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How Will Automation Affect Different U.S. Cities?

91 points by SQL2219 8y ago

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
No matter how you shake this, we're looking at 60+% additional unemployment for every city. Some fare much worse. And I remember from my history studies that the Great Depression was officially around 33% unemployment. I've listened to the national talking heads and political figures, and nobody publicly is talking about this. Not the Republicans, and not the Democrats. However, the Dems seem to have a better idea by bolstering all sorts of subsidy and welfare programs. Those work well and good for keep individuals out of poverty, but falls short when working with communities of impoverished. These end up counting on, and using tax revenues from well-to-do areas. And these unemployment numbers show that there won't be 'well-to-do' areas. The WPA was one such way out of mass unemployment. But given how effective automation is, I question its use this time around, if the current political atmosphere would even have the stomach to discuss such things. This is one result from capitalism. Accelerate until we hit the wall. And this wall, is that we will no longer need "labor" provided by humans. So, what do we do with the 95% of people that must work? That's the $64,000 question. My personal plan: I'm learning electronics from the ground up. I'm teaching myself control systems theory. I'm learning how things are put together - electronics are very similar to code libraries. You do a function block to do something, and you chain them together. This means that I'm untraining specialities, and learning how to analyse and fix quickly. I guess being a sysad also helps in that. I'm not putting much trust in the national or state level government. I see more done at the local levels, but without tax revenue/money, they're up shit's creek as well.
- rubidium 8y ago
  60% is unrealistic. It's still very expensive to make anything as reliable as a human being if we're talking about anything other than pick-and-place (and that was really expensive the first time around). For a business to automate, it must invest substantial resources into the automation process and product. It must work in an industry where consistency is the most important quality customers are looking for. Automation already affected most of what it's going to do in manufacturing. Given the capital and talent being deployed, automated driving is on the way. Most other industries are not seeing similar talent and capital being invested into automation. Long-haul trucking is the industry I have the greatest concern for. Most of the others (e.g. short order cooks) will be fine for quite some time.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Tell that to the explosion of automation occurring right now. My local McD's just put in the touchscreen kiosk that'll ultimately replace the entire counter crew. The 'cooks' are already just a few folks running from machine to machine pressing buttons. That can also be entirely replaced (see other timely HN posting about MIT students' robo-cooker).
    - bluedino 8y ago
      I find it odd that McD's went with something as archaic as self-ordering kiosks when you can just order from your phone. Those kiosks are very slow and a bit cumbersome to use, and they put them smack in the middle of the waiting area in the restaurant. Huge waste of space.
      - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        Exactly my thought. Who doesn't have a phone? But wait - maybe there's a significant demographic there, after all its McD's.
        crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        I also look at places like Chili's, Applebees, and the low-midgrade sit downs. Whenever you see a tablet on the table, that's their way of automating staff on various levels at a restaurant's level. They sell it as a way to play games tableside and to request server assistance... In reality, its so they can hire even less servers, have push-demand by customers when they wanted waited on, and sell more stuff quicker. It's also a way for management to ascertain actual engagement levels along with sales data. It's another case of short-sighted automation segmenting out under management in low end sit down restaurants. You certainly don't see high end restaurants engaging in these shenanigans... yet. Our (wife and I) decision is we place them face-down off the table. We prefer to engage with humans, not a idiot-box upper management dictates.
        8y ago
- bloopernova 8y ago
  My anecdotal experience is that people can't wrap their heads around such an enormous, complete, shift in the way labour and capital will work. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair. The few truck drivers I've spoken with all seem to think that autonomous trucks are going to arrive just after they retire. Similar stories come from nurses, fast food workers, and construction folks like drywallers. They all say "oh, that won't arrive for at least another 30 to 40 years!" I don't belabour the point because that just makes people fearful and angry. In the USA there's a huge amount of people in depressed rural areas already. Their fear at being left behind by society has been manipulated into keeping the Republican party in power by various hatemongers. Now imagine the fear and anger they and many more will feel when 95% of the jobs disappear. What sort of person will rise up and lead this vast angry mob? How many of them will claim disability? Imagine 200 million people potentially starving and angry, many of them with firearms? (NB: I make no statement on the ethics of firearms!) I am deeply worried about the era my teenage stepdaughter will live through.
  - randomdata 8y ago
    The only thing I cannot wrap my head around is why we won't create new jobs. Are we truly months away from reaching the pinnacle of human achievement? We've quite literally lost 95% of all jobs before. That part is nothing new. However, what we found was that when people were jobless and bored, they found new things to do. Things that nobody ever imagined people doing when they were busying doing other jobs. It is not like human-level robots are anywhere on the horizon. At best we have simple pattern matching machines that can be trained to do certain tasks. But they cannot cross tasks. A self-driving car robot cannot start becoming a self-practicing doctor robot on a whim. A self-practicing doctor requires building an entirely new robot specialized to do medicine. Up to this point, each time we lose jobs, the new jobs people invent have become more and more diverse. At one time, 95% of the workforce all did the same job. Now the largest industry employs something like 5% of the workforce. The numbers are getting smaller. And are trending to be even smaller still. It is not difficult to imagine a time when people will all have distinct jobs, that no other human does. The economies of building a robot to replace a single person starts to diminish quickly.
- snarfy 8y ago
  We need to own the means of production. Once everything is automated, that means owning stock in those companies automating everything.
  - Density 8y ago
