacturing are typically modest - and the US is now tax competitive with the OECD median.
To paraphrase Buffett, you get rich making things, and you get poor buying things. The US used to be a potent example of that; China is the latest stellar example of it. The US desperately needs to reduce consumption and boost production + savings, in regards to the ratio in the economy.
Same goes for most industries - there's a small group of companies who show good productivity growth, while the rest stay in place.
So it's just a matter of time.
From what my dad tells me, the trucking industry is hurting for long-haul drivers. Few men want to spend days on the road, far from their families and homes. It's such an unsatisfying job that women largely refuse to consider it. Even fewer want the nomadic lifestyle idolized by many on HN.
How will the trucking industry deal with both this threat to their jobs, and also a lack of human interest in doing the job?
Fixing the pricing to make the working conditions reasonable will simply make long-haul truck uncompetitive with freight railroads. And that is really the solution. If you want to send cargo across the country, put it on a train.
Shipping cargo via trains is dramatically slower than via trucks. When you use a truck, your cargo goes from A->B.
When you use a train, you first need to get a truck to haul your content to the railyard. Then depending on the cargo, unload and reload onto the train. Then wait while the train makes stops for everyone else's cargo. Potentially your cargo will need to be unhooked from the train and wait until a different train headed to a different location arrives to take your cargo. Then once your train gets to the area of delivery, you still need a truck to show up and take your cargo to the final destination.
Even more so, for lots of loads trains cost similar to trucks. Trains have their purpose, but there is a reason why Coca-Cola, Walmart, UPS, etc... use trucks.
Put it on a train, unless it will spoil?
Oh yes, there will always be exceptions. But it will have to cost more. There is no escaping that.
Think what would happen if tomorrow the government said from now on every doctor can see no more than 2 patients per day. (Oh, and by the way, we're installing cameras in every hospital, urgent care, clinic, and private practice office to verify that no one exceeds that limit.) Now imagine that at the same time hospitals said they would no longer work with off site providers of any sort because it increases efficiency to have all of their physicians on site full time. Well, all of a sudden you would need about 6 to 8 times the number of doctors you have today. (At a minimum.)
This is somewhat of a simplification, and it doesn't get across the full depth and implications of the changes, but it gives you a good idea of what's happened to the trucking industry over the past few years.
Well, if doctors were killing patients at the rate truckers were killing other drivers then, yea, hopefully we would. (Honestly tired doctors kill a lot in the US as it is, medical mistakes are the 3rd leading cause of death).
I don't see much purpose in the exaggeration; change it to, Doctors must see each patient for no less than 15 minutes; and can only work 8 hour days.
Granted, internists with their own practices or in small towns do this already.
Highway driving is not hard in comparison with the actual local driving part, getting into tight loading docks, dealing with humans giving directions (at the terminals), handling driveways/paths not on maps, and so on.
And that's the sort of job that's a better quality of life for humans than long-haul is. Go to the terminal in the morning, make short trips all day, be off work at a normal hour, sleep in your own bed and be with your family at night, just like a normal job.
So given that, I actually see trucking as one of the areas where increasing automation may be a smooth transition, especially with the labor shortage in the industry.
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The hypothetical middle-term future then, looks like: Humans on either end making the last-mile trips, automation getting trucks between major terminals via highway.
There are large shipping hubs that already exist. Vast warehouse complexes in most major US cities.
>Who will own and maintain them?
I would assume the gigantic companies that own fleets of automated trucks.
>This could end up costing more than just having the truckers drive the long haul.
Why? Two of the most costly things are people and downtime. Trucks with people in them can only drive so many hours a day. Going from hub to hub with only fueling stops would further reduce transit downtime.
In the US, all major metropolitan areas have a network of trucker fuel/food/shopping stops positioned at the major truck routes around the metros. The big players are Pilot Flying J and Love's. There might be a play by Berkshire Hathaway to leverage the network of these truck stops into trucking automation hubs, as they intend to purchase 80% of Pilot Flying J by 2023.
