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Another report: As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up. So net effect: not much. Point being t

Another report: As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up. So net effect: not much. Point being that for centuries, we have been automating things that were done by humans at some point in time. Not much different even today. Take one example of cellphones. It probably eliminated many "jobs" for people working in landline industries in the last decade or so BUT it probably added a lot more jobs in the telecom industry in general. EDIT: based on some replies, I am not dismissing the fact completely that automation can have impacts on jobs. They definitely do but the point is that the number of jobs themselves do not dimish. It is the "type" of job that is changed which could surely be a problem for the displaced workers because they might not have the new skillset/experience ready to be employed.

acgourley 13y ago
Are you actually citing another report or are you simply hoping this is true on the basis it's been true so far.
arrrg 13y ago
That is (very likely) true in the long run, but it would be foolish to overlook the short-term effects that can be devastating for many individuals. The weavers faced real problems, had a real existential crisis and struggled with real poverty and hunger for many decades. Yes, the industrial revolution brought a tremendous increase in wealth and living standards to everyone, but only eventually to everyone. It is tremendously important to take care of the people who are cast by the wayside by those changes.
- mc32 13y ago
  I agree with this. Not sure how viable, but it'd be nice to see some kind of federal program which allowed for a 5-year transition program for people where their industries collapse precipitously (by some definition) and are guaranteed 100% their wages but must study/prepare for a new career. Not sure how to avoid the occasional dilly-dallier who thought they'd make a good chef, but maybe we'd just have to put up with that fact.
  - luckyno13 13y ago
    To address the dilly dally issue you would more than likely have to only give the transitional aid to someone involved in Science, Engineering, and Math fields, much like current STEM¹ scholarships. ¹https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5257 https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5257
- nickff 13y ago
  These short term effects are exactly what the Luddites were against.[1] They may have gotten a bad reputation, but they had real problems. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
- 3pt14159 13y ago
  How is it true in the long run when we have robots that can walk talk and think as well as our bottom 40% but take one tenth the cost in food / shelter?
  - arrrg 13y ago
    To be honest, I’m probably not as sure about the long term effects as I might have sounded. Looking into the past I see almost universally massively positive long-term effects. A few centuries ago almost everyone worked in farming, now almost nobody does, all those jobs have been automated away – but it didn’t matter in the long run because more people could work first in industry, then in services. Maybe future transformations will work out similarly. However, even if they don’t many solutions for the short-term problems can easily be made to work as solutions for possible long-term problems.
bluedino 13y ago
Automation eliminates jobs - that's the whole point. One robot replaces 20 workers and you only need 1 person per every 20 robots to manage them. Sure, you've got jobs in robot building and such but when a robot shop with 20 employees turns out 200 robots in one year and displaces 4000 workers...
- ars 13y ago
  You need to go to the next level. People automate things not to eliminate jobs (that's not the whole point), but to save money. So now the product is cheaper. So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend - which opens whole new fields of products and services for them, which will (at first) be run by humans and have jobs. It's a cycle that repeated many many times in history. It's just happening faster now. So if you want to always be employable (and you are not particularly skilled) be flexible - don't get stuck in a single field, but be willing to constantly learn new ones. (This is hard for some people, but some extra funding for adult vocational school should help.)
  - wlesieutre 13y ago
    The customers as a whole don't have more money, because half of them just got automated out of their jobs. Maybe enough new jobs come around that it isn't a long term problem this time, but there will come a time when essentially every job could be done by a computer. What then?
    - VLM 13y ago
      Artisan economy? But it can't be monetarily based because only the few remaining capital owners and their very few labor jobs will have all the money. My artisan economy I mean handmade paintings, handmade food, plays with actors instead of CGI movies, musicians, bars...
      - ahomescu1 13y ago
        The artisans can create their own currency (even a digital one, call it ArtisanCoin) and only use it among themselves.
msluyter 13y ago
This has been discussed on HN many many times, and I could probably just dredge up old posts and cut and paste them, but rather that re-iterate those, let me focus on the following: how would one falsify your thesis? What would it take before we could confidently agree that automation was not creating an equivalent number of jobs as it was creating?
byoung2 13y ago
the point is that the number of jobs themselves do not dimish I agree there. Think of the jobs that have been lost over the years as stores have closed due to competition from the internet. During my lifetime, I've seen independent bookstores merge and disappear, and even the mega-chains go away (e.g. Borders). Music stores - gone (Tower Records, Wherehouse, Sam Goody). Video rental - gone (Blockbuser). Big box electronics - going (Circuit City, Good Guys, Tweeter). Despite all of this, unemployment stayed relatively constant, aside from the spike during the recent economic downturn (and these jobs were not lost as a result of automation).
- evacuationdrill 13y ago
  Those are all retail jobs, so they're in the same industry. We probably have some new stores for products that didn't exist. We also have more warehouse jobs for the online merchants that replaced them. Just thoughts, I don't know the numbers or anything.
yodsanklai 13y ago
"As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up." That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job? It seems to me that either we have to accept that a proportion of the population doesn't work, or we have subsidy manual jobs to compete with developing countries with cheap labor. Either way, the ones benefiting from automation have to pay for the unskilled to survive.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job? More importantly, if we were replacing less-skilled jobs that are being automated with more-skilled, higher-paying jobs at a 1:1 ratio, automation would be driving up production costs rather than controlling them, and there'd be no motivation to do it.
  - vasilipupkin 13y ago
    I think you are confused in the same way that people are confused who think that economic pie is fixed size. The point of automation is it would expand the overall economic pie so that those more skilled higher paying jobs would be necessary to do something that would not happen otherwise - and that something, whatever it is, would be useful and profitable
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > The point of automation is it would expand the overall economic pie so that those more skilled higher paying jobs would be necessary to do something that would not happen otherwise No, the point -- i.e., why firms adopt automation -- is to cut the production costs of the firms adopting automation. The hoped for social benefit -- hoped for largely by people who aren't the ones adopting automation -- is of an expanded overall economy that not only provides aggregate growth but also distributes that growth in a nice manner so that not only does the mean income improve, but the total share of population productively employed stays the same or improves, and everyone does better. There's no real reason to expect that is either likely as the near-term result of automation, or necessary as its long-term result as a result of pure market forces. And it is certainly not the point of automation from the point of view of the firms doing the automation.
elwell 13y ago
I was reading about this yesterday in Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines".
jrs99 13y ago
The number of jobs do diminish. There may one day be a point where all jobs are automated. No human being will need to have a job.
Uchikoma 13y ago
Yes, but there are more low income Amazon warehouse jobs than mid income building cars jobs.

