'There's an Automation Crisis Underway Right Now, It's Just Mostly Invisible' (gizmodo.com) 159
"There is no 'robot apocalypse', even after a major corporate automation event," writes Gizmodo, citing something equally ominous in new research by a team of economists.
merbs shared their report: Instead, automation increases the likelihood that workers will be driven away from their previous jobs at the companies -- whether they're fired, or moved to less rewarding tasks, or quit -- and causes a long-term loss of wages for the employee. The report finds that "firm-level automation increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of 11 percent of one year's earnings." That's a pretty significant loss.
Worse still, the study found that even in the Netherlands, which has a comparatively generous social safety net to, say, the United States, workers were only able to offset a fraction of those losses with benefits provided by the state. Older workers, meanwhile, were more likely to retire early -- deprived of years of income they may have been counting on. Interestingly, the effects of automation were felt similarly through all manner of company -- small, large, industrial, services-oriented, and so on. The study covered all non-finance sector firms, and found that worker separation and income loss were "quite pervasive across worker types, firm sizes and sectors."
Automation, in other words, forces a more pervasive, slower-acting and much less visible phenomenon than the robots-are-eating-our-jobs talk is preparing us for. "People are focused on the damage of automation being mass unemployment," study author James Bessen, an economist at Boston University, tells me in an interview. "And that's probably wrong...." According to Bessen, compared to firms that have not automated, the rate of workers leaving their jobs is simply higher, though from the outside, it can resemble more straightforward turnover. "But it's more than attrition," he says. "A much greater percentage -- 8 percent more -- are leaving." And some never come back to work. "There's a certain percentage that drop out of the labor force. That five years later still haven't gotten a job."
The result, Bessen says, is an added strain on the social safety net that it is currently woefully unprepared to handle.
merbs shared their report: Instead, automation increases the likelihood that workers will be driven away from their previous jobs at the companies -- whether they're fired, or moved to less rewarding tasks, or quit -- and causes a long-term loss of wages for the employee. The report finds that "firm-level automation increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of 11 percent of one year's earnings." That's a pretty significant loss.
Worse still, the study found that even in the Netherlands, which has a comparatively generous social safety net to, say, the United States, workers were only able to offset a fraction of those losses with benefits provided by the state. Older workers, meanwhile, were more likely to retire early -- deprived of years of income they may have been counting on. Interestingly, the effects of automation were felt similarly through all manner of company -- small, large, industrial, services-oriented, and so on. The study covered all non-finance sector firms, and found that worker separation and income loss were "quite pervasive across worker types, firm sizes and sectors."
Automation, in other words, forces a more pervasive, slower-acting and much less visible phenomenon than the robots-are-eating-our-jobs talk is preparing us for. "People are focused on the damage of automation being mass unemployment," study author James Bessen, an economist at Boston University, tells me in an interview. "And that's probably wrong...." According to Bessen, compared to firms that have not automated, the rate of workers leaving their jobs is simply higher, though from the outside, it can resemble more straightforward turnover. "But it's more than attrition," he says. "A much greater percentage -- 8 percent more -- are leaving." And some never come back to work. "There's a certain percentage that drop out of the labor force. That five years later still haven't gotten a job."
The result, Bessen says, is an added strain on the social safety net that it is currently woefully unprepared to handle.
Well, yeah (Score:5, Funny)
That's the expected outcome after decades of harassing beardy Unix sysadmins who wear t-shirts that read "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script."
You were warned, people! You should've left him alone to play Nethack in peace!
Re: (Score:3)
I worked at a place where we ran some software that generated a pile of CSVs. Those CSV files were taken by a herd of employees, imported to Excel, tweaked slightly, and then sent out to other people.
I was not popular for designing a system to tweak the data the same way, export the data as Excel files, and automatically email it. Strangely enough both management and those people who'd I'd replace with a very small shell script were not happy.
Re:Well, yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not too surprising. The prestige, and often compensation, of non-producing middle-management types is usually measured, to a large degree, by the number of their direct reports. So you didn't just do away with your office's Tom Smykowski; you stepped on the toes of your office's Bill Lumbergh.
