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Pandemic May Permanently Replace Some Human Jobs With Machines (bloomberg.com) 98

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The coronavirus pandemic has the potential to permanently replace some humans with machines, according to a new study on Monday from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. From a report: Layoffs have been higher among workers in industries that can be automated, which increases the risk those jobs will become permanently obsolete, according to the study by economists Lei Ding and Julieth Saenz Molina. At the same time, the spread of Covid-19 has accelerated automation in industries that have been hit hard by the virus or that don't permit remote work. The longer the recession lasts, the deeper the impact of automation will be. "In case the COVID-19 crisis evolves into a prolonged economic crisis, many job losses in automatable occupations could become permanent in the post-pandemic economy, similar to what happened during the recovery from the Great Recession," Ding and Saenz Molina wrote. Industries that were already facing a high risk of automation lost 4.2 more jobs per 100 than jobs in sector facing fewer threats by technology, the study shows, which analyzes data through August.
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Pandemic May Permanently Replace Some Human Jobs With Machines More

Pandemic May Permanently Replace Some Human Jobs With Machines

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  • I'm tired of watching life go in slow motion. Where's my fucking 30 hour work week?

    • France [bbc.com]? Maybe not.

    • Where's my fucking 30 hour work week?

      In the porn industry.

      • Prostitution (aka porn) is the most literal form of raw capitalism. You aren't just figuratively "whoring yourself out" to the bourgeoisie for a quick buck. You're literally whoring yourself out. Bezos is beating his dick to your gaping dripping anus right now. Pretty soon we'll all be doing the "side-hustle", if you catch my drift.

    • Right now. Provided you're willing to accept a 1950s standard of living.

      • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday September 14, 2020 @02:45PM (#60505428)

        Right now. Provided you're willing to accept a 1950s standard of living.

        Working class families could own a car, a modest sized house in the suburbs, and go on vacations, all on a single bread-winner's earning? Sounds good to me. Just as long as we don't have to go back to all the pastel colors. And as a father, do I have to join a bowling league?

        • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday September 14, 2020 @02:59PM (#60505466)

          Working class families could own a car, a modest sized house in the suburbs, and go on vacations, all on a single bread-winner's earning?

          In the 1950s, most families owned one car. Today, they own several.

          Houses in the 1950s were, on average, half the size they are today. Homeownership rates, at about 65%, are nearly identical today.

          Even white males are better off today. Everyone else is much better off.

          • Working class families could own a car, a modest sized house in the suburbs, and go on vacations, all on a single bread-winner's earning?

            In the 1950s, most families owned one car. Today, they own several.

            Houses in the 1950s were, on average, half the size they are today. Homeownership rates, at about 65%, are nearly identical today.

            Even white males are better off today. Everyone else is much better off.

            Nonsense. Several cars? Really? You're making shit up. STFU.

            • Nonsense. Several cars? Really? You're making shit up. STFU.

              The number of cars registered in America: 280M.

              The number of households in America: 128M.

              280M/128M = 2.2 cars per household

              Data source: 10 second Google query.

              Also keep in mind that the average family today has 2.5 people. In 1950, it was 3.5. So cars per capita, rather than per household, has climbed even more.

              The same is true of household space. Houses are much bigger today. Families are smaller. I lived in the 1960s and shared a bedroom with three siblings. Today, that would get parents arrested f

          • The world has changed a lot since the 1950's, and many things that worked just fine back then do not translate well.

            1 car: If most wives were stuck at home due to sexism, glass cielings, etc of course a house did not need a whole slew of cars. Towns were also smaller, making it more practical to go to the neighborhood market on foot rather than drive miles to the Mega-Mart.

            Houses: You used to be able to kick your kids out the front door so they could explore and play in the neighborhood. Now that gets y

            • Working spouses should be resulting in money-gluts in house holds instead of simply treading water and leaving the kids to be turned into zombies at some unregulated pre-school

              • Working spouses should be resulting in money-gluts in house holds instead of simply treading water

                Doubling the size of your house, doubling the number of cars you own, and increasing your TV size ten-fold is not "treading water".

                Move to a small town, get a 1950-sized house, a single crappy car, cancel Netflix and Comcast, and your family can still live on one income.

