Once again…the hypothetical that is the stated subject of the thread specified “unskilled”; it’s presumed regardless of plausibility…
I will comment that the last five years brought to Walmart the only new potentially job-taking automation that I’ve seen in a retail store (as I was too young to see ‘take your bags out to your car yourself’): automated checkout lanes. An unprecedented advance, in my experience; however I don’t think that the stockboys have to fear for their jobs just yet.
(Oh, wait, I’m supposedly the ‘doom and gloom’ around here. The robots are coming!! They will eat your babies!! AAaugh!!! )
I could see Roomba’s sweeping up and polishing the floors at night…that’s another $6.25/hour job down the tubes.
But I suspect as Sam imagined the real labor savings through automation at a place like WalMart are the white collar workers.
Oh, I can’t resist one more comment on my 12 hours of labor for a crust of bread theme. If 12 hours of labor are equal to a crust of bread, that means that robot labor is so cheap that just about anything that a human can do that a robot can’t do is worth an incredible amount. If there’s any job, any job at all that a human can do that earns even a dollar, that human would be richer than a middle class person today, because that one dollar earns them the equivalent of 12 hours of labor from a robot. If I wanted to hire someone to clean my house, it would cost $120 for 12 hours of work. But in this future scenario, I can get a robot to do it…for a dollar. That’s damn cheap.
I have to de-lurk and sign up to add some evidence to the debate.
About the hypothetical robot plumber and electrician. I’ve done both jobs, and both require a fraction of the labor they used to.
In my grandfather’s day, plumbing in a drain involved cast iron pipe, packing the joints with oakum and sealing them with molten lead. That’s all been replaced with light PVC pipe and glue. Cast iron required a crew of three men to install the pipe, while a whole house can be plumbed in a day by one skilled plumber. My grandfather had to cut and thread galvanized pipe for supply lines. That was replaced by copper pipe that could be cut and soldered. And in most areas, copper has been replaced by Pex, plastic pipe connected with brass fittings and crimped with copper rings. But even the labor involved in crimping is being eliminated by Shark Bite fittings, where one just pushes the pipe in.
The grunt-level work of plumbing is being made less labor intensive. It took a bit of skill to cut and thread pipe, less to solder, even less to crimp and practically none at all to push in. One skilled plumber can guide a crew drilling holes in studs and putting in Pex pipe, using Shark Bite connectors and PVC drain lines and glue (though I have no doubt we’ll see a Shark Bite type system for drain lines soon).
Electrical connections have evolved in the same way. My grandfather would have twisted wires together and taped them. That was replaced by wire nuts, which you stick two or more stripped wires into and twist. Those are being replaced by connectors into which one just pushes a stripped wire.
But this is assuming that home building is going to remain as it is today - every home essentially custom built. With a home designed in a CAD system, the plumbing and electrical could be easily designed in. Every stud wall can be replaced with Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) pre-wired and pre-plumbed in a factory, delivered to the job site and connected with push-together connectors. Right now, SIPs are generally available only as standard units, but there are little reason to believe that every unit couldn’t easily be customized - the additional cost of doing so is far less than the labor cost of on-site modification.
All of this is current technology. Customized homes with the cost advantages of manufactured housing. And a fraction of the labor currently required to build a home.
If a company is going to build a factory to make custom SIPs, they are going to build it to employ as few people as possible. I can easily see these panels rolling off the line and onto flatbeds or into shipping containers with no human handling. Once they get to the job site, each RFID tagged SIP could be moved into place and connected by a very small crew who snap together the electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems.
From what I understand, the two biggest volume purchasers of consumables are Walmart and the US Army. Both have demanded that all their supplies come with RFID tags - at the pallet level at first, but with the eventual goal of having RFID tags on every individual item. If one doubts this, remember Walmart’s role in the wide acceptance of the UPC system.
