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This is this thinking of "Automation reduces workforce". The next argument then is always "We need Basic Income" because of this. But this is ignoring the fact

This is this thinking of "Automation reduces workforce". The next argument then is always "We need Basic Income" because of this. But this is ignoring the fact that automation never replaced workforce as such. It moved the focus of the workforce. At the end more automation even required more workforce. The thing is, you cannot engineer the process to be automated. You need to keep maintaining the automation. This includes not only daily maintenance, but also to keep up with obsolescence. You need to keep-up with new upcoming technologies of automation to replace your old once. But all this distracts and takes-away focus on the development of you product. So you need workforce to basically run your business, while you can still stay focused. But even then you can't stay focused, because it is also your job to decide what newer automation processes to chose. As this will have an impact on your own product. That again takes away you focus for the development of you product. So again you need workforce to help you to stay focused. At some point you need workforce to manage your workforce namely HR. So there is a cycle when you get more and more workforce so that you stay focused to develop your product. All that of course assuming that you need to develop your product even further after launch.

lancesells 4y ago
How many people here have simpler jobs than 10-20 years ago due to automation? I work in marketing and I all I see is more apps and more complexity no matter how "automated" things get.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  I'm a developer and honestly ChatGPT and GitHub copilot handle 90 percent of the frontend/templates and 40 percent of my code is now somehow enriched by ai. It's remarkable and has helped cut way back on burnout.
  - eulers_secret 4y ago
    Exactly! These tools are force multipliers. 1 dev can do the work of 3. If this is the case, a business should absolutely lay off 2/3 of their eng staff. If they don’t, their competitors will and then will eat their lunch! No more lazy devs, they should be at their desks working all 8 required hours as they agreed to in their contract. If they’re not: you have too many staff.
    - yamazakiwi 4y ago
      I'm assuming you sit at your desk and work 8 hours under supervision? Many great devs I know work more hours than 8 per day. Why do you have a bone to pick with Devs providing value disproportionate to time spent? You sound pretty happy that devs will have it worse in your proposal.
    - Archelaos 4y ago
      This would only be true if the demand were capped. Other scenarios are also conceivable: For example, if the same workers in this sector can produce for a third of the price, demand may perhaps increase by more than three times and the number of workers would have to increase accordingly, not decrease.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - marstall 4y ago
      another way of looking at it: writing software becomes cheaper, so software becomes more accessible in more parts of the world - leading to more demand for more kinds of software, and more developers needed.
chinchilla2020 4y ago
I have to agree here. Automation increased the productivity of employees, and drove down the price of goods. It never truly 'reduced' the size of the workforce. The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world.
- moooo99 4y ago
  > The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world. This is generally true, but also ignores a key difference. When processes first became mechanized and then industrialized, they we're fairly similar in their nature. Sure, they were different and did require some qualifications, but in the end the imaginary jump from a blacksmith to someone who works in an manufacturing plant building components out of metal is not too severe. With the increasing automation, the jump would be from a machine operator to a software engineer/automation engineer. While this are certainly all teachable skills, they require an extremely different skill profile than the ones they're replacing. Overall, automation is nothing new. And although the capabilities continue to develop from a manufacturing standpoint, there is nothing disruptive about most new things in that area. With the tasks that are currently not automated, the cost is mostly the limiting factor, closely followed by technical complexity. And while there is certainly some change in terms of costs coming down thanks to technological advancements, it's still not completely disruptive. But that is all for blue collar work. But what I think is overlooked way too often overlooked is white collar work. Working in a large company myself, I very frequently witnessed people whose job was essentially the human equivalent of a for loop with a bunch of if conditions. These jobs were hard to automate efficiently, mostly because of the lack of consistently digitally accessible process artifacts, but that is continuing to change. As (traditional) companies continue to shift towards completely digital business, it will become increasingly easy to automate "paper pusher" jobs like these. Beyond that, I hate to be that person, AI will likely have an impact as well. Recent developments, namely GTP-3 or ChatGPT, have shown the current level of AI. And while there things to be criticized about those models and their abilities are still limited, they are significantly more advanced than what most people (outside of those closely following) deemed possible. And while they lack the creativity for original work, these models are already very good at transferring knowledge. And considering that many jobs don't necessarily need original problem solving skills, I can see how automation can have an impact there. It might not completely automate people away, but it certainly has to potential to boost productivity significantly. But will it really put many people out of jobs? Who knows. Given the less than ideal demographic structure of many (european) countries, companies operating here do certainly need any productivity boost they can get. As for countries without those demographic issues? Who knows. Generally my experience in automation projects: the people who many think will be the first ones to be automated away, the people doing the actually physical work, are significantly safer than the ones not expecting it. No matter how much AI or 3D printing houses you throw at the problem
yobbo 4y ago
> But this is ignoring the fact that automation never replaced workforce as such. But it actually did. "Workforce participation", which might be the closest metric of what we actually mean here, keeps declining. In addition to that, we have the era of "bullshit jobs".
- musingsole 4y ago
  Source: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab... Workforce Participation (a per capita metric) decreased. Starting from 2002 with a participation of 66%, the US employed ~192 million. But in 2022 at a participation of 62%, the US employed ~203 million. Absolute employment is up. Between that and productivity gains, more work is being done today than ever before.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  >keeps declining Where? It's highest in the history in Poland, Germany, Italy and very close to the top in UK. US is the outlier, even there, it kept increasing after 2015 and just the pandemic dropped it. Even then it's higher than before 70s. Even in aging Japan it's very close to top.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    https://data.oecd.org/chart/6UQi https://data.oecd.org/chart/6UQi It doesn't look as bad as I thought, but I suspect some national statistics are using evermore generous definitions of "participation". For example, people in higher education being included. That group is increasing as proportion of the population, especially in some European countries with laughably high official statistics.
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      Some of this data is straight up bad in the earlier days, like drastic around 2000 in several countries or Italy in 1992. Another examples are Estonia or Russia around soviet union disintegration. The labor statistics of socialist countries were extremely bloated. The point about education does not make sense to me - the percent of higher education students in Poland is dropping in the last years, and the participation rate keeps climbing.
altacc 4y ago
Yes, automation is nothing new and we're all still working. It changes the jobs and then typically the company can use the gain to expand and so needs to hire more.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >and we're all still working Because governments attempt to maximize 'job creation' via a number of methods including tax benefits to businesses. Businesses don't really give a shit about unemployment unless it is too low, they benefit from low wages when it is high. When unemployment is too high the government risks getting burned to the ground by angry mobs with pitchforks and tends to optimize around preventing that.
WitCanStain 4y ago
We could eventually replace (parts of) the workforce if we were happy with the current standards of living (and prevented a small group from hoarding all the wealth). If we were satisfied with a 1850s standard of living, only a small portion of the modern workforce would need to work. What automation enables is greater productivity with the same amount of human effort/time. But because we seek to improve out living standards, we need to keep the same portion of people employed and productive. So I say, once we bring everyone to a decent standard of life, we can just stop and gradually liberate people from the shackles of work until society runs on a bunch of robots and a small core of maintainers.
stemlord 4y ago
>automation never replaced workforce as such. It moved the focus of the workforce Seems true but also doesn't automation diminish the diversity of work available?
- oblio 4y ago
  It does, primarily by raising the floor.

