Coronavirus may mean automation is coming sooner than we thought
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This is more than "full wage" for people with low incomes since it's an extra $31K/yr ($15/hr) on top of existing state unemployment benefits. It won't be more for higher incomes.
It's state managed, and we definitely have a huge surge of unemployment claims to process, so your family may not have benefits yet due to the backlog of claims. Also, states may have eligibility requirements which your family members don't meet. Which category do your family members fall into?
a) Have been denied unemployment
b) Are in the queue for unemployment, but haven't gotten it yet
c) Have unemployment, but it's less than their previous income
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_Aid,_Relief,_and_E...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-stimulus-package...
Rare event? The list of pandemic/epidemic events of the last two decades alone is long. The world was simply incredibly lucky the last few times, only that the Western world ignored what happened in Asia. There's a reason why so many infections and deaths are in Western countries.
With superbugs on the rise "thanks" to abuse of reserve antibiotics in farming, it's only a question of time until the world is ravaged by another pandemic.
Not yet, that is the point. It is only a matter of time.
> Something like the bubonic plague can easily be controlled by basic hygienic practices.
Agreed, but we see with coronavirus how many people (sometimes intentionally) ignore them. Besides many places even in developed nations lack basic hygienic needs, such as prisons (see e.g. https://www.coe.int/t/dg3/health/Prisonsreport_en.asp), which leads to endemic tuberculosis outbreaks in prison inmates.
Conversely, maybe Asia could make some changes to their food and wildlife handling practices so they aren't regularly introducing novel viruses to humans.
At the moment it seems equally likely that some companies come out of all of this with the "lesson" that remote work caused their downturn in productivity and stock value (who can remember that every other company experienced the same when your investors only care "what have you done lately?" and "what have you done 'proactively'?") and we'll quickly see a return to "everybody needs to be in the office together" culture back backed by the same consultants that learned the wrong lessons after Marissa Mayer's Yahoo! house cleaning and were still badly ratcheting companies towards as miserable as possible colocation strategies.
It seems about 50/50 to me right now which group will prevail. At least with US public traded companies the only inertia seems to whatever shiny fad stock traders are enamored with versus whatever misery HPCs manage to sell on golf courses in C-Suite handshakes. (ETA: Some of whom, the worst stock investors and HPCs are the same people, of course.)
But working from home will expose a lot of stuff that can be done from home, a lot of employees who turn out to prefer working from home, and a lot of CEOs and accountants and so on will realize a lot of money can be saved on real estate. People are being quoted in the news along these lines, you don't have to anticipate it.
I am a advocate for working from home. But I know plenty of people and roles who are suffering a great deal from working from home.
I know working from home all the time is not optimal, but reducing the "drive to work" days and replcing then with "work from home" for people who prefer that would be great.
I'm thinking of how you have something like a powder or gravel, and you shake the container and it levels out like liquid.
1. We could invent a vaccine and discover that COVID mutates slowly enough that we get long term immunity. After mass vaccination in rich countries, the problem is basically solved after 1-2 years and life can go back to what it was in 2019. However, after 2 years of changed consumer habits and a set of companies and supply chains that will naturally adapt to the situation in the interim, the new normal might be significantly different than the old normal. Governments and international trade will have been changed. Investments in automation and telework will have been made. Some changes will be permanent. Like with WW2, 9/11 or the Great Recession, the ripples of causality will spread out for decades.
2. We could realize that the virus mutates fast enough that even with vaccines, we have a new endemic virus, possibly resembling the prevalence of the flu, but much more deadly. COVID will be one of the leading causes of death, up along with heart disease and cancer. People accept this increase in mortality and accept shortened lifespans. After several years of adjusting to the new reality, people start to just live with it. Some common activities completely lose their appeal due to the increased risk, such as theaters, concerts, travel, public transportation, and open offices.
3. We are unable to vaccinate against the virus, but continue aggressive measures to keep it from spreading a much as possible. We accept a new form of digital surveillance state that keeps us the goldilocks amount of isolated. We accept the new reality of algorithms determining our ability to live, work, and socialize. Life is increasingly lived digitally and in VR.
I think it's important to consider these possibilities because of the Normalcy Bias. The best way to overcome it to to seriously consider that tomorrow will not at all be like today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
After a few months of being cautious of no major risk People will relax.
I really doubt that. Even with very dangerous disease, like Polio and Measles, most people lived their lives as normal.
The AIDS epidemic peaked in 1995 in the USA at 40k deaths per year. People absolutely made permanent changes to their sex practices as a result of the disease such as safe sex, regular STD testing, and taking preventive medications (PREP). Because of transmission characteristics, the disease spread fastest among gay men and the epidemic created huge cultural changes in gay America. Until PREP was available, the idea of having unsafe sex was extremely looked down upon and seen as an unnecessary risk, even though many men find condoms less pleasurable.
