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Robots are going to take your jobs. I mean, you probably knew that. Like, 100 years from now, right? Not in your lifetime, but your grandkids or something. No. It's going to happen in your lifetime and it will happen relatively soon across several job types. The Facts: The Future of Employment (Oxford Martin, 2013): 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. Economic Report of the President (2016): US Government report that came to similar results as the Oxford study. Starts on page 236.  (from the oxford study)  What does all this mean? Robots, computers and other technologies are replacing human workers and new jobs aren't being made fast enough. It will lead to systemic unemployment. We will have a permanent class of workers unable to find work. Our current social safety nets are inadequate. Nobody seems to care or even fully understands what is happening. This is a bunch of luddite nonsense! / Technology hasn't ruined us so far! In the 19th century, the luddites (a group of rebellious, highly skilled workers, many from guilds) feared that technology would rob people of jobs. This turned out to be false. Technology broke down highly skilled jobs into easier tasks. These tasks paid less than highly skilled workers, but many more people were hired, which in turn increased demand and the demand was able to be met thanks to this new class of workers. And so this cycle continued, breaking down more and more highly skilled jobs, opening more doors for the average worker. In the 1990's, this cycle came to an end. Technology began to break down the very middle class jobs technology had previously created. Low wage workers have taken their place. Soon, these low wage jobs will also come to an end. It will not be an even breakdown, and it will not all happen at once. There are certain job sectors that are most vulnerable, they likely pay less than $20 an hour, and some of them consists of huge numbers of workers. Transportation alone has about 3.2 million jobs in the US. Holy poo poo what do we do!? That's what we need to discuss. The ideal solution is to support free college education and a guaranteed minimum income. Automation can be allowed to happen if we focus the workforce into jobs that are much less likely to be automated. Many of these non-vulnerable jobs won't be automated for at least 20 years. If for some reason someone still can't find a job, it is necessary for a person to participate in the economy in order for automated companies to still be able to sell product. A basic income or guaranteed minimum income would provide enough to live on at the very least. Less ideal would be to prevent automation from happening. There is no realistic neo-luddite movement to speak of, for now. However, CEOs and billionaires have been threatening minimum wage workers with automated replacements, particularly fast food workers, in an effort to stymie minimum wage growth.  I'm mad about automated cars!! Please don't. We've had so many derails. Weather it does or does not come to fruition, it's only a fraction of the problem. Here, watch a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
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Dec 1, 2016 16:09
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I am about to become an automation engineer at a software company. How long will it be until my job is automated?
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Dec 1, 2016 16:41
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B B posted:I am about to become an automation engineer at a software company. How long will it be until my job is automated? It depends how good you are at it
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Dec 1, 2016 17:03
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Same thing will happened that happened like 6000 years ago, 200 years ago and 50 years ago: Jobs will just move up maslow's hierarchy (or rather, modern versions of similar ideas) and everyone will complain that all the new jobs are just frivolous and all the real jobs are gone until a generation passes and it just ends up it was actually better after all.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:29
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You think the 3 million transportation workers in this country are all going to go back to college to become automation engineers?
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Dec 1, 2016 17:33
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Mozi posted:You think the 3 million transportation workers in this country are all going to go back to college to become automation engineers?
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Dec 1, 2016 17:34
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Mozi posted:You think the 3 million transportation workers in this country are all going to go back to college to become automation engineers? A society with that level of automated vehicles that it can replace 3 million drivers is a level of automation that would reshape society so much hypothesizing what individual people would do is pretty silly. Think about how cars themselves changed everything about american society.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:43
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It's sorta depressing that what should be a net benefit for humanity, in that we won't be stuck doing repetitive and monotonous tasks, will ultimately prove disastrous to huge segments of the population, because yay capitalism.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:47
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Monaghan posted:It's sorta depressing that what should be a net benefit for humanity, in that we won't be stuck doing repetitive and monotonous tasks, will ultimately prove disastrous to huge segments of the population, because yay capitalism. Pretty much. This transition period will be more or less 'communism or bust' for the majority of us. For the economic and political elites, it'll be a game of balancing greed vs. The need to not be eaten alive by poors. If they play it right, we all fall into abject poverty or die off squabbling about the ethics of hard work and capitalism until only the elite, their automated servants, and a relative handful of underclass workers remain. It'll be like Wall-E except instead of a junkyard it'll be the mass graves of the underclass. This is the real Agenda 21!
