6 ms·

How can you in once sentence say we can employ workers previously displaced by automation, and in the next sentence assert that we can produce these goods at a

How can you in once sentence say we can employ workers previously displaced by automation, and in the next sentence assert that we can produce these goods at a competitive price with automation?

echelon 7y ago
I should proofread and given examples. Lack of caffeine from WFH isn't helping me. There are many types of automation. Grocery workers (cashiers, stockers) are replaced with robotics and self-checkout (which automates pricing and theft detection) that removes them from the equation. Automobile machinists and doctors are supplemented with robotics that let them do higher-precision work and avoid mundane and/or stressful tasks. The gig economy is driven by automation (customer discovery, billing, payroll, etc.), but the industry is set up in a way that happens to produce negative externalities and push risks and costs onto workers. We need the type of automation that reduces mindless repetition and extends human capability. Not the kind geared at removing people.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  I don't understand why we insist on keeping people in jobs that can be automated. Let them go pursue something that's fulfilling. Not automating something that can be just to keep people doing jobs we don't need done is a fascinating make-work project. The displaced should be re-trained, provided meaningful opportunities, or yeah, paid basic income out of the money saved by them not going to work. Why pay them to do a less efficient job, that they're not fulfilled by, to produce uncompetitive goods at an uncompetitive price?
  - tlrobinson 7y ago
    I’m not saying we should protect these jobs by law or anything, but I question whether work that can be automated can't be fulfilling. I keep seeing these “Cafe X” robotic coffee bars in San Francisco. Surely some baristas find their job fulfilling, and some customers enjoy chatting with their human barista instead of a robot? Personally I think I’d have a hard time feeling good about working on something that directly replaces human labor without much benefit other than profit.
    - krillkkl 7y ago
      > I’m not saying we should protect these jobs by law or anything, but I question whether work that can be automated can't be fulfilling. Thanks for writing this, I don't think it gets said often enough (or at all).
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      You picked an example where the Job includes social interaction, which is a fundamental human need. Let's consider an assembly line worker who fastens the same set of screws over and over again. Do you still come to the same conclusion? Is a dull, repetitive job psychologically harmful over long times? There are jobs that greatly endanger people's physical health. Mining and construction come to my mind. If automation can make these jobs safer, go for it. For everything else, we will probably end up with a balance between heavy automation and niches where artisans hand craft similar products because they love doing so. It should ideally be a free choice instead if people getting preasured into low skill/low wage/high risk jobs because they need to eat.
  - jyrkesh 7y ago
    I agree with you generally, but the issue is really that we (in the US) replaced manufacturing with some combination of the perception and externalization of automation. We shipped it all overseas and said "we really don't care how you get it done, but if you can consistently do it at this price, you may as well be an 'automated' black box to us". If it was fully automated today, we should be able to do it here. Build the same machines. Hell, buy the machines from over there, and set them up here. Then figure out how to pay everyone for the service/idea/artsy work. Whatever they wanna do, at