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The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

107 points by aburan28 10y ago

yalooze 10y ago
Can any one recommend any recent books or articles on this topic? I'm particularly interested in what the current suggestions are for solutions (if any), which this article doesn't tackle.
- ldp01 10y ago
  I highly recommend Yanis Varoufakis: The ex Greek finance minister who was in office during the Grexit crisis. He advocates basic income as a solution. This is a speech rather than an article, but I found it pretty relevant and compelling (He starts talking about AI at 7:50) [Yanis Varoufakis: Basic Income is a Necessity] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss
thatfrenchguy 10y ago
What if people with jobs worked less ?
- jokoon 10y ago
  They will be paid less. Ultimately a company hire more people and it's harder to havve more workers for the same amount of work. In france we have a 35h per week system, it's a basis but it's not really ideal either, many companies need to use "heure supplementaires" but they cost more.
- adrianN 10y ago
  1) Why would you pay them the same for less work? 2) Once a machine can do the job, why would you hire a human at all?
  - akerro 10y ago
    >2) Once a machine can do the job, why would you hire a human at all? Because we need a point in our lives, otherwise we will make up some gods and start killing each other. Jobs keep us busy, keep revolts down. Most frustrated and aggressive people are those without jobs and daily schedules.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
      True in theory, but Spain has been in a state of mass unemployment (>20% unemployment rate, >40% youth unemployment rate) since 2010, and it still is among the top 25 safest countries in the world ( http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/safest-countries-in-the-world.html http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/safest-countries-in-the-w... ). Portugal has been over 13% unemployment rate since 2011, and it's the 5th country in the world by that same index.
      - Clubber 10y ago
        I would imagine they have much better social safety nets than in the US. In the US, if you are unable to work, for whatever reason, you are pretty much on your own.
        akerro 10y ago
        Watch a movie "Where to invade next". EU countries where designed completely differently, in some countries welfare takes more than 60% of taxes.
        Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
        Sure, but the point in the comment I replied to was that we need to keep people busy (not only with their material needs covered) to avoid violence and revolts. The case of Spain or Portugal seems to tell us that as long as people have basic needs covered, they don't necessarily fight or revolt much.
        10y ago
- formula1 10y ago
  You think through the eyes of idealism. Consider this You are the owner of a fortune 500 company You need to hire enough people to fullfill 1600 hours a day, 14 days per paycheck. You want to hire the people as cheaply as possible. If the individual knows they only have to work 20 hrs per week to survive, they have the power to negotiate. If the individual believes that they have to work two jobs for 60 hrs per week to survive, the company has the power to negotiate. Why would you pay more money for same value and less negotiation power? In your ideal world there are enough starving/superficial/ambitious people that you can pay pennies for exponential growth.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    Sorry, I don't understand your point in the historical context. Original labour conditions in factories were horrible. The conditions did not improve through economic rationalization but because society recognized it as wrong and forced factory owners to employ better working conditions.
    - formula1 10y ago
      Its slso possible they werent sustainable. Worker strikes snd unions will definitely put a hamper on your production. If people cant support children or they know a job is a death sentence, when an opening comes up due to a strike they may not be too eager to work
      - fsloth 10y ago
        Yes, I trivialized a complex social evolution on my comment to make the point that labour conditions were not changed simply because it made sense economically in the factory owner's yearly budgeting. The main driving factor was recognition from all around that the labour conditions needed to change for ethical reasons, and the factory owners had to acquiesce to the demands of the society.
        formula1 10y ago
        Are you talking about the gov? If thats the case, you should look into the history in regards to unions and unethical labor practice. I think it was this year that a whistleblower revealed that lithium was being mined by children. I appreciate you think we have "evolved" but really we just wear better masks
- humanrebar 10y ago
  For jobs where 40 hours per week has basically the same productivity as 30 hours per week, that's fine. For jobs where context is important (medicine, software), 'working less' will cause a disproportionate hit to productivity. Some problems you can't throw more people at. That's more or less the thesis of the Mythical Man-Month, and it applies to many careers. Though there are probably plenty of careers (like driving trucks, certain kinds of teaching) where you can lighten the work load and hire more.
  - sverige 10y ago
    No, you can't lighten the work load for trucking (without automation). Over the road truck driving doesn't benefit from reducing hours and hiring more, since OTR drivers basically live in their trucks for three or four weeks at a time to maximize flexibility in moving freight. You would need more trucks to accomplish that, and there's already a driver shortage since there aren't enough Millenials willing to do the job. The other thing is that driver pay has declined considerably over the past 25 years (stagnant since the early 90s, minus inflation), so it would cost trucking companies more (more trucks, more drivers) while decreasing wages for individual drivers. OTR truck drivers are paid by the mile. Third, the increased costs for moving freight would end up increasing the costs to consumers for all goods moved by trucks, which is pretty much everything.
