No Recent Automation Revolution
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
This sounds like the centre of the distribution catching up to the frontier moreso than the frontier advancing.
I think the OP's comment is very relevant.
However, even before Covid, McDonald's was rolling out touchscreen kiosk and app ordering. So, there has definitely been automation in that sector.
The paper is ... kinda odd ... because its methodology considers machine operators (injection molding machine operators, lathe and machining center operators, etc.) to be some of the most automatable. That's a pretty laughable idea to anyone who has tried to run one of those machines.
Yeah, 20 hours of training got me to the point I can run a CNC mill. However, I wouldn't say I'm good at it. I touch off incorrectly probably 1 in 20 times--which likely blows a part and breaks an end mill. I sometimes don't leave enough clearance to the vice jaws--which certainly breaks a mill and possible damages the machine itself.
I think it was NYC CNC on YouTube that had a whole video of the various fails he's had with CNC milling machines over time. Anyone who has used a CNC cringes at that video because we have all done exactly the same things.
That’s not laughable in the slightest to anyone who knows history of machining. There are fewer and fewer machine shops, and at the same time the machining centers are becoming more and more sophisticated. Sure, operating CNC mills requires significant expertise, but so did manual machining. We used to have hundreds of thousands of machinists in this country, making various parts for cars, household appliances etc. Now it’s all factory made. Just because some existing process requires expertise, doesn’t mean that we cannot come up with a new process that will not need that skilled operator as a step.
However, completely wiping out a process (replacing sheet metal fabrication with plastics) is not particularly "automation" of said process. You've just changed where the expertise is rather than automated it away.
Replacing injection molding machine operators with 3D printing machine operators is automation because it makes some people go away/requires less expertise.
The customers replaced shipping disk drives (or, in DoD's case, boxes of analog videotapes!) with transferring files over fiber and satellite links. NYT switched from reading stories aloud over bad phone connections to transferring files via satphone.
This displaced fedex package handlers and mailroom personnel, and stenographers.
In DoD's case, a physical library of surveillance drone videotapes, and everybody schlepping tape cartridges, was replaced with a remote-accessible video library. Nowadays digital video is streamed to Nevada and Utah in real time, and copied off there.
Similar stories apply for numerous other customer industries. These were all permanent changes. Aspera grew to a hundred-some employees in 2014, but must have displaced thousands.
Does this count as automation?
My current employer had a curiously very successful corona-quarter and building a solid backorder because we cannot have everyone in production right now.
We automate everything we can and still employ more and more people. We often think manufacturing when speaking about automation, but I think administration will be affected most (you won't automate anything if you fired your internal IT department).
We also build a fairly sci-fi robot to populate circuit boards for parts that cannot be fitted by reflow soldering. Great device to show off but the soldering women are just plainly faster and less error prone. And we have quite a high wage level.
But sales planning, accounting, reporting will be mostly automated at some point. Our own in-house production is steadily growing even with additional support by machines.
Of course it is bad if people out of job have no alternative. I think there should be state support for such cases instead of artificially keeping an industry alive.
All of these jobs were replaced by a spreadsheet decades ago.
Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once we manage to get rid of them.
I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.
Not going to happen under capitalism.
Look at the numbers, they are pretty horrifying.
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_wor...
https://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
You know this, and we know you know this.
What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements? Is it the political equivalent of unobtanium or vaporware?
Im not trying to be a smartass; I want to know what the answer might look like. It doesn’t have to be a treatise. Just something consistent with a chance at succeeding with non-ideal people.
It's actually funny to listen to political debates of the 60s and 70s because people were planning that if automation were properly handled we'd be working like 2 days a week while keeping our standards of life and retiring at 40. What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c.
By the way, you might want to reassess your way of starting conversations, you're definitely trying to be a smartass. There are answers all over the place if you're willing to search/read a bit, it's not like these societal issues are new, there are literally hundreds of books about this very topic.
The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one. Adding a bit more wealth distribution just means tweaking the system, rather than creating a new one, which is what the parent poster implied was needed.
Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."
It is, but it's also very heavily influenced by socialism. You, and many other people, seem to believe it's and "either or" question when it really isn't and it never has been...
> The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one
What does that even mean ? the current "one" ? Since when there is only one ? Just compare the US and French or German systems they're extremely different, especially for the average workers.
> rather than creating a new one
Come on, we're not talking JS frameworks here, what kind of rhetoric is that. Nobody is talking about tearing down the whole thing and starting from scratch.
> Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/07/global-ineq...
https://www.schroders.com/en/insights/economics/world-pensio...
Everything I can find talks about rising retirement age, lowering of pensions, and stagnation of purchasing power. If automation really brought what it was supposed to bring we would see much deeper _positive_ changes when comparing 1970s and 2020s. People got kicked out of factories and pushed into the tertiary sector but for all intent and purpose it's the same shitty working conditions, wages and social statuses. The guy who built cars for ford in the 50s is now driving a uber and has to pay his own insurances and pension, talk about the automation revolution ...
Capitalism existed for thousands of years (first company if the world was registered like yr. 700) and only supported miserable living standards. Most of these systems appears during / after the Renaissance, and deserve more credit for the society we have today than capitalism does
And the Welfare State was created to avoid Socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck
> A master of complex politics at home, Bismarck created the first welfare state in the modern world, with the goal of gaining working class support that might otherwise go to his Socialist enemies.
> What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements?
Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.
Different political systems/policies combined with capitalism can produce very different societies and structures. For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.
It is you need a giant violent state to create a culture of sophisticated property rights. AKA capitalism requires a state and legal system, it doesn't exist without one. Things like copyright and Intellectual property are pure man made cultural political fictions, they do not exist in the natural animal kingdom.
How is it possible to own large tracts of land the size of small cities or entire provinces without a state/army to enforce it? AKA before populations got big there was plenty of "common" land that wasn't anyones. Property rights are a cultural invention.
That's why you always hear communists and socialists talk about the need for a "revolution". No one ever talks about a capitalist revolution because people don't need to be coerced into voluntarily exchanging goods and services. They do, however, need to be coerced into giving up their wealth to some massive state who's self-appointed role is to decide "what's fair" and who does and does not get to receive wealth produced by others.
They may well be instances where the hard edges of capitalism need to be sanded down a bit with redistributive policies, but make no mistake, between socialism and capitalism, socialism requires a lot more force, state-backed violence, and coercion to make work.
The answer to this is not to double down and give the state even more power to pick winners and losers, thinking that "this time will be different" or "we just need to get the smartest most moral people into power".
No need for a capitalist revolution? Did the monarchy give up power willingly? The french revolution, the american revolution, etc.
The only 'freedom' that exists in the natural world is the law of the jungle. You want freedom but want to live in a society? The idea of police and public prosecution, of justice and judges are all recent inventions. Without them, what stops me from taking whatever is yours and assures your freedom. How do you even come into possesion of land, water or any resource in the natural world?
Apparently some people's idea of freedom means they can wonder around the city spreading deadly disease. I would very much like freedom from them coughing in my vicinity and infecting me.
Some people think they have freedom to shoot me in the face if they feel 'scared', while i value freedom from getting shot.
Some people believ they have freedom to pollute the air with sulphur oxide, while i believe they should have to pay the cost it takes to clean up their pollution.
Any freedom for you is an obligation on me, and vice versa.
It’s not like collectivism or communism or anything else allows interlopers to seize things willy nilly.
Peasants in Cuba or the Soviet Union couldn’t just squat on land and do as they pleased. The kulaks are a good testament to what happens in those circumstances.
Common land used to be a thing, you could graze your animals there, etc. https://www.gov.uk/common-land-village-greens
Today, air and seawater are common resources that are being taken willi nilly and polluted
“Capitalism” is not a full description of a national political system, but since it is fundamentally a system of legal property relations, it is exactly an aspect of a political system.
> For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.
Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist but one of many forms of post-capitalist mixed-economy systems which retain elements of capitalist property relations but constrain them in various ways foreign to capitalism in the strict sense.
But then would it also not be fair to consider the US to also be such a mixed system. Not as equally mixed, but still mixed with behaviors that are post-capitalist?
The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation.
It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when talking about redistribution as a solve, that for every Sweden or Denmark, there's a Cuba or North Korea.
A country where wealth is primarily controlled and distributed by state cannot, by definition, ever be free, even if the people doing the redistribution got elected at one point. That's simply mob rule with no respect or regard for the individual. Socialism or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it requires constant state coercion of individuals to work at all. This type of coercion may happen in capitalism systems like those in dictatorships, but it's not a built in requirement of the system itself.
So where is this magical line, once we cross it, the system suddently becomes oppressive?
Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production".
Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.
Collectively funding some services has nothing to do with socialism.
I can't find a single country (maybe North Korea?) still in existence, that has outlawed private business. We aren't just talking social democracy, even Cuba and Venesuela allow private business.
From my original comment: "the majority".
The examples you have given, have indeed outlawed many private businesses, in the past. Although, I agree that those countries have become significantly more capitalistic over the years.
You also skipped the most famous example of socialism, which was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union absolutely banned almost all forms of private enterprise.
