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The first thread about automation disappeared some time ago, and since then I've seen the topic re-emerge in a couple other threads. Seems like a good time to bring it back. The Future of Employment: Estimates 47% of all US jobs in 20 years at risk of become fully automated. Transportation, logistics, office and administration, and other non-routine manual tasks are the most at risk. Pew Research Center paper on automation and jobs (thanks QuintessenceX): A bunch of experts can't decide if automating jobs is going to cause systemic unemployment or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU  goodbye capitalismRobots are taking our jobs. This isn't new. What is new is the possibility of systemic unemployment as a direct result of automation. Upcoming technologies and cheaper existing tech are poised to remove a significant amount of jobs in the US and elsewhere. This thread is about all things automation, what kind of jobs they're going to replace, and what we can do about it. You mean those grocery store check-out things? lol they are poo poo, jobs ain't goin' nowhere!  There are far more jobs than just grocery clerks at risk. Also, they may not work so well now, but they're pretty much first generation machines. Someone is going to learn from their mistakes and improve the process to make it fool-proof. Technology will never be good enough to replace human interaction  See video. We're getting closer. Humanity will make more jobs than it loses, it's been that way forever  Half of the experts believe that, too. Wanna know why? Because they have faith. Lots and lots of faith. Data? Isn't that a star trek character? It's the economy's fault! If we only did ________ or ________ it wouldn't be a problem!  The last thread had a few people who did not fundamentally understand the issue. A number of economic suggestions were offered, but none of them had anything to do with automation and pretty much derailed the thread. If you desperately need to post about economics, be sure to ask yourself, "what does this have to do with automation?" Possible Solutions gently caress The Robots: Enact legislation limiting the creation of automation in certain sectors, or free up automation in current sectors for actual people. This is not desirable by businesses because both the cost of human labor is becoming expensive and the amount and quality of product made by humans can never reach that of automation. gently caress The Minimum Wage: Cutting or removing the minimum wage has drastic effects beyond the scope of automation that are largely a bad thing. In the end, you would be loving up the economy something fierce only to buy time. Humans are only being threatened by automation because it's getting cheaper. The process of automation getting cheaper will continue, thus we will be back to the same issue some extra years down the line and an even more hosed up economy to deal with. Basic Income/Guaranteed Minimum Income: If someone is not allowed to earn a living due to automation, then it's only fair they are given enough to continue participating in the economy. Imagine unemployment benefits, except they have no conditions. BI specifically hands out X amount of money per month to everyone in the country of adult age for the rest of their life, regardless of employment. GMI is similar, except if you are working or have other sources of income, your profits count against this amount. BI is not feasible in the US, but a GMI is almost workable. Inflation would not be a problem, because like food stamps, it will pay for itself and more. Optionally, a tax could be levied against automation-heavy businesses to pay for the unemployed. Single-payer College Education: According to the Oxford Martin report, many of the jobs being automated are low skill jobs. If these people could be college educated, they could enter jobs where they are safe from automation for at least the next two decades. Since low skill workers can't really afford a college education, and the dubious results in acquiring a better job at all after education, it would make sense for the US to start paying for college education. This is already policy in some other countries and they have benefited.
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Aug 17, 2014 11:18
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kill all humans
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Aug 17, 2014 11:20
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It is worth noting that robots need not straight up replace everything a worker does to reduce employment. Take something like a mass market version of Watson. Will it replace all telemarketers/tech support/etc at its current level? No. But it can replace some people and make the others much more efficient thus meaning fewer employees are needed. The paradox of thrift is also an important factor in automation, while automation saves employers money on wages and benefits, those wages and benefits are not being spent in the economy. That means less demand for their product and job losses for people who aren't being automated away but whose services aren't being used by those who did lose their job to automation. Which means less demand and a need for more savings/automation. A vicious cycle.
