26 ms·

Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs

139 points by blopeur 5y ago

burntoutfire 5y ago
As someone with a bit of experience in robotics, I've always viewed these economists as "useful idiots", unknowingly doing the bidding of firms who sell us the dream of advanced automation (e.g. Tesla, Uber). The economists were clueless themselves, but the companies selling the dream profited immensely thanks to them.
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Oh, it is very much the case, there's a famous saying that goes something like There are two types of economists: The ones that say what rich people want to hear, and the other ones that no one puts attention to
- 0xy 5y ago
  The vast majority of the population used to work in manual agricultural work, until it was largely automated to the point we're down to <1% in agri employment. The result of this huge wave of automation was not profit for agricultural companies and farms. The average operating margin for farms is 11%. What else happened? The resulting plummeting food prices lifted billions out of poverty, to the point where extreme poverty is at the lowest level ever. It's a little bit hard to see backroom fat cats with cigars behind this movement when automation has only ever brought massive benefits to society, including when 90% of the population worked in a vulnerable industry. Your mistake is believing that humans have a fixed set of jobs and when jobs are removed from the job pool that the pool shrinks. In reality, the size of the pool is increasing while some jobs within the pool reduce in size and scope. From my perspective, it's also hard to see how automating back-breaking laborious jobs like cleaning, burger flipping or fruit picking is a bad thing. These jobs ruin your body. Ever see a manual laborer who was over 50 and didn't have at least one body ailment?
  - burntoutfire 5y ago
    I was specifically commenting about economists who predicted that millions of drivers will be out of jobs in just a couple of years, and speculated what should be done about it, what will be the wider consequences etc. Basically uninformed and irresponsible blabbering under pretense of expertise.
streamofdigits 5y ago
How about people revising their views on the Economist (and its real job)
- tedheath123 5y ago
  What is its real job?
bottesting 5y ago
sounds interesting
akoster 5y ago
https://archive.is/L6TDA https://archive.is/L6TDA
- FabHK 5y ago
  Or https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Ffinance-and-economics%2F2022%2F01%2F22%2Feconomists-are-revising-their-views-on-robots-and-jobs https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Ffi...
  - metadat 5y ago
    12ft ladder for 10ft paywalls, eh? I hadn’t seen this before.. it’s got quite the aggressive charter: https://12ft.io/ https://12ft.io/ > Why? > I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information. > You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter. I find the current state of the web, post-AdWords, disappointing too. edit: apologies, it was submitted and discussed a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29679716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29679716
    - majormajor 5y ago
      If you hate the ad-driven web, bypassing paywalls seems wildly backwards. Do we want to make sites attempting to do something other than SEO-spam harder to find in search?
      - javajosh 5y ago
        I agree with this, but I think it's a step in the right direction. To wit, imagine a service like this, but it costs $20/mo, and it breaks all paywalls for you but allocates that $20 to the pay-walled things you read that month, piecemeal. It would save you a great deal of friction, far fewer accounts to maintain, and reduce your dependency on any single news-source. And of course authors stand to gain - as long as they are okay accepting a variable allocation for each consumption (which they almost certainly are).
blacksmith_tb 5y ago
I cringe when I see an analysis begin with a trite conflict of interest argument like "Warning people of a jobless future has, ironically enough, created plenty of employment for ambitious public intellectuals looking for a book deal or a speaking opportunity." Yawn - that's charmingly glib, if factually dubious, public intellectualism is not a growth industry in general, let alone for bot-doubters. 1: https://archive.md/L6TDA https://archive.md/L6TDA
- Uehreka 5y ago
  Agreed. I likewise find analysis/comments that begin with some reference to journalists and clickbait pretty tedious.
vorpalhex 5y ago
This strikes me as the "AI will replace..." problem. Everyone understands AIs are anything except intelligent.
- imapeopleperson 5y ago
  Sure, but you don’t need to be intelligent for most jobs.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    This is often repeated, but isn't true. Almost every job has to deal with the inconsistencies and constructs of society (including law, morality, history and creativity) while also navigating the decisions constrained by the physical world (perception, physics). This is more than any machine, ever, has managed. I'm just thinking about food service, crossing guard and roofing, which isn't even a statistical blip.
    - rory 5y ago
      What is true is more like "~80% of many jobs is routine enough to (theoretically) be handled by a machine." This phenomenon is obvious with e.g. grocery store checkout machines. For every 5-10 machines, there needs to be one person to confirm I'm old enough to buy alcohol, or assure the machine I'm not stealing when I bag my onions in a way it doesn't recognize.
      - vorpalhex 5y ago
        + UPC doesn't appear in the system + Scales (bagging vs PoS) don't match + Temporary ID The list goes on. There are lots of exceptions that can happen and those are trivial for a human and impossible for an AI.
bjelkeman-again 5y ago
My take on it is that it is too early to tell. The automation envisaged has not arrived, yet. (Maybe it will take a long while.) Self driving trucks or book keeping systems without data entry are still not widespread. At the same time, automation sometimes produces other results. Not many executives in medium sized companies have secretaries, rather the type their own messages, on a phone.
axiomdata316 5y ago
Previously posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067249
contingencies 5y ago
What drives the adoption of automation is not "labour is expensive" but "labour is unavailable", "labour is too slow to obtain/train", "labour is imprecise", "labour is dangerous", "labour is untrustworthy" or "labour is unreliable". Generic industrial automation solutions are still very expensive to integrate unless simplistic. Furthermore, if you automate one unit operation, the rest of your process line also needs automating or the adjacent operations will simply become the new choke points.
- aksss 5y ago
  sounds a bit like how asynchronous programming is a 'virus' in that once you start applying the pattern, so much upstream and downstream code needs to start implementing the same pattern.
timkam 5y ago
Isn't the real development that automation and efficiency improvements move more and more people into bullshit jobs? So instead of becoming entirely obsolete, we continue working, not knowing what value we contribute, if any. That's why my intuition (and fear) is that in such BS jobs, the rewards will become more and more skewed. So instead of a 9-5 corporate BS job, one gets a highly competitive BS job (evaluated using metrics that are poor predictors and assessors of individual quality of work) in a high-pressure environment.
- 6510 5y ago
  And if we ever manage to overcome that we will not have jobs at all and our mind will be full of things not relating to what sustains humanity. The longer we then embrace unproductivity the more horrific a single incident will be.
sam_lowry_ 5y ago
This is missing the obligatory reference to Bertrand Russell who said in 1932 that working hours will reduce to 15 hours/week [1] and this is good. [1] https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > This is missing the obligatory reference to Bertrand Russell who said in 1932 that working hours will reduce to 15 hours/week [1] and this is good. It'd only be good if it came together with other social changes. So long as profit-seeking owners control employment, they will certainly not share the benefits of productivity improvements equitably. They'll cast some workers off to unemployment and pocket their wages, and the rest will be continued to be worked as hard as they are able.
- Litost 5y ago
  David Graeber (from Bullshit Jobs fame) talked about this at some length [1]: "Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true." "But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones." "These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”" and goes on to come to the following conclusion: "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days." Having just done Fritjof Capra's Systems View of Life course, channeling the ideas that: a) "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" [2] and b) "All behaviour in complex systems is emergent" A (vastly simplified) argument is that bullshit jobs is the emergent behaviour from a system compromising between the needs of: a) People to work so they can earn money, be fulfilled and see a material increase in their wealth. b) A political class keen to keep the workers busy less they revolt and upset the system. c) A system of economics/a reductionist western/scientific worldview that increasingly externalised anything that didn't show everyone was better off (e.g. GDP). d) Elites who were increasingly happy to take an increasing proportion of the wealth from the efficiency gains. Everyone wins in relation to the amount of power they have relative to everyone else and the system sustains itself based on the fact no-one with enough power has enough incentive/will to overthrow it. Obviously the planet (which once indigenous peoples had been conquered) mostly lost it's voice in the conversation and so that's why we're where we are now. [1] https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/ https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky
jordwest 5y ago
These discussions are always focused on the "robots". What about the spreadsheets, the computers, algorithms, industrial control systems, Python scripts, voice recognition systems, data pipelines, software powered gig economy, algorithmic traders? These types of automation have been in place for decades, and all of them cut costs for the owners of them and reduce the number of workers needed. Many of them can be operated with minimal training. The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation? We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades, and we've been completely blind to it because we're always talking about "the robots that are coming to take our jobs". We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally. In fact, we needed to years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if this explains a lot of the productivity-pay gap [1] [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  The only possible outcome is automation of most if not literally all jobs. At this point, capitalism will necessarily break down because it depends on continuous consumption and there will be no disposable income with which to consume. Hopefully society will evolve into post scarcity at this point instead of a cyberpunk dystopia where gigacorporations create artificial scarcity economies just to maintain the status quo.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    I'm hopeful for a solarpunk future. https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg
  - jordwest 5y ago
    Frankly I think we're already at the tipping point for that. If I think about it, how many jobs are actually involved in: * Providing food * Providing shelter * Providing healthcare You could argue just about everything else is really a form of artifical scarcity, none of it is needed for survival, perhaps just for comfort. That divide became a lot more clear in the past 2 years with the acknowledgement of "essential workers". Without Google, Facebook, or auto insurance, we'd be inconvenienced. Without essential workers society as we know it would collapse. And almost all of those workers are paid less than an entry level Facebook engineer. So now the question is, are we already post-scarcity? And perhaps we don't know it only because it hasn't been distributed equally.
chrischen 5y ago
Automation will probably hit information workers before it hits manual labor workers. The reason is that information workers are expensive because it's harder to outsource to a poorer country, and we've got a long way to go before robots get good enough to compete against child labor (joking).
- aksss 5y ago
  well, maybe less about ability as about energy consumption. Perhaps we've got a long way to go before robots can do the same work as kids for the same equivalent energy cost of three bowls of rice per day.
pydry 5y ago
>The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination. Thanks to the likes of the Economist. Their story on how copilot will make programmers redundant exemplified the way they framed automation - as an answer to their executive readership's prayers - a deus ex machina that will let them fire half of their employees while maintaining their margins. To be fair, there is a litany of trashy economics studies thumping the same drum. E.g. there was a famous one from Ball State U that mathematically conflated automation and outsourcing to prove that the robots already took over and one from Harvard, I think, that measured job automatability through surveys about how "creative" workers thought their jobs were.
fleddr 5y ago
I continue to believe in the idea that automation/AI will destroy entire sectors currently requiring labor. It is something that happens gradually, then suddenly. I also believe there's "safe" sectors where this is unlikely to ever happen. Good luck making a robot plumber. By the time you solve that, you've solved everything and we're entirely obsolete. Package delivery, cash registry, retail jobs...there's plenty of high employment sectors at danger. And perhaps many office jobs are at even more danger. One idea is that "as always" we simply move on to "higher order" work. This is nonsense. We don't need billions of AI programmers, it would be really crappy AI if that was the case. Nor is it realistic that everybody can do such a demanding job. We're talking about billions of relatively lowly educated workers here. Another idea is UBI, or even better...post scarcity. For the optimists, I guess. I expect that neither will happen, instead we're already experiencing the solution. You just inject trillions of stimulation money into the economy, which creates (artificial) demand, hence allowing for jobs that otherwise might not exist. Right now, somebody is inventing potato chips flavor #31,122. Nobody asked for it, the world doesn't need it, and I hope we can agree that it's unimportant. But somebody invents it anyway, somebody designs the packaging, and somebody ships it. You buy it, and might just like it. All these activities aren't really demand or need driven, they're more like "because we can" jobs. Our world is largely supply and marketing driven, not demand driven from the bottom up. Fluff and endless meaningless luxuries. When I walk through a mall I wonder...do people really buy all this garbage? Put harshly, you can call all of this bullshit jobs. Keeping each other busy. And that's what we'll continue to do no matter the state of technology. It's just a few dials in the financial system. Have you never wondered why everybody deeply cares that one has a job (at any and all costs) yet there's never any serious inquiry about the point of the job? Nobody cares if you have a meaningless job, the point is that you have a job. Any job. This reality gives away how the system works.
- scollet 5y ago
  > Our world is largely supply and marketing driven Great way to put it. I've felt this way for awhile. Advertising, for example, is low-hanging fruit in the world of useless things, but it's so embedded in US culture that efforts to displace it are stopped at the door.
lapetitejort 5y ago
There's a local burger joint with two screens where customers can ring up their own order. There's always a line at the register and never at the screens. I've walked in, keyed in my order, and received my food faster than people in line. And yet people just don't seem to want to use them. Yesterday I walked in and both screens had an "Out of order" sticky note on it. Minimum wage jobs have a few more years of life left.
- mlac 5y ago
  I don’t want to learn every point of sale system at every restaurant I go to. I sometimes have custom orders. If I screw something up, I want to be able to say, “sorry, can I change that?”. I have to touch a screen that others have touched. The UI might be bad, the machine might be slow. About 1/3rd of the time at Home Depot I end up having to wait for someone to come over for some reason at the self checkout. Regardless of how I order at a fast food joint, I have to see someone hand me food, and it is a bit dehumanizing if there is no line for me to walk in and use a machine instead of talk to them, especially when they hand me the food. (I’d definitely use a self-order if there was a line and saved time) An app is different - there is a clear benefit to ordering ahead and having food ready. The only expected interaction is the pickup.
  - rory 5y ago
    I sympathize the dehumanizing bit and get where you're coming from, but in general I greatly prefer to use the touchscreen machines at fast food places. I like to look through all the options and take my time choosing, which translates to a very awkward verbal interaction, no matter how polite the person taking my order is.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat There were "fully automated" restaurants (obviously more of a mechanical turk type operation) well over a hundred years ago. Doesn't seem like they've caught on yet.
- bllguo 5y ago
massysett 5y ago
I’ve always laughed at this idea that automation will take all our jobs. If it were true, farm automation would have left all of us unemployed at least a century ago. Most humans used to barely survive trying to eke food out of the earth. Yet somehow there’s not mass unemployment even though now a small fraction of the population is in agriculture.
worik 5y ago
Oh my. Econonmists >... a solid microeconomic foundation. ...more profitable and thus expand, leading to a hiring spree. Technology might also allow firms to move into new areas, or to focus on products and services that are more labour-intensive. In my time spent studying economics, this is the sort of thing that micro-economists say all the time and it is not true. The untrue bit is "solid foundation". It is post hock story told to give a quasi theoretical basis for an observation. The article, bless them, acknowledges separating causation and correlation is tricky. Solid foundation, pfft!
- Def_Os 5y ago
  Dr. Taleb? ;)
  - worik 5y ago
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb has done interesting work. But this is something different. His contribution was updating Knight's uncertainty for the modern world
waingake 5y ago
Not while we place very little value on peoples time ( their sole existence on earth ever ). Capitalism is happy for people to waste there lives doing things they don't want to do. A society that values peoples time as it should would encourage automation. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead-your-time-is-everything https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead...