So I'd say that's pretty direct evidence that people are willing to curtail or modify their recreation when it becomes risky.
This is not a good example. Most people in the United States were never in a position to get AIDS because they are not MSMs and not promiscuous. Most sex takes place between spouses.
Gay men still have much higher prevalences of promiscuity and unsafe sex practices than the population at large. Promiscuity and 'unsafe sex' was never an issue in the general population.
Moreover, as your study points out, 'switching' who is in what role in anal sex is another effective way of spreading AIDs. Women cannot be the penetrative partners in anal sex, so even if a woman contracts AIDS via anal sex, she cannot spread it as a penetrating partner.
But to directly contradict your false narrative. I'd point out that your study was done in 2007. That's 13 years ago. Gay male sexual behavior in 2007 greatly differed from that during the AIDs epidemic. By choosing to use an article from 2007 to explain away gay sexual behavior during the AIDs epidemic of the 1980s, it is clear that you are trying to spin a narrative instead of actually look at events. In the book "and the band played on" by Shilts, the number of partners recorded during the 80s among the minority of gay men who had AIDS was regularly in the hundreds. This is clearly more than most people -- gay or straight.
Like I said, AIDS is a disease that affected a relatively small amount of people who continued to live life as normal because they could not control themselves. This furthers my point that people are not necessarily willing to sacrifice life's pleasures due to a deadly disease
Our business had seen its robotics and automation sector picking up before the pandemic hit and as other verticals have paused development plans, robotics and automation continue to press ahead.
The view here is momentum for automation already existed and the pandemic is seen as one more justification for continued investment.
Once those systems are developed they won't go away after the pandemic is over and those roles will likely be allowed atrophy by attrition.
From what I've heard in the manufacturing industry, automation is great conceptually but there are still many finer motor tasks for which the technology just isn't there yet, so cheap labor is the solution. Perhaps in hindsight these managers will find that concentrating all of that cheap labor in pretty much just one geography (China) isn't exactly the definition of redundancy, so supply chains in the long term will need to be redefined.
Slowly, geographies like Vietnam, Mexico, India and even the U.S. should benefit from this desire to diversify away from China. This "next generation" of factories will be smarter and pave the way for more advanced automation involving finer motor tasks.
> "The demand for smart factories is likely to grow with increased diversification of production locations – from China to Vietnam, India, and even the US." (Morgan Stanley Research. Investing in the Second Machine Age – Picking the Winners. July 19, 2019)
What if the recovery looks different?
If we create even a sizable percentage of automated factories, then you don't necessarily need the same post-WWII levels of labor that you needed back then to get production increases. My own bet would be on inequality in the developed world actually accelerating. Businesses will be doing what's rational. Finding manufacturing locations close to coastal ports for the purposes of distributing their productive capacity across the globe in a bid for redundancy. Automating everything they can. And more.
All of which will be completely reasonable actions. It's just that the result will mean even fewer jobs, and even more education to get those jobs. Probably good for the HN crowd if I'm being honest. But not so good for opioid infested flyover country.
It's easy to say there are plenty of jobs from the perch of your average HN User. You have the skills. I have the skills. Good for us.
But from the perspective of people trying to get by in rural Wisconsin? Yeah. Not so much.
Automation does not necessarily imply offshoring. Germany has highly automated industrial production within the country because it still has a high demand for qualified technicians in its factories, and has a highly integrated supply chain within the country and its neighbors.
This is still part of the same trends we have been experiencing for the past couple of decades. If anything it will force strategic thinking from governments of the very real second-order effects, many of which have been ignored.
It is inferior to a rise in consumer goods in a few ways - less incentive to automate especially if there is little competition. However the lossiness of defection prisoner's dilemma works in the consumer's favor for once.
If one automates and takes lower margins then they gain market share but shrink the market cap. If multiple automate and scale up then it leads to even lower margins.
This approach does lead to more accessible goods however than an "inflated" higher income for workers norm but also devalues competition from the third world - China produces clothes even for Sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti as it is cheaper than even their labor in areas where there is less money to be made transporting goods and materials.
I think actual recovery will take 1-2 years, and the demand is going to be for a product that's less centralized, more automated.
And my wild-ass guess is that the oil markets are going to be fucked for years after this. I suspect there will be massive bankruptcies and consolidation that results in price spikes to the highest levels ever seen as mono/oligopolies emerge from the ashes and seek to capitalize on their victory in this price war.
