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The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China, It’s Automation

274 points by petilon 10y ago

tmnvix 10y ago
One upside to automation is that comparative advantage with regard to labour costs becomes much less important. This means that manufacturers can more easily afford to keep production in high wage economies. There are other considerations of course, such as proximity to resources, transport hubs, and markets. Ultimately though, this doesn't change the fact that automation is mostly beneficial to capital owners and not the wider workforce, so capitalism's tendency toward inequality (as described by Piketty) still applies.
- hamandcheese 10y ago
  > This means that manufacturers can more easily afford to keep production in high wage economies. But this doesn't really bring jobs back, since they'll just be automated. That's not to say there aren't other benefits aside from job creation, though.
  - blackguardx 10y ago
    Someone has to service the machines. Also, big machines are expensive to transport, so it makes sense to make them closer to where they will be used, leading to more service jobs. There are also a lot of engineering jobs designing the hardware and software of these automated factories.
    - torpfactory 10y ago
      Doesn't the question then become how many and at what salary do these engineering jobs exist? Seems like there typically are fewer jobs and the total compensation for labor is reduced when manufacturing is automated (why else would the company pursue such a course of action?)
      - blackguardx 10y ago
        The engineering jobs already exist. Factory automation has been a big business for decades (Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Mitsubishi and others). They generally aren't high paying compared to Silicon Valley software engineers, but pay more than civil engineers. Automation will continue, but labor will probably never be completely replaced within our lifetimes. I think it makes sense to have factories and make physical goods in the US. It is easier to bring hardware to market when the production is in the same timezone. I think it leads to a more robust economy even if there is heavy automation. There are still ancillary jobs associated with factories.
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      Yes, but this isn't very many jobs. The amount of labor per unit of productivity is drastically reduced in any case. If we can attract new factories then it could be a net win, but someone will lose out (not china, but Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and other countries that are trying to break into middle income).
      - blackguardx 10y ago
        Some jobs is better than no jobs, right?
        mjevans 10y ago
        Actually no. Zero jobs would be best, because then -everything- that people didn't do for their own sense of enjoyment would be automated.
        blackguardx 10y ago
        One outcome would be a utopia where everyone would share equally in this new prosperity. Another would be a distopia where the prosperity only went to the factory owners.
        seanmcdirmid 10y ago
        Well, there is the theory that employed masses are too busy to cause trouble (e.g. demand more equality), and much of our society is structured around keeping the non-upper class busy, even if that means making them move dirt between holes. The distribution of wealth sort of bears this out.
    - wott 10y ago
      The whole point of automation is to increase benefit by increasing productivity, i.e. by either increasing the production output for the same amount of jobs, or decreasing the amount of jobs needed for the same production. Since we already produce about everything in the amount we need (and sometimes much more than we need), there is no point in increasing production (it would not be sold, consumed), so productivity gains will translate into cost reduction, i.e. less jobs.
      - blackguardx 10y ago
        No one is arguing that. The argument is if we should have automated factories in high paying regions (like the US). I'm arguing that having automated factories here is better than no factories here.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    It won't bring manual assembly line jobs back, but let's be honest: nothing will.
  - tmnvix 10y ago
    > But this doesn't really bring jobs back, since they'll just be automated. Yeah, that's right. There would certainly be other benefits (and a limited number of jobs created) that are more indirect. The real issue around automation in my opinion is how we as a society manage it. If we stay the course, it is clear that capital owners stand to benefit most (almost entirely I would say). We are already seeing problems with rising inequality due to diverging returns from capital and labour. This is going to exacerbate that hugely. I'm generally in favour of capitalism but I think we are going to need to revisit 'the social contract' that allows capitalism to exist in exchange for a share of the rewards being used to ensure that society's basic needs are met. Just as when it was first negotiated by Bismark, this is going to have to be an initiative of the capital owners if serious unrest is to be avoided. I'm hopeful and think that it is possible. Rich people are not inherently sociopathic. A good example of this sort of compromise in more modern times was the reaction of Kennedy snr when the US faced economic and social unrest. Partly through correspondence with Keynes he was convinced that if himself and his peers didn't take a hit for the good of wider society then they stood a good chance of losing a great deal more. Every so often the social contract needs a reset (e.g. Bismark, the labour movement, the new deal, etc). Automation is going to make this more urgent. The one thing I am sure of is that it will be a political solution and not simply an economic one (e.g. less regulation, more free markets, etc).
- cm2187 10y ago
  > Ultimately though, this doesn't change the fact that automation is mostly beneficial to capital owners I think that inequality will increase but not because of owning capital. Rather because this automation will shift demand away from unskilled workers and into software developers, marketing experts, etc. And I do not think that the supply of skilled worker can adapt fast enough, if any. The good news (for the US) is that China will be the main casualty. In a way the US has already largely paid this tax to automation by outsourcing factory jobs to China. It is chinese factory workers that are going to be automated the first. Some low skilled jobs that couldn't be outsourced offshore like construction, taxis, etc will suffer but I'd argue a large part of the impact is behind us. Obviously the tax paid to outsourcing is also having Trump at the white house.
  - tmnvix 10y ago
    While we'll have to agree to disagree about ownership of capital leading to increased inequality, I definitely agree with you when you say that you "do not think that the supply of skilled worker can adapt fast enough" to the demand. I think that while education is fundamental, even if it were always of a high quality and free, not everyone has the temperament or innate ability necessary to make the commitment to getting sufficiently qualified.
    - yourapostasy 10y ago
      > ...agree to disagree about ownership of capital leading to increased inequality... If it is not capital ownership, then some other inequality mechanism is at work if the automation trend is true, considering that as automation scoops the obvious and not-so-obvious patterns of workflows in the economy out of the labor market, proportionally none of the benefits accrue to those who are left creating that automation. Think about that for a second. If you are one of the few who create the automation, then by definition what you are doing is currently not amenable to automation. You are creating a fabulous wealth machine with the automation, but by and large, unless you own a capital stake in that exercise, you will not see compensation proportional to the value you bring to the table. It's a curious dynamic to me, because due to classical economics, I would have expected capital to flow more readily to those whose work could not (yet) be automated, to accelerate delivery towards the proven benefits of automation.
twblalock 10y ago
It's interesting that many politicians, including Trump and Sanders, want policies to prevent jobs from leaving the US, but have no policy proposals around automation. If you want manufacturing jobs to stay in the US, regulating automation would be far more effective than trying to prevent companies from outsourcing jobs. (Incidentally, a lot of jobs that have been outsourced probably would have been automated if outsourcing had not been possible, and that's what opponents of outsourcing are missing.) I'm very much against a policy to restrict automation, but it's worth pointing out.
