Automation Is Now Taking Service Jobs Once Thought Safe (apnews.com) 286
"Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks," reports the Associated Press.
They're arguing that the pandemic "didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs." Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe...
Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe. I was completely taken by surprise." Improvements in robot technology allow machines to do many tasks that previously required people — tossing pizza dough, transporting hospital linens, inspecting gauges, sorting goods.
The pandemic accelerated their adoption. Robots, after all, can't get sick or spread disease. Nor do they request time off to handle unexpected childcare emergencies.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund found that past pandemics had encouraged firms to invest in machines in ways that could boost productivity — but also kill low-skill jobs. "Our results suggest that the concerns about the rise of the robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified," they wrote in a January paper... Employers seem eager to bring on the machines. A survey last year by the nonprofit World Economic Forum found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce as a result of new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, business investment in equipment has grown 26%, more than twice as fast as the overall economy.
They're arguing that the pandemic "didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs." Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe...
Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe. I was completely taken by surprise." Improvements in robot technology allow machines to do many tasks that previously required people — tossing pizza dough, transporting hospital linens, inspecting gauges, sorting goods.
The pandemic accelerated their adoption. Robots, after all, can't get sick or spread disease. Nor do they request time off to handle unexpected childcare emergencies.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund found that past pandemics had encouraged firms to invest in machines in ways that could boost productivity — but also kill low-skill jobs. "Our results suggest that the concerns about the rise of the robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified," they wrote in a January paper... Employers seem eager to bring on the machines. A survey last year by the nonprofit World Economic Forum found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce as a result of new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, business investment in equipment has grown 26%, more than twice as fast as the overall economy.
Touchy assumption. (Score:5, Funny)
Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand.
We are geeks. We don't need any human contact.
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Read too much Ayn Rand? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh boo hoo. Companies whining that they can't pay minimum wage, which hasn't changed in 20+ years is always going to happen. European companies pay an order of magnitude more, many places have waitstaff that are salaried, and even some of the waitstaff get the Les Clefs d'Or gold keys, just to be more valuable. The company owners here in the US are the ones who are the ones in the wrong here.
Let them get the robots and stop the complaining. If Flippy can make hamburger patties and cook the fries, great. That is one less person exposed to a fat fryer. If they could get a 100% automated shop, they would, but they can't so they whine and make noise threatening to... but in reality, those minimum wage guys are a necessary evil for them.
As for a chatbot taking orders, good luck at that. In my neck of the woods, around ten years ago, McDonalds tried using an offshored team from India. The guys doing it couldn't understand various accents and fouled orders so badly that the entire project was scrapped. Good luck with that, because people are going to get very frustrated very fast, and for every person sitting there in line and waiting for their order to be done correctly, that keeps 5-20 people from being able to get through the line.
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Consider the alternative to minimum wages - not starvation wages, but properly, fully implemented Universal Basic Income (combined with the restructuring of income tax to a linear, flat tax rate and the introduction of wealth tax to pay for this). This would mean that employers could give much lower pay and people could still survive. There are a bunch of people who are effectively unemployable. That includes people with a very bad employment record, but also disabled people who get tired after a couple o
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>European companies pay an order of magnitude more, many places have waitstaff that are salaried, and even some of the waitstaff get the Les Clefs d'Or gold keys, just to be more valuable.
That's the myth in US, just like the "Scandinavian countries are socialist" when we're far more capitalist than US. Reality is, restaurants often just don't follow the laws, regulations and contracts. Even here in Finland, where laws are widely respected (as opposed to places like France where they're guidelines rather
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It is minimum wage laws
Nearly everywhere in America, prevailing entry-level wages are above the legal minimum.
I live in San Jose. The minimum wage here is $15.45. Yet even McDonalds and Walmart are offering a starting wage of $18.
Re: SlashDEAD is gay sex (Score:3)
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The best solution here is to remove the minimum wage laws and repeal the expanded unemployment benefits.
