I am wholly confident that you could construct a theoretical model of transportation choices whereby 26,000 robot cars could replace 203,000 human-driven ones.
I do not for an instant believe that that model would reflect what would actually happen in real life.
Think of all the jobs lost because people don’t rise horses so much anymore.
Of course jobs will gradually be lost. So it has always been. A superior mode of transportation, however, would also reduce the COST of transportation, which frees up resources for use in other areas. Nobody ever looks at that side of it; it’s great that people have jobs making car parts, but the other side of that is that my family has to spend a significant percentage of our take home pay on owning and operating cars, because that’s our only viable option to get around. If we had no need for one or both cars, then it is true people who make parts for the cars we would otherwise have owned will be out of jobs. But the money we spent on cars will now instead be spend, say, on improving our home (jobs for contractors, architects, manufacturers of various things) or furniture (jobs for furniture makers) or vacations (jobs for airline pilots) or savings (less burden on social services when we’re old, taxpayers save money) or whatever. Someone else will have more demand for their job.
Complaining about a better way of doing thing costing jobs is, as the old saying goes, like claiming you can improve the economy by running around town throwing rocks through windows so there’s more work for glaziers.
Of course, that is little comfort to Bill, who actually will lose his job at the wheel rim plant and is not easily moved into a different job. But that’s why a civilized country invests money in social safety nets.
I don’t see the issue so much as WHETHER mass unemployment will happen, but WHEN, and how well will people adapt. To the last point, I think people will adapt very poorly, especially in America.
I think those who insist that new jobs will come along to replace those lost, “just like for all of history ever!” are failing to appreciate that that trend could change. I don’t dispute that history has shown such a pattern. I am in the “this time will be different” camp. It isn’t just about one technology replacing another, and the economy adapting. It is about the increasing rate of change. I think the Singularity theory is a bit overboard, but that basic trend is true. Things are getting more and more advanced, faster and faster. Tech doesn’t have to reach crazy sci-fi levels, but [del]if[/del] when it gets going fast enough, more than just the buggy whip makers are going to be left without an answer, and in relatively short time compared to the prior paradigm shifts.
Our population is just too slow, divided, and intransigent to keep up without some major turbulence. Combine the unemployment problem with the wealth inequality, political polarization, and American dogma regarding welfare “takers”, and I see shit seriously hitting the fan. I don’t see a trend of our society getting ahead of major issues like Minimum Income. More often I see it reacting inadequately and too late (ie Healthcare Reform, Climate Change, Banking Reform, etc).
That much all seems clear to me. The only unclear part is WHEN. 5 years is way too short. Maybe 5-10 years to see the writing on the wall. 20-30 years until the real pain hits and people start talking about doing something about it.
Sure, but if you make transportation cheaper then people can go out to eat more often, leading to a rise in restaurants. Delivery services will be cheaper so products that were once too expensive to ship now become commonplace.
Everybody can easily see the jobs that are lost. Few can see the new jobs that are created but they always are.
You only really have to look at the reasoning behind the TARPS program, and that had nothing to do with automation. Some people say that we came that close, that the economic map had here be dragons at the edges. We don’t have secondary and teritiary economies, the tax system is too efficient. Automation might collapse the economy later, but we do have other problems now, that could topple the local economy.
Depends on the govt’s response, as your mainly talking about a self inflicted economic holocaust, and how fast something rises from the ashes of the old economy. TPP and other agreements go right out the window, and tarriffs go up, with the expected rise of prices for what is coming in. Housing, insurance and Credit , gone. For what its worth,I would expect mortgages and car loans to be frozen or written off by govt decree. Unsecured loans, gone, they cant get blood from a stone.
What would happen with property taxes, drivers license renewal, plate renewal and all the money that local and state govts take now, is up for guesses. I’d have to look up the great depression to see how they coped that way.
Aww, it’s been a while since I’ve inspired a wall o’ text, I appreciate it Stranger.
I hope you’re right, I really do. Maybe robotization (sp) and automation are canards sold to gullible capitalists, the idea that you can wipe out 8,000 jobs with 1,000 machines… and them not taking into account the fact that people have to attend the machines, that customers still want to deal with people, that the increased efficiency in one department causes bottlenecks in other departments… bottlenecks that can only be relieved by hiring more people. That model has worked before and worked well, and there’s no reason it can’t continue.
