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posted by takyon on Friday November 01 2019, @07:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the robot-funded-studies dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Saturday November 02 2019, @01:25AM (4 children)

    by edIII (791) on Saturday November 02 2019, @01:25AM (#914896)

    The failing in your reasoning is that all automation before this still required humans at some point. Fundamentally, there was still a human being employed to utilize tools to increase their productivity.

    There is a vast difference between "improves the productivity of human labor" and eliminates the requirement for human labor. When robotic labor is entirely adequate for the work, this is inevitable. In an highly advanced society this could mean that human productivity could switch to different domains.... but that's not the case with our society. It's based on money and profit above all else, and has no need to account for human beings unable to find work. Capitalism cares not for people remember?

    I would agree with you if automation simply improved human labor, but the evidence does not provide for that interpretation. The evidence shows quite a different picture. One in which a class of people called executives treat a lower class called employees like expendable resource units not worthy of consideration. Our current state affairs proves that.

    You should read the prospectus and filings from these major companies. Major chains are creating dark super markets, and it's direct language being communicated to the investors that it would ultimately be required to be 100% automated to find profits. They directly state their plans to eliminate human labor from the equation, which is to say eliminating costs. That's what toxic Capitalism does; Strives to find efficiency at the cost of human livelihoods to provide maximum shareholder return.

    It's you that's actually wrong here. There is a concerted effort in just about every industry to automate everything possible, and that includes physical processes as well as software. Humans will not benefit from this, and their labor will be deemed too costly and not actually required.

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  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:52AM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:52AM (#914971) Journal

    There is a vast difference between "improves the productivity of human labor" and eliminates the requirement for human labor.

    A vast difference which has yet to occur even over the course of several centuries!

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:57AM (2 children)

      by edIII (791) on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:57AM (#914989)

      Are you serious? Well, that's just not true. There are several examples where human labor has nearly disappeared completely, or in fact, completely. Several innovations in farming technologies have obviated the need for human pickers. Machines that attach to the trunk of a tree, shake it to cause the produce to fall out into nets, and then transferred to processing facilities. Those facilities don't require nearly as many workers as the fields do, and therefore represent exactly what I stated; human labor nearly wholly displaced by robotic labor. That's only if you consider those jobs in the processing facility to be the same as the pickers and included in the same head count. I do not. They most likely don't pay the same, and are a fraction of the head count required for large fields of difficult to pick to produce.

      There are other examples that have automated inspections of many different large infrastructures, which again, reduces the necessary head count to carry out the tasks. Those redundant workers aren't kept employed, or shifted to other tasks. They're simply no longer hired and required.

      If it weren't so late, and the weed weren't so good, I might be tempted to find more examples and citations for you. However, I highly suggest you perform some more research. I know your evidenced based right? Look into the agriculture industry first. You will find examples with a moderate effort searching. Corporate filings are a good place to look since they quantify and provide clear metrics.

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      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @09:02PM (1 child)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 02 2019, @09:02PM (#915120) Journal

        There are several examples where human labor has nearly disappeared completely, or in fact, completely.

        No point to considering that in a vacuum. As another poster noted, very few make buggy whips any more, but the people who would have done that now do other things instead. If those "several examples" resulted in permanent unemployment, we'd see a majority of the developed world unemployed.

        • (Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday November 07 2019, @09:24PM

          by ilsa (6082) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 07 2019, @09:24PM (#917535)

          Holy crap, is it really that hard to accept that you are completely wrong? How are you benefiting from the denial of what is patently obvious?

          Your buggy whips example is a total strawman argument. It didn't matter that buggy whips weren't made anymore because there was a lateral move to manufacture new and different items. The workforce didn't need to change (or at least only changed marginally), only the product.

          The point you seem to be going out of your way to ignore is that automation is going to make entire industries, one after another, largely humanless. Manufacturing *as an entire industry*, has *already* gone that route. Manufacturing that hasn't been offshored is now so automated that you now need only a handful of people to watch over entire factories of robots. The windows in my house were built by a, for all intents and purposes, an autonomous factory. You'll have maybe a small handful of service people to service multiple factories.

          Even outsourced labor is struggling against such a behemoth. It's like slavery except robots are far cheaper than slaves. And this is an unprecedented event that the world has never seen before, so your "the world would be out of work already" statement is outright stupid.

          The total number of people employed in manufacturing is now several orders of magnitude less than where they were even a decade ago, and is shrinking fast. And where do all these displaced workers go? Nowhere, that's where, because we're running out of lateral moves that people can make. Maybe a few will have the ability to take a wild shift into a completely new field, assuming that they have the means and opportunity to be retrained. The rest get jobs as Walmart greeters, or Uber food delivery people because there is literally nothing else available to them.

          And as the automation improves, increasingly complex front-line jobs will also disappear. MedLab techs that analyze x-rays, blood samples, etc? They're ripe for being wiped out once the ML gets a little better. Anything that involves fixed tasks or raw analysis is at risk, if not now, then soon. And we just have to work up from there.

          The only jobs that are relatively safe in the short or medium term are jobs that require direct human interaction (eg: sales or service and related management, teachers), and jobs that require leaps in insight that ML is not yet able to achieve (eg: architects of various types, doctors, lawyers, teachers again).

          And take a wild guess what will happen to the economy when people are no longer able to get jobs, or the only jobs available aren't enough to sustain basic living conditions? We've *already* got that. Just look at San Francisco.

          I could go on and on, but I'm pretty sure I'm just talking to a wall. If you can't already see the problems, then no amount of arguing is going to convince you. You're the economic equivalent of a climate change denier.