Once RFID tags are on every product in the retail chain, it will no longer be necessary to scan the UPC bar code - or even to remove it from the shopper’s cart. Stockboys? All of us are going to become stockboys in the same way that all of us have become soda jerks and gas jockeys. The shopper will bag their purchases as they shop and go to the self-service checkout station which will RF scan the contents of their bags. (Fruits and vegetables will be self-bagged and tagged in their respective departments by the shopper like nuts and bolts in a hardware store).
Once you have an RFID tag on each product, it’s location can be triangulated with 3 antennas. It doesn’t even require a vision system to produce a robotic stockboy.
If one doubts that it’s worthwhile to automate such low pay jobs out of existence, consider the fruit growers initiative to develop a robotic fruit picker. These people have a special exemption to the minimum wage laws, and they are still wanting to eliminate labor. Even the very cheapest labor.
And this has directly led to the increase in wages for plumbers. It used to be a very low paying job back in the day. It didn’t become a high-paying job because of unions (only 30% of plumbers are unionized) - it became a high paying job because modern technology of the type you describe made plumbers more productive.
You’ll also note that people have far more plumbing in their houses today. When I was a kid, most people had one bathroom. One and a half baths was a luxury, and only wealthy people had two or more. Today, your average starter home has two and a half baths. Many people have ensuites and jacuzzi tubs. We have fancier kitchen plumbing, dishwashers, fridges with drink dispensers, wet bars in our rec rooms, etc.
In fact, the plumbing industry contradicts the OP’s point. There are more plumbers working today than ever before, and there is strong job growth predicted in the plumbing field - higher than the average growth for other trades. This is not in spite of advances in plumbing technology - it’s because of it. Plumbing provides more value today, and therefore people want and can afford more of it.
Except that the plumbing trades, with the hearty cooperation of state and local governments, have managed to set up incompatible building codes throughout the country that makes pre-fab housing very difficult. In many places, regulations are clearly put in place to protect plumber’s jobs rather than the public.
This is called regulatory capture, and it’s one of the worst aspects of the intesect between government and business. People clamor for regulations, and get them. Then the people lose interest, and the regulated industries get busy with lobbyists modifying and twisting regulations in ways that protect them, often at the expense of the public.
And yet, plumber’s incomes are above average for the trades, and even apprentices make good money. The nature of the job is changing - in the old days, a plumber might be one guy who goes into a house and laboriously cuts, threads, and and solders a primary line, a couple of sinks, a toilet, and some faucets. Now, a house is full of plumbing lines running all over the place, and the plumber is doing more design work while apprentices do the fitting. All of these is commensurate with an industry in which automation and technology has made everyone more efficient and lowered costs.
Plumbing became a relatively high paying job because unions held the line against wage reductions. My brother, the master plumber, while working for a non-union company, got paid a wage comparable to a union plumber. But virtually all of his work was repairing old plumbing, not new construction. That’s the job of Pex pipe, snapped together by unskilled labor.
Nearly every employee today is more productive than they had been in the past. But their pay has not risen at the same rate as their productivity. I don’t believe that plumber putting in PVC drain stack for a house with a cut-off saw and glue earns the same amount in constant dollars as his grandfather and his two helpers would have earned hauling around cast iron pipes and a pot of melted lead. Are you claiming that one plumber today has more earning power than three men in 1940? In constant dollars? I’d like to see those numbers.
Greater efficiency and lower costs in the real world translates into fewer people employed to do the same work. Running Pex through a house is easier and requires few laborers than running copper pipe. I’ve just re-plumbed two houses, so I’ve got a pretty decent handle on the work involved. New kitchen, dishwasher, 2 baths, 50 gallon water heater, external faucets (to fill the hot tub outside), all mod cons. The hardest part was removing the old cast iron stack and cutting out the oakum and lead to tie on the PVC with a Fernco. The second hardest part was removing the old galvanized pipe. So I’ve got a pretty decent handle on the relative amounts of work involved in each. And, even with the extra T connectors and shut-offs required to put in the ice maker, it’s a damn sight easier than doing less work with 1940s technology.
As for local codes, theft of copper from houses under construction is a huge problem, and is going to push more areas to change the codes to allow Pex.
