Only 25 Percent of Occupations In US Are At 'High Risk' For Losing Jobs From Automation, Study Finds 205
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Automation is coming, but not for everyone. Researchers at the Brookings Institution estimate just 25% of occupations in the US -- in production, food service, and transportation -- are at "high risk" for losing jobs from the advance of automation. "Automation is not the end of work," said Mark Muro, policy director for the Brookings Institution's program on urban economies and co-author of a study published Jan. 24. Most occupations will see specific tasks assumed by machines, but much of their labor will likely be enhanced, rather than fully replaced, through automation, the study found. That's because automation rarely replaces entire jobs, but instead handles specific tasks in occupations that often require hundreds of them.
To forecast the effects, Brookings researchers looked at thousands of specific tasks within each occupation, and the degree to which automation could handle them, coming up with a risk rating for each occupation. The workers most vulnerable are in transportation, production, food preparation, and office administration, which, combined, make up about 36 million jobs, or 25% of the total jobs in the US today. In these occupations, roughly 70% of tasks were considered routine and predictable, prime targets to be managed by machines. The most vulnerable were "packaging and filling machine operators" (100% exposure to automation), food preparation workers (91%), payroll and timekeeping clerks (87%), and light-truck and delivery drivers (78%).
To forecast the effects, Brookings researchers looked at thousands of specific tasks within each occupation, and the degree to which automation could handle them, coming up with a risk rating for each occupation. The workers most vulnerable are in transportation, production, food preparation, and office administration, which, combined, make up about 36 million jobs, or 25% of the total jobs in the US today. In these occupations, roughly 70% of tasks were considered routine and predictable, prime targets to be managed by machines. The most vulnerable were "packaging and filling machine operators" (100% exposure to automation), food preparation workers (91%), payroll and timekeeping clerks (87%), and light-truck and delivery drivers (78%).
Only? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those people aren't going to go quietly into the good night. Forget violence, a lot will start gunning for _your_ job. It'll be a race to the bottom like you've never seen before where the only winners will be the ones that own the robots pitting us against each other for their profit and amusement. You'll be lucky to make min-wage with a 4 year degree there'll be so many desperate workers.
There's a reason I can get a competent programmer in India for $30k/yr instead of $120k/yr, there's too damn many of them. If you don't want your standard of living to go to hell now's the time to do something about it. And no, buying lottery tickets or hoping your gonna get rich off your MCSE doesn't count.
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It'll be a race to the bottom like you've never seen before where the only winners will be the ones that own the robots pitting us against each other for their profit and amusement.
So what you're saying is, study hacking and robotics?
Re:Only? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's 25% of occupations, not 25% of jobs.
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Virtually 100% of the carriage making industry has been lost. There were 13,000 of those businesses in 1890, now they're pretty much all defunct. There's almost nobody who hand spins thread for a living anymore, either. That used to employ vast numbers of people, mostly across the South.
Fortunately, there is literally no limit to the amount of work available for people to do, just a lack of people to be available to do it. Specific jobs have been being destroyed by automation for hundreds of years. Yes, the
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Some more recent examples: Telephone switching equipment put hundreds of thousands of switchboard operators out of work. ATMs put thousands of tellers out of work (although overall bank employment went up). Typesetters are gone. "Secretary" is mostly a job that no longer exists. Same for "filing clerk".
Yet somehow, despite all these jobs disappearing, we have a full employment economy, and our economy has grown 500% since 1960.
30% of workers change jobs annually, and many of them switch to different oc
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Filing clerks didn't go away at all, they're called "data entry specialists" or something now.
Secretary is now called either Executive Assistant or Receptionist depending on their level of duties.
Telephone switchboard operators and typesetters are better examples because it was a different person doing the work after the change. ;)
Bank tellers are a mediocre example because those are low level jobs where people would eventually get promoted to something else in the bank anyways, so few actual jobs were lost
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Filing clerks didn't go away at all, they're called "data entry specialists" or something now.
No they're not. A file clerks job was to take a piece of paper and put it in a file. At that time everything was recorded on paper and had to be filed. A data entry specialist is someone who takes information on a form printed on paper and enters it into a computer. Very few places use this method to enter data into a system and those that do are rapidly disappearing. In almost every case direct entry of data is done by someone else whose job is not data entry, such as the mechanic who will start to work o
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Did you seriously just claim we have "rising wages" and "better living standards"?
