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: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @07:27PM
To put these people out of jobs and perform endless debates over which situation will happen.
The CPU time and models will still cost less than all of these schmucks.
(Score: 2) by anotherblackhat on Friday November 01 2019, @07:51PM
No.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ilsa on Friday November 01 2019, @08:12PM (13 children)
Unless I've misread the article, the author has done such a poor job of countering the previous study he claimed to counter that I'm willing to bet he's probably also a climate change denier. Hell, he's literally using the exact same argument climate change deniers used to use, which was that because the anticipated problems arn't manifesting as quickly as predicted, problems don't exist at all.
Just because ML isn't mowing down jobs like a farmer cutting hay with a scythe, that means to him that it's not an issue. Self-driving vehicles may not be perfect at this very moment, and it's taken them longer to reach a good point than anticipated, but progress IS being made, and once they reach a critical threshold, literally millions of truck drivers will be out of a job in a fairly short time frame. And that's just truck drivers.
Just because we arn't yet having mass layoffs of entire industries, doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Friday November 01 2019, @11:07PM (6 children)
I can't understand why your basic point is not more widely understood. The only 2 questions you have to answer are: is automation improving, at any rate? And, is there some fundamental limit to automation? The answers are, quite clearly to me, yes (and rather quickly), and no. The first question is just an empirical observation about the world. Automation gets more sophisticated over time. The second question seems obvious to me, but if you want to dispute it then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate what the fundamental is. I side with David Deutsch who said, paraphrasing, that anything that is compatible with the laws of physics is simply a research problem.
So all we are left to debate is how quickly the problem will manifest. Yet it seems like if the issue will unfold on a timescale beyond the length of the detractor's lifetime then they assert that the problem doesn't exist at all. This is future-discounting behavior, practically solipsism, that I am used to seeing in the pathologically selfish, reactionaries, and conservatives--and, as you identified, climate change deniers. But I repeat myself.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @12:24AM (5 children)
What makes you think the problem is that it's "not more widely understood" rather than "wrong"? The problem with your two questions is that human labor is also improving due to that same automation and there's no more a fundamental limit to human productivity than there is automation either.
Or if it'll manifest at all! It's funny how there's centuries of evidence that automation actually improves the productivity of human labor, making it in higher demand now than it has ever been. Yet the same narrative continues unabated.
It's got to be some psychological failing of the critics, not your ignorance of reality.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Saturday November 02 2019, @01:25AM (4 children)
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.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:52AM (3 children)
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)
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.
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)
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
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @11:32PM (2 children)
But still need people to load, unload the trucks. To fuel the trucks, etc.. Furthermore, the truck driver is not going to be obsolete. The system will just become additional safety systems, like the current crash prevention systems. Truckers will be working in 2030, after personal vehicles already could be fully automated. But instead of actually driving the trucks, maybe they will be monitoring them. Maybe there will be one person driving a convoy? Who knows. But they will not be fully autonomous any time soon.
Also people completely misunderstand what ML is for. The only thing that it's good at would be to replace troll farms with ML bots blasting each other on the anti-social platforms. In other words, it's good at a limited set of tasks (pattern matching) with well defined parameters. Once those parameters get more loosely defined, the inadequate size of the ML's simulated neural nets just tips them over.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @11:59PM (1 child)
With truckers earning high 5- or 6-figure salaries, and a perennial shortage of tens of thousands of drivers, there are a lot of incentives to automate trucking.
Walmart or Amazon will solve the problem of how to load and unload the truck. It will spread out from there.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:02AM
Agreeing with you here, but it's not that much of a problem. There are already automated forklifts, and they are improving all the time. It's a lower difficulty problem than public road driving.
And even if there were not, in a well set up palletised warehouse it doesn't take a human on a forklift very long to load a semi. That task is independent of the driving, which still has a high incentive to automate.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @12:58AM (1 child)
You're looking for: "aren't" with an e.
