During the Pandemic, Will Robots Take Over More Human Jobs? (baltimoresun.com) 142
An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:
Before the pandemic, automation had been gradually replacing human work in a range of jobs, from call centers to warehouses and grocery stores, as companies looked to cut labor costs and improve profit. But labor and robotics experts said social distancing directives, which are likely to continue in some form after the crisis subsides, could prompt more industries to accelerate their use of automation.
And long-simmering worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could dissipate as society sees the benefits of restructuring workplaces in ways that minimize close human contact. "Pre-pandemic, people might have thought we were automating too much," said Richard Pak, a professor at Clemson University who researches the psychological factors around automation. "This event is going to push people to think what more should be automated...." Brain Corp, a San Diego company that makes software used in automated floor cleaners, said retailers were using the cleaners 13% more than they were just two months ago. The "autonomous floor care robots" are doing about 8,000 hours of daily work "that otherwise would have been done by an essential worker," the company said. At supermarkets like Giant Eagle, robots are freeing up employees who previously spent time taking inventory to focus on disinfecting and sanitizing surfaces and processing deliveries to keep shelves stocked.
Retailers insist the robots are augmenting the work of employees, not replacing them. But as the panic buying ebbs and sales decline in the recession that is expected to follow, companies that reassigned workers during the crisis may no longer have a need for them.... Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies labor markets, said that with companies hurting for cash, the pressure to replace humans with machines becomes even more intense. "People become more expensive as companies' revenues decline," he said.
A new wave of automation could also mean that when companies start hiring again, they do so in smaller numbers. "This may be one of those situations when automation does substantially depress rehiring," Muro said. "You may see fewer workers when the recovery does come."
Even YouTube had said it's "temporarily" relying more heavily on machines to moderate its videos.
"This means automated systems will start removing some content without human review."
And long-simmering worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could dissipate as society sees the benefits of restructuring workplaces in ways that minimize close human contact. "Pre-pandemic, people might have thought we were automating too much," said Richard Pak, a professor at Clemson University who researches the psychological factors around automation. "This event is going to push people to think what more should be automated...." Brain Corp, a San Diego company that makes software used in automated floor cleaners, said retailers were using the cleaners 13% more than they were just two months ago. The "autonomous floor care robots" are doing about 8,000 hours of daily work "that otherwise would have been done by an essential worker," the company said. At supermarkets like Giant Eagle, robots are freeing up employees who previously spent time taking inventory to focus on disinfecting and sanitizing surfaces and processing deliveries to keep shelves stocked.
Retailers insist the robots are augmenting the work of employees, not replacing them. But as the panic buying ebbs and sales decline in the recession that is expected to follow, companies that reassigned workers during the crisis may no longer have a need for them.... Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies labor markets, said that with companies hurting for cash, the pressure to replace humans with machines becomes even more intense. "People become more expensive as companies' revenues decline," he said.
A new wave of automation could also mean that when companies start hiring again, they do so in smaller numbers. "This may be one of those situations when automation does substantially depress rehiring," Muro said. "You may see fewer workers when the recovery does come."
Even YouTube had said it's "temporarily" relying more heavily on machines to moderate its videos.
"This means automated systems will start removing some content without human review."
Would be nice... (Score:2)
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If they automated away the Slashdot editors, it would be a start.
Huh? From some of the work they do, I had assumes they had at least be partially replaces but Artificial Stupidity.
No. (Score:5, Informative)
Automation is expensive, hard, and takes time and very careful planning to get right.
And someone has to keep all the bots running which is entirely new org most companies don't have in place.
By the time cv19 either naturally or through medicine is under control we will not have a single new robot in place that wasn't already planned to be. Quite the opposite, any existing projects will be on hold or delayed.
As far as the long term goes, we will continue to use machines to replace humans since the first pers0n used a plow and animal instead of a stick to farm.
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Just think, what if we had an economy where 70% of people could work at home?
