I haven’t seen any discussions in the news about what happens when automation deletes too many jobs.
I’ve seen first hand many jobs disappear. The grocery stores eliminated some checkers and baggers with scan it yourself. Garbage trucks used to have a 3 man crew each. One driver and 2 guys emptying the cans into the truck. One guy driving the truck today empties the cans with a special device. The list of lost jobs goes on and on. Especially in the factories.
Even in my own tech field as a Analyst/programmer my shop went from custom written applications to canned software that was purchased. We found ourselves supporting the software and occasionally installing patches. Our shop today is half the size it was when custom code was written. I have no idea how my former coworkers are supporting themselves today. Hopefully they found a job somewhere as computer support techs. It’s doubtful they are programming anymore.
I see a steadily diminishing pool of jobs for a growing workforce. The people without jobs still require some form of income. It falls on the government and taxpayers to supply that income. First as unemployment and then quite possibly on public assistance. Essentially the employers are shifting the costs of employment directly to the taxpayers. They are saving money. But it costs a heck of a lot more for the government to provide the assistance.
Not to mention the social problems created by public assistance. It’s well known that a person with a job does better. There’s a certain degree of pride and self worth in going out each day and supporting a family. We’ve seen situations where families on welfare get stuck in a vicious cycle generation after generation. Escaping welfare gets harder and harder. It leads to a lack of personal responsibility, there’s no incentive to take care of property they don’t and will never own. Kids don’t do as well in school because they don’t have any hope for the future. Why study when there’s no job waiting when they graduate? Crime rises.
What can be done? Is there any kind of plan? Without a doubt automation will continue to take jobs. How are we going to employ people and allow them to support themselves with dignity and hard work? One of governments most basic responsibilities is to ensure an economy that employs people and allows them to suport themselves.
Should we even consider reserving some jobs? That, yes they could be automated. But it’s more important for society to employ people rather than cast them aside?
This is easily disprovable. This chart shows that we have more people employed than ever before, at ~140m. Unemployment is currently 5.5% which is pretty good.
The counter to your argument is this: automation has been making some jobs obsolete for centuries and we have the best overall employment we’ve ever had, both in the US and globally. When automation removes a job that means the overall economy has just gotten a little more efficient which is a good thing. This efficiency allows humans to concentrate on other jobs and do more with their time.
btw, the focus of this discussion is the near future. Say 10 to 20 years from now. Will a 25 year old today have a job available when he/she is 45 or 50? How many jobs will automation take by the 2035 or 2040?
I’m awed by the how clever some employers can be in eliminating jobs. My local hospital had cashiers in booths at the exits of the parking decks. Collecting money. A basic job that brought home a paycheck. Not a lot, but it was a job that people depended on. Those jobs are gone. Now the clinics at the hospital zap the car to indicate free parking Or you put the card in a machine in the lobby and pay the fee. No more human interaction. No jobs. I suspect a lot of those people and their families went straight to public assistance. The hospital saves money and the taxpayer picks up the tab.
This is the lynchpin of your argument, so prove it. Don’t tell you “you suspect” it happened. Prove it.
And then prove it for the thousands of women who were once switchboard operators. The bank tellers displaced by ATMs. The gas stations attendants displaced by self serve stations.
And then tell us what your solution is to this non-problem. Are you going to outlaw technology?
And also tell us how this thread is different form the one Deeg linked to. That was just a few months ago.
We’ve actually had this same discussion on this board myriad times before…I want to say there was a thread on a similar subject last month in GD if you want to go searching for it. At any rate:
No, it would be a bad idea. It’s been tried before, you know. This is the same subject that the Luddites brought up when the saw the exact same thing happening in their time with jobs ‘disappearing’ because of mass production and early mechanical automation. You don’t need as many guys to felt clothe, for instance, if you use a water or steam powered process instead of a bunch of guys pounding away manually.
It’s a good question and one I doubt anyone has the answer to because no one has a crystal ball or can read the future. My answer to this is to look at the past. What did we do when we went from 95% of the population working on farms or in the agricultural sector to today, when it’s less than 5%. Did 90% of the work force go unemployed? What did we do when whole sectors became obsolete in the past? We don’t have telephone operators or Morse code telegraph operators today…what happened to them? Should we have protected those jobs? In hindsight, would it have made sense to still have telephone operators as a protected job, since that entire sector collapsed and is no longer relevant? I mean, for the folks who were operators it really sucked after all, and no doubt they would have liked to have had their jobs protected. How about the guys who fed the cards into the old main frame computers or changed out the tapes? Should those jobs be or have been protected?