least we can afford the masks when we need them, right? (And the healthcare, and the iPhones, and the whatever else is either absolutely necessary or has supposedly been automated.) But it's not, so the conversation is really about how we can afford to pay people a living wage in a country with a higher cost of living when they're working as underpriced supplemental labor for not-quite-there automation. And the reality is that we can't: we externalized that lower wage and we slapped an "automation" sticker on it so that everyone would jump on board. Then we realized that we don't own the automation AND we're eliminating the jobs that automation is replacing instead of retooling the existing jobs to ride the technology curve of said automation as its benefits start to grow. Again, this is all a very America-centric view, but I think it applies to pockets of Europe as well. And if I was living in certain Asian countries, I think I'd be stoked as hell about the increase in wages that could continue to meet the cost of a rapidly increasing standard of living. I should also say I'm very much in favor of free trade, and I think that mercantilism/protectionism is net negative for the global welfare of humanity. But I think there was an opportunity that a lot of short-sighted American manufacturing powerhouses missed when they agreed to sign up for the Chinese manufacturing equivalent of SaaS.
    - Gravityloss 7y ago
      It's remarkable what you can do with automation. There's a small factory that produces a large proportion of the world's manual industrial power switches here in Helsinki. It's basically a few machines that crank them out like no tomorrow, and then the associated personnel to keep the machines running and doing some hard to automate jobs. (Some hundreds of people perhaps.) And sales guys.
  - axaxs 7y ago
    Because to me, the consumer, I can't think of a single time automation replacing humans has been better. Self checkouts suck for anything more than a handful of items, especially compared to a well trained cashier/bagger combo. Automated call/IVR systems are hypertension inducing bad. ATMs are no replacement for tellers for most situations that bring one to the bank. I'm not a complete luddite. In many systems, specifically manufacturing, robots outcompete humans and it makes sense. The problem arises when anything requiring the least bit of thinking is attempted to be automated. Those are nothing more than cost saving measures, and bring down the quality of service to everyone involved.
    - drdeadringer 7y ago
      I guess self-checkout is a matter of taste and/or opinion. Personally, I prefer it at the grocery store when I have the choice.
      - wtallis 7y ago
        It's not a matter of taste. It's a question of whether your preferred grocery store employs any experienced cashiers and baggers, and the degree to which their self-checkout machines are artificially dumbed-down and slowed-down. In most cases, the customer-facing self checkout systems are objectively much slower and more cumbersome than the manned checkout systems that require some training and practice to use correctly. Paid cashiers never have to slow down their scanning because of a spurious reading from a scale in the bagging area. They get real keyboards to interact with the computer, and user interfaces that are far more responsive than the typical touchscreen UI's update latency.
        drdeadringer 7y ago
        Whiles some of that may be true, I can still get through via self-checkout faster than a manned station most of the time. Then again, I'm not buying 57 individual items in a line 6 people deep who are all buying similar amounts of items. Perhaps you are. A matter of taste.
    - 7y ago
- satanspastaroll 7y ago
  > self-checkout A self-checkout is not automation, it's simply transferring the same amount of work from the paid employee to the customer