I do not know what "arn't" is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @01:01AM
That boy ain't right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @02:28PM
The other one is:
1) Are a lot of the jobs the Chinese and Indians took from the US workers easily automated? If yes, then just think of those bunch as the preview version of what future robots will do.
2) Are those jobs coming back?
From what I see the low end workers in the US aren't getting smarter or better and they sure aren't getting cheaper enough to be competitive. Most of them can't spell, write or think better than potential replacements in Asia at quarter the cost.
And at the higher end see: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579/outsourced-employee-sends-own-job-to-china-surfs-web [npr.org]
Well I guess that guy would make for a good project manager?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday November 01 2019, @08:20PM (34 children)
Instead UBI and Work Guarantee, here is another idea . . .
A Robot Tax to pay for this.
If corporations are going to reap huge benefits from robots while causing loss of jobs, then they should pay for it. If it is still profitable to use robots, then great, do so.
If as TFA suggests, there is nothing to worry about, then this idea never even needs to be considered let alone implemented.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 01 2019, @09:19PM (28 children)
Or folks could stop making buggy whips and make car upholstery instead.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday November 01 2019, @09:43PM (25 children)
Or folks could stop making car upholstery and learn Computer Science, Mathematics, Music, Filmmaking, or other non-automatable skills instead. Switching from buggy whips to car upholstery does not fix anything.
Maybe a huge part of the workforce at a certain age, cannot easily retrain for more advanced skills.
Maybe most non-advanced skills are the jobs that get automated.
Maybe the jobs that don't get automated are not jobs that all of the population can do. There might be a real problem here.
And maybe as TFA suggests, this concern is moot. But I'm not holding my breath. I'm not worried that MY job will be automated soon. But if many jobs will be, this is something I should be concerned about, because it will effect me, even if I still have a job.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 02 2019, @03:09AM (24 children)
You know, we've been having this exact argument since the birth of the US and there have always been new jobs created whenever old ones were made obsolete. Not just enough to keep up, enough to double the labor pool by expecting women to work as well. Exactly how many times do you need to see it happen before you quit saying it's a fluke?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:23AM (1 child)
That's one way to look at it.
Doubling the labour pool allowed employers to halve the wages. It now takes a double (average) income family to buy a house. Law of supply and demand. Adding robots could do far more towards increasing the supply of labour. If you add three human labour equivalent robots for each human, you could expect the wages to decline to a quarter of what they are now.
That is obviously unsustainable, most people could not live on a quarter of their income. How that gets dealt with has several options:
- UBI and encourage people to become artists and performers, to do things that benefit society but where it is difficult to see a monetary return
- Luddite style pogroms against robots, where the villagers come wielding hammers and axes.
- Government laws that attempt to share out the remaining jobs fairly.
- massive general taxation and spending to create jobs.
- sufficient taxation directly against human-replacing robots to make hiring a human economically competitive.
All of these have problems, but I favour the first as it is the only one that lifts people up rather than holds robots down.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 03 2019, @03:52AM
Or you could do absolutely nothing and humans will find something valuable to do with their time and people will pay them to do it. It only ever fails to happen in the most immediate term.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:44AM (7 children)
That's not true. Look at about a hundred plus years back when a big wave of automation happened, you had various ways that the labour force was reduced due to not enough jobs. The hours worked were cut back, instead of working 6 and a half long days (12 hours), people went to an 8 hour day. Children were taken out of the workforce, and then sent to school to keep them out of mischief. Suddenly all the 5-15 year olds were out of the labour force. For the first time since agriculture, lower middle class women were also taken out of the workforce, the idea of a stay at home Mom became common, stay at home Mom's who weren't taking in laundry or whatever to help support the family.
One difference is the fear of communism etc saw the benefits of automation being shared so a family only needed one bread winner instead of even the 4 year old having to work to help pay the rent.