NO, I did NOT say that. What I said was we had rising wages and living standards while jobs were being automated.
Automation leads to higher productivity, making labor more valuable, and thus leads to higher wages.
They've been stagnant for a long time.
They have indeed, and this is due to stagnant productivity growth [nytimes.com]. The problem is not automation, but a lack of automation. Manufacturing and agriculture jobs were easy to automate back in the 20th century, but those days are over, and modern service jobs are proving much harder to make more pro
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While I agree with your point I think we need a better metric than employment rates or measuring success.
The UK had fairly decent levels of employment, but a large number of those jobs were of very low quality. Often they were "zero hour contracts", where the company calls you up to tell you how many hours you get to work that week. There are also a lot of low paid jobs which while technically employment leave the worker living on benefits, essentially passing the cost on to the taxpayer.
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Over time? Yeah, people don't train for jobs that no longer exist. Once cars became mainstream, people stopped learning to be horse & buggy drivers, but the people who already were that lost their jobs, and had to find other lines of work. Same w/ typesetters. ATM tellers were one group of people who could learn other skills in the bank that had not been automated (although an ATM can't (yet) give me a roll of quarters, or a few tens, which is why I still go to a human teller)
It's the same thing h
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Bullshit, if you were a carriage company when the automobile showed up, you kept making the carriages and started adding tow hitches.
The reason there are less companies doing it is because of consolidation. And that consolidation is made possible by their own products!
Carriage companies became trailer companies. There are many more trailers being made, and people employed making them, than there ever were carriages.
Find better examples, like a product that actually stopped being made, instead of just one th
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It turned out that bicycle manufacturers were much better equipped to make auto-related products. The carriage companies were essentially wood-based, with lots of carpenters making stuff. They all went away. Studebaker lasted the longest by actually somewhat successfully pivoting into automobiles, but even they were eventually absorbed with only the brand name remaining.
Re:Only? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a false equivelancy because in your example, those jobs that were displaced were recreated doing something else in a similar field.
With automation, those jobs are gone .. poof .. no similar spot to take its place.
In an ideal world, everyone else would just work less hours, but that won't get around the reality of it being easier to push the remaining people harder than it is to lessen their load at the bosses expense.
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His example is unconvincing, as you rightfully pointed out, but general look at the history of humanity shows that we recovered from every single problem we had. :-) In this generic aspect he was right.
The solution would be some kind of society where (a) a lot more is given to unemployed than now in US (b) a lot more policing (Orwellian to the bone, Kafkaesque in implementation, Huxleyan in the results) is done against disenfranchised population depressed for the reason of being useless to the society.
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That's what baffles me about these discussions. Every time we talk about automation, someone comes on and posts about how industries were lost in the past, but we always found new things for people to do. That completely ignores the giant problem of machines being faster and better at so many things that there increasingly will be nothing productive for us to really do.
AI just crushed some of the greatest Starcraft players in the world. That's an insanely high level of organization, management, and efficien
Re: Only? (Score:5, Insightful)
Automation frees up limited resources to improve profits for an increasingly smaller number. The value of automation is seen by the wealthy more so than the poor. For the poor it is an added expense, an additional pressure towards a minimum level of capacity to be competitive and remain employed. Because there is a sufficient supply of optimal labor, inefficient sub-optimal labor is unnecessary. Inefficient sub-optimal labor has a lower return on investment, if it has one at all, and thus has no economic incentive to fund the life towards automation and optimization.
How much does it cost to automate your home? To replace appliances and devices with more energy efficient alternatives? To install double-paned or other more moder window types? To replace a vehicle with an energy efficient alternative, or one with greater capacity and accident mitigation technology to reduce the risk of damage. Can one afford to live within a city on the income provided by said city?
We are raising the cost of entry while simultaneously lowering the return on investment.
An Alaskan said it best when he said that he feels sorry for those of us on the mainland, because Alaskans can live off the land.
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>An Alaskan said it best when he said that he feels sorry for those of us on the mainland, because Alaskans can live off the land.
I am not sure I understand what that means. Is it sarcastic? I need a sarcasm sign.