How can you in once sentence say we can employ workers previously displaced by automation, and in the next sentence assert that we can produce these goods at a competitive price with automation?

echelon 7y ago

I should proofread and given examples. Lack of caffeine from WFH isn't helping me. There are many types of automation. Grocery workers (cashiers, stockers) are replaced with robotics and self-checkout (which automates pricing and theft detection) that removes them from the equation. Automobile machinists and doctors are supplemented with robotics that let them do higher-precision work and avoid mundane and/or stressful tasks. The gig economy is driven by automation (customer discovery, billing, payroll, etc.), but the industry is set up in a way that happens to produce negative externalities and push risks and costs onto workers. We need the type of automation that reduces mindless repetition and extends human capability. Not the kind geared at removing people.

arcticbull 7y ago
I don't understand why we insist on keeping people in jobs that can be automated. Let them go pursue something that's fulfilling. Not automating something that can be just to keep people doing jobs we don't need done is a fascinating make-work project. The displaced should be re-trained, provided meaningful opportunities, or yeah, paid basic income out of the money saved by them not going to work. Why pay them to do a less efficient job, that they're not fulfilled by, to produce uncompetitive goods at an uncompetitive price?
- tlrobinson 7y ago
  I’m not saying we should protect these jobs by law or anything, but I question whether work that can be automated can't be fulfilling. I keep seeing these “Cafe X” robotic coffee bars in San Francisco. Surely some baristas find their job fulfilling, and some customers enjoy chatting with their human barista instead of a robot? Personally I think I’d have a hard time feeling good about working on something that directly replaces human labor without much benefit other than profit.
  - krillkkl 7y ago
    > I’m not saying we should protect these jobs by law or anything, but I question whether work that can be automated can't be fulfilling. Thanks for writing this, I don't think it gets said often enough (or at all).
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    You picked an example where the Job includes social interaction, which is a fundamental human need. Let's consider an assembly line worker who fastens the same set of screws over and over again. Do you still come to the same conclusion? Is a dull, repetitive job psychologically harmful over long times? There are jobs that greatly endanger people's physical health. Mining and construction come to my mind. If automation can make these jobs safer, go for it. For everything else, we will probably end up with a balance between heavy automation and niches where artisans hand craft similar products because they love doing so. It should ideally be a free choice instead if people getting preasured into low skill/low wage/high risk jobs because they need to eat.
- jyrkesh 7y ago
  I agree with you generally, but the issue is really that we (in the US) replaced manufacturing with some combination of the perception and externalization of automation. We shipped it all overseas and said "we really don't care how you get it done, but if you can consistently do it at this price, you may as well be an 'automated' black box to us". If it was fully automated today, we should be able to do it here. Build the same machines. Hell, buy the machines from over there, and set them up here. Then figure out how to pay everyone for the service/idea/artsy work. Whatever they wanna do, at least we can afford the masks when we need them, right? (And the healthcare, and the iPhones, and the whatever else is either absolutely necessary or has supposedly been automated.) But it's not, so the conversation is really about how we can afford to pay people a living wage in a country with a higher cost of living when they're working as underpriced supplemental labor for not-quite-there automation. And the reality is that we can't: we externalized that lower wage and we slapped an "automation" sticker on it so that everyone would jump on board. Then we realized that we don't own the automation AND we're eliminating the jobs that automation is replacing instead of retooling the existing jobs to ride the technology curve of said automation as its benefits start to grow. Again, this is all a very America-centric view, but I think it applies to pockets of Europe as well. And if I was living in certain Asian countries, I think I'd be stoked as hell about the increase in wages that could continue to meet the cost of a rapidly increasing standard of living. I should also say I'm very much in favor of free trade, and I think that mercantilism/protectionism is net negative for the global welfare of humanity. But I think there was an opportunity that a lot of short-sighted American manufacturing powerhouses missed when they agreed to sign up for the Chinese manufacturing equivalent of SaaS.
  - Gravityloss 7y ago
    It's remarkable what you can do with automation. There's a small factory that produces a large proportion of the world's manual industrial power switches here in Helsinki. It's basically a few machines that crank them out like no tomorrow, and then the associated personnel to keep the machines running and doing some hard to automate jobs. (Some hundreds of people perhaps.) And sales guys.
- axaxs 7y ago
  Because to me, the consumer, I can't think of a single time automation replacing humans has been better. Self checkouts suck for anything more than a handful of items, especially compared to a well trained cashier/bagger combo. Automated call/IVR systems are hypertension inducing bad. ATMs are no replacement for tellers for most situations that bring one to the bank. I'm not a complete luddite. In many systems, specifically manufacturing, robots outcompete humans and it makes sense. The problem arises when anything requiring the least bit of thinking is attempted to be automated. Those are nothing more than cost saving measures, and bring down the quality of service to everyone involved.
  - drdeadringer 7y ago
    I guess self-checkout is a matter of taste and/or opinion. Personally, I prefer it at the grocery store when I have the choice.
    - wtallis 7y ago
      It's not a matter of taste. It's a question of whether your preferred grocery store employs any experienced cashiers and baggers, and the degree to which their self-checkout machines are artificially dumbed-down and slowed-down. In most cases, the customer-facing self checkout systems are objectively much slower and more cumbersome than the manned checkout systems that require some training and practice to use correctly. Paid cashiers never have to slow down their scanning because of a spurious reading from a scale in the bagging area. They get real keyboards to interact with the computer, and user interfaces that are far more responsive than the typical touchscreen UI's update latency.
      - drdeadringer 7y ago
        Whiles some of that may be true, I can still get through via self-checkout faster than a manned station most of the time. Then again, I'm not buying 57 individual items in a line 6 people deep who are all buying similar amounts of items. Perhaps you are. A matter of taste.
  - 7y ago
satanspastaroll 7y ago
> self-checkout A self-checkout is not automation, it's simply transferring the same amount of work from the paid employee to the customer