15 ms·
Predictions of massive job losses to automation miss data that show the opposite
- zulln 9y agoNon-paywall link: https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982 https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/ro...
- 10165 9y agoNon-paywall, non-Facebook link: https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/robots-arent-destroying-eno... as in fetch -4o 0.htm https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982
- paulddraper 9y agoIn 1850, 70% of American jobs were farming. Eighty years later, it was 25%. Half of America's jobs vanished in one lifetime. This trend has been hard on farmers; I happen to know several. But I don't think we want to return to that time. Nor do I think basic income/farm subsidies is a good answer.
- ricw 9y agoYou know farmers who worked on farms in the 1920s?
- paulddraper 9y agoNo, I know farmers who worked on farms since the 70s. The trend didn't stop in 1920. It's necessarily slowed in absolute workforce percentages of course, but even now agriculture is becoming increasingly mechanized (requiring massive capital investment).
- nur0n 9y agoShouldn't it be: Half of the US's _farming_ jobs vanished in one lifetime?
- mike-cardwell 9y agoThat's not how I read it. 70% of total jobs were farming jobs. Then it was 25% of total jobs. Meaning, 45% of total jobs disappeared. Of course, they were mostly replaced by other jobs. But the jobs still disappeared. [Assuming the number of jobs is constant] [edit] Apparently the population grew massively over this period. From about 23 million to about 123 million. So there was actually an overall doubling of the total number of farming jobs. Just not proportionate to the population increase. http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html
- DonaldFisk 9y agoYou'd expect the amount of work done on farms to increase in line with the population, simply because the population has to be fed. Any comparison should take that into account. The number of farming jobs per capita has declined drastically as a result of mechanization.
- paulddraper 9y agoRight. More people => more food. But some combination of "keep farming like I always have" or "grow up keeping farming like Dad" wasn't supported by economic realities. (FYI, farming automation was much of the reason the population was able to grow by that much.)
- orbitur 9y agoThe US's population grew from approximately 25mil to 110mil in that window. Was that taken into account?
- paulddraper 9y agoYes. That's why it's percentages. Bigger populations always require more food, child care, accountants, etc. From 1840 to 1920 farmers per-capita shrunk immensely.
- bamboozled 9y agoYou know what, we've not really walked away unscathed after the transition to modern agricultural approaches just yet. The environmental cost of modern agricultural approaches is very high and is having knock on effects, food quality isn't always of the highest nutritional quality and crops will suffer as dead humus from petro-chemical based fertiliser retains no water, more water means higher food costs as it grows more scarce due to climate change and over population. Maybe it wouldn't hurt society if a few more "skilled farmers" worked with/closer to the land.
- valuearb 9y agoYea, no. Food quality and quantity is higher than ever. Our world is also awash in water, the fact that California gifted control of its water supplies to opportunists a hundred years ago not withstanding. There is no water supply problem that cannot be solved by finally applying free markets.
- paulddraper 9y agoEspecially when you consider irrigation water. In my ruralish community, irrigation water is less than 1/10 the price of potable water, because it is so much easier to produce.
- slg 9y ago>There is no water supply problem that cannot be solved by finally applying free markets. Do civil wars[1] count as "free markets"? [1] - http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241 http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241
- neon_electro 9y agoCan you expand on why you don't see basic income as a solution?
- maxerickson 9y agoMany people left viable farms for better opportunities in industrial jobs though, rather than getting laid off from their farms. My great-grandparents were homesteading in the 1900s. My grandfather was still using some horse drawn equipment in the 1940s-1950s, to farm on maybe 110 acres. So the barriers to farming for survival didn't go up very fast.
- ricw 9y agoAnecdotally I can only state that this can also be seen by searching for "robotics engineer" or related job openings. I was doing just that a year ago and the findings are slim. There just aren't many jobs out there, which to me indicates that there is little demand and consequently little development in that regard. Ever since, I've stopped believing that we'll have massive job losses due to automation (self driving cars are the only big counter example).
- wtvanhest 9y agoI don't believe future tech will replace all jobs any more than past tech has. I'm confident that people who say "this time, its different" are naive. But... will there ever be 'robotics' jobs? I would think most jobs would be really specific like a type of machine learning or computer vision etc.