Be careful what you wish for. If a job can be done from home, it can be done from Mumbai.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
The most important feature of automation isn't to eliminate jobs, rather it's to allow your business to scale without making the labor cost prohibitive. Nowadays, mom and pops can do things that only very large companies used to do in the 70's and earlier, and the number of people employed has only increased. Those large companies don't have fewer employees today, they have more. All that has changed is the type of work that they do. For example, switchboard operators used to be a large part of AT&Ts workforce, but now people that would have been switchboard operators do other jobs instead, and there are more of them.
That doesn't necessarily mean you need more people to run the automated switchboards than you needed switchboard operators in the past, but it does mean you'll need more business operational jobs like marketers, accountants, and technical support to accommodate more customers. The same technology that introduced the automated switchboard also introduced new computers that made the jobs of business operational workers more effective.
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Ehh, bad analogy. AT&T probably employs far fewer people from top to bottom to operate its long distance telephone service. If AT&T actually employs more people now than it did back in the heydey of switchboard operators, it's due to them offering other products and services.
One thing Covid-19 has shown us is how inessential so many jobs really are. The nature of our economy is such that people are expected to work for a living, even if what they are doing is not necessary to the survival of pret
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EMS is a tricky situation. Lots of folks work in those jobs as a ladder up to something else. Not everyone, but still. It's almost like an internship for some.
As for people working in a pork processing plant . . . supply/demand prevails. Not quite the same situation as EMS, but rather, the skill set required for working in the plant is so low that you get a lot of highschool dropouts, immigrant laborers (read: not necessarily here legally), and felons in places like that. They're hard-up for money and
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OK
So the most important feature of automation is to eliminate jobs in your business?
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That's already being done. Have the government lower taxes on corporations with the idea the company will pass on some of the money to people working for the company. Then the company keeps the money for itself and uses it to buy back stock to inflate the price so it doesn't have to actually grow its business.
It's a brilliant plan. Been in operation for almost 40 years.
Yes, kinda (Score:2)
We don't have robots just sitting around in warehouses preprogrammed to just go out and do everyone's jobs.
My assumption is most of the job functions which will be automated in the next decade won't be accomplished with robots, but with software. This has already been happening, but any disruption to the economy tends to accelerate cost cutting projects such as business process automation. Well, plenty of companies don't have the money for this investment, but these are the ones who will lose market share to those who do.
Your comment is certainly on point for this article, which focused on physical robots taking
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I don't know if I'd go as far as saying there "will not have a single new robot in place that wasn't already planned to be." There could easily be some companies who buy a robot because of the pandemic, who otherwise wasn't planning to. However, in a general sense, you're right. It's just not as easy as buying a robot.
You have to plan it out, figure out which tasks you can automate, shop for an appropriate robot or maybe even have someone build you a custom robot, perform a bunch of testing, etc. You m
More likely scenario (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More likely scenario (Score:5, Insightful)
I think offices may go the way of the dodo.
A company could save a lot of money if they don't need to pay rent on office spaces. What stopped it in the past was the investment in changing most of the office to online, and the cultural shift needed to perform it. Covid-19 has forced that investment and cultural shift and now companies have the base investment in an officeless office, and a staff that is being trained to be used to being an online office. Any issues with this is being sorted out every day social distancing goes on, and other businesses rushing to help meet this demand.
While it does cost money to maintain the online office, it is cheaper then the rent of a physical office space (that would also be using quite a few of those online functions anyway)
Once the bugs are worked out and the rest of the tools designed, it won't be hard to convince many office workers (that have gotten used to it) to stay at home and not have to worry about a work commute each day.
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Companies would save SHITLOADS of money if they moved their offices outside very dense, exclusive, and expensive commercial districts.
But having thousands of square meters in downtown manhattan and paying millions a year in rent is not about productivity. It's about making an impression. So no, offices aren't going away any time soon.
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Because every company has THOUSANDS of square meters of downtown major cities....
You do know that many companies don't actually have giant downtown locations? And many that do only pay enough to really just have their name on the build, right? Why pay millions in rent, when you can pay a few hundred thousand?