- cnnsucks 10y ago
  You know what else is interesting? The same part of the political spectrum that cites automation as the real cause of working class decline does not hesitate to rationalize mass immigration as necessary to fill the demand for labor. If automation is the problem then what are all the unskilled immigrants for?
  - twblalock 10y ago
    What part of the political spectrum are you referring to? It certainly isn't part of the mainstream.
  - james-watson 10y ago
    It's funny how obvious the holes are when a little light is shined upon the patchwork that is the elite's master plan. The establishment parties are pure self serving propagandists, nothing more. They use marketing techniques to convince people that smoking is good for them, because they need to sell cigarettes. Nothing has changed.
- 2sk21 10y ago
  A Butlerian Jihad perhaps? Frank Herbet was really on to something in his Dune series.
- coldcode 10y ago
  Being against automation does not make for good sound bites. But if the business of America is business (I forgot who said that, maybe Hoover or Coolidge?) and automation makes more profit, then it will happen assuming society doesn't fall apart first.
jobu 10y ago
This was one of the more frustrating parts of this past election cycle: "No candidate talked much about automation on the campaign trail. Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico, there is no clear way to stop it, and many of the technology companies are in the United States and benefit the country in many ways." A lot of US jobs have been lost to globalization, but in the long-term that won't compare to the jobs lost to automation. As a software developer this seems painfully obvious to me, and I would hope most politicians are intelligent enough to see it as well. Unfortunately none of them have even talked about it, much less proposed solutions to help displaced workers.
- saryant 10y ago
  Senator Ben Sasse has spoken about automation frequently. https://twitter.com/SenSasse/status/806889568276336641 https://twitter.com/SenSasse/status/806889568276336641
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  >Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico Technology is a MUCH more convenient villain. You can roll back 1% friendly trade agreements with China and Mexico. You can point pitchforks at the 1%. You can't roll back technological advancement and it's pointless to try. You achieve nothing by being against technology except looking like an idiot, which is precisely why articles like this are trying to convince everybody that technology is the "villain". Because god forbid Lloyd Blankfein and his cronies start being seen as villains. >A lot of US jobs have been lost to globalization, but in the long-term that won't compare to the jobs lost to automation. As a software developer this seems painfully obvious to me, Funny. As a software developer it seems painfully obvious to me just how far off we are from this supposed goal. All around me I see developers who shirk at even automating their own tests while getting excited over vaporware.
codecamper 10y ago
I guess we in tech have seen this coming for the past oh.. 25 years? Now it is really starting to hit home. Another big thing that drives automation is the stock market. The stock market provides a bunch of money to companies that can show earnings growth. Used to be you could just expand globally. Well, all the big brands have done that now. So the next step is to cut costs. How? Automate. Without the stock market this might also happen but at a slower pace.
torpfactory 10y ago
I think we are destined for a future of political and social instability in the world if we continue to define labor and its compensation as we do now. We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required. The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval, to be harnessed by willing politicians of short-sighted vision. What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines?
- mjevans 10y ago
  I really hope we end up with something much closer to socialism than we do either the future from "The Time Machine" or perpetual cycles of Viva-La-Revolution.
  - visarga 10y ago
    Up until global trade took off, cities, villages and even individual farms were almost self sufficient. Why couldn't people be self sufficient with automation?
    - dhdhfjsjgh 10y ago
      >Why couldn't people be self sufficient with automation? Have you tried buying land recently without signing yourself into debt for the rest of your life to a bank? How did it go? Not to mention that self sufficiency would imply a major cut in the standard of living for most people, for largely no good reason. It would be far more preferable just to reduce the concentration of capital in too few hands than for the rest of us to live like it's 1850 again.
    - pavanred 10y ago
      Agree, I sometimes wonder how much of this is just a manifestation of our fear of the unknown. Consider, the world before the internet when the postal services was doing all the heavy lifting for communication. Once we got internet, a huge chunk communication was replaced by email etc. But, it also gave rise to eCommerce, on demand delivery services etc. And, the same postal services companies are doing better than ever before.
credit_guy 10y ago
I think it's likely that automation will be a huge creator of jobs. And I'm not talking about creation of high skill jobs at the expense of destruction of low skill jobs. I'm talking about a net creation of both low and high skill jobs. Allow me to explain. Here's a youtube movie of some robots in a Mercedes factory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VreG1iC65Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VreG1iC65Lc There are thousands of movies like that. Lots of robots doing a lot of work, and apparently displacing lots of jobs. But there are some jobs in the background. Someone has programmed those robots. But aren't those programmers (super-)highly skilled? I don't know for sure, but it feels to me a robot is programed like an Excel macro: you record the moves, and then edit what you recorded. For an Excel macro, both parts are done (generally) by the same person, but for industrial robots, they are probably done by different people. The person who is being recorded needs only know how to manipulate a mechanical arm with a controller, that is probably not very different from a PS4 controller. The person who edits the macros, creates procedures, then combines them, optimizes them, creates tests, etc, etc, that person is a highly skilled individual. The other one not so much. The difference here is the capacity for abstraction. Now, one could say that both these jobs happen only once, and then the robot performs the jobs thousands of times, so you have 2 new jobs (one high skill, one low skill) displacing thousands others. Alas, the programming, maintenance, re-programming, upgrading, not to mention construction of the robots still needs a small army of people. But overall, I agree that it's possible that introducing these robots resulted in a net job destruction for Mercedes and its suppliers (but not entirely sure; Mercedes was most likely more concerned with the quality of their cars rather than their cost of production). However, not every manufacturer is similar to Mercedes. A lot of manufacturers produce things in smaller batches for example. And now you start to look at the trade-off of putting the automation in place: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ If a batch is small enough, the initial investment in automation is not recouped. If the batch is huge, the automation is a no-brainer. But there's a huge middle ground where only some partial automation makes sense. And part of that automation that makes sense is to do things using some mechanical arms moved by some PS4-type controller. I think in the near future, a lot of the "mechanical" type of work (welding, cutting, soldering, hammering) will become remote-controlled. It might look like high-skilled now, but the job of a machinist was considered high-skilled 50 years ago, and essentially they are the same. Now, the farther you are from the moving or hot or electricity-conducting parts, the farther you are from danger, and the more people can try something as a hobby. More importantly, the barrier of entry for a given (low-skilled) trade goes down, so people will be able to retrain themselves more quickly. And these people will be able to create more quickly. Just like blogging has created millions of (unofficial, but money making) jobs, the advent of remote-controlled machines will create millions of new (low-skilled) jobs. And these remote-controlled machine will show up exactly because of the need for automation.