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Capitalism is just people being free to own what they produce or acquire in trade, and do with it what they wish. What people do within this context, is up to them. This attribution of a value system, e.g. consumerism or profit-seeking, to capitalism, is misguided, and a way for certain ideological camps to pathologize and stigmatize human freedom.
  - waingake 5y ago
    Capitalism here is what you are doing once the accumulation of further capital becomes the principal objective of you activities. If you generate a lot of profit, but you use it all to finance a luxurious lifestyle of even just to keep you and your employees comfortable then you are not necessarily doing capitalism. The pursuit of captial accumulation is always dependent on the exploitation of someone's labour / time somewhere. If you really care about freedom why are you happy with a system that means all but the very rich must spend the majority of their lives in toil?
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      >>Capitalism here is what you are doing once the accumulation of further capital becomes the principal objective of you activities. That is not the definition when used in the context of cross-economic-system analysis. Individual objectives, values and motivations are completely orthogonal to whether capitalism is in place. Eliminating capitalism doesn't mean changing people's objectives and values. It means depriving them of the right to keep what they produce and acquire in trade, and do with what they wish. And no, profiting has no relevance to exploitation. That is just Marxist pseudoscience to pathologize success. >>If you really care about freedom why are you happy with a system that means all but the very rich must spend the majority of their lives in toil? The amount that people toil has decreased largely as a result of the ruleset I mentioned, that is associated with capitalism.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Slightly off topic, but unemployment rate is one of those all but meaningless metrics that politicians and economists love to parade around (as meaningful). For example, you can be ineligible for unemployment (i.e., you are employed) but your income is so low you still get public assistance. Or you're living with 20+ other people. It's also possible to stop being eligible for assistance, so they stop counting you as unemployed. The point is, the unemployment rates rides a lot. Which is why politicians love it so.
- rory 5y ago
  As a percentage "rate" it does mean something very specific, and therefore not super intuitively useful. But it's still helpful as a directional metric. If the U-3 unemployment rate goes up, it's likely the number of people in the other situations you mentioned has gone up as well.
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    It's still too high level. You can't make any meaningful decisions based on it. For example, and we hear similar all the time, "...X jobs were created in the quarter and the unemployment rate fell to Y..." But 1) What were those X jobs? Min wage (or less)? Or high paying? 2) Where were these jobs? Min wage in CA or NJ, or min wage where costs are less. The quantity (i.e., direction) doesn't tell enough, we need quality - at least - as well. Politicians love it as a metric because no one asks "what type of jobs? How well do they pay?" And that alone makes it suspect.
    - rory 5y ago
      Sure, it's obvious that you can't capture that complexity in a single number. I could tell you my weight, and it wouldn't tell you if I'm a smoker or a drunk, if I eat my veggies or exercise. But if I'm 400 pounds you can still reasonably predict I'm unhealthy, and if I lose weight from there that's a decent sign I'm getting better.
      - 5y ago
pessimizer 5y ago
"Automation" propaganda was always a threat aimed at labor and labor unions. The only significant "automation" has been 1) moving factories to countries with lower wages and to localities with lax regulations on working conditions, and 2) the gig economy (the culmination of Manpower's et al. temp revolution from the 90s) along with independent contracting in name only to dodge benefits and the costs of downtime. Actual automation is a comparison between workers, who are infinitely flexible, know their jobs better than their bosses, and are responsible for taking care of themselves, - and machines, which are morons that break down and require expensive workers to fix. Workers are better the vast majority of the time, and when we can get a machine to be cost-effective against them it's a good thing. It is just a rare, difficult thing.
- umeshunni 5y ago
  > The only significant "automation" has been I take it you've never stepped inside a modern factory?
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    Or modern warehouse... Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
Ericson2314 5y ago
All this is wrong. The causalities are: Low unemployment -> uppity expensive workers -> increasing rate of automation Positive rate of automation -> more workers
jopsen 5y ago
How is automation different from industrialization? This has been going on for 200 years more or less. Maybe, if lower prices stops increasing consumption (and investment). So far, better automation has just made us build more. But why should that all change now? If it does, the transition will probably be gradual and take decades.
Proven 5y ago
[dead]
lawrenceyan 5y ago
> The world was supposedly in the middle of an artificial-intelligence and machine-learning revolution “supposedly”
cipheredStones 5y ago
The thesis of this article seems to be that robots won't eliminate jobs, but it really doesn't adduce evidence to support that: > a recent paper ... put forward a “new view” of robots, saying that “the direct effect of automation may be to increase employment at the firm level, not to reduce it.” "At the firm level" is quite the caveat! If a company can produce two widgets per worker instead of one by adding robots, it'll succeed and grow as a result - at the expense of its competitors. But if every widget maker adds those robots, and there's no more demand for widgets than before, a lot of factory staff will be out of work. They touch on a related point near the end: > Mr Aghion and his colleagues add that even if automation boosts employment at the level of the firm or industry, the effect across the economy as a whole is less clear. In theory robot-adopting companies could be so successful that they drive competitors out of business, reducing the total number of available jobs. ...but it seems to me like a major problem with the whole framing of the article, not just a "by the way".
r00tanon 5y ago
The more we automate jobs that people hate doing, the more time people will have to do jobs they are really good at and enjoy doing. Hopefully creating TikTok videos won't be the majority of the creative jobs humans will focus on. There is always that danger.
scottcodie 5y ago
Most automation is labor augmenting rather than labor replacing.
lmeyerov 5y ago
We are seeing a boom as cloud and data spend is going up as internal IT struggles to go without it, which in turn makes a virtuous cycle for even more. Likewise, once you start doing things like GPUs for graph neural nets and visualization, it's like highspeed internet: our users don't want to go back. For folks doing real things with data, it's been busy times. My issue is more like "we and our F500 users are asking for more GPUs than azure can supply", vs job loss and stagnation.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
This is not at all surprising. The scholarship positing the opposite was a deviation from what has been the standard line of economic thought since more than a century ago. Automation is the main cause of a 20 times growth in inflation-adjusted wages since 1820. Per capita GDP growth is mostly just labor saving innovation, which is primarily automation, and secondarily greater coordination, like division of labor and specialization, and that is mostly through trade.
mathattack 5y ago
This doesn’t seem controversial in economics. If robots increase the value produced by non-robotic workers there will be increased demand for them.
- vidarh 5y ago
  At a firm level, sure. In aggregate that only works as long as aggregate demand for products and services rises faster than the output per unit of labour.
  - mathattack 5y ago
    When has it not?
    - vidarh 5y ago
      All of agriculture is a good example. We produce far more food today while agriculture employs a far smaller proportion of the population. The improved productivity in agriculture has in no way increased demand for agricultural labour proportional to the increases in productivity. If you mean across all products, we're not there yet, not least because population growth has provided ongoing stimulus. Whether that continues as growth rates in more and more countries flatline remains to be seen.
      - mathattack 5y ago
        Demand shifts to other things. We’ve always been capable of inventing new desires.
eucryphia 5y ago