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      > Over the road truck driving doesn't benefit from reducing hours and hiring more, since OTR drivers basically live in their trucks for three or four weeks at a time to maximize flexibility in moving freight. So give them three weeks on, three weeks off. Or have them drive shorter runs, handing trailers off to other trucks for 'long hauls'. To your other points, I wasn't commenting on the economics of pay levels for truck drivers. I was saying if everyone was happy with the wages, some tasks (leaving the concept of 'a job' to the side) can certainly be divvied up among more workers without a major loss in productivity... The only objection I could see to that hypothesis is that there's a shortage in the natural talent pool so that there aren't enough workers to allow a shorter work week. Maybe there aren't enough patient, healthy, and alert people (or whatever the other qualities of a good trucker are) to handle three times more truckers working one-third as much. That's an empirical question at the end of the day. With that in mind, it seems unlikely to me that makes sense to have three times more brain surgeons working one third as much.
ldp01 10y ago
Another one of these articles. It's almost like there is a robot somewhere writing them...
cousin_it 10y ago
Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on welfare instead, and the economy as a whole is burning almost 2x more resources. Sure, the employer is spending slightly less, while screwing over the economy via prisoner's dilemma logic. [1] http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20160704.html http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20160704.html
- usrusr 10y ago
  One more for the huge but reliably fruitless pile of good arguments for an unconditional basic income: with an UBI, it becomes possible for the worker to outprice the robot even at a rate below the survival minimum. E.g. to consume 1.5x resources total compared to bare survival, which would still be less than the nearly 2x of unemployed+robot. (edit:typo)
  - cousin_it 10y ago
    I guess it's more of an argument for a universal wage subsidy, but I'd be happy with UBI as well.
    - sverige 10y ago
      I've been thinking about UBI a lot. Who's going to pay for it? Certainly not the big tech companies. They barely pay any taxes now, and they're the ones who stand to gain the most with automation.
      - dmoo 10y ago
        Don't forget that if nobody gets paid then they can't consume all the wonderful output the robots produce.
      - 10y ago
iliketosleep 10y ago
It appears like the logical conclusion of capitalism: the majority of people being made redundant due to AI/automation, and a small handful of corporations basically ruling the world.
- JMCQ87 10y ago
  Depends on us if that's the end of history, or just a stage though. ;)
- trgn 10y ago
  Compare this to the logical conclusion of capitalism that Marx put forward 150 years ago. For him, capitalism creates an ever-growing proletariat, a majority of the population being transformed into a commodity; individuals become interchangeable, and are payed only enough to have their basic needs met. The proletariat as a whole was a necessary condition though. Their labor produced value, the surplus of which went to the owning class. Your take is similar, but instead now people will actually become redundant. Not even producing value anymore. Things did not exactly turn out the way Marx thought they would. I certainly hope your prediction won't either!
  - iliketosleep 10y ago
    my prediction isn't necessarily a gloomy one. once people become redundant in terms of their labour there are many possibilities. I see VR playing a leading role :)
neuromancer2701 10y ago
My current theory is that this “automation bomb” won't really happen in the sense that 5 million Truckers are going to get laid off all of a sudden. Especially in the case of Truckers the average age is getting higher and higher every year because Millennials have said that is not a job they want. So my theory is that as Baby Boomer/Early Gen Xers retire automation will step in and fill the employment gap. So there won't massive amounts of laid off Truckers sitting around. It will be under-employed Millennials, which is the same issue we have now.
- gozur88 10y ago
  That's how it works when the fundamentals shift, and it's hard to see because it's not like you lost a job - you just never got it to start with.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > So my theory is that as Baby Boomer/Early Gen Xers retire automation will step in and fill the employment gap. So there won't massive amounts of laid off Truckers sitting around. Young workers used to take those jobs, though. The young (especially men) are underemployed right now. If you're right, they are the ones hurt the most in the long run by automation.
  - neuromancer2701 10y ago
    I think the better question is why don't/haven't Millennials taken those jobs as previous generations did. This is a problem that has occurred outside of the technology debate.
    - mdorazio 10y ago
      There has actually been quite a bit of discussion around this. Here's one article discussing it [1]. It's a combination of factors including low pay for the number of hours worked, social stigma/low respect, huge amount of time away from home/fun activities, and the fact that driving just kind of sucks. Also, as another commenter mentioned, trucking companies have not made it all that easy to get started from zero skill/certification recently. [1] http://www.overdriveonline.com/trucking-or-not-with-the-twenty-somethings/ http://www.overdriveonline.com/trucking-or-not-with-the-twen...
DyslexicAtheist 10y ago
the underlying message from the top is rather brutal (or with a healthy dose of realism?): "No matter if you're farmer, factory worker or good with your hands, learn to code or be prepared to get swept away." Obama's message to the kids about learning to code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XvmhE1J9PY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XvmhE1J9PY
- Noseshine 10y ago
  But the only reason for having vastly more people with coding abilities is to lower the price of coding. There is no need for so many coders. Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once, then replication is free - that's even worse than in industry, where everything needs to be developed just once too but at least production required people.
  - alanwatts 10y ago
    >Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once, then replication is free This is true in terms of physical reality, but not in terms of the patent system.
