Technological Unemployment: Those Dang Robots Are After Our Jobs!!

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DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

I'm not an academic scholar, nor do I have easy access to academic materials, so please forgive me in advance if I am uninformed in the field of labor economics, unemployment, and current trends in business and technology. I'm just a public librarian, so I have lots of time on my hands at the computer and lots of books to read. One of the books I read recently was Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. That set me on a kick of reading books about technology, automation, and its impact on jobs. The best of them was Ford's, as the others struck me as a bit too breathlessly optimistic / libertarian with their faith in capitalism.

Nevertheless, I feel the topic has come up often enough in discussions on minimum wage in D&D, so it might merit some discussion on its own right.

Here's a very long, but interesting, article by the Economist to get us started. I'll take some key background and quotes from it.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less

quote:

The future of jobs
The onrushing wave
Previous technological innovation has always delivered more long-run employment, not less. But things can change
Jan 18th 2014

IN 1930, when the world was �suffering�from a bad attack of economic pessimism�, John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay, �Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren�. It imagined a middle way between revolution and stagnation that would leave the said grandchildren a great deal richer than their grandparents. But the path was not without dangers.

One of the worries Keynes admitted was a �new disease�: �technological unemployment�due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.� His readers might not have heard of the problem, he suggested�but they were certain to hear a lot more about it in the years to come.

...

For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century�s exploding population. Keynes�s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass.

Yet some now fear that a new era of automation enabled by ever more powerful and capable computers could work out differently. They start from the observation that, across the rich world, all is far from well in the world of work. The essence of what they see as a work crisis is that in rich countries the wages of the typical worker, adjusted for cost of living, are stagnant. In America the real wage has hardly budged over the past four decades. Even in places like Britain and Germany, where employment is touching new highs, wages have been flat for a decade. Recent research suggests that this is because substituting capital for labour through automation is increasingly attractive; as a result owners of capital have captured ever more of the world�s income since the 1980s, while the share going to labour has fallen.

At the same time, even in relatively egalitarian places like Sweden, inequality among the employed has risen sharply, with the share going to the highest earners soaring. For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying �bullshit jobs��low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others.

Be that as it may, drudgery may soon enough give way to frank unemployment. There is already a long-term trend towards lower levels of employment in some rich countries. The proportion of American adults participating in the labour force recently hit its lowest level since 1978, and although some of that is due to the effects of ageing, some is not. In a recent speech that was modelled in part on Keynes�s �Possibilities�, Larry Summers, a former American treasury secretary, looked at employment trends among American men between 25 and 54. In the 1960s only one in 20 of those men was not working. According to Mr Summers�s extrapolations, in ten years the number could be one in seven.

This is one indication, Mr Summers says, that technical change is increasingly taking the form of �capital that effectively substitutes for labour�. There may be a lot more for such capital to do in the near future. A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University of Oxford, argued that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47% of the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted. That includes accountancy, legal work, technical writing and a lot of other white-collar occupations.

...

In 1500 an estimated 75% of the British labour force toiled in agriculture. By 1800 that figure had fallen to 35%. When the shift to manufacturing got under way during the 18th century it was overwhelmingly done at small scale, either within the home or in a small workshop; employment in a large factory was a rarity. By the end of the 19th century huge plants in massive industrial cities were the norm. The great shift was made possible by automation and steam engines.

Industrial firms combined human labour with big, expensive capital equipment. To maximise the output of that costly machinery, factory owners reorganised the processes of production. Workers were given one or a few repetitive tasks, often making components of finished products rather than whole pieces. Bosses imposed a tight schedule and strict worker discipline to keep up the productive pace. The Industrial Revolution was not simply a matter of replacing muscle with steam; it was a matter of reshaping jobs themselves into the sort of precisely defined components that steam-driven machinery needed�cogs in a factory system.

The way old jobs were done changed; new jobs were created. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University in Illinois, argues that the more intricate machines, techniques and supply chains of the period all required careful tending. The workers who provided that care were well rewarded. As research by Lawrence Katz, of Harvard University, and Robert Margo, of Boston University, shows, employment in manufacturing �hollowed out�. As employment grew for highly skilled workers and unskilled workers, craft workers lost out. This was the loss to which the Luddites, understandably if not effectively, took exception.

With the low-skilled workers far more numerous, at least to begin with, the lot of the average worker during the early part of this great industrial and social upheaval was not a happy one. As Mr Mokyr notes, �life did not improve all that much between 1750 and 1850.� For 60 years, from 1770 to 1830, growth in British wages, adjusted for inflation, was imperceptible because productivity growth was restricted to a few industries. Not until the late 19th century, when the gains had spread across the whole economy, did wages at last perform in line with productivity (see chart 1).

