Target is planning a concept all-robot store in the next two years.
I do not believe that the robotic concept store, as indicated in the article, is a direct response by Target management to the fact that pharmacy employees in one Target store have voted to unionize. But it’s not hard to see what’s coming …
Great example, Captor. From the link:
Which suggests we could be approaching a tipping point that ushers in a quick acceleration of this trend, rather than it being gradual and inexorable.
These are the experiments, the harbingers. The experiments might not work out. But the desire of retailers to decrease their labor costs is real and constant. None of them can see the problem that will occur if retail sector employment collapses along with fast food and transportation. Each corporation is concerned mainly with competitive advantage against other corporations. The specter of a total economic collapse is not on their radar.
The labor force participation rate is now the lowest in nearly 40 years. But even graphs like this obscure the true nature of the trend, as they build in a shift of middle class women from being primarily homemakers to the workforce. If you look at just men, it’s nearly all downhill since 1950.
What might be even more revealing, but is a stat I can’t seem to find, is something showing the labor force as a proportion of all population, not just 18-64 or 15-64. That would obviously show an even steeper decline. Many would object that it’s not “fair” to count children and senior citizens, but I’m not looking at this from the conventional angle, but more to see how many people (who, regardless of age, still need food, shelter, etc.) are supported by each job.
In some ways you can view the offshoring of many jobs as if they have been taken over by robots. Those jobs are subtracted from our economy. The goods and services remain to be purchased and used. But the profits are not spread equitably to the robots ( overseas underpaid workers ) or to those who lost the jobs here. So far, the extra profits are being kept to a smaller portion of people. We can see how this is beginning to have negative effects. How we deal with this real, current situation, may also be how we deal with further automation.
At this time, we are not doing very well dealing with this precursor of the future.
It’s a good point, up to a point. We have seen countries mature from being very low wage targets for offshoring sweatshops, to slowly working upward and seeing workers become consumers with higher and high standards of living who eventually create markets for other countries’ exports. It’s hard to say if that will continue, but it hasn’t been quite the “race to the bottom” or “giant sucking sound” many warned against.
I agree and disagree with your reply. But it is the overall effect of displaced jobs that I am alluding to. We are already accumulating a huge debt load, as people try to continue lifestyles that the economy, job market, cannot support. Government debt, as tax revenue declines in relation to operating costs. Consider that a robot is not really paid a taxable wage. The tax will only be collected at the sale of the product or service. A big drop in tax revenue. Of course the robot’s health and welfare will not be supported by the state. No pension, unemployment insurance. Unless it is also working for the state.
In a way, the private sector might finally be completely responsible for the total welfare of it’s workers. If there isn’t already one in place. I can imagine a sort of group healthcare plan for them. The private sector pooling money into it. Workers compensation? Spread out the risk of an expensive piece of machinery going down? The shift to ever more automation, opens up some odd realities to deal with in odd ways?
Could happen, if governments completely abdicate any role–but that would surprise me.
There was a tech guy on Colbert Friday night who led a team that created a new game called “No Man’s Sky”. This is an exploration game in which there are something like 18 quintillion planets. Colbert asked him how they could create so many, and the guy said it was actually a team of only ten developers that made the game, when it has traditionally been hundreds behind major games. (If this is incorrect, don’t blame me–I’m just relating what he said.) The reason, he said, is that the environments on all these vastly different planets, as well as their flora and fauna, are created automatically by the program based on evolutionary rules laid out by the developers.
So I bring this up not only because it is a form of AI, but particularly because of the smaller team of developers despite the game featuring an unimaginably enormous universe. This is exactly what I’ve been predicting in steering my son away from the type of tech career most of his friends are planning. Yes, there will still be game developers, but they will increasingly have to do less and less of the actual coding. More and more, they will just tell an AI interface what they want the game to do. This will mean a lot of the skills coders learn in college (or out) will become superfluous. It will also mean far fewer people are needed to make games, while at the same time opening up competition for the jobs that remain from “creative” types who don’t know a thing about coding.
Here’s a look at the future of robotics in the manufacturing sector by a corporate advisory group – very rosyscenario … if you’re a robot:
Note that there is no mention of unemployment in the whole article. Because they don’t give a fuck. There’s your future.
In all forms of software engineering the tools get better and so it takes fewer people to do the same task. This increasing productivity is one reason why engineers’ salaries remain very high.
Game coding right now remains an extremely technical discipline; a job where you must continue to study while you work, or be left behind.
And I think at the point where this is no longer true; where you just tell an AI interface what to do and they’ll be no scope for a human to better understand the problem, and what would be the most fun, is the point where computers can basically do any job.
Oh, I don’t know. The creative part of that job will probably remain in human hands for quite some time.
It’s like in medicine: X-ray technicians’ jobs are going to be imperiled before radiologists, and radiologists before surgeons…etc. Or as this article notes:
Watch out, political speechwriters–you may be next: Inside The Message Machine That Could Make Politicians More Persuasive : It's All Politics : NPR
This one might not affect large numbers of jobs, but it’s definitely more than a little creepy. I can’t picture voters or judges allowing AIs to become candidates for election any more than I can imagine them allowing them to argue or hear cases in court. But the prospect of politicians becoming meat puppets whose every move is guided by an AI is bothersome, even as it seems inevitable.
Meh, most national political figures are meat puppets for Wall Street and other wealthy interests anyway. It’s hard to get excited about a different hand waving them about.
I’m not as cynical as you are in that regard.
Driverless buses in use in Greece.
Mainstream media starts to get a clue about safety benefits of driverless vehicles.
I enjoyed the *Atlantic *article, thanks.
Greece seems like the last place you’d want to start laying off bus drivers right now…
I had the same thought. But it’s interesting, some of the countries that are experimenting with Basic Income have been countries like Brazil, India and, I think, Uruguay … not places you’d think would have deep pockets. I actually think it’s a wonderful way for a country with a lot of poverty to bootstrap themselves a large middle class that can, you know, buy the things companies in their country make. America is not exactly on the forefront of social innovation nowadays. Au contraire.
We’re not on the furthest regressive end, either. The ghost of Calvin Coolidge presumably is horrified at what a socialist nightmare this country has become, from his perspective.