lancesells 4y ago

How many people here have simpler jobs than 10-20 years ago due to automation? I work in marketing and I all I see is more apps and more complexity no matter how "automated" things get.

gremlinsinc 4y ago
I'm a developer and honestly ChatGPT and GitHub copilot handle 90 percent of the frontend/templates and 40 percent of my code is now somehow enriched by ai. It's remarkable and has helped cut way back on burnout.
- eulers_secret 4y ago
  Exactly! These tools are force multipliers. 1 dev can do the work of 3. If this is the case, a business should absolutely lay off 2/3 of their eng staff. If they don’t, their competitors will and then will eat their lunch! No more lazy devs, they should be at their desks working all 8 required hours as they agreed to in their contract. If they’re not: you have too many staff.
  - yamazakiwi 4y ago
    I'm assuming you sit at your desk and work 8 hours under supervision? Many great devs I know work more hours than 8 per day. Why do you have a bone to pick with Devs providing value disproportionate to time spent? You sound pretty happy that devs will have it worse in your proposal.
  - Archelaos 4y ago
    This would only be true if the demand were capped. Other scenarios are also conceivable: For example, if the same workers in this sector can produce for a third of the price, demand may perhaps increase by more than three times and the number of workers would have to increase accordingly, not decrease.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - marstall 4y ago
    another way of looking at it: writing software becomes cheaper, so software becomes more accessible in more parts of the world - leading to more demand for more kinds of software, and more developers needed.

chinchilla2020 4y ago

I have to agree here. Automation increased the productivity of employees, and drove down the price of goods. It never truly 'reduced' the size of the workforce. The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world.

