So You Automated Your Coworkers Out of a Job (gizmodo.com) 244
merbs writes: Automation is too often presented as a faceless, monolithic phenomenon -- but it's a human finger that ultimately pulls the trigger. Someone has to initiate the process that automates a task or mechanizes a production line. To write or procure the program that makes a department or a job redundant. And that's not always an executive, or upper-, or even middle management -- in fact, it's very often not. Sometimes it's a junior employee, or a developer, even an intern.
In a series of interviews with coders, technicians, and engineers who've automated their colleagues out of work -- or, in one case, been put in a position where they'd have to do so and decided to quit instead -- I've attempted to produce a snapshot of life on the messy front lines of modern automation. (Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the automators.) We've heard plenty of forecasting about the many jobs slated to be erased, and we've seen the impacts on the communities that have lost livelihoods at the hands of automation, but we haven't had many close up looks at how all this unfolds in the office or the factory floor.
In a series of interviews with coders, technicians, and engineers who've automated their colleagues out of work -- or, in one case, been put in a position where they'd have to do so and decided to quit instead -- I've attempted to produce a snapshot of life on the messy front lines of modern automation. (Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the automators.) We've heard plenty of forecasting about the many jobs slated to be erased, and we've seen the impacts on the communities that have lost livelihoods at the hands of automation, but we haven't had many close up looks at how all this unfolds in the office or the factory floor.
any job that can be automated (Score:5, Insightful)
should be.
Re:any job that can be automated (Score:5, Insightful)
Any job that can be automated will be . End of discussion.
That's right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Any job that can be automated will be . End of discussion.
And where do all those displaced workers go? Rely on the retraining fairy tale?
For one, everyone cannot be retrained for a marketable profession. And who knows what will be marketable by the time they're done.
And only so many people can work in any profession before it gets saturated.
And it's one thing if someone is in say their 20s, but sending a middle aged person for retraining? Even if they could do very well, employers don't like hiring old (over 40) people.
And in the past when workers lost their job
Re:That's right. (Score:5, Interesting)
Rely on the retraining fairy tale?
Yep.
For one, everyone cannot be retrained for a marketable profession. And who knows what will be marketable by the time they're done. And...
And those are all strawman arguments.
Automation doesn't happen overnight. If I automate a production process, it's just one small part of the industry. There are still jobs available for the displaced workers on other lines production lines or in other departments. As an example, they might not be holding the meter, but they would be reading the test report. In the time it takes to automate a whole industry, the oldest workers usually retire, the mid-career ones head toward management, and the youngest (who started their career when automation was starting) are easily able to move, because they're grown alongside the new automated processes.
It's a common fallacy to think that someone like me (occasionally an automation specialist) will come into a factory in the morning, and put a thousand people out of work by evening. The reality is it takes about 20-30 years to fully automate an industry. Automation just shows such promise that most industries (even those that were reluctant in the 1980s) are about halfway down that road now, so people look around and see automation everywhere, and get worried, even though the unemployment rate has actually dropped, and workforce size has stayed relatively flat.
Now, I'm not saying automation isn't disruptive, and in the short term and small scale it can indeed be devastating to a local economy, but at a national scale it isn't going to lead to any major economic collapse.
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"For one, everyone cannot be retrained for a marketable profession"
If this is true (I doubt it, but it might be) then you are saying that those people are useless to society. They should be given a reasonable pension and the freedom to enjoy the remainder of their lives.
The real problem is that some people with very poor education and not much skill have been raking in the cash at certain jobs that are ripe for automation. THOSE people may not be able to be retrained for another job that pays as much. I
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Interesting (Score:2)
People that seem to have no problem with H-1B Visas holder taking US Jobs, are mightily concerned about those jobs going away due to automation.
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More art and handcrafted luxury goods is the answer.
Hollywood, Broadway, Netflix, Video Games, Etsy, Books, etc. are not 'productive' yet employ large numbers of people; and people appreciate things being custom crafted instead of cranked out automatically.