Did he really mean that Alaskans live off the land (which is patently not true - Alaska is heavily subsidized) - then I do not really see a point. How is that relates to "We are raising the cost of entry while simultaneously lowering the return on investment."
If he is sarcastic then I do not see
I've said this before (Score:3)
It took a _long_ time for technology to catch up. The Luddites died jobless. Their kids did too. There were decades of unemployment and social strife following the industrial revolution until the two [wikipedia.org] greatest [google.com] employment programs in history restored full employment.
The tech that came out of the war (and the mad rush to rebuild the world) kept us going for t
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The actual Luddites went on a spree of violence and were either killed, or arrested and transported to Australia. The Luddite resistance only existed for a couple of years.
In terms of the general population, England's employment issues of the time were more related to lots of recently discharged soldiers and sailors (300K all at once) at the same time as a big population boom (50% increase between 1801 and 1831). By 1834, many factories in England were complaining about a shortage of available labor, althou
You're straw manning (Score:2)
Luddite resistance only existed for a few years because they were brutally oppressed.
The discharged soldiers just show that their economy couldn't absorb an uptick in workers. What do you think will happen when we put 10-25% of a population of 350 million+ out of work.
And employers are _always_ complaining about a shortage of employees. Nothing new there.
I'm not saying we should resist these patterns (you're putting
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This means we're not gonna have wars save us this time. The next industrial revolution is upon us in the form of computerized automation. I've never _once_ heard a credible explanation of exactly what jobs we're all gonna retrain for. That's because there isn't one. You say that it's just that I can't imagine those jobs? That's because by the time they're available I'll be dead and I'll have died dirt poor.
We were saved by two humongous wars a result of which about 100 million people died (directly during the war...so we can make this number bigger)? Guess who did the vast majority of dying? Rich folks? No. The poor and the middle classes...
Yes, I'm saying that you just can't imagine those jobs - and no, not because you'll be dead by the time they're available (unless you are already an octogenerian), but simply because you can't imagine them. Some of the jobs which are widespread today (social media coordina
There's a saying among cynics (Score:2)
If I can't imagine the job then it's not going to exist on a time frame that matters to me or even my kids. The resulting technology unemployment, OTOH, will exist.
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Nonsense. There are now just a few dozen companies, but there are at least 4x as many people, so presumably at least 4x as many (horseless) carriages, and probably more given that most families only had one carriage, and the average family probably has 2.5 cars or something.
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Carriage companies didn't turn into automobile companies. Woodworkers didn't make the best car makers. Instead, bicycle companies turned into automobile companies and their suppliers. The Carriage companies literally went away, with only one (Studebaker) lasting for very long, before it also went out of business and the brand name (not the workers) was absorbed by a car company.
At one point, 70-80% of everyone was employed in agriculture, primarily as labors. Now 1% is. That's way more jobs "going away" tha
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This is true for some, but not nearly all, workers. The fields directly related to automation such as programming are in high.demand and have seen wages grow, but this is not the case for jobs requiring less education. As automation becomes more and more commonplace, it means the
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Fortunately, there is literally no limit to the amount of work available for people to do, just a lack of people to be available to do it.
There's also a lack of people willing to pay them to do it. There's lots of things that need doing that nobody has figured out how to profit from, and they're going undone. For example, meaningful fire prevention for California, reclamation of regions desertified by human activity, etc. But then there's the flip side of that argument, which is that those activities can be automated as well, and they will be eventually. So no, there is a limit to the amount of work available for people to do. Under capitalis
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Please don't read into what I said things which I didn't say. No need for strawmen.
There is literally no limit to the amount of work available for people to do. Once we've converted this solar system to our liking, we can move on to the rest of the universe. Then we can redo it all again. There are an infinite amount of possibilities for something useful for someone to do, which is all that work is.
New opportunities for work become practical as we gain more technology or figure out ways to accomplish existi
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There is literally no limit to the amount of work available for people to do.
Ugh, stop saying that. It was meaningless the first time you said it, and it's still meaningless. The amount of work which could be done in the universe isn't necessarily going to be done by humans, nor should it.
Once we've converted this solar system to our liking, we can move on to the rest of the universe. Then we can redo it all again.