I'd be very surprised if the auto industry as we know it know recovers from this recession.
The oil glut crisis is an early result, our depression level unemployment rate is another. But balls are going to continue to drop: loan defaults, bankrupt businesses, hyperinflation in some countries, trade agreements blowing up. And all of this is just the trajectory we are on right now - it may well get worse with a more severe COVID outbreak.
I think given the situation, the onus on you to explain why in the world these bad outcomes WON'T happen, since they seem l to be causally inevitable without strong intervention.
It is like the world has been juggling 5 balls at once and someone just turned out the lights. Maybe we get the lights back on in time, maybe we catch a couple of balls, but gravity is pulling everything to the ground whether we like it or not.
So finding someplace along one of South America's coasts would be attractive. Australia would be extremely attractive if we could get automation right because labor costs there are just too high. Africa would also be attractive in the extreme. You wouldn't even have to take the resources off of the continent. Lowest labor costs around. Plus, two enormous coasts full of warm water ports.
Anyway, the idea would be to set things up so that if one region goes to the dogs, you just switch to the other.
EDIT: Now I think about it, there are some pretty large political issues in africa right now, so maybe africa wouldn't be the best place. Populism could easily end up landing you in the same situation as white farmers in Zimbabwe. Anyway, the fundamental idea still stands. Balance manufacturing from Asia and N America more towards S America, and Australia.
I do wonder however if this effect will be hampered by the number of unemployed. More unemployed people means a greater supply of laborers and that translates to lower costs.
Of course on the flip side it may be that many companies are starting to see what is actually necessary for their company to operate and will run with a leaner staff moving forward.
The future will be wild that's for sure.
EDIT: When I say "translates to lower costs" I mean lower costs for labor, realized what I said could be ambiguous.
So, jobs for the unemployed, and robots that can’t get sick.
If you answer something like UBI, then you're just passing the buck and the obvious question is, "where does that money come from?"
This problem is secretly baked into the structure of the current crisis. More automation is inevitable, I'm not arguing about that, but it will only exacerbate the problem.
The point of UBI proposals is that there is enough total value in our national economies to meet everyone's basic needs— the question of where the money/value "comes from" is simple, it comes from taking it back from where it's been concentrated over decades of inadequate taxation.
Printing money doesn't increase financial value it only increases liquidity.
> it comes from taking it back from where it's been concentrated over decades of inadequate taxation.
Again you're not increasing the financial value, you're changing how it's disbursed. Whether your fuel is in the form of gasoline or electricity you still have a finite amount of it and once you burn through it, it's gone unless you're adding more to the system.
"Moral" as a descriptor seems likely to derail the argument here. There's nothing immoral about delivering groceries; it's providing a genuinely useful service, and can be intrinsically rewarding as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of people volunteering to do it for free in the UK at the moment.
> But there isn't much value in people spending their lives driving delivery cars or bagging groceries either.
The parent is conflating different meanings for the word "value". The grandparent is talking economic value, eg receiving money for labor. Clearly there is economic value for delivery services since I'm happy to pay them and their drivers do infact get paid.
Therefore the parent must intend a different meaning of value. The most likely meaning (that makes sense in this context) is moral value. There may be great moral value in being a doctor for instance - saving the lives of others.
I am not saying that it is the case that there exists no moral value in delivery jobs or grocery. I am saying that even if it were the case that those jobs have no moral value they still have economic value.
(I would argue all work well done has moral value, but that's irrelevant)
In a UBI world where those people weren't working to avoid starvation and homelessness, it's likely that much of this bottom-tier work would start to look more like the kind of job a middle class teenager does while living with their parents— they're not there to survive, they're there to earn supplementary cash for a video game or prom dress. I'd expect then that:
- Employers would experience some frustration with the flakiness of non-desperate personnel, and would be willing to pay at least something of a premium for labour that sticks around.
- That premium and the promise of even greater reliability gains would lead to increased automation pressure at the bottom end.
- Poor people who used to work themselves to the bone just surviving (eg, Stephanie Land) actually have the time to take training programs and ready themselves for higher-value work.
That labor cost premium would have to be reflected in higher prices. I'm not paying a premium for marginal items. That's the whole definition of premium...
<- Poor people who used to work themselves to the bone just surviving (eg, Stephanie Land) actually have the time to take training programs and ready themselves for higher-value work.>
Not everyone is cut out for higher-value work, and the amount of higher-value work is also limited. Rembember Carlin's Axiom [1]
The reason these jobs don't pay very much isn't just because there's a large pool of people willing to take them. In fact, many menial job positions have a hard time being staffed because the labor pool is not big. The reason they pay poorly is because they have low economic value. They add little marginal value to a product or service.
