(1) Assuming that the replacement of human jobs must involve entirely replacing every (or nearly every) person’s job with a robot. This is definitely a heavy lift. Creating automation that still depends on humans, but less than half of the number previously needed, still eliminates a lot of jobs.
(2) Focusing too narrowly on factory jobs. These were the ones people were paying attention to a few decades back, as you noted. But was anyone then worrying about the jobs of radiologists, paralegals, even lawyers? That’s a real issue now.
(3) Focusing narrowly on the unemployment rate, which only tracks those actively looking for work. The share of working-age men not involved in the labor force is up over 40 percent in the past 40 years, including 14 percent just in the past decade: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001. I can easily imagine a future another 40 years from now (which is really not all that long) in which that non-working segment is actually the majority (after being only about 12 or 13 percent back in the Fifties) , even as the unemployment rate itself remains within its historical range.
That is not the share of working-age men. That’s all males, 16+. So good job including all the college students and boomers to help push this robot narrative. During that same time period (40 years), the participation rate for women increased (LNS11300002, also including all the college students and retirees). This is not a problem, although if you think it is, by all means please share why you think it’s bad that in many households today a woman works and a man stays at home. We’re all ears. Or eyes I guess, this being text.
My advice here is to try thinking about demographics and social conventions before immediately jumping to the “robots!” conclusion.
Since you started this thread, the seasonally adjusted “core age” (not my term) 25-54 labor force participation rate has increased from 81.5% to 82.2% (LNS11300060). The highest it’s ever been is 84.6% (1999). 40 years ago (not terribly relevant IMO but you brought it up)? 78.1% [JMT]This is not the trend you are looking for.[/JMT]
And we used human computers to send spaceships to the moon, and my dad had a bank of secretaries before his first desktop computer. “A few decades back” we had 43 million fewer jobs (and we’ve increased 16.6 million since you started this thread.) “A few decades back” we didn’t even have types of jobs that we have today. Please allow me to google that for you. Jobs change. That’s normal and expected. You might be able to formulate and test a hypothesis about the rate of job change. Let us know what you find out.
I see the automation of radiology and legal services is a good thing, making those services more affordable and accessible.
My focus on male labor participation has nothing to do with thinking it’s a bad thing for women to be in the labor force. It’s just that looking at both genders combined obscures the fact that “women’s liberation” goosed the numbers for a while, but that peaked (as you alluded to) in 1999, and labor participation has been down since then. You talked about college, retirement, etc.; but economists will tell you that people going back to school or retiring early are just more socially acceptable ways of being out of the labor market.
Definitely. So do I. Looks like it’s time for one of my periodic disclaimers (I must have issued them several times in the thread so far) that, unlike several other Chicken Little posters, I don’t see the ultimate obviation of need for all or even most human beings to work as a bad thing, not at all. I think in the long run, it will be great for humanity (as long as we avoid some other existential dangers that are outside the scope of this thread). My concern is over how the transition to this state of being will come about economically and politically—which is why I strongly support implementation of a basic income or “mincome”.
Bolding mine – prove it. Not that it’s relevant to anything I wrote, because I didn’t write about going back to school or retiring early. My links show college enrollment ages 18-24 and the percent of the population age 65+. It is a simple fact that young people are more likely to go to college today. It is a simple fact that we have more old folks than we used to. It is a simple fact that household structures have changed in the past 40 years. All of those have contributed heavily to the trend seen in the male 16+ labor participation data. So to use those 16+/M data alone as evidence of, well, anything, without acknowledging and accounting for the other contributing factors is simply misleading. Careful readers of this thread will note I already brought up demographic factors wrt workplace participation in this very thread (#874 and subsequent posts).
For those interested, here’s a FRED blog post on the working age population as a percentage of the overall population. It topped out in 2007 and as of 2017 was the lowest it’s been since 2000. Anyone have caregiver stats on hand? That’s another factor to look into. An aunt flat out didn’t work (as an employee) during my grandfather’s last few years, but I don’t know how common that is. https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/01/changing-demographics/
Your “concern” is noted. If you have anything specific, measurable, etc. to discuss, I’m here.
