Number of Workers in Jobs That Can Be Automated Falls (ft.com) 105
Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation. From a report: Statistics from the Office for National Statistics published on Monday showed that in 2011 about 8.1 per cent of workers were in jobs with a "high" risk of automation, but by 2017 that had fallen to 7.4 per cent. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source and original study.] The ONS report highlighted that fewer workers remain in areas that can be easily automated, such as dry cleaning and laundry jobs, which fell by 28 per cent between 2011 and 2017, and retail cashier work, which fell by 25.3 per cent over the same period.
Since the financial crisis the UK has enjoyed rapid growth in employment combined with one of the lowest rates of investment spending of any large rich country. Many economists have suggested that hiring cheap labour instead of investment in new techniques is behind the country's weak rate of productivity growth. Policymakers had hoped that increasing the minimum wage would spur companies to replace low-paid jobs with machines, in turn boosting growth in productivity. [...] But the ONS analysis suggests the increase in employment over the past decade has not come from jobs that could easily be done by machines. Instead, since 2011 the UK lost jobs with a high or medium risk of automation, like shelf fillers, but gained them in areas with a low risk, such as physiotherapy.
Since the financial crisis the UK has enjoyed rapid growth in employment combined with one of the lowest rates of investment spending of any large rich country. Many economists have suggested that hiring cheap labour instead of investment in new techniques is behind the country's weak rate of productivity growth. Policymakers had hoped that increasing the minimum wage would spur companies to replace low-paid jobs with machines, in turn boosting growth in productivity. [...] But the ONS analysis suggests the increase in employment over the past decade has not come from jobs that could easily be done by machines. Instead, since 2011 the UK lost jobs with a high or medium risk of automation, like shelf fillers, but gained them in areas with a low risk, such as physiotherapy.
Re: Is that a challenge? (Score:1)
I read Slashdot all day long. Good luck automating that!
Re: (Score:2)
Why not? They already automated writing it.
Re: (Score:2)
And guess what - they already automated writing it!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Those investigations will continue apace, as will the SDNY and other Federal investigations into, among other things, emoluments, conspiracy, fraud, charity fraud, campaign finance fraud, self-dealing with government monies, obstruction of justice ongoing, lies his son and daughter told to Congress, among a myriad of other unknown charges that will be coming to light over the next year to two years.
Well, no collusion. Your list is at least getting shorter. That's progress I suppose.
Re: (Score:1)
Keep it up. Being completely disconnected from reality can only be good for your life. There are no risks.
Re: (Score:2)
Mueller found some evidence of collusion
Where's your evidence of this evidence?
Automated Falls (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This makes me think of a robot pushing a human worker off a cliff.
Do you have stairs in your house?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It makes me think of farmers in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. 80% of the workforce in 1850, 5% by 1950. Society didn't collapse then, won't now.
It'll change, of course. But then, without that movement from the farms to industry back then, we'd not be typing this stuff at each other, since most of us would be working dawn to dusk on farms....
Companies should put value in jobs that cannot be (Score:2)
Yes, jobs that can be automated will be replaced by automation. There is a reason why we no longer have a lot of jobs (outside historical reenactment, or custom work) like Type Setters, Black Smiths, Weavers...
Being that companies can now automate a lot of their entry level jobs, this means over time a companies competitive advantage would be lessen (as all the machines will make the products the same way and at the same quality) That means they will need to put resources into Support, and Client Relation
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And many of those old jobs that used to be automated also resulted in signficant problems in society, with protests and the rise of the workers movement in general. The word "sabotage" comes from this. It also caused a major migration from rural areas into metropolitan areas. There's no reason to think that continued automation will happen without the corresponding societal problems.
Re: (Score:2)
The stocks are mostly shared in high amounts with other wealthy people who only care for the short term gain.
Wrong and wrong. Most stocks are "owned" by middle class workers in the form of pension plans and IRAs [taxpolicycenter.org]. And wealthy people generally don't buy/sell stock very often; they buy and hold for years, sometimes generations.
Re: (Score:2)
This seems highly unlikely.
I know not all wealth is stock, but a lot of it is. The top 10% of the population hold 76% of the wealth.
The skew away from stock for the richest would have to be extreme for the middle class to hold 50% of the stock.
The 50th=90th percentile hold 23% of the wealth, so they'd have to be holding 3x as much in stock relative to the top 10% to be holding 50% of the stock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Assuming they're made to the same design & spec, with the same materials, using the same machines and in the same locations.
Not impossible but very improbable.
Re: (Score:2)
All it says is that (like automation in the Industrial Revolution) one type of job disappeared and another (less automatable) job sprang up. Companies are now choosing to employ this “cheap” available labor (people that were previously in lower-paying, now automated jobs) and paying them a premium over spending the investment in automating a more complex job.
Automating is a risk, there will be people that do it, there will be those that don’t and rather try the true and tested method of ju
Re:Due to automation? (Score:4, Interesting)
She's only half-right.
