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Say What ? I don't understand this line of reasoning. For every job that is lost, a new one is potentially created due to these industrial revolutions. For exam

Say What ? I don't understand this line of reasoning. For every job that is lost, a new one is potentially created due to these industrial revolutions. For example, when Cars were invented, I am sure a lot of buggy drivers lost their jobs. But they probably learned to drive and moved on. Yes when the transition happens, there may be a period of adjustment but why not. That is how we have been able to progress from the stone age till now. If things like Robots take over blue collar jobs, I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Computers, anyone ? And yes, may be AI will change things a bit more but I am sure we will come up with a way to manage that as well.

imglorp 10y ago
First up: 10 million truckers in the US; cabbies and bus drivers to a lesser extent. Where will those people go?
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Back to University or go and do other jobs ? Create their own companies and new services ? Why would they necessarily end up as homeless on the streets?
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    For the same reason they haven't already gone to school to get a better job than the one they currently have: they either don't have the money or the mental capability to do it. What makes you think this is going to change?
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      Erm... online education being now a thing, for one. Them having more resources now after having worked for x years than when they started without education. Them being probably married after a while and therefore having a safety net inside the family to be able to take some time off to learn new skills. Many things are plausible.
      - Grishnakh 10y ago
        Wow, you have an incredibly naïve and rosy view of what life is like for the lower and working classes. Maybe you should try meeting some of them in person and seeing what their lives are really like instead of spouting this BS.
        ekianjo 10y ago
        I come from a lower class family so im not sure why you assume i dont know what i am talking about.
  - RoboticWater 10y ago
    You say that like anyone can just up and go back to university or simply create their own service (presumably some new, inventive one because the one they just had is already nearly perfected by machines). Neither of those things are especially easy to do with a decent paycheck, and these people wouldn't even have that.
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      Not just anyone, but the possibility is there. Stories of business owners who made it starting from nothing are not rare (obviously many fail as well) - but do not underestimate the resourcefulness of people who have their back against the wall.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    The "let them eat cake" solution. If they had the opportunity to go back to university or create their own companies, wouldn't they have done so already?
- icantdrive55 10y ago
  Don't leave out Programmers. No barriers to entry. Just a good mind, and an Internet connection. There's millions of people around the world learning to Program. It's cool. It's hip. They all want to learn, and it's getting easier yearly. And you don't even need to go to college. I cringe when ever I hear Programmers left of out of the, "Where will these people go." Guys like Willie Brown are alwready wondering what San Francisco is going to do with the new homeless that will be hitting the streets--when this current bubble ends. Yes, the Rock Star Programmers will always have a job, but that's a minority of you.
- dntrkv 10y ago
  One important factor to consider is that this won't happen overnight. Once autonomous trucks actually hit the roads, there will be a long period where the drivers will still have to be behind the wheel. And even then, there is a lot of other work a truck driver does other than drive. My father runs a small trucking business, and according to him, the logistics are a way bigger annoyance than the actual driving. You have to time deliveries, you have to unload the cargo without damaging anything, you have to repair the truck (or call a tow / mobile repair) you have to take photos of any potentially damaged products, you have to make sure there are people there to sign off on a successful delivery, you need to find the right people when nobody knows anything about your delivery, etc... The job sounds pretty cut and dry, but in reality, every delivery has some new issue and the driver is usually the one that ends up dealing with it. I'm not saying that the job won't be automated eventually, but the actual driving is only a part of the job. And even when the automation begins to happen, I think there will be time for them to transition into new roles.
