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All well replacing mundane jobs with robots, but what will those displaced workers do. Also come 2030, the population will of increased, which will be mostly i

• m463 7y ago
  I wonder if this will be like secretaries and word processors. Everybody does their own word processing now, and the world has adjusted. In the same way, I would like to do my own robotic assembly now. Or even have a personal factory. (Maybe a cornicopia machine in a suitcase, like charles stross wrote about in singularity sky) maybe business will be democratized and more companies will exist, with smaller org charts making more specific things of value.
  • Spooky23 7y ago
    You can do that today at great cost. Most consumer product companies are lawyers, buyers, salesmen and accountants. Drive by the headquarters of a brand company, they usually are about the size of a small/medium bank HQ. The products are designed and built in some factory in China or elsewhere. Maybe there’s an industrial design consultant.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • iguy 7y ago
    > I would like to do my own robotic assembly now. It's going the other way. Automation increases the return to scale. Your grandparents probably performed a lot of non-robotic assembly: making food and clothes at home was basically the same process as in a factory. The gain from having 1000 people making chairs under one roof was modest. But a massively automated factory that turns trees into Ikea chairs isn't something that makes one a day, more like one a second. So there are fewer.
• ackbar03 7y ago
  Actually the assumption of population increase might not be true. A lot of countries now showing slowing population growth from having fewer children. It might be possible that we will happen to be in need of robotics to address the shrinking workforce
  • mdorazio 7y ago
    Yes and no. With a shrinking population, the jobs you end up wanting to automate the most are related to elderly care in a lot of cases (see: Japan), which is fairly difficult for robots/computers in comparison to factory line operations, cashiers, etc. The other issue is that the timescales don't necessarily match up. It's a pretty safe bet that improvements in robotics, computer vision, machine learning, etc. will outpace the decline in population in most countries, so the net result still stands.
• TomMckenny 7y ago
  Absolutely. Automation will increase net wealth. But I do not believe everyone will quickly find an even better job when a factory closes because 1) popular perception aside, that is not what happened in the industrial revolution and 2) it is not what happened with globalization 3) it is suspiciously pleasant and easy belief for those who are least likely to be hurt. It's also a bit magical thinking. And if wage depression from globalization has caused damaging ethnic and nationalist backlashes, it's not hard to imagine the multiplying effect that will come with reckless displacement due to automation. Because people who have a continuing or sudden drop in quality of life due to events beyond their control are not going to blame themselves forever and are not going to be convinced by a rising GDP graph that leaves them further behind. Great would be a society that everyone feels vested in and an economy that everyone can participate in. But it's hard to imagine any such plan being invented let alone honestly implemented in the foreseeable future. Are thousands of 50 year old factory workers going to get hired as a web designers? Are they going to work as Walmart greeters thinking "sure I lost my house but national wealth is up so I don't mind". So at the very least there needs to be more adequate social safety nets.
  • jjoonathan 7y ago
    There's probably a way to allow everyone to participate by capping individual participation. It wouldn't be easy to implement, or popular, and frankly I don't have any idea how it could happen, but it's the only approach I can think of to address the underlying labor supply/demand issues without partitioning society into haves / have-nots, productive / not-productive, Elysium / peasants, etc.
    • bseidensticker 7y ago
      Capping individual participation does not make new low skill jobs. When you cut all low-skill jobs you are always going to increase the number of people below the cut as not everyone is going to successfully re-train into a job that won't soon be automated. Making new high-skill jobs does not help them. I don't see a convincing solution other than UBI. Sure, it's untested, and the transition is going to be rough. But capitalism isn't going to stop automating jobs. The jobs are going away and I think the easiest way to prevent the negative effects of having a big chunk of unemployed young men of fighting age. When given a choice between extreme poverty and fighting to overthrow your government, the choice is obvious (Syria for example). When given a choice between a comfortable lifestyle (if you budget well) and fighting to overthrow your government, the choice is obvious. Part of the reason poverty sucks (in a developed country) is that you have to work long hours for barely enough money and then cook and clean and take care of your kids / elders. If you don't have to work, the effective poverty line drops significantly. Our society already has the wealth distribution issue, and seems to be moving forward without crumbling. If we can drop 40% of jobs without decreasing overall productivity, I don't see why we have to make something up for the unemployable to do.