- randomdata 9y ago> I would think most jobs would be really specific like a type of machine learning or computer vision etc. Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? A "robotics engineer" in my mind is someone who evaluates the problem needing to be automated and then finds a solution to automate it. That solution may include machine learning or computer vision, but not necessarily. There are lots of problems that can be solved more effectively in different ways.
- wtvanhest 9y agoI doubt it. That is more of a founder role you are describing. People hiring for robotics work will likely already be working on a problem.
- randomdata 9y agoThat sounds like a different market segment. If McDonalds wants to invest in removing their line cooks, they aren't going to wait until someone starts a startup providing that. They are going to hire an automation firm staffed with "robotics engineers". They, the engineers, then have to figure out how to make it work, be that through machine learning and computer vision, or some other method. Although the fact that you point to founders here, and echoing that there is little viability in a career as a "robotics" engineer, emphasizes the earlier comments.
- andrewtbham 9y agoDownvote. This is a political and ideologically motivated article and it has little to say about technology and lacks any insightful speculation into the future. It is backlash against all the liberal hand wringing about the impending robot apocalypse. Such as...Obama's reports... Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/12/20/artificial-intelligence-automation-and-economy https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/12/20/artific... Or bill gate's ridiculous suggestion to tax robots.
- paulpauper 9y agoThe doomsayers say this time is different, that technological change is so profound and so fast that millions of workers will end up on the dole or consigned to menial, minimum-wage mobs. Isn't that already the case? I read that most of the jobs created since 2009 are in the low-paying service sector. The problem is the financial crisis permanently gutted a lot of middle-class professional jobs. This has less to do with automation and more to do with structural changes in the labor force and economy.
- oren_thrall 9y agoI think we have yet to see the worst of it for now. But make no mistake, huge sections of jobs are going to evaporate if not by 2019, then in the decade thereafter. Not just elevator operators and dirigible pilots. A massive chunk of economic activity is going to look silly in a decade. Pretty much everything regarded as a summer job for high school teenagers is game, and that leaves a considerable number of normal, employable adults out in the cold too. Magazines are pretty much already dead, and everything that went with them shrank. Music and movies have imploded hard enough to show signs of serious stress. Shops, department stores and big box retail are off balance, and will fall over before 2030. It's going to be pretty rough. Think about your first job, and the summer jobs your high school classmates had. Will your kids hold the same jobs? I doubt it.
- dsacco 9y agoI think summer camp jobs will probably still be readily available for teenagers in a decade. Maybe not working at a movie theater or something like that (cashier-intensive jobs), but a lot of jobs with interpersonal interaction will probably stave this off for a while yet.
- aetherson 9y agoWhat is your predicted level of unemployment in the US by 2019, 2024, and 2029?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
- gumby 9y agoDebating whether the number of jobs will actually go down or not is irrelevant. The fact is on the human lifetime timescale, jobs go away (farming from 1900-1940; various factory jobs in the late 1980s, coal mining 1970s-2000s etc). People with decades in these jobs may not be able to move into equivalent (in renumeration & status) replacement jobs as their skills are likely not transferable. Thus to the tractor manufacturer in her 50s it is irrelevant whether there is high demand for experienced web designers or not. Perhaps her kid can go into the job, but she very likely can't. This is part of the reason for the demand for low-skill (and low paying) jobs. So either way we have to plan for rolling mass unemployment. The only question is the shape of the derivative.
- randomdata 9y ago> So either way we have to plan for rolling mass unemployment. Interestingly, each time we have lost jobs, we have diversified into many more types of jobs that cannot be swept away with a single automation breakthrough. ~90% of workforce were once farmers and almost every single one of them lost their job when mechanization came. Now, with self-driving cars, we are worried about the ~2% of the workforce who drive for a living. That is already a big change from the past, and each iteration how shown that a smaller and smaller portion of the workforce will be affected by automation at any given point in time. That is not to say that everyone will go unscathed, but mass unemployment becomes less and less likely.