The more we work, the more we produce, so we're effectively trading time for wealth. Without raising the minimum wage, the amount of low-end labor purchaseable by everybody a bit above the lowest-paid worker increases (and this scales at every step, so people a bit above that can buy more of those slightly-more-than-minimum workers's labor). That creates a glut of low-wage jobs.
Most of the money is, in fact, going to those low-wage jobs.
Walmart's CEO gets $4 per employee per year. Home Depot is like $120 among all their executives, and around $20 per employee for their CEO. AIG is ludicrous at $518 including the non-cash perks (usually negligible).
There are few billionaires, and the top doesn't have all of the income. People started massively conglomerating businesses (Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, Kraft), allowing them to take less per employee and still take more in total.
Raise minimum wage and you'll see a redistribution; it won't be from billionaires. Instead of creating 5 $250,000 jobs in the next growth cycle, we'll create 25 $50,000 jobs. There will be less poverty, more productivity, and greater wealth. Job growth will be somewhat slower; unless you jack up minimum wage insanely-fast and to ridiculous amounts (note: it has been 67% of GNI/C for decades up until 1970, and is as high as 58% in some of the best-performing nations today), you won't see an unemployment spike or the related recession.
As for high-poverty areas, those come from structural change initiating a local economic collapse. Such areas stay collapsed. Rural America is an exception: they mainly produce food there, and food becomes worth less and less of our productivity over time; they need the land to produce food, so they can't help but be left behind.
The fix for all of this is a Universal Citizen's Dividend--a form of negative income tax implemented as a social insurance. It doesn't pay an inflation-adjusted cost-of-living stipend; it pays a share.
We need social insurances--universal childcare, universal college, universal healthcare, long-term support services. This means we divert some of our great wealth to pay for these things, which stimulates the poorest areas (who pay the least in taxes) and flows wealth in to help repair them. This is yet insufficient.
Those services become more-productive over time. Healthcare, childcare, college, all become cheaper and more-effective. That means Rural America will continue to decay. The blighted Urban environments will have more success from provisioned-services insurances.
A Universal Dividend taxes a flat percentage on personal income (wage, rents not taxed as profits) and corporate profits, reflecting productive incomes. It distributes this as a flat, twice-monthly payment. The poorest receive a greater total impact, as they pay less into this; and the proportion of their income reflected by that total impact is higher, as they have less income.
While productivity improves and Rural America is bound to the land and the increasing productivity therein, thus receiving ever-less of our great wealth, the Dividend pours a share of our productivity into the hands of rural households. Those provisioned services employ workers who receive a part of this share, along with payment drawn less from the poorest than the wealthiest. This combination helps to hold up even Rural America, the seemingly-doomed corner of our economy.
This is the truth about the economy. Ocasio understands productivity--many don't--but she does miss the larger, more-complex details.
Re: (Score:1)
Wooden shipping pallet (Score:3)
It takes 15% as much human labor to load and unload canned goods when using wooden shipping pallets versus when just stacking them directly on the truck.
Pneumatic construction tools.
The hot-blast furnace (86,000 hours of labor became 200 hours of labor).
Intensive agriculture.
Computers.
Could you imagine digging out a basement with only hand shovels?
Re: (Score:2)
My old house had a hand-nailed woodwork lattice and plaster over it. Imagine building a house like that now without drywall, without long siding but paying every contractor $120/h for those jobs.
Houses would cost millions of dollars.
Re: (Score:2)
My old house had a hand-nailed woodwork lattice and plaster over it.
I grew up in an old Victorian like that.
Between the framed lathe and plaster interior walls and the exterior brick wall was a space anywhere between 6" and 4'.
There were spots in some of the closets to get into this area, sort of hidden compartments that me and my siblings would play in as kids.
Our friends were mostly terrified of the house and the spaces!
It had a total scooby doo vibe.
Re: (Score:2)
I can imagine that, however the difference in cost can be huge to do it by hand rather than just renting the backhoe.
Re: (Score:2)
Digging out a basement isn't the issue. The issue is what do the basement diggers do for a paycheck when they're no longer needed.
Since the industrial revolution started three centuries ago, nearly all jobs have been eliminated by automation, starting with weaving and agriculture. Yet incomes have gone up 20-fold and we have a full employment economy.
Re: (Score:2)
Could you imagine digging out a basement with only hand shovels?
Tell Bender it's a grave and you could break records.
Re: (Score:2)
Truth, but all of these people were on the chopping block in 2011. The TRL was 6ish and is now approaching 9.
The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge was for autonomous vehicles. This stuff has been a long time in coming.
What I want added to that list are: Lawyers, doctors, pilots, politicians, and program managers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
So it explains why "the number of workers in jobs that can be automated (in 2011) has fallen".
The only silver lining here is that it's been 14 years since they started demonstrating self-driving vehicles so the change might not be that quick and immediate, giving those in the industry time to move away. They've already had 14 years to see the writing on the wall. That said, the time between the first automated commercial semi-truck and 80+% being automated is going to be REAL short. It's going to hit fas
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know where these figures come from, but how do the stats count someone on a zero-hours contract? Employed? Half employed? Depends if they get called in that week?