Tim Worstall said it better than I ever could: https://www.timworstall.com/2011/03/peter-wilby-really-really-doesnt-get-economics-at-all/ https://www.timworstall.com/2011/03/peter-wilby-really-reall... snippets: Average wages in an economy are determined by the average productivity in that economy. Individual wages are not set by what that individual does: but by the wages paid by the next possible alternative use of that individual’s labour. . . . Finally, as Marx pointed out, wages rise to meet average productivity, not wages falling as cheaper labour becomes more productive. This happens because capitalists compete for access to the profits that can be extracted from that labour. As the labour becomes more productive more profits can be extracted and the competition means that wages are bid up. . . . All of the things that we consume, now being made by these cheaper providers of labour, become cheaper, thus our real incomes rise. Their wages, now that they are becoming more productive, rise. Our wages on average, determined by our average level of productivity, move in step with our productivity, not the changes in the productivity of others. And our labour can go off and do those other things which will satisfy yet more human desires and wants: another way that we get richer of course, for satisfying two or three needs and desires instead of only one means that we are of course richer as long as we define wealth in any rational sense at all.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Wages are only bid up when there's a shortage of qualified labour. As for the reference to Marx, Marx also argued that once capitalists run out of new markets to expand into, capitalist competition necessarily need to focus on driving down aggregate Labour costs.
octodog 5y ago
Why do we care about the number of jobs? We use this as a proxy for individual well being, but having a job is not intrinsically valuable. What matters is that everyone in a society has their needs met. We should not be optimising the number of jobs but the total output of society, while maintaining an equitable distribution of the said outputs. It may be the case that automation permanently makes some classes of workers unemployed, but with the increased benefits from automation we should still be more than capable of providing for them.
- CyanBird 5y ago
  > What matters is that everyone in a society has their needs met. Well, if they are not having an income stream then they very well are not having their needs met given that engagement with the economic system for the delivery of needs has as a prerequisite that the individual or entity have a baseline level of monetary spending ability
marcell 5y ago
The article and headline asserts that economists view robots and automation as a threat to jobs. They don’t. The conventional wisdom from most economists (defined as professors of Econ at major Universities) is the opposite, that automation leads to more jobs. This article is based on a strawman.
Slartie 5y ago
>The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination. This "gloomy narrative" first and foremost served well for decades to depress wages and wage expectations and ensure a considerable supply of cheap labor exists. The political argument was even spoken out quite freely from time to time, and it went like "well, if you [politicians] don't ensure labor is cheap, we [rich corporate owners] will simply automate away all the jobs and your voters will be left unemployed". The narrative of this development seemingly being "inevitable" and the necessary tech always being "just around the corner" for the automation of practically everything played so well into this, that it leads me to assume that interested circles knowingly pushed this narrative for exactly these political reasons. And a lot of technologists helped hugely in this push, often not because of political or economical gains (though quite some probably own tech stocks or work in the tech sector and thus stand to benefit potentially, but I also know tech enthusiasts for which these both don't apply) but because of tech fascination. The truth however is that automation is a hard and costly business with clear limitations, and even many simple jobs are probably not automatable for decades to come. Automation often just helps to make certain jobs more efficient, but the efficiency gain is immediately being consumed by extensions in service and/or complexity that would not have been possible before, but leave us with a net zero in the change for the need for human employees (or even an increase!). But that did not stop the automation zealots from pushing their political agenda, because it's just too helpful in ensuring that most of the monetary value of the efficiency gains ends up with them and their shareholders instead of the human workforce. So the newest paragraph in the book is "AI will automate away even all the complicated, brainy work!" and a surprising number of otherwise smart people fall for the same trap that has already been successfully used to "manage" the lower-paid untrained workforce for decades.
amelius 5y ago
Can we replace economists by AI?
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Sadly that AI would need to be trained with something, and that something would likely be books of status quo economic thought, and after that's done the result would be an even more ruthless version of modern neoclassical economic thought It makes one shudder at the thought
  - Litost 5y ago
    It makes me shudder as well, the first thing that comes to mind is the paperclip maximizer - https://terbium.io/2020/05/paperclip-maximizer/ https://terbium.io/2020/05/paperclip-maximizer/.
jokoon 5y ago
I don't understand people who argue that robots create jobs because they need to be programmed, built and maintained. Of course those jobs are created, but many more jobs were destroyed in the process. Not to mention education cannot make engineers out of thin air, it requires a lot of resources to educate people. And for those who don't get educated, it's a net loss since the gains of productivity are not shared. That is what Antiwork is about: there's enough shelter and food for everyone, so work can't be mandatory. What's the point of working in fast food or taxi driver as a permanent job?
- RhodesianHunter 5y ago
  This is a very narrow view. The robots don't just create jobs for robot engineers. Entire new industries are built on their backs. Look at the printing press. Did it destroy jobs hand copying books? Yes. Do we now have publishers, journalists, authors, distributors, illustrators, etc.? Also yes.
  - bluddyYang 5y ago
    > Do we now have publishers, journalists, authors, distributors, illustrators, etc.? Also yes. We sure do. When you obsolete labour, you free people up to do other things. However, I question how true this will be with the AI revolution. The printing press is an example of mechanical automation which does not extend into either human creativity (content of writing) or other mechanical processes. It merely provides a means of making multiple copies and passing them along. The printing press among others inventions from the industrial revolution are a false equivalence to the coming AI. AI with the ability to perform physical and mental tasks along with internet-like connectivity and an ability to learn will completely obsolete all work. If not immediately, that is the only foreseeable long-term outcome. AI is not a printing press. It is a way to invent and apply the equivalent of a printing press to all existing and emerging labour markets in an exponential way. Very dangerous when you realize its impacts are not bounded like the industrial revolution. This is an existential threat that comments like yours waive away too easily.
    - 5y ago
powerapple 5y ago
Jobs are not a necessity. People work because of they need money, country need people to work because they can tax and use the remaining to buy weapons. We don't need jobs, we just need hobbies. I am very optimistic about robots. It will be the time when there will be no slaves in this world, everyone will be truly free.
- abyssin 5y ago
  There’s one crucial issue with this view: robots need energy to work. And consuming energy destroys the planet and will continue to do so for quite a while, because clean energy solutions aren’t ready and we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions (among other things) right now. Time is running out and we can no longer afford the dream of a post-work society.
  - powerapple 5y ago
    What about nuclear energy? Say we move robotic productions to areas we don't want to live, with nuclear plants, and keep renewable energy just for humans in cities. Or the idea from Bezos which I liked: move robots to a different plant, ship everything to Earth.
    - abyssin 5y ago
      Nuclear energy isn’t magic. It’s an awesome technology but it won’t replace fossil fuels soon enough.
  - questiondev 5y ago
    the energy crisis is not really a crisis with energy but a crisis with policy, there is a lot of energy floating around us that we do not harvest, the ocean is filled with energy that can be harvested safely without harming ecosystems. we really have a lack of resourcefulness problem, outdated systems in place that stop progress and keep us all asking why can’t we fix this?
naasking 5y ago
> Automation might help a firm become more profitable and thus expand, leading to a hiring spree. Technology might also allow firms to move into new areas, or to focus on products and services that are more labour-intensive. This is a good argument as long as machine learning doesn't get too good. Unfortunately, improvements in ML are accelerating, so we'll see if that holds up.
monkeydust 5y ago
As someone who develops automation software for the capital markets industry its too early to state what the impact will be on jobs. For sure what I have personally seen is backed by this article in that automation has not resulted on job losses. It has however resulted in task losses - meaning tasks that humans would do are being done done by software autonomously - this has freed up time and the theory is this time is then deployed to more valuable tasks. In my mind the jury is out how this is really working out but if the gain is shift from work -> leisure time without impact on growth then I also see that as a win but as we know the distribution of these gains is far from even across society which is a growing problem.
known 5y ago
darepublic 5y ago
If we had perfect robots creating almost limitless "free" labour, what would we as a civilization do? Ban the technology? Descend into a struggle to own the technology. Or forge a better and different society for ourselves