But sure, socialism has significantly decreased in relevancy over the last few decades, to the point where basically all old socialist countries are becoming more and more capitalistic. Socialism is dying, all throughout the world.
Before Stalin forced the kulaks out of their farms Lenin allowed private farming as a means to an end. Stalin lost patience and forced it.
> Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.
No, it's not. Private businesses executed through private labor applied to public capital which the business rents from the state are perfectly compatible with socialism in which private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.
It's true that there are “socialist” states and parties that have banned or sought to ban private business, but that's not essential to socialism.
Also, all of those collectively funded services listed upthread tend to feature public capital ownership of the means of delivering the service as well as public operating funds, and often exclude private ownership of some of the means of delivering those services and/or use of privately owned capital to provide the same service, resulting in a domain in which private capital ownership is restricted.
This is a borderline semantic argument.
There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.
Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital. And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.
Yes, code is capital. The value of almost all software companies, is not in the server racks, it is in the code that they produced.
As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital, and now that capital would be illegal for them to own, even if they produced it.
Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone, noone is coming for your code. Every half-sensible discussion of modern socialism is not about taking away all of your stuff. I am really tired of this bait and switch social democracy for communism.
Einstein, Heinzenberg and many other scientists have advanced the whole human race, but you can't have IP on ideas and on laws of nature, and on scientific theories. So have they produced capital?
The discussion of IP is very nuanced, and raises question for why code is covered by overlapping patents and copyright, how long it should last, what rights does end user have and how right to repair is affected, etc.
Anyway, this thread has been massively derailed. It started with a bizzare slippery slope argument of "for every Finland there is a North Korea" as if social democracies are in danger of turning totalitarian any day.
Correct, that is kind of my point. Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era. That does not change the definition of what "The means of production" are though.
I am not too worried about socialists taking over. They lost, and aren't going to take back the means of production from anyone.
> is not about taking away all of your stuff
Well yeah. That is because they are no longer relevant, because of how significantly they lost, and because of how much capitalism has become the defacto government system, all around the world, even in many places that used to call themselves socialist.
If socialists want to redefine socialism to be actually be just capitalism, but with a slightly more expansive social safety net, with more free healthcare and government programs, I guess that is fine by me.
But I am not going to call that socialism.
But I am not going to call that socialism.
That's just capitalism, with a slightly larger safety net.
You said that a reasonable definition of socialism was the following: "means you can't own those goods while renting labor"
This situation, is so far removed, so far out there, so far significantly different than the current state of the world, that it makes no sense at all to call the current state of the world "socialist".
The situation you gave, is far, far outside the norm of how the world currently works, and is borderline unimaginable as to how such a society would even look like.
But my situation, of "Capitalism countries put more money into existing social safety net programs" is easily immaginable. It require no restructuring of society. It merely requires a bit more money, being put into existing programs.
Or in other words, not much would change.
Wheras making it so "you can't own those goods while renting labor" would mean that basically every major company in the world would have to be shutdown or restructured. It is such a massive change, that I cannot even begin to guess as to what such a world would look like.
If you want to make up a new word, or something, that describes giving a bit more money to existing social safety net programs, go ahead.
But whatever you decide to call it, please do not pretend that it is any way similar to if people "can't own those goods while renting labor". The situations are so extremely different, that it makes no sense to describe them using the same word.
Leninists and their descendants might be; socialists aren't any more than capitalists are, as pretty much every advanced economy is some hybrid of the two. Because of the Cold War (by which point that was already largely true), it's become fashionable to call those mixed economies “capitalist”, that is not particularly accurate (though it comports well with Leninist propaganda.)
There's no borderline, once the issue was raised of, to paraphrase “what does the term ‘socialism’ encompass”, the discussion was inherently one of semantics.
But that hardly invalidates a response once the term of the discussion are set.
> There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.
There's a very big difference, especially in the way socialists (who established the term) define “capital” (the definition is used in finance within capitalist societies is broader, expanding the original by metaphor, and useful for its purpose within capitalist societies, but it's not what socialists seek to abolisg. The socialist use is strictly limited to the physical, non-financial means of production.)
> Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital.
No, you didn't, as socialists define the term (whether or not private ownership of IP is recognized—on which socialist preferences may vary—IP is not capital in the socialist sense, being decidedly non-physical.)
> As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital.
Again, no, what in capitalists societies are called “capital goods” are not capital in the socialist sense until and except as they are used as means of production. Socialism doesn't mean you can't own capital goods, it means you can't own those goods while renting labor to apply to them in the course of production (and many schools of socialism have a principled carve out for means of production to which the owners own labor exclusively is applied, the prohibition is most centrally about the separated relationship between labor and capital, which does not exist in that case.)
And this is all strict-sense socialism, which much modern developed-world socialism is decidedly not, being largely instead mixed economy ideology with a preference for more restraints on the power of capital owners over others in society than the dominant status quo in modern mixed economies. Your precious code and capital goods are even more safe there.
And this is only slightly different than banning all private enterprises.
I do not consider "you can own some capital, but only if you are a single person, and you can't purchase labor from others for your business" to be significantly different than the slightly more extreme situation of banning all private enterprises.
I guess the question would be, if given a chance to choose would people living in those regimes keep the economic system and reform government or would they vote for a different kind of system altogether?
Whether the dictators where honestly trying to create communism, or they were using it to fool the populace much the same as monarchs used religion, is debatable.
As long as we all get to do less of the undesirable work, our needs are covered and the profits and power of automation are not concentrated in the hands of a few I'd say we reached the goal. 'Evenish' distribution might be sufficient too.
There is a lot of literature on ideas and theories about it. The systems used so far had a lot of debugging time already, and I'd expect unexpected effects to turn up when implementing anything new, and thus it is hard to advocate for any specific one. Working with our problematic traits (such as laziness, selfishness and hunger for power) instead of against them (or worse, ignoring them) seems advisable though.
> our needs are covered
Human desires and human needs don't work the way you're probably thinking. I'd suggest to take into account Maslow's theory of human motivation. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
is what I meant but did not specify. Is that more in line with what you mean?
How do you define desirability in the society where "needs are covered" (already)?
What would comprise the desirability if the profit of every action is alienated from the acting person?
I would say a desirable job is one with
- mostly pleasant tasks,
- good working conditions (not hard on the body (heavy lifting and bad positions, no natural light, noisy, bad air quality, ..) and mind (bad stress, bad social fit, ..),
- good relationships with the people around you, (and the ability to leave if they don't work for you)
- a good amount of agency (where 'good' might differ from person to person),
- achievable and worthwhile goals that do not feel like 'bullshit work', with a good feedback loop,
- and probably more I cannot think of off the top of my head right now.
(Respect and reward of other people is definitively a big plus, but if you yourself think your job is worthwhile it's probably enough to count as desirable.)
Most of these are not material rewards (though not having them can increase profit). If the only reason somebody does a specific job at all is money, the above conditions are not met/the person is not actively happy about doing it, and it can be done by a machine just as easily, I say we shouldn't have a need for this person to do it. Still, current society demands people have a job, any job, or even several, as a value in itself.
How the profit from work done is distributed is whole other (but connected) story. (Concerning your last question, I would argue that this disconnect to profit is already the case for many many people.)
Sorry for not writing clearly, this topic would probably warrant a seminar with lots of beer and reading at least.
I don't know the answers here but they don't look like free market capitalism or redistributive socialist utopia, and actually I think this axis or spectrum is an actively harmful frame for constructing a society with fulfilling lives and less inequality. Neither more government nor more free enterprise is quite right.
People want to live productive lives where they are valued and make a difference. How do you do that in a society which has such enormous returns on capital which alienates people from their work product?
If there's a real social fear that I hold, it's that we'd suddenly have supply problems in certain segments of the labor market. I know I, for one, would never have taken that 2nd shift job working in the kitchen of an all night diner if I hadn't needed the money to buy food. I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead.
EDIT: Not sure if this was understood, this was meant on a commentary on how capitalism and class can find its why back into such a system
In broad strokes, I'm more capitalist than communist, so I don't really disagree with the whole "greed is good" thing. Where I part ways is the unstated - often, I suspect, un-recognized - premise that it's the only good. Money's only useful for what it can buy, and its value has been artificially inflated by a social structure that makes it something that you just can't live without.
That's a good point. And makes me think of videogames analogy, particularly MMORPG.
In a typical MMO, you need to labor to earn money (known as "grinding") to buy all the stuff you'll need to make progress easier (and/or possible). But at any time, you can just stop, take time off, go explore the places you've been to (i.e. not containing enemies stronger than you can beat), or even just log out and leave your character be for a week. You lose nothing except time and perhaps your rank in some completely optional competition with other players. But your character won't go hungry, won't starve or freeze to death, won't be evicted for not paying taxes.
That illustrates the difference between money being useful, versus being necessary. And even if it's only useful and not necessary, that doesn't mean you won't be motivated to earn it - you will want more money if the things you can buy with it are interesting enough.
There are other kinds of value, too.