    means of production: entry level laser sintering metal 3d printer is 70k. CNC mill is 10k. Marx's dream is available to nearly every single American. Have at it.
gregpilling 8y ago
from the article: "In a small town, there are likely a few small restaurants run by a few people who do many things—cook, clean, manage the books, etc. “Some of these tasks are easily enough defined to soon be automatable,” Youn says. By contrast, in a larger city there will likely be some much larger restaurants that require more specialized knowledge and skills—perhaps a marketing team, or a lawyer who specializes in the restaurant industry—that cannot be easily automated." I have a small factory, we use a fair bit of automation. I disagree with the above quote - I think that the larger restaurant will be more likely to automate first, and arguably the franchise restaurant model is automated marketing and business management. The larger places will go full robot in the kitchen sooner, the smaller places will continue to have one person wearing many hats for a long time. Larger places have more budget, can afford more automation, and the smaller places would have a harder time justifying a burger cooking robot if it would only be in use a small fraction of the time. My welding robots are super fast. I have two so that I can reduce setup and changeover time. The robots are so fast, the main headache is feeding them enough jobs - selling the work. The setup and changeover is very slow. I spend 5-10 hours getting a new jig built, programmed and tuned up. This setup time is never discussed in the media. Sure the robot will be amazing and fast and super productive - once you spent 10 hours programming it to do so. If the task is a 'once-only' and it only takes an hour, who in their right mind would automate that? This setup time will be the biggest impediment - humans are pretty quickly adapted, autonomous fleshy robots, that outperform the best automation when it comes to setup time. I love automation. I have 6 automated machines, and a couple 3D printers, that you can push a button and go get a coffee, and there is the part when its done. Sometimes one button push can make a couple thousand dollars in products - that is a great feeling! But the setup time is massive, and this is the greater expense over the cost of the machine. Its like an algebra equation. y=ax+b where 'a' is the setup time, and 'b' is the time for one unit. With a human welding a simple part, 'a' would be 5 minutes, and 'b' would be 5 minutes. With a robot welding cell like a Panasonic PA-750, the 'a' would be 500 minutes, and the 'b' would be 2 minutes. If you need 100 of them, no sense in turning on the robot. If you need 10,000 of them, the robot welding cell will be done in 20,500 minutes instead of 50,005 minutes for the human welder. My Panasonic costs $2284 a month for 60 months on a lease, $1 to purchase at the end. The human costs $1000 per week in perpetuity, with increasing costs due to inflation if nothing else. The robot is half the hourly, and its paid for in 5 years. The human is never paid for, it always needs compensation. In this example, the human takes 500 hours more to do the task, and that is $12,500 more in wages over the robot. My 7 year old son can run (not program) the welding robot and make parts, which he does for Pokemon money on the weekend. So where does that leave the human? Doing small runs! Which is better for the human anyway! Welding the same small part for weeks at a time makes you a little crazy. Its like watching the same GIF every 5 minutes for weeks at a time. Welding the same part every 5 minutes for 2-4 hours is quite doable, can be fun to get in the groove. I think in the future that production runs will become smaller as CNC machines proliferate. Everyone will want something custom, which is what humans are best at. High volume will be robot welded, because its boring and machines do it faster and better. I manufacture in America. Using automation, I am directly cost competitive with China and India in my core products that we have been making (and optimizing manufacturing) for 14 years. Its 1/4 steel plate mostly, and our cost to build is directly in line with the best quotes from Asia. Robot welders are cheaper than any welder in Asia. We loose on thinner stuff, like 16 gauge and lower, and we lose on items that need a lot of hand work. But we are right there for heavier items. We did a large welding job for Chinese factory last year that was for the US market. Our price was the same, but shipping was less since the product was already here. We got the deal over their own factory. 28,000 units. TL;DR - things are better for humans than these articles would have you believe.
danesparza 8y ago
I completely disagree with the article's assertion that 'knowledge professions like ... lawyers' will be relatively unaffected. 'DoNotPay' (the robot lawyer) has already helped overturn millions of dollars of parking fines. NPR article on the subject: https://www.npr.org/2017/01/16/510096767/robot-lawyer-makes-the-case-against-parking-tickets https://www.npr.org/2017/01/16/510096767/robot-lawyer-makes-... Also in reference to manufacturing processes, it appears that Toyota has learned some hard lessons in automation and is actually moving in the opposite direction: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/02/toyota%E2%80%99s-secret-weapon-low-cost-car-factories/ http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/02/toyota%E2%80%99s-se...
- SlowBro 8y ago
  Also, from my (very much outsider) observation of the legal profession there seems to be a lot of boring work that probably could be automated. So maybe not lawyers themselves, but legal helper workers, will increasingly be replaced.
  - pc86 8y ago
    It seems to me that knowledge worker support staff (paralegals, PACs, etc) are the current low hanging fruit in terms of automation. Firms without them will be able to turn higher profit on less revenue.
- okreallywtf 8y ago
  Its possible that some mundane examples will be automated, but the law is not a deterministic code that can simply be interpreted and executed. Automation may make the job less tedious and might reduce the numbers of lawyers needed (or more likely, paralegals).
  - Retric 8y ago
    Quite a few paralegal jobs have been removed simply by adding document search capabilities. Automation that cuts the work down by 50% can have huge impacts even without dealing with all the edge cases.
justaman 8y ago
Millions will wake up with no goals and no structure to their lives because they have all of their most basic needs satisfied by UBI if the democrats have their way. Republicans will require mandatory public service to obtain UBI. Optimists tend to think this means more time for artistic passions and inventive endeavors. Pessimists think people will spend more time watching Big Bang Theory. Usually and answer is in the middle. I will be investing in antidepressants.
- pc86 8y ago
  Any requirement to obtain UBI by definition means it's not UBI. And I've not heard a single proposal for "mandatory public service" in order to receive any benefit. Not to mention that UBI is squarely a libertarian (small l) proposal and neither the Democrats nor Republicans want it. Republicans only want it if it means slashing public services (one of only two ways it is even fiscally possible, which is a nonstarter for the vast majority of Democrats), and Democrats either don't want it or want it as part of a huge tax increase (the other way, which is - surprise! - a nonstarter for the vast majority of Republicans).