And that is another reason I'm solidly of the opinion that the "automation will replace us all" crowd are a bunch of chicken littles. It's not just the productive people who would lose their jobs. Before that can happen, middle management has to die first. And they have more power in most offices than the actual workers.
So what are we doing to do with all these people (Score:2)
Mass Unemployment + society where if you don't work you don't eat + a shit ton of guns = interesting times. WWI & II will seem like a rowdy birthday party in comparison.
Re:So what are we doing to do with all these peopl (Score:5, Interesting)
there are no jobs for them to train to.
We have record low unemployment and every business I see has a "help wanted" sign.
The problem is that these new jobs either require skills or don't pay well, not that they don't exist.
Re:So what are we doing to do with all these peopl (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that these new jobs either require skills or don't pay well, not that they don't exist.
If nobody who can do them wants them because they don't pay enough, or if they don't pay well enough to live on, then they're not real jobs. They're looking for slaves, not employees. The small local businesses are essentially forced to do this by the bigger businesses, which will outcompete them otherwise. But this race to the bottom is brought to you by automation, which is a major competitive advantage enjoyed by larger businesses who can afford it. Ma and Pa can't afford a robot even if one would do the job they're hiring for. They have no choice but to offer a wage you can't live on, if they want one on which you can.
Automation is not the enemy. The greedy wealthy are, and they're raising the stakes.
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They're looking for slaves, not employees.
Or, I dunno, robots?
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They're looking for slaves, not employees.
Or, I dunno, robots?
Since the name came from a Czech word for forced labor, it's apt enough either way. Either way, they won't treat the workers like humans.
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The only flaw in that hypothetical, is that if nobody else has an income, these automated super-factories won't be able to sell any products. Clearly, that situation is going to have a fair bit of self-balancing going on.
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The only flaw in that hypothetical, is that if nobody else has an income, these automated super-factories won't be able to sell any products
If the robots can make everything that the top 1% want for themselves, there's no need to sell anything to the bottom 99%.
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Omg you give then eyes, lord, but they cannot see.
If automation gets to the point the rich can sit bacj and push a button, then there's no reason that can't feed the desires of everyone -- and with those same larger and better-quality products.
This won't be a sudden change.
For crying out loud, even the poor today run around with a huge belly and a supercomputer in their pocket. It's already happening. Rich may be the bleeding edge purchasers of new stuff, but it quickly filters down.
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If automation gets to the point the rich can sit bacj and push a button, then there's no reason that can't feed the desires of everyone
Of course, there's a good reason not to feed the poor. It wastes resources, and pollutes the water and atmosphere, and they will ruin the view and block the roads. And the more you feed them, the more they multiply, making all these problems worse.
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If the robots can make everything that the top 1% want for themselves, there's no need to sell anything to the bottom 99%.
If the 99% are not busy, they can make things for each other.
Or they could use their own robots.
People predicted that only "the rich" would have cars, computers, and cellphones. It didn't turn out that way. Maybe robots will be widely owned as well.
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Hell, once upon a time, air-travel was only for "the rich". And a vacation in Hawaii was only for the rich. And avoiding the annual disease outbreaks was only for the rich....
And it must be remembered that once upon a time, getting your clothes washed involved a hell of a lot of work, or some slaves to do the hell of a lot of work for you. Now, of course, since the washing machine, all those pe
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This is such an overly simplisitic, and quite frankly, borderline fucking retarded view.
And yet here we are, without a counterargument.
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And yet here we are, without a counterargument.
The counterargument is reality.
We are 300 years into the industrial revolution. Billions of jobs have been automated away. Then billions of the replacement jobs were automated away. Yet the 99% are far better off, and are especially better off in the countries that automated the most.
So the argument that automation causes poverty make sound good, but is the opposite of what actually happens.
Re: So what are we doing to do with all these peop (Score:5, Insightful)
So the argument that automation causes poverty make sound good, but is the opposite of what actually happens.
Which is great if you have a 100 year working life to take advantage and can get by without eating and living without taking up any space for a couple of decades here and there.