Re:any job that can be automated (Score:5, Insightful)
^^THIS^^ its the fundamental problem with the 'you are a collaborator' in the labor vs capital argument. If *I* don't do it management will find someone who will (and probably with little difficulty). There is not resisting this from the front lines anyway.
There really is no resisting this from the political lines either. One way or another is going to happen because even if we outlawed certain types of automation or chose to forbid certain industries from automating, some other nation would choose not to do so and our industry would simply get wiped out.
There is no choosing people over productivity. If you don't chose productivity you get no products and the people suffer anyway. We must find solutions that allow people to retain their value by moving into new roles.
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Any job that can be automated will be. End of discussion.
Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script
Re:Must be tough for prospective parents (Score:5, Insightful)
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The leading theory that apologists for our dumpster fire of an economic system have come up with is that the 1% will be able to drive enough demand to employ the 99% who will not purchase much beyond the bare essentials of participating in the economy. I'm serious, that's the future they have to offer.
any asshole's job that can be automated (Score:2)
should be, because they're an asshole.
The other option, of course, is to pedantically document work-around for bugs, create instructions, add a few steps to make sure it won't break and then inform the asshole's manager that this is the process to ensure that a certain business process completes properly. A few of these and the asshole will be begging you to automate their job.
Either way, you win.
What do you do with the people out of work? (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep saying this on Automation threads, but there was close to 80 years of strife and unemployment following the industrial revolution before WWI & II came alone (the largest government backed guaranteed jobs programs in history, which I could take the credit for that observation but it was Rob Reich who made it). We blew up most of Europe & Asia and killed tens of millions of working age males. The 20th century equivalent of Aztec sacrifice to cull the population.
Are we gonna do that gain? If not what are we doing to do with all these people? Look at the American Indian reservations before the Casinos if you want to see what life is like for people who aren't needed by anyone. Do we want large masses living like that? If not do we have a solution besides "Wait 80 years for a technological revolution to employ everyone"?
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Re:What do you do with the people out of work? (Score:4, Interesting)
> There's also other professions like the traditional trades (carpentry, plumbing, electricians, etc) that can't be easily automated away.
Sure, but how *many* carpenters, plumbers, etc are needed? Just one sector that's going to be automated to hell in the next 5-10 years is self driving vehicles. In the US alone that is projected to put 4 million drivers out of work. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers. Is there really enough work in trades that 1 in 50 working age adults becomes another one? To put that in perspective there are ~430,000 people in the US with a job that matches the category plumber/pipe fitter/steamfitter, 600,000 electricians and just under a million carpenters. So about 2 million of those 3 trades. If all the displaced drivers took up those trades, there'd be 3x as many of those trades. Do you think the current demand could support that kind of explosion of the workforce? Not from where I'm sitting...
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This is hyperbolic rhetoric from anyone afraid of change in general. Most of the reason that happened is because of the societal shifts that accompanied the industrial revolution. Everyone needed to go from trying to live on a plot of land and do everything themselves to a centralized production model. This required people to relocate and change the mindset of the past. Everyone now needed to congregate to do work, not sit in their shack of choice god knows where and have to understand an entire process
Luddite didn't start out as an insult (Score:5, Interesting)
What new jobs? Be specific? How will anyone buy the things those new jobs product if they don't have money from jobs now? It doesn't take much to get humans to stop progressing. Remember the Dark Ages? 1200 years of no progress and abject poverty for 99% of the population.
It won't be apocalyptic. The world isn't coming to an end. But we're going to have anywhere from 50-100 years of mass unemployment, poverty, social strife and war. This is exactly what happened the last time we had a major industrial revolution. Eventually new tech caught up and employed people, but in the meantime folks suffered. We have history. We know this happened and we know it's happening now. Why not do something about it?
Put another way: When in your life has the solution to a complex problem (mass technology unemployment) been to ignore it and hope for the best (laissez faire)? Because right now that's all I see us doing.