For example, if I want a hamburger, I can cook one at home for approximately $1.50. A nice bun, 1/4lb of fresh meat, some condiments. If I get a Quarter Pounder from McDonalds, it's around $4. So I normally only buy one for convenience; when I'm too far from home, or too tired to cook. Now if that ends up $8, then I'll cook one at home every time I want one.
[1]George Carlin — 'Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.'
Conflict diamonds and non fair trade coffee are also cheaper than what replaced them. Obviously these kinds of ethical externalities exist on a scale, but the point is that it's more complicated than just arbitrarily declaring an item or class of labour as "marginal" and moving on.
> Not everyone is cut out for higher-value work...
The snide value judgment aside, lots of artists/writers/musicians/etc begrudgingly participate in the "low value labour" market as a means of staying afloat while they pursue their real passion on the side. Isn't all of this just a further argument for taking on as a society the obligation to meet people's basic needs? Do we really need to hold people's livelihoods hostage just so that upper middle class software professionals can still get a $4 hamburger whenever they want it?
And yes quite a few people want to be artists or musicians and can't. They should be able to try but also at some point we need a mechanism for them to realize they may need to try a different career path if it's not working out and they aren't creating value.
With UBI, you're just making a subset of the population pay for everyone else. Sometimes that tradeoff makes sense - food stamps - but when you end up just increasing inflation and hurting those who it's meant to benefit then it seems like tail chasing.
If you were out in the middle of the woods self-sufficient except for some bartering with your friends, you would still have to pay property taxes and your barter transactions would be subject to taxation, which you would have to pay with Federal Reserve Notes or the government could come and take your stuff and imprison you.
Before the income tax (1911) you could live in the countryside and you wouldn't even have to think about the federal government, just your state and local governments, unless you were importing things. People didn't even used to elect senators, that was the state government's job.
Instead of big banks getting bailed out over and over again, before the federal reserve, you'd just call up the local rich guy, like Rockefeller who would bail out your company out of his personal bank account. People didn't need the banks to survive to move things along. These days, if there was no income tax, and the fed, you'd probably just call up some fabulously wealthy venture capitalist every time you needed some money. The low taxes on venture capital QSBS and carried interest have led to this phenomenon to some extent.
And sometimes humans can even borrow money from robots, if they're really nice to them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17353666
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik
“Five cents, please,” his front door said when he tried to open it. One thing, anyhow, hadn’t changed. The toll door had an innate stubbornness to it; probably it would hold out after everything else. After everything except it had long since reverted, perhaps in the whole city … if not the whole world.
He paid the door a nickel, hurried down the hall to the moving ramp which he had used only minutes ago.
[…]
“I don’t have any more nickels,” G. G. said. “I can’t get out.”
Glancing at Joe, then at G. G., Pat said, “Have one of mine.” She tossed G. G. a coin, which he caught, an expression of bewilderment on his face. The bewilderment then, by degrees, changed to aggrieved sullenness.
“You sure shot me down,” he said as he deposited the nickel in the door’s slot. “Both of you,” he muttered as the door closed after him. “I discovered her. This is really a cutthroat business, when —“ His voice faded out as the door clamped shut. There was, then, silence.
[…]
“I’ll go get my test equipment from the car,” Joe said, starting towards the door.
“Five cents, please,”
“Pay the door,” Hoe said to G. G. Ashwood.
[...]
“Can I borrow a couple of poscreds from you?” Joe said. “So I can eat breakfast?”
“Mr. Hammond warned me that you would try to borrow money from me. He informed me that he already provided you with sufficient funds to pay for your hotel room, plus a round of drinks, as well as —“
“Al based his estimate on the assumption that I would rent a more modest room than this."
The people hoarding it.
Can anyone prove it? Do they need it?
Is a CEO with multiple mansions and private jets and billions in the bank more worthy of life than the guy working in the mines processing the raw materials of modern civilization but living from paycheck to paycheck and barely able to support a family?
What about the mogul who raises essentials prices during a crisis? Or the traffickers running prostitution rings? There are many ways to make money without "earning" it. Can you make sure that only the people who earned their money can have it?
The point of UBI is to not have to ask or try to answer these sorts of questions.
The burden of proof is on you to show that they did not earn it.
> Do they need it?
Irrelevant. It's theirs whether they need it or not. And whether they need it is not for you to decide.
> Is a CEO with … billions in the bank more worthy of life than the guy working in the mines…?
No, they are equally worthy of life. Which has nothing at all to do with how much wealth each of them has earned. In any case these CEOs are rare outliers; as rich as they are, if you took all their assets combined and diluted them evenly among the rest of the population nothing would materially change, at least in the short term. In the long term, since you'd no longer have competent individuals administering things, the economy would implode and everyone would be far worse off.