Re:More likely scenario (Score:4, Interesting)
Companies would save SHITLOADS of money if they moved their offices outside very dense, exclusive, and expensive commercial districts.
The issue then becomes transport. There is generally good transport into those dense districts, but if you locate to somewhere on the edge of a city then getting from one side of the city to the other for workers on the wrong side of the city can become painful and so the good ones will seek alternative employment that they can get to. Also, in a dense location you can tempt someone to move from another company to yours more easily, whereas if you are asking someone to increase their commute from 30 minutes on one edge of a city to 90 minutes plus on the other you are probably going to have to offer relocation and so on.
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* Many of the larger companies have offices in multiple locations, many of the smaller companies are located near their owners.
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Most consulting engineers are in downtown areas to be close to the architects they work for. For me, only half my career was downtown; the second half was more suburban as our primary clients were no longer architects, replaced by direct-to-owner work.
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The cultural shift hasn't happened. Once the legal mandates end, back to normal for the vast majority.
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The cultural shift hasn't happened. Once the legal mandates end, back to normal for the vast majority.
I agree it will be back to normal for the vast majority (well, not right after legal mandates, but within the next year or so). But even if 90% of people go back to normal, it would be a huge shift for a very large number of people.
This pandemic will more likely be a catalyst for change, not the start of an overnight revolution.
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Bosses are anal-retentive power-grubbing types. They want to SEE people working, even if it makes them less efficient.
So here's what you'll end up with: people 'working from home', but with cameras and microphones watching them every single moment, and keyloogers watching their computers, and threatening emails (or worse, their boss's face on the screen) screaming at them ab
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At first I thought your signature was a seed phrase, but then simply googling it revealed a comic book...
Hmm...that gives me an idea, I should create a signature that sends anybody who reads it on a wild goose chase thinking there's hidden gold behind it, but all it is is gibberish.
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Questionable Content is a great webcomic. You should read it.
No, I don't get paid by the author. I just think it's great.
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The companies would have to kick in to help with the expense of the internet, possibly subsidizing computers or equipment or furniture as well. I'd be quite happy to take my Aeron chair home with me, get a larger desk, add some lab space, and so forth. I maxed out my power strip quickly, and have been tempted to go into work to borrow another. But companies will probably be cheapskates and treat it like a "bring your own tools" journeyman job.
Currently the VPNs are having issues by being overloaded. The in
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Wait, I take it back, I forgot my one job that was business software. I normally block that one out.
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It seems to work for us tech-savvy person. The majority of people I support have NO CLUE how to work from home and 3-6 weeks at home doesn't help, they just accept the loss of productivity and hope it all turns out well for the company.
Hopefully (Score:5, Insightful)
It is essential to drive human labor out of food industry (increased farm automation, fully automated slaughterhouses, indoor agriculture for greens, etc), long haul transportation industry (trucks, buses, etc), and vending industry (fully automated stores, automated warehouses and local deliveries). It would also be good to eliminate secretarial work and automate as much of middle management as possible. With that done we would be much more pandemic proof in the future.
The current pandemic is showing that these economic chains as they are now cannot be shut down and powered up on demand. They do not scale well and need a complete overhaul anyways. If demand plunges 50% overnight, you cannot have farmers cry about their lack of planning. You need farms where labor can be turned off on a minute by minute basis and turned on just as fast. That can only happen if labor is automated. Human seasonal labor must be the first to go from our economy.
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Re: Hopefully (Score:2)
I was not thinking in those terms. If you plan for the next cataclysm then you need key parts of the economy to run even when everyone shelters in place. Right now we have essential workers who are exempt. We need to make every effort to reduce this category. Truckers, cops, agry workers. We also need to reduce potential for transmission of future diseases so all face to face jobs like middle management and secretaries. The economy needs to runs with a very minimal number of people having very minimal inter
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For that, robots would have to want something to spend money on. Robots do not and won't ever "want". AI won't change that. "Need" in order to complete a task isn't the same as a "want".