In the First Industrial Revolution massive poverty lasting decades was the actual result as the entire textile industry in Britain suffered a spectacular collapse in employment, starting about 1770 when thread spinning (think "spinning wheel") as a career was wiped out in only a decade.Then over the next 45 years progressively more complex textile skills were automated away, with complex weaving being the last around 1815. Britain instituted a massive program of prison building to house the destitute who became petty criminals, then started housing them in hulks (old ships), then started transporting them to colonies, then built "work houses" (prisons for entire families who had committed no crimes), and the Poor Laws (starting in 1782) to deal with the crisis. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars did siphon off a lot of young male labor for about 20 years that softened the blow a bit - so war is one option.
The new industrial economy did not produce enough new labor demand to bring employment rate back up to the level of 1770 until 1840, a full human lifetime.
The new wave of automation looks like it will be more like the the First Industrial Revolution in its effects than, say, the Second IR.
Umm... no. (Score:5, Insightful)
TFS: "People are focused on the damage of automation being mass unemployment," study author James Bessen, an economist at Boston University, tells me in an interview. "And that's probably wrong...."
No, that's almost certainly right. If the trend continues the outcome WILL be mass unemployment - it just won't be sudden mass unemployment.
The shitty thing here is, all the extra efficiency resulting from automation could mean that we could all enjoy a good standard of living while working less than 20 hours a week - maybe even substantially less. But it won't, because concentration of wealth will beget further concentration of wealth, and so on until the whole system collapses from instability.
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This again.
We've been automating people out of their jobs for hundreds of years. Factories automated the jobs of blacksmiths and countless other craftspeople. Mechanization automated the jobs of farmers. Software is automating the jobs of office workers. Yet somehow we are at 4% unemployment.
Automation gives us the freedom to do other things. That's why today, factory work is only a small percentage of our work force; years ago it was a majority. Same for farming. Personally, I don't want to do the jobs tha
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We've been automating people out of their jobs for hundreds of years
Ditto. Thank you for beating me to it.
I'm also a little mystified about the distinction between robots and automation. Do people hear "robot" and think that means a T2000? At what point does driving automation (automatic transmission, cruise control, GPS navigation, self-driving) become a robot (fully autonomous delivery vehicle, not that such a think actually exists today)?
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This again.
We've been automating people out of their jobs for hundreds of years. Factories automated the jobs of blacksmiths and countless other craftspeople. Mechanization automated the jobs of farmers. Software is automating the jobs of office workers. Yet somehow we are at 4% unemployment.
And during those hundreds of years there were periods, sometimes lasting decades, in which unemployment was north of 25%. Saying "in a couple of undred years it will all be fine" does not help anyone in the present moment. The problem is ensuring the continuing well-being of everyone as these changes disrupt industries, careers and opportunities. Telling a 55 year old that they need to start over at an entry level job and salary as they try to nail down their retirement assets does not help them.
It's not just the rich getting richer (Score:2)
The trouble is how to redistribute money. As they saying goes we're all a bunch of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. How do you make people OK with high taxes on the wealthy to pay for that 20 hour work week? I guess you could also have very, very high minimum wages (without them the high unemployment & competition for jobs means low wa
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"People are focused on the damage of automation being mass unemployment," study author James Bessen, an economist at Boston University, tells me in an interview. "And that's probably wrong...." No, that's almost certainly right.
Guess you're smarter than the people who study this for a living.
Nah, actually that's wrong. You're just ignorant with a loud mouth.
Can't happen here (Score:2)
In other words, if the wealth concentration you describe starts to happen, the rich will actually start to make less money because fewer people will be able to buy the stuff they're making, even if they're making it more efficiently.
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There's no shortage of jobs.
We can always have more doctors, teachers, social workers, home renovators, personal support workers, gym trainers, robot engineers, police officers, nurses...
The actual problem is have is that 'natural' private sector economy producing goods and services might not provide enough jobs/taxes to fund a balanced public sector. By natural private sector, I mean things ordinary people are willing to pay for out of their own pocket (clothes, cars, food, appliances...)
For example, imagi
Let's look at data (Score:5, Informative)
Civilian labor force participation rate [bls.gov] graph. Note how it bottomed out in Sept 2015 and has started to trend up. A higher percentage of people with jobs, even as retired seniors are a higher percentage of the population also. [statista.com]
Job openings: https://www.bls.gov/charts/job... [bls.gov]
Unemployment: https://www.bls.gov/charts/emp... [bls.gov]
Duration of unemployment: https://www.bls.gov/charts/emp... [bls.gov]
People who want a job but aren't counted in the labor force: https://www.bls.gov/charts/emp... [bls.gov]
Weekly hours worked in manufacturing: https://www.bls.gov/charts/emp... [bls.gov]
Wages and salaries y/y percent change: https://www.bls.gov/charts/emp... [bls.gov]
I'm not seeing the robots in these charts. Where are they hiding?