What, you thought corporate shareholders hired CEOs and offered them huge salaries for administering their companies at a loss? The difference they make in the company's bottom line far exceeds their pay.
Moreover, if you actually liquidated those billions of dollars worth of shares in order to fund consumption then the companies and the productive capital they represent would rapidly cease to exist. Those few of us who survive can look forward to a bare subsistence standard of living in exchange for long, hard days of manual labor in the fields. But at least we'd all be equally poor, right?
> What about the mogul who raises essentials prices during a crisis?
Raising prices on scarce goods during a crisis is economically and socially productive. It ensures that these essentials will be saved for the situations where they are actually needed most and incentivizes the production of more essentials. If you hold prices low and pretend that it's just business-as-usual then you're going to end up with shortages.
> Or the traffickers running prostitution rings?
That's what the courts are for. But you'll have to prove it, not just throw around vague accusations.
> Can you make sure that only the people who earned their money can have it?
Guilty until proven innocent? That's not how this works.
> The point of UBI is to not have to ask or try to answer these sorts of questions.
That isn't really the point of UBI, and even if it were it wouldn't be a laudable goal. Solving the perceived problem of unequal outcomes at the expense of justice is not a trade worth even a moment's consideration—even if UBI actually had a chance of accomplishing that, which it doesn't.
Do you want the "bottom rung" to just die off during every crunch and crisis like this?
I'm not against that; the universe is.
What I am opposed to is the idea that it's acceptable for some people to take what they want from other people in order to avoid "having to constantly struggle for basic needs and comforts". Find a way to avoid the struggle without taking anything away from others and I'll be 100% on board.
I love the idea! You are welcome to support them with whatever means you have available. I won't, though.
> Do you want the "bottom rung" to just die off during every crunch and crisis like this?
No.
> The burden of proof is on you to show that they did not earn it.
It was a response to "Didn't they earn it?" so the burden of proof is on them.
> Do they need it?
> Irrelevant. It's theirs whether they need it or not.
So why can't it be given to anybody else whether they need it or not?
You want to take what they have away from them, so the burden of proof is on you to justify that. No one is obligated to justify keeping what they already have.
> So why can't it be given to anybody else whether they need it or not?
The owner can give it to anybody else whether they need it or not. You are not the owner.
Sure, just follow their bank statements and other financial ledgers.
> Do they need it?
I dunno, 'need' is tricky to define. Could you list all of the needs that you think you have? Why do you think you are entitled to those needs?
> Is a CEO with multiple mansions and private jets and billions in the bank more worthy of life than the guy working in the mines processing the raw materials of modern civilization but living from paycheck to paycheck and barely able to support a family?
Certainly not. Are we talking about life or money?
> What about the mogul who raises essentials prices during a crisis? Or the traffickers running prostitution rings? There are many ways to make money without "earning" it. Can you make sure that only the people who earned their money can have it?
You make a fair point, there are many ways to collect money with questionably ethical methods. Does that matter? What about rich technology workers? Folks that own businesses that aren't spectacular, like car insurance companies, speed boat manufacturers, construction companies, etc?
Where consumer earnings come from in the future is crucially connected to how society decides who owns the robots.
So an alternate path would be money is paid to companies by consumers, which are taxed, the tax money is redistributed to consumers again.
It seems a bit circular, but so does the first one.
I think money could be tied directly to people if we quantify human needs. Then fulfilling these needs of the population would be the source of money. The more needs a company fulfils - food, energy, housing, communication, health, child care, transportation, education, recreation, science, arts, sports, the more it earns. If it's not benefitting people, then it is should be worth nothing.
Let them compete in serving the population, instead of us competing for jobs. Keep those incentives aligned with our real goal - to exist. We don't exist for money, money exist for us. If we redefine money to represent 'fulfilled human needs', we fix the goal alignment and the equal distribution problems.
All land for skyscrapers, office buildings, etc -- all land would be taxed at a specific value, and that would also go into UBI.
Then we could also have a VAT instead of income taxes so all Americans are also tax payers but UBI puts everyone above poverty so no biggie if we all pay tax on our purchases.
Mechanical keyboards are a good example. There's a wide variety of plates, cases, and circuit boards available today that would be infeasible to make by hand, and were not cost effective to make just a few years ago. But here we are today with an appreciable hobby and market that wouldn't exist if not for improvements in manufacturing efficiency.
It seems to me that if mass produced, they should at lesat cost less than entry-level cars, since they are a similar size/weight and simpler, so less than 15k.