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You mean like this?
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/self-aware [smbc-comics.com]
and this will make jail health care better after t (Score:3)
and this will make jail health care better after the lawsuits. and for some that will be there docker for the stuff the ER does not do.
Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Interesting)
If demand plunges 50% overnight, you cannot have farmers cry about their lack of planning. You need farms where labor can be turned off on a minute by minute basis and turned on just as fast. That can only happen if labor is automated. Human seasonal labor must be the first to go from our economy.
The first part of what you wrote was interesting, but this bit is just gibberish. I can't even imagine how you think crop growth cycles and planning work. Farmers can already hedge against demand at the time of harvest by selling futures, or buying option on futures, at the time of planting. For some crops, storage is also a good option. The mega-corporations that are most of US agriculture are quite adept at this sort of planning.
Anyhow, food demand is quite steady. Restaurants may have seen a fall-off in customers, but everyone is still eating food. Crops are still being harvested. Agricultural workers are of course "essential" and not locked-down, at least in the US. Once you plant the crop, you're pretty much going to harvest it (assuming the crop came out OK), with very rare exception.
And without a doubt, the agriculture industry is every bit as automated as it can be. It's a very well funded area of R&D, as demand is quite high for more automation.
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Umm...
There is this from 26th March:
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
and this:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
And more.
Doesn't look that good, really?
Re: Hopefully (Score:2)
Agriculture is automating but investment lags and is limiting progress. For example fully automated slaughterhouses exist for things like chicken or lamb but not for beef or pork. The latter are being designed but are not yet there because the money is only trickling in. Right now some slaughterhouses are closing dye to workers with covid. This should not happen. We need automated trucks delivering cattle to an automated dock where they could be stunned, shackled, suspended, and processed without human invo
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So wherever you look, agry work is not push button automated at all.
Required farm labor is about 3% of what it was 100 years ago for the same product. That's a lot of automation. What's left are all the corner cases where automation is particularly hard. Still, $billions to be made from those corner cases, and John Deere et al have had self-driving farm equipment that works well enough for years now, far ahead of self-driving cars. Some problems are just harder than others.
We need that automated but the money going into that research is far less than e.g. autonomous driving.
So wherever you look, agry work is not push button automated at all.
We need both. It tends to work out better if we let market pressures provide incentives, not a c
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First, 3% of a lot is still a lot. There is a lot of people now employed in agriculture, related transportation, and food processing and distribution. That's a very fragile chain if you are worried about a virus and if you are thinking about something much worse than the current one. In some native american tribes tribes, smallpox killed about 75% of their population. Black plague had a mortality rate now estimated at 50% and likely approaching 75% in some areas. This was when the world was nowhere near as
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But what if Godzilla attacks? What if aliens invade? What makes your extraordinarily unlikely worry more worthy of giving people money and power than any of a million other extraordinarily (though technically possible) unlikely worries?
Anyway, if some imaginary future plague kills off 95% of the population, there will be food in your neighbor's house that they won't be needing, and you'll have other pressing concerns.
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Picking strawberries seems like a hard task to automate, especially for berries rather then jam.
Even the berries that have been automated such as blueberries, the automated picker (actually shaker) does a way shittier job then humans and is only used as a last resort when humans aren't available as there is so much more wastage.
Then there's things like picking apples, need to be picked individually, with some varieties needing spot picking as they don't ripen evenly and avoiding bruising.
As lgw says, these
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Sounds like satire to me. Maybe it needed a smiley at the end?
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And without a doubt, the agriculture industry is every bit as automated as it can be.
This isn't true for any industry on the planet. While it is true there have been significant advances in agricultural technology consistently over the past century, there is still plenty of room to improve. The crisis is showing us many of those areas now.
You mention people still eating food even though restaurant demand is down, but that hasn't been any easy transition for supply chains. It isn't just having trucks go to Walmart instead of a local restaurant. It doesn't take much time on Google to find sto
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While I do not disagree, there is one major problem with this: How are people going to get the money they need to make a living? Because none of the newly automated will do anything about that issue. They will just get rid of the workers and that is it. And there will be no new jobs to speak of to compensate.