If we catch news of Pilot Flying J upgrading some of their Net connections far beyond what would normally be needed (say into 10 gigabit ranges and up), and correspondingly investing in Cisco-level WiFi gear (their WiFi is notoriously awful among truckers), that might be a sign of laying in the networking groundwork of a data-intensive hub where they charge the trucking companies for high-speed real-time truck updates at the hub, for example.
If we catch news of Pilot Flying J buying a fleet of near Level 5 self-driving cars, then that might be another sign. Reefer trucks sometimes take about 4-6 hours to unload, vans almost as long. If carrying produce it can be 6-12 hours to load. If you switch to a metro-based hub system, then your drivers show up at the hub, and any load longer than the time it takes to drive to the hub, get another load assigned, and get another driver dispatched to the drop/load point, sees the truck arrive with a self-driving car behind it in "little duckling mode", tailing the truck, reducing the problem space for the self-driving programs. Driver positions the trailer, gets in car, goes back to hub for next load.
That change converts nearly every load into drop/hooks. This increases profitability by stripping out a ton of dead wait time. Driver wages and quality of life, and corporate profits, can go up in tandem while rates go down for customers. Customers won't be pressured to rush through the load/unload cycle (it can be priced lower than if a trucker is waiting), and trucking companies will have a huge, immediate profit incentive to pressure customers to pay for any trucker time required for helping load/unload contents, and truckers can partake in paid assistance for loading/unloading.
An efficient Uber-style dispatch system would be required, because there are options to route drivers in a "duckling car" to go directly to another load in the metro, then drive the load back to the hub, for example; I see a lot of optimization scenarios, all dramatically driving up trucker utilization. Whoever is working on automated long-haul trucking also needs to work on automated drop/hooking at the hubs, so automated rigs can drop off and pick up trailers without human assistance, saving even more time.
But back in the day, it paid well enough to make that sacrifice. I knew families growing up that did okay with Dad was a truck driver and sole bread-winner, probably as well as my UAW-working father.
But now, sound like it's crap pay and the job didn't get any easier. And, duh, they can't find anyone to do that job.
I think that is the story they like to tell, because it gets on the news and leads some people to seek jobs as truck drivers. But I don't think it's really true.
I think they have all the drivers they are willing to pay for. If they really had a shortage of drivers, they would pay more to attract more drivers.
So this could explain why they won't just pay more -- because some people are already willing to do the work at the current pay, and it's cheaper to have them work more.
Which is where UBI comes in as the missing part of a liberal capitalist economy. Until you remove the stick of starvation and homelessness, labour markets cannot respond rationally.
Is not that a symptom of not paying enough?
Is this portion of the trucker population relatively small, and//or have little impact on issues being discussed here?
My wife has seen 48 states (except Hawaii & Alaska) through the windshield of an OTR truck, because when she was young her father would take her on some of his trips when school was out. He would also go with his wife sometimes. None of that changes anything: the vast majority of trips are still with a single driver alone in the cab.
Just because you can have a passenger doesn't make the lifestyle more desirable for most. In fact, I think the drivers who do it the longest are personality types that prefer to be alone.
Can anyone point at the original data of which this is presumably a summary?
grump.
That forces public schooling to train children for intellectual persuits, and children who are gifted need to have programs tailored for them.
It also means you are going to have post-scarcity politics. The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property. Universal income is horrific in the fact it dissolves those relationships, and politicans can decide to revoke people's food or shelter on a whim and also the public can decide to support it. You also realize that things like firearms ownership become very important as that becomes one of the few things that forces people to have value for each other at a very basic level.
Are you saying that the 'cognitive elite' will live unsatisfied, lonely existences, and that's the price they have to pay for material success?
It seems like you're equating material scarcity with a 'mythic' view of human struggle. I.e: we need to challenge ourselves to grow and become better people.
I'm not denying that struggle is 'good' for bettering yourself, but I think there are ways to provide this kind of challenge that doesn't involve encouraging or maintaining material scarcity for vast swaths of the human population.