No, we can't. Ever heard of entropy? There's a limit to how much can physically be done before it results in the heat death of the universe. And on a more personal note, we are using up more natural capital than is being replenished here on Earth. At this rate, we are not actually going to make it
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This could happen already. It turns out that having an actual knowledgeable person in the class matters a great deal, because passive learning doesn't work nearly as well as active learning.
The other things, yes, but education probably won't be automated for a long time to come.
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so it might be even worse then 25% of jobs!
if those happen to be just those 25% of jobs that employee the majority of the people.
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Maybe you should read and understand the article instead of scaring yourself needlessly.
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Calm downand read Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut.
There is nothing to worry about, they'll find something else to do!
Humans are nothing if not engines for creating a feeling of purpose!
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Yeah, it'll be even worse than the introduction of tractors and harvesters to farming was! Admittedly, the impact on farming jobs only meant that farming jobs went from 80%+ of the population to 5% effectively overnight. Not nearly so bad as this will be....
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People start rioting at even 20% unemployment. And that 25% of jobs displaced would produce WAY more than 20% unemployment, and would also disproportionately affect working-class jobs (you know, the people who have the least to lose by rioting).
So yeah, that would not be good.
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>Do you have any idea what losing 25% of the jobs effectively overnight (that's what "at risk" implies) means?
I do not have the slightest idea either, since I do not know how many workers are for each of the jobs. I seriously doubt that researchers analyzed "thousands of specific tasks within each occupation". They analyzed some occupation and then they extrapolated it on the rest of the jobs.
A simple crucial information needed. Without this information we can't say.
Logically, I would assume that researc
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Precisely! They talk like 80 million people losing their jobs is no big deal. Maybe we should work on automating the work that Brookings does, and then see how their staff feels about it.
The biggest problem is the assumption that elitists make - just go and find a job in a new line of work, develop a new skill... Sure, b'cos any trucker who loses his job to a self driving truck or an Amazon Scout can simply learn Java or Python or whatever language fad of the moment there is at the time, move to a shit
Re:Only? (Score:4, Informative)
If one missing comma makes it that hard for you to understand, maybe you should just turn off the computer, get another drink, and watch some teevee.
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Bourgeois are the tradespeople who own their own tools. The canonical example would be the cobbler (shoemaker) who owns his own shop and lives upstairs.
This is why you commies always fuck shit up so bad; you can't even figure out that it is the factory owner who shits on the factory worker! You're too busy hating on people doing things for themselves to even notice the causes of your own suffering.
My advice: be less jealous, and more greedy.
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The cheapness of my company is also the reason why my job isn't at risk of automation, they look to save money for this quarter, and will never make the up front investment to automate my job. Ship it off to India if they can, but automate it? No.
I also wri
25% of the Country Rioting (Score:2)
The Great Depression never had the unemployment rate go much over 10%. Imagine what would happen to a society with a permanent 25% unemployment rate. Most companies are already one down quarter away from massive layoffs, so don't expect them to absorb the losses. The unemployment would also hit all consumer-oriented businesses, leading to a vicious cycle. We won't cleanly have full employment one day, then a SOTU address saying "Good news, you don't have to come in to work tomorrow. ALL jobs have been fully
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More like 25%. 13 % under Reagan. Both U3 numbers. Obama hit about 10%. U3 unemployment. So think about Regan and Obama's unemployment rates and then double them if 25% of the workforce is displaced.
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Guess I misremembered. Swear I read a Slashdot headline several years ago where economists found the unemployment rate would never go above X% because at that point people will be willing to take any job in exchange for food. The Great Depression was used as an example of this. Of course I can't find it now.
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More like 25%. 13 % under Reagan. Both U3 numbers. Obama hit about 10%. U3 unemployment.
Taking the U3 seriously is a sign of mental illness. At least use U6.
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Guess (Score:2)
This includes sex workers, if we can keep the neo-sex-luddite SJWs from dictating sex bots shall be illegal. They will be worse than the remants of the religious.
A prediction. Write it down.
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Wait, what? You thought SJWs were a type of puritan?!