They will. They are testing them, but they don’t want to build systems based around UPC when they’ll just replace them in a few years with RFID. A UPC identifies the manufacturer and item. RFID can identify every individual Snickers bar.
RFID is very likely to make shoplifting a thing of the past. When a SKU (stock-keeping unit - retailer slang for an item for sale) goes out the door without being removed from the inventory by being purchased, the alarm will go off and the security guard will grab the person holding the item. They’ll have a wand, like a metal detector, that will identify the item, cost and location in the perps clothing.
Why would it be bad for ONE man to not make as much as THREE?
Are there fewer plumbers, though? As Sam has pointed out, it may take fewer plumbers to do a given amount of work, but there’s far more plumbing work, in part because it’s easier to do.
The thread is about fewer people working. Even if this one plumber made as much, in constant dollars, as the three men previously required, that’s still two fewer trade jobs.
He claimed that, but where the evidence? If 100 houses are built, but fewer plumbers can plumb them in less time, even if each house has double the amount of plumbing, that’s still less work by fewer workers.
If I run galvanized iron pipe through a wall, I have to cut the pipe with a saw and thread each segment. I have to put pipe dope on each joint, thread them together and tighten them with a pair of pipe wrenches.
If I do it with Pex, I cut the plastic tubing with a hand cutter. The Pex tubing is either in long sticks or on a roll, so I only have to put in a joint where I’m rounding a corner or connecting to something else. Then I either crimp it or (if local code allows) just stick the tube into a Shark Bite connector. The latter is about as difficult as Tinker Toys.
But all this is a bit of a hijack. Pex is getting more popular for the exact same reason any new technique gets more popular - it’s cheaper. And it’s cheaper because of lower labor costs.
But, as has been said twenty or thirty times now, there’s no evidence that this leaves people out of work. The evidence says they just work elsewhere and that other jobs are created by virtue of the economic benefits of better technology. If all such examples had simply left people out of work, the unemployment rate today would be (this is not an exaggeration) about ninety-eight percent.
I don’t see what’s wrong with having fewer plumbers who make more money by virtue of the technology being better/more efficient/economical. The other two guys perhaps can find jobs that pay better than “plumber’s assistant,” which I’m betting did not pay a mint.
Right now, there is a shortage of skilled plumbers in many areas. Why would this be, if unskilled people are taking their jobs? Right now, wage growth for plumbers is above average for the trades. Why would this be, if technology is taking their jobs? Right now, only 30% of plumbers are unionized. Why would you say that unions are responsible for their wage gains, especially when their wages are higher than other equally unionized trades? And if Unions are always responsible for wage gains, how do you explain similar gains in completely non-unionized trades? Or why wages are falling in the 100% unionized auto workers trades?
Wages are the result of market conditions. Unions can skew them a bit and negotiate slightly better deals in some cases (often at the expense of job creation - featherbedding those who already have a job and keeping new entrants out). But ultimately, the wages of any given job will be set by the demand for that job and the productivity of the workers doing it.
You’re talking a lot of heterodoxy provided by unions and fear-mongering, also provided by unions and the popular media. The problem you have is that almost every economic measure proves you wrong. You’re flying in the face of reality. The hard facts are that there are more plumbers today than there have ever been, and they make more money than they ever have. Unemployment among plumbers is not just at historical lows, but there are shortages all over the place. Not only that, but working conditions have improved, as you noted.
It’s pretty hard to accept your gloomy scenarios when the current trends all indicate that plumbers have it pretty good. I imagine the housing downturn will hurt them somewhat, but that has nothing to do with automation or technology or unions or anything else.
When farming was automated, the industrial revolution provided jobs to replace them. And as the industrial jobs have been automated out of existence, we’ve been told that “service sector” jobs will magically appear to replace them. But there’s no evidence that that is happening. Service jobs, like telephone support, are being exported to India. Pretty much any tech support call winds up being picked up in Bangalore.