acgourley 13y ago

Are you actually citing another report or are you simply hoping this is true on the basis it's been true so far.

arrrg 13y ago

That is (very likely) true in the long run, but it would be foolish to overlook the short-term effects that can be devastating for many individuals. The weavers faced real problems, had a real existential crisis and struggled with real poverty and hunger for many decades. Yes, the industrial revolution brought a tremendous increase in wealth and living standards to everyone, but only eventually to everyone. It is tremendously important to take care of the people who are cast by the wayside by those changes.

mc32 13y ago
I agree with this. Not sure how viable, but it'd be nice to see some kind of federal program which allowed for a 5-year transition program for people where their industries collapse precipitously (by some definition) and are guaranteed 100% their wages but must study/prepare for a new career. Not sure how to avoid the occasional dilly-dallier who thought they'd make a good chef, but maybe we'd just have to put up with that fact.
- luckyno13 13y ago
  To address the dilly dally issue you would more than likely have to only give the transitional aid to someone involved in Science, Engineering, and Math fields, much like current STEM¹ scholarships. ¹https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5257 https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5257
nickff 13y ago
These short term effects are exactly what the Luddites were against.[1] They may have gotten a bad reputation, but they had real problems. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
3pt14159 13y ago
How is it true in the long run when we have robots that can walk talk and think as well as our bottom 40% but take one tenth the cost in food / shelter?
- arrrg 13y ago
  To be honest, I’m probably not as sure about the long term effects as I might have sounded. Looking into the past I see almost universally massively positive long-term effects. A few centuries ago almost everyone worked in farming, now almost nobody does, all those jobs have been automated away – but it didn’t matter in the long run because more people could work first in industry, then in services. Maybe future transformations will work out similarly. However, even if they don’t many solutions for the short-term problems can easily be made to work as solutions for possible long-term problems.