- autokad 9y ago> ~90% of workforce were once farmers and almost every single one of them lost their job when mechanization came It was very easy to go from one job to the other. weather it needs to be required or not, many jobs today effectively require 20 years of education (12+ school, 4 undergrad, 2 masters, 2 years experience). we talk about coal mining jobs going away as if they should have seen it coming, but tech can also be vulnerable. people forget what it was like to search for a tech job even years after the 2001 bubble burst. also, the reason why people are worried about automation isn't the number of people effected by each iteration. it was widely accepted automation would destroy jobs and more than what was destroyed would come. the 2001 and 2008 recession seems to indicate that is becoming less true. i would categorize those recessions as mass unemployment, thus mass unemployment is not becoming less and less likely.
- SirensOfTitan 9y agoThe Economist remarked the same thing in their report on automation a little while back. The automation fears espoused by Bill Gates and Elon Musk are purportedly premature. Automation isn't spreading fast enough. One other note, while I do believe that automation will cause massive job losses eventually, there exists an alternative narrative. Centered around the knowledge that: 'you don't know you don't know,' we just have no idea which jobs will emerge as a result of new industries powered by automation. What does seem evident is that concentrated education at the beginning of an adult's life is unlikely to be enough in the future. Investment in education reform and adult education seems critical, whether or not automation causes large scale unemployment.
- m12k 9y ago> we just have no idea which jobs will emerge as a result of new industries powered by automation The question is, if you believe AI will eventually catch up with all jobs that exist today, what skill could a significant portion of the population possibly have at that point, that the AIs would not also match? Perhaps we'll have social constructs to provide jobs, similar to how people are willing to overpay for designer goods instead of copies (e.g. maybe 'hand-crafted' will take on a whole new meaning). But from a solely economic perspective, it seems like a matter of when, not if, an AI could more efficiently do most jobs.
- valuearb 9y agoIf AI and robotics can do everything cheaper than humans, how is that not the greatest thing ever?
- ImSkeptical 9y agoIt would be great. However, it would also obligate us to solve the problem of resource distribution that is currently being solved by the system of working a job for money, then exchanging that money for goods and services.
- mattnewton 9y ago
- faragon 9y agoIndustrial automation is very expensive, and human labour, with semi-automated processes, is very productive and flexible. So fully automation is far for happening, except for massive production.
- Houshalter 9y agoThat's why general purpose robots will change everything. With recent progress in AI, we will soon have robots that can be trained to do a job just like humans.
- xg15 9y ago> The alternative is a tightening labor market that forces companies to pay ever higher wages that must be passed on as inflation, which usually ends with recession. Higher wages, god beware! More generally, the article seems to follow a pattern I've seen in a number of "there is no problem" articles: They concentrate stoically on the present. Maybe we don't have massive job loss due to automation just yet (and even that is disputed), but we also don't yet have self-driving cars in widespread use (not to mention trucks), the retailers haven't yet gotten rid of their cashiers and Amazon's warehouses are still mostly run by people - yet all those things are predicted to happen in a the next decades. So think a discussion about future developments is more useful than stating that everything is fine right now. (Though even that seems questionable to me. If we're in such a job miracle as the article states, why did so many people vote trump? Mass delusion?)
- ChuckMcM 9y agoInteresting having this come just after the "Guaranteed Minimum What" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326505) article was posted and commented on.
