10 ms·

Automation Alone Isn’t Killing Jobs

69 points by evolve2k 13y ago

evolve2k 13y ago
We're getting mixed messages as to if automation is slowly killing more jobs than it creates. I think low level knowledge worker 'paper-shuffling' jobs are on the way out but where to from here? What's out role as coders as we disrupt industry by industry?
- svachalek 13y ago
  This article seems to argue that automation isn't killing jobs, it's just killing jobs for a certain type of people, nudge nudge. It then proceeds to go pretty much nowhere with the thought. I can't figure out if this is some political propaganda piece or just thrown together by someone who can't put together a coherent argument.
- waps 13y ago
  You're assuming coder jobs aren't getting disrupted themselves. They are. It just moves the coder demand from "insane" to "extreme" at the moment. I would argue that ever more capable frameworks are destroying opportunities for coders to make money/have jobs as much as they are destroying other's jobs. Paul Graham's great success was such a tool : it enabled idiots to have online stores without help. I used to work in colocation and it was amazing how many servers we rent out that are essentially custom developed online stores for various small service industry companies (e.g. retailers, accountants, call centers, ...). Those have slowly been going away, usually we were getting replaced by larger online organisations that did lots of stores, like pg's application. These days it's mostly wordpress (it's been for a surprising number of years actually), but there was a time when it was other destinations. An entire army of developer jobs has been replaced with a few thousands doing wordpress plugins and selling them. Now, obviously there has not exactly been a shortage of developer jobs, but you do see that you can do ever more without a developer. One day this will reach critical mass.
pmorici 13y ago
"There is also a special problem for some young men, namely those with especially restless temperaments. They aren’t always well-suited to the new class of service jobs, like greeting customers or taking care of the aged, which require much discipline or sometimes even a subordination of will." Did the above line from the article strike anyone else as flagrantly sexist?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- api 13y ago
  It strikes me as flagrantly lot of things. There's been a nice string of NYT articles in which people from planet trust fund try to comprehend disadvantage.
- throwaway54984 13y ago
  No. I couldn't care less about political correctness.
  - whatevsbro 13y ago
    That's a good attitude. Political correctness is insane. But you don't need a new throwaway account for each "bold" statement you make. Speak up, though. The world needs more people waking others up.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  Do you believe the line is incorrect, or does it merely make you dislike the writer?
  - pmorici 13y ago
    I think it is a broad generalization of a group of people based on a stereotype w/o supporting evidence.
- opendais 13y ago
  Yes. It is very sexist imho
increment_i 13y ago
Bit of an awkward narrative. Has that undergrad "crank it out the night before its due" quality to it. Lots of words, none of them really saying anything.
- snambi 13y ago
  I agree. Lots of words, not much meat.
- malandrew 13y ago
  I feel like people upvoted this without reading it first.
orasis 13y ago
Boo! lame article.
MWil 13y ago
Automation has never killed jobs, only dis[re]placed them.
- bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  That is only true if you see jobs as statistics, not as activities carried out by actual human beings.
  - MWil 13y ago
    designing, producing, selling, installing, operating, and maintaining automation are activities carried out by actual human beings
    - ebiester 13y ago
      How many of those jobs can be done by a dull person? Consider someone smart enough not to be classified as disabled, but not smart enough to do more than semi-skilled labor under supervision. They used to have factory jobs. These have been automated. Agriculture is increasingly automated. We are finding ways to build our systems around fewer and fewer people. More capable people are fighting further down the food chain. Do we just throw people who can't adapt on disability? That's what we did for the group below them, after all. (Who themselves, mind you, we're once capable of being functional members of society, even if they needed help and we're often exploited.)
      - MWil 13y ago
        it doesn't automatically follow that "finding ways to build our systems around fewer and fewer people" in a SPECIFIC area = a system for fewer and fewer people. What if the journey to automation elevated job positions to something far greater than if the job had remained off-limits to automation?
        ThomPete 13y ago
        You are grabbing for straws now. The whole point of technology is to increase production output. To do more with less. This might open up new areas but it doesn't follow at all either. And unless you can point to something like the semiconductor revolution it's hard to see what you are referring to.
pcurve 13y ago
This is a throw-everything-and-see-what-sticks... kind of article. Financial crisis, long term unemployment stigma, business cycle, technology, demographics, all crammed into 1 page, and doesn't really answer its own question. A very frustrating read.
MWil 13y ago
Automation has always been an interesting topic to me. I wrote my upper level paper in law school on automation for a labor law class. Unless something has changed recently, the Supreme Court hasn't really addressed whether intentional "job killing" from automation qualifies as anti-union activity. The last time the Court did talk much about it the new cool technology was cold type setting.
wyager 13y ago