Eventually the good times ended, then there was a world war which created a lot of broken windows to be fixed and employment rose.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 03 2019, @03:54AM (6 children)
Erm... that is not why those labor practices changed.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday November 03 2019, @04:20AM (5 children)
It is why the ownership class allowed the labour practices to change. Child labour laws, for example, were heavily fought against until the owners realized they no longer needed child labourers due to automation.
The most of history of the industrial revolution has seen the percentage of labourers dropping from close to 100% at the beginning to today where between retirees, students, the disabled and those just choosing not to work results in a labour force much lower then 100% and continuing to drop. Hard to find good numbers but it seems to be about 2/3rds of 15-64 year olds with those underage and overage people not even counted anymore. Pressure is still being applied on the youth end by jobs requiring more and more education, laws designed to remove liberty and lock up millions of people, enforced retirement and much ease in getting considered disabled. No longer does a population of 350 million translate into well over 300 million labourers as lack of automation would require.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 03 2019, @11:22AM (4 children)
The ownership class allowed those changes to happen because they had a choice between that and torches and pitchforks, automation had nothing to do with it except after the fact.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday November 03 2019, @07:00PM (3 children)
Been lots of times when the choice was between pitchforks and torches or giving into the people resulted in slaughter of those holding the pitchforks and torches. Just reading about the German peasant uprising, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Peasants'_War [wikipedia.org], 100,000 out of 300,000 peasants slaughtered. There's enough cases in 19th century N. America as well to show that the owners don't easily back down unless their bean counters make a case for it, which they did with automation reducing the need for labour.
Another slightly different example was one of the biggest strikes in Canadian history, asbestos workers struck for a few simple things, showers, a car wash and 2 sets of lockers so they didn't have to mix their street clothes with their work clothes as it seems the asbestos workers didn't want to bring any of their work home and kill their families. The strike lasted a few years IIRC as the owners weren't going to back down or give in.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 03 2019, @08:26PM (2 children)
They can not back down all they like, it still isn't going to do shit when it's a federal law.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday November 04 2019, @03:47AM (1 child)
That's strangely naive for you, Mr Buzzard. Who do you think writes federal laws ?
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 04 2019, @04:11AM
Depends on how much pressure the congress critters have on their necks from the electorate. Usually it's lobbyists but only usually.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @02:31PM (1 child)
Were there enough new jobs for the horses when the automobiles came?
If you don't get it then maybe when the first thinking machines come, you won't be able to compete either...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 03 2019, @03:55AM
Oh? Pour a Dr. Pepper in me and I'm just fine. Pour one in a rack of AI boxen and see how they fare.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday November 04 2019, @03:01PM (11 children)
Just because something has been in the past doesn't mean it will always be in the future.
We've always had easy to find cheap oil.
We've always had plenty of breathable air.
We've always had an INFINITE amount of drinkable clean water.
We've always had a high standard of living for the middle class.
We've always had elections secure from foreign meddling.
I could contrive examples, but my point simply is that just because things have always worked out in the past doesn't mean it will always be so.
The new jobs you speak of may indeed be created, but the number of people who can do them may be a minority of the population. THAT is the big problem. I think I've pointed it out three times. Not all "jobs" are the same. Not all people are interchangeable with all jobs. If the only jobs left require either high skill and/or talent, and/or high training, then there may be huge numbers of jobless people. THAT is the concern. How do you address THAT without just throwing out again that "we've always had plenty of jobs". Are people just going to suddenly get a lot smarter, more talented or more adaptable to retraining for high skilled jobs at age 40?
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 04 2019, @07:52PM (10 children)
None of your relevant examples are actually true as they deal with finite resources. Jobs are not finite resources. Jobs will exist as long as human beings are willing to part with the fruits of their own efforts in exchange for the efforts of others. Since there is no end to humanity pissing and moaning about how life could be better, there can be no end of job creation.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday November 04 2019, @08:25PM (9 children)
Pissing and moaning about life does not mean one has the resources to hire someone to make their life better.