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New Jobs:
Data analyst in many fields to sift through all the new information systems create
Mechanics/technicians to fix the systems in place
Producers of the mechanics/electronics/software platforms for automation specifically (this entails A LOT, there are companies and an industry growing around this concept alone)
Consultants to provide oversight
Contractors to install the engineered components whether that is a bunch of millwrights, electricians, IT staff or any number of other trade jobs
Service techs to p
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At the moment high paying factory jobs (Score:3)
More importantly those low skill jobs (cashier, driver, data entry, back office worker, etc) are what's being automated. So there's going to be nowhere left to go.
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Exactly. How low does your self esteem have to be to cling to a job that's better done by a machine? Go find something useful to do.
Not necessarily (Score:3)
IT is a good example 95%-99% of it can be automated by writing a bunch of script
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For most jobs that have been automated, they weren't really having a good job. Every time I have seen this, it was some guy who really wasn't really good at his general job, but he just did that one thing all the time. He wasn't necessarily happy with his work, it was just what he did, because it was the only thing he could do. Normally after we automate the employee out, we actually hire a new employee who has better skills and we overall can get more things done.
Re: any job that can be automated (Score:4, Interesting)
Give it time. A few more rounds of automation and the average minimum wage person will be able to do the job.
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Subtraction is a bastard.
Re: any job that can be automated (Score:2)
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100% agreed.
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A leisure society* is possible.
* Using the standard of leisure set in 1950
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Well, it seems people really like their cell phones, computers, voice-controlled lights, and all those other luxuries of the ever-advancing modern society, so people keep working.
Those techno-luxuries cost little. Food and transportation costs have gone down since 1950. The big increase is in housing, and even there it is mostly because people today have much more living space. Houses today are twice the size, and families are half the size.
When I was a kid, I shared my bedroom with 3 siblings (two sets of bunkbeds), and the whole family took turns with one bathroom. Today, my kids each have their own room, and my wife and I each have a home office.
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An interesting theory, it would hold together if housing prices had increased 1:1 with housing sizes, but they haven't. You can't get a '50s-sized house for inflation-adjusted '50's house prices today.
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Fix my sink, asshole.
Only management can eliminte jobs (Score:2, Interesting)
Blaming job elimination on non-management workers is like blaming 9/11 the jet passengers.
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A new way to get an employee to quit? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if this would work on a overly righteous but inept employee. Hmmmm.
>> To write or procure the program that makes a department or a job redundant.
I don't know about you, but automating work that people manually previously had to perform is one of the main reasons I enjoy what I do.
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It's especially rewarding when the quality goes up, the speed goes up, and the problems go down.
And it's so much easier to debug and re-run a script than a person.
Nope (Score:2)
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It's also missing the obvious. You are virtue signalling not saving people by deciding to not do the task.
If a job can be automated, someone will do it. Quitting will not prevent this.
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https://i.imgur.com/IPzv0Ny.mp... [imgur.com]
Viva la revolución!!!
Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Involve workers to increase productivity, wages (Score:5, Interesting)
Multiple times I've automated much of the work that a person or department has been doing. In each case, it made the workers more valuable.
I talked to workers and watched them work. Together we looked at what tasks they spent a lot of time on, tasks that could be automated to help them achieve department goals more efficiently, while removing human error from that task. We talked about what their workflow would be after the automation and what additional value they could add after they didn't have to spend time in $menialtask.
Being part of the planning, they were able to think about how they could more effectively accomplish department and organization goals when they were freed up from the time-consuming task we were automating. There are ALWAYS more things the company or department wants to do, worthwhile things for people to work on, that they don't currently have time to do (unless perhaps the company is headed for bankruptcy).
The people I "automated away" didn't sit there and say "well now that I don't have to copy/paste from system A to system B, I'm useless". They said "now that I don't have to copy/paste from system A to system B, I can do these other important things to move the organization forward".
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"The people I "automated away" didn't sit there and say "well now that I don't have to copy/paste from system A to system B, I'm useless". They said "now that I don't have to copy/paste from system A to system B, I can do these other important things to move the organization forward"."