Some targets may be more geographically-constrained data. Let’s consider a pool of people whose careers are disrupted by technology. Those living in more densely populated areas may be more easily able to shift to related jobs or be closer to re-training opportunities. Those in less dense areas may have to move. But not everyone can move, for various reasons. This is from-ass brainstorming, so I got nothing to actually analyze. Yet.
If the robots taking over requires increased population mobility to cope with it, are there policies we can enact (or remove) to facilitate this? Dunno, but I’ll mull it on the plane this afternoon.
My comments are only wrt automotive component manufacturing, I’m pretty clueless about any other sectors of the evonomy. However, just imagining the world of the future? I would think by the time human labor is obsolete, future humans will be living in a virtual world for the most part, and won’t even need the physical items that future AI/robots would produce, except nutrition of some sort.
Of course jobs will be lost to automation. But the history of those job losses show that they ultimate grow the economy, which means jobs are created to replace the ones lost.
What I am arguing against is that automation will make humans so obsolete that there simply won’t be enough jobs for them, leading to mass unemployment. There is exactly zero evidence that we are heading for such a future, and all the evidence we have suggests that a future where 100 million current jobs are automated is probably one in which at least 100 million new jobs will be created, and the future world will be much wealthier.
This is because employment carries with it opportunity cost for society - if you weren’t doing job A, you’d be working somewhere else doing job B. Since you chose A, there will be less of B. If you can automate A, you can do B, and other people can create job categories C,D,E… etc.
The reason so many people have a pessimistic view of the future is because it’s easy to imagine a potential automation catastrophe, but impossible to imagine the new things we will choose to do or the new things we will invent when millions of people are freed up from their current jobs and are available for other new jobs. Humans are a resource. An incredibly valuable one. When automation can replace them while maintaining or increasing their output, wealth grows because we now have the same things we had before, plus whatever the worker is now building.
In my opinion, the only way this pattern will be broken is if we invent AI with general intelligence, but nothing we are doing today leads to that, and we have no idea how to get there, or even if we can.
Focusing on factory jobs is an act of charity, because factories are the best case place for automation, which is why it appeared there first.
The key in automated factories is that everything the robots do is extremely well defined, and the range of choices it can make extremely limited. Move spot welder to location defined by the process instructions, apply current, move arm back. That’s simple automation, which actually isn’t that simple. Nowadays, we are adding limited AI in terms of analytics, and advances in vision systems are sensor technology are allowing robots more choices. For example, a robot might use a camera to reject a drilled hole that is too oval, or even inspect the paint job of a car and report flaws. But the minute the process deviates from the limits set in the plan, the robots are completely helpless to change it. They can’t think.
Now try automating something less well defined - like driving. That is turning out to be much harder than people originally thought, and a lot of car companies have scaled back their claims. And actually, driving isn’t even the worst case for automation because it still happens within a set of pretty well defined rules. Now try building a robot that can go into a framed house and install all the plumbing and electrical. Totally different thing.
Before you do that, you’d have to convince me that any of this has to do with automation. There are lots of things that can affect the unemployment rate. And automation could certainly cause short term job losses - there has to be lag between job losses and job creation, because people need time to change jobs, retrain, whatever. That’s different than massive, permanent job losses from automation.
Ha, nice one. One might wonder how the fetishist gets his money, but he looks like he might be old enough to be retired and living on a pension or savings.
Yeah, good point. Kind of like in “Ready Player One”. I suspect though that there will still be a high-end market for stuff that’s “real” and not possible to mass produce (like land in a highly desirable, scenic location). Kind of like how people now appreciate handmade, bespoke items even if they could get comparable quality for much less at Target.
It seems to me that this is a false dichotomy. What about the optimistic vision of the future in which no one needs to work? That’s what optimism looks like to me. The idea that human labor will be a crucially needed “resource” until the end of time is actually the pessimistic outlook, from where I’m standing. But then, I guess as an inveterate slacker I may not be in tune with the way most people think. In some of these discussions, of automation and basic income and so on, you’ll read stuff about how people have a fundamental psychological need to work, so they would be profoundly depressed if they just lived off a basic income. I cannot comprehend this mindset at ALL.