                • I have manged to raise three kids in a large metro area on one income, thank you very much for you "sincere" advice Bill

                  While I agree that consumerism does rest with the consumer, our entire economy ('merican here) is based on most people spending greater than 95% of their income (burns even hotter if they spend 105% by mortgaging value from homes, etc).

                  This behavior is reinforced through media, in a thousand different things that are shoved into our brains so well that we barely notice them at all.

                  Both par

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

              If most wives were stuck at home due to sexism, glass cielings, etc

              Wives weren't stuck at home because of sexism and glass ceilings, the were stuck at home because they could!
              Ok, there was sexism, but now, even in sexist families, women go to work, because they can't afford to stay at home.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by PPH ( 736903 )

              You used to be able to kick your kids out the front door so they could explore and play in the neighborhood.

              You can't do that any more. Because its dark when school gets out. You can thank all the stoners-in-training for pushing back the start times to accommodate their lazy asses.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • We should be working to "live", not living to work.

              That is your personal choice, not an economic requirement.

              Plenty of people live very cheaply in rural areas in modest homes and grow their food in their backyard.

          • Families need multiple cars because they need multiple people working to pay for their 3k square foot house (even without kids) that costs more, costs more to heat/power, etc. And if you do have kids? Costs a months wage just to send them to day care for the month.

            • Convincing people that they really need all that crap is the first step to wage-slavery

              I am reminded of Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle", where a family had put their children into credit card debt before they were born to purchase numbered, limited edition collector plates, which would surely be worth a fortune some day (fyi they are not).

          • In the 1950s, most families owned one car. Today, they own several.

            Cars per capita were 30% lower in the 1950's. Meanwhile, new cars cost a higher percentage of median household income with two workers in 2018 than it did in 1950 with one primary breadwinner.

            It's the size of the used car market that's driving total car ownership rates higher, not any other concern. I wonder why the 1950's didn't have a huge number of decade old cars to fuel the used car market?

            Houses in the 1950s were, on average, half th

          • Technological progress has made things cheaper combined with globalization so serfs can use newer technology to get you cheaper goods; plus less pollution for you (but not for the serfs.)

            Used cars are a massive market; cars also run longer.
            Electronics run far longer...tubes are dead. It's so cheap you DISPOSE rather than repair! People used to need a TV repairman because an American on a living wage was cheaper to pay for a house call to fix the TV than it was to buy a new TV (or get insurance to replace t

          • Yup, more people living out of their car than ever, record, mortgage and auto loan delinquencies, 1 in 5 people under 35 saying they've seriously considered suicide, everything is GREAT! Man I haven't been to slashdot in a while but you are consistent aa ever with the bad takes
        • Do without EVERY family member having a phone, a tv in every room, Cable/Satellite/Streaming, A brand new car and or MULTIPLE cars, going out to dinner 3-4 times a week and on and on and on. Consumerism, is mostly caused by people trying to keep up with the Jones'. It use to be ONE tv, ONE phone, 3-5 tv channels, one late model car and every meal was at home.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            Every family member has a phone because neither parent can be home to take care of the kids because both parents have to work all day. They have a TV in every room and cable/satellite/streaming services to entertain the kids because both parents have to work. They have multiple cars because both parents have to work. They go to dinner 3–4 times per week because both parents have to work. And so on.

            Consumerism isn't the cause of the financial decline of the working class. It's an effect.

        • You can live like it's 1950 (one road-trip vacation per year) on a one person income in certain suburbs if you budget properly. Housing is the biggest problem but that is because bureaucracy makes it very hard for developers to build housing cheap. If you don't have a mortgage you can live fine.

          Let's see .. median US individual (one person) income is $34K per year

          Budget on $34K per year ($29K after taxes, or $2400 per month):

          • Mortgage + taxes: $1200 ($200K is the median sale price of a home of 1950s median

          • Were you trying to be hilariously incorrect with your numbers, or was that an accident?

            I hope you were trying to be funny, because if this is how much you think things cost, damn do you need to get out of the basement more.

      • 1950s standard of living with 2020 doctor bills!
        One hour wipes you out for life at the ER

    • Here it is: http://eco-epistemology.blogsp... [blogspot.com] The title and subtitle are "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite!
      You have nothing to lose but your free time!"