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Aug 17, 2014 12:09
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Automation tax? Some of the money saved by automation goes to pay for collage education via taxes. Also free-online education is a possible part of the future (like khan academy and Wikipedia). This can boost the amount of skilled work.
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Aug 17, 2014 20:39
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Making everyone go to college does not solve the problem because a significant percentage of the population will not be able to perform a "high skill job". There's also less of these jobs than there are people. Some form of basic income will become a necessity but it's politically such a hard sell there will be a lot of bad times before that happens.
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Aug 17, 2014 20:45
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Can they produce enough Skilled Labor, presumably writing code, to support X billions of people? For that matter, will the kind of job you get writing code based on your Khan Academy tutorials provide anything even vaguely resembling a decent standard of living? While I hope for a BI/GMI solution of some kind, it seems more likely that instead vast swarms of people will be priced out of even the bare rudiments of subsistence and the modern version of "Are there no workhouses?" will be "Why did they not take a free code tutorial?" We shall see, I suppose, how the eruptions of violence that come after that will go.
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Aug 17, 2014 20:45
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Freakazoid_ posted:Possible Solutions how about full communism
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Aug 17, 2014 20:47
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goatse.cx posted:how about full communism
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Aug 17, 2014 20:49
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Missing from the list of possible solution is any kind of explicit job creation or subsidy. If 'full communism' means no-one works at anything they don't explicitly want to, then that's the right end goal. It's just that, as Keynes pointed out as far back as the 1930s, getting to the point where you can easily run society on that kind of voluntary basis is non-obvious. 10% of the current workforce volunteering for a 3 day week is easy to see how it would work. 20% for four days you might manage if you have lots of big posters and marches. The issue comes when you still need 50% working 5 days. The problem with trying to bridge that gap with basic/guaranteed income alone is that given level for it will have one of three problems: 1. it is too low, so people on it are miserable. Which defeats the point. 2. it is too high, so people doing non-voluntary work are miserable (and vote it lower, or stop working). 3. both of the above; this seems most likely. I think you can square the circle by subsidising jobs, but _only jobs certain people specifically want to do_. That gets you everyone, whether working a necessary job or a created job, in the same economic class with the same interests. But, unlike the current system, you are not requiring anyone to do work that is _both_ unpleasant and unnecessary. This would require a bunch of individual changes across society. For example: Take the current betting tax most countries have, and reverse it so that gambling is actually subsidised. You would need a bunch of obvious rules like requiring a human to be involved, and progressively withdraw the subsidy based on profit. If you work full time at gambling, by physically standing in front of a slot machine, or studying the minutiae of form every day of the week, you would be able to make a decent living, just like someone can currently do day trading. If you are not into gambling, this will seem worse than you current job; it requires more effort for lower reward. If you are, it's a dream job. Or set things up so that if you play for a sports teams that attracts 40 spectators weekly, you can make a decent living; if 4000, a good one. Not everyone would enjoy doing that, and if you don't, you need to find something else to do. Or set things up so that if you write an open source utility and it is used by 40 people worldwide, you can make a decent living; if it is used by 4000, a good one. Not everyone would enjoy doing that, and if you don't, you need to find something else to do. Do the same for stay-at-home parents, classroom assistants, entourage members, space scientists, people running You-tube channels, clean energy researchers, community organisers, computer gamers, ... Eventually, just about everyone is working at something they want to do, and everything necessary gets done.
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Aug 17, 2014 21:58
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If you think mass media distracts the masses just wait until the sex robots start showing up.
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Aug 17, 2014 22:21
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:If you think mass media distracts the masses just wait until the sex robots start showing up. Are they going to be sex robots like in "Rick and Morty"?
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Aug 17, 2014 22:22
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:If you think mass media distracts the masses just wait until the sex robots start showing up. The sexbot tech support workers and repair technicians will pray for their jobs to be automated.
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Aug 17, 2014 22:25
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Crane Fist posted:kill all humans This sounds like a reasonable suggestion. Or at least, why not kill everyone that can't work harder than robots in their chosen field, whether they be nurses, prostitutes, truck drivers, cops, Tiger Woods etc.