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Indeed.
And if you search for the term "productivity" in the entire comment list, there is not a single hit. If robots are taking over, that means more output is made for each human worker, and that is known in economics as the worker productivity rising.
Yet productivity growth is lower than anytime before since the industrial revolution. We need more robots!
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Productivity is a slow, long-term thing you can miss if you look too closely at short term ups and downs. To look at endpoints of a recession and think it not there is the same known mistake people make when disbelieving Julian Simon's observations [juliansimon.com] about decreasing cost and increasing plentitude of resources over years and decades in a free society (as opposed to central economic planners.)
He was uncomfortable with even a 10 year granularity. These are long term trends.
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Productivity growth in most Western economies has been horrendously bad for 30-40 years now. This is not a short term trend. The vast majority on Slashdot have not been alive at a time of rapid productivity growth, the kind of growth that threatened employment.
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they are hiding in the job quality (Score:4, Interesting)
You're stats are misleading (Score:2)
So to go through them one by one
1. Labor force participation rate going up among retired is bad news. It means younger folk (lots of them reading this) aren't moving up in their careers and/or it means older folk are getting forced out of retirement by not having enough money saved or enough SSI / Medicare benefits. Also the trend is just up, among the under 35 set it'
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While I don't disagree that his stats are both misleading and incomplete, a chunk of your post is rather misleading as well.
Regarding "70% of us are living paycheck to paycheck", you are the individual who has claimed a lot of times that he's always bought his daughter the newest iThing, gave her all the opportunities in the world, and is paying for her college, all to the detriment of your bank account and retirement. If you are in that pool, that's by your own choice. Similarly, a whole lot of other peopl
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How are links to labor data "misleading"?
Thanks Captain Obvious (Score:2)
Shocking.
This article would have been revealing and timely. In the mid- to late- 1800s.
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The net result is less company money going to the workers.
Not exactly. The result is more money going to the remaining workers. Because they tend to be doing the high value added jobs that are difficult to automate.
Now go back to supervising your household domestic workers. I certainly hope you weren't so callous as to have replaced them with washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners.
not obvious to me (Score:2)
Automation includes IT. I'm making good money admining automated systems. My wages have done nothing but go up decade after decade.
I'm calling bullshit. Automation creates new jobs.
What's the alternative? (Score:2)
So we could try NOT automating. Guess what happens next...
Somebody else WILL automate. And they will price us out of existence.
Not everybody in the world is going to go along with any scheme to prop up workers who do not adapt in the face of automation.
Automation is inevitable. But we aren't likely to run out of jobs to do. We've been automating jobs for hundreds of years, but somehow most people who want a job, can still get one.
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We should pay more.
In previous decades, when productivity went up, so did wages. More value per hour = more $$ per hour.
Then about 1978ish (noisy data, so can't be precise) that trend broke. Productivity went up and real wages didn't. And that's continued for the last 4 decades.
Higher pay to workers means those workers have more disposable income which means they buy stuff which means more jobs. That's how we got through all the big boosts in productivity from, say, the 1940s to 1970.
The upper class jus
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Then about 1978ish (noisy data, so can't be precise) that trend broke. Productivity went up and real wages didn't. And that's continued for the last 4 decades.
We can be precise because the break was complete and sudden. It was 1973.
Yup (Score:2)
Automation has been going on for over 100 years (Score:2)
Maybe this time is different because more jobs will be destroyed than will be created or because automation will affect people across all kinds of occupations and/or classes. But, it's been a continuum and I don't understand why suddenly now everyone is going haywire over this and talking about taxing robots (WTF is a robot? is only a physical device or do computers also
Re: Up his sleeve (Score:5, Insightful)
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And that's one case for having the self-checkouts at supermarkets - fewer personnel tied up at the cash registers scanning groceries. Some of them can instead be out in the supermarket keeping things in order or helping customers but overall a supermarket can do with fewer people. But those that remain will have a more varied work.
