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It seems like the people studying this stuff disagree with your opinion: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/02/25/automation-and-ai-will-disrupt-the

It seems like the people studying this stuff disagree with your opinion: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/02/25/automation-and-ai-will-disrupt-the-american-labor-force-heres-how-we-can-protect-workers/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/02/25/automat...

andrenth 7y ago
Automation has been in use in the auto industry for decades, and yet it employs much more people than it did before automation was widespread.
- deogeo 7y ago
  What about farming?
- wavefunction 7y ago
  Car sales in total have increased though. Due to the population of the world and adoption of automobiles in the rest of the world as well. I don't find any compelling arguments to disprove what a lot of seeming educated and intelligent researchers and social critics are saying regarding the coming disruption of the labor market.
  - andrenth 7y ago
    The claim is that automation destroys jobs. This has been historically false, despite claims made each time that “this time it will be different”. Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Let us turn to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The first chapter [...] is called “Of the division of labor,” and on the second page of this first chapter the author tells us that a workman unacquainted with the use of machinery employed in pin-making “could scarce make one pin a day, and certainly not twenty,” but with the use of this machinery he can make 4,800 pins a day. In the pin-making industry there was already, if machines merely throw men out of jobs, 99.98 percent unemployment. Arkwright invented his cotton-spinning machinery in 1760. At the time it was estimated that there were in England 5,200 spinners using spinning wheels, and 2,700 weavers - in all 7,900 persons engaged in the production of cotton textiles. The introduction of Arkwright’s invention was opposed on the ground that it threatened the livelihood of the workers, and the opposition had to be put down by force. Yet in 1787 [...] the number of persons actually involved in the spinning and weaving of cotton had risen from 7,900 to 320,000, an increase of 4,400 percent. [...] Technophobes will assert: “That may have been all very well in the past, but today conditions are fundamentally different; and now we simply cannot afford to develop any more labor-saving machines.” If it were indeed true that the introduction of labor-saving machinery is a cause of constantly mounting unemployment and misery, the logical conclusion to be drawn would be revolutionary, not only in the technical field but for our whole concept of civilization. Not only should we have to regard all further technical progress as a calamity; we should have to regard all past technical progress with equal horror. There is also an absolute sense in which machines may be said to have enormously increased the number of jobs. The population of the world today is four times as great as in the middle of the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution had got well under way. Machines may be said to have given birth to this increased population; for without the machines, the world would not have been able to support it. Three out of every four of us, therefore, may be said to owe not only our jobs but our very lives to the machines. [From “Economics in One Lesson”]
    - wavefunction 7y ago
      You can post a long wall of text but the actual claim is that FUTURE DISRUPTION due to globalization and automation will destroy existing jobs faster than new jobs that the displaced workers can move into can be created. Please respond to the actual subject of discussion in the future.
      - andrenth 7y ago
        This has always been the claim, and it’s been historically proven false. The book quote provides a way for you to understand for how long this claim is made (with an exemple from the 18th century), and yet here we are.
        AstralStorm 7y ago
        Presuming that the 200 years of short history is a blip. We're still far from automating away many tasks, especially social ones.
    - blub 7y ago