Along with social reforms and new political movements that gave voice to the workers, this faster wage growth helped spread the benefits of industrialisation across wider segments of the population. New investments in education provided a supply of workers for the more skilled jobs that were by then being created in ever greater numbers. This shift continued into the 20th century as post-secondary education became increasingly common.

Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard University, and Mr Katz have written that workers were in a �race between education and technology� during this period, and for the most part they won. Even so, it was not until the �golden age� after the second world war that workers in the rich world secured real prosperity, and a large, property-owning middle class came to dominate politics. At the same time communism, a legacy of industrialisation�s harsh early era, kept hundreds of millions of people around the world in poverty, and the effects of the imperialism driven by European industrialisation continued to be felt by billions.

The impacts of technological change take their time appearing. They also vary hugely from industry to industry. Although in many simple economic models technology pairs neatly with capital and labour to produce output, in practice technological changes do not affect all workers the same way. Some find that their skills are complementary to new technologies. Others find themselves out of work.

...

For a task to be replaced by a machine, it helps a great deal if, like the work of human computers, it is already highly routine. Hence the demise of production-line jobs and some sorts of book-keeping, lost to the robot and the spreadsheet. Meanwhile work less easily broken down into a series of stereotyped tasks�whether rewarding, as the management of other workers and the teaching of toddlers can be, or more of a grind, like tidying and cleaning messy work places�has grown as a share of total employment.

But the �race� aspect of technological change means that such workers cannot rest on their pay packets. Firms are constantly experimenting with new technologies and production processes. Experimentation with different techniques and business models requires flexibility, which is one critical advantage of a human worker. Yet over time, as best practices are worked out and then codified, it becomes easier to break production down into routine components, then automate those components as technology allows.

If, that is, automation makes sense. As David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out in a 2013 paper, the mere fact that a job can be automated does not mean that it will be; relative costs also matter. When Nissan produces cars in Japan, he notes, it relies heavily on robots. At plants in India, by contrast, the firm relies more heavily on cheap local labour.

Even when machine capabilities are rapidly improving, it can make sense instead to seek out ever cheaper supplies of increasingly skilled labour. Thus since the 1980s (a time when, in America, the trend towards post-secondary education levelled off) workers there and elsewhere have found themselves facing increased competition from both machines and cheap emerging-market workers.

Such processes have steadily and relentlessly squeezed labour out of the manufacturing sector in most rich economies. The share of American employment in manufacturing has declined sharply since the 1950s, from almost 30% to less than 10%. At the same time, jobs in services soared, from less than 50% of employment to almost 70% (see chart 2). It was inevitable, therefore, that firms would start to apply the same experimentation and reorganisation to service industries.

...

The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in �The Second Machine Age�, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits�but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change. Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.

A startling progression of inventions seems to bear their thesis out. Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master. Now Google cars are rolling round California driver-free no one doubts such mastery is possible, though the speed at which fully self-driving cars will come to market remains hard to guess.

Even after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in America�s popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show �Jeopardy!� Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms across a range of industries to help with all sorts of pattern-recognition problems. Its acumen will grow, and its costs fall, as firms learn to harness its abilities.

The machines are not just cleverer, they also have access to far more data. The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some occupations wholesale; in others it will allow firms to do more with fewer workers. Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories.

...

Being newly able to do brain work will not stop computers from doing ever more formerly manual labour; it will make them better at it. The designers of the latest generation of industrial robots talk about their creations as helping workers rather than replacing them; but there is little doubt that the technology will be able to do a bit of both�probably more than a bit. A taxi driver will be a rarity in many places by the 2030s or 2040s. That sounds like bad news for journalists who rely on that most reliable source of local knowledge and prejudice�but will there be many journalists left to care? Will there be airline pilots? Or traffic cops? Or soldiers?

There will still be jobs. Even Mr Frey and Mr Osborne, whose research speaks of 47% of job categories being open to automation within two decades, accept that some jobs�especially those currently associated with high levels of education and high wages�will survive (see table). Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger, writes in his most recent book, �Average is Over�, that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest, for whom not so much.

...

In a forthcoming book Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and �supermanagers� grab a growing share of national income and accumulate an increasing concentration of national wealth. The rise of the middle-class�a 20th-century innovation�was a hugely important political and social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.

...

But though growth in areas of the economy that are not easily automated provides jobs, it does not necessarily help real wages. Mr Summers points out that prices of things-made-of-widgets have fallen remarkably in past decades; America�s Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons that today you could get the equivalent of an early 1980s television for a twentieth of its then price, were it not that no televisions that poor are still made. However, prices of things not made of widgets, most notably college education and health care, have shot up. If people lived on widgets alone� goods whose costs have fallen because of both globalisation and technology�there would have been no pause in the increase of real wages. It is the increase in the prices of stuff that isn�t mechanised (whose supply is often under the control of the state and perhaps subject to fundamental scarcity) that means a pay packet goes no further than it used to.