It's anyway of course the shareholders that reaps the profit from it.
The big problem we all see at the horizon is however that for some businesses that automation of processes are
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And that's one case for having the self-checkouts at supermarkets - fewer personnel tied up at the cash registers scanning groceries.
Except now you have 1 employee who's expected to manage upwards of 10 customers at the same time, at the same wage as one checkout person. They have to keep an eye out for theft, help the customers who inevitably have problems with the checkout system, keep said system functioning or call in for support when it doesn't. Sure, it's more varied work but it's not suitably compensated either.
Nor has any automated system seller proven that it's a better system for either the customers who must now take on the
Re: Up his sleeve (Score:3)
But if youâ(TM)re not unhappy enough to shop somewhere, how bad is it really? My mom used to do this, complain about the old washing machine but if you buy a new it was a waste of money and the old was fine. Some people just like to whine and complain about their woes even though theyâ(TM)re self inflicted and they do nothing to change them. I guess even self-pity can become an addiction.
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If all the grocery stores have the same self-scan checkouts, where exactly are you going to shop to escape them?
Also new appliances ARE a waste of money compared to older appliances. They have more delicate components and the mfgs. don't make parts available so repair costs are often higher than replacement costs. Video [youtube.com]
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Self-checkout works great for barcoded items, but when you have uncoded produce, there is no common scheme for distinguishing the baking potatoes that are on special from the Idaho russets. A clerk has t be called over to log in and enter the proper code. Same for age-limited merchandise, like a bottle of wine.
The last time I used one of these the machine sat there befuddled at the start, because I had brought my own bag and there was no way of telling it that this was not an "unexplained item in bagging ar
Re: Up his sleeve (Score:2)
I've never seen a self checkout where you need an attendant for any of the scenarios you describe. Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's typically a customer education issue which would evaporate over time.
Now, if you are running a grocery store next to a retirement home, there might be some issues with customer uptake. But most communities take up the self scanning without much hassle.
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Re: Up his sleeve (Score:2)
At my store, they usually have two regular cashiers, one bagger jumping between, and a self checkout attendant.
If the self checkout line has 6 people waiting in it, I can expect that to be faster than one of the professionally managed lanes with 2 people waiting in line.
Those cashiers - and the customers demanding them - are a drain. They could put those three people in self checkout and increase their throughput by 400% easy.
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When my local Warlmart first got self-checkout several years back, it was buggy, difficult to use, and they had plenty of the normal lanes open. But now that the self-checkouts work quite well, there are very few lanes open, and the people running the lanes are retarded at bagging, I prefer self-checkout. It's actually slowly changing the way I shop. Instead of a few large trips to Walmart, I'm starting to make smaller ones, and checking myself out is actually really nice when I don't have a huge cart of goods. At least I know not to put canned goods on top of the bananas and bread.
I think self checkout should be equivalent to the Express lines. It's great when you have a small number of items and get through quickly. The problem is the people with carts literally overflowing with merchandise and who are much, much slower scanning them than the people who do it for a living. That is actually way less efficient than if there were no self checkouts at all.
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My giant discount grocery warehouse solved this with a full fledged assembly line for self-scanning. It even has two bagging areas with a divider so when you're done you can flip it to the other side and bag in peace while someone scans their stuff and it gets diverted to the other side. Probably 30' long, scan at the top and down a long belt, onto some rollers, past the divider, onto another belt. You can pile up a cart full of groceries at the bottom with no issue.
This is the place that in the beer/wine/l
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Supermarkets already had such persons around, so it's nothing new and fresh - just that there's now room to have more such persons.
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You might like to think that all of the savings disappear into the pockets of the managers or share holders, and maybe if we only had a single chain this would be the case, but competition ensures this doesn’t happen. Grocery stores are already a low margin enterprise for this reason.
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I shop at the store with more employees, at least on the weekend where they advertise all checkouts open (and they usually are) and pay their employees better and treat them well enough that there is no talk of unionization. The prices are about the same and the experience is much better though I admit we do have to bag our groceries ourselves. Even the self bagging isn't bad as they've pushed plastic crates like what you'd use for a few small items, put four crates in buggy, fill them up. Unload at one end
Consider the long-term goal: No work for humans! (Score:2)
True. However, consider the long-term goal. Machines will do all the work. Humans won't have to work.