  - fapjacks 8y ago
    I don't know why you're being downvoted. I'm not a good fit for most labels so I've got quite a varied social network, and I've been pushing the idea of UBI out to them to gauge what folks think. It's approximately what you've mentioned here. Average people seem skeptical but open to the idea, interested but certain there's a catch. Republicans look at it like a way to cut welfare funding and Democrats look at it like a way to increase public assistance. I've got friends on both sides looking across at one another, wondering how something could be both things at once. I personally think most Americans would support UBI if it were spelled out clearly what it is and also what it is not.
    - justaman 8y ago
      A bit of anecdotal evidence of the pitfalls of welfare and what it could mean for UBI. I grew up in an area of questionable safety. There was a woman across the street who spoke to my mother about how she would scam the welfare system to receive multiple payments every month. This was on top of food stamps and child support checks. She was making more than most people with full time jobs in the area while doing absolutely nothing for society with no desire to ever change. People will take advantage of the system if they can. Spelling out what it is and what it is not would have to mean making people understand that it is only the minimum and somehow encourage them to expand their horizons. That seems like a cultural shift that needs to happen before UBI becomes prevalent.
ajmurmann 8y ago
I used to believe that automation will lead to greater unemployment. Now I think that two things happen: goods get cheaper which lowers the minimum amount someone needs to earn for a job to be acceptable. People who still have a great job have more spending our. This unlocks new jobs that previously nobody would have paid for and nobody would have accepted. But both maximum price somebody would pay went up and minimum price someone wants to perform went down. Recent examples are all these delivery services and obviously Lyft and Uber, although the car services are a little more complicated since there always were taxis.
- lev99 8y ago
  I think there are three forces discussed here. Automation (removing work). Decreased cost good (reduced labor costs). Increased wealth (those with it spend more on goods and services). Automation's effects on the economy larger depends on the pace it is achieved. If someone released a box that replaces truck driver's tomorrow and sells it for $1000 then there will be huge disruption. If drivers are replaced with automation slowly over 30 years the impact will be less because the rest of the economy will have time to absorb the impact. Increased wealth is expanding the service industry, with petcare being a prime example. This will create more jobs, but those jobs are both at risk of being automated and might not be enough to replace automation. Decreased good costs works for some things like toothbrushes and iphones, but they don't work so well for limited resources like gold jewelry or real-estate. It might improve quality of life in some ways, but it cannot help with everything.
- zanny 8y ago
  Except it doesn't matter if general goods and services get cheaper if life necessities like healthcare and residence have their costs ballooning out of control. That $8 minimum wage job in ten years might be able to buy you twice as many trinkets at the same price but that doesn't mean anything if you have no where to live for less than $3,000 a month in rent. Thats not to say that you cannot make housing and healthcare dramatically cheaper and more efficient, but we simply are not doing it, and there doesn't seem to be nearly enough momentum to see change happen in that regard. Lives rarely get better without a good protest, but there is no uniform movement with only big wig opposition to fixing zoning laws or socializing medicine. Its all working class vs working class infighting between haves and have nots.
SlowBro 8y ago
There is a presupposition in this article: The automated jobs will leave a vacuum. That is, routine jobs will be taken away with no other jobs to replace them. What if reducing routine jobs frees up minds for higher pursuits? In the same way that high level programming languages such as Python have increased the amount of programming jobs, as contrasted with writing in assembly. A quick search on Dice shows Python jobs outnumber assembly 8 to 1. This might actually lead to a jobs explosion.
- adamsea 8y ago
  Interesting :). Though, this sort of presupposes that the people whose jobs are automated away have the financial security in order to take the time necessary to create a new job/career. I think a lot of people, in the U.S. at least, don’t have that level of financial security (plus the healthcare snafu). I agree with you about the potential.
  - SlowBro 8y ago
    What is financial security but the ability to afford to pay for one’s needs? Automation in farming has cut the price of calories, and perhaps too automation in other sectors will reduce the cost of living. Automation in medicine could be a big help for costs. Unfortunately though, housing cannot be automated and that is very expensive. Though much of housing costs, at least for new builds, is from regulations and labor. Reduce regulations with better governance, and reduce labor with automation (3D printed houses?), and you’re on your way to part of a solution.
    - burlesona 8y ago
      The true cost of housing is relatively flat across the developed world and especially the US. The actual cost is almost entirely a function of local politics. We could have a flood of nice, brand new homes for $300k in Silicon Valley and nice older homes for $200k, in the same way a city like Tokyo or Houston does, if the people of California had not made the deliberate choice to pull up the ladder behind them.
zwieback 8y ago
I've spent a lot of time building automated assembly lines and I think the writers of the article (and the underlying research) gets a lot wrong. I doubt the smallest cities will be prime automation areas since areas with high degrees of automation require a few highly-skilled robot babysitters that are unlikely to relocate into the provinces. I think large cities are much more likely to see high automation rates due to economies of scale and small citiies will either stay the same or businesses will simply leave.
- lev99 8y ago
  I think you'll find enough highly skilled baby sitters in the provinces living there for personal reasons. McDonald's shouldn't have any problem finding someone in a city of 50,000 to watch their burger flipping robots machines.
caymanjim 8y ago
I find it bizarre that they single out fishing as a job that's likely to be automated away. I don't see this happening any time soon. Fishing crews are already pretty streamlined, and many things on fishing ships are mechanized. I can see automation replacing more of the post-catch processing on giant factory ships, but I don't see robots costing many other fishing jobs in the near future.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Could you elaborate more? From my very amateur point of view, fishing seems like something that could be completely automated pretty easily, but it seems like I'm not seeing the complexity.