So technological progress squeezes some incomes in the short term before making everyone richer in the long term, and can drive up the costs of some things even more than it eventually increases earnings. As innovation continues, automation may bring down costs in some of those stubborn areas as well, though those dominated by scarcity�such as houses in desirable places�are likely to resist the trend, as may those where the state keeps market forces at bay. But if innovation does make health care or higher education cheaper, it will probably be at the cost of more jobs, and give rise to yet more concentration of income.

In fact, one of the reasons posited for the "jobless recovery" of the economy after the recession was that capital simply invested more in automation software, algorithms, and machinery, rather than rehiring workers who were laid off during the recession. Capital has replaced labor, which means lower costs for companies and soaring profits for owners.

Yet what many of these authors seem to elide over is that this state of affairs is unsustainable in the long-term. They seem to believe that we'll all become entrepreneurs , personal trainers, and caregivers. But not everyone has the temperament or desire to become a nurse or businessperson. What will happen to the economy when it passes a tipping point where demand has fallen low enough such that companies can no longer sell their products?

What will happen to the economy in the future as this continues? I know personally that when I watched footage of Watson beating the contestants in Jeopardy! in trivia, I realized that one day I might be seeing a Watson replacing my job as a librarian. We've already replaced most of our circulation and checkout desks with self-checkout machines. So I'm certain that automation is definitely going to encroach on my job in the future.

When the time comes, we may be forced to institute a basic minimum income, a solution apparently favored by many on the right, but does it really make sense to pay a substantial number of the population just so they can continue to consume so that capitalism remains profitable? This seems like circular logic. Alternatively, the wealthy may just choose to wall themselves in from the restless, unemployed masses, defending themselves with drones and robots. In the more optimistic scenario, perhaps the automation of most (if not all) jobs will usher in a post-scarcity society where toil is a long-forgotten memory.

Either way, it seems to me that technological unemployment is becoming a serious issue, one that merits debate and awareness. I am highly suspicious of the conclusions of the liberal and utopian (Singularitarian) authors who've written on this subject -- it doesn't seem likely to me that capitalism can continue to exist if steadily growing numbers of people are being made unemployed.

What do you think?

Books

Brynjolfsson, Erik. (2012). Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
Brynjolfsson, Erik. McAfee, Andrew. (2014). The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
Ford, Martin. (2015). Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
Lanier, Jaron. (2014). Who Owns the Future?

Articles

Thompson, Derek. The Atlantic, July/August 2015 Issue. A World Without Work
The Economist, Jan 18th 2014. The onrushing wave

Informative Videos

CGP Grey, "Humans Need Not Apply"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

VSauce, "Will Robots Make Us More Human?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsACeAkvFLY

DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Nov 26, 2015

# ? Nov 25, 2015 22:37

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 10:28

ugh its Troika: May 2, 2009; by FactsAreUseless

Realtalk: is there any reason at all people whining about THE ROBOTS ARE TAKING OUR JERBS should be humored? I most frequently seem to notice it in the context of various ports that can't upgrade to more modern equipment because it would cause the longshoremans unions to pitch a fit.

# ? Nov 25, 2015 23:23

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

-Troika- posted:

Realtalk: is there any reason at all people whining about THE ROBOTS ARE TAKING OUR JERBS should be humored? I most frequently seem to notice it in the context of various ports that can't upgrade to more modern equipment because it would cause the longshoremans unions to pitch a fit.

This article isn't whining or hand-wringing though, it's just discussing how automation will affect future employment.
If future automation will make a portion of humanity essentially unable to find employment, then the question of what to do with those people might become a defining ethical and sociopolitical issue in the 21st century. Especially since economic policymakers are currently expected to implement policies that, among many other things, maximize employment.

# ? Nov 25, 2015 23:41

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

The transition to automatonic labor will be brutal on employment. However the end result is very good.

# ? Nov 25, 2015 23:42

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

-Troika- posted:

Realtalk: is there any reason at all people whining about THE ROBOTS ARE TAKING OUR JERBS should be humored? I most frequently seem to notice it in the context of various ports that can't upgrade to more modern equipment because it would cause the longshoremans unions to pitch a fit.

Yeah it's crazy those assholes don't want their jobs to be replaced by machines.