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there is one major problem with this: How are people going to get the money they need to make a living?
There is one major solution already being discussed: UBI. Some of the output of the automated factories will go to the people, not as wages, but as basic income - enough to provide basic living for everybody. That doesn't mean everybody gets mansions and Ferraris (at least not yet), but enough for shelter, food and medical care. That's the whole reason why humanity built factories to begin with: to produce goods for humans. The global productivity keeps growing - if you divide the total industrial output by
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there is one major problem with this: How are people going to get the money they need to make a living?
There is one major solution already being discussed: UBI.
I _know_ that. The money would be there, the productivity would be there, the infrastructure would be there. What is not there is enough people getting greed and envy and arrogance (" _I_ work! I am better than you scum! And, of course _you_ deserve to starve, because _obviously_ you are completely responsible for your situation!") under control.
And please can the invalid Ad Hominem. I am a proponent of a real UBI that you can life off decently and have said so here many times. I do not think it would do re
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In general, robots need a large team to make them work. What they do is removed the unskilled labor and replace it with a mix of skilled and unskilled labor. Some things robots are bad at: putting seats into cars on the assembly line. But some things they are great at: precision spot welds and inspections on those cars.
So if the robots are polishing those floors in the store at night, then there's someone who's turning those robots on at night, refilling the floor wax dispenser, performance mechanical mai
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They aren't replace one for one. Some of those jobs at the firm that installed the robots will never come back. But some new jobs were also created elsewhere. How does it work overall? Today we have vastly more people working than we had 100 years ago. Where did the jobs come from? Jobs come and jobs go, they're always in flux and no industry stays static, not even farming.
Given that we can't stop this, then imagine we can and where would you engineer society for perfection? Back to agrarian serf soc
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If anything, Covid-19 is showing us how many jobs are already inessential.
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We need to treat people not employed as backup. When you store data in a datacenter, you hopefully have copies of it stored around the world, fully redundantly. Same idea. For every job we should have a chain of succession and we should have training and drills for people not involved in the economy to be ready for that one in ten thousand year event. We should treat people not currently active in the economy the same way you treat your backups - as essential and valuable so long as they pass their drills a
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Having picked cucumbers for money as a kid, I would love to see robots in the fields as much as you. But turning them off instantly leaves the crop to rot, or at least go to seed, and be lost, leaving nothing to eat.
And if you wait for demand to startup before you start the robots to plant, you are still looking at thirty to sixty days before there is even lettuce and radishes to eat. Most vegetables take longer. Tree fruit, well, lose this crop and you are waiting until next year.
The nice thing about the r
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Loss of some output for the duration of demand drop is probably inevitable but you do not need to turn off all production. You just shut down the agricultural work to account for lower demand.
Anyways, the point is that we have a historic opportunity to rethink agriculture, to make it more resilient and to try to eliminate the effects of climate and human factor on our food supply. But the current virus makes it a no-brainer to at least eliminate the human factor. Moving agriculture entirely indoors might be
Automation probably won't fix that (Score:2)
It wouldn't hurt if we could automate meat packing more, since there's some problems right now with plants shutting down when folks get sick (the plants need to be sanitized, which will take days) but labor isn't that much of a problem. If all else fails we'll force prisoners to
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I hope so (Score:3)
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We need a FAIR policy on taxation. One that encourages business ownership and encourages us to help each other, not just screw ourselves over.
I thing I really like about other nations is that they actually back each other, In Ameri
Betteridge's return (Score:3)
As usual, no. Not unless this thing lasts even longer than the experts say it will. There are plenty of jobless people out there who would like work right now, and robots are still expensive.
On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of thing that will spur investment and research into automation, for the next time this happens. And with more people out of work, and some of them with interest and applicable skills in this area, more people are available to work on it. Plus, it's work that can be done in a distributed fashion.