Same as it ever was (Score:5, Interesting)
Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation.
It's been this way since the start of the industrial revolution and even before. Some jobs get automated by new technology and those people have to find or create new jobs. As a species we're quite good at that. Generally the automation enables jobs that didn't exist previously. If you need evidence look at the very device you are using to read these very words. Smartphones are a multi-billion dollar business that didn't even exist 20 years ago. The web didn't even exist 30 years ago yet you'd be hard pressed to argue it hasn't been a net creator of jobs and prosperity. (note I didn't say a uniform creator of prosperity) That's not to say there aren't some bumps and bruises along the way for some people but in the end our society ends up better off pretty much every time.
There is this fear that somehow this time it will be different. That somehow devices have finally gotten clever enough to replace people permanently with nothing left for people to do. Problem with that idea is that it presumes there is a finite amount of economically useful work which is an idea that has never been true in the history of man. It also presumes that we have no control over automation politically, economically, or physically which also isn't true. One of our defining traits is that we are tool makers. Our tools enable us to do more than we could do without them. Instead of just making a product we use machines to help us make it so we can spend more time selling it or improving it or funding it.
We're actually pretty bad at it (Score:3)
You mentioned we'll have to find or make new jobs, but
Sure (Score:2)
I'd love to see the work week dropped, but good luck getting that past American puritanicalism....
And no, we're not going t
Re: (Score:2)
It's not to do with the amount of economically useful work. It's the amount of economically useful work that can't be done cheaper, better, faster, at a lower cost, or cheaper by robots.[1]
If you belong to the same "we" that I do - the 99% - then I won't say we have no control. Just very v
Re: (Score:3)
I think the real fear right now, is the main thing that's different now versus 20 years ago... is that computers are starting to delve in the intellectual. Deep blue beat humans by painstaking work of putting years worth of professional chess games into the computer and letting them learn from the masters.
With alpha go, they did that at first, but then basically they made alphago zero, where they effectively threw out all the human data. just left the learning algorythm, and had it learn by playing against
News or Olds? (Score:3)
Number of Workers in Jobs That Can Be Automated Falls
This headline is from 1887.
well... yeah? (Score:3)
If their job gets automated... they no longer work there.
Here, lemme rephrase that a little: "Number of remaining workers in jobs that can be automated falls."
WTH?! (Score:2)
Policymakers had hoped that increasing the minimum wage would spur companies to replace low-paid jobs with machines, in turn boosting growth in productivity.
And suddenly you have to wonder about all the calls and campaigns for a $15 minimum wage here in the US and if they weren't after the opposite of what was claimed.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes! Blut und Boden! Because that works so well...
In the End No Jobs Will be Left to Automate (Score:2)
Stability is important (Score:2)
My bud's been looking for a few years now (Score:2)
And for the record, while the automation didn't work out the door it would have eventually, but it was cheaper to outsource now than wait. The offshore guys who took his last job are all on borrowed time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
People that put in some effort to train themselves get good jobs. Learn a trade, get a diploma, take some online classes, read some books... and opportunity increases.
I'm making six figure salary with skills from my hobby...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
no luck involved, they don't know I learned skills from hobby and then used them on prior job where I wasn't hired to do that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No lies at all. How exactly is it a lie if I took on more responsibilities and used the skills I learned from hobby where I worked, then claimed those skills as used on the job on resume to get next job?
This is how you grow your skill set and become more valuable to employer. Maybe it's so alien to you and many others because you are lazy and rather whine?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
if I did systems admin for an employer it become a role, how could it not be a role?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My job that I was hired to do had nothing to do with systems admin, nor development. At the time I was hired those were hobbies only.
BUT I took those duties on at the employer by my own choice after a couple years besides my regular engineering job. Adminned Unix CADD / CAE systems, later the VAX cluster we bought that became our central server, then customized the CADD system, the estimating system, and the scheduling system. All from my hobby skills, not from any schooling which mostly had to do with
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously I listed them right with the other duties. Just like I also listed my role as trainer of multiple departments in use of new networked computer systems, I wasn't hired to do that either but these things things are useful skills that prospective employers will find attractive.
I'm confused why you think there is a problem. Why do you think that people can only list duties you imagine belong under a job. The real world's jobs very different than any cookie cutter description.
Re: (Score:2)
I just never would have thought to bother listing
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't work for an IT manager who wasn't technically astute and couldn't ask in-depth questions. As for that job I came from, my accomplishments were verifiable. For example, could I restore from "bare metal" a CADD station (we had IRIX, Solaris and Windows) that had failed that the Vax cluster was making backup? Yes, I could and did. Did the custom template files and routines I made for the CADD system work and save hundreds of hours of engineer and designers time every year? Yes, they did and manag
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Your statistics are irrelevant. (Score:1)
But There Will Be A Big Future... (Score:2)
In Robot Maintence!
...because they were automated?! (Score:2, Interesting)
This summary is weird. It's like they don't realize there are fewer people employed in automatable jobs because those jobs are now becoming automated.
Misleading (Score:2)