# ? Nov 25, 2015 23:42

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

Please tell me more about how it's a good idea to economically displace large groups of people and replace them with robots.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 00:01

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Automation is a good thing provided we have the right institutions in place to deal with the disruptive social impact. Right now we don't and as a result automation is creating serious political and economic problems, and there's every reason to think that these problems will get worse before they get better.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 00:11

BabelFish: Jul 20, 2013; Fallen Rib

The Atlantic has an article from August on this as well: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/

# ? Nov 26, 2015 00:23

Kim Jong Il: Aug 16, 2003

I've been doing a fair bit of automation of previously white collar positions. It's inevitable, but there will be a small rise in jobs for those making the algorithms and that's also more use for server farms in supporting the work.

I also think there will be a growth in Mechanical Turk-style drudgery, the new data entry type jobs, where you're creating massive training sets for these algorithms.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 00:26

Mc Do Well: Aug 2, 2008; by FactsAreUseless

I like when Marco Rubio said a higher minimum wage is bad because it makes automation more attractive. Automate it all, Marco - make Marx right.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 00:29

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Kim Jong Il posted:

I've been doing a fair bit of automation of previously white collar positions. It's inevitable, but there will be a small rise in jobs for those making the algorithms and that's also more use for server farms in supporting the work.

I also think there will be a growth in Mechanical Turk-style drudgery, the new data entry type jobs, where you're creating massive training sets for these algorithms.

Oh to be certain. There will be plenty of jobs for those who mind the machines -- technicians and the like -- as well as people engaged in creative labor to take advantage of machinery, or develop new automation technology. But will the jobs created in these industries, and small/self-owned business models like Uber, Lyft and AirBNB, and work-from-home systems like the Mechanical Turk, be enough to replace the ones that are lost? The greater concern, I think, is the erosion of jobs (and consequent decrease in national per-capita-GDP) to the level where demand is insufficient to keep the economy going.

EDIT:

BabelFish posted:

The Atlantic has an article from August on this as well: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/

Interesting article! Easier to read than The Economist's too.

I liked this quote here:

quote:

One of the first things we might expect to see in a period of technological displacement is the diminishment of human labor as a driver of economic growth. In fact, signs that this is happening have been present for quite some time. The share of U.S. economic output that�s paid out in wages fell steadily in the 1980s, reversed some of its losses in the �90s, and then continued falling after 2000, accelerating during the Great Recession. It now stands at its lowest level since the government started keeping track in the mid‑20th century.

A number of theories have been advanced to explain this phenomenon, including globalization and its accompanying loss of bargaining power for some workers. But Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, economists at the University of Chicago, have estimated that almost half of the decline is the result of businesses� replacing workers with computers and software. In 1964, the nation�s most valuable company, AT&T, was worth $267 billion in today�s dollars and employed 758,611 people. Today�s telecommunications giant, Google, is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees�less than a tenth the size of AT&T�s workforce in its heyday.

-v

DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Nov 26, 2015

# ? Nov 26, 2015 00:32

Dr. Arbitrary: Mar 15, 2006; Bleak Gremlin

I mostly discuss this topic at a low level, in Facebook discussions and the like, but one thing that people often fail to take into consideration is that jobs that are suited for automation are not necessarily low skill jobs.

You see lots of memes acting like food workers asking for $15 are prime candidates, but I think that the real money is in automating or outsourcing skilled labor.

Suppose you're lucky enough to have a safe job, you're going to have to compete with unemployed people who are educated, intelligent and motivated, and they may be willing to take a pay cut to stay out of poverty.

In the short run, I think you'll see professional drivers early on the chopping block. Self driving cars could potentially put millions of people out of work. I don't think there are any plans to adapt to that change.

Edit:

Nice job on the thread. You did good.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 00:35

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

Automation is inevitable. Eventually humans will be unable to fill the cogs to keep our society turning. Look at China in the 19th century as a great example of what happens when you don't accept the reality of industrial progress.

Dr. Abitrary made a great reference to a potentially dangerous automation which is Professional Drivers. Look at Uber and the displacement of Taxi drivers just by the ability to call a taxi in whatever city They currently operate you want to.

Imagine what happens when we can 3d print an entire house from foundation to completion.

The advent of E-Mail has ruined the postal service.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 00:41

Flowers For Algeria: Dec 3, 2005; I humbly offer my services as forum inquisitor. There is absolutely no way I would abuse this power in any way.

LeoMarr posted:

Please tell me more about how it's a good idea to economically displace large groups of people and replace them with robots.

Reduce the cost of goods and reduce the legal working hours in a week to something like 25h. Make life enjoyable.

That's the end-all of automation, isn't it? The promise? That one day wage slavery will be a thing of the past and all that. Let's start somewhere and profit from automation.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 00:50

Freakazoid_: Jul 5, 2013; Buglord

We've have this discussion a couple times and we generally agree it's going to happen and we're definitely not prepared, but it still attracts some people who miss the forest for the trees or devolve into arguments that have nothing to do with automation.