  - imglorp 10y ago
    Partially agree. I think big fleets will be first as soon as the bugs are worked out. Long haul trucks are loading dock to loading dock, so you don't need the driver to do loading. Uber is another fleet: they just want to do transport-as-a-service so they HATE drivers as overhead. They have signed up to buy 100,000 Mercedes (future autonomous upgrade). They've indicated interest in 500,000 Teslas. http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-orders-100000-mercedes-benz-s-class-sedans-report http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-ord... http://www.autoblog.com/2015/07/08/uber-tesla-self-driving-cars http://www.autoblog.com/2015/07/08/uber-tesla-self-driving-c...
ekianjo 10y ago
> If things like Robots take over blue collar jobs, I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Computers, anyone ? And yes, may be AI will change things a bit more but I am sure we will come up with a way to manage that as well. Exactly. It seems like most people on HN reason with the "work revolutions" being zero-sum games or something. It's been proven over and over again it never ends up being like that, despite the numerous revolutions the Human Race has seen. It's getting a little old.
- jklinger410 10y ago
  So for autonomous trucks how will human truckers keep their jobs? For the auto manufacture industry, how many less humans does Tesla employ to produce a vehicle vs in 1996? For the service industry...how many jobs are being replaced as McDonalds rolls out kiosks? You are uninformed if you believe these jobs are staying. There is no way, mark my words, that our economy doesn't experience a net negative in jobs during this next revolution. It's not all bad though, it could push us towards UBI, maybe a supply based economy. Otherwise we're basically saying jesus take the wheel. A guy can dream.
  - reverend_gonzo 10y ago
    Jobs will definitely disappear, and some people will definitely suffer, but new jobs and new industries will rise up. Those who can adapt to changes will do just fine, and the rest, well, they will get left behind. The world is changing, faster than it has in the past. No one know exactly what will happen, but there's a whole new generation of people who have no idea what it used to be like, and they will do their best to survive. The economy, and life, will find a way.
    - jklinger410 10y ago
      >but new jobs and new industries will rise up. At some point you have to admit that there is a limit to the potential jobs that a society can support. You can hope these hypothetical new jobs get created, but I don't know how you can prepare for them. I sincerely believe there is no way to invent enough jobs, by convenience or necessity, to replace the amount of jobs that will be destroyed by automation.
jklinger410 10y ago
>I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Not sure how you can explain this. You're saying that we would need 1 person per robot? That's not even true currently, let alone in 10 years.
- codegeek 10y ago
  Not necessarily 1 Person per Robot. Lets say 1 Robot replaced 5 people. 1 of those handle the Robot directly, the other 4 are now pulled in things like maintenance, cleanup, admin etc that comes with running Robots. Just like for every computer programmer, we have QA, Testers, Sys Admins etc.
  - jklinger410 10y ago
    Firstly we do not need humans to "handle robots directly" now or even in the near future. Secondly it is highly wishful thinking that we would need 4 people to administrate or clean a robot as well. Going to be honest here, this doesn't hold any weight at all.
    - kd0amg 10y ago
      Besides, if it takes that many humans to maintain each robot, the robot is simply too expensive to replace those humans.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    So you're at best replacing 5 skilled (higher paying) jobs with a robot + 5 unskilled (low paying) jobs, and at worst not replacing those jobs. Multiply this across the industry and how can you say this is a good thing for all these people?