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And how will those non-working humans get food and shelter? Do you think those upper management types are going to start giving their products away for free?
Automation will grow all the food and deliver it. (Score:3)
The average person will be much richer than today.
Several years ago, I got into a long conversation with a programmer at an open house at Intel about automating the building of houses. We agreed that there could be many advantages. Far better quality at much lower prices.
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The average person will be much richer than today.
Yes, if you have a billion dollars, and I have none, on average we're both rich. It's a completely meaningless metric.
Instead, what we need to look at is the median case, not the mean.
Re:Automation will grow all the food and deliver i (Score:5, Interesting)
Not backed up by numbers, it feels like a lot of these poorer people are unemployable. When I look at the people at Walmart, it looks like a 50/50 split of people who don't look like they take care of themselves, aimlessly looking at stuff, buying junk food and games, kids running around, and generally seeming uncouth. Then there's the other 50%, wearing name-brand, take care of themselves, move with purpose, kids well mannered, health food. It feels like half of the population doesn't want to work if it doesn't have to, and the other half is highly motivated.
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It feels like half of the population doesn't want to work if it doesn't have to, and the other half is highly motivated.
That sounds like New York lol.
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Automation will grow all the food and deliver it.
Why would the rich owner of the automation worry about delivering food to the poor and unemployed ? Why not just let them starve in the streets, and keep more for yourself ?
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Also why would these 1% (or whatever you imagine their number to be) keep all of the good for themselves when they couldn’t
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Think about the LONG-TERM goal.
Kill off all the plebes?
The average person will be much richer than today.
Historically, the worker's share of profits have declined as the worker's productivity has increased. Robots are the ultimate productivity-increaser, so if history holds true (and there's no reason to believe that it won't, since human nature hasn't changed, and the wealthy still have the power) they will also be the ultimate profit-share-decreaser.
Several years ago, I got into a long conversation with a programmer at an open house at Intel about automating the building of houses. We agreed that there could be many advantages.
Yeah, like not needing us plebes around.
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Machines will do all the work. Humans won't have to work.
Humans won't have to work, but they will have to think.
This is known as the IBM Pollyanna Principle [wiktionary.org]:
"Machines should work; people should think."
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Machines will do all the work. Humans won't have to work.
Humans won't have to work, but they will have to think.
This is known as the IBM Pollyanna Principle [wiktionary.org]:
"Machines should work; people should think."
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And what about all those people that aren't able to beat Alpha Zero at Go?
Once the machines can "think" better than the average person, how many relatively unskilled human thinkers are you really going to have a use for?
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Not just shareholders, also executives and board members. If they were all grey aliens or even an unusual minority we could easily see how a small in-group has hijacked productive work in general for their own personal gain. But they blend into society just well enough to make you have to do your homework to see it.
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The answer is almost universally shareholders.
When you raise or lower a firms costs, there are at least four groups who could get some of the benefit: owners, employees, suppliers, and/or customers. Who actually benefits and by how much depends on the individuals involved. The numbers I've seen (which sadly I don't have handy and can't reference so I could be blowing smoke) indicated that customers reap most of the benefit most of the time.
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That 11 percent - where did it go?
11 percent is only the loss to the worker (over 5 years, or about 2% per year). But the gain to the company is likely much more than that. If the worker is separated, then the company is saving 100% of the worker's salary minus whatever the automation costs. If the worker is retained but reassigned, the company is still getting the benefit of the employee's labor but just in another area, in addition to the advantage of the automation.
So where do these savings go? In a competitive industry, much of it m
Not sure there's a lot of competition left (Score:2)
I think you're hinting at trickle down in your post. I'm not even sure you know you're doing it. One thing I can say, higher pay will _
Re:Not sure there's a lot of competition left (Score:4, Informative)
we've been green lighting pretty much any merger an acquisition you can dream up for the last 40 years.
Anti-competitive practices don't even need a merger. If Vanguard, Fidelity, and Blackrock are the biggest shareholders of both Comcast and Spectrum, and all have board seats, they would likely veto any proposal for a fight over market share, since they would have nothing to gain by a shift of the market from one of their portfolio companies to another.