carsongross 10y ago
Whatever. In the meantime, let's bring the manufacturing chain back here so we can build up the automation expertise ourselves, and, while we wait for the End of Work, stop making the middle of our IQ bell curve compete with countries that don't give a shit about their environment, the concept of intellectual property or the safety of their workers. We can figure the automation problem out later.
- inimino 10y ago
  Automation saves money, bringing jobs back doesn't, that's why the jobs went away in the first place.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    Who, whom.
    - inimino 10y ago
      I can't tell what point you're trying to make, here.
- Ironchefpython 10y ago
  > In the meantime, let's bring the manufacturing chain back here so we can build up the automation expertise ourselves How? There's obvious long term financial value in having local supply chains and manufacturing expertise. Therefore state capitalist systems will subsidize local manufacturing in the short term, while anarcho-capitalist systems will flock to set up shop there to capture convert those short-term subsidies into short-term profit. Do you have a solution that will work to build high-tech manufacturing infrastructure in the United States with no corporate incentives and no US government intervention? (I mean besides tweeting brags about job creation)
  - adventured 10y ago
    Sure, dramatically lower the corporate income tax rate and substantially reduce the massive over-regulation in the US economy. Check out the various regulation registries at the Federal level, the US is choking to death on thousands of unnecessary regulations (growing rapidly for decades) that are almost always written solely for the benefit of protectionism or for fake the-government-is-doing-something purposes (which happens at all levels). The US corporate income tax rate has been a bad joke for a long time. Countries like Sweden at 22%, understood decades ago that it was bad economic policy to have a high rate. You tax the income of the wealthy as the offset. The US for example already has an extremely progressive personal income tax rate. For several decades the corporate income tax rate has been falling around the world; the world's average rate has fallen from near 30% to 22% in the last 12 years. The US isn't competitive, you see that in how we've been bleeding pharma & biotech companies off to Ireland. Over time, you start seeing R&D & operations offshoring because of that. Give it time and you've artificially created a lot more global competition through bad policy. If you're a small to mid size manufacturer in the US, paying a 30% effective income tax rate is brutal if you want to compete globally while everyone else is paying far lower rates. Germany for example lowered their top rate by about 9 points a decade ago. Finland and Iceland have a 20% rate. Korea is at 24% and China at 25%. The European average is about 20%.
remir 10y ago
Self-driving cars and robots replacing factory workers are obviously just the beginning. How about computers that can program themselves? How about machines that can think and create like we do (and better)? We approach 2017, we know climate change is a real threat, we know automation is going to be a big problem, we know we're consuming the world's resources at an alarming rate and there's 7.5 billion people on this rock... I get the feeling the future won't be this Utopian scenario that some people are dreaming of.
- warmwaffles 10y ago
  Time to invest in firearms. Apocalypse is near.
- dispose13432 10y ago
  >How about computers that can program themselves We've done that. Starting with the first language after Assembly.
xbmcuser 10y ago
The global market was still expanding so all efficiency gains from industrial revolution and the internet revolution were absorbed. Where as today the global economy is stagnating. The efficiency gains in the next decade are expected to be a few times the rate of market growth which would put many people out of work making the global market contract further. This cycle could accelerate very quickly.
known 10y ago
Does automation kill jobs in China?
- badsock 10y ago
  Yes. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966
  - Animats 10y ago
    That's Foxconn, and they're just getting started with replacing workers. Foxconn has 1.3 million employees. Hon Hai CEO Terry Gou: "Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache." He means it. He brought in the director of the Tapei Zoo for advice on how to manage animals with different temperaments.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  Countries where manufacturing makes up a big proportion of their economy are likely to suffer most because manufacturing is the low hanging fruit for automation.
dfabulich 10y ago
(I posted this on another thread this week where it was less relevant, so I'll just repost it here and see if anybody notices.) Mass automation is undermining our democracy in a very specific way: it's acting as the ultimate "resource curse." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse "Countries with an abundance of natural resources, specifically non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources." Scholars debate the causes of the resource curse, but one popular theory has to do with the way autocrats fund themselves relative to democracies. Autocrats, it turns out, need a lot of wealth to pay their cronies. No dictator rules alone; they need someone to run the military, someone to collect the taxes, and someone to enforce the laws. Those people have to be paid, and handsomely, or they'll overthrow the dictator (or just allow the dictator to be overthrown). This is called "selectorate theory" and this video is a great introduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Oil wealth, specifically, undermines democracy because when autocrats have access to oil wealth, they don't need to depend on their citizens very much. (Indeed, many oil-rich autocratic countries just allow other countries to come in and drill it, keeping local labor entirely out of the loop.) Resource-cursed autocracies tend to democratize when the oil wealth runs out and they need to rely on the people's productivity to deliver wealth to cronies. When autocrats are forced to allow people to educate themselves and communicate with one another, democracy ensues. It can work the other way, too. In every democracy, there's a group of folks asking themselves a question: is now the time to try a coup, to replace democracy with an autocracy? As the value of capital increases and the value of human labor decreases, the advantages of staging a coup become more and more enticing. For years we've thought of human labor as the "ultimate resource." But it turns out that human labor isn't the ultimate resource. Robot labor that's just as good if not better than human labor is a resource beyond any we've ever seen. But that means that we're discovering/inventing the ultimate resource curse. We might use automation to fund universal basic income, or a class of elites could use it to undermine "unnecessary" citizens (the "unnecessariat"), establishing a corporate fascism. When the government depends on human productivity for our tax base, the government needs to keep us all well-educated and healthy. But soon, government won't depend on human labor. "Is now the time?" they're asking. And, increasingly, the answer is "yes."
Animats 10y ago
It's about time for fruit picking to be automated. There are prototype systems, but they come from SRI International, not John Deere, and they're too fragile and too complicated mechanically. The vision system isn't the problem any more; that's simpler than a smartphone. Once that works, California loses jobs about 2.1 million illegal immigrants.
JoachimS 10y ago
I can recommend the book The Second Machine Age that discuss this topic thoroughly: https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649 https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technol... There is also a (imho) great SF short story by Marshall Brain about this: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
tcbawo 10y ago
Once productivity increases through bio hacking becomes possible, we may see the day when hacking yourself to be competitive for employment becomes an ethical problem.
- usrusr 10y ago
  Ever heard of a guy called Lance Armstrong? How many people routinely mess with their brain chemistry to fulfill self-imposed (via career expectation) performance expectations?
alkonaut 10y ago