  - krapp 10y ago
    >, the other 4 are now pulled in things like maintenance, cleanup, admin etc that comes with running Robots. No they're not. The entire point of automation to be able to extract the benefits of labor without paying for the burden of human employees. Unemployment isn't a bug, it's a feature. More likely - all five employees are fired, and whatever skills those employees had becomes useless to them, as regards future employment elsewhere. Operation, maintenance, cleanup, admin, etc. gets farmed out to contractors for a fraction of those former employees' salaries, or else shared by the remaining employees. A few people wind up reaping the benefits, everyone else becomes surplus to requirements.
wslh 10y ago
> For example, when Cars were invented, I am sure a lot of buggy drivers lost their jobs. Following your reasoning, the difference with those buggy drivers is the level of education you need to cover the new jobs. The education funnel left a lot of people behind.
dvdcxn 10y ago
>If things like Robots take over blue collar jobs, I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Yes, but we'll need a lot less of them...otherwise, what's the point in having automation?
DonaldFisk 10y ago
> when Cars were invented, I am sure a lot of buggy drivers lost their jobs. But they probably learned to drive and moved on. When cars were invented, a lot of horses lost their jobs. Now, there aren't as many horses as there were before.
- daniel_levine 10y ago
  The invention of the car has almost certainly led to more jobs, even if you were to include the jobs lost by horses. In part because there were exponentially more cars that needed manufacturing, maintenance, roads to drive on etc. Heck, I'd be interested in seeing the ratio between total employment numbers before the advent of the car in the late 1800s and automobile-related jobs at their peak (US only).
  - vkou 10y ago
    Which jobs has the invention of car manufacturing robots created? Was it anywhere near as many jobs as were lost in Detroit? We still manufacture roughly the same amount of cars per capita, so these robots didn't enable any new industries. The only reason to automate, is because buying robots is cheaper then paying employees, for the same amount of output produced. Since those robots were built by people, who had to get paid... Clearly, at the end of the day, you are employing fewer people. New jobs get created when the amount of produced goods grows, as happened in the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, we are currently in a supply glut - we are demand-limited.
    - daniel_levine 10y ago
      Robotics production, tooling, software engineering, and the jobs associated with whole new industries that are enabled by robotic manufacturing. Also, the jobs associated with more cars being on the road and being more reliable. I think it's fair to say that there are instances of technology causing variable effects on the labor market over time (particularly variable effects on different parts). That's not a particularly interesting result though :) More broadly, economists overwhelmingly think that increases in productivity lead to improvements in quality of life of people over time. Either by improving their labor situation (better, safer jobs) or their consumer situation (cheaper goods, more choice etc). The logical counterexample would be technology we wish we would not have created, of which I can come up with a few examples, but far fewer than the reverse.
douche 10y ago
The problem I see is that the education and intelligence floor for being employable keeps going up, and at some point there are going to be an untenable number of people underneath that floor. Some of this is just blatant credentialism and signalling - what insignificant fraction of office jobs really require a college degree? But on the other hand, you're never going to turn somebody like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, who could get by working as a farm-hand in a pre-mechanized agricultural economy, into a software engineer. Maybe we can simplify the process and tools enough that more people are capable of working with very complex things and being productive, but it's hard making abstractions that don't leak.