So wrong. So very wrong.
First, having ppl working below a living wage/insurance, means that we are stuck with paying out lots of Medicaid, WIC, Housing, etc. IOW, the government is subsidizing the companies. That is total BS. Far better to have them unemployed looking, or creating a company.
Third, Automation will come REGARDLESS. It is coming to China, Vietnam, etc and they have even lower wages.
Best thing is raise minimum wage slowly, while phasing in e-verify/real ID; Finish the Southern Border F
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Funny that countries outside America can manage to pay more and give more benefits.
But that "MUH SOCIALISM" i guess huh?
American is such a shithole country. Sliding towards conservative theocracy.
But most other (major) developed countries also have much higher youth unemployment rates than USA. EU does for example have a youth unemployment rate of 15.9% compared to the US one of 10.4% for men and 16.5% for EU versus 8.0% for USA for women (latest OECD data). Sure, some countries in the EU (Germany in particular is drawing down the average EU youth unemployment rate) have lower rates than USA but the general picture is that young people have a much smaller risk of being unemployed in USA than in the
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"Funny that countries outside America can manage to pay more and give more benefits."
You mean more money, job security, 30 days paid vacation, unlimited paid sick days, full health coverage, full dental, 6-18 months parental leave and so on?
That's just crazy talk. :-)
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We can only play the WWII card so often.
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You think people earning minimum wage pay a lot of tax...
Have a bit of a think about why, in a progressive tax system, that might not actually be the case.
Arby's Technically it's Food (Score:5, Funny)
Arby's Technically it's Food
Re: Arby's Technically it's Food (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Arby's Technically it's Food (Score:5, Funny)
Arby's is (relatively) better than Nickelback. If Photograph doesn't make you hate Nickelback then I don't know what will.
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Fascinating story of how to screw up a successful business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Economics drives this, not pandemics (Score:5, Insightful)
The COVID pandemic is just an excuse. The reason Tori exists is because a mechanical slave is cheaper and more reliable (as in less bitchy, not more effective) than a human wage slave.
That'll work until enough people are out of work that nobody earns any money to buy the stuff made or served by machines...
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Predicated on the assumption that these "wage earners" aren't part of the Covid-19 deniers and will be around long enough to be a problem for future employers.
Why do that? (Score:2)
Because it could be done.
Money is a tool to encourage cooperation. To build a needed workforce. The cost of production is only that of the labour used to bring it about. If no labour input then production becomes zero cost. Money is no longer needed. That's the easy part.
What happens to the once needed population? This becomes the hard part.
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What happens to the once needed population? This becomes the hard part.
America's birthrate is at 1.73 BPW and trending down.
The excess population problem is already being solved.
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A declining population brings lots of other problems with it. Pensions are often based on the assumption that there will be enough people working and paying in to pay out for the retired ones, for example.
Japan has been dealing with this for decades and it's so bad that they have a minister in charge of getting people to have more children, with various schemes aimed at making it easier and cheaper.
Re:Why do that? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pensions are often based on the assumption that there will be enough people working and paying in
Perhaps. But this discussion is predicated on the assumption that machines will produce everything and humans will no longer be needed.
Japan has been dealing with this for decades
I lived in Japan for two years. Japan is weird. You go into a bar and see a dozen women at one table and a dozen men at another, and for the whole evening, none of them make any effort to talk to the other. Trying to get the Japanese to have babies is like trying to get pandas to mate.
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The ideal would be Star Trek style fully automated luxury communism. I have a feeling that the transition will be very difficult though.
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The Afghan immigrants are a drop in the bucket compared to those streaming out of Central America. Or China, actually.
Did the king need peasants to buy stuff? (Score:2)
Re:Did the king need peasants to buy stuff? (Score:4, Insightful)
When you own everything it doesn't matter that there's nobody to sell it to.
