Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Robotics Businesses

The Robot Revolution Will Be Worse For Men 271

Recode's Rani Molla shares the findings of a new study from the Brookings Institution, which finds that automation will impact men at a higher rate than women. Here's an excerpt from the report: Young people -- especially those in rural areas or who are underrepresented minorities -- will have a greater likelihood of having their jobs replaced by automation. Meanwhile, older, more educated white people living in big cities are more likely to maintain their coveted positions, either because their jobs are irreplaceable or because they're needed in new jobs alongside our robot overlords. The Brookings study also warns that automation will exacerbate existing social inequalities along certain geographic and demographic lines, because it will likely eliminate many lower- and middle-skill jobs considered stepping stones to more advanced careers. These jobs losses will be in concentrated in rural areas, particularly the swath of America between the coasts.

However, at least in the case of gender, it's the men, for once, who will be getting the short end of the stick. Jobs traditionally held by men have a higher "average automation potential" than those held by women, meaning that a greater share of those tasks could be automated with current technology, according to Brookings. That's because the occupations men are more likely to hold tend to be more manual and more easily replaced by machines and artificial intelligence. Of course, the real point here is that people of all stripes face employment disruption as new technologies are able to do many of our tasks faster, more efficiently, and more precisely than mere mortals. The implications of this unemployment upheaval are far-reaching and raise many questions: How will people transition to the jobs of the future? What will those jobs be? Is it possible to mitigate the polarizing effects automation will have on our already-stratified society of haves and have-nots?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

The Robot Revolution Will Be Worse For Men

Comments Filter:
  • Coal Miners (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They could just learn to code. Or be robotics engineers.
    Iâ(TM)m sure the ratio of engineers to replaced coal miners will be 1:1 and everybody will have a place at the table.

    • by elrous0 ( 869638 )

      They could just learn to code.

      No, those jobs are already being snapped up by unemployed journalists.

    • They could just learn to code. Or be robotics engineers. Iâ(TM)m sure the ratio of engineers to replaced coal miners will be 1:1 and everybody will have a place at the table.

      Hard to say. Automation has replaced most coal miners anyhow. In my area a few men, dynamite and draglines can do in days what it used to take a lot of men and months/years to do.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:24PM (#58037644)

    They're not counting sexbots, are they?

  • Robotic Men (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:24PM (#58037646)

    When women lose economic opportunities, marriage rates go up. When men lose economic opportunities, rioting rates go up.

    • Re:Robotic Men (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2019 @09:03AM (#58039652) Homepage Journal

      They don't riot, they elect populists who promise to bring their jobs back.

  • "for once" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:26PM (#58037654)

    For once, bwcause, you know, women are banned from those jobs or something.

    I'm 40 and never once in my lifetime has it been illegal for a woman to do a job in my lifetime. At 40 I'm at the age where whatever experience I've had is AVERAGE.

    Stop pretending it's 1950.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @10:19PM (#58037826)
      the problem is that the jobs men traditionally do are most likely to be automated. That's it. That's all there is to it. You can't really automate watching kids, for example, because kids are emotional and except a parental figure to be near. So short of perfect androids that ain't happening. People want nurses still. And yes, they want doctors, but there are a lot more nurses than doctors.

      Also, to be blunt, women do better academically than men. The reason's really simple: girls calm down and start studying and an earlier age than boys so they get an extra year or two of education.

      Yes, this does mean we're going to eventually need to start shifting from helping girls catch up (necessary because they were discouraged from doing anything short of having babies for hundreds of years) to helping boys catch up.

      The trick is doing this rationally and without it devolving into identity politics from both sides used to distract us all from economic issues. Right wing Dems like identity politics because it lets them pretend to be progressive while supporting the same supply side/trickle down economics as the GOP does. Meanwhile the subject is so emotionally charged it's easy to rile people up and point them at the polls to vote for whoever without considering the economic factors involved.

      The solution is a) more education for everyone (if nothing else it'll help absorb some of the unnecessary workforce) and b) be wary of anyone who talks identity politics without also talking sound, demand side economics.
      • by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @10:41PM (#58037902) Homepage

        The argument is a lie. The dominant male jobs are the trades, plumber, electrician, carpenter, brick layer et al automation in that regard requires full robotics and AI. Labourers will lose jobs but it depends on the labour, some rural industries more than others and that affects women equally, low end labour also counts the food services industry and so the impact will be equally felt by women, more so in fact because low end labour will feature major competition for places between men and women and men being stronger means women forced out ie low end labour will shift from rural to metro and with it job pressures will rise.