I'm not sure what everyone is so afraid of? There will be tensions and a political problem about redistribution if "simple" jobs dry up, sure, but isn't automation a good thing regardless? It means we make more stuff withuot putting in more effort. Automation and industrialization over the last 150 years already meant we went from 120h weeks on farms to 40h weeks in offices and factories, while living standards increased. Measured in 40h/week jobs per person that means we lost 2 of 3 jobs in the industrialization! The world didn't end. And now everyone is worried that if we go from 40 to 30h or 20h weeks that will be a disaster? We can't afford to have a large fraction of the people unemployed and the rest still working 40h weeks in ever fewer jobs of course, but that's a problem societies will hopefully solve.
- ti32x 10y ago
  This is a very idealistic view that I don't believe is based in reality. While we still measure a person's worth out of how much they make, this is going to pose an enormous problem for all of us. We can't just take away people's livelihoods for the benefit of a few (us, to be honest). There will be a violent reaction, as there has been every time this situation has arisen throughout history.
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    > We can't just take away people's livelihoods for the benefit of a few But how is shifting from e.g. production to services taking away peoples livielihood any more than shifting from farms to industry was? > While we still measure a person's worth out of how much they make, this is going to pose an enormous problem for all of us. Aren't most developed countries already either speculating in, or already effectively using shorter working hours now than say just one or two decades ago? Working less seems like the natural way to go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_in_working_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_... Edit: I should add: I'm optimistic about this in societies with a high degree of labour organization, a flexible/agile political system, reasonably strong welfare states and a population that is positive towards working less in general. Simply put: if you are in an OECD country and using kilograms you'll be fine.
2sk21 10y ago
Its not just automation. There have been many more applications of optimization to reducing operating margins. At my company, there was, for example, a project aimed at identifying the optimal service intervals for heavy mining equipment. As a result of this work, it was possible to substantially reduce the amount of preventative maintenance that was being done on the machinery. It was found that not all of the preventive maintenance was cost effective.
- Delphiza 10y ago
  This is a missing part of long stories about AI and automation. I too work in servicing of industrial equipment that is now being connected. The algorithms can be simple - after n running hours a component needs servicing. No fancy AI or automation, no over-hyped 'predictive maintenance' machine learning, just a 'connected machine'. As a result, the number of service engineers can be reduced significantly because they no longer over-service. This is not a robot taking someone's job, but a 10% efficiency gain in servicing equipment is a lot of people. It's across a skills range too - we have customers that range from minimum wage floor cleaners to PhD-level scientific equipment engineers.
SFJulie 10y ago
The long term job killer is UNFAIR access to automation decided by the costs of automation or political decision. The revolt in late XIXth century in Europe were based on the generalisation of the steam engine that were favoring without any other merits than birth the wealthy and ripping the craftsmen of their jobs. Diesel made an engine so craftsman could compete vs steam engine. The german government pre-empted his invention so that it would not disrupt the dominant position of big corporations... Automation is not the problem, it is unfair access to automation decided by capital.
logicallee 10y ago
No kidding! Based on early nineteenth century trends, automation will result in most people being completely unable to do work of any kind by the middle of the twentieth century :( :(
ultim8k 10y ago
We have finally reached the age where humans can only do creative jobs. Humans are not good enough in doing heavy and repeating stuff. Robots on the other side are perfect for that. So the problem imho is not technology but lack of education.
iamgopal 10y ago
we not only need accelerated minimum wages consensus and field trials, but also defined way to remove wealth from the top few using such creative ways, that wealth still become desirable pursuit.
agumonkey 10y ago
Automation, which is rooted in all of our brains. We'll have to solve that paradox and change our mindset on life. Philosophy time.
1982734234 10y ago
I think we have to deal with reality first, rather than delving into hypothetical situations where robots control the world. Currently, many countries are growing their population despite the reduction in jobs. Secondly, corruption in the government, and businesses that manipulate the government, is funneling money into a small group of people. These are two issues that will actually help with both creating jobs and ensuring decent pay. Nobody really knows what will happen in the future. If there are robots that can do all of our work, who says that only extremely rich people will be able to afford them? Which technologies have stayed permanently unaffordable where there is consumer demand? Not that many.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Idle hands are the Devil's workshop. We're going to have to find ways to help people stay busy/occupied. Otherwise, society will just turn nasty.
jganetsk 10y ago
This is exactly wrong. Automation happened already, 200 years ago. It upended society. It was called the Industrial Revolution. Things changed dramatically, and nothing remotely of that scale is occurring now. We are suffering today not because of technological progress, but rather the contrary: the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally come to a grinding halt. Let's stop denying this. The stream of lifechanging breakthrough inventions of the 20th century, from A (antibiotics) to Z (zippers), have ended. As a result, we now suffer from secular stagnation. [1] This is why people can't get jobs. The answer is Keynesian spending, and the most fair kind of Keynesian spending is basic income. Call it a "Keynesian dividend". [1] http://larrysummers.com/2016/02/17/the-age-of-secular-stagnation/ http://larrysummers.com/2016/02/17/the-age-of-secular-stagna...
- sqldba 10y ago
  Thank you! Finally someone who gets it. IMHO these articles are fake news, journalists love beating the Automation is killing jobs drum. IT certainly is changing and outsourcing is swings and roundabouts. But there's more work than ever.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    Automation is "changing the world" provided you're finding excuses for why there are fewer jobs with worse pay that exculpate the 1%. Suddenly the American oligarchy loses its faith in automation once you discuss potentially inflationary increases to public spending. If we really are in an automation renaissance public spending could be ramped up massively and the potentially inflationary impact would be offset by all of the cost savings from replacing people with robots. If.
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >IMHO these articles are fake news Oh god, stop with this in every article. This isn't "fake"; it isn't even "news". News is either fake or not. A researched opinion piece isn't "fake" because you disagree with the conclusions. It might be wrong, but it isn't "fake".
gooseus 10y ago
Surprised I haven't seen CGP Grey's Humans Need Not Apply[1] video posted up in any of these automation discussions. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Anyone who thinks that automation isn't a big deal want to respond? I'm also curious how we assume with such confidence that everything will be fine since we survived the Industrial Revolution when there was an order of magnitude less people on the planet in the 19th century?
petarvasilev 10y ago
I can make up jobs really fast. You should think about this.
xwowsersx 10y ago
Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" is relevant here. http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
Pica_soO 10y ago
The final stage are fully automated factory's on ships, going to where the resources are the cheapest. Receiving machinery from other ships, selling Kalashnikov and cellphones, to a mankind at war over boredom. Good thing is though, machines dont need CEOs - so the last rat on the ship, might have the flagpoles cotton as towel. That is unless they can invent so many boolshit jobs, that the hamster wheel keeps on churning.
fruktstav 10y ago
Ridiculous. We are already losing our world to capitalism, it's just that we've been so indoctrinated that we've forgotten that nobody needs to be poor anymore.