Here's a study I like to whip out: The Future of Employment. Up 47% of US jobs automated in the next 20 years, with a list of which jobs are most affected.

It seems like a long way out, but several car manufacturers believe they'll have fully automated (level 4) vehicles in 5 years. If they actually work and cause less accidents, that means over 3 million transportation jobs are at risk with no other industry for them to fall back on... unless they can get a college education. Which as we've seen, is having a bit of a cost and job placement problem themselves.

I still think the biggest hurtle is the existential crisis inherent in the current system. People in the US worship jobs, to the point that they ascribe social darwinism to it. Hard workers are rewarded with their next meal and the lazy die a slow, miserable death. They cannot conceive of a hard worker not being rewarded, so when someone claims they are hard working and being screwed by whatever reason, they instead assume they are actually lazy and deserve what they get. This makes the discussion of automation very difficult to spread outside this forum.

Also, need to get that CGP Grey video out of the way!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

# ? Nov 26, 2015 01:32

Plexiwatt: Sep 6, 2002; by exmarx

This is a good book: http://www.amazon.com/Our-Robots-Ourselves-Robotics-Autonomy/dp/B00SI02AWK

# ? Nov 26, 2015 01:43

RuanGacho: Jun 20, 2002; "You're gunna break it!"

As someone who works in government tech and process improvement I'm very sure about vehicle automation and not much else. Anecdotal experience tells me that market forces are ripe for the destruction of the transportation industry and how that will change culture but I have a hard time believing that this is really a "we won't have enough jobs" problem, I've got work enough to keep the entire population busy, I just don't have the means to capitalize it.

Robots aren't the problem, its the economic social structure.

Your choices are Cyberpunk, Jetsons, The Culture and Mad Max, select two.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 01:45

kikkelivelho: Aug 27, 2015

Freakazoid_ posted:

Also, need to get that CGP Grey video out of the way!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

drat I was gonna link that.

Anyway, lately I've seen people on the internet claim we should boycott companies that automate their businesses or that we should create regulations that keep people from being replaced by robots, and I think that poo poo is utterly moronic. Mass automation isn't a bad thing, in fact it's a great thing as long as we properly prepare for the effects it's going to have on the workforce and our society. It's incredibly short sighted to rail against technologies that are going to make our lives better just because the guy at your local McDonald's might lose his job.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 01:45

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

Freakazoid_ posted:

People in the US worship jobs, to the point that they ascribe social darwinism to it. Hard workers are rewarded with their next meal and the lazy die a slow, miserable death. They cannot conceive of a hard worker not being rewarded, so when someone claims they are hard working and being screwed by whatever reason, they instead assume they are actually lazy and deserve what they get. This makes the discussion of automation very difficult to spread outside this forum.

The weird part is that you see this sort of mindset even within the forum. During discussions of climate change, it's brought up every so often that large parts of the country still do rely on coal mining and would have to be taken care of as we transition off of it. The response to the latter is quite often some form of "they should just suck it up and move to a not lovely part of the country", which is baffling from people who otherwise support a strong safety net.

e: This is relevant to the topic at hand too since automation has been a primary driver of unemployment in the region.

computer parts fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Nov 26, 2015

# ? Nov 26, 2015 01:46

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Freakazoid_ posted:

We've have this discussion a couple times and we generally agree it's going to happen and we're definitely not prepared, but it still attracts some people who miss the forest for the trees or devolve into arguments that have nothing to do with automation.

Here's a study I like to whip out: The Future of Employment. Up 47% of US jobs automated in the next 20 years, with a list of which jobs are most affected.

It seems like a long way out, but several car manufacturers believe they'll have fully automated (level 4) vehicles in 5 years. If they actually work and cause less accidents, that means over 3 million transportation jobs are at risk with no other industry for them to fall back on... unless they can get a college education. Which as we've seen, is having a bit of a cost and job placement problem themselves.

I still think the biggest hurtle is the existential crisis inherent in the current system. People in the US worship jobs, to the point that they ascribe social darwinism to it. Hard workers are rewarded with their next meal and the lazy die a slow, miserable death. They cannot conceive of a hard worker not being rewarded, so when someone claims they are hard working and being screwed by whatever reason, they instead assume they are actually lazy and deserve what they get. This makes the discussion of automation very difficult to spread outside this forum.

Also, need to get that CGP Grey video out of the way!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Americans have been successfully convinced that the economy is uncontrollable - the only option for our society is to bend to the whims of market forces, because gee, what else could we do? After all, if the government could actually positively affect the economy and buffer individuals from market oscillations, wouldn't it have done it some time in the last 40 years?