That's great when there is opportunity to do so. Most managers are shit though, and they not only don't know what to do with that employer, or outright won't let them change things either because they don't understand the chan
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While that is unfortunate for you, I don't believe that is the norm at all. I worked over 6 years doing automation in the airline industry which has probably invested more in automation than nearly any other industry except maybe manufacturing and can say that rarely happened/happens. I worked at a lot of sites around the country over those years and due to the culture of it I kept in touch with a lot of people. Generally, managers were eager to move employees on to more valuable work. Still continues t
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This is the beauty of corporations. There's no personal responsibility. It's always someone else to blame.
As a group leader you get ordered to let one of your employees go. It's tough, but you don't have a choice, your department head decided that one of your employees has to be axed and you do it, justifying it thusly that you don't really have a choice.
The department head has to cut his expenses by 10%, so he tries to split the burden, knowing that if he doesn't make his group leaders fire one or two of t
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I do believe them that they actually rationalize this for themselves that way, that it's not just for show and that deep inside they really, really love to see those fired suffer.
People don't want to be "evil". They want to tell themselves at least that they're good people and whenever they have to do something bad, it's done because there was no alternative.
This is what dictatorships are built upon.
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People do tend to believe their own bullshit up to a point. Often times they are trying to rationalize their actions with some simple justification or diffusing responsibility as Opportunist described, but it is unfair to say they don't understand the ramifications of their actions otherwise they wouldn't even bother trying to justify it. It is more of a survival mechanism and comfort as if everyone thought we had to do all these evil things constantly they would most likely go crazy and end up dead possi
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there's the fact that 99% of opinions are both illogical and wrong
You are aware of the irony in this statement and how it alone disproves your assertion right? You are literally stating an opinion about opinions being wrong and using that as the basis for your argument... That isn't proving a damn thing, its just waving your hands around saying out of the billions of people on Earth I am more correct than anyone because I said so. I'm talking about actual evidence to support the position which at best a psychologist might be able to get something with about a 70% confid
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Facts aren't opinions.
I know, that is the point. Saying 99% of opinions are wrong is an opinion because by definition an opinion cannot actually be wrong in the sense of a provable statement. It is merely the particular viewpoint of the person stating it meaning another person's opinion can only be wrong relative to the person reviewing it. That is why you can't use an opinion as the basis of an argument that seeks to prove something as I was suggesting. I seriously feel like I am in a philosophy class right now...
You're wrong there, because if my statements are false they by virtue of their content cannot be used to dispute themselves.
They can b
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I spoke to my manager and she said it was our duty to make things more efficient for our customer and that if we didn't someone else would.
I think that's the really important thing to consider when looking at the impacts of automation, innovation, and efficiency changes.
Amazon vs Sears. Netflix vs Blockbuster. Etc.
If you just hamstring your organization and don't get better, you'll probably keep most of the jobs in the short-term, but lose most of them in the long-term. A few people getting laid off can find new jobs fairly easily. When an entire organization or even department gets shut down, it becomes a lot harder as everyone is now fightin
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This is a fantastic point to bring up actually. Automation has been around for 30+ years, you would think that if it were going to destroy the working world and economy it might have made some progress by now right?
Things are about to get interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Things are about to get pretty interesting in this respect. For the last century we've been focusing on automating physical labour and we've made a lot of headway, but automating data oriented tasks has been kind of ignored. Sure we've introduced computers into the workplace, but we haven't done a lot of work to make sure we are using them efficiently.
I've seen countless organizations who had 2 systems that didn't communicate with one another so they just employed a bunch of people to copy and paste data between them, and never thought of whether it could be done better and/or cheaper if they just did a little bit of programming to glue the systems together.
Very few companies realize how much time they are wasting when they don't have a good system that is tailored to their needs. There are so many companies working in an Outlook + Excel + Word culture where they don't have any real processes, nobody knows what anybody else is doing, and they aren't really taking full advantage of the computers sitting on their desks.
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we need medcare for all in the USA befor the jail (Score:2)
we need medcare for all in the USA befor the jail fills that role.
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There are so many companies working in an Outlook + Excel + Word culture where they don't have any real processes, nobody knows what anybody else is doing, and they aren't really taking full advantage of the computers sitting on their desks.