There are so many things people could be doing which are not compensated by the market and corporations. “Leaning in and earning $1 instead of 70c” is a meme that corporations use to get more humans to trade quality time with parents and kids for them. [1] Why don’t we ask about “Leaning out and spending more time with our families?” [2]
Open source
Science
Philosophy
Family
Personal development
Volunteering in community
You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all. That’s why many in NYC lamented when Amazon was not given tax breaks to come to our city. It’s almost as if we need Bezos’ company to organize ourselves an our time so we can get paid the money.
Society spends tons on fossil fuels and commuting and for what? To sit in a chair 30 miles away?
I haven't been conditioned, thanks.
Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. We can't live at our current standards with artisan search engines, hand-crafted phones and home-made cars. But the same scale which enables modern living alienates workers from their labour. In most companies, all but a select few at the top have very little agency. They mostly get told what to do and they often don't even see the customer that benefits from the value they create. And the people with agency at the top get the vast majority of the profits.
The result is a society with a lot of inequality and poverty, and a mass of alienated consumers trying to purchase those things which are missing in their lives: narrative, stories which connect their consumption with humanity. Hand-made this, small batch that, experiences you can share with other people., the personal touches which weave a life into a broader more meaningful tapestry.
And raising children, of course. But that's somewhat bitter-sweet, knowing the world they're going out into, unless you have some assurance they're going to be among those with agency.
> > You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all.
Emphasis added.
> Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. ...
I want to point out in this connection that advertising (commercial propaganda) is ubiquitous in most modern societies, and IMO counts as "conditioning".
It does not follow that I think that's the way things ought to be. That's how I interpret the "better" in EGreg's comment, because this conversation is about how we can live a better lives, not how to maximize efficiency. But we can only talk about oughts in the context of what can be.
What I'd like - as I've mentioned in another comment here - is some kind of organizational technology which enables the same efficiencies as large orgs, but without the alienation of labour.
Have the labor classes of the U.S. seen any advancement in the last few decades? Are the advances the labor classes of other (US/India) even worthwhile given the lack of political bargaining power?
You economically depress local workers, and sell them on their freedoms and in then in the next breath you're politically oppressing foreign labor classes while selling them on their economic advances. Both are true, but you take the larger margin from both.
I was interested (from a distance) in "Holacracy" but it's hard to find information about how well it works in practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy
Also, FWIW, I'm hoping that automation frees up enough time to be able to support "consensus driven" governance, which is I suspect is theoretically optimal, but it's really expensive:
LiveJournal vs Wordpress
AOL vs The Web
Britannica vs Wikipedia
I could go on and on. Science, Open Source, Creative Commons allows collaboration instead of a top-down approach, and has been wildly successful.
In the past, we needed centralized manufacturing, centralized telephone operators etc. No longerz
Google “Distributism”
AOL -> Web -> Google AMP etc.
Wikipedia has its editors and its petty squabbles, and worse, its ever increasing budgets (for what, exactly?) funded by guilt-based extortion from the masses, a bunch of parasites feeding on public contributions.
Once a hill has appeared from the bottom up, climbers crawl out of their holes, clamber up and try and steer from the top. And they usually succeed.
The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people - not necessarily for money, but for other people.
I'd love if we could try and figure out a social, institutional, structural technology which doesn't require taxes (and thus politics and government) for this. Government slowly but surely gets captured by people with the biggest pockets, until populists take over and everything falls apart with simple wrong answers, or worse, kleptocracy.
Exactly. So we should set up a system that provides everyone with enough to meet their basic needs.
That way they can spend their time and effort to find the way they can most effectively do things for other people rather than finding the local maxima "job I can tolerate that keeps me alive"
That means capitalism.
The downsides are lack of agency in large efficient orgs and unearned profits from capital.
I don't know the answer, but I don't think UBI + charity++ is it.
>College education becoming increasingly expensive proves this false, I believe.
Or is college education becoming more expensive because government has allowed for loans that can't be discharged to be given to people who have been given a false sense of the value college provides. This in turn means there is more demand (including the ability to actually purchase the desired product) for a product that isn't always worth it, increasing price?
One last consideration. Being the most efficient doesn't mean it is as efficient as one could theorize, only that it is more efficient than any alternative that can be put into practice.
That means markets, not capitalism.
Probably because the origin of the term is very political in nature.
In the end, the number of actual jobs available is very limited, and it's not so illogical to call the act of making such money/labor exchange possible as "job creation".
This seems like an easy explanation striped of nuance that really needs some data backing it. How is it different from resentment from people who earned it by working? Why is it unfulfilling - is it only because of comparison to others, or is it common even for UBI? Is it specific to feelings about income, but balanced out by easier life, or is it a significant decrease in satisfaction overall?
In such an economy there's no incentive to work on further automation. In particular if there's a part of world where profits aren't distributed evenly - the innovation and manufacturing will move there.
A tiny group might try to live in it, but more would see seasonal jobs as enough. As automation improves in general people would work less over their lifetime. Critically this would likely slow down the economy in the short term, but the constant minor labor shortage would presumably push for ever more automation to offset this.
Unfortunately, it needs to be a pay go system based on a fixed economic percentage to really work. But, assuming it was the general population would suddenly have a huge incentive to promote automation and economic growth.
That said, labor has been cheaper outside the US for decades, yet manufacturing is still 2+ Trillion dollars per year in the US. In part it’s because you can’t simply move farms, oil wells, or forests etc. But, business friendly regulations, educated workers, efficient transportation, etc are also huge contributors.
Read about industrialisation of United States and history of tarrifs. US had plenty of them when the British Empire was the industrial powerhouse.
And no need if the work on further automation is automated.
What's the incentive for millions of people working for free on open source projects?
If I had to guess, you have a job, so it's fun for you to sit here and make these comments from your high horse.
What you are describing is already a reality for our house pets. I don't find becoming a house pet to some AI/automated machine to be desirable in any way shape or form.
> Got it, thank you for adding to the debate.
How about don't be such a dick?
The point is that the aristocracy did not engage in "work" as many would define it, but seemed to be pretty happy about that.
It worked for them. Why not for others?
Go leave you job in 2020 and see how that goes for you. I understand "the dream" you're trying to describe, but it's 100% fictitious.
Just on the agriculture bit, do you even know where your food comes from or how it's produced? Honest question?
If everyone were magically able to live without jobs, some would still go off and do things productive out of an innate desire to be productive, but many wouldn't.
Millions have recently lost their jobs so I'm sure its' easy enough to find someone who can tell you how it feels.
If I had a job I might not want to continue if it was undesirable, if it was desirable I would continue anyway.
If I didn't have a job I would still like my basic needs covered (living in a country with good social security means that that would actually be so), and if nobody else had to pick up my slack I'd want more than the basics.
And then I want that for everyone. Any of the situations given above is true for someone in my surroundings, colleagues, friends, neighbors.
My perspective is coloured by the country I live in of course. Nobody will be on the street, hungry or without healthcare if they lose their job here, there is plenty of annual leave by law. And it's great, I gladly pay taxes for that. But imagine, it could be even better!
Why do you think the question matters?
Bucky Fuller pointed out that we could apply technology to solve our problems efficiently and wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever.
(FWIW, this is the context within which I think UBI makes sense, and we are not there just yet.)
Really it's a choice (at least in theory, maybe we are strapped in but I like to think we can affect things at least a little.) We can't un-invent the transistor.
True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire. Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks.
People who never aspire to such professions might be spared long working years, but some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.
Oh I agree.
In the absence of a profit motive those fields would be taken up by the most dedicated, eh?
> Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks.
Again I agree. I think that one obvious benefit of automation is that it frees up humans for important things that only humans can do. Mark Miller has an adage "Moore's law means that humans are becoming exponentially more valuable from the CPU's POV."
We're not talking about forcing people to retire after two years. We're talking about eliminating drudgery and wasteful processes.
> some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.
No, that's the whole point: no one has to put in long hours anymore thanks to the knock-on effects of the invention of the transistor.
Just like farming went from ~90% of the population to ~3%, so will our industrial space-age civilization, if we let it.
Hm there was a certain German economist which had that sort of idea.
Distribution of profits evenly: This is called "company stocks".
Equal distribution is called taxes and social programs.
Kevin Simler (via Dennett) goes as far as modeling this phenomenon on the level of individual neurons [0]: that conditions like depression and grief can be thought of as neurons and their networks becoming suddenly obsolete, and casting about trying to find new ways to be useful.
The employment model is hardly perfect; if anything, it has an uncomfortably feudal flavor in practice, where one is a thrall/vassal for 40(+) hours/week, in exchange for autonomy the other 128(-); and where one has the option to seek a new lord if sufficiently dissatisfied. There are countless other ways to be/feel useful outside that model: entrepreneurship, non-profit/community work, raising children, passion projects.
There are also potential perverse incentives: in particular, to maximize the problem one purports to solve. The most obvious parallels are the military- and prison-industrial complexes; planned obsolescence is another milder example. It's easy for unions to tip from collective bargaining into protectionism of industries that we'd like to become obsolete (prison guards, coal miners), out of a very understandable desire for those individuals to not lose their social bargaining chips.