Automation doesn't "kill jobs" at all. I'm tired of news articles that try to pass of "jobs" as some sort of discrete, easily quantifiable units. "Over a million jobs are being shipped to china", "12,000 jobs created", etc. That's not how labor works. Or at least, it's a useless and misleading way of thinking about labor. Sometimes automation makes a certain type of labor irrelevant. Those laborers need to find a new job (which possibly involves retooling) or starve (or, today, live off some sort of welfare or charitable income). We are not even close to simply having no labor left that needs doing by humans. That's the only way you can really "kill" jobs; replace all human labor altogether. Otherwise, humans will just move to whatever they're still good at. Because of automation, the world will always be able to support those new jobs. The market will force this to be the case.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Automation doesn't "kill jobs" at all. Perhaps, but it certainly reduces the relative value of labor vs. capital. "Kills jobs" is, as popular simplifications go, not at all bad. It's certainly more accurate than: > Because of automation, the world will always be able to support those new jobs. The market will force this to be the case.
  - andkon 13y ago
    Exactly. Thinking that "the world" will miraculously support anyone is to be willfully ignorant of how power and money actually get distributed. And while "the market" (lol) will create new jobs every time some previous labour marketplace is disrupted, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will provide the same amount of jobs (or, really: demand for the same units of labour). From there, it sorta follows that everyone's wages will drop: same number of people looking for work, but much less need for workers? The workers lose income as a result, meaning that there's both less demand for workers, and the work that is now available isn't going to pay your bills.
    - ThomPete 13y ago
      It has NEVER created the same amount of jobs. It has always looked like that because new markets where liberalized, but technology creates less jobs than it destroys. The upside of this is that it make many things very cheap. But it's not good news for most of us unless something change.
andkon 13y ago
My beef with this piece: automation probably isn't the only thing killing jobs, but it's the only thing that the author provides any evidence of having a causal role in driving job losses. Everything else mentioned (e.g. the financial crisis) is a sort of catalyst for labour market changes or a red herring. I mean, if a dude gets shot and dies, we tend not to argue too much about whether it was the bullet that killed him, or the corresponding massive blood loss.
sirdogealot 13y ago
I don't get the "back in my grandpappy's day the steam engines left and we still survivded" notion that automation is not killing jobs. Most everybody was employable back in the 1820s. Simply because of the fact that there was no automation. Train took your horse carriage job? Go work in the fields. If all department stores adopted automated cashiers, the cashier as a retail option as we know it is dead. Killed. If all farms adopt tractors and automatic harvesting machines, the crop picker option as we know it is dead. Killed. Etc. Etc. There will come a time when we can conceive of a new task to be completed, while simultaneously sketching up the automatic machine to complete the task. In fact, this job-killing-automation already exists in the form of the latest and greatest production lines. They were not built to be filled with workers, only product.
- MWil 13y ago
  "There will come a time when we can conceive of a new task to be completed, while simultaneously sketching up the automatic machine to complete the task." My point throughout this thread has been to say that we are already at the point where if you have a task you should already be thinking of ways to automate it and it's THAT failure that is really killing jobs - not any act of bringing in automation.
- philwelch 13y ago
  You can still work in the fields if you want to. Farmers are finding lots of their crops withering away and dying at harvest time because we're doing too good a job of keeping illegal immigrants out. People just refuse the work.
  - rwallace 13y ago
    I'm curious about that; do you have any references to data on this phenomenon and theories about the cause?
    - philwelch 13y ago
      http://m.siouxcityjournal.com/iowa-farm-labor-shortage-fuels-immigrant-debate/article_db32e2b7-d390-5423-8804-ab2e2a6ec341.html?mobile_touch=true http://m.siouxcityjournal.com/iowa-farm-labor-shortage-fuels... http://www.cnbc.com/id/48725145 http://www.cnbc.com/id/48725145 http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3996502/ http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3996502/ http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324866904578513510141995612?mobile=y http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324866904578513... http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2014/02/15/2830734/farm-labor-shortages-spread-across.html http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2014/02/15/2830734/farm-labor-...
danieltillett 13y ago
The problem of automation is it shifts the allocation of production from labor to capital. Compounding this the owners of capital are not spending their allocation on activities that employs low skilled human labour (e.g. if a billionaire's income goes up 10 times over a decade then he does not employee 10x as many maids). The general trend is to push down the demand for low skilled jobs and hence wages.
jcolemorr11 13y ago
Did anyone actually think that automation was the only thing killing jobs? And then you read it and find that the title has only a small portion to do with the actual content. Coming from an economist (a professor at least), I'd expect a little bit more positive economic analysis and objectivity. This reads more like a sociology commentary.
z3t4 13y ago
I think there is this big confusion about jobs and money. And that the psychological view is overlooked. We want to feel important. And we want freedom to do whatever we want to do. While automation gives more freedom, it makes us feel less important? What we can do with a washing machine, everyone else can do too. But the question is, do they want to? With more automation we will see more and more services. And even more possibilities.
hownottowrite 13y ago
The original conference paper upon which the NYT article is based: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring%202014/2014a_krueger http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring%202014...