Robots need to take over mundane tasks (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't limited to robots and AI. It seems to be a fundamental aspect of our reality, as even logic is bound by the same constraint [wikipedia.org]. Within a bounding set of rules, there will always be a set of logic problems which can be solved only if you're able to think beyond those rules.
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While I completely agree on what machines can and cannot do (and I think there is now enough evidence that strong/true AI is likely a pipe-dream), there are some problems with this idea, desirable as it may be.
First, most people are not really creative either and cannot really help here. Sure, you find creative people in the most surprising places, but they are a minority.
Second, and that is the truly sad thing, because too many members of the human race have never managed to overcome greed, more automation
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There's a class of problems which cannot be solved by a deterministic algorithms [wikipedia.org].
Except there's no way for humans to solve those problems either.
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Dishwashers predate microprocessors, although most modern ones do have an MCU in them.
Some people know nothing. That does not give anyone much insight into anything.
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Re: Mulch them? (Score:2)
Now there's a creative idea !
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In one of my first jobs I swept and mopped floors. A robot could do that, but it might not have put me out of a job either, because I did more than just sweep and mop. I don't think that a robot that does a great job at sweeping and mopping is going to put hundreds of thousands of people out of a job. Some will be out of a job, sure, but there will also be new jobs. This isn't the doom and gloom for society any more than the mechanical loom was.
Many people suck at creative and have no ed. (Score:2)
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People need to be reassigned to creative tasks. There's a class of problems which cannot be solved by a deterministic algorithms [wikipedia.org].
The issue here is that it may be possible for enough art objects to be created that are good enough for people to want to consume them using those algorithms. There may still be a niche for authentic singer-songwriters with acoustic guitars, but it might be that acceptable levels of mediocre pop to be churned out, even on-demand, and there seems to be a pretty large market for mediocre pop written by humans. With a large volume of cheap output, then it might be that even Taylor Swift can't make much money a
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But that market is not driven by the music, it's driven by cults of personality.
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But that market is not driven by the music, it's driven by cults of personality.
That's a fair point which I had missed as I am not 14 any longer!
Not really (Score:2)
But plans for that have clearly been made and this is an opportunity to implement them without too much opposition. Sadly, this will be one more instance where better machinery will just make the already rich richer and the poor poorer.
Oh for fuck's sake, no, it's not! (Score:2)
'Robots' suck. They're not 'taking everyones jobs' any more now than they were before, which is to say, 'not'.
For FUCKS SAKE, people, stop panicking, and stop listening to people trying to get you to panic.
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Run fer the hills! The robots are coming! Everybody read Kurt Vonnegut and despair.
They already are (Score:5, Interesting)
Retailers have just gotten carte blanche to go ahead with bringing in robots to help with everything from inventory to mopping the floors. They are doing it as well, taking advantage of the opportunity. They can do so right now and no one is going to give them a hard time over it.
https://ktla.com/news/grocery-... [ktla.com]
By the time this is over the robots will be entrenched and people will remember that they could not get groceries when they needed them. Robots do not get sick - that fight is over. The only question is what job will the displaced workers do? Society only needs a limited number of robot repair technicians and there is a large gap between cashier and technician.
Service jobs will not save society, that has been proven unworkable. Not everyone can or should go to college, we tried that and it failed miserably with millions of people having useless degrees and student loans that they cannot repay. Universal income is a pipe dream that fails hard once it encounters the real world. You cannot have most of society living off of the minority for any sustained length of time.
You cannot support an entire society on intellectual property, especially when other countries simply steal everything you create. At some point you either have to revert to subsistence lifestyle or you have to revert to producing something that others can consume. At the end of the day I think society needs to go back to having a stronger manufacturing base. You need blue collar jobs that people without college degrees can perform. Only academics can afford to live in ivory towers.
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Meanwhile, Zume pizza just fired their robotic chefs.