274 points by petilon 10y ago

One upside to automation is that comparative advantage with regard to labour costs becomes much less important. This means that manufacturers can more easily afford to keep production in high wage economies. There are other considerations of course, such as proximity to resources, transport hubs, and markets. Ultimately though, this doesn't change the fact that automation is mostly beneficial to capital owners and not the wider workforce, so capitalism's tendency toward inequality (as described by Piketty) still applies.

hamandcheese 10y ago
> This means that manufacturers can more easily afford to keep production in high wage economies. But this doesn't really bring jobs back, since they'll just be automated. That's not to say there aren't other benefits aside from job creation, though.
- blackguardx 10y ago
  Someone has to service the machines. Also, big machines are expensive to transport, so it makes sense to make them closer to where they will be used, leading to more service jobs. There are also a lot of engineering jobs designing the hardware and software of these automated factories.
  - torpfactory 10y ago
    Doesn't the question then become how many and at what salary do these engineering jobs exist? Seems like there typically are fewer jobs and the total compensation for labor is reduced when manufacturing is automated (why else would the company pursue such a course of action?)
    - blackguardx 10y ago
      The engineering jobs already exist. Factory automation has been a big business for decades (Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Mitsubishi and others). They generally aren't high paying compared to Silicon Valley software engineers, but pay more than civil engineers. Automation will continue, but labor will probably never be completely replaced within our lifetimes. I think it makes sense to have factories and make physical goods in the US. It is easier to bring hardware to market when the production is in the same timezone. I think it leads to a more robust economy even if there is heavy automation. There are still ancillary jobs associated with factories.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Yes, but this isn't very many jobs. The amount of labor per unit of productivity is drastically reduced in any case. If we can attract new factories then it could be a net win, but someone will lose out (not china, but Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and other countries that are trying to break into middle income).
    - blackguardx 10y ago
      Some jobs is better than no jobs, right?
      - mjevans 10y ago
        Actually no. Zero jobs would be best, because then -everything- that people didn't do for their own sense of enjoyment would be automated.
        blackguardx 10y ago
        One outcome would be a utopia where everyone would share equally in this new prosperity. Another would be a distopia where the prosperity only went to the factory owners.
        seanmcdirmid 10y ago
        Well, there is the theory that employed masses are too busy to cause trouble (e.g. demand more equality), and much of our society is structured around keeping the non-upper class busy, even if that means making them move dirt between holes. The distribution of wealth sort of bears this out.
  - wott 10y ago
    The whole point of automation is to increase benefit by increasing productivity, i.e. by either increasing the production output for the same amount of jobs, or decreasing the amount of jobs needed for the same production. Since we already produce about everything in the amount we need (and sometimes much more than we need), there is no point in increasing production (it would not be sold, consumed), so productivity gains will translate into cost reduction, i.e. less jobs.
    - blackguardx 10y ago
      No one is arguing that. The argument is if we should have automated factories in high paying regions (like the US). I'm arguing that having automated factories here is better than no factories here.
- twblalock 10y ago
  It won't bring manual assembly line jobs back, but let's be honest: nothing will.
- tmnvix 10y ago
  > But this doesn't really bring jobs back, since they'll just be automated. Yeah, that's right. There would certainly be other benefits (and a limited number of jobs created) that are more indirect. The real issue around automation in my opinion is how we as a society manage it. If we stay the course, it is clear that capital owners stand to benefit most (almost entirely I would say). We are already seeing problems with rising inequality due to diverging returns from capital and labour. This is going to exacerbate that hugely. I'm generally in favour of capitalism but I think we are going to need to revisit 'the social contract' that allows capitalism to exist in exchange for a share of the rewards being used to ensure that society's basic needs are met. Just as when it was first negotiated by Bismark, this is going to have to be an initiative of the capital owners if serious unrest is to be avoided. I'm hopeful and think that it is possible. Rich people are not inherently sociopathic. A good example of this sort of compromise in more modern times was the reaction of Kennedy snr when the US faced economic and social unrest. Partly through correspondence with Keynes he was convinced that if himself and his peers didn't take a hit for the good of wider society then they stood a good chance of losing a great deal more. Every so often the social contract needs a reset (e.g. Bismark, the labour movement, the new deal, etc). Automation is going to make this more urgent. The one thing I am sure of is that it will be a political solution and not simply an economic one (e.g. less regulation, more free markets, etc).
cm2187 10y ago
> Ultimately though, this doesn't change the fact that automation is mostly beneficial to capital owners I think that inequality will increase but not because of owning capital. Rather because this automation will shift demand away from unskilled workers and into software developers, marketing experts, etc. And I do not think that the supply of skilled worker can adapt fast enough, if any. The good news (for the US) is that China will be the main casualty. In a way the US has already largely paid this tax to automation by outsourcing factory jobs to China. It is chinese factory workers that are going to be automated the first. Some low skilled jobs that couldn't be outsourced offshore like construction, taxis, etc will suffer but I'd argue a large part of the impact is behind us. Obviously the tax paid to outsourcing is also having Trump at the white house.
- tmnvix 10y ago
  While we'll have to agree to disagree about ownership of capital leading to increased inequality, I definitely agree with you when you say that you "do not think that the supply of skilled worker can adapt fast enough" to the demand. I think that while education is fundamental, even if it were always of a high quality and free, not everyone has the temperament or innate ability necessary to make the commitment to getting sufficiently qualified.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    > ...agree to disagree about ownership of capital leading to increased inequality... If it is not capital ownership, then some other inequality mechanism is at work if the automation trend is true, considering that as automation scoops the obvious and not-so-obvious patterns of workflows in the economy out of the labor market, proportionally none of the benefits accrue to those who are left creating that automation. Think about that for a second. If you are one of the few who create the automation, then by definition what you are doing is currently not amenable to automation. You are creating a fabulous wealth machine with the automation, but by and large, unless you own a capital stake in that exercise, you will not see compensation proportional to the value you bring to the table. It's a curious dynamic to me, because due to classical economics, I would have expected capital to flow more readily to those whose work could not (yet) be automated, to accelerate delivery towards the proven benefits of automation.

twblalock 10y ago

It's interesting that many politicians, including Trump and Sanders, want policies to prevent jobs from leaving the US, but have no policy proposals around automation. If you want manufacturing jobs to stay in the US, regulating automation would be far more effective than trying to prevent companies from outsourcing jobs. (Incidentally, a lot of jobs that have been outsourced probably would have been automated if outsourcing had not been possible, and that's what opponents of outsourcing are missing.) I'm very much against a policy to restrict automation, but it's worth pointing out.