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Dec 1, 2016 17:58
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It's only disastrous if you hold to the idea that everybody must work a job for a living wage. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that people must graduate college in order to have a chance at a healthy life - I think it's a bit crazy, actually. Not to mention my friends who are struggling with student loan debt a decade after graduation, working in a field completely unrelated to their field of study. But that's a digression. My own sense is that while in theory automation will take over, the complexity of the systems needed to design, produce and maintain automated systems are going to run up against a much more violent and chaotic world in the near to mid future which will give a reminder of the benefits of a more resilient system (lots of human labor,) but who knows. Mozi fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 17:59
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B B posted:I am about to become an automation engineer at a software company. How long will it be until my job is automated? Owlofcreamcheese posted:Same thing will happened that happened like 6000 years ago, 200 years ago and 50 years ago: Jobs will just move up maslow's hierarchy (or rather, modern versions of similar ideas) and everyone will complain that all the new jobs are just frivolous and all the real jobs are gone until a generation passes and it just ends up it was actually better after all.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:02
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Mozi posted:It's only disastrous if you hold to the idea that everybody must work a job for a living wage. Buckminster Fuller's quote is nice and all, but good luck getting humanity to shake the 'hard work is necessary to justify one's existence' mentality. The sub-upper class seem more than willing to blame each other, rather than the 1%, for the state of the economy and what's to come. Because one day they will be the one wearing the boot! Cicero posted:Programmers have been attempting to automate themselves out of a job since the first assembler. Thus far they've been spectacularly unsuccessful. Art is not a viable employment solution because it requires popularity to be economically beneficial. It relies on the fact there's only 1 mega popular celebrity making music/movies/etc. for every million regular schlubs who consume it. There will be no art based economy to replace our current paradigm of work. And the computer therapist doesn't have to replace a human expert entirely, but if it effectively handles many low priority concerns and simply problems effectively, then less human experts are needed as many are simply screened out. PoizenJam fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 18:02
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Cicero posted:I at least half-agree: we'll probably see more and more jobs where people specifically value the human element. Live music is an obvious, currently-existing example of this; we've had excellent sound systems and recording capabilities for some time now, but people still pay lots of money to hear their favorite bands at live concerts. Similarly, even if computers were capable of being, say, therapists, in terms of raw analytical/language ability, you'd probably still want a human to be the one actually talking to you. I'm not even thinking highly trained jobs. I'm talking about like, all the jobs that don't exist now because they are not important enough to hire someone else to do. The way cooking used to be. Maybe the la de da queen could get someone to cook for them but not the common person, they were spending hours cooking at home. Now restaurants are so easy and cheap some people die from eating there too much. I COULD make my own cloths, I vaguely know how to sew, but I don't because I can just have someone in a factory do it for me. In the future people there will be lots of jobs doing things that were not seen as worth employing people to do, since labor could be more usefully applied to more important things. That's always how it's gone.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm talking about like, all the jobs that don't exist now because they are not important enough to hire someone else to do. The way cooking used to be. Maybe the la de da queen could get someone to cook for them but not the common person, they were spending hours cooking at home. it's not clear when you're talking about but since you're talking about the queen, labor in early modern england was so cheap that one of the stepping stone status symbols of the middle class was hiring someone to cook for you. more people had maids back then than do now, and any ease in cooking today is due to processed foods and advances in food packaging
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Dec 1, 2016 18:26
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Owlofcreamcheese is right. Once all the menial and skilled jobs are gone new jobs will be created for us that are right now deemed not worthy of doing. Not everyone can make rape jokes while playing video games on the internet, but the rest of us might find work as gimps or reality TV death-match-for-food contestants.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:27
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm not even thinking highly trained jobs.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:32
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boner confessor posted:it's not clear when you're talking about but since you're talking about the queen, labor in early modern england was so cheap that one of the stepping stone status symbols of the middle class was hiring someone to cook for you. more people had maids back then than do now, and any ease in cooking today is due to processed foods and advances in food packaging Think of an annoyance in your daily life that other people might have. Someone will have a job dealing with that annoyance in the near future because that is what always happens.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:32
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Think of an annoyance in your daily life that other people might have. Someone will have a job dealing with that annoyance in the near future because that is what always happens. someone's going to be paid to get you to stop posting?