The point of be a plumber’s assistant was that you’d learn and become a plumber eventually. My brother quit plumbing because he had to work alone, the company would not supply an assistant, and he’d pulled one too many lime-filled 50 gallon water heaters out of one too many basements.
Everywhere I look, I look for the “service sector” jobs we’ve been assured would replace good paying industrial sector jobs. And, with few exceptions, they aren’t there. Instead, I see them either outsourced or automated.
Bank teller? ATM.
Gas station employee? Self-service pump with credit card reader.
Sales? Web site.
Telephone operator? Voice mail system.
I’ve got no problem with automation. I’m not a Luddite. Given a choice, I’ll use the self-checkout lane at Home Depot, and buy a book from Amazon. But I can’t deny that these choices have consequences, and that society has no plan to deal with the fact that huge numbers of people are going to wind up unemployed.
In my area, Blockbuster Video has been closing stores. NetFlix has proven to be a better choice for most consumers - far better selection, lower price. But every one of those stores employed far more people than NetFlix ever will in their distribution centers. For people who want it now, every McDonalds in my area has a Red Box DVD vending machine. Presumably there is a person who comes by to service it and change the DVDs. But compared to the number of people who would be employed at a video store?
It seems like a religion “The Market will Provide!” OK, where are these jobs? We can easily point out where the jobs are disappearing, and have done so. Where are these new jobs you claim are appearing? Point them out, please! Reading through this thread, every time someone mentions that a particular job has been automated out of existence, someone repeats the mantra that the market will somehow magically produce new work - but never bothers actually identifying them.
They are the children of those radio sensor tags stuck on cards inside DVD or attached to expensive items of clothing in stores. Those just reflect back a radio signal. These pick up the radio energy, use it to read some computer memory containing a unique number and send it back out to be picked up by the antenna.
A) It is simply a falsehood to say “pretty much any tech support call winds up being picked up in Bangalore.” In fact, there are lots of tech support jobs in North America. Call centres still recruit. Let’s not pretend every single call center job is in India.
B) It’s not just farmers. Switches put telephone operators out of jobs. Chimney sweeps are out of jobs. I could name 100 jobs that have been reduced in importance or simply wiped from the map and the unemployment rate in the United States still isn’t fifty percent, which, if those jobs were not replaced, it should be.
SO
WHY
HAVEN’T
THEY?
Jesus, this isn’t 1946! The things you have described have already happened and there are not huge numbers of people unemployed. You are talking about things… ATMs, self-serve gas stations - that have been around for quite a few years now and yet the unemployment rate isn’t going up. Please explain.
Great God Almighty, you cannot be serious.
Thirty-five years ago there weren’t any Blockbuster stores. Thirty-five years ago there was essentially no home movie rental business of any kind, as a matter of fact; VCRs were a very newfangled and expensive toy. Home movie rentals didn’t really start becoming commonplace until the late 70s/early 80s. The jobs you’re bemoaning the loss of, which are in any event minimum wage jobs for students, did not exist less than two generations ago. A new business model simply popped into existence, created jobs, and now you’re claiming it’s bad that it’s going away in what is, in historical terms, a burp of time.
You know what, though? When video stores popped up people said it’d rob the employees of movie theatres of their jobs. They pointed out, correctly, that it takes fewer people to run a Blockbuster than it does a movie theatre. Now it’s Netflix. Netflix will be obsolete in five years. What then?
I’m not going to do your homework for you; if you want to know the percentage of jobs that make up the economy go find it yourself. What I know is that the unemployment rate is not skyrocketing even after many of the things you have described have happened. Indeed, it’s quite a bit lower now than it once was.
There are lots of jobs out there. Did you know the trucking industry is short of drivers? The skilled trades are short, too. Lots of existing jobs are growing.
You ask for jobs that have been created. Well, okay; video store employee. That job was just invented thirty years ago and still employs thousandes. Now, Netflix employee. How about computer programmer? PBX technician? Load broker? Lots of science majors get jobs doing environmental assessment and rehabilitation work, stuff that didn’t exist twenty years ago. Cell phone retail sales, that’s new. Cell phone manufacture. The guy who repairs cell phone towers - I have a friend who does that, in fact. How about the people who make Blackberrys? Twenty years ago they employed a handful of people; now just the Waterloo HQ, 45 minutes from my house, employs 7000. All created in the last ten to twenty years.
