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As I understand it the incentive to automate is to 1) reduce costs and to 2) increase quality by standardizing the execution of complicated tasks. If this is t

As I understand it the incentive to automate is to 1) reduce costs and to 2) increase quality by standardizing the execution of complicated tasks. If this is true then as a general rule automation is going to target jobs of highly payed, semi-skilled workers. I think we can expect that these positions will become scarcer and scarcer as automation technologies are adopted. One area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is longshoremen (dock workers). I suspect that in the near future we'll be seeing these jobs disappear as well. https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-dockworker-pay-20150301-story,amp.html?client=ms-android-google https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-do...

Eridrus 10y ago
Both opportunities and challenges, but people are working on it: https://www.flexport.com/blog/port-automation-oakland-rotterdam/ https://www.flexport.com/blog/port-automation-oakland-rotter...
- porpoisemonkey 10y ago
  Thanks for the additional info. I'm not sure how to feel about the increasing use of automation. As a technologist I know that technology tends to increase efficiency and to some extent productivity which could allow us to scale up to projects of a magnitude never seen before in human history. (SpaceX's mission to colonize Mars comes to mind.) As a human being I feel wholeheartedly for the people being displaced by the technology and the chaos it wreaks on their lives. I can imagine many of them may not be capable of adapting to this trend and will become completely marginalized in the workforce - relegated to having multiple low paying jobs.
  - pizzetta 10y ago
    Any such "tech automation moratorium" would have to be a world-wide thing. It would not work if everyone abided by a moratorium but the US didn't or Every did but Australia --that would create an unfair advantage to the one doing all the automation where others had to pay for semi-skilled labor. There is no easy answer to the conundrum.
    - sbov 10y ago
      The other problem is how do you create the moratorium? If it's related to "how you used to do business", new companies would quickly wipe out old companies. If its by industry, new industries could wipe out old ones not because they're more efficient at their core - but because they are allowed to automate whereas other ones aren't. There just isn't a realistic mechanism to enforce this sort of rule.
cestith 10y ago
Watch out for the civil unrest when it reaches the longshoremen and the Teamsters.
Gargoyle 10y ago
Another area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is web developers. Whee!
- porpoisemonkey 10y ago
  > Another area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is web developers. I'm not even sure that this stops at web development. It's my general feeling that in all software there's a small core of very talented developers that are pushing the boundaries of the technology and an army of semi-skilled developers that are building off of their labors and backfilling functionality using the patterns established by the leading developers. (Most notably in the "quality assurance" teams of some large software firms.) Over time I expect that artificial intelligence and more intelligent tooling will eliminate many of these "backfill" positions. I'm not sure what happens when this occurs as it would seem that survival of the fittest might leave many software developers unemployable (myself included).
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    To some extent, the idea of frameworks and open source components is pretty much automation targeting web developers. WYSIWIG dev tools are pretty much the end point to this, but they never let you connect to data, so maybe Tableu is essentially the WYSIWIG for now.

Eridrus 10y ago

Both opportunities and challenges, but people are working on it: https://www.flexport.com/blog/port-automation-oakland-rotterdam/ https://www.flexport.com/blog/port-automation-oakland-rotter...

porpoisemonkey 10y ago
Thanks for the additional info. I'm not sure how to feel about the increasing use of automation. As a technologist I know that technology tends to increase efficiency and to some extent productivity which could allow us to scale up to projects of a magnitude never seen before in human history. (SpaceX's mission to colonize Mars comes to mind.) As a human being I feel wholeheartedly for the people being displaced by the technology and the chaos it wreaks on their lives. I can imagine many of them may not be capable of adapting to this trend and will become completely marginalized in the workforce - relegated to having multiple low paying jobs.
- pizzetta 10y ago
  Any such "tech automation moratorium" would have to be a world-wide thing. It would not work if everyone abided by a moratorium but the US didn't or Every did but Australia --that would create an unfair advantage to the one doing all the automation where others had to pay for semi-skilled labor. There is no easy answer to the conundrum.
  - sbov 10y ago
    The other problem is how do you create the moratorium? If it's related to "how you used to do business", new companies would quickly wipe out old companies. If its by industry, new industries could wipe out old ones not because they're more efficient at their core - but because they are allowed to automate whereas other ones aren't. There just isn't a realistic mechanism to enforce this sort of rule.

cestith 10y ago

Watch out for the civil unrest when it reaches the longshoremen and the Teamsters.

Gargoyle 10y ago

Another area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is web developers. Whee!

porpoisemonkey 10y ago
> Another area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is web developers. I'm not even sure that this stops at web development. It's my general feeling that in all software there's a small core of very talented developers that are pushing the boundaries of the technology and an army of semi-skilled developers that are building off of their labors and backfilling functionality using the patterns established by the leading developers. (Most notably in the "quality assurance" teams of some large software firms.) Over time I expect that artificial intelligence and more intelligent tooling will eliminate many of these "backfill" positions. I'm not sure what happens when this occurs as it would seem that survival of the fittest might leave many software developers unemployable (myself included).
- Eridrus 10y ago
  To some extent, the idea of frameworks and open source components is pretty much automation targeting web developers. WYSIWIG dev tools are pretty much the end point to this, but they never let you connect to data, so maybe Tableu is essentially the WYSIWIG for now.