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Dec 1, 2016 18:33
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Can you come up with one or more examples of what these jobs might be, specifically? Like boner confessor, I'm not entirely convinced by the cooking argument, for I think the same reason. I am deliberately avoiding trying to be futurist and making up specific careers because that just pits my specific dumb idea instead of it being the concept that humans have a bunch of unfilled needs and every time they fill them they suddenly realize that instead of being done that all the lesser problems are needs too.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:34
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Are you missing the part where in the future those annoyances will be solved by automation and not humans? Also, it's worth watching the video in the OP if only to see the numbers of jobs that are going to be affected. It's not as simple as saying 'well they'll find something else to do.' We're talking about 45% of the workforce being unemployable. To say 'well they'll all make bands and people love live music' is laughable.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:35
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it's really not a good idea to resort to historical economics to explain future trends because historical methods of dealing with surplus population are forced deportation, starvation, slavery, compulsory military service, etc.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I am deliberately avoiding trying to be futurist and making up specific careers because that just pits my specific dumb idea instead of it being the concept that humans have a bunch of unfilled needs and every time they fill them they suddenly realize that instead of being done that all the lesser problems are needs too.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:43
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the problem with oocc's argument also is the focus on work rather than on the system which prioritizes work. there's plenty of necessary work to be done - look at all the people in society who need care, orphans, the elderly, the disabled, addicts, the mentally ill, who aren't getting it because nobody's paying adequately for it. their needs aren't currently being addressed. there are tons of perfectly good cats and dogs killed every day because they are surplus for society's need for pets - these animals could be cared for if there weren't financial barriers to care for them. when oocc says "needs" what he means is "needs of those with the ability to pay to have their needs cared for" which is a necessarily shrinking group as the labor pool itself contracts. oocc is arguing that an equilibrium exists where this isn't clearly the case
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Dec 1, 2016 18:46
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm not even thinking highly trained jobs. The reason those jobs don't exist now isn't because the economy just can't spare the surplus labor for them, it's because most people don't have the money to hire someone to do them. Automation decimating the middle class will destroy low-wage work, rather than helping it - restaurants and other service jobs depend on a certain number of people having a certain amount of surplus money that they can spend on unnecessary services. The issue is not the importance of the jobs, but the number of people with the ability to pay to have them done.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:01
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Mercrom posted:Owlofcreamcheese is right. Once all the menial and skilled jobs are gone new jobs will be created for us that are right now deemed not worthy of doing. Not everyone can make rape jokes while playing video games on the internet, but the rest of us might find work as gimps or reality TV death-match-for-food contestants.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:06
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Which means people will be competing for the chance to serve the people who haven't yet been automated out of a job. Okay, but that is the same as the US going from 90% farmers to 9% farmers over a generation. It's not everyone just slaving to serve the few remaining farmers, it's people running off to make teeshirts and arby's burgers and stuff for eachother. Stuff that wasn't worth doing.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:09
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Hey now, it's not just skilled workers who are going to get hosed over. We're finding new ways to replace/outsource people in white collar jobs with software. Cloud tech has now made it possible to shift the more actual human work to cheaper jurisdictions while keeping the regulatory jurisdiction in somewhere "Tax Efficient". Increasing acceptance of digital signatures is making a new round of admin work redundant. It's not just the low level corporate drones at risk either. Decision making algorithms, crafted to take care of business logic automatically, are starting to replace middle management too, requiring only the barest minimum of interaction.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:27
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Right now we don't consider killing rats and then selling the carcasses to street vendors for black-market credit chips a viable career option but in the future that is just one of a multitude of new, exciting job opportunities.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:28
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Okay, but that is the same as the US going from 90% farmers to 9% farmers over a generation. It's not everyone just slaving to serve the few remaining farmers, it's people running off to make teeshirts and arby's burgers and stuff for eachother. Stuff that wasn't worth doing. No, it's people having the money to buy shirts and burgers, due to the formation of a real middle class. Clothes and food were always worth having, it's just that now more people can afford to pay for those things.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Okay, but that is the same as the US going from 90% farmers to 9% farmers over a generation. It's not everyone just slaving to serve the few remaining farmers, it's people running off to make teeshirts and arby's burgers and stuff for eachother. Stuff that wasn't worth doing. i think you'll find that people were making clothing and cooking food in 1900 as well. simplistic historical reference doesn't really do the job here, you're proposing some kind of hierarchy of jobs where food production is at the top and video game playing is at the bottom and we're all just slowly going down the chain. you're ignoring a huge number of factors like how society has traditionally dealt with surplus labor (spoiler: horribly) as well as the fact that the labor market has unprecedented levels of surplus within it both in proportionate and absolute terms. the growth of the middle class in the 20th century allowed for a large tertiary employment sector to form, the question of "what happens to these people as there are less jobhavers over time" can't be answered through historic analysis because this sort of problem has never happened before
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Dec 1, 2016 19:31
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How do I become a computer?