So I do think we should celebrate the idea of "employment", as such, becoming optional; I strongly favor UBI. But at the same time, we need to be thinking about new institutions and proactive strategies for people to be, and feel, useful. I dare say, in some cases we want to be spending the economic surplus from the efficiency of automation, on intentionally inefficient pro-social economic activity. One example might be a community garden: it's a safe bet that industrial agriculture will always be an order of magnitude more efficient at producing food; but the community garden has other benefits, of connecting humans to nature and to each other (and perhaps a bit of resilience against supply chain disruption).
Post 2001, there was a huge shift to offshore models, ticketing-workflow models, and a shift to a blossoming open source environment.
Post 2008, there was another huge shift to more flexible infrastructure models, and to automation.
Companies are often reluctant to restructure workforces, even when there are potential efficiencies available. Economic crises provide an "opportunity" for them to right-size.
If automation were taking over jobs, or jobs were being refactored because some tasks are automated, then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing in employment advertising and classifications such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics's.
This does happen, as it has happened since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Social Media Manager" is a new job that has arisen in the last several years, for instance.
But, and this is the point, this "job churn" been happening more slowly over the last 20 years than at any time since WW II.
That is also incompatible with the claim that an automation revolution is under way.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”For instance: In IT we also have this. Dev is the typical product development team, Ops is the team that takes care of keeping the lights on. Now with all the automation we have a new job called Devops which is somewhat in the middle betwen both Dev and Ops. We thought both groups would move to the middle and form this new Devops group. But what most companies did is completely hire from zero for their Devops teams.
Now what we see is that Devops is growing, while Dev and Ops are shrinking. But the sum of both shrinking groups is smaller than the sum of new Devops jobs.
Of course that given enough time the labour market will adapt and correct itself, the issue is what happens in the meanwhile with real people, with real lives. The numbers eventually balance out, real lives suffer.
If there's an engineer paid $200k + overhead for working on automation, then that only can happen if his/her job alone results in automating away ten $30k jobs.
Unless someone was claiming that the current automation revolution is different than previous ones because of software eating the world.
How many people worked on assembly lines in, say, 1910 vs. 2010? How about as a percentage of an average manufacturer's staff?
How many people worked as social media managers in 2010?
I'd bet that (adjusted for population growth) for every 100 assembly line workers in 1910 you now have 2-3 stressed out engineers plus a bunch of machinery. And maybe one social media manager every few companies.
They are contending with additional supply of labor from other countries where people are willing to work for less. In addition, software and the ability to scale at zero cost has made people more productive, so one person can do much more than before. And it also leads to big companies getting even bigger meaning people only have a few employers to choose from.
This change also happens at a faster rate than before in history, so while in decades past, technology obviate people slowly enough that they were able to retrain and do other things, now it could be moving too fast for people to retrain (or perhaps they’re simply not capable of learning the new task).
This growth doesn't really have anything to do with necessary work. It has to do with how incentives function for management.
We do not and have never had an economy where everyone is needed for production. In economics, as the marginal increase in utility for a worker goes down you would think that there would be less workers hired, or at least they would be more evaluated prior to hiring. That doesn't take into account the competing incentives of middle and upper management who have no real incentive to increase production efficiency or where that incentive isn't properly balanced against the social and internal gain from having a larger budget and staff within an organization.
If you have the ability to hire and gain from hiring people more than you lose from their work being totally unnecessary, you hire. It's not your money you're wasting. Afterwards, you or your new hires will create systems of increasing complexity to justify the continued employment and hiring of new workers.
Also we shouldn't discount the various sophistries used to manipulate the unemployment rate. Many, many people aren't counted as 'unemployed' when they probably should be, because either they aren't applying for jobs, or they get occasional casual or gig work.
The real messed up part is that expenses don't actually have to have gone down - you could have a smaller number of people charging the company a lot more and siphoning off money to do the same work because they don't actually run a company based on efficient production and engineering standards, they run a piggy bank. A lot of those went bankrupt in 2008 and were bailed out by the government. More are on the brink and being bailed out now.
Not at all! If we replaced all accountants with software, no new jobs title would appear. If anything, they would Dissapear!
You'd need to automate Early Childhood teaching through to post-grad university student supervision to eliminate those jobs. Humans trust (make decisions based on) stories.
And in fact the most important part of what an accountant does is to convey stories. Software does all the rule-based stuff.
What about the replacement of W-2 with 1099 task-oriented roles? Where does that show up in the job title data set?
The 2M Uber drivers, just in the US?
The tens of millions of jobs offshored that no longer show up in US surveys?
That requirements for the job of a CEO now generally include technology...?
A piece contemporaneously on the HN front page? The "job" this person could have had 10 years ago still exists under the same title, but they are no longer qualified for it.
https://forklog.media/after-10-years-in-tech-isolation-im-no...
With all respect to Robin Hanson, his distilled claim is, to use his term, "bullshit."
It would be good for him to be subjected to automation of his job, then he might develop an understanding of the dimensions of the situation beyond the limits of the data he's myopically studying.
real world -> noisy data collection -> noisy data classification -> noisy expert analysis -> specific study -> paper
leads to something where the paper is just too disconnected from the real world.
To take time off I must open shitty software, enter my vacation days, then print the sheet and sign it. My manager signs it too. Then I bring it to secretary, she signs too, confirms the date in shitty software. Secretary sends paper form to the HR lady, she checks, if it’s ok and forwards my sheet to accounting lady. I see here a huge potential for automation, throwing at least 1st secretary and HR lady out of the process. This ancient process is happening in Germany, but automation will come sooner or later even here.
Edit: typos
There are lots of examples which don't really count though, such as self-checkout, which have exactly the same amount of work left, only who works it is a different person.
Automation fully replaces human work for a given job. It's a difference in kind.
However, automation may replace only some jobs in a value chain, making the remaining ones even more productive and valuable.
A fully automated value chain is a difference in kind again.
Automation is a very broad term, which mechanization is a part, but not a requirement of.
Anything that moves work from human to other forces is automation, having a thing do things by itself. An automobile is the automating of our movement.
See here for a discussion: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/18079/labour-s...
The purpose of the system is what it does.
Manual data entry for claims via the phone and a system called 'TAM'.
There are roles such as 'claims handlers' who's job is to repeat what is said over the phone into TAM.
Cut out the claims handler and present the claimant with a form, and their jobs are gone.
(Disclosure: I work at SAP, though not on customer-facing software.)
"It's terrible, my father lost the job he had for decades. He was replaced by a clever mechanical gizmo just six inches long. And then my mom got one."
It plays on the fear of being emasculated by technology. Maybe that leads us to exaggerate the threat.
Automation is rapidly accelerating into the wall that is identity beliefs at scale, and there is evidence that these belief systems are fairly rigid, making adaption to change challenging to say the least.
The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go (caveat systems are in place to ensure quality of life is provided for at an agreed upon floor). It's just a job.
This is perhaps the only thing socialism got right. At least the flavor we had in Yugoslavia and the remnants it left on the psyche of my parent's generation.
You do your job, then you go home and live your actual life. The job exists as a way to "pay your dues" in society, but it isn't your life. Your life is home, family, the house you're building, maybe a little side business. That sort of thing.
My generation growing up in the 90's and 00's tossed that away and went full american. Hustle hustle. Doing your job is not enough. You must love your job or you are a failure.
We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life.
When I was younger and naive, I judged the Amish. As I've grown older and wiser, I realize they had the right idea all along. Family, loved ones, community first. Everything else serves those.
So... its probably not all just "friends and family values" in the Amish world. Despite a luddite-based culture and "technically" an 8th grade education, they're probably one of the hardest working people around.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/06...
--------
They just figured out where to focus their business chops. Organic foods, hand-crafted customized furniture, etc. etc. And the Amish have a huge reputation as among the best craftsmen and freshest foods for these sorts of things.
Their sense of community probably also helps keep the various Amish businesses alive since they help each other so much.
This inherently makes them immune to the majority of the downsides we see in today's tech such as addictive patterns, advertising or "broken by design" tools as they would just not become accepted in the community to begin with.
Given the current, often user-hostile state of technology I think this is an example we should at least consider.
Striking a balance between the two is subtle I suppose.
My point was that people are competitive, social animals and social status is very important; sure, communism castrated a lot of those impulses and some people claim they were much happier back then, but its mostly bullshit nostalgia.
I was very young back then, but I remember the deprivations, my kindergarten educator slapping me for not applauding "dear leader", my parents just leaving me alone in the flat because they had to go the communist parades, being lectured in kindergarden how my parents jobs(doctors) were in fact less important than the jobs of other coleagues worker-parents jobs who "perhaps" made the syringes my parents could not do without; I remember people having to work on saturdays, night shifts and so on.
Now this is different in other parts of Germany, but it's an interesting natural experiment, because these guys were literally in the same city.
Meanwhile the country still does the same in international rankings as it did during the time of our dear leader. However more of the egalitarianism we had disappeared, and while some enjoy some semblance of prosperity in the heart of the major cities, the bulk of the nation has no job security and no future prospect but to be a cheap labor source for the west.