I've helped a couple of them, with varying levels of success. It really takes management to be not only on board but exemplars of using any new process, or the organization doesn't break that cycle.
One where I was able to mostly break that up (fuck marketing) had some visionary leaders, and they were willing to engage in some workplace disruption for the sake of change. We had gone to a centralized knowledge bank over a sea of personal MS Office docs and personal knowledge, documenting processes and workflo
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organizations who had 2 systems that didn't communicate with one another
Years ago I worked for a telecom in the group of "The Land of Misfit Toys". In other words, all of the weird things that didn't involve mainframes or coordinating 4,096 people at once, or just weird stuff that didn't fit anywhere else. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commision, a state sanity check on telecoms (they make us fix broken user problems or explain exactly why) was tired of everybody faxing incidents and reports back and forth to all of the providers as well as retyping everything all of the ti
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For the last century we've been focusing on automating physical labour and we've made a lot of headway, but automating data oriented tasks has been kind of ignored.
Until the 1950s, a "computer" was the job title of a human. They would hire entire rooms of people to sit and do calculations all day.
Excel? You're not going to believe how many data oriented tasks that has automated.
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As far as I can tell, whenever some large organization decides to deploy some technology, it ends up requiring more people to do the work.
For example, my employer has a web expense claim system. So instead of sending the receipts to someone to review and issue a payment, now we type all the receipts into a web form, print out a report, staple the receipts to it, and send everything to someone to review and issue a payment.
Automation is the goal, not the enemy (Score:3, Insightful)
We all should strive to have a higher standard of living and work less. Automation is not the enemy, bad allocation of resources is.
Good employees are gold (Score:5, Insightful)
I know we're all supposed to fear automation, but the fact of the matter is humans respond best to other humans; there will always be work for people to do.
On that note; if I have a good employee, and I write some code that deprives them of anything with which to pay them for, a few things are happening, and will happen:
1) I was grossly underutilizing the good employee to begin with
2) I will find something else for this good employee to do.
Good employees are like gold; you never throw one away, or waste them in such a manner that they'll go looking for someone to better appreciate them. I realize a lot of managers don't grasp this concept, but enough do that good employees will find one if they keep looking.
Mind you; if I automate someone out of a job, and that's all they're capable of doing, they aren't a good employee. At best, mediocre, but probably lower than that. My payroll is more important to me than their want to waste my money.
Re:Good employees are gold (Score:4)
Right. Every instance of automation I've seen for a knowledge worker (we're not talking factory jobs here) has made them delighted and increased productivity. Smart people use better tools to improve their environment and become smarter knowledge workers. If what they are actually doing is knowledge work.
For those who disagree, please head down to your local library and find a counterargument in an index of journals, pull the article from microfiche when they get it from ILL, and post a photostat to my work address.
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Microfiche? Go pull that hand written source from the dusty shelves, get a scribe to write out a summary, and have a runner deliver it.
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I get all my sources from oral folktales; lemme run down to the senior center and ask them about stories their grandfather told them.
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To add to this, removing a good employee from a job which can be automated means you have one spare good employee. So many managers can't see that automating a job is the exact same thing as saying, "Hey, we've got a great employee who is going to work for free. What could you use them for?" It's always, "We've got one employee too many", in their minds.
It's more often the case that a business could be more productive than it is if it could just shift a few employees around and tweak some things. Sure, cut
Well, Great employees are gold (Score:5, Insightful)
The key here is these are highly skilled and creative people. They're not just workers, they're creators. When you've got people literally making new things for your business yeah, they're gonna be worth while.
This is not to say you can't make money off good employees. But you're going to run into margins at some point. Like the classic pizza example of economics. That first slice is great, and second might even be better, by the third you're pretty much done and you're probably not gonna make it to the crust on #4. Diminishing returns.
The key here is your good employees are "doers". They aren't making new things for you and opening up new markets, they're just servicing the existing markets.
Most of us are "Doers". Some of them are even very, very good at it. But there just aren't that many "creators". Especially in STEM fields. If there were we'd already have flying electric cars and no disease. You're expectations are too high, which sadly is pretty common among small business employers. You want the world, but you don't want to have to pay for it.
