Robots Are Taking Some Jobs, But Not All: World Bank (mercurynews.com) 92
Some Amazon stores have no cashiers, and Waymo is testing self-driving taxis. Are robots taking our jobs? It depends on what you do and where you do it, according to a new report by the World Bank released this week. From a report: "Advanced economies have shed industrial jobs, but the rise of the industrial sector in East Asia has more than compensated for this loss," said the report, titled "The Changing Nature of Work." That may seem like good news in a broad sense, but not to the people whose jobs are disappearing. Technological advances and automation are making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
"Workers in some sectors benefit handsomely from technological progress, whereas those in others are displaced and have to retool to survive," the report said. "Platform technologies create huge wealth but place it in the hands of only a few people." The World Bank recommends a new social contract that includes investment in education and retraining. Would that help American workers? "Policy-makers in Washington may have talked about the need to better prepare lower-skilled workers for the future transition, but little has been done," Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, said Thursday.
"Workers in some sectors benefit handsomely from technological progress, whereas those in others are displaced and have to retool to survive," the report said. "Platform technologies create huge wealth but place it in the hands of only a few people." The World Bank recommends a new social contract that includes investment in education and retraining. Would that help American workers? "Policy-makers in Washington may have talked about the need to better prepare lower-skilled workers for the future transition, but little has been done," Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, said Thursday.
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Grandma, how many times do I have to explain they have robots for that too?
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The rational thing to do then is for the lower classes to compost the rich.
This is the well to do telling us not to worry (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, your job might not be automated, but the millions who are about to lose jobs to automation (or already have [ft.com]) aren't just going to go quietly into that good night.
A lot of them will end up destitute. They'll start looking for somebody to solve their problems. A man. A Strong Man.
A lot of them will study and find new jobs. Your jobs. They'll flood the market with new labor and drive down your wages. This is what's meant by "race to the bottom". Some of you will join the ranks of the destitute looking for that Strong Man to save the day...
I keep saying it folks, we've got an election in two years, and it's going to be a turning point. We've seen Democratic Socialism work just fine where it's been tried. There aren't really a lot of other solutions to automation besides a war so big it kills off 30% of the excess workforce. And I don't think that's an option anymore. The rich aren't going to let us break their stuff this time, but we might be able to use the apparatus of Democracy to pry some wealth from their hands.
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Universal Basic Income is not needed to "fix" it?
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We already have automated AI driven tractors. Get with the times buddy... :)
Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry (Score:5, Insightful)
The view of the job-seeker is so short sighted. People have been conditioned to think they *need* to have a job, which causes them to seek jobs, any jobs. If your job can be done more efficiently by a robot, why would you want to do it? If you derive self worth from your work go do something that's useful!
People need money, not jobs. The morality police like to equate the two, because it means people have to go out and do work to get the money they need. But if robots are doing most of the work then fewer people need to work.
I think we are entering a period where our economy changes in very basic ways, based on the above. That will inevitably require changes in the way wealth is distributed, as noted in the summary. I think you're right about the ultimate incentive to do this, but I hope very much that the rioting masses don't demand that the elite invent more useless make-work jobs for them.
lower full time to 32 hours to start with X2 ot 60 (Score:3)
lower full time to 32 hours to start with an X2 ot rate at 60 hours going to X2.5 at 80.
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It's not about morality. Money is simply a medium of exchange.
If you have something I want, and I have something you want, we can trade.
If you have something I want, and I don't have something you want, we have a problem. Money solves this problem because it can be exchanged for anything.
"Something" could be a thing, or it could be labor. That's why we work for money, we are trading our time/work for money. Money isn't really a thing in itself. It represents the value of something we want to trade.
If we sta
Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry (Score:5, Insightful)
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There will be entirely new jobs created by automation. The future will need AI specialists. Mass data specialists. "People have to fix the machines."
All misdirection bullshit. Whatever it is - all of it, every fucking novel labor you can imagine in your wildest dreams, all of them combined - we won't need billions of them.