      That books was originally written in the 40s and updated in the 70s. Hazlitt likely didn't even dream of people being replaced by algorithms. The trick in the past has always been to invent new types of jobs to take advantage of the technological progress. We're out of tricks if one can automate highly sophisticated tasks.
      - andrenth 7y ago
        He probably didn’t dream of auto industry automation either. And yet that industry employs millions of people.
        AstralStorm 7y ago
        In a world with population of 10 billion vs 5 billion, that number suddenly sounds much less impressive, and most of these jobs are in China.
  - hollerith 7y ago
    >Car sales in total have increased though. _because_ of automation lowering car prices among other causes.
    - wavefunction 7y ago
      That appears to be an unfounded assertion given what I've found comparing inflation adjusted average car prices: https://blog.chron.com/carsandtrucks/2016/04/cost-of-a-car-in-the-year-you-were-born/ https://blog.chron.com/carsandtrucks/2016/04/cost-of-a-car-i... The average car price from 1967 is $3000 cheaper in 2016 dollars than the 2016 average car price. That may be due to a number of factors but I'm at least providing some data to back up my assertions.
      - andrenth 7y ago
        I think the difference is pretty low considering how much safer and more comfortable current cars are.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  That's simply not true, and impressively so. Despite the growth of car sales worldwide it takes far fewer employees to run a car factory than it did in say the fifties or sixties - probably 90% fewer. I find it just about impossible to believe there's been over a ten fold increase in number of plants to compensate for each factory's reduction of staff. UK's Ford Dagenham - mainly an engine plant - once used to employ 40 or 50,000 people in the fifties. Now it employs about 2,000, yet produces more engines. The same picture will be repeated for all of their sites. Cowley where the new BMW Mini is produced now employs about 3,500, it employed around 25,000 when it was one of two plants producing the original Mini in the sixties and seventies. The current car sells more per year.
  - andrenth 7y ago
    Compare these numbers from the 80s-90s to current data. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/sept/wk5/art02.htm?view_full https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/sept/wk5/art02.htm?view_fu... https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Interesting. I'm really surprised that auto parts don't track vehicle assembly more closely. But, in your second reference, see the "back data" graph links for 1990-2019, in any of the manufacturing categories. I would expect that figures for the sixties and seventies would be much higher still, as much of the automation and de-industrialisation was through the eighties. The seventies perhaps, as a pure guess, the maxima, and a crash from the oil crisis. It's a shame the data goes back no further. I suspect the eighties, where their graph in the first link starts may have set the minima after decline, with slow growth since.
      - andrenth 7y ago
        I’ve found this paper [1] which has data from 1960 to 1990 in a plot on page 3. The peak is in 1978 but the number range is very similar to today’s numbers (~1 million employees). I’m assuming the numbers in that chart are in manufacturing alone (didn’t read the paper), because today’s numbers including retail trade, wholesale trade and services add up to more than 4 million jobs, according to my second link above. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/24ba/b100ea6eb7d96c9c4247eb349ab28eadc950.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/24ba/b100ea6eb7d96c9c4247eb...
- jogjayr 7y ago
  How much of that can be accounted for by increased population and demand? Has the number of people employed scaled linearly with production and demand?
  - andrenth 7y ago
    Why would it have too? The claim is simply that there are more people employed now in the industry than there were before automation. That these workers now are able to be massively more productive makes the situation even better. Contrast this with the claim that automation leads to massive unemployment.