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My trade was electronics. I worked in Cable TV. We had just started installing satellite dishes so I wrote a program on an HP programmable calculator to calculate the azimuth and elevation for the 4.5 meter dishes. I was hired by another company who also owned businesses in other industries. They had a Commodore 8032. I wrote a program to calculate the value of the equipment on each pole from a survey using a bicycle wheel with a counter then converting the circumference to feet. This task had been previ
take away $10/hr jobs and create $20/hr jobs (Score:2)
I automated a bunch of tasks that resulted in us hiring less $10/hr positions, but it created $20/hr positions. I was moved to new projects but we needed jr devs on board to support the scripts I left behind. We need more $20/hr jobs, not more $10/hr jobs. The latter isn't going to pull anyone out of poverty.
my first job / project (Score:2)
My first job as an ME intern during college was to help design a machine to automate product inspection.
I was present when the machine was moved into QA department ... right in the center of the human inspectors.
They knew what their new co-worker was about to do and they were staring at me. It was awkward but such is progress.
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that happened everyday
The other way is sad too (Score:4, Insightful)
The other way is sad too. Having employees do busy work that could easily be automated is kind of soul-crushing in its own way. It's like watching someone dig a tunnel with a spoon when you're standing next to them with a shovel.
It's sad to see someone lose their job, especially if they haven't built skills to get their next job. But we would never go the other direction and purposely remove automation and modern tools from people so that we could hire additional folks. The fact that we never choose to go backwards means that we should be wary of being too critical of moving forward.
Re:The other way is sad too (Score:5, Interesting)
When considering IT efforts I like to ask people: "What do you do that makes you feel like a robot?" and/or "What sucks the most?"
That's where efforts should mostly be focused when not purely focused on revenue generation.
There is no shortage of answers to these questions, in any organization.
You will never automate yourself out of a job (Score:2)
Bears repeating: You will never automate _yourself_ out of a job.
Quitting seems like a Quixotic gesture.... just kinda delays the inevitable while they find a new engineer.
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I've done it, so you clearly have no idea what you're talking about, and can safely go away without decreasing the quality of dialogue on slashdot.
Go ahead and automate (Score:2)
We are not there yet (Score:2)
BTDT (Score:2)
I've done this, automating a half-dozen data entry people out of jobs by using clever work* to connect Great Plains to our case management system.
* More specifically using VBScript to read invoice data from our sql database, import the customer and invoice data with Integration manager, and a separate process to record success or failure back to the CMS.
Most of them moved to doing other more interesting work, and a few left the company. I do sometimes feel bad about it, but the work was drudgery. No-one s
Automation for all (Score:2)
I automated myself out of a job (Score:2)
I built Crystal reports and InDesign templates that made my job easy. Then I got fired due to a conflict with the staggeringly incompetent it manager who was the son in law of the acting CEO, who was actually the CFO. Then they wound up hiring two people to replace me. Acting CEO guy is now gone, of course, he doesn't work there at all any more.
Cluster fuckery abounds
Time to lower the full time to 30 hours and up OT (Score:3)
Time to lower the full time to 30 hours and up OT pay. So that 80 hour weeks come with an BIG OT payout.
If your job can be replaced.. (Score:2)
If your job can be replaced by a shell script, you are due for a skills upgrade.
As a SDET, my job is literally to automate people (including myself) out of a job, and that is the goal of most programmers. Just what do people think happened when a secretary was no longer needed to draft a letter, and calculators replaced dozens of engineers computing figures by hand?
Similar story in October (Score:2)
We had a similar discussion back in October about people coding themselves out of a job, and the morality of not telling your employer if you've done that: The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job [slashdot.org].
I feel like this is going to be a rehash of the same arguments.
Been there (Score:2)
Was for a company that sold and repaired tractors. They had a 30 admins (secretaries) that worked on transcribing the time/notes from the mechanics into two other systems (one for their accountants, and one for the actual manufacture that required the information...neither system was optional). Wrote a wrapper app that the mechanics could use that dual entered the information into both systems for them. Once I was done they fired almost all of the admins.