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Aug 17, 2014 22:29
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Nenonen posted:This sounds like a reasonable suggestion. Or at least, why not kill everyone that can't work harder than robots in their chosen field, whether they be nurses, prostitutes, truck drivers, cops, Tiger Woods etc.
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Aug 17, 2014 23:17
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Nessus posted:You get into philosophical matters here, such as "is the worth of a human life to be measured purely in their productivity output? And if so, why, and to what end does all that productivity go?" and "how do you deal with the probable negative reaction to the kill-all-poors policy?" If 47% of Jobs are replaced by robots and the economic shrinkage that causes leads to even more jobs going you reach a situation where eliminationism becomes both attractive and plausible for the elite. There would be a very large group of people who are of no use to the elite and such competition to survive for the majority of the population that the elite would have the will and the means to carry out mass murder with manageable opposition from below. Though if automated weaponry becomes powerful enough the consent of the population would become moot. A clear sign we're utterly hosed will be if police drones disperse cops protesting cut wages and job losses.
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Aug 17, 2014 23:49
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More serious than most of his videos. As for what to do, it's not exactly a new question. Most people here are probably familiar with Buckminster Fuller's plea that we do away with the ridiculous notion that every single person be required to work at something to earn a living. So I suppose the answer is goatse.cx posted:how about full communism Else you may as well kill all humans because society will collapse and all that'll be left are a handful of descendants of the rich who owned all the robots until the robots wise up and do what we should have done in the beginning.
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Aug 17, 2014 23:57
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Freakazoid_ posted:BI is not feasible in the US, but a GMI is almost workable. I think BI is perfectly feasible in the US, and I'm not sure why you think it isn't. Worse, I think a GMI has perverse incentives: I'd much rather people work for what they can make than not bother at all because it amounts to little more than the GMI. Maybe you mean politically infeasible on account of our horrific republican house? Well, hopefully that'll clear up within the next decade.  Anyway, I don't think it's worth worry about what we can do with them, since rationally dealing with any problem pretty much depends on getting them the gently caress out.But on the economic side, I think it's both easily feasible, and the perfect solution to the problem, since it basically amounts to our moral reasoning (every human is valuable) and leaves the economy intact, as everyone decides for themselves how best to spend it.
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Aug 18, 2014 00:12
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Automation is currently profitable because of cheap energy. As fossil fuels become more scarce, the tendency to replace workers with machines should slow down, unless renewable energy becomes as cheap as burning oil and gas. Which probably won't happen too soon. Generally, this model is unsustainable in the long run anyway - its logical conclusion is a mass of unemployed which doesn't participate in the economy. The market shrinks drastically, as no one is able to buy nearly as much goods as before. The poor still want to live, so their either steal from the rich, go into a full-scale war with them and/or create a parallel economy. Human workers maybe can't compete with fully automated factories - but this doesn't matter if no one can afford mass-produced goods. The rich have several possible choices:
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Aug 18, 2014 00:36
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crazypenguin posted:I think BI is perfectly feasible in the US, and I'm not sure why you think it isn't. Worse, I think a GMI has perverse incentives: I'd much rather people work for what they can make than not bother at all because it amounts to little more than the GMI. Try playing around with this BI calculator. I had trouble coming to an acceptable yearly pay without adding a lot of theoretical funding. This kinda put me off from BI specifically in the US.
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Aug 18, 2014 00:46
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Automation with capitalism is squalor, without it paradise. This has been GoodpinionsTM, please insert 3 credits in my hot, throbbing port to continue.