andrenth 7y ago

Automation has been in use in the auto industry for decades, and yet it employs much more people than it did before automation was widespread.

deogeo 7y ago
What about farming?
wavefunction 7y ago
Car sales in total have increased though. Due to the population of the world and adoption of automobiles in the rest of the world as well. I don't find any compelling arguments to disprove what a lot of seeming educated and intelligent researchers and social critics are saying regarding the coming disruption of the labor market.
- andrenth 7y ago
  The claim is that automation destroys jobs. This has been historically false, despite claims made each time that “this time it will be different”. Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Let us turn to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The first chapter [...] is called “Of the division of labor,” and on the second page of this first chapter the author tells us that a workman unacquainted with the use of machinery employed in pin-making “could scarce make one pin a day, and certainly not twenty,” but with the use of this machinery he can make 4,800 pins a day. In the pin-making industry there was already, if machines merely throw men out of jobs, 99.98 percent unemployment. Arkwright invented his cotton-spinning machinery in 1760. At the time it was estimated that there were in England 5,200 spinners using spinning wheels, and 2,700 weavers - in all 7,900 persons engaged in the production of cotton textiles. The introduction of Arkwright’s invention was opposed on the ground that it threatened the livelihood of the workers, and the opposition had to be put down by force. Yet in 1787 [...] the number of persons actually involved in the spinning and weaving of cotton had risen from 7,900 to 320,000, an increase of 4,400 percent. [...] Technophobes will assert: “That may have been all very well in the past, but today conditions are fundamentally different; and now we simply cannot afford to develop any more labor-saving machines.” If it were indeed true that the introduction of labor-saving machinery is a cause of constantly mounting unemployment and misery, the logical conclusion to be drawn would be revolutionary, not only in the technical field but for our whole concept of civilization. Not only should we have to regard all further technical progress as a calamity; we should have to regard all past technical progress with equal horror. There is also an absolute sense in which machines may be said to have enormously increased the number of jobs. The population of the world today is four times as great as in the middle of the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution had got well under way. Machines may be said to have given birth to this increased population; for without the machines, the world would not have been able to support it. Three out of every four of us, therefore, may be said to owe not only our jobs but our very lives to the machines. [From “Economics in One Lesson”]
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    You can post a long wall of text but the actual claim is that FUTURE DISRUPTION due to globalization and automation will destroy existing jobs faster than new jobs that the displaced workers can move into can be created. Please respond to the actual subject of discussion in the future.
    - andrenth 7y ago
      This has always been the claim, and it’s been historically proven false. The book quote provides a way for you to understand for how long this claim is made (with an exemple from the 18th century), and yet here we are.
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        Presuming that the 200 years of short history is a blip. We're still far from automating away many tasks, especially social ones.
  - blub 7y ago
    That books was originally written in the 40s and updated in the 70s. Hazlitt likely didn't even dream of people being replaced by algorithms. The trick in the past has always been to invent new types of jobs to take advantage of the technological progress. We're out of tricks if one can automate highly sophisticated tasks.
    - andrenth 7y ago
      He probably didn’t dream of auto industry automation either. And yet that industry employs millions of people.
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        In a world with population of 10 billion vs 5 billion, that number suddenly sounds much less impressive, and most of these jobs are in China.
- hollerith 7y ago
  >Car sales in total have increased though. _because_ of automation lowering car prices among other causes.
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    That appears to be an unfounded assertion given what I've found comparing inflation adjusted average car prices: https://blog.chron.com/carsandtrucks/2016/04/cost-of-a-car-in-the-year-you-were-born/ https://blog.chron.com/carsandtrucks/2016/04/cost-of-a-car-i... The average car price from 1967 is $3000 cheaper in 2016 dollars than the 2016 average car price. That may be due to a number of factors but I'm at least providing some data to back up my assertions.
    - andrenth 7y ago
      I think the difference is pretty low considering how much safer and more comfortable current cars are.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
That's simply not true, and impressively so. Despite the growth of car sales worldwide it takes far fewer employees to run a car factory than it did in say the fifties or sixties - probably 90% fewer. I find it just about impossible to believe there's been over a ten fold increase in number of plants to compensate for each factory's reduction of staff. UK's Ford Dagenham - mainly an engine plant - once used to employ 40 or 50,000 people in the fifties. Now it employs about 2,000, yet produces more engines. The same picture will be repeated for all of their sites. Cowley where the new BMW Mini is produced now employs about 3,500, it employed around 25,000 when it was one of two plants producing the original Mini in the sixties and seventies. The current car sells more per year.
- andrenth 7y ago
  Compare these numbers from the 80s-90s to current data. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/sept/wk5/art02.htm?view_full https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/sept/wk5/art02.htm?view_fu... https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Interesting. I'm really surprised that auto parts don't track vehicle assembly more closely. But, in your second reference, see the "back data" graph links for 1990-2019, in any of the manufacturing categories. I would expect that figures for the sixties and seventies would be much higher still, as much of the automation and de-industrialisation was through the eighties. The seventies perhaps, as a pure guess, the maxima, and a crash from the oil crisis. It's a shame the data goes back no further. I suspect the eighties, where their graph in the first link starts may have set the minima after decline, with slow growth since.
    - andrenth 7y ago
      I’ve found this paper [1] which has data from 1960 to 1990 in a plot on page 3. The peak is in 1978 but the number range is very similar to today’s numbers (~1 million employees). I’m assuming the numbers in that chart are in manufacturing alone (didn’t read the paper), because today’s numbers including retail trade, wholesale trade and services add up to more than 4 million jobs, according to my second link above. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/24ba/b100ea6eb7d96c9c4247eb349ab28eadc950.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/24ba/b100ea6eb7d96c9c4247eb...
jogjayr 7y ago
How much of that can be accounted for by increased population and demand? Has the number of people employed scaled linearly with production and demand?
- andrenth 7y ago
  Why would it have too? The claim is simply that there are more people employed now in the industry than there were before automation. That these workers now are able to be massively more productive makes the situation even better. Contrast this with the claim that automation leads to massive unemployment.