cnnsucks 10y ago
You know what else is interesting? The same part of the political spectrum that cites automation as the real cause of working class decline does not hesitate to rationalize mass immigration as necessary to fill the demand for labor. If automation is the problem then what are all the unskilled immigrants for?
- twblalock 10y ago
  What part of the political spectrum are you referring to? It certainly isn't part of the mainstream.
- james-watson 10y ago
  It's funny how obvious the holes are when a little light is shined upon the patchwork that is the elite's master plan. The establishment parties are pure self serving propagandists, nothing more. They use marketing techniques to convince people that smoking is good for them, because they need to sell cigarettes. Nothing has changed.
2sk21 10y ago
A Butlerian Jihad perhaps? Frank Herbet was really on to something in his Dune series.
coldcode 10y ago
Being against automation does not make for good sound bites. But if the business of America is business (I forgot who said that, maybe Hoover or Coolidge?) and automation makes more profit, then it will happen assuming society doesn't fall apart first.

jobu 10y ago

This was one of the more frustrating parts of this past election cycle: "No candidate talked much about automation on the campaign trail. Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico, there is no clear way to stop it, and many of the technology companies are in the United States and benefit the country in many ways." A lot of US jobs have been lost to globalization, but in the long-term that won't compare to the jobs lost to automation. As a software developer this seems painfully obvious to me, and I would hope most politicians are intelligent enough to see it as well. Unfortunately none of them have even talked about it, much less proposed solutions to help displaced workers.

saryant 10y ago
Senator Ben Sasse has spoken about automation frequently. https://twitter.com/SenSasse/status/806889568276336641 https://twitter.com/SenSasse/status/806889568276336641
crdoconnor 10y ago
>Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico Technology is a MUCH more convenient villain. You can roll back 1% friendly trade agreements with China and Mexico. You can point pitchforks at the 1%. You can't roll back technological advancement and it's pointless to try. You achieve nothing by being against technology except looking like an idiot, which is precisely why articles like this are trying to convince everybody that technology is the "villain". Because god forbid Lloyd Blankfein and his cronies start being seen as villains. >A lot of US jobs have been lost to globalization, but in the long-term that won't compare to the jobs lost to automation. As a software developer this seems painfully obvious to me, Funny. As a software developer it seems painfully obvious to me just how far off we are from this supposed goal. All around me I see developers who shirk at even automating their own tests while getting excited over vaporware.

codecamper 10y ago

I guess we in tech have seen this coming for the past oh.. 25 years? Now it is really starting to hit home. Another big thing that drives automation is the stock market. The stock market provides a bunch of money to companies that can show earnings growth. Used to be you could just expand globally. Well, all the big brands have done that now. So the next step is to cut costs. How? Automate. Without the stock market this might also happen but at a slower pace.

torpfactory 10y ago

I think we are destined for a future of political and social instability in the world if we continue to define labor and its compensation as we do now. We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required. The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval, to be harnessed by willing politicians of short-sighted vision. What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines?

mjevans 10y ago
I really hope we end up with something much closer to socialism than we do either the future from "The Time Machine" or perpetual cycles of Viva-La-Revolution.
- visarga 10y ago
  Up until global trade took off, cities, villages and even individual farms were almost self sufficient. Why couldn't people be self sufficient with automation?
  - dhdhfjsjgh 10y ago
    >Why couldn't people be self sufficient with automation? Have you tried buying land recently without signing yourself into debt for the rest of your life to a bank? How did it go? Not to mention that self sufficiency would imply a major cut in the standard of living for most people, for largely no good reason. It would be far more preferable just to reduce the concentration of capital in too few hands than for the rest of us to live like it's 1850 again.
  - pavanred 10y ago
    Agree, I sometimes wonder how much of this is just a manifestation of our fear of the unknown. Consider, the world before the internet when the postal services was doing all the heavy lifting for communication. Once we got internet, a huge chunk communication was replaced by email etc. But, it also gave rise to eCommerce, on demand delivery services etc. And, the same postal services companies are doing better than ever before.

credit_guy 10y ago

I think it's likely that automation will be a huge creator of jobs. And I'm not talking about creation of high skill jobs at the expense of destruction of low skill jobs. I'm talking about a net creation of both low and high skill jobs. Allow me to explain. Here's a youtube movie of some robots in a Mercedes factory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VreG1iC65Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VreG1iC65Lc There are thousands of movies like that. Lots of robots doing a lot of work, and apparently displacing lots of jobs. But there are some jobs in the background. Someone has programmed those robots. But aren't those programmers (super-)highly skilled? I don't know for sure, but it feels to me a robot is programed like an Excel macro: you record the moves, and then edit what you recorded. For an Excel macro, both parts are done (generally) by the same person, but for industrial robots, they are probably done by different people. The person who is being recorded needs only know how to manipulate a mechanical arm with a controller, that is probably not very different from a PS4 controller. The person who edits the macros, creates procedures, then combines them, optimizes them, creates tests, etc, etc, that person is a highly skilled individual. The other one not so much. The difference here is the capacity for abstraction. Now, one could say that both these jobs happen only once, and then the robot performs the jobs thousands of times, so you have 2 new jobs (one high skill, one low skill) displacing thousands others. Alas, the programming, maintenance, re-programming, upgrading, not to mention construction of the robots still needs a small army of people. But overall, I agree that it's possible that introducing these robots resulted in a net job destruction for Mercedes and its suppliers (but not entirely sure; Mercedes was most likely more concerned with the quality of their cars rather than their cost of production). However, not every manufacturer is similar to Mercedes. A lot of manufacturers produce things in smaller batches for example. And now you start to look at the trade-off of putting the automation in place: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ If a batch is small enough, the initial investment in automation is not recouped. If the batch is huge, the automation is a no-brainer. But there's a huge middle ground where only some partial automation makes sense. And part of that automation that makes sense is to do things using some mechanical arms moved by some PS4-type controller. I think in the near future, a lot of the "mechanical" type of work (welding, cutting, soldering, hammering) will become remote-controlled. It might look like high-skilled now, but the job of a machinist was considered high-skilled 50 years ago, and essentially they are the same. Now, the farther you are from the moving or hot or electricity-conducting parts, the farther you are from danger, and the more people can try something as a hobby. More importantly, the barrier of entry for a given (low-skilled) trade goes down, so people will be able to retrain themselves more quickly. And these people will be able to create more quickly. Just like blogging has created millions of (unofficial, but money making) jobs, the advent of remote-controlled machines will create millions of new (low-skilled) jobs. And these remote-controlled machine will show up exactly because of the need for automation.