We're about to lose a whole fucking lost of musical chairs.
"We" not meaning you or I, of course. By comparison, our generation was fucking swimming in "people can offer to labor for their
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I suppose Democratic Socialism works if you’re fine with everyone paying the majority of their income in ta
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Take a look at Norway and such, although we can do better. My models suggest the top tax rate would hit 45% if I got my own wishlist (and it's huge), and then long-term would reduce to around 25%, with the middle-class tax rate actually being negative.
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Norway's top tax rate has been quite similar to that of the U.S. for quite a while. The biggest difference is that in the U.S. you needed to have over 8 times the average income to fall into that bracket, whereas in Norway it was only about 1.6 t
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I would really need to see your figures and reasoning regarding the middle class having a negative tax rate.
I usually carry around a rough worksheet [google.com] on this stuff. The gist is that we can restructure the Federal social insurances to build on top a foundation of a 12.5% universal dividend without cutting services, largely re-basing OASDI (retirement and disability) on top that. For example: you receive $1,500 from retirement and disability each month; under the new system, everyone receive $500 each month, and you receive $1,000 from retirement and disability, so you get a total of $1,500 per month.
This inco
Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry (Score:5, Insightful)
because they're afraid we might start taxing their robots
Okay let's start with this [slate.com].
Not enough pictures, but here's the gist: if the economy only produces hotdogs and buns, automating hotdog manufacture gets you producing 33% more hotdogs with 33% less labor. The journalist screams that millions of jobs have been destroyed, yet unemployment is low because we now need to produce 33% more buns and it takes 33% more labor to do that.
Long ago, we proclaimed America's economy was agriculture. Agriculture became more-productive--we make more agricultural products today than we did when we had 25 million farm workers, and we have fewer than one million farm workers--and there was this economic crisis because the agriculture industry collapsed. America didn't collapse: we got a lot of manufacture jobs.
General Motors was once the biggest company in the world. It was called the "Heartbeat of America". Manufacturing was American employment. We hear this story a lot today [aacnnursing.org]...oh, wrong story. There's a nursing shortage, and nursing is becoming a bigger part of our employment base because manufacturing is so damned productive. We manufacture a lot more today than we did in ages past; now everyone's getting into services--accounting, nursing, lawyering, even fast food.
So what does this have to do with taxing robots?
Imagine if we obsoleted 30% of our workforce.
Now imagine if the products didn't get any cheaper as a portion of income. We spent 40% of the average household income on food in 1900 and 13% in 2000--and in 2000 we ate a lot more food out of home, meaning we spent a lot of that 13% on services (the food number is closer to half that). As the cost of food and transportation went down, we spent money on other things.
"Taxing the robots" freezes economic growth and creates poverty. It's just raising the price for the consumer--or rather preventing the price from falling as jobs vanish.
If you want to turn productivity gains back to workers without increasing consumption, shorten working hours. This actually reduces the number of available jobs, but productivity gains increase the number of available jobs anyway.
There are good reasons to raise minimum wage with productivity and to provide a sort of universal dividend; the reasons you've given are complete bullshit.
I think you're underestimating the upheaval (Score:5, Insightful)
There was close to 80 years of unemployment following the industrial revolution that is seldom talked about (if you took history in high school or college you got maybe a paragraph at best). This is because text book historians like to keep an upbeat tone and because school boards are often staffed by economically conservative (political now) who don't want anyone speaking ill of capitalism. Go find a book called "A People's History of the United States" if you want a sense for how screwed up American history actually is.
In your bun example the problem is that the laid off hot dog makers can't buy hot dogs anymore. So bun sales go down and there are layoffs on that side too. But since it's food any you have to eat the owner of both factories can and will raise their prices (e.g. inflation).
Normally the government steps in here to maintain the food supply, but we've been pushing a right wing, winner take all form of capitalism since Reagan. Add to that food exports and climate change and there's a very real possibility that US citizens will see food shortages. Even if there's enough food to feed us it may be shipped to other markets where folks pay higher prices.