> we will all have the dignified life of middle class westerners
What a sad irony. If he was a highschool teacher in the US as now he could be struggling to pay rent and medical bills and get more or less the same "respect".
If you are from Romania, as I assume from your username, the experience of socialism there, or other Eastern Bloc countries, does not even compare.
"Money doesn't buy happiness" refers to happiness, which is not simply the lack of sadness.
It means that once all the typical material needs are provided, simply having more money does not make people visibly HAPPY all the time, and most people tend to focus on other goals.
This has been proven again and again by scientific research.
Where America still shines is you can for the most part still go with either mindset as you prefer. Even in SV tech where there's so much "dream job" this and other such talk, BigCos are nevertheless packed full of employees for whom it's just a job. But there are the occasional rather devoted employees who put in much more than 40 hours (not to mention the fudgey to account for time where you're thinking about work topics in the shower, at dinner, before bed...) and that's fine, it can make a nice mix. Now if you start down the socialist path of promoting a universal policy, and there are many (like limiting work hours) that could support making things easier for the just-a-job mentality, what you're actually doing is eliminating an option people prefer, and a huge source of innovation along with it.
How does anyone have time to have an actual life outside work?
This helps very much at code review and performance review times.
facepalm
Twenty years ago I had a friend who was a social worker and I offhand mentioned to her that "well, I'm not my job." She stared at me as if I had two heads and then said, slowly, "I completely agree with you, but you have no idea how rare it is to hear a man say that."
I enjoy my job and I'm happy to do it, but it in no way defines who I am for more than the 8-or-so hours per day I spend at it. The thing is, making your work your identity is almost central to the American male experience, and I doubt that's going away any time soon.
I guess you're in good company :-)
I envy your work-life balance %)
And memes like the dignity of labor, the just world fallacy (that wealth and poverty have inherent moral dimensions) and welfare (or leftist/secular ideology) breeding laziness definitely have their basis in Christian influence. I've seen people quote the Bible directly ("If a man will not work, he shall not eat") when criticizing UBI.
The just world fallacy in particular is going to hit people hard. People who believe society owes them safety, stability, a job and a living wage simply because they worked hard and obeyed the law are going to be hit with a rude awakening when they realize how capitalism actually works.
Opposition to UBI (as well as healthcare for all, proper schooling for all, nutritional food for all, etc) is about not wanting to pay higher taxes and maintaining a competitive edge in being able to obtain resources over others in society (or the world).
Those with more wealth (or who think they are capable of gaining more wealth) want to prevent others from having it, predictably.
Removing tax advantages of healthcare from employers? Oppose.
Removing exempt status or even raising the minimum salary under which an employer has to pay overtime? Oppose.
Lowering the cost of education? Oppose.
Parental or sick leave? Oppose.
Outlawing non competes? Oppose.
There's always some reason, which I believe to be a façade. The consistency and fervor with which they do not want labor to gain negotiating power is revealing. And, of course, always in support of tax cuts.
Edit: I'm not supportive of the first group because the policies as stated are wishes, not actual policies. For example, any real healthcare for all solution has to have a plan for dealing with the millions of people who are employed by the current healthcare system (which admittedly sucks) and who will be replaced by a new one. Similarly for UBI. It requires completely overhauling massive federal and state bureaucracies that have a lot of power.
I agree with you that many people who are against those things are they way you're describing, but many are not as well.
The big ideas seem like wishes, but I think it’s completely doable. But a sizeable portion of the population opposes even the baby steps I listed, and I can’t deduce any reason other than they like to imagine themselves in the owner class and want to keep down labor.
Mark Miller
Sally Baker
etc...
There are, and has been, hundreds of different cultures. Some have similarities, some are profoundly different.
(I'm not trying to dismiss your whole point: I agree with everything else you wrote)
These cultures didn't emerge from a vacuum completely in isolation from one another. Their similarities and commonalities are what form the basis for these categories, broad though they may be.
In addition to automation, I fear there are a lot of bullshit jobs out there right now that people cannot see as their purpose; it's a job, they take it because they need to make money, and because there isn't a living to be made in what they themselves are passionate about.
There's a LOT of people who would love to make a living in the arts - writing, drawing, etc - but there's just not enough money in it because people aren't willing to actually pay for it, so they have to move their passion to a hobby while working a dead-end job where they are just a number in a payroll system - i.e. they are replaceable. McJobs, if you want.
In a society where "you are your job" you already have huge problems even if there is full employment.
It's about stability. You carved a nice spot where you found joy and financial ... well .. stability. And now your life might go to the toilet. There's no guarantee that your next job will be
1. Fulfilling in itself
2. Provide the same income
3. Provide the same secondary benefits (colleagues, hours, boss, etc)
And.. automation is not even a guarantee that what your were producing is gonna improve (lots of chances it may but it can go the other way too: cheap commoditization)
> 1. Fulfilling in itself
> 2. Provide the same income
>3. Provide the same secondary benefits (colleagues, hours, boss, etc)
Given how the job market is trending in favour of uber/postmates-style gig work (for people who aren't working in specific skilled trades) , I'd say it is guaranteed to be worse in all three aspects.
"This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Doomsayers have been issuing similar warnings for some time, but never before have they commanded so much visibility.[...]AI redesigns itself to be more effective, it might decide that the best way to maximize its output would be to destroy civilization and convert the entire surface of the Earth into strawberry fields"[...]
"This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies."[...]
"The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism."
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-dang...
The mistake here is the nature of capitalism. In reality, when you see a bunch of companies beginning to turn everything into "a field of strawberries", something is going extremely right. Why? Because capitalism is working based on needs, and it means it found a way to satisfy a very deep (or very wide) need. At the end of the long chain there are people that are more satisfied with their lives than before.
As for being afraid of this? Hogwash. In nature every exponential curve is the beginning of a logistics curve. And the more complex the system, earlier the curve flattens. If you burn a forest it'l taper only when it has nothing left to burn. If you try something similar in a human society, it will find blockers long before that.
And that's why we should be more afraid of AI - there is the chance (small, true) that to an AI our society is as uncomplicated as a dry forest, and the feedback mechanisms that hold us in place just don't apply to it.
Companies move to India or China, then some move back but with none of the assembly jobs, because they don't move back until the investment in automation is paid back efficiently.
Its easy to confuse 'automation across the job fields' with 'automation replacing people'. The first is slow - automation proceeds in rote assembly tasks and continuous-flow processes. But automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum. I still get my fries from a human being. I still get my hair cut by Anton at a local shop. My car is fixed by Mr. Harapat (though it got assembled by a giant robot).
My nieces and nephews are automation Engineers. They are as busy as they can possibly be, changing plants over to automation. It's cost effective when a plant grows past a certain size/capacity. And with the rising tide of population, plants that served us 20 years ago are woefully boutique now, being rebuilt, and being rebuilt automated.
Are you sure the US population has doubled in 20 years?
But in contrast, US manufacturing jobs have disappears much faster than that - by 1/3 in the 2000's alone. So the conclusion (few jobs remain, per-capita) is still a good one.
Exactly. Its impact has been limited to areas where there is repetitive work on standardised, clean objects[1], in standardised environments, in product lines where volumes are sufficient to justify the investment in machinery.
> Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years.
Yes it has. The size of the needed investment has gone down a lot in activities where automation is feasible.
But manufacturing has been a minor part of the US economy for more than 30 years, and its share is getting smaller. "Services" is over 80 percent. Advertising, making movies, sports, construction... zillions of different things.
[1] If any manufacturing work should be automated, it's meat packing. Unpleasant, boring work that gives you carpal tunnel syndrome and other joint and tendon injuries. Plants are always short of workers and absenteeism is rife because of the nature of the job.
But automation is impossible, because animals are not standardised enough. Putting that another way: because machine vision is still so ludicrously bad. And so is the state of robotics.
Granted for very slow transitions it’s not as big of a deal.
Then they hired them back out of retirement because the project went badly wrong.
The latter part went awry (although I think they didn't mind too much) but the timing kind of worked out.
In a more vicious corporation they probably wouldn't have been so bothered about the timing of the rollout.
Provided there is competition
Imagine a gig economy where 100 employees are on call the year round, ready to jump in when you need them for as long as you need them, complete with training to make this absurd level of scaling possible. We could do a kind of fire drill to test your corporate scale-ability. Then we get valuable information: Your corp atm make 100 widgets per day but you can scale to 50 000 in 2 weeks.
In stead of a skill and experience starved pool to hire from it is redefined as a national asset. We monitor its market value and print money against it.
Since we/you/one/I want to feed, house and cloth everyone anyway we may coin a separate (freely exchangeable) currency for necessities and expire it after n months.
Just discarding people the way we do now quickly turns them from profitable & productive sources of tax revenue into expensive nuances. Having your head on the chopping block the year round with the sword hovering over it inspires a kind of productivity we no longer need. In the current economic situation we need people to maintain and grow their natural ability to think and learn. Similarly, people running businesses shouldn't have to fill their head with that horror nonsense either. They have better things to do for us. (things that they are actually good at)
These areas have grown hugely, eating up all the gains, and will continue to eat all the gains so that the number of work hours needed is constant.
