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Also let's not forget that automation still means someone needs to write some code, which needs to be written, maintained, updated, synced with other projects e

by nednar 6y ago

Also let's not forget that automation still means someone needs to write some code, which needs to be written, maintained, updated, synced with other projects etc. The act itself creates new jobs already. For instance: In IT we also have this. Dev is the typical product development team, Ops is the team that takes care of keeping the lights on. Now with all the automation we have a new job called Devops which is somewhat in the middle betwen both Dev and Ops. We thought both groups would move to the middle and form this new Devops group. But what most companies did is completely hire from zero for their Devops teams. Now what we see is that Devops is growing, while Dev and Ops are shrinking. But the sum of both shrinking groups is smaller than the sum of new Devops jobs.

piva00 6y ago
It creates new job opportunities for those that can train for them. The open questions are always: will automation create enough, higher-skilled and better paying jobs than the ones it will substitute? How does a society re-train the newly jobless to perform more productive tasks that require higher/different skills? Of course that given enough time the labour market will adapt and correct itself, the issue is what happens in the meanwhile with real people, with real lives. The numbers eventually balance out, real lives suffer.
PeterisP 6y ago
Automation is generally done due to cost savings. So if you replace a thousand jobs, then you pay for automation less than you paid for these thousand jobs, so obviously there's less than thousand people involved in creating and maintaining and selling that automation. And if the automated jobs are low-paying jobs and the "automators" are mostly highly-paid engineers, then the gap is even larger. If there's an engineer paid $200k + overhead for working on automation, then that only can happen if his/her job alone results in automating away ten $30k jobs.

by nednar 6y ago

piva00 6y ago

It creates new job opportunities for those that can train for them. The open questions are always: will automation create enough, higher-skilled and better paying jobs than the ones it will substitute? How does a society re-train the newly jobless to perform more productive tasks that require higher/different skills? Of course that given enough time the labour market will adapt and correct itself, the issue is what happens in the meanwhile with real people, with real lives. The numbers eventually balance out, real lives suffer.

PeterisP 6y ago

Automation is generally done due to cost savings. So if you replace a thousand jobs, then you pay for automation less than you paid for these thousand jobs, so obviously there's less than thousand people involved in creating and maintaining and selling that automation. And if the automated jobs are low-paying jobs and the "automators" are mostly highly-paid engineers, then the gap is even larger. If there's an engineer paid $200k + overhead for working on automation, then that only can happen if his/her job alone results in automating away ten $30k jobs.