If this happens you'll have millions of folks with guns and no options. Like I said, they'll go find themselves a strong man.
You're hinting that laissez faire capitalism is fine because the system is self correcting. We know from experience that our food supply (and our health care system while I'm on the subject) are _not_ self correcting. We know what robber barons. We know what farm subsidy programs are for and we know that penicillin for children used to be watered down.
Bottom line: When in your life has the correct solution to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it goes away? Because that's more or less what you're suggesting.
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You're hinting that laissez faire capitalism is fine because the system is self correcting
Nope, I'm suggesting that the jobs aren't all going away forever and that the economy actually doesn't work in this magical way people imagine.
The main point, however, is that the proposed solution is wrong. The proposed solution is to ensure the jobs never come back by ensuring the need for labor goes down while the prices don't.
When in your life has the correct solution to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it goes away? Because that's more or less what you're suggesting.
Oh, the correct solution is to correct how minimum wage works and provide a universal dividend. Basically, all the shit you're babbling about with our economy isn't a food sh
What you're missing (Score:4)
So computers/machines will become increasingly superior (more effective and more cost-effective) to more humans for more categories of work.
So every time you say, increasing productivity increases production and adds more jobs, I will say that going forward, increasing productivity increases production and adds more work for computers and machines, with no net increase in human jobs.
Pre-inflection-point economic models won't work after the "machines are more effective and more cost-effective than humans" inflection point.
You can say, well that's never happened before, so it won't happen this time. And I will say "That's a simplistic and overly conservative way of predicting the future".
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we are hitting an inflection point where computers and computerized machines are getting better than (most) humans at most types of work.
You mean someone actually invented the power loom? Oh, or were you talking about the wooden shipping pallet? The air-drive frame nailer?
You can say, well that's never happened before, so it won't happen this time.
I'm saying that's what has happened repeatedly. You're missing something: you surmise there will be no net-increase in human jobs because you don't understand where human jobs come from.
We don't invent jobs. We don't say, "Ah, now humans can make a new widget!" We simply respond to demand. Humans become more productive by employing machines, and so there is less t
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productivity will tend toward infinity, as automation takes over.
(Yes, you can automate goal formation, prioritization, management, planning based on counterfactual reasoning and probability and situation models etc etc etc., not just drudge work.) Eventually, you could get fully automated DAOs doing business with each other to get stuff done/made.
Productivity -> infinity
Demand -> who knows. Studies sho
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At infinity, governments or independent organizations make a magical infinite-goods machine once--the machine takes care of itself and does all the work, no human input.
Below that point, the same thing happens as has happened for the past hundreds of thousands of years.
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if the economy only produces hotdogs and buns, automating hotdog manufacture gets you producing 33% more hotdogs with 33% less labor.
That's fair. But here's another example. If the service economy has fast-food-cashiers and trash cleaners, then automating fast-food-cashiers won't do anything. That's because the rate of service is limited by the rate of customers, which is already being met fine.
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That's because the rate of service is limited by the rate of customers, which is already being met fine
We have people outside begging for money to buy a hamburger at McDonalds. I've spent over $650 in one month to feed MYSELF eating fast food all the time. Are you telling me that if people had twice the money or fast food cost half as much that there wouldn't be more fast food sales per year?
Likewise, you're shifting from an economic model that's ridiculous in one way to one that's ridiculous in another way. When we try to address the obvious flaws in the hotdog model, we end up looking at an economy w
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The problem is, we also automate making buns. True, that makes hotdogs cheaper, but unless it makes them cost zero, the out of work hotdog and bun makers can't afford them.
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True, that makes hotdogs cheaper, but unless it makes them cost zero, the out of work hotdog and bun makers can't afford them.
The trick here is that only a portion of the population is out of work. In the real world it's usually something like 0.1% to 0.3% due to a factory shutting down or moving or whatnot. The other 99% can buy just fine, and the reduction in cost creates booming demand...somewhere. Maybe not for hotdogs. Somebody invents the hamburger.