    - Noseshine 10y ago
      Which is human-made and not a property of the universe. That is not an argument for OPs comment, since it can be changed very easily. Nor does it have any influence even if it isn't (changed) - I don't see the relevance for this sub-discussion?
      - alanwatts 10y ago
        >Which is human-made and not a property of the universe Precisely my point. >it can be changed very easily. It would seem this is not the case, though I wish it was.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
beat 10y ago
I'm prone to saying my job is to build robots to do my job for me. Any time I can replace my own labor with a robot (script/program), I do so. I won't ever run out of work, because software is inherently creative. It's the uncreative jobs that rely on humans as muscle or control mechanisms that are in danger. It's not like humanity has never gone through this before, either. Two centuries ago, 98% of people were employed in farming. Today, it's more like 3% and falling. But it took generations for the robots (farm machinery) to take over. It wasn't as rapid as, say, the rise of self-driving trucks will be.
- system16 10y ago
  A lot of software development is far from creative. Many company projects involve making versions of X that do Y (Facebook for the enterprise!), or modifying an existing tool to fit a new requirement. A lot of it comes down to putting together existing pieces, and while there aren't a lot of solutions today that can accomplish this effectively without humans, I think it's a bit short-sighted to think there won't be in the future and that just because you are a developer you are exempt from this.
  - beat 10y ago
    I've been creating software professionally for over 20 years. The only tools from the start that are still in my toolbox are Unix (now Linux) and SQL. Java didn't even exist when I started, nor did Python or Ruby or JavaScript or even Apache. But my job feels basically the same. It always will, because the problems are always out there at the edge. They're incredibly specific, and often at the bleeding edge of what software can do. Basically, software meets human needs. You need humans to come up with problems to solve, and describe them specifically enough that a computer can be programmed to repeat the solution. So those creative tasks, and the discipline of turning vague human ideas into strict logic, those aren't going anywhere, at least not with the tools we have today, or a reasonable extrapolation of those tools into the future. Programming languages may change, but the existence of programming languages does not. You still need humans to figure out how to say what they really mean. On the other hand, I could spend days or weeks configuring a development server old-school, or I can run 'vagrant up' and have a perfect, repeatable development environment that works on any server. That's the robots. I love the robots.
w8rbt 10y ago
"Politicians need to begin thinking boldly, now, about a world in which driverless vehicles replace most truck drivers’ jobs..." Can we replace politicians with robots?
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Somebody elected them, so they are not the cause but he effect. Even a guy like Trump finds a lot of support from voters. So it seems to me ranting about politicians is like treating the skin rash when someone has measles. Sure, choice is very limited especially in winner-takes-all systems like the UK or the US, but even so, the politicians you get can then be viewed as consequence of the system, so again the secondary issue.
- alanwatts 10y ago
  Reminds me of a Buckminster Fuller quote: >"I'm going to give you an important kind of a picture. I hear a lot of people say "I don't like machinery and technology it's making a lot of trouble", so we're going to take all the machinery away from all the countries of the world, all machinery, all the tracks and the wires, and the works and were going to dump it all in the ocean. And you'll discover that within 6 months, 2 billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain. So we say, "that's not a very good idea, let's put all the machinery back where it was". Then, we're going to take all the politicians from all the countries around the world and we're going to send them on a trip around the sun, and you'll find we keep right on eating. And the political barriers now...scientists say very clear you could make the world work and take care of 100% of the people at a higher standard of living than anyone has ever known despite the increasing population, but you can't do it with the political barriers, any more than you can try run a human organism with a wall between the ear, the eye, and the stomach. It is an organic whole, it is total industrialization."
dharma1 10y ago
I'm not really sure we are going to see the kind of job losses from robots/AI that people fear, not within the next 10 years anyway
jr94g 10y ago
As time goes on the necessity of a for-use economy becomes more and more apparent. A for-profit system where human labor becomes less and less necessary is going to lead to a massive concentration of wealth and the destruction of the economic middle class. It's time to accept that a worker planned economy is necessary. Not a government planned one, but one run by the people for all society. Personally I propose a syndicalist economy. Profit where the citizens in society don't see returns, or can only exist by living off of government assistance bodes a very grim future for all mankind.
_yosefk 10y ago
"If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, 66 percent of jobs in finance and insurance could be replaced, the most recent report says." If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, probably >99% of all jobs could be replaced, 'cause it's pretty close to passing the Turing test. I'm willing to get monthly payments from anyone who wants to bet until this happens, and then pay out monthly payments after this happens till I die.
- alanwatts 10y ago
  The difference between your comparison is that automation of finance/insurance would be achieved purely by mathematical calculations performed by software, while the automation of many/most other jobs would require much more complex robotics.
  - tarpherder 10y ago
    I read the parent comment as; getting to the point where computers understand speech that well, is a far more difficult challenge than a large number of robotic challenges.
known 10y ago