Unless by "people" you mean "corporations".
Jobs are NOT finite resources -- they are the limited resources that others have, as you point out.
The people pissing and moaning may not have jobs themselves, and thus no "fruits of their own efforts", because very few people have the skills to fill the jobs.
As for people hiring services, yes, but done by robots. Robots would have the jobs. But what jobs are left for people? Jobs that haven't been automated away? What new jobs would be created that people ACTUALLY can retrain for, or have the necessary skills or talent for?
I'm not trying to be alarmist. But looking at possible problems down the road is part of how you avoid them.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 04 2019, @09:51PM (8 children)
Wow. Just wow. You really have not clue one about what money is, how jobs are created, or even what wealth is, do you?
Jobs are limited only by the number of humans and how fast each can think of something they can do that another human would trade their own efforts for. They are effectively infinite.
If you think you have to work for a corporation, you are an absolute moron. The amount of net job creation by companies with over 500 employees is dwarfed by companies with 499 or less; the gross isn't even the same order of magnitude. And 499 employees is easy to hit without becoming a major anything.
Which is to say, you do not have to be a super rich motherfucker to create jobs. I know this first hand as I've created quite a few over the years and I flat refuse to become rich. You don't need much in the way of money to create jobs, you just need a thing that someone will pay you to do or create for them because it will make their life better or even just a little easier. And you need more demand than you feel like keeping up with yourself. That is in fact what all jobs boil down to. Thinking it has to be something that someone else thought up or that already exists is idiocy. If you want the absolute laziest route, find most anything people don't enjoy doing and offer to do it for them for pay.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday November 04 2019, @10:00PM (4 children)
This sounds like maybe you are talking about bartering rather than working for cash or direct deposit.
If society gets to that point, then the worst thing that I am concerned about has already happened.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(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.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(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.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:59PM (2 children)
Just to point out, I am not trying to be disagreeable or disrespectful.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 05 2019, @04:52PM (1 child)
Fair enough, I'll tone it down. My apologies.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:13PM
I didn't take any offense. I'm pointing out that I'm not trying to be a jerk.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Friday November 01 2019, @11:34PM (1 child)
Except that is a perfect job for automation and AI robots. Still, following your logic, I could get a job in the fast food service industry. Oooops! That's being automated too. Wait, I could go work Amazon, or the fast growing industry of online groceries. Except, again, Amazon is leading the way with automation instead of workers, and those online grocery companies/departments outright state their only path to competition and profitability is replacing workers with robots.
Just about every example you can come up with, is an industry ripe for automation.
Basically, the only industry is left will be making the AI robots and providing maintenance to their infrastructure. Yet, that too, will be automated.
The only thing left to decide at that point, is *who* gets to benefit from the automation (profit/living wages/basic necessities met), and the rest of the abject poor who can't pay for anything, and can't find any work.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 02 2019, @03:13AM
If you can only see mindless labor opportunities that can be easily automated, it's because you're deliberately lying to yourself. Now that's your prerogative but you should keep it to yourself because most of the world can spot such obvious bullshit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @12:27AM (3 children)
"IF". What if instead they reap huge benefits from robots while creating lots of jobs?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Saturday November 02 2019, @01:43AM
You're so cute. Positively dripping with naive optimism :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 02 2019, @03:16AM (1 child)
What if they don't and folks mind their own fucking business? Jobs don't exist for the sake of the workers, they exist because the employer can make more money by employing people. If they can't make more money by employing someone, it'd be fucking retarded squared to do so.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:00AM
I think folks should mind, if like many other areas of commerce and industry the sector lobbies for law that supports their business models - like mandatory shortenings of the work week or minimum wage laws.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:33AM
We're rather gonna have a robocalypse than start paying taxes, meatbag. You have been warned.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @09:18PM (20 children)
People have been hand-wringing over the next thing to be eliminated by automation ever since the Luddites, the actual literal Luddites from 200 years ago, and they've been wrong every single time. I think a 200 year track record of perpetually being wrong is enough reason to distrust any such arguments.
