Modern societies are going to have a very real problem to grapple with as this replacement goes from newsworthy to the norm. This could result in significant worker displacement with massive bottom-line ROI for companies in the next decade or two, particularly as minimum wages rise.
I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Even if they do, it is unlikely those new positions will employ the same degree of skilled worker.
Assuming a net unskilled job reduction due to automation in a couple of decades, what happens as this becomes pervasive in a society?
> At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force
Not necessarily. The same robotic technology that decouples low-skill labour inputs and outputs is decoupling populations from force projection capabilities. Less cynically, there are organic ways for the situation to positively evolve (e.g. higher across-board labour productivity) without overt wealth redistribution.
Can you expand on this? I don't understand which populations you're referring to as having become decoupled from force projection?
In the US at least, there's 1+ gun for every man, woman, and child. Even if the elite class is backed by the entire US military, there's something to be said for overwhelming force of numbers.
The gun owners are typically on the other side of the aisle from those who support redistribution of wealth. Not saying that couldn't change or that desperation can't trump principle, of course.
I don’t know if thats true: I think everyone wants a “fair” distribution of wealth. The question is in the definition of fair, and means to achieve it. Conservatives believe that distribution achieved by tax and regulation will hurt the total economic production of the US, and lead to everyone being worse off, though more equal (in the extreme: everyone is equally poor), and they also consider it fair that the distribution is unequal (as do liberals). Its just a matter of how unequal.
But at least part of their definition of includes that they have the chance to increase their position, which is incompatible with tax/regulation at the extreme: if everyone has their incomes set in stone by the government, there is no chance to change in status.
But losing all low-level jobs to robots, notably, removes that chance. For different reasons than the liberal (who dislikes it for the centralization of wealth/power, and the extreme polarization of wealth distribution), conservatives would intuitively be against it for the denial of opportunity across the board
Tldr: everyone hates being poor/homeless, and too many people being homeless will cause a revolt regardless of their individual political leanings.
This isn't true, most democrats do not support redistribution of wealth, where leftists who do support the redistribution of wealth are generally in favor of gun rights.
There's no chance that's close to true. The further left you go, the more ardently people are anti guns in the US. With few exceptions it's a dramatic difference between the center left and far left on gun rights. The far left is entirely anti gun, the center left occasionally panders to win votes out of necessity.
The two most famous Socialists in the US right now are probably Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Both are very aggressively anti guns.
Even without guns, it's much easier to break a robot than it is to operate one. I think the economics of the physical economy favor the physical masses over the paper wealthy.
Guns don't do anything without bullets. Bullets don't do anything if they don't hit a target. Disable power and communications and most people become immediately useless at living, let alone mounting an assault.
The days of sheer numbers being useful are long past in the era of modern warfare.
Not really. The US followed certain rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan that a truly ruthless military would not.
For example the Battle of Fallujah was fought with Vietnam level tactics. There were about 100 KIA for the US side. The battle could have been fought differently with zero US losses.
Guns have limited range, and are easily rendered largely ineffective (e.g. armored vehicles). Robots and other advanced weapons make direct combat entirely one sided. Surveillance apparatus allows identifying combatants attempting a guerilla warfare approach. AI could allow identifying an assassin attempting to draw a weapon and killing them before they could get a shot off. Etc.
Against the current US military I dare say that overwhelming numbers would win, against a theoretical future military that is less clear. Moreover the current US military would probably revolt if used to overtly oppress the population, but a more robotized one with humans only required at high levels might not.
What if the lower class is getting simultaneously bigger and also better off? Do you think the bottom 10% is living as bad as they were in 1940? 1980? Things that used to be luxuries are now normal across all income brackets... That's a good thing. :-)
People don't compare themselves to how people lived 80 years ago. They compare themselves to other people, today. So saying "Look poor people, who cares if you can't afford decent housing, or health care, or quality food - you've got a cell phone!" will not quiet the social unrest that a growing underclass will cause.
Yes, I agree the lowest 10% are no longer as destitute, but my point is the dangerous social unrest that is likely to be caused (some would argue already has been caused) by widening inequality is not something that absolute measures of living standards will have much bearing on.
You attacked a very poor interpretation of the parent comment then. Claiming ' they may have iphones, but they don't have food ' is patently ridiculous.
That remains to be seen. There's clearly a certain level of "comfort" where the majority of people become satisfied enough, and the quality of life at the bottom is rapidly increasing as technology and the world matures. The rise of the middle class in China and India seems to be the biggest indicator of this approaching steady state.
I'm not sure if that's a helpful observation, though. The floor for the "lowest" percentile in America is outright destitution.
Homelessness means no shelter from the elements or people that want to hurt you, possessions beyond what you can carry and defend, no health care, and being treated like a second class citizen.