bluedino 13y ago

Automation eliminates jobs - that's the whole point. One robot replaces 20 workers and you only need 1 person per every 20 robots to manage them. Sure, you've got jobs in robot building and such but when a robot shop with 20 employees turns out 200 robots in one year and displaces 4000 workers...

ars 13y ago
You need to go to the next level. People automate things not to eliminate jobs (that's not the whole point), but to save money. So now the product is cheaper. So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend - which opens whole new fields of products and services for them, which will (at first) be run by humans and have jobs. It's a cycle that repeated many many times in history. It's just happening faster now. So if you want to always be employable (and you are not particularly skilled) be flexible - don't get stuck in a single field, but be willing to constantly learn new ones. (This is hard for some people, but some extra funding for adult vocational school should help.)
- wlesieutre 13y ago
  The customers as a whole don't have more money, because half of them just got automated out of their jobs. Maybe enough new jobs come around that it isn't a long term problem this time, but there will come a time when essentially every job could be done by a computer. What then?
  - VLM 13y ago
    Artisan economy? But it can't be monetarily based because only the few remaining capital owners and their very few labor jobs will have all the money. My artisan economy I mean handmade paintings, handmade food, plays with actors instead of CGI movies, musicians, bars...
    - ahomescu1 13y ago
      The artisans can create their own currency (even a digital one, call it ArtisanCoin) and only use it among themselves.

msluyter 13y ago

This has been discussed on HN many many times, and I could probably just dredge up old posts and cut and paste them, but rather that re-iterate those, let me focus on the following: how would one falsify your thesis? What would it take before we could confidently agree that automation was not creating an equivalent number of jobs as it was creating?

byoung2 13y ago

the point is that the number of jobs themselves do not dimish I agree there. Think of the jobs that have been lost over the years as stores have closed due to competition from the internet. During my lifetime, I've seen independent bookstores merge and disappear, and even the mega-chains go away (e.g. Borders). Music stores - gone (Tower Records, Wherehouse, Sam Goody). Video rental - gone (Blockbuser). Big box electronics - going (Circuit City, Good Guys, Tweeter). Despite all of this, unemployment stayed relatively constant, aside from the spike during the recent economic downturn (and these jobs were not lost as a result of automation).

evacuationdrill 13y ago
Those are all retail jobs, so they're in the same industry. We probably have some new stores for products that didn't exist. We also have more warehouse jobs for the online merchants that replaced them. Just thoughts, I don't know the numbers or anything.

yodsanklai 13y ago

"As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up." That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job? It seems to me that either we have to accept that a proportion of the population doesn't work, or we have subsidy manual jobs to compete with developing countries with cheap labor. Either way, the ones benefiting from automation have to pay for the unskilled to survive.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job? More importantly, if we were replacing less-skilled jobs that are being automated with more-skilled, higher-paying jobs at a 1:1 ratio, automation would be driving up production costs rather than controlling them, and there'd be no motivation to do it.
- vasilipupkin 13y ago
  I think you are confused in the same way that people are confused who think that economic pie is fixed size. The point of automation is it would expand the overall economic pie so that those more skilled higher paying jobs would be necessary to do something that would not happen otherwise - and that something, whatever it is, would be useful and profitable
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > The point of automation is it would expand the overall economic pie so that those more skilled higher paying jobs would be necessary to do something that would not happen otherwise No, the point -- i.e., why firms adopt automation -- is to cut the production costs of the firms adopting automation. The hoped for social benefit -- hoped for largely by people who aren't the ones adopting automation -- is of an expanded overall economy that not only provides aggregate growth but also distributes that growth in a nice manner so that not only does the mean income improve, but the total share of population productively employed stays the same or improves, and everyone does better. There's no real reason to expect that is either likely as the near-term result of automation, or necessary as its long-term result as a result of pure market forces. And it is certainly not the point of automation from the point of view of the firms doing the automation.

elwell 13y ago

I was reading about this yesterday in Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines".

jrs99 13y ago

The number of jobs do diminish. There may one day be a point where all jobs are automated. No human being will need to have a job.

Uchikoma 13y ago

Yes, but there are more low income Amazon warehouse jobs than mid income building cars jobs.