This is a troubling thing to think about. What I can see happening is that increasingly, the utility of the labor of people in that subpar, but still adequate, IQ band is steadily decreasing as automation tears out the bottom of semi-skilled labor. You can take somebody with an 85 IQ and put them on an assembly line, and they'll make a good living in 1970, but you can't realistically send that person to a dev bootcamp and make them into a web developer in 2018. So what do they do? Low skilled service industry work sure isn't the answer. My suspicion would be that the trades are most likely to combine reasonable return and resistance to automation, along with a probable shortage once the boomers retire, but it's a thorny question.
I think it's become obvious that the "Everybody needs to go to college" narrative has been borderline disastrous, given the mountains of student loan debt and stunted development that my generation has experienced.
AI is going to outright replace a whole bunch of what are currently decently paying, stable, office jobs: accountants, clerks, schedulers.... and AI-augmentation is going to allow 1 person to do the same work that currently requires 2+ in so many fields.
Law and Medicine, two fields that have historically been good pathways to the middle class, are likely going to see AI hit them first in the middle, with the need for non-senior/non-specialized doctors/lawyers dramatically reduced as AI-assisted tools become standard.
As the middle gets cut out, more people are pushed towards lower-skill jobs that require physical interaction, likely pushing down wages in a buyer's market and decreasing the incentives for robotic automation.
That's going to be a massive blow to the US and global economy, all without having to build a single robot.
But it's understandable why people on this forum always talk about low/middle skill jobs being automated , when it's just as likely that cognitive jobs will be automated while emotional jobs will still be valuable.
... what? Fear at a basic level, perhaps, but making murder weapons widely available is the opposite of respect for human life.
Taken another way, would you also support publishing your bank account credentials if everyone else did as well?
"Incorrect. Making bank account credentials widely available is indeed compatible with respect for ones wealth. Ones wealth is worth being defended. One may disagree, but the right to protecting ones wealth is a natural, inalienable right".
I'm pretty sure that you can find people that argue that natural rights are a quasi-religious fiction invoked solely as a discussion terminator in debates about the proper parameters of legal rights.
We really need a mental paradigm shift here. If a robot can now do a job that used to require 2 million workers, why should that not result in 2 million people being freed to enjoy this increased leisure rather than having to desperately find new "jobs" or otherwise face destitution. What are we working towards again, GDP growth?
Regarding the article, to be completely blunt: no sh*t. Software engineering in the U.S. is already very saturated, just less so than every other field (eg. marketing, finance, law) so nobody frames it as such. One of my ex-coworkers just went through 6 technical interviews and a coding project only to have his offer rescinded by an HR lady at the parent company due to a minor mistake on his original resume (against the will of everyone who actually interviewed him). Coding bootcamp placement rates right now are awful.
Do people really think the 2 million truck drivers can just become software engineers (without some kind of massive government-sponsored jobs program akin to a "New Deal")? Taking a step back, why is that even something we should socially desire? Do society really need more Javascript monkeys?
Interesting supporting info graphics, as well.
Truck drivers have probably heard this for a few years longer than that.
At what point do you blame the individual for not learning any skill in this time period?
also, given the age, culture, geographical location of applicants and their families, what percentage of former truck drivers turned software developers will be hired by a tech startup or a FANG company?
It wont pay as much as programmers who eliminate jobs, but given how starvation is over, people live alone, and I watch my friends with tons of college debt spend money on bars and activities, the future will be entertainment/human based.
If possible, I am all for elegance in presenting information, but I almost always prefer to have less eye candy and more content. My 2c.
Maybe we need less designers and more writers?
If these long pauses are "transitions", I see nothing to admire.
If you are interested in helping to understand and be part of solving this issue, come join us at Guild Education in Denver. We're a venture backed B-corporation working to connect the future of work with (company funded) education opportunities - from the skilled trades + nursing to data scientists.
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Generally, if you have to obfuscate the thing you want to post because you need to avoid a filter, it's unlikely that what you're posting is welcome in the place you're trying to post it.