I would be interested in the numbers, but based on my experience of homelessness in California, most homelessness is due to severe mental health issues, not poverty. I'm unsure of any data suggesting these kinds of mental health issues are increasing, but I'd be interested in the data.
Also, having seen the situation in third world countries, I have a real issue calling American homelessness destitution, but I understand the arguments from social cohesion.
I have no doubt homelessness in San Francisco is caused by poverty. However, San Francisco is not california. Do your data apply to California as a whole, or just the bay? San Francisco is a very bad choice in city to extrapolate from.
Globally this may be true, but it's just false for the US. Wages haven't increased since the 1970s, and now even metrics like life expectancy are falling.
Wages have increased since the 1970s. Median and average wages are at new all-time highs. The middle class hasn't improved, the bottom 25% have seen dramatic improvements since the 1970s.
That 1970s income figure, is a fluke of history. The sole reason it was that high back then was because the US inherited a unique position post WW2, in which it had 55% of all global manufacturing, temporarily. That caused a brief 20-25 year period of artificial economic results that saw the US pull far away from everyone else. Over time much of the developed world has caught back up.
Total compensation has increased since then. That includes health care, which is very expensive. The per capita cost of healthcare is near ~$11,000 now, several times what it cost in the 1970s inflation adjusted.
Homelessness is near an all-time record low in the US and poverty is near 40 year lows.
A record number of people are covered by health insurance.
The per capita income transfers for social welfare policies have tripled since the mid 1970s, inflation adjusted. That is, the US welfare state has dramatically expanded over 40 years, to the benefit of the poorest.
Sure, there's a lot more to do. That doesn't mean there haven't been some vast improvements.
> What if the lower class is getting simultaneously bigger and also better off? Do you think the bottom 10% is living as bad as they were in 1940? 1980? Things that used to be luxuries are now normal across all income brackets... That's a good thing. :-)
Ah yeas, the good ole "TV's and refrigerators" argument[0]. They have luxuries! Even homeless people have cell phones, what a world!
Now how about things that actually matter:
* Housing
* Healthcare
* Education
* Transportation
* Income security
All these things are less accessible now than they used to be.
As for the "luxuries": when everyone is expected to have something, it's not a luxury anymore, it's a necessity.
Before most people had a fridge and a car, daily grocery delivery and grocery stores a walk away were the norm. It isn't now because cars and fridges changed the infrastructure. You are screwed without either in most places (and yes, relying on McFoods instead of a fridge is "being screwed").
Public bathhouses aren't the norm because most people aren't homeless and have access to those at home. In that regard, the very poor are worse off than a hundred years ago when a lot of tenements didn't have showers/bathtubs[1].
Before everyone had a cell phone or a computer, people weren't expected to find jobs online. Now this is a requirement to be a member of the society in most cases.
And so on, and so on.
In short, "Poor people now have ________, so we're better off!" is a bad argument. If these people had good lives, you wouldn't call them poor. Their lives suck. Yes, in a different way than a 100 years ago.
But back then, nobody would be out of job because they couldn't answer recruiters' email either.
What? More people across the entire world have more access to those things that actually matter than ever before in history. This is indisputable fact. There are also 7.5 billion people now so it's impossible to compare absolute numbers without looking at the actual billions who have been lifted out of poverty.
There is greater inequality and that is a real problem, but the bottom is still rising, helped along by the very things you seem to mock.
It's a really big stretch to say that some people are somehow worse off now than before because of a lack of public bathhouse (we do have public shelters and bathrooms) and lack of cell phones (we do have libraries, subsidized phones, social services, etc) and just comes off as disingenuous.
> At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force.
There's also the dystopian possibility that automated forms of social control are developed neuter the ability of any kind of popular political movement from challenging the elites. That automation could be anything from systems of censorship, surveillance, and propaganda to police androids.
I think it makes some sense to deliberately cultivate and preserve IRL communities and networks that aren't very tech-mediated. By no means are they a panacea, but I think they have fewer vulnerabilities to tech-based automated control.
I think this will happen. Brings to mind Google's secret project The Selfish Ledger, especially how it can be used for "Behavioural Sequencing"... [0]
As tech gets better it'll become easier to analyse the masses and make good predictions - how much can the masses put up with? How much further can we push them before the boiling point is reached?
"And just before the nuke hit, he reflected on what a great life he had. Under his watch, Skynet raised the percentage of female programmers to an even 50%."
Of course, some would see that that's actually a DYStopia, I mean, where are the trans?!
An alternative, which I advocate for, is that the lower class form productive collectives, stop contributing to the ultra wealthy, and generate their own real wealth. Much of the worlds wealth exists in wealth-generating infrastructure and information that is accessible to all of us. If we simply divest from the ultra wealthy and build a new economy based on cooperation, we can construct a system that inherently lifts us all. Automation will increase our productivity. In the end, the question is simply how we share the result of that gain. Normal capitalist corporations are designed to funnel wealth to a few board members, but cooperatives could succeed here too, where the wealth they generate is more naturally shared amongst all the workers. It’s not a silver bullet, but I feel as though it would represent a real improvement. We have to do something about how we distribute the creation of new wealth, and I don’t think we should wait for someone else to make this change for us - we must take action to realize the potential here!
