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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: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @05:34AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 12 2018, @05:34AM (#691789) Journal

    And where does somebody making minimum wage get that money to invest you fucking moron.

    They don't continue to earn minimum wage, that's how. Merely knowing the basics of showing up to work on time, clean, and in uniform, plus a willingness to work hard can get you past minimum wage.

    Meanwhile, most jobs have salaries that have not increased over time.

    Which is incorrect even when adjusted for inflation. Once you include benefits [forbes.com], particularly health care benefits and Social Security taxes, the cost of hiring an employee is quite in line with their productivity as one would expect.

    If salaries were increases due to inflation and increased productivity, the minimum wage would be over $20 and hour.

    Complete bullshit. Minimum wage, adjusted for inflation peaked at $8.68 per hour [pewresearch.org] (in 2016 dollars) not $20 per hour. That's compared to $7.25 per hour today. And for most of the history (going back to 1940) of minimum wage listed on that site, minimum wage adjusted for inflation was lower than $7.25 per hour. So it's actually on the high side at present.

    Also on an unrelated note, that report mentions dozens of minimum wage laws at the state and local levels. None of the state level minimum wage laws vary by cost of living below the scale of the state. That one-size-fits-all is a glaring example of the flaws of minimum wage advocacy.

    And businesses can clearly afford that, if they couldn't afford that, you wouldn't be seeing such massive amounts of profits by so many corporations.

    Spoken by someone who doesn't have even the slightest clue how to run a business.