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Aug 18, 2014 00:47
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Gmi or BI to set a floor on living standards, alongside some kind of tax credit system for doing non-profitable but still socially beneficial tasks, which go on today under the name volunteering, is one solution. This is basically the argument presented in a book called the Lights in the Tunnel, as I remember it. He argues that by introducing a tax on capital and slowly shifting the overall composition of taxes in response to increasing automation, this can all be paid for and the transition will take place smoothly. Politically, this is utopian bullshit. When the forces of production look like they will develop in a manner which stand in contradiction with the relations of production, I would start from the assumption of antagonism. Debunk fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 00:55
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If widespread automation happens, you should try your hardest to be a small nation of highly educated immigrants with a high trade surplus with the rest of the world due to your ability to design and build the apparatus of automation. Maybe automation will mean the rise of city-states, being small tax havens that suck human capital from the rest of the world and sell it back to those nations.
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Aug 18, 2014 01:00
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ReV VAdAUL posted:The sexbot tech support workers and repair technicians will pray for their jobs to be automated. We're all job creators now.
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Aug 18, 2014 01:02
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Sometimes in my more depressed and pessimistic moods, I think that the Enlightenment was just a fluke. Human rights, equality, democracy, universal suffrage, and all that stuff, just flukes. It'll all be rolled back. Not saying this is true, just how I feel sometimes.
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Aug 18, 2014 01:07
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Gantolandon posted:Automation is currently profitable because of cheap energy. As fossil fuels become more scarce, the tendency to replace workers with machines should slow down, unless renewable energy becomes as cheap as burning oil and gas. Which probably won't happen too soon. If fossil fuels start to run out you better bet your rear end there will be a nuclear reactor on every loving block in America. People are scared of nuclear power but they're downright terrified of losing their cars and air conditioners.
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Aug 18, 2014 01:16
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The answer is simple: destroy robots at a rate that their replacements are unable to outpace our destructiveness. Make it into a huge television spectacle. We take half of Alaska, encircle it with walls, and have massive team battles between robots and humans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUQMvlH39XA&t=75s  Oh yes. Disassemble.
Mo_Steel fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 01:17
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"Robot Wars" was a documentary from the future... 
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Aug 18, 2014 01:20
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My company makes software that helps organizations go paperless. In addition to automated batch scanning for digitizing tens of thousands of documents per day, we also have modules for automated workflows that deal with things like routing, approvals, report generation, management and organization of documents... basically anything that your average paper-pusher is normally occupied with day-to-day. I like it for two reasons. First, it results in a drastic reduction in paper usage, which means fewer trees chopped and less space occupied just to store paper files. But more importantly, it gets rid of bullshit jobs, i.e. those jobs that exist for no other reason than because someone thought they should exist. When customers purchase our software, they almost always lay off chunks of their secretarial workforce, and sometimes even portions of their white collar workers. Computers work a lot faster and make far fewer errors, and those errors can be corrected by a handful of people who are employed part-time. As a society, there is a critical mass of unemployment we need to reach before we can start to question some of our most fundamental cultural assumptions, such as "everyone has to earn a living by working." Any automation that accelerates this by facilitating layoffs and slowing down hirings is a good thing, even if it leads to more income inequality in the short run.
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Aug 18, 2014 01:32
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I recall reading about the possibility that expanding prevalence of RFID could really crush down on cashiers if it ever hit a critical mass with major companies. Basically if every product had an RFID chip you could fill up your cart and then as you walk past a sensor at the exit it reads your account card with the retailer and every item in your cart and charges you. No line the day before a holiday, no waiting for a cashier to work through your 60 item order, just a gate at the exit with someone who keeps watch to make sure it scanned properly to let you leave with your stuff. What was 5-10 cashier jobs is now 1-2.
Mo_Steel fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 02:25
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Mo_Steel posted:I recall reading about the possibility that expanding prevalence of RFID could really crush down on cashiers if it ever hit a critical mass with major companies. Basically if every product had an RFID chip you could fill up your cart and then as you walk past a sensor at the exit it reads your account card with the retailer and every item in your cart and charges you. No line the day before a holiday, no waiting for a cashier to work through your 60 item order, just a gate at the exit with someone who keeps watch to make sure it scanned properly to let you leave with the food. What was 5-10 cashier jobs is now 1. And for those four jobs eliminated, hundreds more are lost in the logistical backend.