The concentration of equities into fewer and fewer big funds encourages implicit collusion and price fixing. Since 2010, corporate profits have averaged about 9% of GDP, more than double the average of the 1990s.
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...infographic going around showing that something like 7 companies make 80% of the products we buy. I can count the number of places I shop regularly on one hand (local grocery chain, Costco, Target, Walmart, Amazon).
That doesn't pass the laugh test. Just from where I'm sitting I can count products from over 100 companies. They may get delivered at retail via few large companies but Target/Amazon/Walmart/Costco make virtually nothing themselves. Even their store brands are made by many other companies, not to mention the deep supply chains involved in that final assembly.
Re: Up his sleeve (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, after accounting for inflation, what is much more expensive, and of less quality?
Here are a few counterexamples:
In the 80s, TVs 55" and larger were only affordable by rich people. Today's 55" TVs commonly range for less than $1,000 in price, offer 16 times the resolution, have far better color accuracy, don't need to be periodically recalibrated, and have a perfectly even display geometry so that overscanning in order to hide display imperfections is no longer necessary.
In the 80s, the high end personal
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Your description isn't wrong, but I think there's also the paradox of other economic indicators like flat or even slightly declining real income over the last 20-30 years, greatly increased housing costs, the post-secondary education debt taken on by anyone in college over the last 20 years is huge.
For the slice of people for whom the economy is good, it's very good, and its not all super rich people. But there's also a vast swath of people for whom the economy is much worse.
The problem seems to be for peo
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Umm, not cars.
I remember a car my father bought new in '73. Adjusted for inflation, he paid about as much for that one as he paid for the car he bought my mom last year.
Of course, mom's new car is FAR more capable than the one from '73. If only because it'll last her 150K+ miles, rather than the maybe 75K miles the old one lasted.
And never mind that back then, having two cars was not common for an average family. Whereas now it's more the norm than the exception....
you are only looking at tech (Score:2)
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You mean three sectors heavily regulated by government have prices going up?
Golly.
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Food: Price supports to stop it from going down, preventing farmer bankruptcies as supply and demand adjusts.
Land: No more being made, true, but mercilessly controlled at the behest of nimby crowds and zoning. It's ok, I guess, if you want multi-million dollar environmental studies for every new apartment, not to mention more millions in legal fights, but don't lay those costs on capitalism.
Energy: Also heavily regulated, and having to get on bended knee for permission for rate increases. Still, where
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Thus prices going up in one sector but not in another does say exactly nothing about the price effect of regulations.
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well I dunno about that but office automation has been removing jobs for some 50 years now so the guy is pretty far behind the curve.
on the other hand, it's not new at all - now let's all go burn some spinning jennies. sensible people equate office and data automation(or decisions based on them) into the "robot revolution" anyways and I guess it's invisible if you don't have a job or something but if someone is working as a journalist at a newspaper or magazine it's kinda hard to imagine they wouldn't have
Re:It doesn't need to dematerialize (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's good that we're at 50-year-record levels of unemployment
That doesn't count people who have given up finding a job, people who work but still can't make ends meet, people who work two jobs in order to pay the bills but whose health is suffering as a result... The unemployment rate was and is a scam.
Homelessness is at an all-time high. You can't have that and have a meaningfully low unemployment rate. Someone has sold you a false view of reality, and now you're repeating it to make yourself feel better. But reality doesn't care how you feel.
Re:It doesn't need to dematerialize (Score:4, Informative)
Homelessness is at an all-time high. You can't have that and have a meaningfully low unemployment rate.
Sure you can. All you need to is close down the hospitals that previously housed the mentally ill who are incapable of taking care of themselves or staying on their medication and decriminalizing hard drugs without actually offering support to help people get clean.
Also a quick Google search suggests your entire premise is wrong. The Wikipedia article on homeless ness in the US sources a graphic from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States#/media/File%3AUS_yearly_timeline_of_people_experiencing_homelessness.gif) that show a decline in the homeless population that’s been happening over the last decade.
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However, regarding your point about inequality dropping, you're flat-out wrong. Simply wrong. So wrong, you're either trolling, ignorant, or lying. Inequality is as high as during the great depression. The highest it's been in close to a century.