      I should update it with something about overabundant free time, but mostly I've moved on to other aspects of ekronomics these days. That blog was just one form of Ekronomics 101. The only comments were AC, so either no one read it or no one cared. Of worse?

    • Sure, sure. Be sure to enjoy your 25% pay cut while all your bills stay the same (or increase).

  • Pandemics aren't running HR. It only harms or kills people. Humans are in charge of the hiring and firing.

  • Technology and innovation will take away jobs. However they also open the door for new jobs or the company needing people for work they had never bothered before with.

    Accountans are still around today. They are managing funds making sure it is put to effective use. In the old days their job was to mostly add up the numbers. Computers have replaced the need for old accountans but their job has expanded and improved after technology took over their old jobs.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )

      "However they also open the door for new jobs"

      Logically, they will open the door to fewer new jobs (or lower-paying new jobs) because otherwise the automation would be pointless. No company is going to save $1 million dollars by putting a robot on the assembly line if they'll then need to spend $2 million dollars on technicians to service it.

      "Computers have replaced the need for old accountans but their job has expanded and improved after technology took over their old jobs"

      Computers put a lot of bookkeeper

      • And inventory used to be a massive headache, and now barcodes and RFID scanners make it a breeze. And every company used to have armies of secretaries, and every boss had one and they all had roledexes filled with contacts. Outlook and VOIP has replaced all of that. The newspaper boys used to be in every neighborhood at the crack of dawn on their bikes, every morning. Now we roll over and start scrolling on the phone.

        I agree with you that I don't see what jobs automation is going to make. In the short term,

      • Those jobs never came back. But new jobs that were never considered before came into play.

        A company can save $1 million a year with robots. They may spend 2 million on technicians, because beyond the million savings, they are producing 3x as much, so they are now making a lot more to justify the expense of paying more for the technicians.

    • you're not going to see a lot of that in the States since most of what's here was already automated due to higher wages. But in China, Mexico, etc expect mass layoffs and the social unrest that comes with them. Also expect automation in places like meat packing plants too.

      It's not being done for cost (they have defacto slave labor) they're doing it to protect their supply chains.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      I concur. My longer response is in my earlier comment about couch potatoes.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      They can open more jobs for those who are able to create and adapt. The problem, for example, we had in the 1970's and 1980's with the loss of manufacturing jobs was that we were not well educated in the US, and certainly the aftermath if WWII created a false sense of financial well being.

      Around 1960 Sputnik created a awareness that we, in the US, needed to educate ourselves beyond the classic myths, and this took hold for about 20 years. Therefore there was a good amount of people my age who were able

    • That's the "replacement theory" that's usually given when automation is brought up. However, there are at least three problems with it.

      1. We don't know how long the trend will continue. There may be a tipping point where the smartest machines out-do the dumbest humans.

      2. It's usually the next generation that takes up the replacement jobs. Replaced older workers have a harder time moving into new jobs. (Whether it's a less flexible brain or hiring discrimination is hard to say.)

      3. During recessions a lot of

  • Lesson (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RandomUsername99 ( 574692 ) on Monday September 14, 2020 @02:44PM (#60505426)

    If menial work wasn't to some extent a matter of social control in this country then maybe we could benefit from this to make our lives better. Instead, it will cause misery and death because rich people are perturbed by the idea of their slice of the pie increasing less each day, and non-rich people are brainwashed into thinking that life without work is life wasted. I don't know how dumb you'd have to look at this and realize that we don't need all of the people whose jobs are replaced by automation to keep working. Our society is no less wealthy than it was beforehand. The work they were doing before is still being performed, and they're not using any more of society's resources than they were when they were doing whatever function they were performing. If you somehow tie your own self-worth into always working regardless of whether or not that work could easily be replaced by a robot, then that's your warped perspective, and whether you realize it or not, it was probably given to you by people who stand to make a whole lot of money off of you believing that. We can have a world that's better than this.

    • Re:Lesson (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Monday September 14, 2020 @02:47PM (#60505436) Homepage Journal

      We can have a world that's better than this.

      We can. But people have to be OK with not everyone working and that will never happen. Why should I have to work when you get to play video games all day? That thought process has to be overcome and I am not sure that's possible.

      • But people have to be OK with not everyone working and that will never happen.

        That's not true. There are plenty of trust fund kids who don't work and for some reason that's okay.