moooo99 4y ago
> The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world. This is generally true, but also ignores a key difference. When processes first became mechanized and then industrialized, they we're fairly similar in their nature. Sure, they were different and did require some qualifications, but in the end the imaginary jump from a blacksmith to someone who works in an manufacturing plant building components out of metal is not too severe. With the increasing automation, the jump would be from a machine operator to a software engineer/automation engineer. While this are certainly all teachable skills, they require an extremely different skill profile than the ones they're replacing. Overall, automation is nothing new. And although the capabilities continue to develop from a manufacturing standpoint, there is nothing disruptive about most new things in that area. With the tasks that are currently not automated, the cost is mostly the limiting factor, closely followed by technical complexity. And while there is certainly some change in terms of costs coming down thanks to technological advancements, it's still not completely disruptive. But that is all for blue collar work. But what I think is overlooked way too often overlooked is white collar work. Working in a large company myself, I very frequently witnessed people whose job was essentially the human equivalent of a for loop with a bunch of if conditions. These jobs were hard to automate efficiently, mostly because of the lack of consistently digitally accessible process artifacts, but that is continuing to change. As (traditional) companies continue to shift towards completely digital business, it will become increasingly easy to automate "paper pusher" jobs like these. Beyond that, I hate to be that person, AI will likely have an impact as well. Recent developments, namely GTP-3 or ChatGPT, have shown the current level of AI. And while there things to be criticized about those models and their abilities are still limited, they are significantly more advanced than what most people (outside of those closely following) deemed possible. And while they lack the creativity for original work, these models are already very good at transferring knowledge. And considering that many jobs don't necessarily need original problem solving skills, I can see how automation can have an impact there. It might not completely automate people away, but it certainly has to potential to boost productivity significantly. But will it really put many people out of jobs? Who knows. Given the less than ideal demographic structure of many (european) countries, companies operating here do certainly need any productivity boost they can get. As for countries without those demographic issues? Who knows. Generally my experience in automation projects: the people who many think will be the first ones to be automated away, the people doing the actually physical work, are significantly safer than the ones not expecting it. No matter how much AI or 3D printing houses you throw at the problem

yobbo 4y ago

> But this is ignoring the fact that automation never replaced workforce as such. But it actually did. "Workforce participation", which might be the closest metric of what we actually mean here, keeps declining. In addition to that, we have the era of "bullshit jobs".

musingsole 4y ago
Source: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab... Workforce Participation (a per capita metric) decreased. Starting from 2002 with a participation of 66%, the US employed ~192 million. But in 2022 at a participation of 62%, the US employed ~203 million. Absolute employment is up. Between that and productivity gains, more work is being done today than ever before.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
>keeps declining Where? It's highest in the history in Poland, Germany, Italy and very close to the top in UK. US is the outlier, even there, it kept increasing after 2015 and just the pandemic dropped it. Even then it's higher than before 70s. Even in aging Japan it's very close to top.
- yobbo 4y ago
  https://data.oecd.org/chart/6UQi https://data.oecd.org/chart/6UQi It doesn't look as bad as I thought, but I suspect some national statistics are using evermore generous definitions of "participation". For example, people in higher education being included. That group is increasing as proportion of the population, especially in some European countries with laughably high official statistics.
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    Some of this data is straight up bad in the earlier days, like drastic around 2000 in several countries or Italy in 1992. Another examples are Estonia or Russia around soviet union disintegration. The labor statistics of socialist countries were extremely bloated. The point about education does not make sense to me - the percent of higher education students in Poland is dropping in the last years, and the participation rate keeps climbing.

altacc 4y ago

Yes, automation is nothing new and we're all still working. It changes the jobs and then typically the company can use the gain to expand and so needs to hire more.

pixl97 4y ago
>and we're all still working Because governments attempt to maximize 'job creation' via a number of methods including tax benefits to businesses. Businesses don't really give a shit about unemployment unless it is too low, they benefit from low wages when it is high. When unemployment is too high the government risks getting burned to the ground by angry mobs with pitchforks and tends to optimize around preventing that.

WitCanStain 4y ago

We could eventually replace (parts of) the workforce if we were happy with the current standards of living (and prevented a small group from hoarding all the wealth). If we were satisfied with a 1850s standard of living, only a small portion of the modern workforce would need to work. What automation enables is greater productivity with the same amount of human effort/time. But because we seek to improve out living standards, we need to keep the same portion of people employed and productive. So I say, once we bring everyone to a decent standard of life, we can just stop and gradually liberate people from the shackles of work until society runs on a bunch of robots and a small core of maintainers.

stemlord 4y ago

>automation never replaced workforce as such. It moved the focus of the workforce Seems true but also doesn't automation diminish the diversity of work available?

oblio 4y ago
It does, primarily by raising the floor.