I'd endorse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_worl...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
crdoconnor 10y ago
"Job insecurity is a central theme of the 2016 campaign, fueling popular anger about trade deals and immigration. But economists warn that much bigger job losses are ahead in the United States — driven not by foreign competition but by advancing technology." Technology in and of itself destroys and creates jobs and it will keep doing so until all human wants and needs are satisfied (i.e. never). While automation of manual farm work in the 19th/20th century eliminated farming jobs - which accounted for a huge majority of jobs; it didn't eliminate jobs. The main thrust of this argument isn't even This Time It's Different, because reasons, it's just "pay no attention to the history of automation". Why would David Ignatius lie about this? Because the popular anger about trade deals isn't misplaced at all. It's absolutely accurate. That is what is driving job losses, income losses and poverty - not technology. The rhetoric from 'elite' economists about the robotjobpocaplyse is simply an instance of the 1% trying to dodge pitchforks.
leeter 10y ago
A few things to consider about robots: * They require high tech manufacturing to maintain * They require a power source (electrical, hydraulic, etc) Humans while not maintenance free... or power source free (food is a powersource) don't require a ton of technology to get working. While the quality is probably not as good as a robot due to an inability to be perfectly consistent it can be good enough.
hamilyon2 10y ago
The obvious solution is more labour-intensive non easily automatable jobs i.e. service economy. There is a limit of how much laptops and trucks economy wants. But there is no obvious limit in demand of quality services like education, health and leisure. I want to be surrounded by caring people and care for others. That's natural. Question is how to re-orient, re-train and re-educate people to both provide those services and consume them. For each advertisement of yoga lessons and massage sessions I see hundreds of ads on new smartphone or car. That is ridiculous, because I need single car and smartphone, but could go to yoga and massage every day. edit: typos
continuational 10y ago
We already experienced automation for decades. Has that lead to higher unemployment? If not, why will it lead to that in the future?
johngalt 10y ago
Technology has been reducing the need for human labor since the invention of the plow. And yet we aren't all unemployed hunter-gatherers. You could argue that 'this time it's different', but you have to at least acknowledge that luddites of every generation have made similar claims and been wrong every time. Literally tried and proven wrong for centuries.
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  There is nothing to be replaced by in the first place, because most jobs are just arbitrary, and non-required. Not all, but most. I'm sure most people could get by on a fraction of what they actually do. It just comes down to, people don't really know what they want. That's why we work like we do in the first place, most jobs are just jobs for the sake of it, 9-5, Monday to Friday keeping peoples minds occupied and keeping those at the top important. This includes "special" titles like, CIO, CTO, CEO etc. Ultimately humans need very little to be happy and survive, but instead we have invented economies and lots of arbitrary stuff, luxuries, we don't really need, jobs are how one gets those useless things. When I hear about AI and robots taking over the world, taking our jobs etc, it's nice to be able to say, "oh well, there goes sitting in a building 9-5 like a goldfish in a bowl". It's also sad for the robots :(
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply What is different this time, I think is that we're giving up our main advantage: Intelligence. Humans have always been able to fall back on work no animal/machine can do, but we're running out of work that machines can't do.
  - johngalt 10y ago
    The video is a well articulated argument, but there are two large gaps in reasoning that are common with this line of thought. Grey ignores the idea that technology also allows for normal people to do jobs that used to require highly skilled specialists. A big part of this is so called 'brain' labor. A banker before computers had to have amortization tables manually calculated. Now the personal banker who does your HELOC probably doesn't even know basic algebra. If we ran technology in reverse and took away the calculators we would end up with fewer banking jobs not more. Because every banker would have to be highly specialized and costly. The "factory jobs" were originally an invention of technology. A method to take a large number of workers + automation to beat artisans and specialists. If Watson is doing diagnosis, that means that more people with less training can be effective 'doctors'. Which brings me to my second point. Often when things become more efficient we end up using more of them overall. Jevon's paradox applied to labor. Think of what it cost to transport 20 tons of cargo from NY to SF before trucking and standardized containers. How many man hours were involved? How many different specialized jobs? Now done by one guy with a truck replacing them all. Yet the number of people employed overall in transportation went up not down. IMHO the best example is IT. Think about the server admin ratios in the early days. Perhaps a team of 10 to maintain a single mainframe. Now we have 10 guys in a data center managing 50,000 servers. Yet the overall number of people employed in IT went up not down. As processes become more efficient and cheap we consume more of it at an increasing rate.
emblem21 10y ago
Doesn't this reasoning hold up for outsourced jobs as well?
davidf18 10y ago
Macy’s to Close 100 Stores as E-Rivals and Discounting Hit Legacy Retailers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277307 E-Rivals === Amazon. Amazon uses lots of robots for their distribution centers -- they even purchased a robotics company and the subsidiary is called Amazon Robotics. I still think the major issue is trade agreements and the importation of foreign labor in using H1-B visas to replace STEM (think Disney and Abbott Pharma replacing their IT workers with H1-B visas) and H2-A and H2-B visas replacing blue collar workers. Do the numbers. The technology is sensationalizing. Although Amazon replacing Macy's is Internet automation and Robots in the warehouses.