And it also feels like they should cost a similar amount to premium versions of appliances like dishwashers/washing machines/etc., so in the 1-5k range.
I remember him mentioning the project in his robotics class, found it: https://youtu.be/xWPViQ6LI-Q?t=4075 he claims it will be around $5,000
Maybe of interest
When you hire a person, you have to pay them continuously for their work. Once you pay for a robot, you don't owe it a salary.
There's obviously other factors - ongoing costs to keep robots going, but also robots never call in sick and can sometimes work faster or more precisely than a numan.
There are times the math works out for the robot but it's not very often. Keep in mind the robots need to be managed - someone has to make sure they're working and be able to take over when they go down.
Industrial automation is only getting cheaper, more capable, and easier to use with every passing year. Things you "know" from even a couple years ago don't apply today. The rate of progress is pretty incredible.
I know those aren't robots walking around the floor - but that level of automation to load/unload parts is a huge thing to "keep the CNC machines fed" in more and more factories.
Look up Fanuc robots on youtube for tons of examples of automation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKrlXyLQbwM is a cool example of 2 robots on a rail servicing 4 CNC machines. What's neat here is that it's taking parts from machine to machine to work through all manufacturing steps.
None of this is exactly that "high end", either. Plenty of high end hobbyists/micro-businesses run Robodrills (like the last video) in their home garage. The UR robot in the first video I linked is super accessible as well and showing up in more and more small (<10 employee) machine shops.
And, as a sibling comment points out, you have to pay for maintenance and operating costs. The capital price of robots is kind of irrelevant, what's the annualised TCO?
We actually get to see a small model of this on farms. Once upon a time every farm had dozens or even hundreds of workers. Whether planting and harvesting corn or milking cows, it was all done by hand, and it took a lot of people working in close proximity. Today's farmer has a lot of automation, which means far fewer people. One person in a harvester can harvest a field of wheat, maybe a truck drives out to them once in a while, exchanges hand signals, nobody's close enough to get infected. A couple of people can handle milking a herd of cows, they touch the cows but no need to get close to each other. No problem keeping appropriate distances.
Not every farm is like that, it's going to be a problem for fruit harvesting for example where you'd usually bring in a lot of temporary workers once a year. But these systems don't have to change everything. If there are six factories in your city, and three of them remain unchanged but the other three just become a bunch of robots, with the only human on site one mechanic and a security guard that's an enormous change.
I'd predict the opposite. The world will shortly have an international depression, and to the extent that businesses are allowed to be open, there will be 1000 applicants for every position. Wages will collapse. Demand for products generally will be low, dampened by the fact that a huge number of possible buyers are flat broke.
Those are conditions to retard the growth of automation, not increase it. You're going to spend a zillion dollars automating to produce a product people can't afford to buy while there are thousands of people outside your factory saying "we want to make your shit by hand for nearly free"?
Next couple of years will be a LOW time for automation, not a high time. (Which doesn't mean zero, obviously certain products are still going to be produced by increasingly cheap automated processes.) But some big surge in the rate of automation? No way.
The last mile of automation is costly, where the first ones were money savers.
Building physical robots and tuning them, maintenance, cleaning, updates, security, new versions etc etc.
This last phase of robots, drones and self-driving vehicles will take a long time to get right and it is much more costly to enter it. The speed of innovation also makes it quickly out of date when you do commit to it.
The automation remaining involves mostly hardware which is more costly, the initial ones were software that saved lots of money and wasted time.
And I think in a board room in 2019 you could do that, you could say it makes no sense to hedge against a disease pandemic, those never happen. It makes no sense to optimise for locality when we can get cheap labour on the far side of the globe and disruption won't happen.
But the trouble is that when you make that presentation in 2021 every single person in the room knows it isn't true, they all lived through this, they saw it themselves.
Usually the next argument is the one you already brought up - but labour costs in the US are too high. But a robot factory doesn't incur labour costs as I explained.
Here is a summary of the laws; they don't seem that draconian to me. https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/majorlaws
I don't mean to suggest I'm immune to evidence against my prejudices, but I am doubtful enough I'm not going to do my own research right now.
I hate false precision, so I'm not asking for that either. Just, like, what do you think the cost of those things is in percentage points, to one or two significant figures and why?
If you run a business or something (I don't) where you have first hand knowledge, I would expect you would immediately know numbers.
> If you run a business or something (I don't) where you have first hand knowledge, I would expect you would immediately know numbers.
Even if I do run a business(which I have). Insurance companies do not itemize the premiums paid by which external factors affect the amount. A person cannot quantify the factors that affect this. Literally anything in the world can happen. The actuaries calculate what they can based on past and future costs to the best of their ability.