It absolutely matters, and what's more, they're too stupid to understand the fact. You need a substantial population base to produce the individuals who will create the stuff purchased by the wealthy. If it's robots all the way down, sooner or later some failure not envisioned by man will crop up and for want of a nail, or maybe a cotter pin, the entire system will be lost. But you don't have to be intelligent to be rich, you just need to start out rich and then a whole system bought and paid for by the rich can be leveraged to protect your wealth, which is what it's for.
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That'll work until enough people are out of work that nobody earns any money to buy the stuff made or served by machines...
We have already arrived at this point.
Our economy is already not growing at the rate it could because people already have no money to buy the services they'd want. And yes, I said services, not "goods and services", because they still need to buy the goods they need, but they cut back on services. And that's devastating for an economy like ours, and that's also why China is thriving while we're struggling to get some economic growth going.
2/3 to 3/4 of our GDP and employment depends on services. Which has b
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Right this moment, I think this assessment is off track. We have a great deal of demand curtailed by labor shortages. Companies have the will to hire and the income to do so, but no takers. To the point I recently saw that they were offering $2,000 starting bonus for bus drivers, and they'd never offered any bonus before. Big now hiring signs are everywhere, and places are shut down due to staff shortages and too busy when open.
That said, there is some sort of longer term issue with the imbalance of money
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Supply may catch up to demand for labor very soon, but at least until recently there was absolutely demand in excess of supply of labor at 'normal' pay levels. Significant signing bonuses for entry-level low skilled work is pretty significant evidence that a) they can't find applicants and b) they think the situation is transient and demands a transient strategy (a signing bonus as opposed to a long term wage increase).
When the dust settles, the current situation that many *hope* to be a sustained workers
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I think the main problem is that such places exist and that there are mindless people going to those places to buy food.
Is that actually food or only "nutritions" making you fell full for half an hour?
Something like that would not really fly in Thailand, Germany, France or Denmark. Well, the french would perhaps curious enough to visit it once a month - but probably not a thing to make business on.
You know: you go to a place to eat, to look at the sexy waitresses, or other sexy people. Driving buy and get f
technical training needs to cost less / HR needs (Score:2)
technical training needs to cost less / HR needs not look the other way and say we need an 2-4+ year degree that can cost alot.
Assuming a lot (Score:5, Informative)
Ideally, that's what should happen.
In reality, not everyone can learn the things required for those more interesting jobs. Those people are not working low-hanging fruit jobs because they want to - it's because it's the only jobs they're able to do.
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Re:Assuming a lot (Score:4, Insightful)
Your choice of job/career and what motivates you is really a personal matter, and varies from person to person. For some people, their job is nothing more than a means to earn a living, so whatever pays the most is what they gravitate towards.
On the other hand, some people are not motivated solely by money. I could theoretically earn quite a bit more by working an at equivalent technical job outside of game development. But making games is pretty fun for me, and I'd rather spend my working hours doing something I enjoy, and which mentally challenges me on a regular basis. Other people follow career paths for various other reasons, like an interest in travel, or flying, or being outdoors, or working with other people, etc.
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Really?!? As long as I could earn a living wage I would take the tech job even if it payed less.
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Consider what kind of 'meeting new people' you want. Those customers at Arby's aren't going to see you as human, you are a tool that needs to be told loudly and rudely what they expect of you which is usually complete and total subservience.
Be very careful what you wish for.
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Society hasn't worsened so much as social media has made the worst of interactions more prominent. No one posts a video of a cordial yet uneventful transaction, that's boring. However almost daily someone posts an interaction that escalates to at least yelling, maybe racism, potentially punching and it goes viral. A silver lining to consider is that this is *so* unusual, that it is worthy of being viral as its not something someone sees everyday in person.
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Arby's will not hire you but will. What do you do then?
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hahah using angle brackets deleted "inserttechfirmhere". Should have read the preview. Woops!
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Being able to do the job, and being able to get the degree required to get past HR, are different things.
Also, one insight from Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" is "There is no unskilled work".
