Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence
technoccult.net
technoccult.net
Currently we exist in a "low unemployment present" but if you believe a "high unemployment future" is possible, you should reasonable believe we're smoothly approaching it. So if you think my thought experiment can come to pass - we need to be very concerned.
If you're going to bring out the tired argument about how the cotton gin didn't cause mass unemployment, instead I would challenge you to paint a picture of a far off future where most jobs haven't evaporated.
Automation reduces jobs, wages, or both.
Nevertheless, we should embrace it. Increasingly strong social safely nets can be used to take up the slack.
We only need to be concerned if we make the assumption that societal expectations won't adjust as well. "Hard work" is seen as a virtue; someone who takes government assistance is pitied at best, considered "parasitic" at worst.
If we take those views into your world it will be a disaster. But instead the real question should be "why does everyone need to have a job?" If we provide for the needs of people displaced by the new machines, we'd free people up to pursue arts, philosophy, or even simple leisure. We'd be living in Bertrand Russell's paradise of 'idleness'.
Working under the premise (2) should be avoided, I favor discussions around basic income.
We all understand wealth to be money, stock, ownership. So maybe the housing could come under that (if you owned your apartment) but not the others.
Corrected.
Positive statement, not normative as below might think.
Ignoring the fact that this is a pretty offensive reduction to apply to most people, I'd ask:
Does it really matter? And if so, why?
I.e., can we as a society accept the possibility, and make it a reality, that a guaranteed income (in whatever form it takes), frees us from mindless grunt work and inspires us to pursue our dreams, or do we force those whose jobs have disappeared to suffer poverty because there is no 'need' for them?
200 years ago, nobody would have guessed that there would be millions of computer programmers employed in the world today, because the rise of computers couldn't be predicted. It's likely that in an era where basic needs are provided by robots, people are free to come up with new inventions that lead to the creation of new industries that don't exist today.
Once we've digitized all the existing flows of information present in non-software industries, I would expect the number of developers employeed by a free market to begin to shrink.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there are currently millions of people of working in an industry that was unheard of a century ago because the modern day computer was invented. There are millions of people who have jobs today related to cars (manufacturing, sales, repair, driving, etc.) because the car was invented. There could be some new invention we haven't thought of today that spawns an industry that will employ millions.
By historical metrics, unemployment in the U.S. is over 50%.
And I just summarized Firefly. Start learning Chinese.
tl;dr the sky is not falling
Take one example of cellphones. It probably eliminated many "jobs" for people working in landline industries in the last decade or so BUT it probably added a lot more jobs in the telecom industry in general.
EDIT: based on some replies, I am not dismissing the fact completely that automation can have impacts on jobs. They definitely do but the point is that the number of jobs themselves do not dimish. It is the "type" of job that is changed which could surely be a problem for the displaced workers because they might not have the new skillset/experience ready to be employed.
The weavers faced real problems, had a real existential crisis and struggled with real poverty and hunger for many decades. Yes, the industrial revolution brought a tremendous increase in wealth and living standards to everyone, but only eventually to everyone.
It is tremendously important to take care of the people who are cast by the wayside by those changes.
Not sure how to avoid the occasional dilly-dallier who thought they'd make a good chef, but maybe we'd just have to put up with that fact.
Maybe future transformations will work out similarly. However, even if they don’t many solutions for the short-term problems can easily be made to work as solutions for possible long-term problems.
Sure, you've got jobs in robot building and such but when a robot shop with 20 employees turns out 200 robots in one year and displaces 4000 workers...
So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend - which opens whole new fields of products and services for them, which will (at first) be run by humans and have jobs.
It's a cycle that repeated many many times in history. It's just happening faster now. So if you want to always be employable (and you are not particularly skilled) be flexible - don't get stuck in a single field, but be willing to constantly learn new ones. (This is hard for some people, but some extra funding for adult vocational school should help.)
My artisan economy I mean handmade paintings, handmade food, plays with actors instead of CGI movies, musicians, bars...
Yes, people have more money to spend, but no, trickle down economics doesn't really work out for the jobless.
Until they get spooked and cut back discretionary spending just in case. So-called service economies are not stable.
Example: If we have 10 guys making hydrogen cells, and all the sudden we can replace them with one robot and one guy, and that takes an unviable industry to a viable one, well then they are going to need a lot more robots and guys, a lot more than the 10 they previously had.
Today I was at lunch in what's left of our downtown district, and there were old photographs on the wall of business that used to be in the area (mostly manufacturing). I was amazed that some of the photographs showed huge rooms of women sitting at work tables assembling parts, folding boxes, and packing items.
That stuff is all gone. I could imagine a handful of machines replacing that group of people. When you go from a city having 50,000 factory workers to the 4,000 or so that we have now, it's a huge deal.
I agree there. Think of the jobs that have been lost over the years as stores have closed due to competition from the internet. During my lifetime, I've seen independent bookstores merge and disappear, and even the mega-chains go away (e.g. Borders). Music stores - gone (Tower Records, Wherehouse, Sam Goody). Video rental - gone (Blockbuser). Big box electronics - going (Circuit City, Good Guys, Tweeter).
Despite all of this, unemployment stayed relatively constant, aside from the spike during the recent economic downturn (and these jobs were not lost as a result of automation).
Just thoughts, I don't know the numbers or anything.
That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job?
It seems to me that either we have to accept that a proportion of the population doesn't work, or we have subsidy manual jobs to compete with developing countries with cheap labor.