When 5% of the jobs go away, you get the 2008 Great Depression. When 25% of the jobs go away, you get the 1932 Great Depression.
Basically, if the cost doesn't go to zero
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It works out OK for the producers, but not so well for the people who used to make the hot dogs. Especially since the same technology likely makes other fast foods as well.
It doesn't work out so well for the producers if similar tech puts others out of work as well.
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but not so well for the people who used to make the hot dogs
Right. The particular individuals (microeconomy) are generally SOL. You have social insurances and other government initiatives to clean that up.
The macroeconomics are that your unemployment rate is fine and the numbers prove it works out well for everybody. "Everybody" is a mass noun. What actually happens is town A collapses and town B fills with wealthy Silicon Valley workers as the industries shift around, so 10,000 unemployed over here become 12,000 new jobs over there.
It's a structural change
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It is easy to fix, but hard to sell the fix until those 12,000 in A who are in no way qualified for one of the jobs in B decide that survival means they need to use their guns and knives.
I would argue that the latter has already happened. Violent drug selling gangs, for example. They don't do it because it's easy money, they do it because there's a job opening.
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It is easy to fix, but hard to sell the fix until those 12,000 in A who are in no way qualified for one of the jobs in B decide that survival means they need to use their guns and knives.
Those cities become crime-riddled and folks decide that the people are like that because they're bad people. The guns and knives thing actually makes it harder to sell.
It's basically a liquidity problem. In Baltimore City, you'll get on the light rail when a fair is in town and people will be there with money, having shown up at 8am and worked until they got kicked out. They go right back the next day. There are people wandering around telling people they need jobs in these high-poverty, high-unemploy
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In other words, a particular implementation of the Universal Basic Income. I agree that UBI is a proper solution to the problem.
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A particular demogrant, yeah. This one is self-managing and doesn't attempt to supply income to cover basic needs; rather it supplies a share of all income by way of pay-in-pay-out (you pay X% in, you get R/p out for R revenue and p population).
Essentially it's a negative income tax. The zero point is ((R/p)/X%): if the premium is 2% and the payment is $1,400/year, the break-even for a one-adult household is $70,000 and for a two-adult household is $140,000. Everyone below that point is getting a net
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If you're not supporting people, you still get the same downward spiral effect since the jobless still can't support themselves without crime which drives out business which makes more jobless, etc.
You also lose the boost in entrepreneurship and the ability to shut down welfare and food stamps as well as eliminate minimum wage.
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If you're not supporting people, you still get the same downward spiral effect since the jobless still can't support themselves without crime which drives out business which makes more jobless, etc.
That's what your welfare system is for. The Dividend won't pay for your apartment; it will make you less-poor so HUD can pay for your apartment with less funding. HUD gives housing assistance to 1 in 4 qualified recipients; the remainder go on a waiting list, often for 10-15 years.
Welfare goes away when you get work, even if the economy is not yet coupled to the outside economy, which causes welfare stasis: the area stays in depression. The Dividend keeps pushing, so it lifts the economy even when ev
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There are two forces at work with automation.
1) is making productivity go up- and making everyone wealthier. A robot that makes 100 widgy-ma-call-its for the same cost as man making 10 means we're all better off- the cost of a widgy-ma-call-it is less for us.
2) Naturally, that means some people lose jobs. Fortunately, economies are fairly dynamic and new jobs get created. We spend less buying widgets from Walmart than we used to, so now we can afford someone to mow our lawns, or cut our hair. Some jobs
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Now if only the wages were going up instead of staying stagnant while inflation increases, at least on necessities. Food, heat, shelter all going up faster then wages while luxuries come down to keep the official inflation rates low.
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Now if only the wages were going up instead of staying stagnant while inflation increases, at least on necessities. Food, heat, shelter all going up faster then wages while luxuries come down to keep the official inflation rates low.