imglorp 10y ago

First up: 10 million truckers in the US; cabbies and bus drivers to a lesser extent. Where will those people go?

ekianjo 10y ago
Back to University or go and do other jobs ? Create their own companies and new services ? Why would they necessarily end up as homeless on the streets?
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  For the same reason they haven't already gone to school to get a better job than the one they currently have: they either don't have the money or the mental capability to do it. What makes you think this is going to change?
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    Erm... online education being now a thing, for one. Them having more resources now after having worked for x years than when they started without education. Them being probably married after a while and therefore having a safety net inside the family to be able to take some time off to learn new skills. Many things are plausible.
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      Wow, you have an incredibly naïve and rosy view of what life is like for the lower and working classes. Maybe you should try meeting some of them in person and seeing what their lives are really like instead of spouting this BS.
      - ekianjo 10y ago
        I come from a lower class family so im not sure why you assume i dont know what i am talking about.
- RoboticWater 10y ago
  You say that like anyone can just up and go back to university or simply create their own service (presumably some new, inventive one because the one they just had is already nearly perfected by machines). Neither of those things are especially easy to do with a decent paycheck, and these people wouldn't even have that.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    Not just anyone, but the possibility is there. Stories of business owners who made it starting from nothing are not rare (obviously many fail as well) - but do not underestimate the resourcefulness of people who have their back against the wall.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  The "let them eat cake" solution. If they had the opportunity to go back to university or create their own companies, wouldn't they have done so already?
icantdrive55 10y ago
Don't leave out Programmers. No barriers to entry. Just a good mind, and an Internet connection. There's millions of people around the world learning to Program. It's cool. It's hip. They all want to learn, and it's getting easier yearly. And you don't even need to go to college. I cringe when ever I hear Programmers left of out of the, "Where will these people go." Guys like Willie Brown are alwready wondering what San Francisco is going to do with the new homeless that will be hitting the streets--when this current bubble ends. Yes, the Rock Star Programmers will always have a job, but that's a minority of you.
dntrkv 10y ago
One important factor to consider is that this won't happen overnight. Once autonomous trucks actually hit the roads, there will be a long period where the drivers will still have to be behind the wheel. And even then, there is a lot of other work a truck driver does other than drive. My father runs a small trucking business, and according to him, the logistics are a way bigger annoyance than the actual driving. You have to time deliveries, you have to unload the cargo without damaging anything, you have to repair the truck (or call a tow / mobile repair) you have to take photos of any potentially damaged products, you have to make sure there are people there to sign off on a successful delivery, you need to find the right people when nobody knows anything about your delivery, etc... The job sounds pretty cut and dry, but in reality, every delivery has some new issue and the driver is usually the one that ends up dealing with it. I'm not saying that the job won't be automated eventually, but the actual driving is only a part of the job. And even when the automation begins to happen, I think there will be time for them to transition into new roles.
- imglorp 10y ago
  Partially agree. I think big fleets will be first as soon as the bugs are worked out. Long haul trucks are loading dock to loading dock, so you don't need the driver to do loading. Uber is another fleet: they just want to do transport-as-a-service so they HATE drivers as overhead. They have signed up to buy 100,000 Mercedes (future autonomous upgrade). They've indicated interest in 500,000 Teslas. http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-orders-100000-mercedes-benz-s-class-sedans-report http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-ord... http://www.autoblog.com/2015/07/08/uber-tesla-self-driving-cars http://www.autoblog.com/2015/07/08/uber-tesla-self-driving-c...

ekianjo 10y ago

> If things like Robots take over blue collar jobs, I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Computers, anyone ? And yes, may be AI will change things a bit more but I am sure we will come up with a way to manage that as well. Exactly. It seems like most people on HN reason with the "work revolutions" being zero-sum games or something. It's been proven over and over again it never ends up being like that, despite the numerous revolutions the Human Race has seen. It's getting a little old.

jklinger410 10y ago
So for autonomous trucks how will human truckers keep their jobs? For the auto manufacture industry, how many less humans does Tesla employ to produce a vehicle vs in 1996? For the service industry...how many jobs are being replaced as McDonalds rolls out kiosks? You are uninformed if you believe these jobs are staying. There is no way, mark my words, that our economy doesn't experience a net negative in jobs during this next revolution. It's not all bad though, it could push us towards UBI, maybe a supply based economy. Otherwise we're basically saying jesus take the wheel. A guy can dream.
- reverend_gonzo 10y ago
  Jobs will definitely disappear, and some people will definitely suffer, but new jobs and new industries will rise up. Those who can adapt to changes will do just fine, and the rest, well, they will get left behind. The world is changing, faster than it has in the past. No one know exactly what will happen, but there's a whole new generation of people who have no idea what it used to be like, and they will do their best to survive. The economy, and life, will find a way.
  - jklinger410 10y ago
    >but new jobs and new industries will rise up. At some point you have to admit that there is a limit to the potential jobs that a society can support. You can hope these hypothetical new jobs get created, but I don't know how you can prepare for them. I sincerely believe there is no way to invent enough jobs, by convenience or necessity, to replace the amount of jobs that will be destroyed by automation.

jklinger410 10y ago

>I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Not sure how you can explain this. You're saying that we would need 1 person per robot? That's not even true currently, let alone in 10 years.