When your landscaping company buys an excavator, one person can now move as much earth as 15 people used to. You don't keep the other 14 on the payroll.
I've seen one fascinating example where pay per unit eventually boiled down to 40 cents per hour. That was the point where the automatons simply could no longer keep up. Some would decline to do the manual work. Those who did got the less frequent better paid contracts that paid up to 20 euro per hour. (for which no machine exists)
Producing more with less human input is how we raise the living standards of everyone in the long term.
Not pure 'automation' but rather 1 person overseeing several lightly automated processes.
So while 25 years ago you had 4 Operators doing 4 tasks together, you now have 1 Operator doing the 4 tasks with automated assistance.
Also often this person will make less than his individual 4 predecessors due to 'Tiered' wage systems. While being more physically(previous operators taking turns doing physical tasks, etc) and now mentally exhausted(ensuring process is correct) than them as well.
I still think we can use automation to do radical things. I want to see us automate food production and meal preparation, to lower the cost of healthy food. By intentionally lowering the cost of human survival with automation, and with changes to intellectual property restrictions which keep costs high, we could create a world where food is so cheap we give it away to those in need. With changes to our cultural norms and broad application of this theory, it is literally possible to eliminate material poverty.
Think about it - in a world where there are only private book collections, some people are book-rich and some people are book-poor. But that kind of poverty is effectively eliminated if you introduce the concept of libraries to that world. If we share the automation we create the same way we share books at a library, we can create societies where everyone is provided for at no direct material expense to others.
Years ago I wrote an essay [1] where I used the concept of impending job loss from automation to emphasize the importance of this better way of living I proposed above. But I've realized that we don't need to see automation as an impending crisis - millions of people are already in crisis because they cannot afford the food, medicine, or housing they need. So the need for change is still there, but the cause is not some future problem, but the problems of the status quo.
I used to buy Hagstrom map books filled with detailed current maps - they were sold in gas stations and bookstores and they even had some of their own stores. Their stores all shut down and their business shrank enormously as map navigation became automated.
There used to be a lot of tour and travel agencies around. They still exist, but are much less prevalent and are scaled down.
In fact, automation of commodity distribution has had a major effect on retail, and consequently commercial real estate.
Insofar as office work - people who work in law tell me the large number of secretaries who shuffled through cabinets full of folders containing records have largely disappeared as record retrieval has been automated. I had data entry jobs many years ago, itself a type of automation - but the jobs I did have disappeared as data distribution has become automated.
I don't know what they are measuring but I have seen the effects of a automation all around. Maybe with the closing of bookstores and record stores and video game stores, they mean the role of a retail clerk has not been much automated, which may be true. But I have seen automation have a large effect on many industries, and then rippling effects onto industries like real estate.
That said, I recall reading a report that mostly middle class administrative and coordination roles are eliminated due to digitalization and dedicated software. Leading to negative wage pressure on the middle class.
These are repetitive human jobs like looking at a bunch of papers and creating a report.
Manual work is getting more productive and often shifted abroad but on a global scale is actually expanding in line with global gdp growth. https://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/employment-t...
Interesting in this report is that geopolitical instability is more destructive to jobs than artificial intelligence for now.
High-skill jobs are still there, but the middle is rapidly being hollowed out. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the middle class is shrinking as a result.
I know Uber’s end-goal is automation such that taxi drivers aren’t necessary. What I didn’t realize is that it is route planning automation that allowed them to move from dedicated drivers to gig drivers.
You'd be surprised how many "paper pushers" still fill the cubicles of this world (their job literally to copy stuff from this ERP to this CRM or to this legacy Access / Excel / BI system). This is the low hanging fruit of job automation and enterprises are quickly figuring out what kind of cost savings RPA can offer them.
I have a feeling RPA will have a much higher adoption rate than the "digital transformation" trickle.
With increased automation, either new jobs are created(thereby increasing the overall output of the economy) OR expectation for individual productivity is reduced, decreasing individual stress.
History is your proof. Automation has been constantly increasing forever and there’s no job loss en masse because of that. Empirically speaking there are almost always more jobs created.
Not saying anything about quality of life.
What you describe is not the quality of jobs decreasing, it's the increase in (unfulfilled, unreasonable) expectation of job quality just because you have a college degree. IMHO we have much more "good jobs" than in 1920 or 1950, it's just that the number of college graduates has grown faster than the number of good jobs. In 1920 or 1950 there weren't enough good jobs for everybody, and the good jobs mostly went to people with college degrees. But the problem was not actually in the lack of college degrees - if most people have college degrees, then all that means that college degree ceases to be the pathway to good jobs, and other filtering mechanisms inevitably need to appear (and have appeared) to select which people will get good jobs and which will be left behind despite having a college degree.
There was probably a point in time when learning hunting was like going to college and along comes farming to make all those hunters jobless. That’s how the wheel of “progress” rolls.
The idea that going to college will make you more bucks or guarantees you a job in your field of study is very arcane at this point.
These qualities are not guaranteed but are correlated with being able to get into college and graduate - everything from conscientiousness, ability to follow arbitrary complex rules, general intelligence and also socioeconomic status (in e.g. sales and management, the social contacts of a high-SES employee and their family are very valuable in achieving business goals, and the social contacts of a low-SES employee are not). A graduate might not have these qualities, and a non-graduate might have them, but it's hard to tell so the degree is a useful proxy because it does (or did?) correlate with these qualities.
So it made all sense for businesses to prefer college graduates for certain types of jobs ("the good jobs") even if the college major was something like history or literature in a field of business where that's not relevant, and they did just that. And because of that employer preference, a college degree was a ticket to one of these good jobs.
However, if almost everyone gets a degree that means that there's no real filtering happening, and that benefit gradually becomes useless.
Of course there were new jobs created but serving burgers isn't a substitute for decent work. That's why you got Trump.
Personally, I expect the largest disruptor of jobs to come from autonomous driving, but we're still 5-10+ years from seeing that hitting the ground.
As far as today is concerned, I largely agree. ETFs BOTZ and ROBO have increased, but not in such a way that would suggest huge automation revolution.
While those jobs haven't been automated away as such, they are being priced away.
Uber has been consistently losing money every single year.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
This in spite of the reported very low unemployment rate, which is not really the meaningful measure.
The labor force participation was lower a long time ago, but I think that is when there were more single income families.
I am not sure how much this drop in employment is from just bad economics or how much could be attributed to automation.
The primary impetus for automation are labor cost related but not necessarily to take over humans intrinsically. The top reason I heard uttered in my amateur research was a common theme of the past 100+ years - unions make things more costly whether in terms of capital or general speed / agility of the business. Wages are suppressed through automation effects noticeably around factories that automate compared to nearby cities that don’t. The suppression is concurrently correlated to labor suppression / arbitrage though so it is hard to detangle the automation v. labor angle because the biggest job losses and wage suppression happened before modern automation - they happened during the late 80s to 90s as unionization started dropping faster. Diminishing returns on outright hard balling unions would lead to more investment in machinery to drive down hiring needs and avoid the need to hire while also putting the companies that do automate in a better operational cost position.
not sure. The unions shift revenues from capital to society. The speed/cost of "things" is not relevant here.
We have quite the high wage standard and even then the device is mostly used to show off.
Real automation is probably needed in bureaucratic workflows even if we usually think about manufacturing. There are probably advantages and disadvantages here as well.
Since order situation is great at my current company (strangely the covid-quarter was particularly good), we have significantly expanded workforce in production.
I doubt that unions really drove automation in my country though. Price plays a role but also technological feasibility.
Retail jobs are being decimated across the USA not because robots are directly replacing them, but because as more people shop online these companies collapse and Amazon is able to perform the same service without the staff.
Maybe warehouse worker, delivery jobs and coders are increasing at the same place? That doesn't pass the sniff test to me as they seem to have much higher efficiency than your average salesperson at a retail store.
I followed him briefly during the 2013-2015 automation hype (which hasm't died yet; far from it), and I found him to be carrying out reasonable analysis of tech economics. I found him to be one of the few economists who are in touch with tech reality, and so things weren't that bad in the econosphere in terms of keeping up with tech trends.
This blog post doesn't help maintain that perspective at all. I'm sorry.
As a tech person myself, I'm extremely busy with making this happen instead of being a negative nancy towards other tech folks, but I'll finish my though with this:
I have a close friend who is a typical naysayer of tech progress, "business as usual", "old jobs replaced with new jobs", "capital is what makes thing work", "economics good technology meh"
He will not stop for a minute, and will not entertain a single of my counter-arguments.
What is super-surprising to me though is that in the last 5-7 years, he has pivoted from a non-tech job to complete-alignment with one of the big-tech companies, has been investing heavily in all kinds of big tech stocks, and watching his stocks with a keen eye day-in and day-out.
And everytime we talk, the first thing he discusses is my opinion and forecast of where technology is headed. Once having absorbed all that information, he goes back to his same old rotten cassette tape.
Funny how it works.
The humble takeaway is that it is far more difficult than people imagine.
Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated? Or the other way around?