        Of course for the psychopaths at the top, they want the labour camps, they want hold and cold minors on tap to abuse, they want war games with the peasants, they are sick fuckers. The automation discussion in the current context, is psychopathically insane, the rich buy robots and the poor die, that is the discussion in reality.

        Where is reduced working hours, sharing the labour and the reward, gone with the dominance of psychopaths, the normies are just there to be used, abused, sexually exploited and killed at a whim by the rich and powerful. Don't get rid of them and the killing will start, just the way it is.

        • like brick layer [youtube.com]

          Moreover if you've been paying any attention there's been massive productivity boosts in all those fields. My company is throwing up a new building for a little over 1000 employees in 10 months. When I was a kid that kind of thing took years. They've had these puppies [google.com] for at least 10 years now. I'm sure you can find equivalent tech in plumbing if you know where to look.

          As for carpentry, I know some blue collar guys pissed because they used to get free wood at job sites when the job w
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • and gets their twisted wood and sends it back. But a computer tells that contractor exactly how often "sometimes" really is. Occasionally they're off a bit in the wrong directly... and modern logistics gets him his shortage in a few days instead of weeks.

              Folks really underestimate how tight the supply chain's gotten and what computers have made possible. I think we were expecting flying cars by now. What we got was cheap 2 day shipping. But if you're old enough to remember sending away for something and
          • by ChoGGi ( 522069 )

            Those puppies would be good if everything is prepped beforehand (I assume you're used to new or commercial construction?).
            Taping is the quickest part, mudding takes forever (waiting for each layer to dry).

        • The argument is a lie. The dominant male jobs are the trades, plumber, electrician, carpenter, brick layer et al automation in that regard requires full robotics and AI. Labourers will lose jobs but it depends on the labour, some rural industries more than others and that affects women equally,

          That begs the question "does automation in that regard require full robotics and AI?"

          Automation can't eliminate those jobs outright, but it can reduce their number by making those jobs easier, in the form of partial automation. For example, if homes are pre-fabbed, they'll come with the wiring built into them, meaning less work for electricians. (The work is easier if done while the walls are being assembled on a table.) And if they're being pre-fabbed anyway, they can easily be assembled in another country

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Efforts to help buys academically started long ago. Back in the 90s I remember efforts to help them improve in maths in particular, and to try to take some stigma away from more traditionally female subjects.

        There was a lot of research done in the 2000s but we are still figuring out how to put it into practice. One promising technique is to encourage girls to get involved in traditionally male spaces, so for example building Lego kits or playing football. Of course boys often enjoy things like netball too.

      • You can't really automate watching kids

        Sufficent enough Alexa will change this, whether it's sufficient or not.

      • Also, to be blunt, women do better academically than men. The reason's really simple:

        And there's where you went off the rails. Schools are developed with girls / women as the gold standard. Resources are all devoted to helping girls / women get ahead. Men are excluded from programs and funding on the basis of their sex. It's gotten so bad now that there are actually more women in college than men but they're still being given special treatment. Add to all that the liberal "You're a fucking white male" attitude on school campuses and you've got a much better argument than "girls... start st

    • by E-Rock ( 84950 )

      I'd say the problem is that the 'for once' is extra stupid, both for being sexist and wrong. Every slowdown in manufacturing and low skilled labor has had a larger impact on men.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      I'm 40 and never once in my lifetime has it been illegal for a woman to do a job in my lifetime.

      But if you were 47 that wouldn't be true.

      Stop pretending it's 1950.

      Stop pretending that after centuries of discrimination, flipping a legal switch made everything equal instantly overnight.

      • Uh...what's so special about 47 years ago?
        • It was still legal to bar women from practicing the law in 1971: that's the year it stopped.