:negative:

# ? Nov 26, 2015 02:03

INH5: Dec 17, 2012; Error: file not found.

Freakazoid_ posted:

It seems like a long way out, but several car manufacturers believe they'll have fully automated (level 4) vehicles in 5 years. If they actually work and cause less accidents, that means over 3 million transportation jobs are at risk with no other industry for them to fall back on... unless they can get a college education. Which as we've seen, is having a bit of a cost and job placement problem themselves.

Just because they can automate cars doesn't mean that they will.

We've had the technology to fully automate planes for decades. It's long been a common joke among airline pilots that the standard flight crew will soon be reduced to a man and a dog: the man to feed the dog, and the dog to bite the man's hand when he tries to touch the controls. Yet the vast majority of planes still have pilots, even freight planes and small single engine planes.

We've had the technology to fully automate trains for even longer. The first driverless train was built in 1963. Yet more than 50 years later, the vast majority of trains still have drivers.

The reasons seem obvious: fully automating a vehicle opens the maker of the vehicle up to a lawsuit every time one of their units runs someone over. This is clear when you look at the examples of trains and planes that have been fully automated. Some subway and elevated trains have been automated (though they still have emergency brake buttons inside that staff can use). That is, the trains run on tracks that members of the general public aren't allowed to walk on, meaning that if someone gets hit by one of these trains it is 100% their own fault. With planes, the only UAVs that are large enough to do a significant amount of damage if they crash into anything are military drones, which are inevitably going to cause large amounts of "collateral damage" anyway.

There is every indication that "self-driving cars" are going to follow the same pattern. Right now, there is a self-driving truck legally operating on Nevada highways, but the truck has a driver at all times who can take over if anything goes wrong. I expect the future of "self-driving cars" to end up being much like the current situation with planes: we'll get increasingly advanced "accident avoidance systems," and eventually autopilot systems that can be used on highways, but the law will require a sober and awake person to be in the driver's seat at all times to take over in the event that there is a problem with the computer. If we aren't willing to let a computer drive a train that moves on fixed rails with warning signs, flashing lights, and barriers at every intersection with a road, then there is no way that we're going to let a computer drive a car on streets that kids regularly play in anytime in the foreseeable future.

Though this likely still won't be that good for professional drivers, since once the job description becomes "sit there watching the computer, and pull over and contact headquarters if something goes wrong," the hiring standards and by extension wages will probably drop quite a bit.

INH5 fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Nov 26, 2015

# ? Nov 26, 2015 02:13

Dr. Arbitrary: Mar 15, 2006; Bleak Gremlin

I think the difference is that all those things involve professional drivers getting paid to drive/fly. Self driving cars can remove the drudgery of the daily commute, it can improve people's lives in a very tangible way.

I've seen it in Facebook discussions of what a car should do if it's speeding down the highway and there's pedestrians in the way. Plow through them or drive into the median, killing the driver. People tend to argue in favor of "gently caress those assholes for being in the road"

I think there's political will to make the legal changes necessary to permit automation.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 03:09

Thug Lessons: Dec 14, 2006; I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

Why bother investing in robotics when there's an ample supply of third world slaves to do most manufacturing?

# ? Nov 26, 2015 03:17

a neurotic ai: Mar 22, 2012

I wrote an academic paper on this that essentially concludes that traditional justifications for the existence of private property break down in a system where large groups of people are replaced by autonomous units of productivity.

There is currently no definition of justified ownership that can reasonably survive such a scenario.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 03:54

Dr. Arbitrary: Mar 15, 2006; Bleak Gremlin

Thug Lessons posted:

Why bother investing in robotics when there's an ample supply of third world slaves to do most manufacturing?

At a certain point, slaves are more expensive than robots.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 03:58

Vermain: Sep 5, 2006

Ocrassus posted:

I wrote an academic paper on this that essentially concludes that traditional justifications for the existence of private property break down in a system where large groups of people are replaced by autonomous units of productivity.

There is currently no definition of justified ownership that can reasonably survive such a scenario.

Would it be possible to get a link to it? I'd be interested in reading it, if it's available to read somewhere.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 04:12

RuanGacho: Jun 20, 2002; "You're gunna break it!"

The problem here is not that robots are coming, it's that the current economic and political structures will only use them to enrich the few at the expense of all the rest. We can choose to have utopia if we're prepared to tear down the final aristocracy of the rich and overly influential. Because once the robots come, having the ability to deploy them regardless of the consequences to society are the real issue.

Further, service workers aren't going away. The McDonald's which is used as the bottom rung of employment for some reason is much more likely to last than most other labor work, service industries are the most safe, which is all the more imperative that we pay people a living wage to do them.