Also what does 'employment' refer to exactly? Is measuring how well the demand for labour is being met in a certain job?
Yes. "Simple economic theory predicts that, all else equal, employers are more eager to automate jobs with higher pay and more workers. So these two factors should predict job automation. And we do in fact see such effects in Table 3, though more consistently for pay than employment."
> what does 'employment' refer to exactly?
Number of people employed.
This is why for example there are a lot of bullshit office jobs that can be automated fairly easily but will not be because there's plenty of cheap labour to do it manually (for cheaper than what developing & maintaining the automation would cost) and it also earns them PR points about "creating" jobs.
Yes. One aspect that I've seen in e.g. computer vision and robotics for industrial automation is that there are a lot of processes for which we have the technology to automate production, but it's not worth because it's currently cheaper to get the job done manually by someone in a poor country getting paid very, very little.
However, the obvious implication is that if/when the worker conditions in the world improve and these workers start requiring reasonable wages then these jobs will be automated pretty much immediately. If the shop owner has to choose between buying a robot or providing a handful of rice to a team of near-slaves, the people are cheaper; If the shop owner has to pay something comparable to the minimum wages in the first world, then the best worker gets to supervise and clean the imported robots and all the others are out on the street.
If the first world would stop offshoring these jobs to poor countries, then that would not mean large numbers of blue collar jobs coming back, that would mean shifting to automation.
Thing is, when you are calculating the color of the sky, then it is either a bluish looking spectra, or you are in trouble. And consequently physicists will look outside immediately after that calculation.
The entire post needs an explanation of why they don't find any automation in that timeframe? I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers, containers, several cloud stuff, and so on. If they don't see that in their data, then my immediate assumption is, that they need a more reasonable approach.
Automation replaces human work, business can do better now, then they want to produce more than before so they up hiring as well. It's much easier to set your target higher (production, profit) than to automate anything. As soon as you have automated something new work pops up, work that was probably not done before for lack of resources.
Programming has been automating tasks for decades yet here we are, so many of us. Cloud should have automated many jobs, yet with this new found ease of deployment we chose to deploy more rather than hire less. As long as humans have needs and desire for betterment I don't think we can surpass our ever growing ambition with automation.
Certain tasks that form a particular job are being automated more now than ever before.
This is more true of knowledge workers where they are operating and working in a digital environment already (e.g. traders, accountants, lawyers, marketing, admin...)
This is less true of manual labour - like cleaners and gardeners - why? Well look at robotics, its good but nowhere good enough to replace these dexterity required which a human can provide.
For knowledge workers it is very hard to automate all the tasks that make up a job. Hence why automation has not resulted in mass unemployment (excluding all other factors).
This sounds like a thoroughly fallacious argument? Automation is progressing not by automating jobs in the exact form that they were previously done, but by more automatable (and therefore more automated) forms of job displacing less automatable forms of those jobs. Isn't that exactly what we'd expect?
The ongoing "web 2.0" revolution is finally reaping the benefits of computers and networks, more than 50 years after they were invented. Paper processes are finally on the verge of being eliminated. Remote work is finally possible for many people.
Deep learning will have a transformative impact too, but these things take time. Let's talk again 10 years from now.
Taking inventory in a retail store used to be a paper and pencil mass bureaucracy - it's now streamlined.
We don't stand at the line anymore to withdraw or deposit money.
Secretaries don't type memos.
Many newspapers are dropping photographers in lieu of training journalists on how to use their iPhones.
We don't manage a lot of paper records anymore.
So a lot of things have accelerated, it might not show up in the job market, it may not even show up in the GDP if consumers are in fact getting all the surplus. Life can get a lot better in many ways without a hint of GDP growth. GDP growth usually only happens (all things being equal) if there is either more cost (edit: 'maybe' bad for consumers but not necessarily), more profit taking (also bad for consumers), or more government spending (neutral for the citizenry - depends on the efficiency of spending).
> Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning.
Emphasis mine.
Their point doesn't seem to be that automation isn't happening, but that there is no revolution incoming that is driven by new tech. You can see that in their bulleted point summary:
> * Which job features predict job automation how did not change from 1999 to 2019.
If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed.
This is definitely not self-evident, moreover, I'd totally disagree with it.
The authors are essentially missing the point by trying to categorize jobs or features of jobs as 'automatable' when in the grand scheme, it's just not how it works.
Everyone's jobs are evolving due to automation.
1) Automation has been steadily happening due to progress in IT for decades.
2) AI, in particular, is a nascent field, moreover, it's really on a 'tool' in the tool chest of IT systems overall. The time horizon for impact for direct impact of 'AI' will be a long way off, and when it is, it won't be directly apparent in most cases. There will be very few jobs where we'll be able to say 'AI replaced me'. Maybe Taxi drivers.
3) And my point - is that automation is tremendously difficult to measure in reality, and that it changes the nature of some jobs more than others, and in ways that cannot be measured by using employment numbers.
The 'AI replaced the taxi drivers' example, derived from our 'Industrial Revolution' thinking about automation and productivity, is an outlier.
Seeking to find ways in which 'AI replaced cab drivers' is probably worthwhile on some level, but it's going to miss 95% of the revolution.
Think of an Amazon product picker - their jobs have changed tremendously due to automation. There may be all sorts of flavours of AI baked into an Amazon warehouse pickers job now and in the future: a lot of AI in the vision/3D control for the robots which incrementally replace humans. AI in the route optimisation, AI in labour scheduling (no longer done by humans), AI in facilities management (ordering parts, service automatically).
All of this may lead to considerably more efficient workplace and yet not a single job may be lost nor might it lead us to think of some magic tech replacing some workers in a specific way, rather 'the system got smarter'.
The economic equilibrium may in fact lead to considerably more people being hired to do 'different kinds of more automated picking', not fewer.
The AI revolution is the same as the information revolution and it's happening across the system in myriad ways that will be very hard to measure as we would like.
> For our purposes, a key ONET job feature is “degree of automation,” ranging from “not at all” to “completely.” [...] (Note, these scores are expert judgements, not model predictions. Such scores for all jobs are found here: https://www.onetonline.org/find/descriptor/result/4.C.3.b.2?...)
From the linked paper.
> The economic equilibrium may in fact lead to considerably more people being hired to do 'different kinds of more automated picking', not fewer.
I think you agree with them, then:
> Labor markets change more often due to changes in demand, relative to supply.
Sit through the credits at the end of an effects-heavy movie and look at the thousand or so people involved. The physical effects operations were never that big. I visited Kerner Optical, the physical effects end of Lucasfilm, once, and they had maybe 100 people. (They're gone now, spun off and didn't make it as a standalone company.) Overall, the number of people involved in a major movie seems to be up, not down. Much to the annoyance of some people in the industry, who, 20 years ago, thought they'd be able to make major films with 30 people.
So all these effects people may have spent a week producing digital effects which took many months for a small "analog" team.
Learn to code” is popularizing the conversion of everybody into software engineers, but actually we don’t need most SWE either, so now we have an entirely new class of useless jobs on a SWE assembly line where 99% of the work product is simply discarded, but we still use the old industrial productivity model to drive productivity by aggressive management.
(I have yet to witness a farmer using fully-autonomous hay feeding robots, but the ag magazines have been running articles on them)
(TIL automated pig brushes also exist)
> Our paper has so far received zero media attention
Because you're answering a question no one asked.
[1]: Link to the piece: https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/, recent HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401328
What evidence do we have for being closer to AGI today than we were twenty years ago?
My point isn't that AGI is useless. But it's currently an article of faith. Faith is fine. Faith is essential. But isn't a good way to make huge allocations of resources.
(Also, AGI would be not so useful. Humans are notoriously difficult to work with, and we seem to have General Intelligence. It would have to have a strange concoction of motivations to be immediately --- or even eventually --- useful for anything that we would want to automate).
> The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the recent past.
My point was that predictions of AGI being so far away may be false, as explained the article I linked. If they were false, and we ended up with AGI, I don't think the article's assumption about the near future will apply. This does not need to happen overnight, it can take time, but the kinds of jobs we could automate would change drastically over time (and the time scale in the article is two decades long!)
On your second point, though. Part of why humans are difficult to work with because we have our own emotions and motivations and sometimes decide not to do things other people want. An extremely intelligent AI that did only what it was told to do would probably not be as difficult to work with?
There's much to do for AGI, but I believe that motivation-engineering will be the hardest part. Morality is intrinsically connected to our role as sorta-hive-minded monkeys.
Caveat: All the above is poorly presented opinion from the following resources:
- Learning how to learn on coursera
- Buddhism and modern psychology on coursera
- Righteous Mind by Haidt.
- Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt
- Bullshit as an honest indicator of intelligence
Building a machine using our evolutionary history as a prior design is the only way we know how to produce general intelligence, but all the strange, varied, "Emotional" baggage that goes with it means we never would. Why would a computer be afraid of snakes? If what you want is a computer that can come up with solutions you wouldn't have imagined, then you need clever search, problem specification, and significant computation, not general intelligence. If you want to automate something, you may need learning, but don't need intelligence.