107 points by aburan28 10y ago

Can any one recommend any recent books or articles on this topic? I'm particularly interested in what the current suggestions are for solutions (if any), which this article doesn't tackle.

ldp01 10y ago
I highly recommend Yanis Varoufakis: The ex Greek finance minister who was in office during the Grexit crisis. He advocates basic income as a solution. This is a speech rather than an article, but I found it pretty relevant and compelling (He starts talking about AI at 7:50) [Yanis Varoufakis: Basic Income is a Necessity] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss

thatfrenchguy 10y ago

What if people with jobs worked less ?

jokoon 10y ago
They will be paid less. Ultimately a company hire more people and it's harder to havve more workers for the same amount of work. In france we have a 35h per week system, it's a basis but it's not really ideal either, many companies need to use "heure supplementaires" but they cost more.
adrianN 10y ago
1) Why would you pay them the same for less work? 2) Once a machine can do the job, why would you hire a human at all?
- akerro 10y ago
  >2) Once a machine can do the job, why would you hire a human at all? Because we need a point in our lives, otherwise we will make up some gods and start killing each other. Jobs keep us busy, keep revolts down. Most frustrated and aggressive people are those without jobs and daily schedules.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
    True in theory, but Spain has been in a state of mass unemployment (>20% unemployment rate, >40% youth unemployment rate) since 2010, and it still is among the top 25 safest countries in the world ( http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/safest-countries-in-the-world.html http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/safest-countries-in-the-w... ). Portugal has been over 13% unemployment rate since 2011, and it's the 5th country in the world by that same index.
    - Clubber 10y ago
      I would imagine they have much better social safety nets than in the US. In the US, if you are unable to work, for whatever reason, you are pretty much on your own.
      - akerro 10y ago
        Watch a movie "Where to invade next". EU countries where designed completely differently, in some countries welfare takes more than 60% of taxes.
      - Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
        Sure, but the point in the comment I replied to was that we need to keep people busy (not only with their material needs covered) to avoid violence and revolts. The case of Spain or Portugal seems to tell us that as long as people have basic needs covered, they don't necessarily fight or revolt much.
        10y ago
formula1 10y ago
You think through the eyes of idealism. Consider this You are the owner of a fortune 500 company You need to hire enough people to fullfill 1600 hours a day, 14 days per paycheck. You want to hire the people as cheaply as possible. If the individual knows they only have to work 20 hrs per week to survive, they have the power to negotiate. If the individual believes that they have to work two jobs for 60 hrs per week to survive, the company has the power to negotiate. Why would you pay more money for same value and less negotiation power? In your ideal world there are enough starving/superficial/ambitious people that you can pay pennies for exponential growth.
- fsloth 10y ago
  Sorry, I don't understand your point in the historical context. Original labour conditions in factories were horrible. The conditions did not improve through economic rationalization but because society recognized it as wrong and forced factory owners to employ better working conditions.
  - formula1 10y ago
    Its slso possible they werent sustainable. Worker strikes snd unions will definitely put a hamper on your production. If people cant support children or they know a job is a death sentence, when an opening comes up due to a strike they may not be too eager to work
    - fsloth 10y ago
      Yes, I trivialized a complex social evolution on my comment to make the point that labour conditions were not changed simply because it made sense economically in the factory owner's yearly budgeting. The main driving factor was recognition from all around that the labour conditions needed to change for ethical reasons, and the factory owners had to acquiesce to the demands of the society.
      - formula1 10y ago
        Are you talking about the gov? If thats the case, you should look into the history in regards to unions and unethical labor practice. I think it was this year that a whistleblower revealed that lithium was being mined by children. I appreciate you think we have "evolved" but really we just wear better masks
humanrebar 10y ago
For jobs where 40 hours per week has basically the same productivity as 30 hours per week, that's fine. For jobs where context is important (medicine, software), 'working less' will cause a disproportionate hit to productivity. Some problems you can't throw more people at. That's more or less the thesis of the Mythical Man-Month, and it applies to many careers. Though there are probably plenty of careers (like driving trucks, certain kinds of teaching) where you can lighten the work load and hire more.
- sverige 10y ago
  No, you can't lighten the work load for trucking (without automation). Over the road truck driving doesn't benefit from reducing hours and hiring more, since OTR drivers basically live in their trucks for three or four weeks at a time to maximize flexibility in moving freight. You would need more trucks to accomplish that, and there's already a driver shortage since there aren't enough Millenials willing to do the job. The other thing is that driver pay has declined considerably over the past 25 years (stagnant since the early 90s, minus inflation), so it would cost trucking companies more (more trucks, more drivers) while decreasing wages for individual drivers. OTR truck drivers are paid by the mile. Third, the increased costs for moving freight would end up increasing the costs to consumers for all goods moved by trucks, which is pretty much everything.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    > Over the road truck driving doesn't benefit from reducing hours and hiring more, since OTR drivers basically live in their trucks for three or four weeks at a time to maximize flexibility in moving freight. So give them three weeks on, three weeks off. Or have them drive shorter runs, handing trailers off to other trucks for 'long hauls'. To your other points, I wasn't commenting on the economics of pay levels for truck drivers. I was saying if everyone was happy with the wages, some tasks (leaving the concept of 'a job' to the side) can certainly be divvied up among more workers without a major loss in productivity... The only objection I could see to that hypothesis is that there's a shortage in the natural talent pool so that there aren't enough workers to allow a shorter work week. Maybe there aren't enough patient, healthy, and alert people (or whatever the other qualities of a good trucker are) to handle three times more truckers working one-third as much. That's an empirical question at the end of the day. With that in mind, it seems unlikely to me that makes sense to have three times more brain surgeons working one third as much.