codegeek 10y ago
Not necessarily 1 Person per Robot. Lets say 1 Robot replaced 5 people. 1 of those handle the Robot directly, the other 4 are now pulled in things like maintenance, cleanup, admin etc that comes with running Robots. Just like for every computer programmer, we have QA, Testers, Sys Admins etc.
- jklinger410 10y ago
  Firstly we do not need humans to "handle robots directly" now or even in the near future. Secondly it is highly wishful thinking that we would need 4 people to administrate or clean a robot as well. Going to be honest here, this doesn't hold any weight at all.
  - kd0amg 10y ago
    Besides, if it takes that many humans to maintain each robot, the robot is simply too expensive to replace those humans.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  So you're at best replacing 5 skilled (higher paying) jobs with a robot + 5 unskilled (low paying) jobs, and at worst not replacing those jobs. Multiply this across the industry and how can you say this is a good thing for all these people?
- krapp 10y ago
  >, the other 4 are now pulled in things like maintenance, cleanup, admin etc that comes with running Robots. No they're not. The entire point of automation to be able to extract the benefits of labor without paying for the burden of human employees. Unemployment isn't a bug, it's a feature. More likely - all five employees are fired, and whatever skills those employees had becomes useless to them, as regards future employment elsewhere. Operation, maintenance, cleanup, admin, etc. gets farmed out to contractors for a fraction of those former employees' salaries, or else shared by the remaining employees. A few people wind up reaping the benefits, everyone else becomes surplus to requirements.

wslh 10y ago

> For example, when Cars were invented, I am sure a lot of buggy drivers lost their jobs. Following your reasoning, the difference with those buggy drivers is the level of education you need to cover the new jobs. The education funnel left a lot of people behind.

dvdcxn 10y ago

>If things like Robots take over blue collar jobs, I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Yes, but we'll need a lot less of them...otherwise, what's the point in having automation?

DonaldFisk 10y ago

> when Cars were invented, I am sure a lot of buggy drivers lost their jobs. But they probably learned to drive and moved on. When cars were invented, a lot of horses lost their jobs. Now, there aren't as many horses as there were before.

daniel_levine 10y ago
The invention of the car has almost certainly led to more jobs, even if you were to include the jobs lost by horses. In part because there were exponentially more cars that needed manufacturing, maintenance, roads to drive on etc. Heck, I'd be interested in seeing the ratio between total employment numbers before the advent of the car in the late 1800s and automobile-related jobs at their peak (US only).
- vkou 10y ago
  Which jobs has the invention of car manufacturing robots created? Was it anywhere near as many jobs as were lost in Detroit? We still manufacture roughly the same amount of cars per capita, so these robots didn't enable any new industries. The only reason to automate, is because buying robots is cheaper then paying employees, for the same amount of output produced. Since those robots were built by people, who had to get paid... Clearly, at the end of the day, you are employing fewer people. New jobs get created when the amount of produced goods grows, as happened in the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, we are currently in a supply glut - we are demand-limited.
  - daniel_levine 10y ago
    Robotics production, tooling, software engineering, and the jobs associated with whole new industries that are enabled by robotic manufacturing. Also, the jobs associated with more cars being on the road and being more reliable. I think it's fair to say that there are instances of technology causing variable effects on the labor market over time (particularly variable effects on different parts). That's not a particularly interesting result though :) More broadly, economists overwhelmingly think that increases in productivity lead to improvements in quality of life of people over time. Either by improving their labor situation (better, safer jobs) or their consumer situation (cheaper goods, more choice etc). The logical counterexample would be technology we wish we would not have created, of which I can come up with a few examples, but far fewer than the reverse.

douche 10y ago

The problem I see is that the education and intelligence floor for being employable keeps going up, and at some point there are going to be an untenable number of people underneath that floor. Some of this is just blatant credentialism and signalling - what insignificant fraction of office jobs really require a college degree? But on the other hand, you're never going to turn somebody like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, who could get by working as a farm-hand in a pre-mechanized agricultural economy, into a software engineer. Maybe we can simplify the process and tools enough that more people are capable of working with very complex things and being productive, but it's hard making abstractions that don't leak.