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Automation Won’t Take Your Job Until The Next Recession Threatens It

posted by janrinok on Monday June 11 2018, @01:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the cheery-start-to-the-week dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Good news! Automation capable of erasing white collar jobs is coming, but not for a decade or more. And that’s also the bad news because interest in automation accelerates during economic downturns, so once tech that can take your job arrives you’ll already have lived through another period of economic turmoil that may already have cost you your job.

That lovely scenario was advanced yesterday by professor Mirko Draca of The London School of Economics, who yesterday told Huawei’s 2018 Asia-Pacific Innovation Day 2018 that the world is currently in “an era of investment and experimentation” with technology. The effects of such eras, he said, generally emerge ten to fifteen years in the future.

Innovation in the 1980s therefore sparked the PC and internet booms of the mid-to-late 1990s, and we’re still surfing [SIC - suffering?] the changes they unleashed. “Our current era of mobile tech doesn’t measure up to the radical 1990s,” he said, as shown by the fact that productivity gains appear to have stalled for a decade or more.

[...] “We predict that AI and robotics will lead to some sort of productivity surge in ten to fifteen years,” he said, adding that there is “no clear evidence” that a new wave of technologies that threaten jobs has started.

But he also said that it will once businesses see the need to control costs.

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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:10AM (4 children)

    by legont (4179) on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:10AM (#691712)

    The next recession will happen within two years and it will be worse than the "great" one of 2008.

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @11:00AM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 12 2018, @11:00AM (#691854) Journal

    The next recession will happen within two years and it will be worse than the "great" one of 2008.

    What's the cause? China going belly up and/or a particularly vicious global trade war? I'm not seeing a potential cause internal to the US currently though a lot can change in two years.

    • (Score: 2) by legont on Thursday June 14 2018, @12:37AM (2 children)

      by legont (4179) on Thursday June 14 2018, @12:37AM (#692620)

      The most popular cause projected is junk bonds. Here is a typical scenario: They are very expensive and the rates are going up and a usual recession is due. Also, a lot of them are in ETF's nowadays. So, once junk bonds are down and folks are trying to unload those ETF's but can't because there is no market (thanks in part for new 2008 regulations). By design ETF's have to sell something when they are sold so they will sell better (innocent?) bonds they might have. Then snowball.

      That's just the most obvious one but the trigger could be anything. The underlying issue is that leverage (debt) is already higher than before 2008 and way less productive (less extra production per unit of debt).

      There will be blood which will probably end up with debt cancellation one way or another (inflate or default). I expect a war or two to wash peoples minds in the process.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:09AM (1 child)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:09AM (#692691) Journal

        The most popular cause projected is junk bonds. Here is a typical scenario: They are very expensive and the rates are going up and a usual recession is due. Also, a lot of them are in ETF's nowadays. So, once junk bonds are down and folks are trying to unload those ETF's but can't because there is no market (thanks in part for new 2008 regulations). By design ETF's have to sell something when they are sold so they will sell better (innocent?) bonds they might have. Then snowball.

        Well, how big is the market? Glancing around corporate debt is around 8.5 trillion USD [cnbc.com] in the US. Big but so collectively are the businesses that would be paying off the debt. Overall private debt per GDP appears stalled out [tradingeconomics.com] around 200% of GDP. It's not a great place to be, but doesn't look like it's collapsing any time soon.

        Sure, we might be nearing a recession, but I don't see the craziness that was present with the real estate crisis or the earlier dotcom bubble where those aspects became vastly outsized portions of the overall economy. To genuinely trainwreck an economy, it has to be both big and shaky. We'll just have to see. Perhaps I'm merely out of the loop.