That is true, currently, although I don't blame that on automation. That's really only been a phenomenon for the last few years; automation has been going on far longer than that.
and usa will need healthcare for all befor the jai (Score:2)
and usa will need healthcare for all before the jail becomes that.
say you need daily insulin with no insurance it can be win / win for them and lose / lose for us.
Win as it steal it works both ways get it for free or go to jail / prison where the system is forced to pay for it. and lose / lose as both ways others take to take up the costs of that.
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>> We've seen Democratic Socialism work just fine where it's been tried
*Citation needed.
Seriously, what are you talking about? Are you making the classic mistake of using small, homogeneous countries with small populations, high taxes, and tight immigration controls as models for what would work in the U.S.? This automation-employment issue is sufficiently complicated enough that asserting the "more government" solution is at best naive and, at worst, exploiting a presumed-yet-unknowable future crisis
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Y'know, they were saying the same thing back a century or so when combines and harvesters and tractors were going to cost all the farmers and farmhands to lose their jobs.
And they were right!!! 80+% of the people used to be farmers. And now it's closer to 5%! It's almost amazing we've been able to hold things together so long wit
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I keep saying it folks, we've got an election in two years, and it's going to be a turning point. We've seen Democratic Socialism work just fine where it's been tried.
Democratic socialism is not what is being offered.
Wait till .... (Score:2)
Your viewpoint is entirely obsolete (Score:2)
So stop complaining about old, mostly irrelevant problems, and focus on the real current issue: What are we here for, and should we support each other, regardless of increasingly rare work-usefulness.
Blaming foreigners, with the coming tech-storm, is outrageously evil and misguided. It's nothing but sad.
wrong target (Score:5, Insightful)
" the need to better prepare lower-skilled workers "
IMHO, it's not lower skilled workers who should worry. It's high-skilled, highly-specialized workers. It's a big drop in pay from a "senior [X]" position to "new hire" in some other job category.
And that's assuming anyone will hire an old fogy into a new hire position.
This comes up every 50 years or so. (Score:2)
About every 40-50 years worries about machines will take our jobs. Unlike the last half century ago they are so much more advanced and this time they will be able to do it.
What seems to happen isn't that they take jobs, but change them.
The Amazon store with no cashier. For most retail stores that I have seen there are rarely just Cashier only jobs. They will be doing stocking, cleaning, customer help. So while each Amazon store would need less employees, with the increased profit margin the store can ope
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So while each Amazon store would need less employees, with the increased profit margin the store can open more locations and in general higher more employees.
Amazon uses more automation, people only buy so much stuff, if Amazon opens more locations then the total number of retail jobs falls.
See nobody addressed this issue (Score:1)
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This is the worst scenario (Score:4, Insightful)
If robots can take ALL jobs (in relatively short period of time,) then human race will be liberated from labor, products and services will cost next to nothing, and people can do whatever they like or just vacationing all year round. The problem is that robots take only incrementally more and more jobs but slowly. So on one hand, increasing number of people have no work and no income, yet at the same time, the demand for those other jobs such as healthcare or elder cares are not decreasing, but yet people are not willing to pay for those jobs still requiring human (because those other people needing the services have no jobs.)
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Resorting to personal attack is a symptom of paranoia and hysteria.
worker's toolbox (Score:2)
Workers have to own their robots.
A robot is your toolbox.
Some workers have their tools supplied by the boss.
A good tradesman has his own tools and keeps them sharp and fit for purpose.
Well tradies, robots are your new tools, code is your sharpening stone.
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New social contract (Score:2)
The World Bank recommends a new social contract that includes investment in education and retraining.
That means pulling money from the companies that won from automation, which in turn implies to seriously work against tax evasion.
Robots are prohibitively expensive (Score:2)
No, not the mechanical thing itself. Robots are expensive to integrate into a process.
Buy an industrial robot for, say, $10,000. It will cost many times that to train it to do the job you want it to do. Then, if the job changes, you have to train it again. And again.
We're nowhere near being able to get robots to take over jobs that are not repetitive and routine.