LMFAO When you make it to the surface, a word of caution: Those aren't mutants, tattoos, colored hair, and body piercings are simply normal fashion now. Also, those are the SJWs.
cascading effect of automation (Score:2)
and of those 25% (Score:2)
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actually 100% (Score:2)
If you lose your job it is 100% job loss. Never forget that.
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Now the hard question. (Score:2)
When the time comes and an entire sector is laid off in a period of a year or so, are we going to stick to our "free market" guns and leave these people to fend for themselves (hello crime wave) or will we do the right thing and implement something like UBI?
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When the time comes and an entire sector is laid off in a period of a year or so, are we going to stick to our "free market" guns and leave these people to fend for themselves (hello crime wave) or will we do the right thing and implement something like UBI?
There are other options. We could limit legal immigration, stop illegal immigration, and retrain the workers. If only we had more politicians who were actually on the citizens side. I hope the US gets a working class party before things get too out of hand.
Re:Now the hard question. (Score:5, Interesting)
We could limit legal immigration, stop illegal immigration..
Can you explain why you're worried about immigrants taking your jobs, but fine with robots taking them?
What's your position on immigrant robots?
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Immigrants cost society money. Robots cost their owners money.
One gets needs subsidized medicine, the other doesn't. One has children that need to be taught by teachers. The other only needs a "dd" command. One goes on welfare when they're no longer able to work. The other goes into the recycling bin.
If you want decent UBI, or any kind of social program really, those poor illegal immigrants will have to stop coming.
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There's nothing wrong with them wanting that, but if you let them come and immediately give them handouts, that's what they'll come for and we'll go bankrupt trying to take care of them all.
Your choices are:
1. Don't let them come
2. Let them come, but don't have social services for anyone
3. Let them come, but keep them as 2nd class citizens who don't receive social services
4. Let in only the best people, those who don't need social services
The early parts of US history was dominated by #2. Then as we started
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There's nothing wrong with them wanting that, but if you let them come and immediately give them handouts, that's what they'll come for and we'll go bankrupt trying to take care of them all.
Where's you're evidence for this? Immigrants pay taxes, just like everyone else. Immigrants are also less likely to take advantage of public services. If you look at something like social security, illegal immigrants are a boon for the system, because they are contributing to something that they will never be able to take advantage of. There are many, many economic benefits from immigration, and if we didn't have lots of immigration, we would be facing the same problems Japan is having. If you look at the GDP projections over the next few decades, the US is going to struggle to maintain economic dominance, just because population is exploding in many other countries, and GDP growth is tightly related to population. When you think about it, there are only two ways to increase GDP: add more people, or increase your per-capita GDP. China, India, and many countries in Africa have massive population growth, and are simultaneously improving per-capita GDP rapidly. Clamping down on immigration, which has made the US what it is, is going to slow our economic growth at a time when many other places are accelerating and becoming far more competitive.
But what the liberals are proposing now simply won't work. You can't have everyone come and then also take really good care of them.
Liberals aren't generally proposing this - they've voted regularly in favor of increased funding for border security.
You're conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants as a group are less likely to take advantage of us. Illegal immigrants, and anchor babies, are far more likely to take advantage. By mixing the positive stats of legal immigrants with the negative stats of illegal immigrants you're painting a rosy picture that isn't true. Indeed it's this type of shady use of language that keeps many Americans from understanding the true impacts of illegal immigration. Citations: https://cis.org/Rep [cis.org]
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You're conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants as a group are less likely to take advantage of us. Illegal immigrants, and anchor babies, are far more likely to take advantage.
It's been shown time and again that illegal immigrants 1) contribute more than they consume and 2) commit less crimes than the background rate, because they are trying to keep a low profile. So even if they are more likely to take advantage, they're still a net positive. We also take actions that cause these people to come here, like when we interfere with their democratic processes, or with our War On Some Drugs. If you look at where people are coming from when they come here, it's overwhelmingly from coun
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You're conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants as a group are less likely to take advantage of us. Illegal immigrants, and anchor babies, are far more likely to take advantage.
It's been shown time and again that illegal immigrants 1) contribute more than they consume and 2) commit less crimes than the background rate, because they are trying to keep a low profile. So even if they are more likely to take advantage, they're still a net positive. We also take actions that cause these people to come here, like when we interfere with their democratic processes, or with our War On Some Drugs. If you look at where people are coming from when they come here, it's overwhelmingly from countries we've shit upon in a well-documented fashion. If you don't want refugees here, then stop supporting politicians who will create them.