Yes, income for poor people is slightly up, partly due to Republican tax cuts
Re: It doesn't need to dematerialize (Score:4, Insightful)
You didn't read the link, did you? Income is up across the bottom 80% of income levels. If someone's taking jobs at Amazon or Wal-Mart, it's because it's an improvement on their previous situation. What's wrong with that?
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Please stop commenting as AC (Score:2)
Your comments are lucid and persuasive, but much of their impact is lost because of AC posting.
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Using an event study differences-indifferences design, we find that automation at the firm increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of about 8% of one year’s earnings for incumbent workers. We find little change in wage rates.
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How does the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” work ethic survive when there isn’t much work to be done?
It's like the people who continually scream that "Fast food was never meant to be a living wage!!" but will refuse to admit that the "living wage" jobs came down to fast food's level, not that fast food is trying to raise up. They'll shout, bury their heads in the sand and continue to blame the working class for being poor despite all evidence, because to consider otherwise might threaten their little privileged life.
Maybe we’ll legalize prostitution
Another fun thing most people don't consider: When you try to turn society cashless, as b
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His solution is to implement a UBI for all US citizens over the age of 18.
If you restrict the age, you still have to have a welfare program. It would be smarter to stop letting the republicans compromise sex education (because that always increases the rate of unwanted pregnancy, which the Rs claim to abhor) and go ahead and give it to everyone. But you also have to unfuck education in general so that those kids have some prospect better than popping out puppies as a means of gaining income. And part of that is teaching critical thinking, which would lead to more people rebelling
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Only mention of Yang in a largish Slashdot discussion? I want to be surprised but I can't feel it.
Anyway, I think that Yang is the only candidate who is even considering the problem, though I would reword the problem description a bit:
In the past productivity improvements have focused on the physical side of work. For example, giving one farmer a powerful tractor that allows him to produce enough food for thousands of other people.
Now our productivity improvement are moving into the nonphysical side of work
Re:Does anyone... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't really automation, it's greed. Automation could be great for everyone but the wealthiest people want to get wealthier, and they're willing to do it at the expense of everyone else.
But the obvious end result of these trends is that they will have everything, and the rest of us will have nothing, and they're going to have to automate blowing us the fuck away because we're going to want to eat, and they're going to have all the food.
Lucky for them, sentry guns are cheap. But the story isn't going to end how they want, even so. When they automate us away, they only increase the odds stacked against them by increasing the numbers of the disaffected with nothing to lose.
The rich always manage to forget the lesson of madame guillotine. But there will be a new lesson: You need a certain minimum population to sustain a given level of technology. This isn't science fiction, you can't breed scientists. They have to have both aptitude and the right environment. And speaking of environment, the wealthy have proven conclusively that they will not maintain the biosphere, and they live here to, and there's no planet B. Terraforming is almost certainly possible, but not on a useful time scale even given massive automation.
The race to the bottom only leads one place.
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Specialization. That's how German labor has not been decimated nearly as much as US labor.
Unfortunately, we USAians like to take what we learned by specializing, and then teach it to cheap labor in places like China.
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You are from the Netherlands, right? A little explanation is called for here. The term 'liberal' has different meanings in the USA and the rest of the world. Everywhere else, 'liberal' is the equivalent of libertarian. In the USA, socialists have co-opted the term to seem more palatable to the electorate.
Re: Power has shifted to employers in The Netherla (Score:2)
Yeah Iâ(TM)m Dutch. Youâ(TM)re right, I should have said âoeconservativeâ. The Dutch word âoeLiberaalâ is used for conservative parties.
Tell me, is this a joke? (Score:2)
Is the parent joking or serious?
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If automation is replacing jobs, more jobs are being created right now to replace them in the great Trump economy.
Replacing high-paying office jobs with Wal-Mart greeter jobs is not an improvement for the worker.
But you Maga idiots will happily drink whatever Kool-Aid you are served, so talking about this is a complete waste of time.
it is just the next big change like the industrial age
Enormous numbers of people starved and lived in terrible poverty before the industrial revolution managed to improve things. See, the industrial revolution was only possible because of all the idle labor in the form of unemployed farm workers. That situation was not very good for those un