69 points by evolve2k 13y ago

We're getting mixed messages as to if automation is slowly killing more jobs than it creates. I think low level knowledge worker 'paper-shuffling' jobs are on the way out but where to from here? What's out role as coders as we disrupt industry by industry?

svachalek 13y ago
This article seems to argue that automation isn't killing jobs, it's just killing jobs for a certain type of people, nudge nudge. It then proceeds to go pretty much nowhere with the thought. I can't figure out if this is some political propaganda piece or just thrown together by someone who can't put together a coherent argument.
waps 13y ago
You're assuming coder jobs aren't getting disrupted themselves. They are. It just moves the coder demand from "insane" to "extreme" at the moment. I would argue that ever more capable frameworks are destroying opportunities for coders to make money/have jobs as much as they are destroying other's jobs. Paul Graham's great success was such a tool : it enabled idiots to have online stores without help. I used to work in colocation and it was amazing how many servers we rent out that are essentially custom developed online stores for various small service industry companies (e.g. retailers, accountants, call centers, ...). Those have slowly been going away, usually we were getting replaced by larger online organisations that did lots of stores, like pg's application. These days it's mostly wordpress (it's been for a surprising number of years actually), but there was a time when it was other destinations. An entire army of developer jobs has been replaced with a few thousands doing wordpress plugins and selling them. Now, obviously there has not exactly been a shortage of developer jobs, but you do see that you can do ever more without a developer. One day this will reach critical mass.