- zanny 9y agoOf course they aren't, there is a huge capital cliff to make it happen. Automation is not something that happens slowly in this context. Self driving car research has no impact on the auto industry until the moment tremendous savings can be had in this financial quarter at which point we see the destruction of millions of jobs. Cell phones were not a slow burn advance. The Internet did not slowly take off. These things exploded in (economically speaking) blinks of the eye, and the same happens in every other industrial capacity for automation. The barrier is the up front opportunity cost to bring down the wall and take the costs to that short term economic projection - as long as it costs $150k to replace a $50k truck driver, no publicly traded company is going to do that en masse. It hurts this quarters results too much to accept. The fervor is not about slow burn automation. That has been happening since the industrial revolution, but it is important to not conflict role optimization with role obsolescence. We don't have elevator operators anymore. We still have farmers. The foresight is to see that we will have innovations that eliminate labor classes overnight, that they won't have an impact until they are deleting industries, and that the opportunity cost to get there is a pill few are willing to swallow so the outcomes get delayed. But we can see they are inevitable, in the same way climate change is an inevitable catastrophe that to many seems not to matter until New York City is under water and we have a billion humans dying of famine in a desertified equatorial region. We are very good at creating bullshit jobs[1] to fill the gradual innovative automation. The job optimization that creeps through every domain constantly pounds us so we create more bullshit jobs to keep the economic system afloat. Instead of looking at statistics relating to peak employment, look at worker satisfaction and confidence that what they do actually means something. Those numbers are telling on how many people actually feel like they are making a real economic contribution[2]. [1] http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/ http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d... [2] https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningless/ https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningles... I just want to postfix this with anyone can make up numbers or just use the numbers out there to rewrite history into their favor. You can make a legitimate argument that automation is fake, that worker satisfaction is high, and that this is all fearmongering. If so, I would ask why there is so much civil unrest surrounding it globally. The statistics and numbers might all be bullshit commissioned by biased interests, but the macroscopic behavior of people can reflect the reality. The entire global movement towards isolationist nationalism and totalitarianism is centralized on the obsolescence of people and the rise of bullshit work. People feel abandoned, unfulfilled, or forgotten. It is a growing trend. It is valuable not to ignore why that might be.
- darkhorn 9y agoThis debate was hot too like ehen print come to Ottoman Empire. They feared same thing, destroying jobs of hand writers. So the nation lost several years due to "print ban".
- MilnerRoute 9y agoHere's a non-paywalled link: http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/10/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-capital-account.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/10/robots-arent-...
- dang 9y agoThank you. We switched to that from https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982 https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-.... We also changed the title to the subtitle, which is less baity. The text itself is pretty substantive.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rch 9y agoUnreadable
- rdlecler1 9y agoThere are two things here (1) A lot of people involuntarily dropped out of the workforce which not captured by simple unemployment rate (2) What's important is quality of jobs which is what you can buy with your income. We may have an abundance of food and LCD TVs at the moment -- goods that may have faced inflation before their production was less mechanized/automated but these efficiency gains have been more than eaten up by inflation in housing, education and healthcare which all are associated with competition for a scarce, less elastic, resource.
- DanielBMarkham 9y agoThe "robots are taking our jobs!" folks seem to miss one very important point: commerce is not about the production and trade of things to keep people alive. In fact, that's an extremely small part of it. Most all commerce is because humans are social and like trading for social reasons. That's not going anywhere. So activities that provide needed social capital aren't going anywhere. In fact, some may become quite more valuable. Things like white water rafting or fashion consultant. Things that involve the rote production of life-sustaining products? Sure. If your job can be replaced by a robot, it will be. There are many, many jobs that can't -- and my money says there are a lot more of those kinds of jobs coming down the pike. If that doesn't persuade you, imagine a world with strong AI where robots can produce anything you like. Would humans suddenly stop trading for things or collecting things? Of course not, in fact, it would become highly more nuanced. We're going to see industries emerge that seem incredibly stupid by modern standards, but which will be immensely influential as time goes on. The fact that we can't predict the future is a feature, not a bug of our existence. Having said all of that, it's certainly possible that we'll see a lot of economic stress in the coming few decades. Just like in the previous few decades. Perhaps even as much stress as we had during the Great Depression. But it's always been like that.
- apeace 9y agoAs a software engineer, I often reflect on how much my own job prevents or cuts existing jobs for humans. At least in my case, it seems that cutting out human work creates more jobs. Let's imagine I build a feature that makes it twice as fast for us to close a sale in our pipeline. Do we cut half our sales force? Of course not--we would rather keep all the people and make double the sales. This brings us even more revenue, which we use to hire more sales people and more software developers, growing the company and providing more jobs. Perhaps this simple logic can't apply to all cases, but I've certainly seen it apply a lot!
- johngalt 9y agoJevons paradox applied to employment.
- vannevar 9y agoThe other implication of this study is that technology doesn't contribute nearly as much to economic growth as many people think. Which also means that the 'normal' baseline for economic growth remains stable over long periods of time, and the recessions that followed unusual spurts of higher growth in the 80s and 90s may have been inevitable.