It is hard to quantify at the macro level, so here are some micro examples: https://www.thoughtco.com/big-companies-sued-for-racial-disc...
Each one of those companies either paid up front or through insurance. When the insurance company is forced to pay out on your behalf, your premiums will likely go up. There are actions that can be taken to mitigate this. Some companies choose to have discrimination awareness campaigns as an example. This helps in two ways. It shows the insurance company that you are less of a risk, therefore your cost goes down. It also gives you evidence in court for your next suit to persuade a jury that you are not discriminating. These campaigns cost money.
You may say, "well, they would not have incurred the cost if they did not discriminate". However, lawsuits can be filed where no discrimination existed. They still cost companies "incredible" amounts of money. Either way, before the CRA, a person could not file a lawsuit based on discrimination and now they can. So costs necessarily have to increase. Even if discrimination was non existent, lawsuits would still be filed, because their is a lot of money to be made.
Of course not. You can still estimate numbers to your own satisfaction though, and according to my idea of logic you must have done that in order to call them incredibly large, even in a very rough sense.
I have no particular standard of evidence I'm trying to impose on you; I'm just asking for what convinced you of your opinion that complying with civil rights laws is incredibly expensive. As long as your opinion is genuine, you are able to share its basis.
People get too hung up on fighting over whose standards evidence must meet, and I think in a lot of cases, better communication would happen by simply looking within and honestly saying "this is why I think X and you make up your own mind".
Were the individual examples listed in my link not evidence of increased costs? I define those as incredible costs. Do you understand how insurance works?
Your example linked “ 5 Big Companies Sued for Racial Discrimination”. An article showing small businesses being sued/settling for discrimination would support your argument much better imo.
Try France if you want to see actual labors laws.
Anything that has "Coming soon" or "Than we thought" always triggers a level of credibility erosion in me, this just went full on.
Thing is with automation, what do you do with all those excess humans who are no longer needed to work as I do recall the 70's champion the future would see us all spend most of our time on leasure and 3 day working weeks. Seems a case of some people end up working 6-7 day weeks and others none.
But automation has been on it's way for so long, it's not an overnight shift, but a gradual one. Then the net result is never what is expected. Heck other day people read abour Rumba and how ealy models failed sooner as people was using them daily instead of weekly as previously. So the time saved in one area of interacting with cleaning shifted to another of almost gamified interaction, marking out area's, playing with it and stats. So whilst some automation can do wonders, it can often shift the problem into something else and still not save overall.
It seems implausible to me that the bottleneck to mass automation (or rather, more widespread automation) is the willingness of corporations to invest in it. The more feasible blockers—the fundamental technology even existing, the cost of research/production, etc—don't seem correlated to Coronavirus.
When companies are making easy money, there is very little incentive to improve efficiency, and a lot of incentive to continue the status quo. It’s only during tight times do companies actually begin to seek out new efficiencies.
Example: automated oil rig machines have existed for quite a while, but they really didn’t see a lot of usage until the oil crash in 2016[0]. After this crash the number of oil rig workers remained at low levels, even as oil rigs starting to produce again. Those jobs were already vulnerable to automation, it just took a financial crisis to trigger it.
[0] https://medium.com/basic-income/the-real-story-of-automation...
Software engineers on HN should have had experience of significantly improving some manual procedures, only for half the department to be laid off later.
Anyway, I later developed the hypothesis that one counterbalance to lower productivity in the government is that when people essentially cannot be fired, they are less likely to resist automation and efficiency. There may be more "dead weight" but it's not actively fighting the people who are improving things as much as in the private sector. Laziness cuts both ways. I'm interesting in why anyone might think this is clearly incorrect.
Plenty of us may also struggle with the noise pollution also.
There will be a massive push for clean air and possibly a more quieter world.
The US government's attempts to keep people afloat have pretty clear major issues, for instance. Is it really a bad thing to suggest that we should have a system in place to handle these sorts of events, even on smaller scales, rather than trying to rush something out when every day counts? I'm not arguing for UBI per se, but if somebody thinks it's the right solution then is it a bad thing to argue for it when an example of its usefulness is fresh in everybody's mind?
Obviously there are plenty of bad faith suggestions going around too, but I can't help but think platitudes like this do more to shutdown good ideas than bad.
A lot of people who are in favour of some kind of intervention right now aren't necessarily going to want to turn this permanent.
A regular flow of such cheques compared to crisis stimulus cheques has a couple of advantages though:
- you don't have any ramp-up time, not even if you decide to up the amount in crisis time, as the system already exists
- you don't need to coordinate with multiple levels of governments, insurances, ... to hand out the checks
- regular UBI could offset/replace many struggling programs, from food assistance over child support to other financial aid, thus leading to less overhead costs
An awful lot of the wealth in Western states is based on this exploitation.