ldp01 10y ago

Another one of these articles. It's almost like there is a robot somewhere writing them...

cousin_it 10y ago

Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on welfare instead, and the economy as a whole is burning almost 2x more resources. Sure, the employer is spending slightly less, while screwing over the economy via prisoner's dilemma logic. [1] http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20160704.html http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20160704.html

usrusr 10y ago
One more for the huge but reliably fruitless pile of good arguments for an unconditional basic income: with an UBI, it becomes possible for the worker to outprice the robot even at a rate below the survival minimum. E.g. to consume 1.5x resources total compared to bare survival, which would still be less than the nearly 2x of unemployed+robot. (edit:typo)
- cousin_it 10y ago
  I guess it's more of an argument for a universal wage subsidy, but I'd be happy with UBI as well.
  - sverige 10y ago
    I've been thinking about UBI a lot. Who's going to pay for it? Certainly not the big tech companies. They barely pay any taxes now, and they're the ones who stand to gain the most with automation.
    - dmoo 10y ago
      Don't forget that if nobody gets paid then they can't consume all the wonderful output the robots produce.
    - 10y ago

iliketosleep 10y ago

It appears like the logical conclusion of capitalism: the majority of people being made redundant due to AI/automation, and a small handful of corporations basically ruling the world.

JMCQ87 10y ago
Depends on us if that's the end of history, or just a stage though. ;)
trgn 10y ago
Compare this to the logical conclusion of capitalism that Marx put forward 150 years ago. For him, capitalism creates an ever-growing proletariat, a majority of the population being transformed into a commodity; individuals become interchangeable, and are payed only enough to have their basic needs met. The proletariat as a whole was a necessary condition though. Their labor produced value, the surplus of which went to the owning class. Your take is similar, but instead now people will actually become redundant. Not even producing value anymore. Things did not exactly turn out the way Marx thought they would. I certainly hope your prediction won't either!
- iliketosleep 10y ago
  my prediction isn't necessarily a gloomy one. once people become redundant in terms of their labour there are many possibilities. I see VR playing a leading role :)

neuromancer2701 10y ago

My current theory is that this “automation bomb” won't really happen in the sense that 5 million Truckers are going to get laid off all of a sudden. Especially in the case of Truckers the average age is getting higher and higher every year because Millennials have said that is not a job they want. So my theory is that as Baby Boomer/Early Gen Xers retire automation will step in and fill the employment gap. So there won't massive amounts of laid off Truckers sitting around. It will be under-employed Millennials, which is the same issue we have now.

gozur88 10y ago
That's how it works when the fundamentals shift, and it's hard to see because it's not like you lost a job - you just never got it to start with.
humanrebar 10y ago
> So my theory is that as Baby Boomer/Early Gen Xers retire automation will step in and fill the employment gap. So there won't massive amounts of laid off Truckers sitting around. Young workers used to take those jobs, though. The young (especially men) are underemployed right now. If you're right, they are the ones hurt the most in the long run by automation.
- neuromancer2701 10y ago
  I think the better question is why don't/haven't Millennials taken those jobs as previous generations did. This is a problem that has occurred outside of the technology debate.
  - mdorazio 10y ago
    There has actually been quite a bit of discussion around this. Here's one article discussing it [1]. It's a combination of factors including low pay for the number of hours worked, social stigma/low respect, huge amount of time away from home/fun activities, and the fact that driving just kind of sucks. Also, as another commenter mentioned, trucking companies have not made it all that easy to get started from zero skill/certification recently. [1] http://www.overdriveonline.com/trucking-or-not-with-the-twenty-somethings/ http://www.overdriveonline.com/trucking-or-not-with-the-twen...