Since it's been shown time and time again how about some citations? I usually include some, and you haven't refuted the ones I listed.
We also take actions that cause these people to come here, like when we interfere with their democratic processes, or with our War On Some Drugs. If you look at where people are coming from when they come here, it's overwhelmingly from countries we've shit upon in a well-documented fashion.
If you feel bad about this, as some do, I propose that *you* take them in. That's an immigration process I could get behind. If you have skin in the game I suspect that you won't be quite so cavalier. Seriously though if you think that letting in immigrants even makes a dent then you need to see the scale o what we're talking about. Here's a quick video that will give
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I guess you're not aware of California trying to give medicare to illegal immigrants [latimes.com].
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Immigration is one of the biggest drivers of economic growth. Every capitalist knows this. Here's a short writeup at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative thinktank: http://www.aei.org/publication/how-immigration-boosts-american-economic-growth-and-innovation/
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The robots dont request chain migration for generations of more robots.
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The robots dont need years of a tax payer funded education and free city health care.
The tech cos that make them took a bunch of federal dollars, hate to break that to ya.
The robots dont request chain migration for generations of more robots.
A robot can make thousands more robots. Better put back on that white hood, buddy. You got work to do.
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Robots do not join MS13, they only join Skynet.
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We could limit legal immigration, stop illegal immigration..
Can you explain why you're worried about immigrants taking your jobs, but fine with robots taking them? What's your position on immigrant robots?
I didn't say I was fine with the robots, however I see that as being more beyond our control. Moreover robots could be used for the greater good, immigration can't. To help you understand the scale of mass immigration I'd suggest this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] In terms of why I suggested limiting immigration - it's simply that if robots create a shortage of jobs then limiting immigrants helps the citizens get the jobs that remain. Limited skilled immigration is a good thing. Mass immigr
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There are other options. We could limit legal immigration, stop illegal immigration, and retrain the workers.
Sorry but that wouldn't even help help because of the very short time period on which automation will wipe out a sector. As for retraining workers, what do you think training millions of people to do various trades is going to do to the wages of each trade?
Also, if we're supplying people with state-funded training then why aren't we supplying state-funded college education?
Any way it goes, they are the "welfare queen"s that they despise... they just don't know it.
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There are other options. We could limit legal immigration, stop illegal immigration, and retrain the workers.
Sorry but that wouldn't even help help because of the very short time period on which automation will wipe out a sector. As for retraining workers, what do you think training millions of people to do various trades is going to do to the wages of each trade?
Also, if we're supplying people with state-funded training then why aren't we supplying state-funded college education?
Any way it goes, they are the "welfare queen"s that they despise... they just don't know it.
It most definitely would 'help help'. It just wouldn't mitigate things fully. Retraining is cheaper than welfare. Retraining could be weighed against how much they have paid in taxes if that makes you feel better. Free college is a bad idea as many people just want to avoid joining the working world - college is fun. Having the meter running helps keep that impulse in check.
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Free college is a bad idea as many people just want to avoid joining the working world - college is fun.
I don't know where you get the idea that lots of people want to avoid joining the workforce. People don't get PhDs because college is fun. If you think college is fun then you weren't focused on education. Clearly the sports and frats need to go in order to get people like you to focus.
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Free college is a bad idea as many people just want to avoid joining the working world - college is fun.
I don't know where you get the idea that lots of people want to avoid joining the workforce. People don't get PhDs because college is fun. If you think college is fun then you weren't focused on education. Clearly the sports and frats need to go in order to get people like you to focus.
"People like me". That's funny. I didn't play sports, I didn't join a frat. I did enjoy the experience though. I guess that somehow makes me and "people like me" bad people.
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Sounds like a libertarian's dream to me. Not the dream they were hoping for, but a dream nonetheless.
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The problem with UBI, depending on implementation, is that if 25% of jobs become redundant, that other 75% will be upset if they have to pay for those 25%.