Either way, the ones benefiting from automation have to pay for the unskilled to survive.
More importantly, if we were replacing less-skilled jobs that are being automated with more-skilled, higher-paying jobs at a 1:1 ratio, automation would be driving up production costs rather than controlling them, and there'd be no motivation to do it.
No, the point -- i.e., why firms adopt automation -- is to cut the production costs of the firms adopting automation.
The hoped for social benefit -- hoped for largely by people who aren't the ones adopting automation -- is of an expanded overall economy that not only provides aggregate growth but also distributes that growth in a nice manner so that not only does the mean income improve, but the total share of population productively employed stays the same or improves, and everyone does better.
There's no real reason to expect that is either likely as the near-term result of automation, or necessary as its long-term result as a result of pure market forces. And it is certainly not the point of automation from the point of view of the firms doing the automation.
This time, starting around the 70s and 80s, we entirely failed to educate our populace to the point where the majority can be fully-productive members of the new job marketplace. It's becoming conventional wisdom that having only a high school degree (as a crude heuristic for skill level) is not enough to be productive economically, and this is becoming increasingly true of having a college degree where you don't learn anything useful. In every cycle of improved tools/higher skill bar, there are casualties that weren't able to improve their productivity fast enough; this is one of the uncommon cases where (in the US, at least), "people not keeping up" is a systemic issue instead of a transient one (I don't think the overall education system today is all that much better than 20 years ago).
It's a "this-time-is-different" situation in a limited sense; that is, it's not inherent to the nature of the automation-cycle itself, but rather to the nature of our response to it.
Note that this isn't some engineering-centric notion of needing immediately applicable skills from college. Studying something more academic in college has just as much value, as long as it's something that's useful (a good rule of thumb is "as long as you use the things you learned in college in the future"). I'm referring to the fact that it's long been the practice for many people to get a college degree in literally anything with the knowledge that the existence of the degree itself would be a good enough signal for intelligence/skills that you could get an okay job afterwards. This is increasingly untrue.
If it's not different this time, it will eventually be. That's the goal.
But if nearly every manual labor and semi-skilled labor job is going to be automated, I don't know what those people will do. The people who dig ditches or drive trucks today are not going to be happy or excel in office jobs.
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/human_vs_machine_prog...
My guess is as a species we'll just find something else to do, just like we always do. Who knows, maybe inefficiency will become fashionable at some point.
If the strong AI is hostile, people tinkering with it might be the first to go - and not just as jobs. :)
I'm glad I didn't heed the advice of my grade 12 computer science teacher in 1991. He was convinced that we wouldn't need programmers in the future because we'd have AI which could write software for us.
A freight train with one dude strikes me as unlikely. The few single person trains out there have excellent visibility for the one driver. So you'd have an interesting capital expense if you tried that with freight trains. I do know some small switcher locos run single person but thats in a barb-wired switchyard well away from the general public. So you'd "have to" eliminate all grade crossings or something, another big expense.
Another problem is that the standard deviation of the price of human time is increasing. The typical example is someone of average intelligence who was an accountant but her job got automated. In general, jobs requiring an average intellect are disappearing and people who did these jobs are more often moving down (manual labor) than up (programmer, designer, etc.).
So the real problem of automation is not unemployment – you can always find a slave-like job for a few bucks per hour – but wealth inequality.
We are work-a-holics, and then we spend our weakest part of life sitting on our arses waiting to die- if we had more quality of life time to travel, see the world, spend time with our families, while in the prime of our life--time to pursue entrepreneurial ideas, philosophical/artistic endeavors...
Not only would poverty be put to shame, but quality of life would rise universally. Sure, sounds like a Utopia, maybe it is, maybe it's what we're headed towards..it's not like there's not enough money floating around to pay for it...
130 0.042 Software Developers, Applications
293 0.48 Computer Programmer
The former has 4% probability to lose to automation, while the later is 48%. What is the difference between the two?
[1] http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/fil...
[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/c...
[2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s...
All jobs will be automated in 100 years in my opinion (if technological development continues). In fact, work itself will be automated away. (But some will continue to 'work' for other reasons than gatheting resources).
"Mind The Gap" http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
But, all the wealth accumulation is not the result of a pure capitalism/reward system. 100x wealth does not necessarily equal a 100x contribution of value to society.
There does exist undeserved rewards. That perception, sometimes true, sometimes not, is at the core of the wealth haters and quite a bit of outrage.
Much wealth is controlled by entities that have quasi-governmental status, special protection and privileges (ie.. the entire banking system). Interestingly enough a more pure capitalist system may be more effective at leveling the field instead of a socialist system.
Or maybe it is more a matter of values, and the values of rich white guys in Silicon Valley are hardly those of most of humanity. One's values are factors in the blinders you were while interpreting reality, along with whatever unconscious crap you're not dealing with (or maybe those feed into the values) and from that arises your attitudes, etc.
Anyway, my immediate emotional reaction on reading this was WTF? I wasn't impressed.
Faster! Get rid of all the jobs before people can get used to permanent unemployment-ridden depression! Push them into revolting!
Technology improves efficiency, which eliminates the need for workers. Economics is not a zero-sum game, however. More money saved means more money invested, either by the individual or the bank in the case of pure savings.
Easier lending means more businesses in more industries. Everyone didn't starve to death during the industrial revolution. Dock workers didn't just commit suicide en masse when most of them were obviated by the invention of the shipping container.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/25/technol...