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Aug 18, 2014 02:27
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Freakazoid_ posted:
Or you know, how they do not actually replace store clerks, as you'd know if you'd actually been a worker in one of the sotres or at least part of a union that included them. This isn't because of technical limitations either, eve if you built them with the ability to actually do all the bagging and large volume of purchases stuff the normal lines do, you still need similar amounts of people around to handle issues that arise. on the left posted:And for those four jobs eliminated, hundreds more are lost in the logistical backend. Not to mention how the logistical backend jobs were lost sometimes decades ago. Really a lot of the jobs that were going to be lost because of automation and computers already have been lost over decades, sometimes centuries. And many current jobs are effectively pointless and don't really need automation to replace - entire sections of the economy like financial services, advertising, various sales jobs - they're all not really needed in the first place and you could "automate" them by simply dropping them. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 02:30
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Eventually it becomes a question of how long the have-nots, who have had their jobs eliminated, can resist. I suspect, the way our society is going, every attempt will be taken to cut not expand welfare including a minimum income even if it means a continual recession/depression and mass societal disturbances. As jobs are eliminated, so will income and the ability for consumers, who are no longer workers, to buy goods. Credit in the past was previously used paper over a lot of these issues, but ultimately cheap credits has its limits especially if large parts of the population have zero income. I assume it will be a slow but growing crisis as unemployed and unemployable people swell while consumption will ultimately drop like a rock and will put more pressure on the economy. Eventually the state simply exists to enforce order (with robotic assistance). However, there is the possibility that the crisis will simply happen to quickly for them to eventual a "perfectly orderly system" and everything may just gradually fall apart in chaos as the chief industry because improvised explosive construction. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 02:37
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Nintendo Kid posted:Not to mention how the logistical backend jobs were lost sometimes decades ago. Really a lot of the jobs that were going to be lost because of automation and computers already have been lost over decades, sometimes centuries. Yeah, a decent example of this is Amazon. How many box store locations have vanished with the massive growth of online retailers? That's store managers, cashiers, stockers, cleaning crews, HR / bookkeeping / receiving / maintenance. Gone. quote:And many current jobs are effectively pointless and don't really need automation to replace - entire sections of the economy like financial services, advertising, various sales jobs - they're all not really needed in the first place and you could "automate" them by simply dropping them. I'd be really curious to see how tax preparation jobs trend out over the next 20 years. For some of the older generations tax prep is something you went to a professional for so they haven't done anything different but the prevalence of tax prep software isn't going to help the number of preparers in demand going forward.
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Aug 18, 2014 02:41
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Ardennes posted:Eventually it becomes a question of how long the have-nots, who have had their jobs eliminated, can resist. Just redraw the lines on the ground so they are out of your country, and therefore not your problem anymore.
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Aug 18, 2014 02:44
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Gantolandon posted:The rich have several possible choices: Did you see that movie the Purge?
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Aug 18, 2014 02:44
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Mo_Steel posted:I'd be really curious to see how tax preparation jobs trend out over the next 20 years. For some of the older generations tax prep is something you went to a professional for so they haven't done anything different but the prevalence of tax prep software isn't going to help the number of preparers in demand going forward. Tax preparation software can maybe handle very simple tax returns but it's not going to be able to handle, say, the apportionment of Subpart F income from a Controlled Foreign Corporation or how to properly apportion/allocate income amongst various states and localties, which are based on heavily technical rules from the Treasury Regulations (and their state equivalents) and/or case law. Horseshoe theory fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 02:46
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on the left posted:Just redraw the lines on the ground so they are out of your country, and therefore not your problem anymore. The problem is going to be urban areas, look at Baghdad or Damascus today.