DyslexicAtheist 10y ago

the underlying message from the top is rather brutal (or with a healthy dose of realism?): "No matter if you're farmer, factory worker or good with your hands, learn to code or be prepared to get swept away." Obama's message to the kids about learning to code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XvmhE1J9PY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XvmhE1J9PY

Noseshine 10y ago
But the only reason for having vastly more people with coding abilities is to lower the price of coding. There is no need for so many coders. Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once, then replication is free - that's even worse than in industry, where everything needs to be developed just once too but at least production required people.
- alanwatts 10y ago
  >Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once, then replication is free This is true in terms of physical reality, but not in terms of the patent system.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    Which is human-made and not a property of the universe. That is not an argument for OPs comment, since it can be changed very easily. Nor does it have any influence even if it isn't (changed) - I don't see the relevance for this sub-discussion?
    - alanwatts 10y ago
      >Which is human-made and not a property of the universe Precisely my point. >it can be changed very easily. It would seem this is not the case, though I wish it was.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

beat 10y ago

I'm prone to saying my job is to build robots to do my job for me. Any time I can replace my own labor with a robot (script/program), I do so. I won't ever run out of work, because software is inherently creative. It's the uncreative jobs that rely on humans as muscle or control mechanisms that are in danger. It's not like humanity has never gone through this before, either. Two centuries ago, 98% of people were employed in farming. Today, it's more like 3% and falling. But it took generations for the robots (farm machinery) to take over. It wasn't as rapid as, say, the rise of self-driving trucks will be.

system16 10y ago
A lot of software development is far from creative. Many company projects involve making versions of X that do Y (Facebook for the enterprise!), or modifying an existing tool to fit a new requirement. A lot of it comes down to putting together existing pieces, and while there aren't a lot of solutions today that can accomplish this effectively without humans, I think it's a bit short-sighted to think there won't be in the future and that just because you are a developer you are exempt from this.
- beat 10y ago
  I've been creating software professionally for over 20 years. The only tools from the start that are still in my toolbox are Unix (now Linux) and SQL. Java didn't even exist when I started, nor did Python or Ruby or JavaScript or even Apache. But my job feels basically the same. It always will, because the problems are always out there at the edge. They're incredibly specific, and often at the bleeding edge of what software can do. Basically, software meets human needs. You need humans to come up with problems to solve, and describe them specifically enough that a computer can be programmed to repeat the solution. So those creative tasks, and the discipline of turning vague human ideas into strict logic, those aren't going anywhere, at least not with the tools we have today, or a reasonable extrapolation of those tools into the future. Programming languages may change, but the existence of programming languages does not. You still need humans to figure out how to say what they really mean. On the other hand, I could spend days or weeks configuring a development server old-school, or I can run 'vagrant up' and have a perfect, repeatable development environment that works on any server. That's the robots. I love the robots.

w8rbt 10y ago

"Politicians need to begin thinking boldly, now, about a world in which driverless vehicles replace most truck drivers’ jobs..." Can we replace politicians with robots?

Noseshine 10y ago
Somebody elected them, so they are not the cause but he effect. Even a guy like Trump finds a lot of support from voters. So it seems to me ranting about politicians is like treating the skin rash when someone has measles. Sure, choice is very limited especially in winner-takes-all systems like the UK or the US, but even so, the politicians you get can then be viewed as consequence of the system, so again the secondary issue.
alanwatts 10y ago
Reminds me of a Buckminster Fuller quote: >"I'm going to give you an important kind of a picture. I hear a lot of people say "I don't like machinery and technology it's making a lot of trouble", so we're going to take all the machinery away from all the countries of the world, all machinery, all the tracks and the wires, and the works and were going to dump it all in the ocean. And you'll discover that within 6 months, 2 billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain. So we say, "that's not a very good idea, let's put all the machinery back where it was". Then, we're going to take all the politicians from all the countries around the world and we're going to send them on a trip around the sun, and you'll find we keep right on eating. And the political barriers now...scientists say very clear you could make the world work and take care of 100% of the people at a higher standard of living than anyone has ever known despite the increasing population, but you can't do it with the political barriers, any more than you can try run a human organism with a wall between the ear, the eye, and the stomach. It is an organic whole, it is total industrialization."

dharma1 10y ago

I'm not really sure we are going to see the kind of job losses from robots/AI that people fear, not within the next 10 years anyway

jr94g 10y ago

As time goes on the necessity of a for-use economy becomes more and more apparent. A for-profit system where human labor becomes less and less necessary is going to lead to a massive concentration of wealth and the destruction of the economic middle class. It's time to accept that a worker planned economy is necessary. Not a government planned one, but one run by the people for all society. Personally I propose a syndicalist economy. Profit where the citizens in society don't see returns, or can only exist by living off of government assistance bodes a very grim future for all mankind.

_yosefk 10y ago

"If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, 66 percent of jobs in finance and insurance could be replaced, the most recent report says." If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, probably >99% of all jobs could be replaced, 'cause it's pretty close to passing the Turing test. I'm willing to get monthly payments from anyone who wants to bet until this happens, and then pay out monthly payments after this happens till I die.

alanwatts 10y ago
The difference between your comparison is that automation of finance/insurance would be achieved purely by mathematical calculations performed by software, while the automation of many/most other jobs would require much more complex robotics.
- tarpherder 10y ago
  I read the parent comment as; getting to the point where computers understand speech that well, is a far more difficult challenge than a large number of robotic challenges.