We can start by uplifting our most vulnerable, the coal miners, the taxi and UPS drivers. Our choice is who the masters will be, the 1% or everyone.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 04:31

Vermain: Sep 5, 2006

RuanGacho posted:

Further, service workers aren't going away. The McDonald's which is used as the bottom rung of employment for some reason is much more likely to last than most other labor work, service industries are the most safe, which is all the more imperative that we pay people a living wage to do them.

Front counters, maybe, but anyone in the back is entirely disposable. The "security" (if one can call it that) which they enjoy right now is only a consequence of the price of a burger flipping machine not being low enough. Get the technology to the point where you can assemble a hamburger in 15 seconds at a high rate of accuracy and they're toast.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 04:37

Spazzle: Jul 5, 2003

INH5 posted:

We've had the technology to fully automate trains for even longer. The first driverless train was built in 1963. Yet more than 50 years later, the vast majority of trains still have drivers.

The reasons seem obvious: fully automating a vehicle opens the maker of the vehicle up to a lawsuit every time one of their units runs someone over. This is clear when you look at the examples of trains and planes that have been fully automated. Some subway and elevated trains have been automated (though they still have emergency brake buttons inside that staff can use). That is, the trains run on tracks that members of the general public aren't allowed to walk on, meaning that if someone gets hit by one of these trains it is 100% their own fault. With planes, the only UAVs that are large enough to do a significant amount of damage if they crash into anything are military drones, which are inevitably going to cause large amounts of "collateral damage" anyway.

There is every indication that "self-driving cars" are going to follow the same pattern. Right now, there is a self-driving truck legally operating on Nevada highways, but the truck has a driver at all times who can take over if anything goes wrong. I expect the future of "self-driving cars" to end up being much like the current situation with planes: we'll get increasingly advanced "accident avoidance systems," and eventually autopilot systems that can be used on highways, but the law will require a sober and awake person to be in the driver's seat at all times to take over in the event that there is a problem with the computer. If we aren't willing to let a computer drive a train that moves on fixed rails with warning signs, flashing lights, and barriers at every intersection with a road, then there is no way that we're going to let a computer drive a car on streets that kids regularly play in anytime in the foreseeable future.

You may be able to fully automate the driving of a vehicle, but you will have a hard time automating the error correction that drivers do. I ride light rail on a daily basis, and the drivers alwats have to run out and do shut like reset doors when they break. I wouldn't be surprised if truck drivers do way more than just drive a vehicle as well. You probably could have an autopilot for trucks, but you'd still need a ride along attendant.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 04:44

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Personally I think there is a huge amount of uncertainty here.

On the one hand it's possible that automation will upend society as we know it and the risk here is huge. Society isn't close to being equipped to deal with mass unemployment from from any angle - ethical, economic, political or personal and the transition would be painful under even the best case scenarios (peaceful socialist revolution in this case). Capitalism, though clearly containing feedback mechanisms has no guarantee of full human employment.

On the other hand it might not be a problem for another century or three or ever. Technology has been relentlessly destroying jobs for centuries and that destruction has been the main driver growth which has delivered our modern standards of living and at every step you could find people terrified of that destruction. No one knew what people would do if they weren't all tilling the fields but the answer turned out to be lots of things.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 04:48

Anchor Wanker: May 14, 2015

So, how about that Jaque Fresco eh?
Isn't this kinda his whole schtic?

https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/

# ? Nov 26, 2015 04:55

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Re:driverless cars

This can't be put simply enough - driverless cars are a fantasy that are decades away at a minimum. The google car is basically a joke that can't drive in the rain or above 30 miles per hour and gets frequently rear-ended or pulled over for driving so slow and cautiously. The initial foray into hands-free driving from Tesla and a couple others is one dead child away from a large setback.

Things that might happen in the near future are things like long haul trucks driving on special lanes on stretches of open highways in places like Kansas. But this has limited implications for basically anything. A driverless uber picking you up from the bar downtown or replacing your daily commute on existing roads might as well be a dream.

It's sometimes fun to talk about fantasies, but not too much, and that's what driverless cars, with all their interesting implications, still are today.

Robots are a real thing with real implications, just in places like Amazon warehouses where they have carefully controlled environments and do boring things like move racks of bins around.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 04:56

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

The problem though is that it's easy to see how to go from Agricultural Jobs -> Manufacturing -> Services, but what comes after the service and manufacturing jobs are displaced? Is there a fourth type of job sector that humans can do that will provide gainful employment for billions of people?

# ? Nov 26, 2015 04:57

Anchor Wanker: May 14, 2015

DrSunshine posted:

The problem though is that it's easy to see how to go from Agricultural Jobs -> Manufacturing -> Services, but what comes after the service and manufacturing jobs are displaced? Is there a fourth type of job sector that humans can do that will provide gainful employment for billions of people?