          • Ah, you (probably?) mean the US? In that case, not much has changed from my perspective; for example, the ban on female drivers in Saudi Arabia ended last year, so logically, no taxi drivers. Chances are that somewhere in the world, there's still something wrong in this respect.
    • A woman can do pretty much any job a man can (military still a bit fuzzy on some but...), however, a job with high strength requirement is going to be something on average a man can do better than a woman. Thus despite improvements in equality, and the notion pushed by some that a woman can do anything the same as a man (yes there are women that area as strong as most men, but on average women biologically do not have the same strength physically, which says nothing about mentally), there are still perfectl

    • by f3rret ( 1776822 )

      For once, bwcause, you know, women are banned from those jobs or something.

      I'm 40 and never once in my lifetime has it been illegal for a woman to do a job in my lifetime. At 40 I'm at the age where whatever experience I've had is AVERAGE.

      Stop pretending it's 1950.

      Several jobs in the military are still exclusively male, by law.

  • by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @09:47PM (#58037726)
    I've been hearing robot talk for over fifty years. I'm numb to it.
  • So I just gave a talk at LCA2019 on precisely this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    I also thought about arguing in this direction, but then I didn't want to open the gender debate, and so I left it at "humans".

    Enjoy.

    • That was an excellent talk, containing some really great analysis. The analysis was so clear and thorough though that I was puzzled why it left one very important matter very fuzzy and poorly defined --- the title and main topic of the talk, of all things!

      This is the problem: the word "jobs" (or equivalently "work") means two very different things to us, and these two things have been conflated into one single idea by our history over hundreds of years. Those two things are: (1) Doing something useful in

      • by alfino ( 173081 )

        Thank you very much for that excellent feedback. This talk was to a technical audience. I will be giving this talk again to a humanist audience soon, and you are absolutely right that I need to focus on precisely the point you raise!

      • by ahodgson ( 74077 )

        Work is the something interesting most of us do with our lives. People are most satisfied when they are doing challenging, meaningful work.

        Automation strips us of that and leaves mindless machine-tending or welfare in it's place.

  • Sex Robots (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DatbeDank ( 4580343 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @10:54PM (#58037954)

    Pretty sure women are going to be affected just as badly as men.

    Imagine, hundreds of single men with bad game just stop feeding the egos of all these women on social media and instead buy a robot that looks like a straight 10 that will cook, clean, and well **** without complaining.

    That will be a real crisis worth watching. /Sarcasm... Sort of

    • Re:Sex Robots (Score:4, Insightful)

      by xlsior ( 524145 ) on Monday January 28, 2019 @11:30PM (#58038118)
      Some jobs are just easier to automate than others, and many of those professions are predominantly done by men.

      We'll have robots replacing long haul truck drivers and lumberjacks well before we get rid of all the elementary school teachers. (In no small part because groups of kids will always require constant hands-on supervision)
      • The problem with people when they try to imagine the future is that they carry unwarranted assumptions with them when they do it.

        For example trades will be difficult to replace. Only true if we continue to build houses they way we do now. Factory built houses can be made by automation and assemble on site using low skill robots. Of course there will still be trades, because rich people will not want to live in a cookie cutter factory built house. That's for the masses. So there will continue to be a small n

      • by judoguy ( 534886 )

        We'll have robots replacing long haul truck drivers and lumberjacks well before we get rid of all the elementary school teachers. (In no small part because groups of kids will always require constant hands-on supervision)

        Pff, a T-800 Model 101 can handle the kids easily.

    • Imagine, hundreds of single men with bad game just stop feeding the egos of all these women on social media

      Yep, women *love* being creeped on on social media.

      nstead buy a robot that looks like a straight 10 that will cook, clean, and well **** without complaining.

      If you're looking to get your lazy ass out of cleaning you can pay someone to do that for you already. I do. You don't need to wait for the robot revolution.

      You can get people to cook for you too. And if you're happy to pay to fuck there are in fac

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Guys like this will be enslaved by sexbots.

        Upgrades, accessories, DLC... It all costs money. And the sexbot has them by the balls, governed by corporate "ethics" that prioritize profit over all else.

        • The sex bots also won't do what they expect: the claims of a grand revolution are not so likely.

          Thing is sex bots solve the problem of sex, but they don't solve the problem of not having sex with a specific person, and of course all the things that usually go along with that. It won't give men the sense of self worth they believe they will get through finding a partner.

