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Should we believe headlines claiming nearly half of all jobs will be lost to robots and artificial intelligence? We think not, and in a newly released study we explain why.
Headlines trumpeting massive job losses have been in abundance for five or so years. Even The Conversation has had its had its share.
Most come from a common source. It is a single study, conducted in 2013 by Oxford University's Carl Benedict Frey and Michael Osborne. This study lies behind the claim that 47% of jobs in the United States were at "high risk" of automation over the next ten or so years. Google Scholar says it has been cited more than 4,300 times, a figure that doesn't count newspaper headlines.
The major predictions of job losses due to automation in Australia are based directly on its findings. Commentaries about the future of work in Australia have also drawn extensively on the study.
In Australia and elsewhere the study's predictions have led to calls for a Universal Basic Income and for a "work guarantee" that would allocate the smaller number of jobs fairly.
Our new research paper concludes the former study's predictions are not well-founded.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:57PM (3 children)
Cash is nothing but a convenient abstraction of valuable human effort. The guy you want to fix your roof may not have need of some sysadmin work, so we trade the sysadmin work for tokens to someone who does and give the roofer the tokens instead. It's still barter, just hacked, more convenient barter.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 05 2019, @03:05PM (2 children)
That is also how I see cash. I would have called it "stored work". Or stored "goods and services". But "goods" are basically the result of work. All money has always been tokens exchanged for someone's effort, even if that effort is in the form of a tangible object "goods" or direct "services".
When I need my roof fixed, under the scenario we're talking about, Robots might be doing that work. (someday) If not in the short term, then there would still be jobs for roofers. I noticed that the last time I replaced my roof, a lot of the workers enduring the heat of the day were -- Mexican. (just to mention that)
My thinking is that a lot of those jobs you are imagining are done by robots. That's the entire point of the discussion. What happens when a lot of people suddenly cannot get jobs because robots are better, cheaper, more politically convenient, and don't complain about low pay and getting groped by the boss.
There would still be jobs. Just not jobs that most people are able to do, nor are able to retrain to do. That is my entire concern here. And it is a concern for others -- as I don't (presently) expect it to happen directly to me.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 05 2019, @04:51PM (1 child)
And my point is that as long as humans can think of ways to make each other's lives easier in exchange for said tokens, jobs will never disappear. You're just unable to see over the horizon to find the current and future jobs that humans can do with hardly a thought but nothing electronic will ever be able to do worth a damn.
Automation has never lowered the total number of jobs except in the very shortest term. Humans always either find or invent something else to keep themselves usefully busy. Then they do it for other people and get paid. The only thing automation has ever done is increase everyone's objective wealth by making the expensive and difficult into the cheap and easy. And that's all it will continue to do.
See, this is part of why I keep saying those who steer the ships are genuinely, objectively, and massively more valuable to society than a grunt of any flavor will ever be. They can see the potential, most can't. They take the personal risk to make it happen, most won't. They logically, undeniably deserve far more than those who simply huddle in relative financial safety and do what they're told.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:18PM
That's the one bright light here.
Maybe there will be so much wealth that we stop measuring it.
By "wealth", as we said about "money", that means the goods and services it represents. Wealth isn't the money tokens you have or the numbers on a bank statement -- it's the things you can obtain with that money.
If there were so much wealth (like Star Trek, some episodes or movies) there would no longer be any reason to measure it, keep track of it, nor have "money". As Riker said "the point is to enrich yourself" -- I think that was from TNG episode "The Neutral Zone" if memory serves.
Another thing that would help besides robots would be nanotech developed to the level of what we've done with simple electrical and magnetic principles that were parlor tricks.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.