It boils down to the same thing in the end. Jobs that have become obsolete have become obsolete and it would be pointless and expensive to protect them. What will we do as automation continues to shed jobs in the manufacturing sectors even while productivity continues to go up and costs go down? Broadly we’ll move on…the unused labor will be used for something, because labor is still going to be necessary, even if ‘labor’ means something different to each generation and what is or isn’t a job changes. As to the specifics, no one knows because no one can really predict the future.
That’s part of the problem. No one really knows what happens to people after their job disappears. I’d like to hope that maybe a few of those parking deck cashiers got reassigned to other jobs. I doubt anybody has paid any attention to what happened to the rest.
It does need to be studied. It would be an excellent grant proposal for some of the Universities to take on. We do need to track what happens to these people. How many get new skill sets and jobs. How many take a job for much less money and move downward in society. How many remain unemployed. A comprehensive study over a long period of time is needed.
One big problem is not everybody excels at school. There are a substantial number of people that are very talented working with their hands. Mechanics, mechanics, and so on. Some of my closest high school friends too blue collar jobs. They are very talented at what they do. Many of them would be completely lost if forced to attend college. Every person has their own unique set of talents. Many excel at school and other flounder.
I don’t endorse the views in the more pessimistic of those articles. But this topic actually is regularly discussed in the news. Lots of people share the irrational fear of automation as a (net) job-killer, and so it is often discussed in the media.
It is also discussed all the time on these boards.
The vast majority of jobs in the history of our species have been destroyed. At the same time, we have more jobs today than we have ever had before.
New jobs were created.
You seem to be noticing only one side of the data, and not the other side.
No, you don’t.
You imagine it. You don’t see it. It exists in your head, not in reality. There are more jobs than there have ever been.
People have been afraid of the loss of jobs to automation for centuries. Literally centuries.
They have been wrong about the net effect for centuries.
If you want to claim “This time is different!”, when in the past this time has literally never been different, then you need to offer a stronger argument for it.
This is a terrible idea.
I have never seen a good argument that automation will result in a net loss of jobs anytime soon. But even supposing it actually happens, then it will be a good thing. If robots are better are creating stuff than we are, then we will have more stuff. We can live in a robo-commie paradise. You don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, you just take the extra eggs, of which there will be an embarrassing surplus, and pass them around to everybody.
If you feel that you would lack dignity from having no work, while receiving the splendiferous bounty of a fully automized economy, then there’s nothing stopping you from filling that emotional gap with ego-boosting volunteer time at a nursing home. But to advocate making the rest of us poorer because someone out there might be dissatisfied with having nothing to do, well, that’s just sadistic.
I understand machinery and tech has replaced jobs for centuries. A single tractor on a farm eliminated multiple field hands. People adapted. Moved to the cities and found other work. It often was easier and less physically demanding work. Life improved, and the middle class grew. Suddenly the 40 hour week with vacations and personal leisure time became possible.
It seems robotic technology is going to take far, far more jobs. Practically every field imaginable will be impacted. The option of retraining and working in another field will get harder and harder.
The wealth of society is determined by the productivity of its workers. The more each worker is able to produce, the wealthier the society.
For example, at one time there were no tractors. Seeds were planted and harvested without them, and most people worked on farms. Today its less than one percent. Giant combines, controlled by one person, do the work instead.
When one person is able to do the work of dozens, it results in enormous increases in wealth.
There are at least three ways all that additional wealth can be divided.
One is that the people who aren’t needed on the farm can find other work.
Another is the wealth can be divided among everyone, so that fewer people have to work, and/or those that have to work, can work fewer hours. For example, in Alaska, every resident gets a check, no strings attached, every year.
The third is that the wealth can go, in the form of profits and other unearned income, to owners - the owners of land, companies, patents, factories, stocks and interest bearing loans. Jobs become scarce, and because they’re scarce, wages go down.
It’s the third possibility, I think, you’re worried about. It’s the one that leads to mass unemployment. It also leads to social and economic disaster.