• 20M 7y ago
  ...are afforded some education and opportunity into better jobs. Has the thought not occurred to you that the distribution of employees often aggregates people according to the tasks they can safely be entrusted with? In other words, education and opportunity can't correct for low-quality people. Don't keep your blinders on. You had classmates in grade school that were fundamentally incompetent. No amount of teaching fixed them. They were meatheads in second grade and they were meatheads at graduation. Even now, as they live and breathe, they continue to live lives as meatheads. That factory job was the only way civilization could use them, and make tools out of them. The menial nature of the job was crafted to suit them. Now, we can make things to replace every single public school student, rather than forge standardized school systems to sort capable minds into a variety of buckets, and make what we can with what we have. Children are not the future anymore. And the useless adults, the ones that unionize and strike, they can all go to hell. We don't need them to whittle toothpicks with dremels on the factory floor anymore. We won't need teachers. We won't need pilots. We won't need bus drivers. We won't need firemen. Taken far enough, we won't need police or doctors. We won't have crime or illness, because we won't need humans.
• Chathamization 7y ago
  I think one blindness we have is seeing the question of what to do with these workers as pertaining to the future. But it's hard not to look at things like "bullshit jobs"[1][2], or entire sectors that are parasitic (advertising, credit cards, sales, etc.) and see that we're already decades into this problem. As we've automated much of our work, we've largely failed to move most people to other productive jobs. Instead have been funneling an ever growing part of the population into careers where they're only helping to extract wealth from the ever dwindling percent of the population that actually produces useful things, if they're actually doing anything at all. [1] https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-work-service https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-w... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room-the-rise-of-the-pointless-job https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard...
  • ako 7y ago
    You should be happy with all these bullshit jobs: if we would scale down to only productive essential jobs, most people would be siting at home doing close to nothing. The assumption that we can have productive jobs for everyone is just unrealistic
    • kruczek 7y ago
      I'd phrase it differently: If we would scale down to only productive essential jobs, most people would be siting at home doing whatever they like. So no, I am not happy that people do bullshit jobs just for the sake of having a job at all.
      • ako 7y ago
        With no money from a job, sitting at home will be something people will not like. Doing what you like usually costs money, so you need a job. Any job. How are you going to pay for a home anyways, without a job?
        • kruczek 7y ago
• BurningFrog 7y ago
  The first thing to understand in these discussions is that this has been happening continuously for 250 years. The Industrial revolution never stopped. For all these 25 decades, people have worried a lot about what will happen to everyone losing their jobs to new technology. It's always turned out that new jobs kept appearing as the old ones disappeared, and the result of the increased productivity the "lost jobs" represent has manifested in proportionally increased wages. It's hard to compare directly, but we're about 30x richer per person then 250 years ago. And also a lot more people. Right now we're supposed to be in the middle of a Job Automation Holocaust. THIS TIME IT'S (as usual) DIFFERENT! And yet if you lift your gaze from the theories and look at real world indicators, unemployment is extremely low. Now, it's of course true that this time it actually can be different, and I don't mind people making arguments to that effect. I have less respect for those who argue like this is a brand new disaster falling from the sky, not the prevailing trend since centuries.
  • tzs 7y ago
    One thing that is different this time is that we are more directly replacing humans. When we replaced, say, horse drawn wagons with trucks, yes, we killed off a lot of jobs associated with wagons. Wagon drivers, wagon builders, horse trainers, horse feed suppliers, etc., might have lost some or all of their work. But trucks needed drivers, truck makers, mechanics, fuel supply, and so on, so a lot of new work was created. Now suppose we replace human driven trucks with self-driving trucks, getting rid of a lot of truck driver jobs, and also a lot of jobs related to supporting truck drivers. Yes, the self-driving trucks will create some new work. But a self-driving truck is pretty much just a regular truck with some extra sensors, a computer, some actuators to let the computer operate the controls, and some software. The sensors, computers, and actuators are all commodity items or close to it. So rather than create new jobs sufficient to counter the lost jobs of truck drivers and those who support truck drives, switching to self-driving trucks just increases demand a bit for some commodity hardware, and requires some extra training for truck mechanics to maintain the new equipment. We're starting to transition from a type of industrial revolution where people using machines are replaced by people using very different machines, to a type where people using machines are being replaced by very similar machines that require fewer or no humans to operate.
• idlewords 7y ago
  The nice thing about climate change is that there will be no shortage of jobs for anyone. Miami's not going to move itself.