Tech support?
Art?

# ? Nov 26, 2015 04:58

Woolie Wool: Jun 2, 2006

DrSunshine posted:

Yet what many of these authors seem to elide over is that this state of affairs is unsustainable in the long-term. They seem to believe that we'll all become entrepreneurs , personal trainers, and caregivers. But not everyone has the temperament or desire to become a nurse or businessperson. What will happen to the economy when it passes a tipping point where demand has fallen low enough such that companies can no longer sell their products?

It won't work this way, because this hypothetical robot economy will no longer be capitalism as we know it, but an automated slave economy. Robots will function as slave machines that contribute unpaid labor, the capital owners take their products and use them for themselves and kick a bit down to the "supermanagers" and technicians entrusted with overseeing and maintaining robotized production facilities. A class of servants (healthcare workers, caregivers, entertainers, "concubines", housekeepers, etc.) will serve the classes above them and live barely above poverty, or perhaps even in bondage. The rest of humanity would be reduced to human refuse, left to fend for themselves any way they can unless they can display some talent with which they can get into the servant class. There will no longer be a need for the current market system; the owners will consume the products directly and the "unproductives" will receive nothing (except for mass killings to keep them down or even annihilate them altogether). The only real markets will be luxury-goods markets with which the ownership class trade excess production among themselves, and barter "markets" for the poors below. Perhaps there might be some very basic welfare to keep the poors alive and prevent rebellions but their actual participation in the economy would no longer be necessary.

It would be absolute hell on earth and worse than ancient Sparta.

Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Nov 26, 2015

# ? Nov 26, 2015 05:03

INH5: Dec 17, 2012; Error: file not found.

RuanGacho posted:

We can start by uplifting our most vulnerable, the coal miners, the taxi and UPS drivers.

I think UPS drivers are pretty safe, because even if you could fully automate driving the truck, somebody still has to walk up the front door of the house and deliver the package, and we're a long long way away from cheap robots that can reliably walk up stairs without falling over.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 05:04

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

DrSunshine posted:

The problem though is that it's easy to see how to go from Agricultural Jobs -> Manufacturing -> Services, but what comes after the service and manufacturing jobs are displaced? Is there a fourth type of job sector that humans can do that will provide gainful employment for billions of people?

Well it's easy to see now...there was no way to be sure, say, a century ago when Ford was installing assembly lines in the Model T plants that it would work out.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 05:06

TwoQuestions: Aug 26, 2011

DrSunshine posted:

The problem though is that it's easy to see how to go from Agricultural Jobs -> Manufacturing -> Services, but what comes after the service and manufacturing jobs are displaced? Is there a fourth type of job sector that humans can do that will provide gainful employment for billions of people?

How about we dispense with the stupid notion that everyone deserves a living. If someone can't make it, get rid of them.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Nov 26, 2015 05:10

my effigy burns: Aug 23, 2015; IF I'M NOT SHITPOSTING ABOUT HOW I, A JUNIOR DEVELOPER IN JAVASCRIPT KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW, PLEASE CHECK TO BE SURE MY ACCOUNT WAS NOT COMPROMISED BY A CLIENT-SIDE BOTNET, TIA

TwoQuestions posted:

How about we dispense with the stupid notion that everyone deserves a living. If someone can't make it, get rid of them.

Alternatively, how about we dispense with the stupid notion that our economy correctly estimates people's potential value to society? Our current system assumes that, from birth on, the children of the very wealthy are valuable and useful and should be given a lot of resources. Furthermore, it assumes that the children of the very poor are probably worthless and shouldn't be given very many resources at all. Since 99.9% of people including 99.9% of the current upper class came from people that were once peasants, it's pretty safe to say that status at birth isn't a good indicator of eventual value.

Once we get the robotic automation going, why not just give everyone a guaranteed minimum income, free healthcare, and free education, and then introduce a one-child policy if and when things get too crowded or the pace of innovation slows?

# ? Nov 26, 2015 05:48

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 10:28

size1one: Jun 24, 2008; I don't want a nation just for me, I want a nation for everyone

INH5 posted:

I think UPS drivers are pretty safe, because even if you could fully automate driving the truck, somebody still has to walk up the front door of the house and deliver the package, and we're a long long way away from cheap robots that can reliably walk up stairs without falling over.

They aren't safe from lowered wages as their responsibilities are diminished. Or their workloads will increase since they now can focus on being prepared to dash out of the van while it drives itself.

# ? Nov 26, 2015 05:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Technological Unemployment: Those Dang Robots Are After Our Jobs!!

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