Yes, it’s kinda like Lemur866 theorizes about stuff being the robots make being free. When we’re all living in virtual reality, everything should be basically free. If you want a ferarri? No problem, u have one for the same price as any other virtual car. Free. Want to travel through time or visit another planet? All free. There’s no need to colonize mars, you can just be there in your own home or hospital like compound where they feed u through a tube. Maybe we’ll all have to spend an obligatory amount of time in the real world every now and then to ensure the physical systems that keep the virtual systems running
also, virtual reality may be the main driver behind the Fermi paradox, in that any civilization with the ability to contact earth may have mastered the technology to live in a virtual world. And would have no desire to expend the resources to physically travel/communicate.
I think it is–or rather, it has. Skeptics might point out that automats came to NYC many decades ago; but of course, they still had humans making the food and putting it in the slots.
Wasn’t there some place, though (a fast food chain, maybe?) that implemented something like this and then decided it was a failed experiment?
Remember vending machines?
For 50 years people have been able to get coffee from a machine. Insert in two coins , press a button to choose decaf, regular,etc, press a button for “add extra sugar”, press a button for add milk.
And --MAGIC!–the machine dropped a plastic cup from a chute and filled it with your drink, and you lifted up the plastic shield to remove your cup.
The difference here seems to be that the machine now looks cool.
Instead of a boring rectangular machine made of metal with all the mechanics hidden inside, this machine in the linked picture is transparent glass with a robotic arm you can watch while it works.
And of course, you operate it after loading yet another app on your smartphone linked to your credit card, and, I assume, have to remember your password. Who wants to drink coffee without a password? That’s old fashioned. Not cool at all.
And actually, that’s the big difference: the coolness factor.
It seems to be successful. According to the link, these computerized coffee shops are popular. So instead of installing a bank of vending machines, the airport or shopping mall opens a franchise with these computerized machines, and people stand in line happily waiting to pay.
But regarding the OP 's issue of robots taking our jobs–the question is: is this robot-cafe replacing the old vending machines, or is it replacing human workers at Starbucks? We’ll wait and see.
*Periodic reminder that I, as the OP, actually do believe it will ultimately be a **good *thing for robots to take our jobs, unlike many others who have posted in this thread over the past 7.5 years (I wonder if some of them are now dead??). It’s the transition I worry about.
We are in an interesting point on the transition curve. The machines are continuing to be interconnected. This has 2 immediate effects - centralization and standardization. It’s not ROBOTS (plural). It’s a gigantic robotic system:
Recently I was involved in a complex automobile licensing issue that involved titles, insurance, multiple cars, licenses, owners and states. A young lady was able to sit at a computer and resolve all of the issues in 20 minutes. Many years ago I had to fly to Carson City Nevada to resolve a much simpler title issue. Definitely an improvement.
Also recently, I made an error on the account number when I changed where to automatically deposit my SS check. The bank returned the check to the SS Administration. When that happens the SS computer assumes you are dead and cancels SS and Medicare. The insurance companies then cancel any supplemental policies. All communicated instantly and without human intervention. I was not informed since I was assumed dead. I found out about it when WalMart charged me $90 for a prescription that used to be free. My resurrection required a couple of months of visits and phone calls.
So, the robots are not metal anthropomorphs scurrying around the house to do your bidding. It’s an interconnected robotic system that is meticulous in monitoring what it requires of you and equally rigorous in punishing your bad behavior.
Oof, that SSA deal sounds like a nightmare. Reminds me of the bureaucratic hoops I had to jump through to get a passport after they tightened things up post-9/11. My parents never thought to get a consular report of birth when I was born in Kenya (they were both American citizens). So all I had was a fairly useless Kenyan birth certificate.
I went to a special office of the State Dept. in Connecticut, and brought them a sworn, notarized affidavit from my mother. My father had died decades previous. But since I had written on the form that both my parents were American citizens, they demanded proof of citizenship for both. They acknowledged that if I had put my mother down and listed my father as “UNKNOWN”, I wouldn’t have to prove it for him. :smack:
In Case 1, you were fortunate to make contact with someone who knew what to do.
Case 2 and ones similar to it, are becoming ever more frequent. Any exception that gets kicked out of the automated process, you are in hell, either because no manual process has been set up to deal with it, or nobody knows what it is.