139 points by blopeur 5y ago

As someone with a bit of experience in robotics, I've always viewed these economists as "useful idiots", unknowingly doing the bidding of firms who sell us the dream of advanced automation (e.g. Tesla, Uber). The economists were clueless themselves, but the companies selling the dream profited immensely thanks to them.

CyanBird 5y ago
Oh, it is very much the case, there's a famous saying that goes something like There are two types of economists: The ones that say what rich people want to hear, and the other ones that no one puts attention to
0xy 5y ago
The vast majority of the population used to work in manual agricultural work, until it was largely automated to the point we're down to <1% in agri employment. The result of this huge wave of automation was not profit for agricultural companies and farms. The average operating margin for farms is 11%. What else happened? The resulting plummeting food prices lifted billions out of poverty, to the point where extreme poverty is at the lowest level ever. It's a little bit hard to see backroom fat cats with cigars behind this movement when automation has only ever brought massive benefits to society, including when 90% of the population worked in a vulnerable industry. Your mistake is believing that humans have a fixed set of jobs and when jobs are removed from the job pool that the pool shrinks. In reality, the size of the pool is increasing while some jobs within the pool reduce in size and scope. From my perspective, it's also hard to see how automating back-breaking laborious jobs like cleaning, burger flipping or fruit picking is a bad thing. These jobs ruin your body. Ever see a manual laborer who was over 50 and didn't have at least one body ailment?
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  I was specifically commenting about economists who predicted that millions of drivers will be out of jobs in just a couple of years, and speculated what should be done about it, what will be the wider consequences etc. Basically uninformed and irresponsible blabbering under pretense of expertise.

streamofdigits 5y ago

How about people revising their views on the Economist (and its real job)

tedheath123 5y ago
What is its real job?

bottesting 5y ago

sounds interesting

akoster 5y ago

https://archive.is/L6TDA https://archive.is/L6TDA

FabHK 5y ago
Or https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Ffinance-and-economics%2F2022%2F01%2F22%2Feconomists-are-revising-their-views-on-robots-and-jobs https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Ffi...
- metadat 5y ago
  12ft ladder for 10ft paywalls, eh? I hadn’t seen this before.. it’s got quite the aggressive charter: https://12ft.io/ https://12ft.io/ > Why? > I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information. > You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter. I find the current state of the web, post-AdWords, disappointing too. edit: apologies, it was submitted and discussed a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29679716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29679716
  - majormajor 5y ago
    If you hate the ad-driven web, bypassing paywalls seems wildly backwards. Do we want to make sites attempting to do something other than SEO-spam harder to find in search?
    - javajosh 5y ago
      I agree with this, but I think it's a step in the right direction. To wit, imagine a service like this, but it costs $20/mo, and it breaks all paywalls for you but allocates that $20 to the pay-walled things you read that month, piecemeal. It would save you a great deal of friction, far fewer accounts to maintain, and reduce your dependency on any single news-source. And of course authors stand to gain - as long as they are okay accepting a variable allocation for each consumption (which they almost certainly are).

blacksmith_tb 5y ago

I cringe when I see an analysis begin with a trite conflict of interest argument like "Warning people of a jobless future has, ironically enough, created plenty of employment for ambitious public intellectuals looking for a book deal or a speaking opportunity." Yawn - that's charmingly glib, if factually dubious, public intellectualism is not a growth industry in general, let alone for bot-doubters. 1: https://archive.md/L6TDA https://archive.md/L6TDA

Uehreka 5y ago
Agreed. I likewise find analysis/comments that begin with some reference to journalists and clickbait pretty tedious.

vorpalhex 5y ago

This strikes me as the "AI will replace..." problem. Everyone understands AIs are anything except intelligent.

imapeopleperson 5y ago
Sure, but you don’t need to be intelligent for most jobs.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  This is often repeated, but isn't true. Almost every job has to deal with the inconsistencies and constructs of society (including law, morality, history and creativity) while also navigating the decisions constrained by the physical world (perception, physics). This is more than any machine, ever, has managed. I'm just thinking about food service, crossing guard and roofing, which isn't even a statistical blip.
  - rory 5y ago
    What is true is more like "~80% of many jobs is routine enough to (theoretically) be handled by a machine." This phenomenon is obvious with e.g. grocery store checkout machines. For every 5-10 machines, there needs to be one person to confirm I'm old enough to buy alcohol, or assure the machine I'm not stealing when I bag my onions in a way it doesn't recognize.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      + UPC doesn't appear in the system + Scales (bagging vs PoS) don't match + Temporary ID The list goes on. There are lots of exceptions that can happen and those are trivial for a human and impossible for an AI.

bjelkeman-again 5y ago

My take on it is that it is too early to tell. The automation envisaged has not arrived, yet. (Maybe it will take a long while.) Self driving trucks or book keeping systems without data entry are still not widespread. At the same time, automation sometimes produces other results. Not many executives in medium sized companies have secretaries, rather the type their own messages, on a phone.

axiomdata316 5y ago

Previously posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067249

contingencies 5y ago

What drives the adoption of automation is not "labour is expensive" but "labour is unavailable", "labour is too slow to obtain/train", "labour is imprecise", "labour is dangerous", "labour is untrustworthy" or "labour is unreliable". Generic industrial automation solutions are still very expensive to integrate unless simplistic. Furthermore, if you automate one unit operation, the rest of your process line also needs automating or the adjacent operations will simply become the new choke points.

aksss 5y ago
sounds a bit like how asynchronous programming is a 'virus' in that once you start applying the pattern, so much upstream and downstream code needs to start implementing the same pattern.

timkam 5y ago

Isn't the real development that automation and efficiency improvements move more and more people into bullshit jobs? So instead of becoming entirely obsolete, we continue working, not knowing what value we contribute, if any. That's why my intuition (and fear) is that in such BS jobs, the rewards will become more and more skewed. So instead of a 9-5 corporate BS job, one gets a highly competitive BS job (evaluated using metrics that are poor predictors and assessors of individual quality of work) in a high-pressure environment.

6510 5y ago
And if we ever manage to overcome that we will not have jobs at all and our mind will be full of things not relating to what sustains humanity. The longer we then embrace unproductivity the more horrific a single incident will be.

sam_lowry_ 5y ago

This is missing the obligatory reference to Bertrand Russell who said in 1932 that working hours will reduce to 15 hours/week [1] and this is good. [1] https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

tablespoon 5y ago
> This is missing the obligatory reference to Bertrand Russell who said in 1932 that working hours will reduce to 15 hours/week [1] and this is good. It'd only be good if it came together with other social changes. So long as profit-seeking owners control employment, they will certainly not share the benefits of productivity improvements equitably. They'll cast some workers off to unemployment and pocket their wages, and the rest will be continued to be worked as hard as they are able.
Litost 5y ago
David Graeber (from Bullshit Jobs fame) talked about this at some length [1]: "Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true." "But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones." "These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”" and goes on to come to the following conclusion: "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days." Having just done Fritjof Capra's Systems View of Life course, channeling the ideas that: a) "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" [2] and b) "All behaviour in complex systems is emergent" A (vastly simplified) argument is that bullshit jobs is the emergent behaviour from a system compromising between the needs of: a) People to work so they can earn money, be fulfilled and see a material increase in their wealth. b) A political class keen to keep the workers busy less they revolt and upset the system. c) A system of economics/a reductionist western/scientific worldview that increasingly externalised anything that didn't show everyone was better off (e.g. GDP). d) Elites who were increasingly happy to take an increasing proportion of the wealth from the efficiency gains. Everyone wins in relation to the amount of power they have relative to everyone else and the system sustains itself based on the fact no-one with enough power has enough incentive/will to overthrow it. Obviously the planet (which once indigenous peoples had been conquered) mostly lost it's voice in the conversation and so that's why we're where we are now. [1] https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/ https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky

jordwest 5y ago

These discussions are always focused on the "robots". What about the spreadsheets, the computers, algorithms, industrial control systems, Python scripts, voice recognition systems, data pipelines, software powered gig economy, algorithmic traders? These types of automation have been in place for decades, and all of them cut costs for the owners of them and reduce the number of workers needed. Many of them can be operated with minimal training. The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation? We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades, and we've been completely blind to it because we're always talking about "the robots that are coming to take our jobs". We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally. In fact, we needed to years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if this explains a lot of the productivity-pay gap [1] [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

matheusmoreira 5y ago
The only possible outcome is automation of most if not literally all jobs. At this point, capitalism will necessarily break down because it depends on continuous consumption and there will be no disposable income with which to consume. Hopefully society will evolve into post scarcity at this point instead of a cyberpunk dystopia where gigacorporations create artificial scarcity economies just to maintain the status quo.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I'm hopeful for a solarpunk future. https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg
- jordwest 5y ago
  Frankly I think we're already at the tipping point for that. If I think about it, how many jobs are actually involved in: * Providing food * Providing shelter * Providing healthcare You could argue just about everything else is really a form of artifical scarcity, none of it is needed for survival, perhaps just for comfort. That divide became a lot more clear in the past 2 years with the acknowledgement of "essential workers". Without Google, Facebook, or auto insurance, we'd be inconvenienced. Without essential workers society as we know it would collapse. And almost all of those workers are paid less than an entry level Facebook engineer. So now the question is, are we already post-scarcity? And perhaps we don't know it only because it hasn't been distributed equally.

chrischen 5y ago

Automation will probably hit information workers before it hits manual labor workers. The reason is that information workers are expensive because it's harder to outsource to a poorer country, and we've got a long way to go before robots get good enough to compete against child labor (joking).

aksss 5y ago
well, maybe less about ability as about energy consumption. Perhaps we've got a long way to go before robots can do the same work as kids for the same equivalent energy cost of three bowls of rice per day.

pydry 5y ago

>The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination. Thanks to the likes of the Economist. Their story on how copilot will make programmers redundant exemplified the way they framed automation - as an answer to their executive readership's prayers - a deus ex machina that will let them fire half of their employees while maintaining their margins. To be fair, there is a litany of trashy economics studies thumping the same drum. E.g. there was a famous one from Ball State U that mathematically conflated automation and outsourcing to prove that the robots already took over and one from Harvard, I think, that measured job automatability through surveys about how "creative" workers thought their jobs were.

fleddr 5y ago

I continue to believe in the idea that automation/AI will destroy entire sectors currently requiring labor. It is something that happens gradually, then suddenly. I also believe there's "safe" sectors where this is unlikely to ever happen. Good luck making a robot plumber. By the time you solve that, you've solved everything and we're entirely obsolete. Package delivery, cash registry, retail jobs...there's plenty of high employment sectors at danger. And perhaps many office jobs are at even more danger. One idea is that "as always" we simply move on to "higher order" work. This is nonsense. We don't need billions of AI programmers, it would be really crappy AI if that was the case. Nor is it realistic that everybody can do such a demanding job. We're talking about billions of relatively lowly educated workers here. Another idea is UBI, or even better...post scarcity. For the optimists, I guess. I expect that neither will happen, instead we're already experiencing the solution. You just inject trillions of stimulation money into the economy, which creates (artificial) demand, hence allowing for jobs that otherwise might not exist. Right now, somebody is inventing potato chips flavor #31,122. Nobody asked for it, the world doesn't need it, and I hope we can agree that it's unimportant. But somebody invents it anyway, somebody designs the packaging, and somebody ships it. You buy it, and might just like it. All these activities aren't really demand or need driven, they're more like "because we can" jobs. Our world is largely supply and marketing driven, not demand driven from the bottom up. Fluff and endless meaningless luxuries. When I walk through a mall I wonder...do people really buy all this garbage? Put harshly, you can call all of this bullshit jobs. Keeping each other busy. And that's what we'll continue to do no matter the state of technology. It's just a few dials in the financial system. Have you never wondered why everybody deeply cares that one has a job (at any and all costs) yet there's never any serious inquiry about the point of the job? Nobody cares if you have a meaningless job, the point is that you have a job. Any job. This reality gives away how the system works.

scollet 5y ago
> Our world is largely supply and marketing driven Great way to put it. I've felt this way for awhile. Advertising, for example, is low-hanging fruit in the world of useless things, but it's so embedded in US culture that efforts to displace it are stopped at the door.

lapetitejort 5y ago

There's a local burger joint with two screens where customers can ring up their own order. There's always a line at the register and never at the screens. I've walked in, keyed in my order, and received my food faster than people in line. And yet people just don't seem to want to use them. Yesterday I walked in and both screens had an "Out of order" sticky note on it. Minimum wage jobs have a few more years of life left.

mlac 5y ago
I don’t want to learn every point of sale system at every restaurant I go to. I sometimes have custom orders. If I screw something up, I want to be able to say, “sorry, can I change that?”. I have to touch a screen that others have touched. The UI might be bad, the machine might be slow. About 1/3rd of the time at Home Depot I end up having to wait for someone to come over for some reason at the self checkout. Regardless of how I order at a fast food joint, I have to see someone hand me food, and it is a bit dehumanizing if there is no line for me to walk in and use a machine instead of talk to them, especially when they hand me the food. (I’d definitely use a self-order if there was a line and saved time) An app is different - there is a clear benefit to ordering ahead and having food ready. The only expected interaction is the pickup.
- rory 5y ago
  I sympathize the dehumanizing bit and get where you're coming from, but in general I greatly prefer to use the touchscreen machines at fast food places. I like to look through all the options and take my time choosing, which translates to a very awkward verbal interaction, no matter how polite the person taking my order is.
hotpotamus 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat There were "fully automated" restaurants (obviously more of a mechanical turk type operation) well over a hundred years ago. Doesn't seem like they've caught on yet.
bllguo 5y ago

massysett 5y ago

I’ve always laughed at this idea that automation will take all our jobs. If it were true, farm automation would have left all of us unemployed at least a century ago. Most humans used to barely survive trying to eke food out of the earth. Yet somehow there’s not mass unemployment even though now a small fraction of the population is in agriculture.

worik 5y ago

Oh my. Econonmists >... a solid microeconomic foundation. ...more profitable and thus expand, leading to a hiring spree. Technology might also allow firms to move into new areas, or to focus on products and services that are more labour-intensive. In my time spent studying economics, this is the sort of thing that micro-economists say all the time and it is not true. The untrue bit is "solid foundation". It is post hock story told to give a quasi theoretical basis for an observation. The article, bless them, acknowledges separating causation and correlation is tricky. Solid foundation, pfft!

Def_Os 5y ago
Dr. Taleb? ;)
- worik 5y ago
  Nassim Nicholas Taleb has done interesting work. But this is something different. His contribution was updating Knight's uncertainty for the modern world

waingake 5y ago

Not while we place very little value on peoples time ( their sole existence on earth ever ). Capitalism is happy for people to waste there lives doing things they don't want to do. A society that values peoples time as it should would encourage automation. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead-your-time-is-everything https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead...