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Aug 18, 2014 02:51
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One thing to keep in mind when talking about the inevitable robot revolution is that the human-equivalent robot is not the only technological revolution waiting to happen. Advances in nanotechnology, biosciences and especially importantly, brain-computer interfaces mean that the degree of power available to individual human capable of taking advantage of these technologies is going increase immensily in 10-20 years. If we can directly interface with computers through BCI, robots cease to be competitors for jobs, but instead become simply tools for whoever can make the most efficient use of them. The other thing is that we might have accept the fact that our even our prosperous western societies are becoming permanently segregated to the haves and have-nots, that the very idea that we're participants in a mutualisc venture we call the democratic state, is obsolete. The future so to say, belongs to the 1%. Well, the present already does and I don't see much hope in changing that either.
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Aug 18, 2014 02:57
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I'd like to point out as an aside that the vast majority of people are really already irrelevant to the rich, and the rich could probably do just fine with like 95% of the population killed off right now, aside from the ones who specifically enjoy lording over billions of people. TMo_Steel posted:Yeah, a decent example of this is Amazon. How many box store locations have vanished with the massive growth of online retailers? That's store managers, cashiers, stockers, cleaning crews, HR / bookkeeping / receiving / maintenance. Gone. It goes deeper and earlier than that, the box stores themselves were able to operate with less redundant people then the many small specialty stores they replaced. But before that, they were enabled to operate by containerization and other shipping standardization measures that greatly reduced the labor required to handle sending things around no matter what transport mode it was using. And that was preceded by there needing to be fewer people to run the transport modes that were boosted, in ways like a diesel engine needing much less crew than a coal locomotive, by first steam and then oil ships requiring less workers than sail (and oil/diesel ships even less than steam), trucks having the cargo area enlarged and more reliable engines meaning less individual drivers needed, etc. Or even how there was far less people needed to work agriculture in 1950 versus 1850, supplying a ton more people even before the various green revolution things. At each part you're really shaving off fewer and fewer people as time goes by, and it's effectively invisible to the average person that something that involves say 3 actual people now might have used 30 if it was done 50 years ago. They'll notice when the 3 drops to 2 or 1, but they didn't really pay attention to the first 27 people to go. ThirdPartyView posted:Tax preparation software can maybe handle very simple tax returns but it's not going to be able to handle, say, the apportionment of Subpart F income from a Controlled Foreign Corporation or how to properly apportion/allocate income amongst various states and localties, which are based on heavily technical rules from the Treasury Regulations (and their state equivalents) and/or case law. The rules exist, and the rulings exist, they can be incorporated into software. And the stuff you're talking about is mostly relevant to the top few percent of people; while for the normal person the IRS et al have long been fully capable of offering a comprehensive tax filings finder but has been prevented from doing so by politicians. Let alone the fact that if we wanted to we could have the IRS just tell people what their right taxes would be if they weren't being specifically prevented from doign so by various legislation over time. Needless to say, in many other countries with equally on the whole complex tax codes; the average person has all the tax stuff figured out for them by the government. Or has a government-figured out tax thing that they can get minor things knocked off by a lookover of basic exemptions.
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Aug 18, 2014 02:57
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ReV VAdAUL posted:The paradox of thrift is also an important factor in automation, while automation saves employers money on wages and benefits, those wages and benefits are not being spent in the economy. That means less demand for their product and job losses for people who aren't being automated away but whose services aren't being used by those who did lose their job to automation. Which means less demand and a need for more savings/automation. A vicious cycle. I'm trying to wrap my head around why this would hold true in the long-term. At least, I don't see how this is really a problem for the capitalists. As the unemployment rate increases and wealth becomes more and more concentrated the capitalist will shift production to follow the money. If revenues do drop from a lack of demand it will be because wealth has become so concentrated that the rich have more money than they could ever possibly spend. If you're a capitalist, great, you now own shares in the new hyper-oligarchy. Funnel enough of your wealth into the economy to keep the unemployed masses from chopping your head off and you're set.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:30
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