For people who can't gain sufficient employment* this is an ongoing problem. The people who won't want to make it permanent are people who do not experience this type of instability on a regular basis.
It is interesting how our first thought to say "obviously this is temporary" rather than taking an empathetic look at what it must feel like all the time for a segment of the population (I'm just as guilty here).
* i.e. 1 job, 40 hours a week or less, that allows one to live a fulfilling life
I saw a tweet that summed it up perfectly. "Corona virus is a black light and our current world is a c*m-stained hotel room".
Given so many people are out of work, and this need for social distancing may continue for years, it's the perfect time to discuss improving society.
Just to name a few off the top of my head:
There is vastly less pollution, people are spending much more time with their loved ones, people are spending much less time in vehicles and commuting, and people have much more time to explore their passions and hobbies like instruments and drawing.
> pushing projects like UBI
Calm down. I'm not "pushing" anything, certainly not UBI. I simply said it's a great time to have discussions about the pros and cons of out current system, and any possible improvements.
Are you against discussions?
Some people. We have to be careful not to frame the discussion exclusively from our own, respective positions. I'm very fortunate, for instance, to be able to work from home very easily. This is not the case at all for many. Some have seen their hours increase if they're in the "essential" (a word I hate, but it has become the norm) job category, and/or have taken on risks to their health. Many have lost their jobs entirely.
The reduction in pollution is good. Don't get too used to it.
>Calm down.
That wasn't necessary.
>I'm not "pushing" anything, certainly not UBI.
You may not be, but there is no question that there are many who are, and that's why this thread exists.
>Are you against discussions?
You've assumed something else about me, I guess?
Maybe people are just reflexively opposed to contemplating the possibility that the next 'business as usual' won't be familiar. It is scary to contemplate revising a lot models I have of the world, if I'm honest.
"Free speech" for me, not for thee with these types.
Some people, maybe. I live by myself. The rest of my family lives two states away. I normally drive to visit them several times each year. I've already been forced to cancel one planned visit and it's difficult to say when the next one will be. My parents at least have each other, but they miss spending time with their grandchildren (my nephews). Likewise for my grandparents. The occasional group video calls are nice but just not the same.
I hardly think my case is unique. People are spending more time with people they live with, because they're forced to stay at home. That may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the situation. I'm sure it's caused problems for people suffering from domestic abuse, for example. One's loved ones need not live in the same house—and the people you live with may not be your loved ones.
> people have much more time to explore their passions and hobbies like instruments and drawing
Not if they're working remotely—you don't necessarily have more free time just because you're at home all day. For the rest, they could have had that time before just by quitting their jobs. Certainly the extra free time and lower pollution are something of a silver lining, but let's not pretend that this is a net improvement compared to the way things were before. Being forced to stay home is not something people would have chosen out of preference.
Those things have been true and in place for decades, and they have not destroyed the economy. There are not jobs that are unfilled because people don't want to do them. In fact Australia's economy survived the 2008 crash as well as the best in the world, and continues to be very strong.
You don't need to make guesses about what will happen if free money from the government is available to the masses, you can look at places that are almost doing it already.
Well, how many lives does the lack of pollution save? People talk about suffering from being unemployed, but if that can be dealt with by temporary wealth redistribution...
The ability to make a living(or have income) to sustain through these periods of challenges, is an agenda now?
I mean who goes to prison when a car runs someone over and no-one is driving? What is a developer's motivation to be careful and defer to safety? We've already proven a good chunk of the population are sociopaths, they don't care who dies as long as they get their paycheck.
Seems to me that is a popular cargo cult few are immune to.
He didn't mention it, but there are some pretty obvious mechanisms for this to be true:
1. Automated drivers don't get tired.
2. Automated drivers may "see" more of their environment than a human can. Human sensors aren't upgradeable.
3. Automated drivers don't get drunk.
4. Automated drivers don't have emotions.
5. Automated drivers aren't distracted by the infotainment system, the children in the back seat, or even some thought about what just happened at work.
6. With time, automated drivers can be improved, while human weaknesses stay constant.
There are of course drawbacks:
1. Humans have intuition about situations they've never been in. Most AI/machine learning still generalizes poorly.
2. The programming may be buggy.
3. The datasets may be inadequate.
So what will happen is definitely out there, but there are clear mechanisms for this to happen.
As we get to the bottom of the article we find the real point is to push UBI. When money is created and given to people who do not work, that money becomes worthless. What manufacturer is going to invest in robots to create products for people who have monopoly money?