And what they found is that 45% of current US job tasks could be fully automated with current technologies and another 13% of tasks could be automated if the computers could just understand English. When 58% of what you’re paying a staff to do can be done for a fraction of the cost, you’re going to start looking at how to rearrange job functions among the most-skilled staff while automating away from these assholes.
And this revolution is not about bringing new products to the people (which is what autos were) thereby replacing old jobs with new jobs building the new thing, this revolution is about how to make what we currently do more efficient, without the pesky effort of having to actually create new products.
As far as STEM is concerned, again I hope you’re right and maybe it’s the idiot in me who doesn’t understand the science well enough to figure out why this can’t be automated… but the businessman inside of me is asking “Why am I paying that guy $50k+/year to swish stuff in a beaker?” (at :53)
And if the technology is getting better, and the number of job functions to get automated continue to increase, I’m not too sure why STEM jobs get such a pass… and the above-linked McKinsey/VisualCapitalist report has plenty of STEM jobs on it.
So, again, the issue facing my 14yo daughter is not one of what is going to happen by 2030 because, shit, she’ll just be a few years out of college by then, but what is going to happen in 2040 and 2050? And while her Iowa Test Scores over the years have shown that she has enough academic and intellectual heft to do well in life, the question still remained - what can she learn now that will be very difficult to program for in the future*?
And the answer is leadership. The ability to read people, capture subtle emotional cues, speak and listen, persuade and motivate. And we work on this, and she’s good at it. She speaks out in class and isn’t intimidated by the boys, leads a number of groups, and (until she became a teenager) was very self-motivated.
It will be difficult to automate a job away where the job task is to get people to agree, to work together… but it can be done if all those tasks are automated, leaving Sophia with nobody to lead. But if society comes to that point, well, I have no ideas as to what to do.
Lastly, I disagree about the notion that the job of the “professional blogger” came out of nowhere. There were plenty of journalism-degree earning kids in the 1990s who had no choice but to do something internet-wise as the newspapers weren’t hiring anymore - Bill Simmons was one of them and he talks about this frequently - but these weren’t new jobs so much as they were transplanted jobs. And it’s not as if blogging “salaries” have even come close to replacing lost newspaper salaries.
Agree to disagree and all that. But, again, I hope I’m wrong and you’re right, but I had to make sure my daughter had an edge and saying “well, we’ll always need computer programmers” just wasn’t doing it for me as an answer to this question 10 years ago.
*I feel, eventually, the answer will be “nothing” or “very little”. But there’s nothing I can do about that nor can I prepare Sophia for such a world. C’est la vie!
Again, I hope you’re right and I’m wrong and that there will be plenty of jobs for the middlin’ classes, people who want to work doing tasks and not solving problems and who don’t concern themselves with their job when they are off work.
Did you see the clip that Musk released of the Tesla production line?
Stamped sheet metal pieces being manipulated in the correct positions relative to each other and then welded together?
With exactly ZERO humans involved.
Who decided how to make the car - take a model, figure out how to put which pieces together to produce the shell - there are 1000’s of ways to divvy up the thing into small parts.
Once you have figured out the pieces, in which order do you assemble them?
Finally, which robots are you going to use? Maybe Brand A is a great, general-purpose robot, but Brand B is MUCH better at these jobs - do you mix the make/models of robots (increasing training, replacement part requirements, etc.) or do you eat the inefficiency and use all Brand A?
Those decisions are the current jobs of ultra-specialized humans.
Where we are now heading, even those decisions will be done by AI.
May the gods save us from the cult of “leadership” and all of the silliness that accompanies it which serves only to benefit Scott Adams and the management self-help industry. Look, being able to make decisions, coordinate work, motivate people to work cooperatively, et cetera are all useful skills, and encouraging your daughter to develop the kind of interpersonal skills that will allow her to succeed both socially and professionally is a laudable effort. But the notion that “leadership” is, by itself, some kind of irreplaceably valuable skill makes about as much sense as baking a loaf of bread out of sand and spit. In order to be an effective leader, you actually need to be good enough at doing what the people you are leading do to understand the challenges they face and how to support and motivate them to overcome those challenges. You don’t need to be the best in whatever field you oversee, but you need to know enough to recognize the difference between good and mediocre work, and more importantly, be able to distinguish a legitimate excuse or complaint from someone just trying to cover up their miserable failure or take credit for other’s work. The absolute worst thing to see in a manager or executive is someone who comes in with a shiny c.v. of “leadership” activities and a gleaming smile, doing out random praise and blithering out pithy sayings repeated from the most recent management technique training or book, and then actually doing fuck all to assist or motivate anyone, and yet, there is an entire industry devoted to cranking out the kind of expert management conslutants that msmith537 derides, and a culture of worship for these largely valueless “leaders”.