CryptoPunk 5y ago
Capitalism is just people being free to own what they produce or acquire in trade, and do with it what they wish. What people do within this context, is up to them. This attribution of a value system, e.g. consumerism or profit-seeking, to capitalism, is misguided, and a way for certain ideological camps to pathologize and stigmatize human freedom.
- waingake 5y ago
  Capitalism here is what you are doing once the accumulation of further capital becomes the principal objective of you activities. If you generate a lot of profit, but you use it all to finance a luxurious lifestyle of even just to keep you and your employees comfortable then you are not necessarily doing capitalism. The pursuit of captial accumulation is always dependent on the exploitation of someone's labour / time somewhere. If you really care about freedom why are you happy with a system that means all but the very rich must spend the majority of their lives in toil?
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    >>Capitalism here is what you are doing once the accumulation of further capital becomes the principal objective of you activities. That is not the definition when used in the context of cross-economic-system analysis. Individual objectives, values and motivations are completely orthogonal to whether capitalism is in place. Eliminating capitalism doesn't mean changing people's objectives and values. It means depriving them of the right to keep what they produce and acquire in trade, and do with what they wish. And no, profiting has no relevance to exploitation. That is just Marxist pseudoscience to pathologize success. >>If you really care about freedom why are you happy with a system that means all but the very rich must spend the majority of their lives in toil? The amount that people toil has decreased largely as a result of the ruleset I mentioned, that is associated with capitalism.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

Slightly off topic, but unemployment rate is one of those all but meaningless metrics that politicians and economists love to parade around (as meaningful). For example, you can be ineligible for unemployment (i.e., you are employed) but your income is so low you still get public assistance. Or you're living with 20+ other people. It's also possible to stop being eligible for assistance, so they stop counting you as unemployed. The point is, the unemployment rates rides a lot. Which is why politicians love it so.

rory 5y ago
As a percentage "rate" it does mean something very specific, and therefore not super intuitively useful. But it's still helpful as a directional metric. If the U-3 unemployment rate goes up, it's likely the number of people in the other situations you mentioned has gone up as well.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  It's still too high level. You can't make any meaningful decisions based on it. For example, and we hear similar all the time, "...X jobs were created in the quarter and the unemployment rate fell to Y..." But 1) What were those X jobs? Min wage (or less)? Or high paying? 2) Where were these jobs? Min wage in CA or NJ, or min wage where costs are less. The quantity (i.e., direction) doesn't tell enough, we need quality - at least - as well. Politicians love it as a metric because no one asks "what type of jobs? How well do they pay?" And that alone makes it suspect.
  - rory 5y ago
    Sure, it's obvious that you can't capture that complexity in a single number. I could tell you my weight, and it wouldn't tell you if I'm a smoker or a drunk, if I eat my veggies or exercise. But if I'm 400 pounds you can still reasonably predict I'm unhealthy, and if I lose weight from there that's a decent sign I'm getting better.
    - 5y ago

pessimizer 5y ago

"Automation" propaganda was always a threat aimed at labor and labor unions. The only significant "automation" has been 1) moving factories to countries with lower wages and to localities with lax regulations on working conditions, and 2) the gig economy (the culmination of Manpower's et al. temp revolution from the 90s) along with independent contracting in name only to dodge benefits and the costs of downtime. Actual automation is a comparison between workers, who are infinitely flexible, know their jobs better than their bosses, and are responsible for taking care of themselves, - and machines, which are morons that break down and require expensive workers to fix. Workers are better the vast majority of the time, and when we can get a machine to be cost-effective against them it's a good thing. It is just a rare, difficult thing.

umeshunni 5y ago
> The only significant "automation" has been I take it you've never stepped inside a modern factory?
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  Or modern warehouse... Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

Ericson2314 5y ago

All this is wrong. The causalities are: Low unemployment -> uppity expensive workers -> increasing rate of automation Positive rate of automation -> more workers

jopsen 5y ago

How is automation different from industrialization? This has been going on for 200 years more or less. Maybe, if lower prices stops increasing consumption (and investment). So far, better automation has just made us build more. But why should that all change now? If it does, the transition will probably be gradual and take decades.

Proven 5y ago

[dead]

lawrenceyan 5y ago

> The world was supposedly in the middle of an artificial-intelligence and machine-learning revolution “supposedly”

cipheredStones 5y ago

The thesis of this article seems to be that robots won't eliminate jobs, but it really doesn't adduce evidence to support that: > a recent paper ... put forward a “new view” of robots, saying that “the direct effect of automation may be to increase employment at the firm level, not to reduce it.” "At the firm level" is quite the caveat! If a company can produce two widgets per worker instead of one by adding robots, it'll succeed and grow as a result - at the expense of its competitors. But if every widget maker adds those robots, and there's no more demand for widgets than before, a lot of factory staff will be out of work. They touch on a related point near the end: > Mr Aghion and his colleagues add that even if automation boosts employment at the level of the firm or industry, the effect across the economy as a whole is less clear. In theory robot-adopting companies could be so successful that they drive competitors out of business, reducing the total number of available jobs. ...but it seems to me like a major problem with the whole framing of the article, not just a "by the way".

r00tanon 5y ago

The more we automate jobs that people hate doing, the more time people will have to do jobs they are really good at and enjoy doing. Hopefully creating TikTok videos won't be the majority of the creative jobs humans will focus on. There is always that danger.

scottcodie 5y ago

Most automation is labor augmenting rather than labor replacing.

lmeyerov 5y ago

We are seeing a boom as cloud and data spend is going up as internal IT struggles to go without it, which in turn makes a virtuous cycle for even more. Likewise, once you start doing things like GPUs for graph neural nets and visualization, it's like highspeed internet: our users don't want to go back. For folks doing real things with data, it's been busy times. My issue is more like "we and our F500 users are asking for more GPUs than azure can supply", vs job loss and stagnation.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

This is not at all surprising. The scholarship positing the opposite was a deviation from what has been the standard line of economic thought since more than a century ago. Automation is the main cause of a 20 times growth in inflation-adjusted wages since 1820. Per capita GDP growth is mostly just labor saving innovation, which is primarily automation, and secondarily greater coordination, like division of labor and specialization, and that is mostly through trade.

mathattack 5y ago

This doesn’t seem controversial in economics. If robots increase the value produced by non-robotic workers there will be increased demand for them.

vidarh 5y ago
At a firm level, sure. In aggregate that only works as long as aggregate demand for products and services rises faster than the output per unit of labour.
- mathattack 5y ago
  When has it not?
  - vidarh 5y ago
    All of agriculture is a good example. We produce far more food today while agriculture employs a far smaller proportion of the population. The improved productivity in agriculture has in no way increased demand for agricultural labour proportional to the increases in productivity. If you mean across all products, we're not there yet, not least because population growth has provided ongoing stimulus. Whether that continues as growth rates in more and more countries flatline remains to be seen.
    - mathattack 5y ago
      Demand shifts to other things. We’ve always been capable of inventing new desires.

eucryphia 5y ago

Tim Worstall said it better than I ever could: https://www.timworstall.com/2011/03/peter-wilby-really-really-doesnt-get-economics-at-all/ https://www.timworstall.com/2011/03/peter-wilby-really-reall... snippets: Average wages in an economy are determined by the average productivity in that economy. Individual wages are not set by what that individual does: but by the wages paid by the next possible alternative use of that individual’s labour. . . . Finally, as Marx pointed out, wages rise to meet average productivity, not wages falling as cheaper labour becomes more productive. This happens because capitalists compete for access to the profits that can be extracted from that labour. As the labour becomes more productive more profits can be extracted and the competition means that wages are bid up. . . . All of the things that we consume, now being made by these cheaper providers of labour, become cheaper, thus our real incomes rise. Their wages, now that they are becoming more productive, rise. Our wages on average, determined by our average level of productivity, move in step with our productivity, not the changes in the productivity of others. And our labour can go off and do those other things which will satisfy yet more human desires and wants: another way that we get richer of course, for satisfying two or three needs and desires instead of only one means that we are of course richer as long as we define wealth in any rational sense at all.