  - zanny 8y ago
    A large part of it is liability. In theory you could just send a self-driving boat out with a giant net to scoop up a few tons of marine life to bring back to shore and stuff in a processing plant. Or even better maybe make a self-sufficient platform that uses current to turn turbines and just scoops up fish, sorts them, and puts them on ice for cargo carriers to come by and pick up. The problem is the same one as self driving cars on a more massive scale - accountability. When you have human bodies at every step of the process you have someone to blame if you "accidentally" kill a protected species, overrun your quotas, put tainted meat in the market, etc - if everything is operating on its own you get the same situation where self driving car operators are going to try to blame the software engineers if something goes wrong, while the company gets to take the fallout. And the fines on illegal fishing are actually legitimate compared to the token paltry fines in other industries (depending on the country, of course). The economics are completely on automations side here, you could get 97% good fish for a tenth the price with some substantial up front investments today. But that 3% false positive / sorting error case with the inability to blame line workers kills the business.
  - caymanjim 8y ago
    The ocean is a dynamic environment. Nets get tangled, lines get tangled, wildlife interferes, weather and sea conditions are harsh and unpredictable. The ocean isn't a nice flat square corn field that a combine can lazily navigate through. We've just barely figured out how to automate picking strawberries in a nice safe greenhouse.
geebee 8y ago
Looks like software application development is listed as having a relatively high automation "risk", around 21%. Anyone know how this was calculated. Doesn't have to be a link for this particular site, just some good reading material. My initial reaction was that this number is hard to nail down because on reflection, so much of what I do gets automated. That's the nature of software. When I started programming for money in the late 90s, I still managed memory. That's automated now through garbage collection (for me). I also used to do a lot of direct network and socket programming, also automated away. I managed my own database connection and pooling. JDBC came along and abstracted that away, but a decade later, I heard someone who used an ORM say he wouldn't want to write all that "low level" jdbc code ;) I guess you're getting old when the high level leaky abstraction of your youth becomes the low level code for a new generation of programmers. My whole career has been one long progression of getting automated away, by this perspective. I remember when I proposed getting a web server up and running for a project in college, and a professor remarked on what I was doing. There was a time, he recalled, when doing a "spreadsheet" was fairly advanced and took some serious technical chops. The same would happen to web servers - but for the few years then they required specialized skill and had a big impact on business, this knowledge would be very valuable. The moment would pass, but something new would come up, and that would create all kinds of new apps that require an app developer. To me, the moment when nothing new comes up - ie., when there is no new moment for human app developers, all software development is now automated - that is the moment when we replaced by automation. I wonder if that's what this article is talking about? If that's the case, 20% might seem high, though not out of the question. But by a more general definition, the one I discussed above, I'd ay the odds that my current skillset will be automated away is roughly 100%. I want to be clear I'm not (necessarily) talking about churn, I'm talking about new breakthroughs that fundamentally change the job. That kind of change I don't mind at all, I enjoy it, it's probably why I'm in this field. Churn, on the other hand, is what makes me want to quit. I'm rambling on here, but it occurs to me that software development probably isn't that unusual. It's the jobs that don't change as much that are unusual. Lawyers, for instance, have certainly changed over the years, but we expect people to still be lawyers in 100 years. How many horse and buggy drivers expect that job to still be around? How many lathe operators or truck drivers expect this? I'm thinking, maybe the best metric isn't the odds that a particular job will be automated, since for many (most?) jobs, that's pretty much 100%. The question is, what are the odds that a job will be automated with no path to the next thing. That's the fundamental transformation going on here. And yeah, it actually is happening. A horse and buggy driver can become a bus driver, but what happens when the concept of a drive goes away completely? Will anything emerge? Another aspect of automation I'm interested in is the complete bindside. Music, I think, was one of the interesting automation stories of the last 100+ years. There were various attempts to replicated the human mechanical process of playing an instrument, and they all appeared very unlikely to do much replacement. Yeah, piano rolls made an appearance, and you could try this I suppose by hooking up some contraption to make a flute play. But what happened instead was that it turned out you can actually store music physically in various materials and play it back. Music went from 100% live to less than 1% live in about 50 years. But we didn't really automate music, we replaced it with a similar product. My guess is that this will be the story with software development. It seems absurd to me that this could happen through automation, but that's because I'm locked into one way of thinking about it. Kind of like trying to imagine how a crankshaft could power a bunch of strings tied to a bow and some pegs to try to recreate the physical process of playing a violin. It won't happen like that. Something utterly mind blowing, like storing music in grooves of different depth in vinyl, of all things, utterly unanticipated. Yeah, that's generally how this massive shifts happen.
dmritard96 8y ago
I would love to see a breakdown by country. Given the endless rhetoric around manufacturing reshoring/offshoring/etc., it would be great to see if thats even something we should care about given how much automation already exists and how much more is about to come online. Owning the robots and supply chain will obviously have some value, but politically speaking, the value is often measured in jobs which seems like its minimally shortsighted if not downright disingenuous.
lucasnichele 8y ago
There is a lot of confusion between "automation" and "artificial intelligence", I believe that automation facilitates, and modifies the professions in the short term. AI is something that should be discussed in a broader sense.
bytematic 8y ago
I have always wondered how automation will adapt to things like ice on roads/parking lots/equipment, or salt everywhere like in Minnesota/Wisconsin. Is this being considered in sunny California/Texas?

91 points by SQL2219 8y ago

No matter how you shake this, we're looking at 60+% additional unemployment for every city. Some fare much worse. And I remember from my history studies that the Great Depression was officially around 33% unemployment. I've listened to the national talking heads and political figures, and nobody publicly is talking about this. Not the Republicans, and not the Democrats. However, the Dems seem to have a better idea by bolstering all sorts of subsidy and welfare programs. Those work well and good for keep individuals out of poverty, but falls short when working with communities of impoverished. These end up counting on, and using tax revenues from well-to-do areas. And these unemployment numbers show that there won't be 'well-to-do' areas. The WPA was one such way out of mass unemployment. But given how effective automation is, I question its use this time around, if the current political atmosphere would even have the stomach to discuss such things. This is one result from capitalism. Accelerate until we hit the wall. And this wall, is that we will no longer need "labor" provided by humans. So, what do we do with the 95% of people that must work? That's the $64,000 question. My personal plan: I'm learning electronics from the ground up. I'm teaching myself control systems theory. I'm learning how things are put together - electronics are very similar to code libraries. You do a function block to do something, and you chain them together. This means that I'm untraining specialities, and learning how to analyse and fix quickly. I guess being a sysad also helps in that. I'm not putting much trust in the national or state level government. I see more done at the local levels, but without tax revenue/money, they're up shit's creek as well.

rubidium 8y ago
60% is unrealistic. It's still very expensive to make anything as reliable as a human being if we're talking about anything other than pick-and-place (and that was really expensive the first time around). For a business to automate, it must invest substantial resources into the automation process and product. It must work in an industry where consistency is the most important quality customers are looking for. Automation already affected most of what it's going to do in manufacturing. Given the capital and talent being deployed, automated driving is on the way. Most other industries are not seeing similar talent and capital being invested into automation. Long-haul trucking is the industry I have the greatest concern for. Most of the others (e.g. short order cooks) will be fine for quite some time.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Tell that to the explosion of automation occurring right now. My local McD's just put in the touchscreen kiosk that'll ultimately replace the entire counter crew. The 'cooks' are already just a few folks running from machine to machine pressing buttons. That can also be entirely replaced (see other timely HN posting about MIT students' robo-cooker).
  - bluedino 8y ago
    I find it odd that McD's went with something as archaic as self-ordering kiosks when you can just order from your phone. Those kiosks are very slow and a bit cumbersome to use, and they put them smack in the middle of the waiting area in the restaurant. Huge waste of space.
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      Exactly my thought. Who doesn't have a phone? But wait - maybe there's a significant demographic there, after all its McD's.
      - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        I also look at places like Chili's, Applebees, and the low-midgrade sit downs. Whenever you see a tablet on the table, that's their way of automating staff on various levels at a restaurant's level. They sell it as a way to play games tableside and to request server assistance... In reality, its so they can hire even less servers, have push-demand by customers when they wanted waited on, and sell more stuff quicker. It's also a way for management to ascertain actual engagement levels along with sales data. It's another case of short-sighted automation segmenting out under management in low end sit down restaurants. You certainly don't see high end restaurants engaging in these shenanigans... yet. Our (wife and I) decision is we place them face-down off the table. We prefer to engage with humans, not a idiot-box upper management dictates.
        8y ago
bloopernova 8y ago
My anecdotal experience is that people can't wrap their heads around such an enormous, complete, shift in the way labour and capital will work. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair. The few truck drivers I've spoken with all seem to think that autonomous trucks are going to arrive just after they retire. Similar stories come from nurses, fast food workers, and construction folks like drywallers. They all say "oh, that won't arrive for at least another 30 to 40 years!" I don't belabour the point because that just makes people fearful and angry. In the USA there's a huge amount of people in depressed rural areas already. Their fear at being left behind by society has been manipulated into keeping the Republican party in power by various hatemongers. Now imagine the fear and anger they and many more will feel when 95% of the jobs disappear. What sort of person will rise up and lead this vast angry mob? How many of them will claim disability? Imagine 200 million people potentially starving and angry, many of them with firearms? (NB: I make no statement on the ethics of firearms!) I am deeply worried about the era my teenage stepdaughter will live through.
- randomdata 8y ago
  The only thing I cannot wrap my head around is why we won't create new jobs. Are we truly months away from reaching the pinnacle of human achievement? We've quite literally lost 95% of all jobs before. That part is nothing new. However, what we found was that when people were jobless and bored, they found new things to do. Things that nobody ever imagined people doing when they were busying doing other jobs. It is not like human-level robots are anywhere on the horizon. At best we have simple pattern matching machines that can be trained to do certain tasks. But they cannot cross tasks. A self-driving car robot cannot start becoming a self-practicing doctor robot on a whim. A self-practicing doctor requires building an entirely new robot specialized to do medicine. Up to this point, each time we lose jobs, the new jobs people invent have become more and more diverse. At one time, 95% of the workforce all did the same job. Now the largest industry employs something like 5% of the workforce. The numbers are getting smaller. And are trending to be even smaller still. It is not difficult to imagine a time when people will all have distinct jobs, that no other human does. The economies of building a robot to replace a single person starts to diminish quickly.
snarfy 8y ago
We need to own the means of production. Once everything is automated, that means owning stock in those companies automating everything.
- Density 8y ago
  means of production: entry level laser sintering metal 3d printer is 70k. CNC mill is 10k. Marx's dream is available to nearly every single American. Have at it.

gregpilling 8y ago

from the article: "In a small town, there are likely a few small restaurants run by a few people who do many things—cook, clean, manage the books, etc. “Some of these tasks are easily enough defined to soon be automatable,” Youn says. By contrast, in a larger city there will likely be some much larger restaurants that require more specialized knowledge and skills—perhaps a marketing team, or a lawyer who specializes in the restaurant industry—that cannot be easily automated." I have a small factory, we use a fair bit of automation. I disagree with the above quote - I think that the larger restaurant will be more likely to automate first, and arguably the franchise restaurant model is automated marketing and business management. The larger places will go full robot in the kitchen sooner, the smaller places will continue to have one person wearing many hats for a long time. Larger places have more budget, can afford more automation, and the smaller places would have a harder time justifying a burger cooking robot if it would only be in use a small fraction of the time. My welding robots are super fast. I have two so that I can reduce setup and changeover time. The robots are so fast, the main headache is feeding them enough jobs - selling the work. The setup and changeover is very slow. I spend 5-10 hours getting a new jig built, programmed and tuned up. This setup time is never discussed in the media. Sure the robot will be amazing and fast and super productive - once you spent 10 hours programming it to do so. If the task is a 'once-only' and it only takes an hour, who in their right mind would automate that? This setup time will be the biggest impediment - humans are pretty quickly adapted, autonomous fleshy robots, that outperform the best automation when it comes to setup time. I love automation. I have 6 automated machines, and a couple 3D printers, that you can push a button and go get a coffee, and there is the part when its done. Sometimes one button push can make a couple thousand dollars in products - that is a great feeling! But the setup time is massive, and this is the greater expense over the cost of the machine. Its like an algebra equation. y=ax+b where 'a' is the setup time, and 'b' is the time for one unit. With a human welding a simple part, 'a' would be 5 minutes, and 'b' would be 5 minutes. With a robot welding cell like a Panasonic PA-750, the 'a' would be 500 minutes, and the 'b' would be 2 minutes. If you need 100 of them, no sense in turning on the robot. If you need 10,000 of them, the robot welding cell will be done in 20,500 minutes instead of 50,005 minutes for the human welder. My Panasonic costs $2284 a month for 60 months on a lease, $1 to purchase at the end. The human costs $1000 per week in perpetuity, with increasing costs due to inflation if nothing else. The robot is half the hourly, and its paid for in 5 years. The human is never paid for, it always needs compensation. In this example, the human takes 500 hours more to do the task, and that is $12,500 more in wages over the robot. My 7 year old son can run (not program) the welding robot and make parts, which he does for Pokemon money on the weekend. So where does that leave the human? Doing small runs! Which is better for the human anyway! Welding the same small part for weeks at a time makes you a little crazy. Its like watching the same GIF every 5 minutes for weeks at a time. Welding the same part every 5 minutes for 2-4 hours is quite doable, can be fun to get in the groove. I think in the future that production runs will become smaller as CNC machines proliferate. Everyone will want something custom, which is what humans are best at. High volume will be robot welded, because its boring and machines do it faster and better. I manufacture in America. Using automation, I am directly cost competitive with China and India in my core products that we have been making (and optimizing manufacturing) for 14 years. Its 1/4 steel plate mostly, and our cost to build is directly in line with the best quotes from Asia. Robot welders are cheaper than any welder in Asia. We loose on thinner stuff, like 16 gauge and lower, and we lose on items that need a lot of hand work. But we are right there for heavier items. We did a large welding job for Chinese factory last year that was for the US market. Our price was the same, but shipping was less since the product was already here. We got the deal over their own factory. 28,000 units. TL;DR - things are better for humans than these articles would have you believe.

danesparza 8y ago

I completely disagree with the article's assertion that 'knowledge professions like ... lawyers' will be relatively unaffected. 'DoNotPay' (the robot lawyer) has already helped overturn millions of dollars of parking fines. NPR article on the subject: https://www.npr.org/2017/01/16/510096767/robot-lawyer-makes-the-case-against-parking-tickets https://www.npr.org/2017/01/16/510096767/robot-lawyer-makes-... Also in reference to manufacturing processes, it appears that Toyota has learned some hard lessons in automation and is actually moving in the opposite direction: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/02/toyota%E2%80%99s-secret-weapon-low-cost-car-factories/ http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/02/toyota%E2%80%99s-se...

SlowBro 8y ago
Also, from my (very much outsider) observation of the legal profession there seems to be a lot of boring work that probably could be automated. So maybe not lawyers themselves, but legal helper workers, will increasingly be replaced.
- pc86 8y ago
  It seems to me that knowledge worker support staff (paralegals, PACs, etc) are the current low hanging fruit in terms of automation. Firms without them will be able to turn higher profit on less revenue.
okreallywtf 8y ago
Its possible that some mundane examples will be automated, but the law is not a deterministic code that can simply be interpreted and executed. Automation may make the job less tedious and might reduce the numbers of lawyers needed (or more likely, paralegals).
- Retric 8y ago
  Quite a few paralegal jobs have been removed simply by adding document search capabilities. Automation that cuts the work down by 50% can have huge impacts even without dealing with all the edge cases.

justaman 8y ago

Millions will wake up with no goals and no structure to their lives because they have all of their most basic needs satisfied by UBI if the democrats have their way. Republicans will require mandatory public service to obtain UBI. Optimists tend to think this means more time for artistic passions and inventive endeavors. Pessimists think people will spend more time watching Big Bang Theory. Usually and answer is in the middle. I will be investing in antidepressants.

pc86 8y ago
Any requirement to obtain UBI by definition means it's not UBI. And I've not heard a single proposal for "mandatory public service" in order to receive any benefit. Not to mention that UBI is squarely a libertarian (small l) proposal and neither the Democrats nor Republicans want it. Republicans only want it if it means slashing public services (one of only two ways it is even fiscally possible, which is a nonstarter for the vast majority of Democrats), and Democrats either don't want it or want it as part of a huge tax increase (the other way, which is - surprise! - a nonstarter for the vast majority of Republicans).
- fapjacks 8y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted. I'm not a good fit for most labels so I've got quite a varied social network, and I've been pushing the idea of UBI out to them to gauge what folks think. It's approximately what you've mentioned here. Average people seem skeptical but open to the idea, interested but certain there's a catch. Republicans look at it like a way to cut welfare funding and Democrats look at it like a way to increase public assistance. I've got friends on both sides looking across at one another, wondering how something could be both things at once. I personally think most Americans would support UBI if it were spelled out clearly what it is and also what it is not.
  - justaman 8y ago
    A bit of anecdotal evidence of the pitfalls of welfare and what it could mean for UBI. I grew up in an area of questionable safety. There was a woman across the street who spoke to my mother about how she would scam the welfare system to receive multiple payments every month. This was on top of food stamps and child support checks. She was making more than most people with full time jobs in the area while doing absolutely nothing for society with no desire to ever change. People will take advantage of the system if they can. Spelling out what it is and what it is not would have to mean making people understand that it is only the minimum and somehow encourage them to expand their horizons. That seems like a cultural shift that needs to happen before UBI becomes prevalent.

ajmurmann 8y ago

I used to believe that automation will lead to greater unemployment. Now I think that two things happen: goods get cheaper which lowers the minimum amount someone needs to earn for a job to be acceptable. People who still have a great job have more spending our. This unlocks new jobs that previously nobody would have paid for and nobody would have accepted. But both maximum price somebody would pay went up and minimum price someone wants to perform went down. Recent examples are all these delivery services and obviously Lyft and Uber, although the car services are a little more complicated since there always were taxis.

lev99 8y ago
I think there are three forces discussed here. Automation (removing work). Decreased cost good (reduced labor costs). Increased wealth (those with it spend more on goods and services). Automation's effects on the economy larger depends on the pace it is achieved. If someone released a box that replaces truck driver's tomorrow and sells it for $1000 then there will be huge disruption. If drivers are replaced with automation slowly over 30 years the impact will be less because the rest of the economy will have time to absorb the impact. Increased wealth is expanding the service industry, with petcare being a prime example. This will create more jobs, but those jobs are both at risk of being automated and might not be enough to replace automation. Decreased good costs works for some things like toothbrushes and iphones, but they don't work so well for limited resources like gold jewelry or real-estate. It might improve quality of life in some ways, but it cannot help with everything.
zanny 8y ago
Except it doesn't matter if general goods and services get cheaper if life necessities like healthcare and residence have their costs ballooning out of control. That $8 minimum wage job in ten years might be able to buy you twice as many trinkets at the same price but that doesn't mean anything if you have no where to live for less than $3,000 a month in rent. Thats not to say that you cannot make housing and healthcare dramatically cheaper and more efficient, but we simply are not doing it, and there doesn't seem to be nearly enough momentum to see change happen in that regard. Lives rarely get better without a good protest, but there is no uniform movement with only big wig opposition to fixing zoning laws or socializing medicine. Its all working class vs working class infighting between haves and have nots.

SlowBro 8y ago

There is a presupposition in this article: The automated jobs will leave a vacuum. That is, routine jobs will be taken away with no other jobs to replace them. What if reducing routine jobs frees up minds for higher pursuits? In the same way that high level programming languages such as Python have increased the amount of programming jobs, as contrasted with writing in assembly. A quick search on Dice shows Python jobs outnumber assembly 8 to 1. This might actually lead to a jobs explosion.

adamsea 8y ago
Interesting :). Though, this sort of presupposes that the people whose jobs are automated away have the financial security in order to take the time necessary to create a new job/career. I think a lot of people, in the U.S. at least, don’t have that level of financial security (plus the healthcare snafu). I agree with you about the potential.
- SlowBro 8y ago
  What is financial security but the ability to afford to pay for one’s needs? Automation in farming has cut the price of calories, and perhaps too automation in other sectors will reduce the cost of living. Automation in medicine could be a big help for costs. Unfortunately though, housing cannot be automated and that is very expensive. Though much of housing costs, at least for new builds, is from regulations and labor. Reduce regulations with better governance, and reduce labor with automation (3D printed houses?), and you’re on your way to part of a solution.
  - burlesona 8y ago
    The true cost of housing is relatively flat across the developed world and especially the US. The actual cost is almost entirely a function of local politics. We could have a flood of nice, brand new homes for $300k in Silicon Valley and nice older homes for $200k, in the same way a city like Tokyo or Houston does, if the people of California had not made the deliberate choice to pull up the ladder behind them.

zwieback 8y ago

I've spent a lot of time building automated assembly lines and I think the writers of the article (and the underlying research) gets a lot wrong. I doubt the smallest cities will be prime automation areas since areas with high degrees of automation require a few highly-skilled robot babysitters that are unlikely to relocate into the provinces. I think large cities are much more likely to see high automation rates due to economies of scale and small citiies will either stay the same or businesses will simply leave.

lev99 8y ago
I think you'll find enough highly skilled baby sitters in the provinces living there for personal reasons. McDonald's shouldn't have any problem finding someone in a city of 50,000 to watch their burger flipping robots machines.

caymanjim 8y ago

I find it bizarre that they single out fishing as a job that's likely to be automated away. I don't see this happening any time soon. Fishing crews are already pretty streamlined, and many things on fishing ships are mechanized. I can see automation replacing more of the post-catch processing on giant factory ships, but I don't see robots costing many other fishing jobs in the near future.

TomMarius 8y ago
Could you elaborate more? From my very amateur point of view, fishing seems like something that could be completely automated pretty easily, but it seems like I'm not seeing the complexity.
- zanny 8y ago
  A large part of it is liability. In theory you could just send a self-driving boat out with a giant net to scoop up a few tons of marine life to bring back to shore and stuff in a processing plant. Or even better maybe make a self-sufficient platform that uses current to turn turbines and just scoops up fish, sorts them, and puts them on ice for cargo carriers to come by and pick up. The problem is the same one as self driving cars on a more massive scale - accountability. When you have human bodies at every step of the process you have someone to blame if you "accidentally" kill a protected species, overrun your quotas, put tainted meat in the market, etc - if everything is operating on its own you get the same situation where self driving car operators are going to try to blame the software engineers if something goes wrong, while the company gets to take the fallout. And the fines on illegal fishing are actually legitimate compared to the token paltry fines in other industries (depending on the country, of course). The economics are completely on automations side here, you could get 97% good fish for a tenth the price with some substantial up front investments today. But that 3% false positive / sorting error case with the inability to blame line workers kills the business.
- caymanjim 8y ago
  The ocean is a dynamic environment. Nets get tangled, lines get tangled, wildlife interferes, weather and sea conditions are harsh and unpredictable. The ocean isn't a nice flat square corn field that a combine can lazily navigate through. We've just barely figured out how to automate picking strawberries in a nice safe greenhouse.

geebee 8y ago

Looks like software application development is listed as having a relatively high automation "risk", around 21%. Anyone know how this was calculated. Doesn't have to be a link for this particular site, just some good reading material. My initial reaction was that this number is hard to nail down because on reflection, so much of what I do gets automated. That's the nature of software. When I started programming for money in the late 90s, I still managed memory. That's automated now through garbage collection (for me). I also used to do a lot of direct network and socket programming, also automated away. I managed my own database connection and pooling. JDBC came along and abstracted that away, but a decade later, I heard someone who used an ORM say he wouldn't want to write all that "low level" jdbc code ;) I guess you're getting old when the high level leaky abstraction of your youth becomes the low level code for a new generation of programmers. My whole career has been one long progression of getting automated away, by this perspective. I remember when I proposed getting a web server up and running for a project in college, and a professor remarked on what I was doing. There was a time, he recalled, when doing a "spreadsheet" was fairly advanced and took some serious technical chops. The same would happen to web servers - but for the few years then they required specialized skill and had a big impact on business, this knowledge would be very valuable. The moment would pass, but something new would come up, and that would create all kinds of new apps that require an app developer. To me, the moment when nothing new comes up - ie., when there is no new moment for human app developers, all software development is now automated - that is the moment when we replaced by automation. I wonder if that's what this article is talking about? If that's the case, 20% might seem high, though not out of the question. But by a more general definition, the one I discussed above, I'd ay the odds that my current skillset will be automated away is roughly 100%. I want to be clear I'm not (necessarily) talking about churn, I'm talking about new breakthroughs that fundamentally change the job. That kind of change I don't mind at all, I enjoy it, it's probably why I'm in this field. Churn, on the other hand, is what makes me want to quit. I'm rambling on here, but it occurs to me that software development probably isn't that unusual. It's the jobs that don't change as much that are unusual. Lawyers, for instance, have certainly changed over the years, but we expect people to still be lawyers in 100 years. How many horse and buggy drivers expect that job to still be around? How many lathe operators or truck drivers expect this? I'm thinking, maybe the best metric isn't the odds that a particular job will be automated, since for many (most?) jobs, that's pretty much 100%. The question is, what are the odds that a job will be automated with no path to the next thing. That's the fundamental transformation going on here. And yeah, it actually is happening. A horse and buggy driver can become a bus driver, but what happens when the concept of a drive goes away completely? Will anything emerge? Another aspect of automation I'm interested in is the complete bindside. Music, I think, was one of the interesting automation stories of the last 100+ years. There were various attempts to replicated the human mechanical process of playing an instrument, and they all appeared very unlikely to do much replacement. Yeah, piano rolls made an appearance, and you could try this I suppose by hooking up some contraption to make a flute play. But what happened instead was that it turned out you can actually store music physically in various materials and play it back. Music went from 100% live to less than 1% live in about 50 years. But we didn't really automate music, we replaced it with a similar product. My guess is that this will be the story with software development. It seems absurd to me that this could happen through automation, but that's because I'm locked into one way of thinking about it. Kind of like trying to imagine how a crankshaft could power a bunch of strings tied to a bow and some pegs to try to recreate the physical process of playing a violin. It won't happen like that. Something utterly mind blowing, like storing music in grooves of different depth in vinyl, of all things, utterly unanticipated. Yeah, that's generally how this massive shifts happen.

dmritard96 8y ago

I would love to see a breakdown by country. Given the endless rhetoric around manufacturing reshoring/offshoring/etc., it would be great to see if thats even something we should care about given how much automation already exists and how much more is about to come online. Owning the robots and supply chain will obviously have some value, but politically speaking, the value is often measured in jobs which seems like its minimally shortsighted if not downright disingenuous.

lucasnichele 8y ago

There is a lot of confusion between "automation" and "artificial intelligence", I believe that automation facilitates, and modifies the professions in the short term. AI is something that should be discussed in a broader sense.

bytematic 8y ago

I have always wondered how automation will adapt to things like ice on roads/parking lots/equipment, or salt everywhere like in Minnesota/Wisconsin. Is this being considered in sunny California/Texas?