A real UBI should be granted to ALL citizens, or at least all adult citizens. If you earn more, it should not be undercut. The problem here is that lots of things, say housing, will suddenly experiences price rises. So just about nobody benefits, except those in restricted provider positions. How this should be solved is questionable. Wealth concentr
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The problem with UBI, depending on implementation, is that if 25% of jobs become redundant, that other 75% will be upset if they have to pay for those 25%.
Oh please, we already have most of the blue states carrying most of the red states. This will just be more pronounced.
How this should be solved is questionable.
it's why I said, "something like UBI". Universal Basic Assets is similar idea but it doesn't have the recognition UBI does.
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Better to just give the 25% some income while they are all looking for work. A few might find a new job.
Then move them to some new early retirement benefit.
Paying for 25% of working people for a short time is a lot more tax friendly than 100% of every generation of working population getting an instant UBI all the time.
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Better to just give the 25% some income while they are all looking for work.
Yeah, we have that, it's called collecting an unemployment check.
A few might find a new job.
And the rest can die in a ditch, right? -_-
Then move them to some new early retirement benefit.
"early retirement" is a euphemism for murdering people.
Paying for 25% of working people for a short time is a lot more tax friendly than 100% of every generation of working population getting an instant UBI all the time.
Pff! "tax friendly". You care more for your money than your fellow citizens.
Great Depression and revolution (Score:2)
At the peak of the Great Depression the US came close to a red revolution. Unemployment at that point was 25%. "Only" 25%.
Billionaires and Investment Capitalists (Score:3, Funny)
Unfortunately, 100 percent of occupations held by billionaires and investment capitalists are subject to automation, but they could always retrain as guillotine blade sharpeners and other useful occupations, if need be.
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So Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet could be automated away with no impact?
If you replaced Bill Gates with a small shell script, it would be a substantial improvement.
Actually a big number (Score:2)
Good News! (Score:2)
Not too bad! (Score:2)
Over what time frame? Bureacracies. (Score:2)
A critical detail.
Over the next ten years, just normal automation. Factory jobs, some agricultural work. A few percent each year.
In about ten years time self driving vehicles will become mainstream. And many other easily automated tasks. At that point 25% may become reasonable over the next few decades.
In some 50..100 years after that computers will be able to program themselves. They will then no longer need humans at all.
But the good news is that bureaucracies will continue to grow regardless of an
Parkinson's law (Score:2)
Un paywalled version
http://www.berglas.org/Article... [berglas.org]
just do it another way (Score:2)
I think the number is too low because they considered getting machines to do the human's job instead of adapting the job to the machine or at least meet halfway. Often, you can't get the machine to do the same thing, but you can get the machine to do something else that can accomplish the same end in a way that a human couldn't.
The machines don't have to take over our jobs to eliminate them. For example, in some fields the numbers of scientists needed are decreasing rapidly because a few scientists are able
There's no need to panic! (Score:2)
Soylent Corporation is always "hiring".
How is Family Physician not top of the list (Score:2)
Disaster (Score:2)
Only 25% (Score:2)
Unlike 100 years ago we do not simply need
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UBI (Univeral Basic Income) is not a panacea either. People want to feel needed, useful and most are not self-driven to find satisfaction in the arts.
People have been sold a line of bullshit that states that if they're not working a job, they're worthless because they're not serving anyone. It's some puritanical garbage that has been embedded in our culture. If you want to see the logical end of that game, check out Japan. They've got whole jobs, not just job duties, that are pure make-work. Responsibility to the culture leads corporations to inefficiently employ people doing things that don't need to be done. But there is a real energy cost to putting a
Job replacement (Score:2)
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25% HAH! (Score:2)
"Only" 25%? (Score:2)
Unemployment during the Great Depression was 25%-32%. And, of course, all those folks put out of work won't be buying much, so everyone *depending* on them is going under.
Y'know, sort of like what we're seeing right now, with the government shutdown.
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That show is both terrifying and fascinating.
It's terrifying that in some plants the only thing people do is box shit up or pour raw ingredients into the machines. Not a glamorous thing to talk about when trying to meet people at the bar (bad pick up line: "Then I pour 200 pounds of sugar into a hopper and press a button")...
Fascinating due to the mechanical engineering. And with 3D part manufacturing (https://www.makepartsfast.com) even machine shop jobs for one-off parts are on the line. CAD jobs are