  • mistermann 7y ago
    There's no shortage of obvious work to be done everywhere (garbage all over the place, homeless living in tents, decaying infrastructure), finding a way to get the elitists who are capturing a constantly increasing percentage of the nation's output to share the wealth to pay for it is the tricky part.
• AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > But a balance is needed, so if they had a robot tax as many have raised and mooted in the past, then perhaps that could be used to find education, free recreational activities. If you have a job that pays $20,000/year and you lose it to a robot, the silver lining is that the automation reduces the cost of living by $1000/year and so now you can take a different $19,000/year job with no reduction in quality of life. A robot tax actually makes this worse. It doesn't inherently prevent the automation -- a $5000 robot that can replace a $20,000/year worker would still do so if a tax made the robot cost $10,000 -- but now to add insult to injury the displaced worker is paying the robot tax in the form of higher prices. The underlying friction with automation is that it's non-uniform. A widget used to cost $1000, which was $600 manufacturing labor and $400 administrative overhead. Then the manufacturing gets automated and it becomes a $500 widget, but the proportion which is administrative cost has grown from 40% to 80%. That's what puts the displaced worker in a bad position. If they have to take a job that pays less at the same time as their cost of living declines, everything is fine as long as the cost reduction is at least as much as the wage reduction. But if other costs are keeping prices high despite the higher efficiency from the automation, then there's trouble. So they key is to make sure the efficiency improvements are largely uniform. And markets are generally pretty good at that -- if they're competitive and don't have their hands tied. Which leads us to the real problem. Some industries are monopolistic or subject to ossified regulatory systems. So as the cost of everything else goes down, the cost of housing doesn't due to zoning rules, the cost of medicine doesn't due to regulatory requirements, etc. The things that can't respond well to market forces become a larger proportion of the economy, which is observed as higher prices for those things relative to other things. The solution has to be to get the cost of those things down as well.
  • mantas 7y ago
    If millions of people will be fired from their $20k jobs, what's the chance that all of them will find other jobs paying $19k?
    • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      > If millions of people will be fired from their $20k jobs, what's the chance that all of them will find other jobs paying $19k? Pretty good actually. As wages go down, demand for labor goes up. Moreover, if "millions of people" lose their jobs to automation then you would expect that to result in more than a 5% reduction in cost of living.
• ptah 7y ago
  even better than a robot tax is an employee fund that owns shares in the company. it might even incentivise workers to automate themselves out of jobs so they can have leisure time and still enjoy dividends
• jmkni 7y ago
  > All well replacing mundane jobs with robots, but what will those displaced workers do The only thing we know for sure is that they will continue to vote, and if things aren't going well for them they will vote in the most disruptive way they can.
• Kaiyou 7y ago
  Throwing education and job opportunities at low IQ people won't produce useful results, unfortunately.
  • rejschaap 7y ago
    It doesn't increase IQ, but it will increase skills and knowledge. Which sounds pretty useful to me.
    • Kaiyou 7y ago
      Depending on IQ certain skills are impossible to attain, is what I was trying to say. It's hard to imagine this reality unless directly confronted with such people and witnessing their inability to learn the simplest of things.
• hooande 7y ago
  The purpose of a business is not to create jobs. If you think jobs as we know them are necessary for society, then a government run Dept of Jobs that pays people to dig holes and fill them back in (or whatever) might be a better solution. A makework government job isn't much different than a job that can be done more effectively by a machine. Capitalism finds the most efficient way to produce a thing. The price competitive nature of markets tends to pass that efficiency on to consumers in the form of lower costs. We probably shouldn't mess with that. I think that society will evolve in many ways in the coming decades. That may or may not involve jobs and careers as we know them. If humans are good at anything, it's adapting and changing. No sense wringing our hands over dystopian scifi fanfic that might not come to pass.
  • CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
    I would rather say that market economies finds the most efficient way to produce a thing. Capitalism finds the most efficient way to extract rent from that process. One way to evolve society would be to find out how to leverage market economies for efficiency without having all that rent extraction ending up in the hands of a small elite. Imagine an economy where competition for efficiency is based on actual contributions and cooperation and not on anti-social behavior like guarding trade secrets and patents, or other hostile attempts at securing a market share
• LogicalBorg 7y ago
  The total population is expected to increase by a billion people by 2030, which is 50 times larger than the expected maximum of 20 million jobs lost. Why would you assume that those 1 billion people are going to find jobs except somehow 20 million people are not? Ordinary population growth is by far the bigger story here.