No doubt there'll be setbacks. But human pizza makers don't change much, while robots come back faster and cheaper. Like ROAR [venturebeat.com], their first gen served "more than 15,000 burgers and more than 31,000 pounds of chicken tenders and tots" last year. That one cost $60k, the new one $30k and also it cooks more dishes. Maybe in a year or two it'll be $15k or even less. In price sensitive markets it can go really quick.
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While going back to having a stronger manufacturing base is a good idea for a number of reasons, I don't think it'll really help with jobs. Manufacturing jobs are some of the easiest to automate, because factories are well-controlled environments. Human workers are handy in terms of providing flexibility to manufacturing, but aside from a few skilled workers that understand how to apply and maintain automation, manufacturing jobs are constantly vulnerable to automation.
Really, living off a minority of valua
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The Pandemic has shown Capitalism's Weakness (Score:4, Insightful)
Capitalism can't be overturned, but a much broader movement towards socialism is needed. MORE focus on the worker's plights. MORE focus on public healthcare and livable wages is absolutely NECESSARY, otherwise you end up with 17 million people out of work, trillions of dollars disappearing overnight, and the decade long economic "recovery" on the chopping block. Bernie Sanders wasn't wrong, but Mark Cuban was.
Re:The Pandemic has shown Capitalism's Weakness (Score:4, Interesting)
Socialism is basically capitalism too, except that the leader has a monopoly and even less incentive to provide good service.
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Socialism is basically capitalism too, except that the leader has a monopoly and even less incentive to provide good service.
Right like the business community believes in free markets.
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Billions of dollars in energy subsidies
https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/... [imf.org]
But keep believing business people are heroes and haven't been taking advantage of ignorant people like you to enjoy the wonders of the corporate nanny state.
Re: (Score:2)
Socialism is basically capitalism too, except that the leader has a monopoly and even less incentive to provide good service.
No, they really are different things but they do both exist to some extent in any real world economic system. Having a leader in control of your capitalist or socialist society is simply an authoritarian government, and both societies would have many of the same negative aspects because of this government model. China and Russia have become far more capitalist over the past few decades, but that shift hasn't changed the authoritarian nature of their society. Improved modern communication has to an extent, b
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Oh, you mean like Comcast.
I hope so (Score:3)
The faster the robot future, the quicker to tax the factories and give people UBI.
Why is there no software to design products for lights out robotic manufacture?
Exterminate biological imperfections (Score:2)
No! (Score:2)
They will replace humans, _after_ the pandemic, so that it can't happen again.
They do? (Score:2)
The "autonomous floor care robots" are doing about 8,000 hours of daily work
The ones at my two local stores never seem to do anything other than wait for everyone to walk by or get stuck looking at a shelf. Wait, that's not true. Last week one blocked an aisle telling everyone cleanup was needed despite the floor having nothing on it.
Missing the massive elephant in the room. (Score:2)
But as the panic buying ebbs and sales decline in the recession that is expected to follow, companies that reassigned workers during the crisis may no longer have a need for them.... Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies labor markets, said that with companies hurting for cash, the pressure to replace humans with machines becomes even more intense. "People become more expensive as companies' revenues decline," he said.
But as you replace people those people suffer a drop in income so have less to spend on your goods which means you lose even more sales and revenue. Not everyone automated out of a job, especially those unskilled ones, has the ability or opportunity to move into something else.
Not really (Score:2)
Robots: A scenario that was already being, had LONG been, scrutinized in all sectors as a potential way to send less money out/to the bottom of the pyramid. Nothing particularly changed. Seeing as we're yet in the expensive nascent phase, laborers are still cheap and implementation was mixed depending on myriad task/bot details, including apple-quasiapple dollar numbers. Typical thinking is tentative; it's easier to let the other guy spend millions to get over the hump, be the beta, then you come in and use
you can bet your ass on that. (Score:2)
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And when was that ATM* installed in your bank? Most banks round here have had them more than 10 years. Most supermarkets have completely automated checkouts with one person for every six checkouts (but the un-automated checkouts had a similar level of supervision).
You might want to check under your bed in case the aliens have already invaded.
* Hint: before ATMs existed the (un-automated) "