known 10y ago

I'd endorse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_worl...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

crdoconnor 10y ago

"Job insecurity is a central theme of the 2016 campaign, fueling popular anger about trade deals and immigration. But economists warn that much bigger job losses are ahead in the United States — driven not by foreign competition but by advancing technology." Technology in and of itself destroys and creates jobs and it will keep doing so until all human wants and needs are satisfied (i.e. never). While automation of manual farm work in the 19th/20th century eliminated farming jobs - which accounted for a huge majority of jobs; it didn't eliminate jobs. The main thrust of this argument isn't even This Time It's Different, because reasons, it's just "pay no attention to the history of automation". Why would David Ignatius lie about this? Because the popular anger about trade deals isn't misplaced at all. It's absolutely accurate. That is what is driving job losses, income losses and poverty - not technology. The rhetoric from 'elite' economists about the robotjobpocaplyse is simply an instance of the 1% trying to dodge pitchforks.

leeter 10y ago

A few things to consider about robots: * They require high tech manufacturing to maintain * They require a power source (electrical, hydraulic, etc) Humans while not maintenance free... or power source free (food is a powersource) don't require a ton of technology to get working. While the quality is probably not as good as a robot due to an inability to be perfectly consistent it can be good enough.

hamilyon2 10y ago

The obvious solution is more labour-intensive non easily automatable jobs i.e. service economy. There is a limit of how much laptops and trucks economy wants. But there is no obvious limit in demand of quality services like education, health and leisure. I want to be surrounded by caring people and care for others. That's natural. Question is how to re-orient, re-train and re-educate people to both provide those services and consume them. For each advertisement of yoga lessons and massage sessions I see hundreds of ads on new smartphone or car. That is ridiculous, because I need single car and smartphone, but could go to yoga and massage every day. edit: typos

continuational 10y ago

We already experienced automation for decades. Has that lead to higher unemployment? If not, why will it lead to that in the future?

johngalt 10y ago

Technology has been reducing the need for human labor since the invention of the plow. And yet we aren't all unemployed hunter-gatherers. You could argue that 'this time it's different', but you have to at least acknowledge that luddites of every generation have made similar claims and been wrong every time. Literally tried and proven wrong for centuries.

pmyjavec 10y ago
There is nothing to be replaced by in the first place, because most jobs are just arbitrary, and non-required. Not all, but most. I'm sure most people could get by on a fraction of what they actually do. It just comes down to, people don't really know what they want. That's why we work like we do in the first place, most jobs are just jobs for the sake of it, 9-5, Monday to Friday keeping peoples minds occupied and keeping those at the top important. This includes "special" titles like, CIO, CTO, CEO etc. Ultimately humans need very little to be happy and survive, but instead we have invented economies and lots of arbitrary stuff, luxuries, we don't really need, jobs are how one gets those useless things. When I hear about AI and robots taking over the world, taking our jobs etc, it's nice to be able to say, "oh well, there goes sitting in a building 9-5 like a goldfish in a bowl". It's also sad for the robots :(
CaptSpify 10y ago
http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply What is different this time, I think is that we're giving up our main advantage: Intelligence. Humans have always been able to fall back on work no animal/machine can do, but we're running out of work that machines can't do.
- johngalt 10y ago
  The video is a well articulated argument, but there are two large gaps in reasoning that are common with this line of thought. Grey ignores the idea that technology also allows for normal people to do jobs that used to require highly skilled specialists. A big part of this is so called 'brain' labor. A banker before computers had to have amortization tables manually calculated. Now the personal banker who does your HELOC probably doesn't even know basic algebra. If we ran technology in reverse and took away the calculators we would end up with fewer banking jobs not more. Because every banker would have to be highly specialized and costly. The "factory jobs" were originally an invention of technology. A method to take a large number of workers + automation to beat artisans and specialists. If Watson is doing diagnosis, that means that more people with less training can be effective 'doctors'. Which brings me to my second point. Often when things become more efficient we end up using more of them overall. Jevon's paradox applied to labor. Think of what it cost to transport 20 tons of cargo from NY to SF before trucking and standardized containers. How many man hours were involved? How many different specialized jobs? Now done by one guy with a truck replacing them all. Yet the number of people employed overall in transportation went up not down. IMHO the best example is IT. Think about the server admin ratios in the early days. Perhaps a team of 10 to maintain a single mainframe. Now we have 10 guys in a data center managing 50,000 servers. Yet the overall number of people employed in IT went up not down. As processes become more efficient and cheap we consume more of it at an increasing rate.

emblem21 10y ago

Doesn't this reasoning hold up for outsourced jobs as well?

davidf18 10y ago

Macy’s to Close 100 Stores as E-Rivals and Discounting Hit Legacy Retailers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277307 E-Rivals === Amazon. Amazon uses lots of robots for their distribution centers -- they even purchased a robotics company and the subsidiary is called Amazon Robotics. I still think the major issue is trade agreements and the importation of foreign labor in using H1-B visas to replace STEM (think Disney and Abbott Pharma replacing their IT workers with H1-B visas) and H2-A and H2-B visas replacing blue collar workers. Do the numbers. The technology is sensationalizing. Although Amazon replacing Macy's is Internet automation and Robots in the warehouses.