As I stated previously, I’ve seen the claims that novel technology using “expert systems” is going to replace actual scientists and engineers for the last twenty-odd years, often by overpriced hired guns coming in and trying to sell their systems and software. I’ve been at two companies that attempted to use such technology to manage “teams” of engineers and programmers around the globe (e.g. in Malaysia, India, the Philippines, et cetera) to reduce their costs. I have yet to see such systems work well, or indeed, even competently, much less actually recoup the often breathtaking costs of implementing them. In one case, a global production management system which was custom-built for the company was in development for five years and deployed over the span of another three years until it was finally recognized for being a total failure and abandoned in toto, in large measure because the people architecting and developing the system had almost no real understanding of the needs of the people who had to directly use the system or even a basic notion of the industry it was being used in. We are certainly nowhere near the point of a marketing hack being able to describe a product in general terms and have a automagical factory design, built, test, and manufacture a useable end product. I know that there are people who believe that we could develop this with existing technology, but then, that is because they don’t understand anything about technology.
Your link to the video of technicians or scientists processing material (presumably for analysis) makes a point, but not the one that you think it does. While this work is boring and repetitive, seemingly amenable to automation, it actually requires a good deal of skill and decision-making ability to perform correctly and avoid errors, cross contamination of samples, assuring cleanliness of the equipment, et cetera. It is not the monkey-turning-a-crank type of work that you seem to believe it is. Any individual task could likely be automated and performed more quickly and precisely by a robot or purpose-designed equipment, but performing the entire array of tasks that technicians do in varying sequences and quantity makes automation challenging and expensive, hence why we pay highly trained technicians and junior scientists to do the seemingly trivial work of squirting samples into test tubes, a fact you would understand if you’d ever had to work in a lab. In fact, if and when we automate this kind of work it will be a boon because it can free up scientists to do more intellectually challenging work, and will prevent often overworked technicians from making errors due to inattention or lack of oversight, and likely speed up the process and multiply the productivity of tedious lab work by being able to perform tasks round the clock.
Note that I’m not opposed to automation, and in fact, I’ve argued here and elsewhere that the foreseeable future of space exploration and exploitation should be largely done with automated systems rather than human astronauts because of the cost and difficulty of mitigating the hazards of the space environment, and the capability that advances in robotics and machine intelligence will offer in the near future is equivalent or even superior to what an astronaut could do when encumbered in a pressure suit and other protective and life support equipment. The same is true for many other hazardous, repetitive, or difficult to physically perform tasks. Recent advances in heuristic methods will likely give rises to changes in transportation that will significantly reduce or eliminate the role of drivers and pilots, although not quite as fast as the most enthusiastic advocates claim, and machines capable of learning by trial and error will open up new areas of tasks which machines can do without having to be explicitly programmed. But human beings are so uniquely good at interpreting multi-valued information and filling in missing data with intuition, and while interpreting human behavior is one of those skills it is far from the only one; in performing novel scientific and technical work, that same core intuitive ability plays a critical role in being able to connect ideas or phenomena together, formulate useful questions or experiments, construct a novel solution, and communicate findings or questions to other people, either in person or by useful documentation.
Your belief that work in STEM fields (which encompass a vast array of different types of jobs, tasks, and skills) is just repetitive and easily synthesized tasks belies a complete lack of understanding of what goes on in these fields and how innovations are realized. Automation of the actually simplistic tasks will be welcomed, just as CAD, spreadsheets, and data viz tools replacing hand drawings, calculations, and plots were welcomed by the vast majority of engineers, because it frees them up to spend more time doing novel technical work rather than grinding through calculations or stooped over a drafting table, but it doesn’t mean that engineers and scientists in general will no longer be needed, just the subset of people whose primary focus and training is in doing those repetitive tasks. If there is a danger in the future of employment in STEM fields, it isn’t that trained scientists and engineers will be replace en masse by robots and machine intelligence; it is that technology will allow companies to use skilled labor in countries where education is cheaper and competition such jobs is more fierce. However, the recent experience with trying to offshore technical jobs requiring coordination and decision-making is a cautionary tale with respect to even that kind of job displacement; just having skills doesn’t overcome difficulties in communication and cultural differences.