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Re:Assuming a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of those weird talking points Futurists like to trot out while smoking a joint. "Yeah, man, like instead of flipping burgers or pushing a high torque robotic arm into place twice a minute, these people will, be like, thinking up new ideas and being leaders and shit! Yeah, maaaan!".
I often wonder if I am physically capable of getting high enough to the point where I would think such a thought and then not immediately dismiss it as absolutely asinine.
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I often wonder if I am physically capable of getting high enough to the point where I would think such a thought and then not immediately dismiss it as absolutely asinine.
In the interest of science you should experiment and report back.
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One, I'm not sure UBI is going to work and also even if it can work, I don't know if its time has *yet* come.
For another, we never had UBI even for a moment. You get a UBI even if you work. The money people were getting they would no longer qualify if they worked. So they got to choose $600/week to work zero hours, or they could maybe get $480/week by working 40 hours. We perversely paid people to *not* work and penalized them if they wanted to and could work a normal job. In a UBI scenario, you might pi
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In reality, not everyone can learn the things required for those more interesting jobs.
Maybe in the USA where education is some kind of a hard leap. But the reality is these aren't "long hanging fruit" jobs for dumb people. These are low hanging fruits because of how prolific they are, and because of their high turnover.
Ultimately I've met far dumber people through my life doing far more complicated jobs than I ever met while I (now engineer) worked in the food service industry. Like everyone there it was far from the only job I was "able to do", but not really far from the only job "availabl
Re: Assuming a lot (Score:2)
Assuming stupidity.
What always get ignored in retrospective job displacements and extending them to the future is the importance of productivity/consumption matching and wealth distribution.
Consumption has been getting capped due to environmental reasons, decreasing discretionary income means the poorfags can't afford services either (even when there's the same disposable income, increasing fractions go to housing and healthcare). The two major employment drivers are disappearing.
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It's because training is not available to them. Employers don't want to pay for it, the workers don't have the money to pay for it, and even when it's free it takes up valuable time that could be spent with family or on a 2nd job.
If there was more vocational/on-the-job training it would allow a lot of people to up-skill into better jobs.
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Except, of course, in-house training died due to companies poaching from each other, and therefore deeming it was cheaper to poach than to train. So they all stopped training. Who could have seen that coming?
does human collect the money and hand over food? (Score:2)
If a human collects the money, or even just hands over the food, it hasn't taken away any jobs at all, that's the person who used to take the orders.
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Well, now that employee doesn't even need to speak grade 7 level English.
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Depends. They'll not likely completely eliminate human presence within the restaurant. But if the ordering is automated, and assuming other tasks can be too, then a restaurant that used to need a staff of 10 humans to operate at peak times may be able to operate at the same efficiency with only 4 or 5 humans. Somebody still has jobs but the number available has been drastically decreased.
Granted, this isn't an issue IMHO. There will ALWAYS be jobs that are not really doable by automation. Displaced work
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Most waves of automation have resulted in fewer workers or fewer hours being worked.
At one time people started working at about age 6 for 12+ hours a day, 6.5 days a week, until they dropped at 60 or so. Wave of automation and suddenly employers don't mind child labour laws, another wave and employers don't mind 40 hour weeks. Now people don't start working until 30 in some cases and seldom before 19, often work shorter hours and retire at 60-65. There is also a lot of disabled people compared to historical
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That is not the trend in the United States. Our retirement program - Social Security - is dying slowly. The only solution will be to force people to wait longer for benefits. Retirement age is being pushed up, not down. Birth rates are down, so the number of people paying into Social Security is dropping. Only immigration seems to be holding up the rate at which money can continue to pour into the FICA pot. And even that is not enough.
Education is becoming more expensive. People are being pushed out
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ANY job is doable by automation, maybe not at this point, but AI and machine learning are progressing fast, each year it becomes more sophisticated. Couple that with more agile robots, which also get better and better each year as technology progresses.