pmorici 13y ago

"There is also a special problem for some young men, namely those with especially restless temperaments. They aren’t always well-suited to the new class of service jobs, like greeting customers or taking care of the aged, which require much discipline or sometimes even a subordination of will." Did the above line from the article strike anyone else as flagrantly sexist?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
api 13y ago
It strikes me as flagrantly lot of things. There's been a nice string of NYT articles in which people from planet trust fund try to comprehend disadvantage.
throwaway54984 13y ago
No. I couldn't care less about political correctness.
- whatevsbro 13y ago
  That's a good attitude. Political correctness is insane. But you don't need a new throwaway account for each "bold" statement you make. Speak up, though. The world needs more people waking others up.
yummyfajitas 13y ago
Do you believe the line is incorrect, or does it merely make you dislike the writer?
- pmorici 13y ago
  I think it is a broad generalization of a group of people based on a stereotype w/o supporting evidence.
opendais 13y ago
Yes. It is very sexist imho

increment_i 13y ago

Bit of an awkward narrative. Has that undergrad "crank it out the night before its due" quality to it. Lots of words, none of them really saying anything.

snambi 13y ago
I agree. Lots of words, not much meat.
malandrew 13y ago
I feel like people upvoted this without reading it first.

orasis 13y ago

Boo! lame article.

MWil 13y ago

Automation has never killed jobs, only dis[re]placed them.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago
That is only true if you see jobs as statistics, not as activities carried out by actual human beings.
- MWil 13y ago
  designing, producing, selling, installing, operating, and maintaining automation are activities carried out by actual human beings
  - ebiester 13y ago
    How many of those jobs can be done by a dull person? Consider someone smart enough not to be classified as disabled, but not smart enough to do more than semi-skilled labor under supervision. They used to have factory jobs. These have been automated. Agriculture is increasingly automated. We are finding ways to build our systems around fewer and fewer people. More capable people are fighting further down the food chain. Do we just throw people who can't adapt on disability? That's what we did for the group below them, after all. (Who themselves, mind you, we're once capable of being functional members of society, even if they needed help and we're often exploited.)
    - MWil 13y ago
      it doesn't automatically follow that "finding ways to build our systems around fewer and fewer people" in a SPECIFIC area = a system for fewer and fewer people. What if the journey to automation elevated job positions to something far greater than if the job had remained off-limits to automation?
      - ThomPete 13y ago
        You are grabbing for straws now. The whole point of technology is to increase production output. To do more with less. This might open up new areas but it doesn't follow at all either. And unless you can point to something like the semiconductor revolution it's hard to see what you are referring to.

pcurve 13y ago

This is a throw-everything-and-see-what-sticks... kind of article. Financial crisis, long term unemployment stigma, business cycle, technology, demographics, all crammed into 1 page, and doesn't really answer its own question. A very frustrating read.

MWil 13y ago

Automation has always been an interesting topic to me. I wrote my upper level paper in law school on automation for a labor law class. Unless something has changed recently, the Supreme Court hasn't really addressed whether intentional "job killing" from automation qualifies as anti-union activity. The last time the Court did talk much about it the new cool technology was cold type setting.

wyager 13y ago

Automation doesn't "kill jobs" at all. I'm tired of news articles that try to pass of "jobs" as some sort of discrete, easily quantifiable units. "Over a million jobs are being shipped to china", "12,000 jobs created", etc. That's not how labor works. Or at least, it's a useless and misleading way of thinking about labor. Sometimes automation makes a certain type of labor irrelevant. Those laborers need to find a new job (which possibly involves retooling) or starve (or, today, live off some sort of welfare or charitable income). We are not even close to simply having no labor left that needs doing by humans. That's the only way you can really "kill" jobs; replace all human labor altogether. Otherwise, humans will just move to whatever they're still good at. Because of automation, the world will always be able to support those new jobs. The market will force this to be the case.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> Automation doesn't "kill jobs" at all. Perhaps, but it certainly reduces the relative value of labor vs. capital. "Kills jobs" is, as popular simplifications go, not at all bad. It's certainly more accurate than: > Because of automation, the world will always be able to support those new jobs. The market will force this to be the case.
- andkon 13y ago
  Exactly. Thinking that "the world" will miraculously support anyone is to be willfully ignorant of how power and money actually get distributed. And while "the market" (lol) will create new jobs every time some previous labour marketplace is disrupted, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will provide the same amount of jobs (or, really: demand for the same units of labour). From there, it sorta follows that everyone's wages will drop: same number of people looking for work, but much less need for workers? The workers lose income as a result, meaning that there's both less demand for workers, and the work that is now available isn't going to pay your bills.
  - ThomPete 13y ago
    It has NEVER created the same amount of jobs. It has always looked like that because new markets where liberalized, but technology creates less jobs than it destroys. The upside of this is that it make many things very cheap. But it's not good news for most of us unless something change.