None; I agree. But we have no evidence we are 20 years away from it either. The article I linked gives reasoning for why we shouldn't assume the latter, and prepare for the former.
Resources are scarce; decisions have to be made about where to use them.
The likelier severe risks are nuclear war, pandemic, volcanism, earthquakes and tsunamis, multinational infrastructure cyberattack, bioweapons, nonlinear climate change (e.g. a step change in strength and duration of heatwaves making most of North India and Pakistan uninhabitable), and multiple food supply system collapse (e.g. widespread outbreaks of severe wheat, rice, potato and corn diseases).
In contrast to those risks, which we understand quite well, humanity has no idea how an AGI might be made. Since a putative AGI will be made by humans, this is a big stumbling block for anyone who proposes we need to divert resources to AGI risk.
One is that we may gain sufficient understanding how minds work and become able to implement one. IMHO it's a reasonable assumption that we currently have sufficient hardware capability to make the proper computing power for a mind with human-equivalent intelligence if only we knew how that mind software should be structured, but we simply don't really know how minds work, how they should work, and how to build them. There's lot of work being done there, some knowledge is being gained, but it seems that incremental advances won't be sufficient and progress will happen only in the case of a major breakthrough which we can't predict or expect any time soon - or, possibly, never; there certainly are people arguing that.
The second direction, on the other hand, does not presume a theoretical understanding of how intelligent minds truly work on a high level, but refers to brute force and/or simulation of low level constructs in human brains which we can understand and implement without needing a theoretical breakthrough. This approach requires immense computational power far beyond our current capability, so it's completely unrealistic to attempt in the near future - but twenty years of Moore's law has brought us twenty years closer to a brute-force solution to AGI. If we look at the estimates made in 2000 or earlier (I seem to recall reading brain-brute-force estimates from 1980s but I can't find them now. Perhaps Kurzweil was writing something like this already back then?) about the expected requirements for computing power and the expected progress, then we're pretty much on track; the computing power lines cross at something like 2050-2060; any hopes of "GAI in 2020" were based on the first approach which requires a breakthrough in understanding.
So from this perspective AGI is inevitable even without any progress whatsoever in "true intelligence" research, as long as our physics research and engineering keeps delivering improvements to raw compute power. We'll reach that point someday, likely within my lifetime, even without a breakthrough. But if we do start to understand how minds should be properly constructed, then that can easily shave many orders of magnitude off of the computing power requirements, and accelerate the arrival of GAI by decades.
My takeaway: invest in rock delivery. Everyone wants to live under one. And what with COVID-19, not enough people will be able to scavenge their own.
2020-2040 could have massive automation just with today's tech as soon as it's economically worthwhile - i.e. if you're not competing with workers who'll slave all day in dangerous conditions for peanuts. In 2000, we couldn't automate many jobs, in 2020 we choose not to automate them.
How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn?
I'm still limited by processing speed.
I imagine between math improvements, electrical engineering, computer science improvements/discoveries, and more we can automate jobs that require thinking or fine motor movements.
Most estimates a decade ago forecasted massive automation-caused job losses by 2020.
> How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn?
How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient?
> I imagine
I do to. But based on current technology, we have no idea how to achieve these goals. We can't even model how or when we might do so. This implies a deep lack of meta knowledge.
Ah, thank you. That's handy phrasing.
They didn't become sentient, but at the time how the Quality distinguished themselves from the rabble was through art, literacy, and music, all of which were achievable (to some degree) by mechanical loomwork substituting brass for brains.
Though, on second thought I guess self-driving does end up taking away a lot of taxi driver / trucking jobs. Nevermind...
Which is great for the planet, but not so great for jobs in car manufacturing industry, at least in the long run.
Up until the quarantine I was working in a cowork space; and it happens that - I'm the sole employee of the company I work for in my country - all the desks around me were occupied by a company that makes a lot of their income providing automation to other parties.
I even worked for them for a few months as an "on demand" consultant; the idea would be that I would provide assistance to their devs when they needed help with the "programs" they were developing, and that fastly turned into a process review that eventually cooled off because they weren't - the project manager, at least - very keen on taking my advice.
What I observed was that - bear in mind this is a 3rd world country - the salaries were rather low, so obviously they couldn't get experienced people.
This lead to they having to train them, but as they had no experience, the way in which they approached solving the issues where, a lot of times, "complicated".
Usually they suffered from the apps being interfaced having changes along the project (Or after). This meant they had to fix a lot of problems that were not there in the beginning.
AS the devs had only experience with this tool, and was their first experience coding, they couldn't make the most of the other tools at hand. This mostly lends to processes that take hours to complete, being the execution time only marginally better than a person. This coupled with the issue right above this, many of the projects had a time excess of around 100% (Effectively taking double the time that was allotted in the beginning). Last I heard from them, thought, is that they made a lot of improvements here.
In one particular project I practically had to threat the person responsible to use javascript to fetch data from the browser instead of the "native" way of doung that (Basically, querying the page through the tool with xpath expression). When they did change to javascript, the process execution time was reduced by >90%
All in all, the problem I see with automation is that the people doing that is not formally trained in coding, and the tools I looked at have rather weak integrations with the most used apps today (Namelly, browsers).
I think the idea for many of these tools is to allow people to automate themselves, but that will lead in my opinion into the "phpization" of the automation area.
All in all, there are a few caveats: I know from them of at least one company that had a rather strong and professional dept., and they where _very_ good at it.
I think that eventually automation is going to take the world by storm in the next 5- 10 years. And those that adopt early will have a clear advantage over those that not.
For the record, the tool they use is Blue Prism; according to the CEO of this company BP has some sort of marked edge over UIPath when it comes to enterprise settings. I know there are other tools in the market, but I don't know them except by name.
That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized.
Now, those people will be retrained to do something. Maybe even just do more detailed customer service. So I’m not too concerned - just saying automation is coming
The paper rigorously questions such assertions of faith. It merits a thoughtful response.
As Deming said, "in God we trust, all others must bring data."
Which the link doesn't particularly seem to be analyzing. McDonalds eliminating ~1 near minimum wage job at every store isn't going to be reflected in wages of the remaining employees.
"Did you say at fries to that?" No "Added 27 orders of fries, anything else" Arghhhh!
Texans know that Whataburger is infamous for being slow since everything is made to order. In-n-Out has figured it out but Whataburger is still so slow for some reason. With the app, I can place an order in my driveway, then arrive at the drive thru about the time its ready. If I'm lucky, I can skip the line and pull up and have it brought out in a few minutes. What used to be a 20 minute parking lot wait crawling through the line is now 5~ minutes.
Sometimes if it's busy or late at night and they don't have as many staff, I have to wait my turn in line, but I'm usually not sitting for 5 minutest at the window after paying waiting for the grill. Oh and that's another benefit. Apple Pay makes it seamless to place an order and not deal with CCs that are wearing out being declined.
My biggest complaint is still being required to download a separate app for each restaurant, but for now I can tuck them all away into a folder and forget they exist. If an app isn't in my home screen, I'm going to open it from a spotlight search.
For restaurants I don't visit as frequently, I'll call them and place an order for pickup. This also has the benefit of not incurring many of the BS fees that specialty online ordering platforms charge. It's going to take me a few minutes to order anyway, app or call, so I might as well save 10% by calling.
The analysis is obviously incomplete. Making your order to order, in a timely fashion, was the point that distinguished Burger King from McDonald's.
What's happened is companies have restricted the customer service they offer (the phone operator can't do anything the customer can't do on the website). That's not automation getting closer, it's the service getting shittier.
(seriously compare calling a hospital and talking immediately to an operator that connects you to the person you want to listening to 3 selection lists with the same virus warning at the beginning of the each one and then talking to an operator that connects you to the person you want...)
It doesn't even need to be sophisticated logic, with heavy use of AI and conversational styles of communication. A simple "what are you looking for?" with some preset options is pretty great.
I think Millennials are less comfortable talking with people and are willing to put up with less flexible and less powerful automated solutions where their parents would not. Expect customer service to get even worse with automation, not better.
I'm approaching 26 and still vastly prefer talking to people to solve my issues. Perhaps this is because I work in software and am aware of the massive pile of crap most phone trees are so there is some bias here.
My go to solution to get a person on the phone is whenever a machine asks me "What can I help you with?", I purposefully mumble and make weird noises that it cannot understand. 2-3 repeats and it gives up and automatically passes me to an operator or CSR. I assume this is to better help the elderly or disabled but it sure is useful if you know it exists.
Yea, but does it...you know, work?
Why didn't the internet already eliminate most customer service? The common inquiries can easily be found solutions to online. if I'm calling support it's almost always because the resources available don't solve my problem. And spending 20 minutes on the phone with an automated system asking about billing is very frustrating.
If you can spend 10-15 minutes navigating voice menus, waiting, and listening to canned messages, likely you need operator's help badly enough. Anyone with a petty problem would have hung up already. And the canned messages also eliminate some of the calls which seek some obvious information.
You know, it used to be somehow hard, but not impossible, to reach an oracle in ancient times. Now the same is done on mass scale.