Let's not forget, a human is nothing more than a biological/chemical robot and it a few decades robots will outperform humans for almost any physical job, even office jobs.
Good (Score:2)
Tax the robots and give unemployed people a salary from those taxes. itâ(TM)s better than having people do shitty jobs and slow down production just to get them a paycheck. If a robot can do the job better, faster, and cleaner why not let it? Skip the middle part of having humans do unnecessary work. Let them pursue a hobby or learn some skills instead. I can tell you that many employers rather have a robot do the work even if it costs them more than humans.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Tax the robots and give unemployed people a salary from those taxes.
We should tax flush toilets to pay all the people no longer employed as maids to empty chamberpots.
We should also tax self-dialing phones for all the unemployed switchboard operators.
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There's always an anti-tax political party who will get into power eventually and get rid of those taxes and any type of UBI.
Re: Good (Score:2)
And cause instant mass income loss to millions of people? How did that work out for Trump, and in his case it was widely perceived as being a temporary thing plus he even had an excuse.
These jobs are still safe (Score:5, Interesting)
They aren't doing this in order to lay off a ton of workers. It's because they can't get them.
Every fast food place or retail store around here is desperate to hire. I see marquees offering double minimum wage to start, and hundreds of dollars in signing bonuses.
No one who has tried to talk to a computer on the phone thinks this is going to be a good replacement in the drive-thru; they just don't know what else to do.
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It may be the case that the immediate need is due to not being able to find workers, but the 'workarounds' will likely endure if they find success during these times. The drive through has always been notorious for being hard to get an order right, and yet they stayed popular. They are likely to get some things wrong more often, but be better at other things. For example frequently new employees working a drive through may not realize a menu item exists, or not know how to enter it into the system. Others
and yet here those job are gone (Score:3)
Re: Semi trucks (Score:2)
Truckers are chased out of jobs many used to love by shitty working conditions, cumbersome regulations and low pay.
Trucking relies on churn to expend new hires then replace them with more new hires. It's not bad enough for the transport companies to fix the human problem, and cheaper to replace meat drivers.
Re:These jobs are still safe (Score:4)
""We've got to end unemployment payments because people have to be starving and about to become homeless before they'll accept the shitty wages we're offering!"
old propaganda films (Score:2)
I remember the old propaganda films in school from the 50's and 60's. Back then, they thought that automation and yankee ingenuity would make work obsolete, and everybody would be able to just order whatever they wanted and we would all live peacefully and happily ever after. No need for an income, let the machines do it all.
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If there was a cap on profits (in percentages, not amounts) everyone could only work a few hours per week to pay for things made by machines. The entertainment industry could continue to grow and people would be kept busy/happy as a result. Not everyone is a creator, most people are just consumers.
Re: old propaganda films (Score:2)
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I am glad that someone noticed this, finally. Human beings are more than just units of labor. It is a common error of thinking affected by Marx.
Re: old propaganda films (Score:2)
Right, which is why we need robots and universal basic income.
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Someday, you may be right. I am not convinced that day is today. But the day is coming when beloved members of your family can no longer offer valuable goods/services on open market. When that happens, what do you do?
It's a "What if?" question, really (Score:2)
It's not propaganda if it's not an actionable line.
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I remember the old propaganda films in school from the 50's and 60's. Back then, they thought that automation and yankee ingenuity would make work obsolete, and everybody would be able to just order whatever they wanted and we would all live peacefully and happily ever after
Note this was actually propaganda, IBM and others paid to make sure people had a good view of computers.
Not that I'm complaining, anything that makes people have a better view of nerds is good.
This tech has been around for a while (Score:2)
Instead of desperately clinging to manual labor we need to figure out what we're going to do with all these people we don't need. Because if we don't figure it out someone else will. I don't mean jobs I mean guns. A dictator will come along and give them guns, and form them up into a military to oppress the rest of us. that's what happen
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You are obsessed with armed rebellions. Planning on fomenting one of your own?