          And I say men specifically because these conversations inevitably ignore that women are unable to get sex as well (fun fact, "incel" was coi

      • But I must say, if those men just want a "straight 10" who cooks, cleans and fucks on demand and by the sounds of it, nothing else, it's no wonder they're still single. It's not a lack of game that makes them single.

        'How dare a man have some kind of standard, he should love me for the big beautiful princess that I am.' lol

    • by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      and well **** without complaining.

      Without complaining? Dude, you're doing it wrong.

  • There will be no uprisings, gratefully, as we transition from users surfing porn to users ravaging sexbots to exhaustion while surfing porn. Women, well, who knows? Possibly the same.
  • by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2019 @12:54AM (#58038316)

    The job held by most men in US - Truck driver. Google is coming out with a self driving truck

    The job held by most women in the US - Retail Clerk/cashier. Amazon has already brought a cashierless retail store

    The rioting is not far away

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2019 @02:32AM (#58038538) Journal
    I don't believe in this motherfucking 'robot revolution', it's all hype and nonsense, and nobody else should believe it either. Clickbait at best, fake news at worst. FUD in any event. Nothing to see here..
    • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      I don't believe in this motherfucking 'robot revolution'.

      More like a fatherfucking robot revolution according to the article.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's more of an AI revolution, which is also why it's in doubt.

      When machines first started replacing humans it was hard for people to transition, but there were new jobs for them because we couldn't build really intelligent machines. When AI reaches the point where it can do clerical jobs as well as a human there will be fewer options for people to find new work.

      The question is if AI is anywhere near that point. I think not. AI is always much harder than pundits think and proponents promise.

      • When AI reaches the point where it can do clerical jobs as well as a human there will be fewer options for people to find new work.

        Automation is already reducing the need for clerical work, and replacing it with a smaller amount of more technical work. For example, digital documents. Nobody seems to be paperless, but a lot of industries have reduced the amount of paper they produce, which means less need for file clerks. AI doesn't have to do clerical jobs as well as humans for technology to produce a noticeable effect in job reduction.

      • The so-called 'AI revolution' is all a bunch of marketing department and media company driven bullshit. The shitty excuse for AI everyone keeps hyping is nowhere near as good as they all claim it is and everyone needs to understand that. I don't care what parlor tricks they've got the things doing it's still mostly smoke and mirrors. Show me a general AI that can pass for a human being in ALL circumstances and we'll have a different conversation but until then these half-assed 'learning algorithms' are just
    • Ask people what kinds of new jobs will be created, and they will say, "I don't know, they haven't been created yet!"

      It's not the robots that have people worried... it's the lack of social planning. "Don't panic, everything will be fine" is not a solution.

      • Wringing your hands like a worried old grandmother over media-driven bullshit isn't particularly smart either and I reject it entirely, and furthermore encourage everyone else to do the same. Everything anymore is all hype and bullshit intended to stir everyone up and it's usually over nothing. Clickbait, and spreading FUD for ratings. Screw all that.
  • "For once" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2019 @07:28AM (#58039260) Journal

    "However, at least in the case of gender, it's the men, for once, who will be getting the short end of the stick."
    Setting aside suicide, drug use, drug abuse, being a victim off violent crime, fighting in wars, at-work deaths, shorter life spans, vulnerability to disease, aids, heart disease, yes, "for once" men get the short end of the stick.

  • This statement triggered my BS detector.. "These jobs losses will be in concentrated in rural areas, particularly the swath of America between the coasts"

    Isn't -all- of America "between the coasts."

  • Yes, men do the actual physical work, but women more and more have been in supervisory and management positions over those men working in the physical world. In recent years women have come to exceed men in those supervisory jobs. As the physical work disappears, the jobs supervising and managing men in those jobs will disappear, impacting women also.
  • Productivity will go up but there will be an awful lot of human casualties. Expect Oxy use to rise - it's not quite the Soma we were hoping for but it's close! When the rich can afford machines that do the work of ten or a hundred men, they will get even richer at the expense of hundreds of unemployed. This will even go for Lawyers and GPs and other middle-class jobs though
  • That depends on how you define "worse". When robots get advanced enough to put most men out of work, they'll be advanced in other ways, too. Out of work because of a robot? You'll have more time to make love to your robot "girlfriend"...

  • Seems like they are going to put a lot more women than men out of work! (Does a vibrator qualify as a "sex bot"?_

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

Working...