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Dec 1, 2016 19:33
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Can you come up with one or more examples of what these jobs might be, specifically? Like boner confessor
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Dec 1, 2016 19:55
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Guavanaut posted:I misread this as an example of a suggestion of what one of those jobs might be. please camgirls have been a thing for a while now
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Dec 1, 2016 19:56
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boner confessor posted:"what happens to these people as there are less jobhavers over time" can't be answered through historic analysis because this sort of problem has never happened before It's literally happened over and over a bunch of times that the dominant "profession" rapidly shrinks to be a small percentage of the population who can do it for everyone due to technology. It's been fine every single time.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:58
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's literally happened over and over a bunch of times that the dominant "profession" rapidly shrinks to be a small percentage of the population who can do it for everyone due to technology. Yeah, the Gilded Age was absolutely fine, right? Actually, the wholesale demise of entire categories of employment typically leads to considerable economic upheavals which seriously affect large portions of the population unless remedied by considerable government action.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:03
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boner confessor posted:it's really not a good idea to resort to historical economics to explain future trends because historical methods of dealing with surplus population are forced deportation, starvation, slavery, compulsory military service, etc. It also only works in this case if you assume that every previous example of an industry being automated was a discrete event and not just one point on a long term trend.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:04
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Okay, but that is the same as the US going from 90% farmers to 9% farmers over a generation. It's not everyone just slaving to serve the few remaining farmers, it's people running off to make teeshirts and arby's burgers and stuff for eachother. Stuff that wasn't worth doing. We're already not handling that transition well, I don't think that repeating variations of it with less and less workers needed over time is a "solution"
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Dec 1, 2016 20:09
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Automation is going to eliminate a substantial number of jobs. Ownership of stuff seems like it will decline for a good many folks which seems problematic for a consumer driven society. Maybe good for the environment, but I dunno the how the economics shakes out for everyone involved. Presumably we move to more and more rent based services such as automated cars and the like and this will greatly enrich a handful of corporations, but they depend on folks being able to pay those rents. What happens when they can no longer sell to consumers simply because they have no funds? And what does this mean for government dependent on income based tax revenues? I'm not an economist and I'd be grateful for anyone with reputable studies on economics of automation.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:16
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Death Bot posted:We're already not handling that transition well, I don't think that repeating variations of it with less and less workers needed over time is a "solution" The solution certainly isn't that we need to hold some sort of eternal empire of people driving trucks and working at arby's because it just happens that the technology from before I was born was good and the technology made since all happened to be devil magic. Basically look at your lovely racist uncle wishing it could be the 1950s again and forever, this is that, but for the 90s. Back when we use to have people working at wendys for poo poo wages and having people drive trucks cross country on meth like god designed things.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:17
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I'm a little surprised by some conservative economists calling for a minimum income in order to combat automation, but then I realise they mean bare minimum, like "just enough so you won't die." What a wonderful future.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:19
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