Your daughter will be well prepared for a career in pretty much any field in having good social skills and critical decision making ability, but she will also need to have actual knowledge to perform in that field or even to oversee and coordinate other people in that field, be it law, medicine, engineering, marketing, or whathaveyou. Just having some kind of theoretical decision making template without actual knowledge, or an ability to lead without any notion of where to go or how to get there, is what creates layers of management that do nothing to advance or improve a product, service, or industry. And we don’t even need automation to get rid of those kinds of jobs; we just need to recognize that they add cost to no benefit, or else just accept that we employ people in “a bunch of bullshit jobs for people to feel like they’re doing something productive.” I don’t know about you but I’d rather encourage a child to be proficient at doing something rather than just being some kind of hypothetical “leader”.
This reminds me of the failure of Target Canada, a billions-of-dollars boondoggle that failed in large part because the automated systems meant to control the company’s inventory and distribution failed catastrophically… because they didn’t get enough input from the people who knew what the hell the systems had to do.
Every error Target made - and God knows they made a lot of them - was a failure to use the insight of human beings. Aside from the colossal systemic failures, one of the huge mistakes the company made was in replicating its America grocery store model in Canadian stores; the Canadian grocery market, however, is ferociously competitive and its customers spoiled as a result, so Target’s small areas of packaged foods were treated with disdain, drew no customers, and product simply didn’t move. That’s not something a robot would have fixed.
Could robot arms insert blanks into a machine and then remove them when they’re done? That’s already happening.
Could a robot actually operate a CNC machine? That would be a lot harder. In addition to being able to quickly move around the area on its own, the robot would have to be able to think and to have “gut feelings” to solve problems. For instance: “There’s chatter on the internal diameter of this part. Is it because the tool insert is broken/worn, or because the specified insert is not in the tool, or because another type of insert would do a better job? Or should I adjust the speeds and feeds? Or is the wrong material in the machine? Or is the coolant flow to the tool not adequate? Or should I change the program and have the tool behave differently? Or do I just have to change the offset of the tool?”
Then, whatever the answer, could a robot fix the problem? It would have to be able to loosen a screw, figure out if the insert needed to be changed or just turned around in the holder so a new tip was doing the cutting. It would have to put the insert back in correctly and screw it into the holder again. It would have to be able to find the proper insert in the shop (and ask any machinist how problematic that can be!). It would have to be able to see and measure the part to make sure things are right. It would have to remember how that part ran in previous instances. That’s a lot of back-knowledge for a human, never mind a computer.
Possibly robots could replace inserts and do basic measuring of the part, although that would require more than just a simple ability to grasp and let go of things. The decision making process would be extremely hard to program, I think, at least at this point.
I think it could come to the point where robotic assistants could help the machinist do some tasks, but only with the supervision of the machinist. So I’m not sure that trying to robot-ize the job would make a lot of sense.
To be fair, there are advanced CNC machines that are capable of diagnosing many of the normal problems that occur in machining, can track wear and swapout tools, and otherwise deal with many problems, permitting a group of machines running a predefined program to all be overseen by a single operator. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we need fewer machinists; it means, for a given volume of work, a larger number of parts can be produced, and production can run around the clock without dealing with skilled labor shortages or overtime pay. Of course, even the most sophisticated machines can go wrong, and require periodic and unscheduled maintenance, and this usually isn’t frequent enough to justify the cost of designing automation to perform maintenance or sophisticated troubleshooting, so a human operator/supervisor is still required.
However, although codes for developing CNC machining programs have gotten far more functional over the past couple of decades, they’re still far from being able to take a random CAD part and turn out a working CNC G-code sequence. Inevitably, they still remove material from an area inaccessible to the tool, or perform an operation that will make it harder to access another feature, or otherwise require fine-tuning before its ready to start production. In fact, automated CNC code generation is one of those examples of how automation and expert systems can aid but not replace a human operator; the code will check toolhead access and recommend the optimal sequence for the fastest operations, but lacks the ability to make judgments outside of its algoritms for sequencing operations.
Similarly, additive manufacturing would seem to provide near-magical part creation with minimal human interference, but anyone who has actually had to produce high precision parts with specified mechanical properties using a 3D metallic printer knows of the difficulties and sensitivity to contamination and orientation that the creation of such parts has. There are often features of the design that are necessary to modify or add in order to factilitate machining and printing in order to make the part practical to manufacture, and this often requires some combination of experience and trial & error to work out.
