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AI Businesses Robotics The Almighty Buck United States

How Will Automation Affect Different US Cities? (northwestern.edu) 98

Casino dealers and fishermen are both likely to be replaced by machines in coming years. So which city will lose more of its human workforce -- Las Vegas, the country's gambling capital, or Boston, a major fishing hub? From a research: People tend to assume that automation will affect every locale in the same, homogeneous way, says Hyejin Youn, an assistant professor of management and organization at Kellogg. "They have never thought of how this is unequally distributed across cities, across regions in the U.S." It is a high-stakes question. The knowledge that certain places will lose more jobs could allow workers and industries to better prepare for the change and could help city leaders ensure their local economies are poised to rebound. In new research, Youn and colleagues seek to understand how machines will disrupt the economies of individual cities. By carefully analyzing the workforces of American metropolitan areas, the team calculated what portion of jobs in each area is likely to be automated in coming decades. You can run your city's name, and also the job position you're curious about here.
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How Will Automation Affect Different US Cities?

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  • Boston is a major fishing hub? Is this the 1800s?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Boston is a major fishing hub? Is this the 1800s?

      Boston is home to many large fish processing and preparation businesses. If you're in the midwest and you're eating lobster or cod then it probably passed through Boston. These are the jobs that can be automated away.

      • Really? In Boston? In 2018? You guys need to actually visit Boston. Most cod comes from Alaska and Scandanavia or Canada at this point.
        • There's also the question of whether the folks at Kellog have ever been on a commercial fishing vessel. I haven't been around boats much for about 50 years, But I think that the jobs in the fishing industry might be a bit more complex than they think.

      • Boston is home to many large fish processing and preparation businesses. If you're in the midwest and you're eating lobster or cod then it probably passed through Boston.

        Ah, Boston. Home of Legal Seafood and illegal prices.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I can't take anything that uses, 'might', 'will likely', or 'could' as its basis seriously. Those words have been used to describe a great many things that had exactly zero impact on anything whatsoever over a great many decades. Millennial alert.

    • I''m just amazed that people think this is something new. Since the industrial revolution technology has been replacing jobs. It's not like it's a new invention.

  • Ridiculous data (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @03:16PM (#56419829) Homepage Journal
    The backing data is ridiculous. A house cleaner has a 94.5% likelihood of being automated? How? What planet are these people living on, where they see automated robots appearing soon that have the ability to clean a house? The best we can come up with is Roomba, and that is a complete joke. These "researchers" need to get a real job and learn about technology.
    • by SirSlud ( 67381 )

      Automated doesn't mean "get replaced by an android". It just means that you'll need less people to do the same work due to advances in automation. Your robot may not clean the whole house, but it will let house cleaners clean a house faster, with less people. It's certainly easy to just say that we don't have the technology now, but in 20 years given advancements in robotics and automation ... I'd put my money on the human not doing the brunt of the work in cleaning a house.

      • OK, that isn't what it means, but please explain when this technology will appear that will "automate" house cleaning? Why will it appear in 20 years? Is there some sudden advancement in technology that I am not aware of?
    • *sigh* it's another case of Media Hype being taken as Fact by people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about, that's what this is. We do not have 'AI', we have 'pseudo-intelligence' at best, and it's not very good in any case. All this talk about this-or-that job being replaced in X-number of years is just a bunch of hot air and baseless opinions.
      • We do not have 'AI', we have 'pseudo-intelligence'

        According to my dictionary, one of the synonyms for "pseudo" is "artificial".

    • TFA says that Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists have a 61% risk of being automated. How about that?

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @03:17PM (#56419835)

    Based on this finding, Youn says small cities could see an exodus of workers, as well as exacerbated income inequality, since robots are likely to hollow out the middle class there.

    Something is seriously wrong with our civilization when robots taking over dull, repetitive tasks leads to an overall worse quality of life.

    • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @05:16PM (#56420543) Homepage

      People of below average intelligence - you know, 50% of the population - have no problem with dull, repetitive tasks. In fact, they find learning new things to be a difficult chore. It is only the intelligent people who delight in learning. Because they're good at it, duh. How does an intelligent person overlook such obvious facts?

      If you don't have a job, you don't have a place in society. You're not contributing. This is very destructive to the human soul, and people will start killing themselves because they don't know why they're alive. It's not like instead of a job people are going to start going to see independent films and creating art all day. That's just what a very small segment of the intelligent population - the ones high in creativity and trait openness - wishes they could do. They don't speak for humanity, this is painfully obvious to any observer.

      • it all.

        First is the implicit notion that people have to be contributing to society to feel fulfilled. Bullshit. The upper class is full of layabouts, so much so we've got a term for it (the Idle Rich) and I don't see them offing themselves. People will watch TV, sports, drink and hang out with friends and be perfectly happy. Hell, our ancestors had _more_ free time than we did since they spent a lot of it just waiting for crops to grow.

        Then there's the subtext that people who can't contribute don't
      • Not only that. Training isn't free.

        If you pay $6k for a skill and then lose the job within 2 years, you are in debt and can't retrain.

        We need basic income, universal health care, and free education (that includes trade school). Not *debt*.

      • If you don't have a job, you don't have a place in society. You're not contributing. This is very destructive to the human soul, and people will start killing themselves because they don't know why they're alive.

        Contributing to what? My bosses vacation plans? The 'economy'? I don't think I would kill myself over something so petty.

    • Something is seriously wrong with our civilization when robots taking over dull, repetitive tasks leads to an overall worse quality of life.

      Something is seriously wrong with our civilization when people read some journalist spouting an opinion, and accept it as objective truth rather than some stupid economic fallacy.

      There is no reason to believe that automation is leading to a "worse quality of life".

  • Casino dealers and fishermen are both likely to be replaced by machines in coming years.

    That's just someone's opinion. Nothing to see here..

    • It's true. I was in a casino last years and while I saw maybe 3-4 dozen card tables, I saw hundreds of slot and video game machines. /s
  • Every city in the US is already highly automated.
  • HorseDung to CarSmog, 50 years it took to dislodge a 4 legged beast in the automobile revolution. (https://thetyee,ca/News?2013/03/06/Horse-Dung-Big-Shift/ ) The computer revolution took 30 yrs. to get to ' the rest of us'.

    PeoplePace to BlackBoxAI automation will dislodge our 2 legged friends in the transition. It'll take a scale of systems engineering witnessed in the Computer revolution AND dislodge humans at scale as the Horseless Carriage dislodged beasts to their greener pastures. Yay for the horse th

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Do people really want to play cards with a robot dealer? It seems a little impersonal to me.

    • Do people really want to play cards with a robot dealer? It seems a little impersonal to me.

      While it may seem impersonal, the growth of online poker should tell you something.

      Also, if you can't find a poker table with a human dealer, will you chose not to play? The casino will control what is available.

  • The level of chaos caused by a major economic change caused by automation is not fixed. It is a variable. If law, social policies and social services develop sensible policies there should be no distress at all. It is only if we wait and try to patch the harm done after it occurs that problems will be severe. For example we currently have Unemployment Insurance and retraining as our mode of social response. That is no longer a valid path. for example currently if a fifty year old worker suffers job lo
  • I love how the researcher believes if we know what cities and what industries will be the worst hit we will start making changes now to avoid the worst outcomes. Maybe they spend too much time in the lab and have not seen how real Americans behave in the real world.
  • And where's the jobs to replace them? And who's going to hire "retrained" folks in their 40s and 50s and 60s?

    I see, so all the folks who lose their jobs should leave everything behind, and go die under a bridge.

    Or perhaps we need a basic minimum national income, a reverse income tax. Of course, I realize that's anti-efficience...

    "Efficiency, n. the speed and frictionlessness that money flows from poor people to rich people", New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson

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