        • They have tons of money already, therefore anything and everything they do is already stamped "approved" by society at large. Or at least that's the way it seems looking up from my little dung-heap at the trust fund babies.

      • Not right now, but we used to think a lot of things we don't think anymore. At one time, outright ownership of other human beings was the status quo that needed no defense. The overton window has shifted on a lot of things over the last decade. Politicians are seriously considering how reparations could be implemented when a few years ago, to even consider it was seen as absolute absurdity. If people push back against the fear mongering, brain washing bullshit with words that show how reasonable and normal

        • Well, reparations are an absolute absurdity.

          Not because the african american community doesn't deserve them - they absolutely do! They're absurd because there's no logical way to implement them without racial purity tests and genealogy tracing and that gets ugly really, really fast.

          How black do you have to be to get reparations? 100%? 50%? 1%? Do you have to be able to trace your roots back to slavery? Segregation? Do you have to show proof that it impacted your family for generations? If your ancestor was

          • You're missing the point. The point is that they were considered to be a non-starter issue a decade ago and now people are implementing things that they are calling "reparations." The Overton window moves, and previously ridiculous ideas suddenly don't seem to be as extreme as they once did.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        But people have to be OK with not everyone working and that will never happen. Why should I have to work when you get to play video games all day?

        Why does it have to be all or nothing? Have incentives to have only 3 day work weeks, for example, so we on average work less and play more. Mix it up.

      • Your assuming that this is something that needs to be overcome, that people have to be okay with not everyone working. That's a bad premise. It's one of the false promises long used to sell socialism.

        Historically Stalin solved the problem by inventing the gulag. Literally millions of people were killed.

        https://economistsview.typepad... [typepad.com]
        https://core.ac.uk/download/pd... [core.ac.uk]

  • It was coming anyway. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Monday September 14, 2020 @02:49PM (#60505442)

    Any job that's being automated out of existence was bound to hit that point sooner or later regardless. The pandemic is pushing the accelerator in some cases, but it's not the main reason those jobs are being automated. If it's possible to automate it, and automate it in a way that's less expensive than hiring or keeping a human doing the same job? It will be automated. End of story.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Again I concur, except with your content-free Subject. I approached the topic with "couch potatoes" in an earlier comment.

      However mostly I'm surprised by how substantive the discussion has remained. On Slashdot 2020 any discussion of any aspect of this topic is most often immediately trolled to death.

      • No really sure how many couch potatoes there are, unless you mean people who take to the couch after a day of work, then end up sleeping there until work bids them again.

        Simple experiments with pigs show that they get bored and exhibit signs of mental illness unless you make them do some work to get fed, like hiding their food...

        Is that where we are headed, or has the implementation of busy work already become the case for a significant percentage of our population?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      A loss of life is never a tragedy, because, well, they were going to die eventually anyway.

      • A loss of life can be a tragedy, as it is the elimination of a person's potential.

        A job is something a person does. If a job goes away, the person does something else. Many times their potential can actually be better realized after a job loss.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, there are two forces at work:
      1. What you say
      2. In bureaucracies, the fuckups at the top feel more important the more underlings they have and the more productivity they can erase

  • It replaces automated defense systems with sticks carried by people!

  • Of course. Every disaster is an opportunity to increase wealth inequality. It's been going on for many decades.

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312... [amazon.com]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    It's like the old cartoon of two vultures sitting on a tree and one says to the other, "Patience, hell. I'm just gonna go kill something."

  • You know what? We got enough problems literally everywhere right now, people are still panicking about things, everything is fucked up, so hey let's toss more gasoline on the dumpster fire that is our entire gods-be-damned civilization right now by telling people "Your job will be permanently replaced by a machine!" because you know what the average person will hear? They'll hear "You're going to be FIRED, PERMANENTLY, and will be HOMELESS and DIE OF STARVATION and EXPOSURE and there is NOTHING you can do a

  • Jobs lost to automation is not news. Maybe the pandemic is just an excuse. There has to be a big shake-up in how we work, that is for sure. I am working on the new normal. It will not be like the old normal. It will be better.

    I am lucky to work in a place with a very high quantity of clever people: PhD and all that. I am putting out philosophy ideas where I can. If we get this right, the more intelligent way of working, like most software developers working from home, could be a killer business strategy. It

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