In January, the unemployment rate was 4.9%. You do realize that’s quite low, right? 95.1% of people have found a job. Why don’t you look around and ask them what they’re doing?
Call centers opening up in Bangalore doesn’t really seem like a great example; that’s not destruction of jobs, that’s just a geographic shift in the location of those jobs.
This is going back a bit, but I might have some perspective to offer on this:
Are you kidding?
McDonalds is working on a completely automated kitchen right now. If you’ve ever worked in a McDonalds, you’d know that their goal is to make the process of making hamburgers as much like an assembly line as humanly possible (i.e. possible with humans.) At a recently built McDonalds near me, all soft drinks for the drive-thru are made by a robot. It drops the cup, fills it with a precise amount of ice, dispenses the soda and covers it with a lid. All ready to be picked up by the person manning the window. How hard is it to imagine a robot that could make the fries and Big Mac and put them in the bag? And not forget the ketchup and salt either? By the way, in some locations, the person at the window is not the same person who talks to the customer via speaker - where wages exceed a bare minimum, they are actually outsourcing the job to cheaper locations via telephone and internet. And McDonalds has been lobbying to get an exemption to minimum wage for years.
100 years? We went from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about half that time. Did you forget that robotics is on computer time and is ruled by Moore’s Law (“Processor speed doubles every 18 months”)? Have you been following Japanese developments in robotics? Americans may laugh at news footage of an Asimo tripping while walking up stairs, while somehow forgetting that they are seeing proof that (at least in tests) a robot can now walk up stairs.
I guess you weren’t kidding.
Take drywall. I can imagine how to do it. A LIDAR scan of the entire space. With this data, the system will know exactly how off plumb each stud is, where each electrical box is located. Software calculates the optimum cuts to use as few sheets as possible. Once cut, it’s not really that difficult to conceptualize a system that can hold a sheet in place and attach it to the studs. Further, I can imagine a system that would cut custom length stand-offs to attach to these off-plumb studs so the resulting drywall would be perfectly square.
Give me a large enough budget and it would be possible today. Not cheaper or quicker. Yet. But technology is often possible long before it is economically feasible . Take Doug Englebart’s 1968 “Mother of all demos”, where he showed the mouse, chord keyboard, network collaboration, hyperlinks and other stuff years before even Xerox PARC, let alone Apple, even tried to duplicate his work. What he showed was not immediately usable in an office setting, but it it defined the future of the computer.
100 years? The humorous thing about many science fiction novels of the 1940s and 1950s is not that it over-estimated advancements in space travel, but how far the fell short of the reality of computers. And, as I said, robotics is on computer time. Dog years.
Read up about the DARPA “Grand Challenge” and see just how much development has happened in the last few years. Within surprisingly few years, we’re going to see an autonomous vehicle on the highway. The Department of Defense intends to have one third of their vehicles autonomous by 2015. This is not pie in the sky, this is achievable. The hard part has been vision systems, and the Grand Challenge has given a lot of very smart people a goal and they are getting amazingly close. The 2007 Challenge, the driverless vehicles had to pass the California driver’s license exam. And some of this technology is already on the road - Toyota’s automatic parallel parking system or the autonomous cruise control systems offered by a number of makers.
The vision systems in the Darpa winners occupies most of the seats in an SUV, granted. And the first computers took up most of the floor in a building. Once you have good techniques, you make custom processors and everything shrinks down to a size that you can put in a small box in the engine compartment. We’re talking about software that can identify the lines at the sides of the road, tell the difference between a tumbleweed and a boulder, drive under a bridge or through a tunnel without getting confused. It’s not a huge stretch to imagine the same software applied to a humaniform robot working in a home - at least enough to be able to hang drywall or flip a burger.
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