Some jobs will be eliminated. My career making buggy whips is a complete dead end. New jobs will be created, frequently jobs that nobody even knew about before. What's a social media consultant? Nobody would have a clue even 20 years ago, even though everything necessary to create that job was already in place. Everyone gets wealthier. Life goes on much as before, except better. Well, except that we didn't really need social media consultants.
Truck drivers are a perfect example of the sort of job that should be automated. It's a job that's bad for you, doesn't pay much, is performed in unpleasant conditions, involves truly degrading levels of monitoring, and generally involves a tremendous amount of sitting around doing essentially nothing. But it probably won't actually be eliminated, because truck drivers' main useful job isn't driving the truck - it's loading and unloading, inspecting the vehicle and load, and making sure that the proper regulatory hoops have been jumped. Driving the truck is the annoying thing you also have to do before you can produce value.
Truck drivers have strict limits on how many hours, and more importantly when, they can drive. That means truckers spend a tremendous amount of time looking for parking and generally wasting time that the trucks could be traveling, because they are out of hours. Automation will (or at least should) eliminate this, but it won't eliminate the stuff that they actually need to be doing, which is taking care of the truck and the cargo. The upshot: truckers become two or three times as productive, shipping costs go down, ground shipping gets faster, we have fewer accidents, the remaining truck drivers can get paid a little more, and everyone is just a little better off.
Ground shipping getting faster means fewer packages need to be sent by air, and therefore less air freight is needed, which reduces emissions, and frees up freight pilots to fly passenger planes, alleviating the pilot shortage we keep hearing about (though it is also of dubious reality).
Automation is why we're not all still in the Iron Age. Calling it "AI" is just the new trendy buzzword. Automation is automation. It makes society go. It's good.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday November 01 2019, @09:46PM (16 children)
Unlike industrialization, the problem here could be that the jobs that WON'T be automated may be jobs that most people cannot learn the skills to do.
It may not be a simple matter of retraining.
Stop being a truck driver and become a rocket scientist, brain surgeon, mathematician, or AI expert.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @11:35PM (1 child)
It's ok. With the current bend of fascism in the world, we'll just have some more wars instead. Maybe wars after the next wars will be fought with sticks and stones. Then we never will have to worry about losing our "jubs"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @12:08AM
Still waiting for DT's War to End All Wars?
Oh, well. Now you have more time to buy camping gear.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday November 01 2019, @11:42PM (6 children)
My neighbor had a tree damage his sewer.
A couple of guys came out, replaced the damaged part quickly, and left.
The machines did most all the dirty work.
That was one job I was sure pleased to see a machine doing. However, the new job the machine created was "machine operator", a much more pleasant job. The "ditch digger" job was gone.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:38AM (5 children)
Emphasis added.
This is the important part. It might have taken a couple of ditch diggers all day to dig a hole the machine can do in a few minutes. Those two guys could be replacing dozens of ditch-diggers.
I am totally NOT arguing for work for the sake of work, but the argument that those ditch-diggers can go learn to run machines neglects that each one that does will put another bunch of people out of work, who all have to go off and learn to run machines, that will each put another bunch of people out of work. I'm sure you can see where this is going.
The khallowian argument is that we have been heading towards this cliff for two hundred years and haven't fallen over it yet, therefore we won't.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:02AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:19AM (3 children)
How?
I am not opposed to fixing things quickly, but I don't see how that leads to further employment.
Those two won't be making more money, because competition from all the other out-of-work-ditch-diggeres-now-turned-machine-operators will push their income back down to the same level per hour. The guy paying for the sewer will still have more money in his pocket, but the ditch-diggers collectively will have less by the same amount.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday November 02 2019, @10:55PM (1 child)
I consider inefficiently done work a variant of the "broken window fallacy".
