I think your conclusions are correct but your reasons to support them are wrong.
Your Camaro example : that’s not apples to apples. The newer model has more in it. More safety features, more complex internal systems. The automotive industry makes large charges over time.
As for your craftsman example : sure, there’s little need for craftsmen who can make things out of raw materials, but the mechanical engineers who ‘crafted’ the CAD model have even more skills than the craftsmen of old. That part is normal and expected.
But even though lots more people are mechanical engineers and other higher skilled jobs, and a larger part of the population has college degrees than ever, yeah, the wealthy are pocketing more of the pie - basically all of the increases over the last 40 years.
This isn’t true for everybody. For a few people with new, rare skills, and an even smaller number of people who got stupidly lucky, they did really well. But this is not true for the average person. The average person wasn’t a database architect in the early 2000s (job is a commodity now dominated by H1Bs) or found an online payment service in the mid 1990s (impossible now, entrenched players have an unbeatable advantage)
When robots take over the world, eventually we will reach a point where we / they will look back at films like The Matrix, Terminator or the upcoming Battle Angel: Alita the way we look at minstrel shows.
The “machine world” is not all de-saturated with that Nine Inch Nails Chemical Brothers drum & bass industrial music blaring constantly.
Cyborgs are not all grotesque hardware embedded monstrosities in black leather trench coats and sunglasses.
Artificial humans are capable of jobs other than sex worker or super soldier.
They do not shut down when you ask them to explain “love”.
AI does not want to “KILL…ALL…HU-MANS!!”
They…do…not…all…talk…like…this. [makes robot dance movment]
They find the term “robot” offensive (you know “robot” means slave?)
It depends on how skilled those 100 or 10 workers are. In any case they usually get replaced by management. (Including engineers.) I was at AT&T during a strike, and that was what happened there. No new hiring.
Great, we agree. Unions have a role in getting better pay for workers, not for keeping workers on who are no longer needed. (Union leaders may not agree, but I’m pro-union and I believe this.) In fact automation - which improves productivity for all - might be faster with union factories because of the higher ROI.
Moving factories to the cheaper non-union south helped in the short run, but did not prevent the factories from moving to even cheaper places offshore. Perhaps if they stayed expensive they would have been automated more quickly and stayed here, which is good for our economy and for the company, because of cheaper logistics.
Your video game example isn’t that much different from people making money playing sports. But people good enough at video games to make money are rare. Just like people good enough at writing or at art. What are we going to do with our average Joe or Jane when what they can do has been automated.
The UAW was not limited to a single car company. In my town there are dozens of fast food places and other small restaurants. In the Bay Area hundreds at least. So we’re talking reasonably big numbers. You don’t start organizing in Podunk.
If the kids think that it is worth crossing a picket line. And if the owner thinks his customers will cross the line and not go to the Wendy’s down the street instead.
Jack in the Box, Wendy’s Arby’s, J. Salt … And I don’t even eat at fast food places.
Yeah, with no union it is not going to happen. But how do you think people all over the country used to go out on strike at once?
By your argument unions should have failed because they could replace adult workers with children, and even if the children joined the union they could replace them with more children. Your argument seems to be that low skill levels makes replacements easy. True, but even more true back then.
And child labor stopped not due to strikes but due to political action, which is another subject entirely.
Hell, when we get really good 3D printers, we can print our meals. Master chefs will make the first examples which will get broken down and distributed electronically to all houses who subscribe to the service.
I’m sure people will go to restaurants for the ambience. But when you can print that Big Mac at home or work - I’d pass up the chic Mickey’Ds atmosphere myself.
Which automates fast food workers out of jobs. Which will probably happen before too long.
I’ve read about a vending machine in Italy which serves fresh pizzas. It is coming.
Right? Although I think they may draw the line narrowly, to protect the trial lawyers and prosecutors who actually argue in court, plus of course judges. They will probably find public support for those measures. But that still leaves a lot of behind the scenes lawyers and paralegals SOL.
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IIRC there were also restrictions imposed on “do it yourself” books from law text book makers like Nolo Press thanks to lawyers complaining about that (and that was not AI).
Not hard to imagine many restrictions coming to the AI lawyers, but watch out for the ones in power trying to prevent the common people from getting legal representation that way. That is usually where the restrictions will come, the AIs are more likely to be used as a tool by the lawyers to gain more contracts and more profit follows.
Jobs training deep learning algorithms how to function better, and ultimately require fewer humans for progressively lower and lower wages.
This is automation speeding *up, not slowing down, the replacement of humans, by using us as a stopgap to fill in the blanks and train the AIs via repetition.
David Autor - MIT Economics - Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
Uh uh, the point stands, the article is actually more positive in pointing at the jobs that many did not imagine even a few years ago.
As I remember someone in the past pointed out that Mozart became what he was in great part thanks to the invention of the piano. Many are just approaching this by indeed not thinking about the possibilities, I can see that in reality there is a lot of arguments based on ignorance. Really.
My impression from early in the tread has not changed, yes, there will be jobs lost, (A bit of column A) but many others that many can not imagine will come. (a bit of column B)
Forgot to add: as the evidence David Autor presents, the main danger is really the virtual loss of the middle class thanks to automation. **If **we do not work to drive the changes in a positive way.
Wait, how would “the virtual loss of the middle class thanks to automation” not be anything to worry about?
You can go back to my OP and everything I’ve said all along and you’ll see that I expect us all to be better off a hundred years from now. So my longterm outlook might be even more positive than Autor’s! But it’s the transition I worry about.
Autor’s blithely talking about agriculture going down from 40 percent to 2 percent and being filled in by yoga teachers and app developers—does he really think these are the same sorts of people? What actually happened is that people who used to do dull, repetitive, nonintellectual manual labor on the farm moved to cities and did dull, repetitive manual labor on assembly lines, driving or loading/unloading trucks, etc. The kind of people who do those sorts of jobs are not going to be app developers or yoga teachers, and they also won’t be whatever the 2049 version of such occupations are, even if we don’t know what the occupations are yet.
Industrial transitions in the past could be rough, but ultimately there were still plenty of low-skill manual labor jobs for people to do, just different ones. If you think there will be a significant need for basic, repetive human manual labor in thirty years, you’re just not paying attention. And if you think the kind of people who are not capable of brainier work will not still be a significant percentage of the population thirty years from now, you’re kidding yourself.
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I DID say it was a danger, so one wonders what you are complaining here.
Has he actually pointed out, most of the past farmers would be unemployable now, the solution then was free basic education. And that actually took a generation, not a hundred years.
That is nice, neither he nor me said that. IT will be actually multitasking not quite simple work, but close enough.
And I don’t even eat at fast food places.