carsongross 10y ago

Whatever. In the meantime, let's bring the manufacturing chain back here so we can build up the automation expertise ourselves, and, while we wait for the End of Work, stop making the middle of our IQ bell curve compete with countries that don't give a shit about their environment, the concept of intellectual property or the safety of their workers. We can figure the automation problem out later.

inimino 10y ago
Automation saves money, bringing jobs back doesn't, that's why the jobs went away in the first place.
- carsongross 10y ago
  Who, whom.
  - inimino 10y ago
    I can't tell what point you're trying to make, here.
Ironchefpython 10y ago
> In the meantime, let's bring the manufacturing chain back here so we can build up the automation expertise ourselves How? There's obvious long term financial value in having local supply chains and manufacturing expertise. Therefore state capitalist systems will subsidize local manufacturing in the short term, while anarcho-capitalist systems will flock to set up shop there to capture convert those short-term subsidies into short-term profit. Do you have a solution that will work to build high-tech manufacturing infrastructure in the United States with no corporate incentives and no US government intervention? (I mean besides tweeting brags about job creation)
- adventured 10y ago
  Sure, dramatically lower the corporate income tax rate and substantially reduce the massive over-regulation in the US economy. Check out the various regulation registries at the Federal level, the US is choking to death on thousands of unnecessary regulations (growing rapidly for decades) that are almost always written solely for the benefit of protectionism or for fake the-government-is-doing-something purposes (which happens at all levels). The US corporate income tax rate has been a bad joke for a long time. Countries like Sweden at 22%, understood decades ago that it was bad economic policy to have a high rate. You tax the income of the wealthy as the offset. The US for example already has an extremely progressive personal income tax rate. For several decades the corporate income tax rate has been falling around the world; the world's average rate has fallen from near 30% to 22% in the last 12 years. The US isn't competitive, you see that in how we've been bleeding pharma & biotech companies off to Ireland. Over time, you start seeing R&D & operations offshoring because of that. Give it time and you've artificially created a lot more global competition through bad policy. If you're a small to mid size manufacturer in the US, paying a 30% effective income tax rate is brutal if you want to compete globally while everyone else is paying far lower rates. Germany for example lowered their top rate by about 9 points a decade ago. Finland and Iceland have a 20% rate. Korea is at 24% and China at 25%. The European average is about 20%.

remir 10y ago

Self-driving cars and robots replacing factory workers are obviously just the beginning. How about computers that can program themselves? How about machines that can think and create like we do (and better)? We approach 2017, we know climate change is a real threat, we know automation is going to be a big problem, we know we're consuming the world's resources at an alarming rate and there's 7.5 billion people on this rock... I get the feeling the future won't be this Utopian scenario that some people are dreaming of.

warmwaffles 10y ago
Time to invest in firearms. Apocalypse is near.
dispose13432 10y ago
>How about computers that can program themselves We've done that. Starting with the first language after Assembly.

xbmcuser 10y ago

The global market was still expanding so all efficiency gains from industrial revolution and the internet revolution were absorbed. Where as today the global economy is stagnating. The efficiency gains in the next decade are expected to be a few times the rate of market growth which would put many people out of work making the global market contract further. This cycle could accelerate very quickly.

known 10y ago

Does automation kill jobs in China?

badsock 10y ago
Yes. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966
- Animats 10y ago
  That's Foxconn, and they're just getting started with replacing workers. Foxconn has 1.3 million employees. Hon Hai CEO Terry Gou: "Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache." He means it. He brought in the director of the Tapei Zoo for advice on how to manage animals with different temperaments.
tonyedgecombe 10y ago
Countries where manufacturing makes up a big proportion of their economy are likely to suffer most because manufacturing is the low hanging fruit for automation.

dfabulich 10y ago

(I posted this on another thread this week where it was less relevant, so I'll just repost it here and see if anybody notices.) Mass automation is undermining our democracy in a very specific way: it's acting as the ultimate "resource curse." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse "Countries with an abundance of natural resources, specifically non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources." Scholars debate the causes of the resource curse, but one popular theory has to do with the way autocrats fund themselves relative to democracies. Autocrats, it turns out, need a lot of wealth to pay their cronies. No dictator rules alone; they need someone to run the military, someone to collect the taxes, and someone to enforce the laws. Those people have to be paid, and handsomely, or they'll overthrow the dictator (or just allow the dictator to be overthrown). This is called "selectorate theory" and this video is a great introduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Oil wealth, specifically, undermines democracy because when autocrats have access to oil wealth, they don't need to depend on their citizens very much. (Indeed, many oil-rich autocratic countries just allow other countries to come in and drill it, keeping local labor entirely out of the loop.) Resource-cursed autocracies tend to democratize when the oil wealth runs out and they need to rely on the people's productivity to deliver wealth to cronies. When autocrats are forced to allow people to educate themselves and communicate with one another, democracy ensues. It can work the other way, too. In every democracy, there's a group of folks asking themselves a question: is now the time to try a coup, to replace democracy with an autocracy? As the value of capital increases and the value of human labor decreases, the advantages of staging a coup become more and more enticing. For years we've thought of human labor as the "ultimate resource." But it turns out that human labor isn't the ultimate resource. Robot labor that's just as good if not better than human labor is a resource beyond any we've ever seen. But that means that we're discovering/inventing the ultimate resource curse. We might use automation to fund universal basic income, or a class of elites could use it to undermine "unnecessary" citizens (the "unnecessariat"), establishing a corporate fascism. When the government depends on human productivity for our tax base, the government needs to keep us all well-educated and healthy. But soon, government won't depend on human labor. "Is now the time?" they're asking. And, increasingly, the answer is "yes."

Animats 10y ago

It's about time for fruit picking to be automated. There are prototype systems, but they come from SRI International, not John Deere, and they're too fragile and too complicated mechanically. The vision system isn't the problem any more; that's simpler than a smartphone. Once that works, California loses jobs about 2.1 million illegal immigrants.