You’re just repeating your fears, you’re not making an argument. You’re talking about what “seems” to be the case, but it’s not based on anything. You are imagining that something will change rather than providing the underlying reasons why anything should change, and you are doing this imagining when the present trend, right now, today, even as you write your words, is exactly opposite of what you fear. If it “seems” like the robots are going to take all the jobs, then when will this seeming fear begin asserting itself in the data? Tomorrow? Next month? Next year? Next decade?
To borrow from one of my posts in one of the many previous threads on this topic:
We have two facts here that we have to reconcile.
Fact Number One: The economy is adding jobs. We have better technology, more machines, and more workers than we’ve ever had before. The trend is upward, for both workers and machines, and this long-term trend is centuries old despite business cycle fluctuations.
Fact Number Two: There is a theoretical machine that we can easily imagine that would be superior to a healthy human worker in any job and across every conceivable dimension.
Well, there are some major problems with Fact Number Two, the first and most obvious of which is that just because we can easily imagine something doesn’t mean it’s a probable, or even a plausible outcome. I can imagine a Star Trek teleporter, but that doesn’t mean our future robot overlords are going to invent one. There is only imagination, and nothing else.
So what does it actually mean that it will become harder and harder to find a job? That implies that the job-killing automation replaces the least skilled workers first, looking something like the following diagram with the dreaded robots in red. The most vulnerable workers have literally no work options left because their skills are so limited that they can do literally nothing better than an easily and cheaply installed robot. The green dots represent skills that require levels of human ability that cannot yet be fully automated.
I think this is a fair visualization of people who fear huge net destruction of jobs.
Unfortunately, such a belief shows a regrettable lack of appreciation for how valuable human beings actually are, and how similar our skills sets are. If robots get around to replacing workers, on net, it will look like this. (You’re going to have to scroll to the right. Very very far to the right.)
That X is the entire spectrum of human skills. All of us collectively.
If any single fully functional human can be totally dominated by a robot along every conceivable dimension of economic production – where the worker can’t just hop to a new industry like workers have been doing for literally centuries – then the entire species should be irrelevant for production the very next day. For healthy humans, we’re simply not that different. One robot better than the worst of us means every robot better than the best of us.
Here’s an amazing skill that human workers have. They can be told “Do this!” and they will start doing it without the program crashing and needing to be debugged over the next couple weeks. That is an astoundingly valuable skill, and robots aren’t anywhere close to replacing it. This is such a vast feat of prodigious intelligence that if robots could manage it, they could replace essentially everything else we do as well. Automation as we understand it today is nothing like that. It requires an entire infrastructure of resources and human efforts to keep it going. A person just needs a paycheck and a simple description of the job. Human beings can quickly adapt, but robots can’t be quickly programmed or quickly engineered or quickly implemented.
You fear massive job loss, but all your “cites” such as they are suffer from massive confirmation bias. New jobs are continually created. Industries are replaced. We all used to work agriculture, and now we don’t, but there are more jobs than ever. Why? Humans beings are clever. Human beings are flexible. Human beings can quickly adapt. These are valuable skills. That’s why other people build machines. If human work weren’t so damn valuable, there’d be no incentive to build machines to replace that work. Which is yet another problem with your argument. If workers are so useless given robots, then their wages should be dropping swiftly. But if their wages become so small, what’s the incentive to keep building more and more robots? It just doesn’t make sense. Robots are built because people are valuable, not dispensable.
Basic human intelligence, of the kind all healthy people have, is valuable.
A fully automated economy isn’t a job crisis. It’s a robo-commie paradise. (Or possibly extinction.) That might happen in The Future, but until we get that point, we should expect for automation to continue working in the way it has for the last several centuries.
There may yet be a problem - the technology is not only accelerating, it is growing in complexity.
In industrial robotics, the limit has been the eye - I saw a story about a new, cheap ($30K and you own it) robot with sight capability.
So we are no longer using people to make the machines to replace other people, we are facing a future in which machines build intelligent machines.
This can lead to the parallel mirror phenomenon - the same thing to infinity.
Since modern machines do not need that much maintenance, humans won’t even be given oil cans for the machines.
How about this wrinkle:
We are now developing robot soldiers. Hooray for our side - until the other side gets even bigger robots.At best (least), the idea of war may be more palatable since it’s only machines which get hurt.