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Well, if history serves as an example, there are basically two ways this can be done: Either peacefully with reforms that create livable conditions for all or violent by them who are denied those conditions trying to take it by force. Also, looking at history, the latter is basically the former with a detour through a couple decades of turmoil where nobody is better off than before.
Who thought shitty fast food jobs were "safe"? (Score:2, Insightful)
If your function can largely be performed by a kiosk, you might want to recognize you're not 'safe' from automation.
And then don't be a fecking idiot and demand more $ without demonstrating WHY you're worth that extra amount.
It is going to hurt before it will be good! (Score:2)
You might not like what I have to say about this, but I've been doing a great deal of thinking about automation the last few 20 years or so, and it's actually quite good, here's why:
In the beginning - automation is going to cost us regular people a lot, we're going to see a rise in poverty, unemployment and people on welfare, well - needlessly to say that's ofc. bad! But only for a short term, and by short term I'm talking roughly 10-15 years.
Automation makes life easier for us, we can concentrate on higher
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Computer automation has been creating jobs for over half a century and will continue to do so. We have jobs that didn't even exist before automation, in manufacturing, distribution, sales, marketing, engineering,maintenance, accessories. It's a job maker.
Re: It is going to hurt before it will be good! (Score:2)
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Keep in mind that computers automate a lot of work that companies used to use masses of clerks and secretaries and accountants to do. Take a look at some pictures from the 1940s or earlier, and check out the floors of secretaries doing all sorts of paperwork that computers can now easily accomplish mostly on their own, or at least with far fewer workers.
That being said, it's absolutely true that computers have created entirely new industries. My own job, programming videogames, is part of a brand new indu
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How many jobs did it create? How many jobs did it annihilate? And what level of qualification was required for the old jobs and is required for those new ones?
That is the problem.
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There's always a group represented by a political party who don't agree and they get into power regularly, even if they have to cheat to do it.
Thought they were safe? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Who in their right mind thought fast food service jobs would still exist a couple of years from now?
There are quite a few people that practice denial when faced with something like that.
Re:Thought they were safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
tbh I've been surprised how much difficulty they've had constructing a machine that can cook a hamburger.
Who is arguing? (Score:2)
Editors do your damn job.
Challenge accepted (Score:3)
The pandemic accelerated their adoption. Robots, after all, can't get sick or spread disease.
Pfft, well not with *that* attitude!
Our robotic actuator controlled spray bottle attachment modules have advanced significantly.
I know they might seem expensive at first, but you are paying for quality!
Slow on the uptake (Score:2)
"The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe. I was completely taken by surprise."
This trend has been going on for 30 years at least, so he shouldn't have been surprised, he should have been paying attention.
If you think automation is overhyped, ... (Score:2)
... you're being very native. This Video sums the issue up [youtube.com] pretty well.
"Robots can't get sick or spread disease" (Score:3)
Really?
Have you ever dealt with a computer?
Makes an assumption people want better work (Score:2)
Self checkout is not an example (Score:3)
The article cites self-checkout as an example of automation of jobs. It's not. Self-checkout simply shifts the job from an employee, to you the customer. You are doing exactly what the cashier would do, if not for the self-checkout system. It's not as if a robot is introduced into the process that would otherwise not be there.
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Will you pay more for your prescription or roast beef sandwich to get it from a business where the service is snappier?
I might, but I don't think most people would. In reality I'd probably just use the Walgreens website to refill my script, or get my butt out of my car and order from a touchscreen kiosk inside. Whether the entity on the other end is human or robot, verbal communication is often the less effective way of accomplishing these things.
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The problem we're facing today with these people is that the jobs they can do are dying off. Back when we automated away the most menial of jobs in agriculture, these people could be retrained to do some of the newly emerging jobs in production. When conveyor belt work was automated away, these people moved into service jobs.
With service jobs gone now, where should they go? Since waging wars and stuffing them into uniforms to kill them off went out of fashion as well, we're stuck with an ever growing, ever
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