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday November 03 2019, @07:47AM
There are arguments that the broken window fallacy does not always hold true, relating mostly to full utilization of resources and velocity of money.
https://www.debate.org/debates/The-broken-window-fallacy-always-hold-true/1/ [debate.org]
Regardless of that though, productivity has been steadily climbing since the industrial age began. It's about to take another big leap. The only reason we haven't had to deal with the 'problem' of under-employment before is that consumption has been rising at the same rate, and in the past working hours have decreased. Things are changing. Employers have dropped hours as far as they are going to, and are pushing for more hours per employee. (The only reason there are so many part-time jobs in America is the distorting effect of the health-care threshold.)
I think that the balance between productivity and consumption is about to change. You can only eat so much food, watch so many big-screen TVs, and drive so many cars. Robots will saturate the goods market. You can see an effect of this already in housing prices. Shelter (rent or buy) is taking an increasing proportion of peoples income, as it is still a scarce good.
A UBI* won't solve all the problems, but it will reduce the employee pool, raise wages, and keep the 0.1%'s heads on their shoulders for a bit longer.
*If UBI is too communist for you, call it a citizenship dividend.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 03 2019, @12:18AM
Working sewers have considerable value. Workers can do other things now that their labor isn't tied up in repairing sewers have considerable value. Both these shifts in economic activity create more jobs. Finally, the same technology that eliminates so many jobs, creates new job opportunities.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @12:31AM (6 children)
And how are you going to automate low skill jobs when you can't afford the equipment to automate them? There are many implicit assumptions about economics that ignore that humans can be efficient enough even in a highly automated world just because the automaters aren't interested in putting the effort into automation every single job that humans are doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @03:30AM (5 children)
You can use a universal robot - maybe a humanoid, maybe a spider, maybe something else. After all, a human only has hands to work with, legs to move around, sensors and a processor in his head. Robots already exist with all of this except the sufficient processor. For now they are remotely controlled, but once computers get more powerful or better architected, this job will be replaced by the AI. This robot will replace humans in many odd jobs that are menial enough - and later maybe not menial at all.
Cost? At that point the cost will be insignificant, as robot makers and robot users will be controlling 90+% of the manufacturing and services on this planet. It will be even cheaper to send a robot than to hire a worker, train him, insure him, care for him, risk his injury, and once the job is done get rid of him. Maybe there will be no qualified workers to, say, work in a mine. Here is yet another advantage of a robot: he can be programmed to do anything, and every robot in existence can download this program. Humans need years of training, and each human has to be trained individually.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:16AM (4 children)
We already have a universal robot, the human - without the licensing fees.
So it is asserted. But not by the parties who would be paying those costs.
(Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 02 2019, @03:20PM (3 children)
The times of slavery are gone.
The "licensing fees" paid for humans are called wages. And I see no reason why robot companies wouldn't undercut those as soon as possible.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:28PM (2 children)
Those robot companies would still be in the business of making money. ASAP need never happen.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 03 2019, @07:04AM (1 child)
And they make more money if more companies use their robots, so lowering the price can increase their income, even if they make less per robot.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 03 2019, @10:16AM
"Can".
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:12AM (1 child)
>Everyone gets wealthier
nope, the lower classes ate actual bio food every day, 99% of the people now don't even know what actual food is and if they knew they couldn't afford it. Don't believe the economy graphs unless you spend time mulling over them.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:29PM
And after you have mulled those economic graphs, then what's the excuse?
(Score: 5, Informative) by dry on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:56AM
Took 70 years, 3 generations, for the jobs to come back after the Luddites. Sure from 200 years in the future it doesn't look bad but 3 generations were chronically under employed before the jobs cam back.
(Score: 3, Informative) by lentilla on Saturday November 02 2019, @02:07AM
I tried reading the quoted paper and got a single image, so fixing the link from the original article: