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Experts say demographic shifts, not AI, create the biggest challenges for work
- owens99 8y agoThis argument is old, and pretty lazy. Basically, they are saying that AI both creates and destroys jobs. Well no shit. The problem is, the average truck driver isn't going to retrain and relocate to San Francisco. He will just be out of a job.
- gabbygab 8y agoI agree. And to add to your point, we are bombarded with the demographic problem message every day. So what's the solution from these experts? Are we supposed to continuously grow the population forever? I've read our social welfare programs to private industry are being threatened by demographics change and the solution is more people. Okay, then what? What happens in a generation? We are back to the same demographic problem. Is it really a solution if you are just pushing the problem one generation into the future? Seems like the problem isn't with demographics but the economic system if the problem is perpetual and impossible to correct.
- Latteland 8y agoYes, it seems stunningly obvious that we aren't creating new jobs that pay a reasonable living wage fast enough, for a long time. AI (and plain old automation) accelerates that even more. So where are those new jobs coming from? There's no easy new job for the truck driver that pays as well, but even for the young person who is potentially easier to train for a new field, we keep producing more with less human effort, the general outlook is poor, we won't have as many jobs. It seems to be qualitatively different than when people left farms to go to factories, or factory jobs to office jobs. (edit: typo, added last sentence)
- ForHackernews 8y agoMainstream economics assumes that everything has to keep growing all the time, or it's failing. There is a fringe subfield of steady-state economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy
- tomjen3 8y agoNone of that would have been an issue if we had put the money away it costs to take care of those people when they get old, aka SS done right. But we won't be back to the same demographic issue, because the issue that they people who retire now in the west are the last generations that were bigger than their parents generations (it has a formal name, but you can roughly think of it as many kids born, many kids die transitioning into many kids born, few kids die into what we have now which is few kids born, few kids die).
- Camillo 8y agoIt's really pretty simple. "The jobs" didn't go to robots, they went to humans in China. Blaming automation is just a way to sweep under the rug the results of the last 20 years of American trade policy. Even if all those jobs eventually get automated, at this point they will be done by robots in China, not in America. It's still a big loss for the US.
- space_fountain 8y agoHow come us manufacturer output has gone up while we shed jobs then?
- dd36 8y agoHow is it measured?
- Camillo 8y agoBecause it's counted by the value of the finished products even if most of the actual manufacturing is done abroad.
- jjoonathan 8y agoOnly if you play with the numbers to make it appear that way. https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
- Latteland 8y agoOkay I read that. It basically says if you took away the computer industry growth the us grew at an anemic rate, like 0.2%. Or most of the growth was in one particular sector. I don't think they were arguing that the growth is somehow overinflated, just that it was focused on one sector. Does it matter that it was flat everywhere except in the computer field? I think there must be something more you are getting at.
- owens99 8y agoAutomation will bring the robots back to USA, actually. Since robots cost the same to operate in US and they do in China, factories will shift location closer to the markets they supply. EDIT: my point was not clear enough. I'm saying in the long-term automation will reduce the cost of labor close to zero, leaving only the cost of inputs and distribution (supply chain). Not to mention the IP risks of locating tech in China, advanced automation will make it more cost effective to shift production to be located next to the markets where those products are sold to consumers. China is well aware of this, which is why the current government policy is focused on boosting the local innovation and technology economy.
- Liquix 8y agoIs quality of life / general happiness considered when we talk about how many jobs there are in the service industry? I know a few people who have been steadily employed in such industries but are unhappy and don't see any way out. Imagine a society with two classes - an upper class creating & sustaining 'services' like horse-walking or tinder coaching, a lower class forced to choose between unemployment and being the other class's glorified servants. We need to be looking at ways to level the playing field - provide opportunity and education to those who were not fortunate enough to be born into it. Celebrating the stability of jobs which make people feel like second class citizens feels like shrinking away from the problem.
- deogeo 8y ago> glorified servants. I think they're the opposite of glorified. A servant is someone you personally know, that your children may grow attached to, that, ideally, you feel some mutual obligation towards. Workers in the gig economy are faceless, replaceable cogs.
- coralreef 8y agoSome people see servants as faceless, replaceable cogs. Abuse of servants happens every day all over the world.
- deogeo 8y agoAnd the gig economy marketplaces expands that 'some' to 'all', since it's near-impossible to find out what's happening with any one gig worker once your brief interaction with them is over. Thanks to all that smart tech that automatically matches buyers to sellers, they probably don't even have a manager to notice they got sick. The more you reduce human contact and any chance of forming a relationship, the more cog-like workers will be treated. And reducing human contact in the name of efficiency is exactly what all those gig economy services do. Just because some servants are already abused, doesn't mean gig economy won't make it worse.
- polskibus 8y agoI'd love to know how are those experts betting on their predictions ? Do they trust their guts enough to bet, by going long or short ? What is a good bet if you believe what they say? Go long robotics companies? Or maybe there's something less obvious ?
- JTbane 8y agoSeems like every economist is saying that we need more people working more jobs to support the rapidly growing cohort of retirees- yet a massive housing crisis still continues in most major cities. The future ain't looking bright.
- ThrustVectoring 8y agoThe housing crisis is how we convince more people to work more jobs for the benefit of retirees. The cash flows towards rent winds up in the pockets of real estate owners, and the cash flow from mortgage payments winds up in Agency bonds largely owned by retirees.
- xster 8y agoI feel like there's strawmanning going on too. I don't know of any 'AI alarmists' that are saying gardening and hospitality staff are going to be replaced anytime soon. What are being discussed are radiologists, financial analysts, call center staff etc.
- britch 8y agoThere's a great interview with Ellen Shell about this exact thing[0]. The argument is obvious in retrospect but, call me a dummy, I hadn't considered it until I heard it. The act of automating is expensive, regardless of the work involved. You want a big return on investment. so You're going to automate the expensive, high-skill jobs first and work your way down. Radiologists, and financial analysts are expensive so we automate away their jobs. If you want a decent paying job for the foreseeable future, become a plumber. [0] https://www.recode.net/2019/1/28/18199981/ellen-shell-job-automation-work-labor-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast-interview-transcript https://www.recode.net/2019/1/28/18199981/ellen-shell-job-au...
- areoform 8y agoYou might enjoy a talk that I gave on this very topic in early 2018; https://www.dropbox.com/s/5j9hofavm58d2mi/Gorillas%20don%27t%20play%20go%20%5Banon%5D.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/5j9hofavm58d2mi/Gorillas%20don%27t... The thesis was that everyone keeps getting automation wrong, and why the coming revolution will be far more different than what has come before. I even tried to extrapolate and show from the history of AI, just how wrong we've gotten it before and the few things that we keep on systemically underestimating. Hope you enjoy this!
- hekhtiari 8y agoThe focus on "AI" and its impact on labour markets is an important one, but definitely more "trendy" than others which may be why it tends to outshine the rest (like demographic change) - what it IS doing is sparking a great conversation though about the "navigation problem" that plagues certain demographics in accessing opportunity when confronted with rapid change (regardless of the source). Echoing Autor's comments: "It’s a great time to be young and educated. But there’s no clear land of opportunity” for adults who haven’t been to college..." We live in a world with almost infinite amounts of information, yet how we process and use that information (including labour market information) will be our next challenge. And understanding labour market shifts in the context of multiple forces AND their interactions (i.e. how does a job become automated in practice IN the context of a higher rate of retirement; what does a person actually need to perform well in a job, etc.) will require some novel innovation that I think data + AI can actually help us solve.
- ThomPete 8y agoI am breaking it down like this: Technology creates new jobs but reduces the number of people and processes needed to do the same job. Technology creates new value but reduces the value of the contribution humans make. Technology creates new markets but shrinks the amount winners in those markets Technology compresses, through digitalization, the number of steps involved in delivering products. (Music and movie industry to name two examples) Technology increases your technical advantages but forces other competitors to do the same thus reducing the advantage of the individual until you own most of the market. Globalization creates bigger markets and temporarily offsets the need for technology to provide a more cost-effective competitive advantage. Outsourcing is the step before automation. Technology keeps improving while humans don't. The value added by the individual in a job function is mostly only a fraction of what the human is capable of doing. Technology is really good at solving these simple tasks and are becoming better and better. Ironically a cleaning lady will be out of a job much later than a radiologist is. The jobs that are left for humans are low-value jobs and will be pushed down even more as more and more humans become available to the job market because technology renders them useless in other situations.
- ilaksh 8y agoPeople are missing the point of the article which is that the number of young people who are willing and able to do the service jobs is a limiting number. I think that demographics will play a huge part for a decade or two. There are two breakthroughs that I anticipate will happen and will change things. The first thing we need is a really efficient and powerful artificial muscle combined with truly biomimetic mobility. This is the type of thing that needs to be invented to get humanoid robots that are truly dexterous and fast. Along the same lines we need more general purpose AI to go in those new robots. It doesn't actually need to be fully human-level AGI in terms of generality or capability. It just needs to be more general purpose than current systems and be integrated into the fast dexterous robots.
- dicroce 8y agoyes, yes, the classical economists reaction to AI is to simply consider it equivalent to the machines of the past that replaced human labor.... in the past workers may have had to find new work but since machines need operators eventually everyone found a place... the problem is that AI doesn't replace labor, it replaces operators.