JoachimS 10y ago

I can recommend the book The Second Machine Age that discuss this topic thoroughly: https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649 https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technol... There is also a (imho) great SF short story by Marshall Brain about this: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

tcbawo 10y ago

Once productivity increases through bio hacking becomes possible, we may see the day when hacking yourself to be competitive for employment becomes an ethical problem.

usrusr 10y ago
Ever heard of a guy called Lance Armstrong? How many people routinely mess with their brain chemistry to fulfill self-imposed (via career expectation) performance expectations?

alkonaut 10y ago

I'm not sure what everyone is so afraid of? There will be tensions and a political problem about redistribution if "simple" jobs dry up, sure, but isn't automation a good thing regardless? It means we make more stuff withuot putting in more effort. Automation and industrialization over the last 150 years already meant we went from 120h weeks on farms to 40h weeks in offices and factories, while living standards increased. Measured in 40h/week jobs per person that means we lost 2 of 3 jobs in the industrialization! The world didn't end. And now everyone is worried that if we go from 40 to 30h or 20h weeks that will be a disaster? We can't afford to have a large fraction of the people unemployed and the rest still working 40h weeks in ever fewer jobs of course, but that's a problem societies will hopefully solve.

ti32x 10y ago
This is a very idealistic view that I don't believe is based in reality. While we still measure a person's worth out of how much they make, this is going to pose an enormous problem for all of us. We can't just take away people's livelihoods for the benefit of a few (us, to be honest). There will be a violent reaction, as there has been every time this situation has arisen throughout history.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  > We can't just take away people's livelihoods for the benefit of a few But how is shifting from e.g. production to services taking away peoples livielihood any more than shifting from farms to industry was? > While we still measure a person's worth out of how much they make, this is going to pose an enormous problem for all of us. Aren't most developed countries already either speculating in, or already effectively using shorter working hours now than say just one or two decades ago? Working less seems like the natural way to go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_in_working_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_... Edit: I should add: I'm optimistic about this in societies with a high degree of labour organization, a flexible/agile political system, reasonably strong welfare states and a population that is positive towards working less in general. Simply put: if you are in an OECD country and using kilograms you'll be fine.

2sk21 10y ago

Its not just automation. There have been many more applications of optimization to reducing operating margins. At my company, there was, for example, a project aimed at identifying the optimal service intervals for heavy mining equipment. As a result of this work, it was possible to substantially reduce the amount of preventative maintenance that was being done on the machinery. It was found that not all of the preventive maintenance was cost effective.

Delphiza 10y ago
This is a missing part of long stories about AI and automation. I too work in servicing of industrial equipment that is now being connected. The algorithms can be simple - after n running hours a component needs servicing. No fancy AI or automation, no over-hyped 'predictive maintenance' machine learning, just a 'connected machine'. As a result, the number of service engineers can be reduced significantly because they no longer over-service. This is not a robot taking someone's job, but a 10% efficiency gain in servicing equipment is a lot of people. It's across a skills range too - we have customers that range from minimum wage floor cleaners to PhD-level scientific equipment engineers.

SFJulie 10y ago

The long term job killer is UNFAIR access to automation decided by the costs of automation or political decision. The revolt in late XIXth century in Europe were based on the generalisation of the steam engine that were favoring without any other merits than birth the wealthy and ripping the craftsmen of their jobs. Diesel made an engine so craftsman could compete vs steam engine. The german government pre-empted his invention so that it would not disrupt the dominant position of big corporations... Automation is not the problem, it is unfair access to automation decided by capital.

logicallee 10y ago

No kidding! Based on early nineteenth century trends, automation will result in most people being completely unable to do work of any kind by the middle of the twentieth century :( :(

ultim8k 10y ago

We have finally reached the age where humans can only do creative jobs. Humans are not good enough in doing heavy and repeating stuff. Robots on the other side are perfect for that. So the problem imho is not technology but lack of education.

iamgopal 10y ago

we not only need accelerated minimum wages consensus and field trials, but also defined way to remove wealth from the top few using such creative ways, that wealth still become desirable pursuit.

agumonkey 10y ago

Automation, which is rooted in all of our brains. We'll have to solve that paradox and change our mindset on life. Philosophy time.

1982734234 10y ago

I think we have to deal with reality first, rather than delving into hypothetical situations where robots control the world. Currently, many countries are growing their population despite the reduction in jobs. Secondly, corruption in the government, and businesses that manipulate the government, is funneling money into a small group of people. These are two issues that will actually help with both creating jobs and ensuring decent pay. Nobody really knows what will happen in the future. If there are robots that can do all of our work, who says that only extremely rich people will be able to afford them? Which technologies have stayed permanently unaffordable where there is consumer demand? Not that many.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

Idle hands are the Devil's workshop. We're going to have to find ways to help people stay busy/occupied. Otherwise, society will just turn nasty.

jganetsk 10y ago

This is exactly wrong. Automation happened already, 200 years ago. It upended society. It was called the Industrial Revolution. Things changed dramatically, and nothing remotely of that scale is occurring now. We are suffering today not because of technological progress, but rather the contrary: the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally come to a grinding halt. Let's stop denying this. The stream of lifechanging breakthrough inventions of the 20th century, from A (antibiotics) to Z (zippers), have ended. As a result, we now suffer from secular stagnation. [1] This is why people can't get jobs. The answer is Keynesian spending, and the most fair kind of Keynesian spending is basic income. Call it a "Keynesian dividend". [1] http://larrysummers.com/2016/02/17/the-age-of-secular-stagnation/ http://larrysummers.com/2016/02/17/the-age-of-secular-stagna...

sqldba 10y ago
Thank you! Finally someone who gets it. IMHO these articles are fake news, journalists love beating the Automation is killing jobs drum. IT certainly is changing and outsourcing is swings and roundabouts. But there's more work than ever.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  Automation is "changing the world" provided you're finding excuses for why there are fewer jobs with worse pay that exculpate the 1%. Suddenly the American oligarchy loses its faith in automation once you discuss potentially inflationary increases to public spending. If we really are in an automation renaissance public spending could be ramped up massively and the potentially inflationary impact would be offset by all of the cost savings from replacing people with robots. If.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >IMHO these articles are fake news Oh god, stop with this in every article. This isn't "fake"; it isn't even "news". News is either fake or not. A researched opinion piece isn't "fake" because you disagree with the conclusions. It might be wrong, but it isn't "fake".

gooseus 10y ago

Surprised I haven't seen CGP Grey's Humans Need Not Apply[1] video posted up in any of these automation discussions. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Anyone who thinks that automation isn't a big deal want to respond? I'm also curious how we assume with such confidence that everything will be fine since we survived the Industrial Revolution when there was an order of magnitude less people on the planet in the 19th century?

petarvasilev 10y ago

I can make up jobs really fast. You should think about this.

xwowsersx 10y ago

Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" is relevant here. http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Pica_soO 10y ago

The final stage are fully automated factory's on ships, going to where the resources are the cheapest. Receiving machinery from other ships, selling Kalashnikov and cellphones, to a mankind at war over boredom. Good thing is though, machines dont need CEOs - so the last rat on the ship, might have the flagpoles cotton as towel. That is unless they can invent so many boolshit jobs, that the hamster wheel keeps on churning.

fruktstav 10y ago

Ridiculous. We are already losing our world to capitalism, it's just that we've been so indoctrinated that we've forgotten that nobody needs to be poor anymore.