vidarh 5y ago
Wages are only bid up when there's a shortage of qualified labour. As for the reference to Marx, Marx also argued that once capitalists run out of new markets to expand into, capitalist competition necessarily need to focus on driving down aggregate Labour costs.

octodog 5y ago

Why do we care about the number of jobs? We use this as a proxy for individual well being, but having a job is not intrinsically valuable. What matters is that everyone in a society has their needs met. We should not be optimising the number of jobs but the total output of society, while maintaining an equitable distribution of the said outputs. It may be the case that automation permanently makes some classes of workers unemployed, but with the increased benefits from automation we should still be more than capable of providing for them.

CyanBird 5y ago
> What matters is that everyone in a society has their needs met. Well, if they are not having an income stream then they very well are not having their needs met given that engagement with the economic system for the delivery of needs has as a prerequisite that the individual or entity have a baseline level of monetary spending ability

marcell 5y ago

The article and headline asserts that economists view robots and automation as a threat to jobs. They don’t. The conventional wisdom from most economists (defined as professors of Econ at major Universities) is the opposite, that automation leads to more jobs. This article is based on a strawman.

Slartie 5y ago

>The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination. This "gloomy narrative" first and foremost served well for decades to depress wages and wage expectations and ensure a considerable supply of cheap labor exists. The political argument was even spoken out quite freely from time to time, and it went like "well, if you [politicians] don't ensure labor is cheap, we [rich corporate owners] will simply automate away all the jobs and your voters will be left unemployed". The narrative of this development seemingly being "inevitable" and the necessary tech always being "just around the corner" for the automation of practically everything played so well into this, that it leads me to assume that interested circles knowingly pushed this narrative for exactly these political reasons. And a lot of technologists helped hugely in this push, often not because of political or economical gains (though quite some probably own tech stocks or work in the tech sector and thus stand to benefit potentially, but I also know tech enthusiasts for which these both don't apply) but because of tech fascination. The truth however is that automation is a hard and costly business with clear limitations, and even many simple jobs are probably not automatable for decades to come. Automation often just helps to make certain jobs more efficient, but the efficiency gain is immediately being consumed by extensions in service and/or complexity that would not have been possible before, but leave us with a net zero in the change for the need for human employees (or even an increase!). But that did not stop the automation zealots from pushing their political agenda, because it's just too helpful in ensuring that most of the monetary value of the efficiency gains ends up with them and their shareholders instead of the human workforce. So the newest paragraph in the book is "AI will automate away even all the complicated, brainy work!" and a surprising number of otherwise smart people fall for the same trap that has already been successfully used to "manage" the lower-paid untrained workforce for decades.

amelius 5y ago

Can we replace economists by AI?

CyanBird 5y ago
Sadly that AI would need to be trained with something, and that something would likely be books of status quo economic thought, and after that's done the result would be an even more ruthless version of modern neoclassical economic thought It makes one shudder at the thought
- Litost 5y ago
  It makes me shudder as well, the first thing that comes to mind is the paperclip maximizer - https://terbium.io/2020/05/paperclip-maximizer/ https://terbium.io/2020/05/paperclip-maximizer/.

jokoon 5y ago

I don't understand people who argue that robots create jobs because they need to be programmed, built and maintained. Of course those jobs are created, but many more jobs were destroyed in the process. Not to mention education cannot make engineers out of thin air, it requires a lot of resources to educate people. And for those who don't get educated, it's a net loss since the gains of productivity are not shared. That is what Antiwork is about: there's enough shelter and food for everyone, so work can't be mandatory. What's the point of working in fast food or taxi driver as a permanent job?

RhodesianHunter 5y ago
This is a very narrow view. The robots don't just create jobs for robot engineers. Entire new industries are built on their backs. Look at the printing press. Did it destroy jobs hand copying books? Yes. Do we now have publishers, journalists, authors, distributors, illustrators, etc.? Also yes.
- bluddyYang 5y ago
  > Do we now have publishers, journalists, authors, distributors, illustrators, etc.? Also yes. We sure do. When you obsolete labour, you free people up to do other things. However, I question how true this will be with the AI revolution. The printing press is an example of mechanical automation which does not extend into either human creativity (content of writing) or other mechanical processes. It merely provides a means of making multiple copies and passing them along. The printing press among others inventions from the industrial revolution are a false equivalence to the coming AI. AI with the ability to perform physical and mental tasks along with internet-like connectivity and an ability to learn will completely obsolete all work. If not immediately, that is the only foreseeable long-term outcome. AI is not a printing press. It is a way to invent and apply the equivalent of a printing press to all existing and emerging labour markets in an exponential way. Very dangerous when you realize its impacts are not bounded like the industrial revolution. This is an existential threat that comments like yours waive away too easily.
  - 5y ago

powerapple 5y ago

Jobs are not a necessity. People work because of they need money, country need people to work because they can tax and use the remaining to buy weapons. We don't need jobs, we just need hobbies. I am very optimistic about robots. It will be the time when there will be no slaves in this world, everyone will be truly free.

abyssin 5y ago
There’s one crucial issue with this view: robots need energy to work. And consuming energy destroys the planet and will continue to do so for quite a while, because clean energy solutions aren’t ready and we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions (among other things) right now. Time is running out and we can no longer afford the dream of a post-work society.
- powerapple 5y ago
  What about nuclear energy? Say we move robotic productions to areas we don't want to live, with nuclear plants, and keep renewable energy just for humans in cities. Or the idea from Bezos which I liked: move robots to a different plant, ship everything to Earth.
  - abyssin 5y ago
    Nuclear energy isn’t magic. It’s an awesome technology but it won’t replace fossil fuels soon enough.
- questiondev 5y ago
  the energy crisis is not really a crisis with energy but a crisis with policy, there is a lot of energy floating around us that we do not harvest, the ocean is filled with energy that can be harvested safely without harming ecosystems. we really have a lack of resourcefulness problem, outdated systems in place that stop progress and keep us all asking why can’t we fix this?

naasking 5y ago

> Automation might help a firm become more profitable and thus expand, leading to a hiring spree. Technology might also allow firms to move into new areas, or to focus on products and services that are more labour-intensive. This is a good argument as long as machine learning doesn't get too good. Unfortunately, improvements in ML are accelerating, so we'll see if that holds up.

monkeydust 5y ago

As someone who develops automation software for the capital markets industry its too early to state what the impact will be on jobs. For sure what I have personally seen is backed by this article in that automation has not resulted on job losses. It has however resulted in task losses - meaning tasks that humans would do are being done done by software autonomously - this has freed up time and the theory is this time is then deployed to more valuable tasks. In my mind the jury is out how this is really working out but if the gain is shift from work -> leisure time without impact on growth then I also see that as a win but as we know the distribution of these gains is far from even across society which is a growing problem.

known 5y ago

darepublic 5y ago

If we had perfect robots creating almost limitless "free" labour, what would we as a civilization do? Ban the technology? Descend into a struggle to own the technology. Or forge a better and different society for ourselves