At worst, somebody’s robots win and destroy all the otherguy’s robots. Then they go after the people
Kinda the ultimate in Man vs Machine.
Yes option 3 is the concern. Corporations automate factories and cut jobs. They congratulate themselves for saving money and pocket the profits. Meanwhile the former employees are drawing unemployment and trying to retrain and find new work. The cost of supporting them shifts from the ex employers to the taxpayers. At least until they find new jobs.
There was a documentary a few years ago about the decline of the middle class. I can’t recall if it was Frontline or one of the news ,magazine shows. They interviewed people laid off from factory jobs. For the first time (since the great depression) a generation was less successful and affluent as their parents. Downsizing into smaller homes and struggling to make ends meet. Quite a shock for people that had grown up in comfortably middle class childhood homes. They were having to learn how to be poor. How to survive on a limited budget. Going down the economic ladder is tough.
It’s very unsettling to think of the future our kids and grandkids face. My daughters are just finishing college. They’ll find good jobs. I’m not sure what their kids will face in 2050. By then everything will be automated. Even professional jobs will be threatened. Doctors, accountants, lawyers are even those jobs safe?
If you’re using history as an argument as to why jobs aren’t going to reduce in number because of automation, then you’re only using the history since the industrial revolution - a blink in the history of mankind.
If you want to compare automation of farming to automation of construction, manufacturing, retail, transportation and fishing then you’re comparing apples to oranges, bananas and other fruit.
Only ten years ago the automation of trains, trucks and taxis was considered a pipe dream. Now they’re almost inevitable. Automation of jobs is already here, and looks like it won’t slow down anytime soon. The income of workers is reducing, the innovation is still here but it isn’t in high-wage, mass employment industries like is has been for the last century. There may be more jobs available, many jobs might be still be around in 20, 30 or 40 years, but the likelihood that your job won’t is significantly higher today than it has been.
I’m not seeing or predicting the end of work, just that people should look carefully at the industry they work in and possibly look at upgrading their skills or retraining before the inevitable happens and they’re joined in the out-of-work force along with thousands of peers.
I am sure they are thrilled at working at McDonalds, 7-11 and Walmart for minimum wage. Personally, I would be more than seriously cheesed off at going from a manufacturing job at $17 or so to a McJob where they give you budget ideas like never paying more than $20 for health insurance, take mass transportation and get a second job…
Now if they were GIVEN housing, we actually HAD mass transit available EVERYWHERE and we had universal health care like damned near every other first world country, then a McJob would work out. But I am more than certain that they need a car, need to pay rent or a mortgage and pay more than $20 for health insurance…
Imagine two horses at the dawn of the automobile. One of them is worried that they’re all going to lose their jobs. The other responds by pointing out that so far, things have just gotten better and better - they’ve had to work less hard and jobs haven’t been going away, so why should this change that? There’ll always be jobs.
…Sounds silly when it’s horses rather than humans, doesn’t it? And yet, when we have robots poised to replace us in virtually every job except “programming computers”, I’m not sure how the analogy doesn’t fit. Yeah, the total number of employees are still going up, because we still need things done and robot technology is still not there yet. But when it gets there… Well, there’s gonna be problems. There’s simply no guarantee that humans will be employable, and with technology moving forward the way it does, a situation where most humans need not apply may be not far down the road. And we need to be ready for that.
I think the answer, rather than preventing this, is to embrace it, and face the consequences as they come. That is to say, more and more income redistribution, to the point where it doesn’t matter that you can’t find work - the work is being done by robots, and the government just gives you a living wage.
Those jobs have been getting cut for decades, although often because they move overseas, not just due to automation. Yet we’re better off. We lost some 6.5 million (out of 19 million) manufacturing jobs from 1980 to 2014. But gained 49 million non-farm jobs.
BLS has all the numbers if you like browsing data.
So we have more jobs. The economy is better. Our quality of life is higher. 1980 sucked; who wants to go back there? Even if real median household income has been relatively flat, the quality and breadth of goods I can buy with my 2015 $1 today far exceeds what I could buy with that 2015 dollar in 1980.
Yes, as the economy changes, people lose their jobs and I pay for that. But I’d rather pay for that than be stuck in 1980.