andkon 13y ago

My beef with this piece: automation probably isn't the only thing killing jobs, but it's the only thing that the author provides any evidence of having a causal role in driving job losses. Everything else mentioned (e.g. the financial crisis) is a sort of catalyst for labour market changes or a red herring. I mean, if a dude gets shot and dies, we tend not to argue too much about whether it was the bullet that killed him, or the corresponding massive blood loss.

sirdogealot 13y ago

I don't get the "back in my grandpappy's day the steam engines left and we still survivded" notion that automation is not killing jobs. Most everybody was employable back in the 1820s. Simply because of the fact that there was no automation. Train took your horse carriage job? Go work in the fields. If all department stores adopted automated cashiers, the cashier as a retail option as we know it is dead. Killed. If all farms adopt tractors and automatic harvesting machines, the crop picker option as we know it is dead. Killed. Etc. Etc. There will come a time when we can conceive of a new task to be completed, while simultaneously sketching up the automatic machine to complete the task. In fact, this job-killing-automation already exists in the form of the latest and greatest production lines. They were not built to be filled with workers, only product.

MWil 13y ago
"There will come a time when we can conceive of a new task to be completed, while simultaneously sketching up the automatic machine to complete the task." My point throughout this thread has been to say that we are already at the point where if you have a task you should already be thinking of ways to automate it and it's THAT failure that is really killing jobs - not any act of bringing in automation.
philwelch 13y ago
You can still work in the fields if you want to. Farmers are finding lots of their crops withering away and dying at harvest time because we're doing too good a job of keeping illegal immigrants out. People just refuse the work.
- rwallace 13y ago
  I'm curious about that; do you have any references to data on this phenomenon and theories about the cause?
  - philwelch 13y ago
    http://m.siouxcityjournal.com/iowa-farm-labor-shortage-fuels-immigrant-debate/article_db32e2b7-d390-5423-8804-ab2e2a6ec341.html?mobile_touch=true http://m.siouxcityjournal.com/iowa-farm-labor-shortage-fuels... http://www.cnbc.com/id/48725145 http://www.cnbc.com/id/48725145 http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3996502/ http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3996502/ http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324866904578513510141995612?mobile=y http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324866904578513... http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2014/02/15/2830734/farm-labor-shortages-spread-across.html http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2014/02/15/2830734/farm-labor-...

danieltillett 13y ago

The problem of automation is it shifts the allocation of production from labor to capital. Compounding this the owners of capital are not spending their allocation on activities that employs low skilled human labour (e.g. if a billionaire's income goes up 10 times over a decade then he does not employee 10x as many maids). The general trend is to push down the demand for low skilled jobs and hence wages.

jcolemorr11 13y ago

Did anyone actually think that automation was the only thing killing jobs? And then you read it and find that the title has only a small portion to do with the actual content. Coming from an economist (a professor at least), I'd expect a little bit more positive economic analysis and objectivity. This reads more like a sociology commentary.

z3t4 13y ago

I think there is this big confusion about jobs and money. And that the psychological view is overlooked. We want to feel important. And we want freedom to do whatever we want to do. While automation gives more freedom, it makes us feel less important? What we can do with a washing machine, everyone else can do too. But the question is, do they want to? With more automation we will see more and more services. And even more possibilities.

hownottowrite 13y ago

The original conference paper upon which the NYT article is based: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring%202014/2014a_krueger http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring%202014...