At the same time, this was right before the last b
Eliminating an Entire Section of a Factory (Score:2, Interesting)
Some years ago I worked in the sawmill industry using machine vision and automation tooling. There was a sawmill I visited in Arkansas that was eliminating a huge portion of their workforce because of a piece of equipment they had purchased that sorts lumber automatically. Before they purchased the equipment they had 3 shifts of people picking up lumber as it came out of the mill and sorting it/placing it in the appropriate bins - by width and length and grade. Each shift had about 10 people, so over 30 peo
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I don't particularly see this as a problem. Automation actually has brought in a lot of opportunities that no one has had before. If there was no automation, I would have never built up my plant. I'm seeing more and more people opening up little businesses in their garage thanks to automation. People buying CNC machines, 3D Printing machines and all kinds of things and utilizing their design skills to build unique things.
I'm actually seeing a whole slew of decentralization away from these massive manufactur
And there ain't no replacement jobs (Score:2, Insightful)
Not for a living wage.
I wonder how the idiots who think this is all wonderful will feel when *they* are automated out of a job. Esp. when their job was "automated" by idiots.[1]
In the late seventies and early eighties, there was a lot of blather about how, although factory jobs were being automated and going away, the "information economy" will provide more and better jobs.
These days, there's no blather about anything, because there are no zillions of jobs, other than low-level healthcare assistants who get
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"But those who think it all ought to be automated should be 110% on board with a basic income paid to everyone.[2]"
Absolutely. We *already* do this, we just add all kinds of bureaucracy on top of it to maintain the illusion that having a job makes you better somehow. Most of the western nations have at some point in the last seventy years decided that they were wealthy enough to ensure that every citizen can have their needs met. Automation produces MORE wealth, so in the future we will be able to provide
Who pulled the trigger? (Score:2)
Save the buggy-whipmakers (Score:3)
Or embrace the future.
I automated two people out of a job years ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Literally. This is not an apocryphal story. Their manual job was completely taken over by computer. I then hired them to run the computer system at about twice the pay.
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"The ones losing their job due to automation are dumb people, factory workers, people pushing shelves. They truly desrve it."
Big myth, the people losing their jobs are tech workers and most of them automate themselves and their co-workers out of the job.
Re:bad for dumb people (Score:4, Informative)
"The ones losing their job due to automation are dumb people, factory workers, people pushing shelves. They truly desrve it."
Big myth, the people losing their jobs are tech workers and most of them automate themselves and their co-workers out of the job.
I disagree with who they disparaged, but I also disagree with you too.
I have been doing process automation for 24 years now and no one has ever lost their job because of my work. That was because they were smart enough to not be tied to dead end monotonous jobs and when I presented them with the ability to do a tedious job faster (or not to have to do it manually at all) they used that extra time to perform other tasks.
There is simply always more that needs to be done and automation frees us to work on other things. If someone isn't willing to invest in themselves to learn new skills and find new things to do to stay relevant, it's not the fault of the automation if they lose their job.
Re: bad for dumb people (Score:2)
This.
I automate tasks, I've eliminated or changed a lot of tasks. Elimination of jobs is a management decision. Automating tasks is what I do.
The vast majority of employees I've worked with appreciated me eliminating or reducing the burden of the tasks in question.
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"I automate tasks, I've eliminated or changed a lot of tasks. Elimination of jobs is a management decision. Automating tasks is what I do.
The vast majority of employees I've worked with appreciated me eliminating or reducing the burden of the tasks in question."
Yes that is my experience as well both the workers reaction and the management decision. In my experience you usually automate a piece at a time here and there and it ultimately culminates and people get happier as their jobs get easier, clients get
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Managers simply tell engineers to do a job.
Within a few years that job will be largely automated, because AI can easily tell people what to do, organize and manage, and cut the red tape too, leaving only the part that actually does requires intelligence for humans to do.
FTFY.
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I gather you've never hunted.
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The promotion may have been very useful in her next job search, last job title/pay rate can be important.