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The "real" challenge technology presents isn't that it replaces workers, but rather displaces them.
The robots perform tasks that humans previously performed. The fear is that they are replacing human jobs, eliminating work in distribution centers and elsewhere in the economy. It is not hard to imagine that technology might be a major factor causing persistent unemployment today and threatening “more to come.”
Surprisingly, the managers of distribution centers and supply chains see things rather differently: in surveys they report that they can’t hire enough workers, at least not enough workers who have the necessary skills to deal with new technology. “Supply chain” is the term for the systems used to move products from suppliers to customers. Warehouse robots are not the first technology taking over some of the tasks of supply chain workers, nor are they even seen as the most important technology affecting the industry today.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/scarce-skills-not-scarce-jobs/390789/
(Score: 4, Informative) by gallondr00nk on Wednesday April 29 2015, @06:14PM
It's all very well saying that jobs are displaced to different sectors. That's been a more or less continual process since the industrial revolution. TFA calls the obvious on that count.
The trouble, as most who were displaced when manufacturing or white collar jobs moved to China or India will tell you, is that what's left isn't comparable to what they had before.
This has massive implications for an economy based largely upon consumption of material goods - high household debt ratios indicate a trend towards lower disposable income, where the working and middle classes use credit to either pay for essentials or to maintain some illusion of a previously held living standard.
The statistics don't seem to bear out the displacement argument. Here in the UK there are 4 unemployed for every vacancy, and out of a million or so jobs created from 2008 to 2014, only 330,000 [tuc.org.uk] were full time positions, and only 25,000 of those were employed - the others were self employed. Hardly robust.
I get frustrated at the hand-wringing and murmurs of "well, it was okay in the past" that often accompany positive articles on automation replacing jobs. We don't live in some Nostradamus-esque permanent cycle of history - things change in ways that they havn't before.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:10PM
Another displacement observation is the average displaced income used to be LOWER than the average income of the society. So the net large scale effect was always an improvement on average. Well on the bad side we have a bulldozer resulting in the loss of 100 shovel jobs, on the good side we now have 100 new building trades jobs opening up once the subdivision is graded ...
We've chewed up those people and spit them out, and now all we got left is destroying jobs HIGHER than the average income of the society. That ain't gonna work so well. So total consumer spending permanently declines, resulting in lower employment across the board, turning into a feedback loop, its just a disaster. Its the UK and USA and most of the developed world.
The relevance to the developing world is things speed up and you'll only get a generation or two at most before the tidal wave sweeps you away too. Mexico used to have factories. I was involved in the 90s trying to get Taco Bell (which was pretty useless without bribes) to install high speed (for the time) data lines to factories in Mexico for USA companies that were outsourcing. Then it got cheaper to send to China. Whoops. All those jobs gone, not just in the USA, but in .MX. Well, they can come here and work in our housing bubble for awhile or fight in the drug war. Oh and that whole beheading entire villages in the drug war never helped, but they were screwed economically anyway. Soon it'll be cheaper to send work to Africa, the next century is pretty much the African century. Nigeria rising and all that. So its gonna suck to be Chinese pretty soon because all those jobs are going to Nigeria and neighbors. Oh well. The ole crystal ball is pretty foggy past that. Probably the parts of southeast asia westerners fear to tread (cambodia, laos, vietnam) will be the next industrial powerhouse. Someday south america will get its shit together, people have been saying that for about a century now. Argentina used to be the wealthiest country in the western hemisphere, at one point? Someday I suspect S.A. will unite, peacefully or by the sword, and that'll be interesting.
(Score: 5, Informative) by K_benzoate on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:20PM
So total consumer spending permanently declines, resulting in lower employment across the board, turning into a feedback loop
This is capitalism's natural end-game unless deliberate interventions are made to preserve the mass market, which can be thought of as a sort of "natural resource" that can either be stewarded and managed intelligently, or over-harvested for short-term gain and long term collapse. We've pretty clearly been choosing the short-term gain path for the last 30+ years. Here's a microcosm of what happens when you let laissez-faire manage scarce resources [wikipedia.org]. A few people reap a bonanza of short-term profits, then everyone ends up worse off than they would have been if restraints had been put in place. The mass market itself is a scarce resource. Millions of people with dollars to spend can turn into billions with zero disposable income.
No matter what sector or scale, every business needs customers. You can't be a customer of any businesses without money. Money, for most people, is gotten by selling their labor. We're at a point where human labor, at some levels/scales/locales is literally worthless; bad news if that's all you have to sell. Due to other peculiarities of the human condition (need for food, instinct for dogged self-preservation), you can count on these people becoming rather bothersome for the owners of property and capital.
The ownership class will either see the wisdom in simply giving them the funds they need to continue being consumers (viz some sort of basic income), or they can witness how quickly the "superfluous rabble" learn to improvise weapons from any bottles, flammable liquids, and farm implements they can find.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday April 30 2015, @08:39AM
Bravo on that citation. I've spent a fair bit of time in Altantic Canada as a tourist and I was unaware of it. I'm going to keep it bookmarked, and bring it out when people complain any regulation is a bad thing.
Still always moving