EDIT: I also think some billionaires are sympathetic to these issues and would be willing to contribute. But if we form large economic collectives, we can amass enough power to force the wealthy to notice when we divest.
One concrete step can be getting rid of the capital requirements (by regulation) to invest. The idea of 'qualified investors' is literally a way to keep poor people poor, and rich people rich, by cutting off poor or middle class people from the major vehicles of wealth creation. It is ridiculous that I cannot invest in the IPO of a company in my local neighborhood because, while I have enough money to satisfy the business, I don't have enough money to satisfy uncle sam's onerous requirements.
But yes, cooperatives like Mondragon are good examples, and also incredibly traditional.
These capital requirements are regulations that have been introduced as a response to companies fleecing the poor-ish, the uneducated and those who had a bit of cash, but decided to put it into one (fraudulent) investment.
Drop them and you'll see what already is happening in the cryptocoin scene: people getting exploited left and right. Point is, no sofa investor will be a shark and get rich, contrary to the ICO promises.
Notice I said 'neighborhood business'. I feel comparing ICOs -- which usually consist of a team you've never met asking you for money for a product you've never seen -- to an established neighborhood business interested in raising capital for expansion of a proven business model is comparing apples to oranges.
Won't take long for the crooks though. Most government regulations are introduced in response to abuse and everywhere they've been rolled back, the abuses come back. No matter if in finance, in taxis (e.g. Uber's surge pricing), net neutrality, whatever.
That could create a moral hazard, where businesses court mom & pop investors, who don't have the means to pursue legal action against the company should they do something less than scrupulous with their investments, instead of investors with the means to hold them accountable.
I certainly don't disagree, but the idea that someone like me, who has no debt, and who is in no danger of losing my lifestyle should not be allowed to invest because I don't have 'enough' is absurd. I would be in support of requirements where you have to show to the government that investing will not cause you to lose your livelihood, but most people do not need $1million in the bank in order to achieve that goal.
For example, I have several hundred thousand saved, and wanted to invest 20k of that in a business in my neighborhood that was doing a public offering. Because I 'only' make in the 100k-200k range, and I 'only' have 300k in the bank, versus the 1 million required by the government, I was deprived of this otherwise perfectly fine opportunity.
It is clear to me that the regulatory environment we have now is not at all fair. I am certain that my system would cost the government more. However, the government should be happy to take on extra expense when it means the creation of richer taxpayers, and the democratization of capital, IMO.
Most investment opportunities aren't available to the unconnected, even if they have some semblance of wealth (e.g., RSU grants for an employee).
Private investment opportunities seems to only flow from the connected to their friends. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that even a small time investor (in the order of 1k-10k) can participate in these private deals that often payout with 10%-20%/p.a, but other than govt regulations, the biggest barrier is knowing they exist.
Everybody who thinks this believes in some replay of the 19th-20th centuries - personally I do not buy it because I think computation is qualitatively different to mechanization.
Moravec's Paradox strongly implies that the middle class is automated before the working class is. I think anybody who doesn't understand that isn't worth listening to since it's the most concrete result in A.I for half a century.
It's not about the bottom - it's about the middle and underclasses - that is different to the past.
state-backed jobs with negative income tax/UBI/wealthfare. This is what gonna happen in Japan. USA? no idea, some kind of revolution. The biggest problem will be in countries like Bangladesh.
The second (third?) most recent Sam Harris podcast episode with Yuval Noah Harari discusses this. We normally talk about UBI in the context of one country, but like you said, third world countries will suffer the most.
Automation killing basic factory jobs will have a much larger effect outside of first world countries, and unfortunately there's no real way to address that disparity from the context of policy in any one country.
We've been replacing jobs with automation for a century. It already is the norm. Why are you so worried?
EDIT: more thoughts
I just finished reading an Asimov novel written in 1955. There were computers in this book. They were people. Computer was a job title. Now we have machines that do that job, and we have an entire new industry employing lots and lots of people that didn't exist before that one job, Computer, was automated.
It's a good sentiment, but the replacement of fast-food workers with robots won't really open up a whole new field in the same sense. Robotics and AI are wonderful and interesting fields, but honestly, let's not kid ourselves, most people who are flipping burgers probably aren't going to go on to work in the field of building their own replacements.
"the replacement of fast-food workers with robots won't really open up a whole new field in the same sense"
No, it won't look exactly like moving from human computers to machine computers. It won't look exactly like moving from manual farming to tractors and combines. It's hard to imagine what it will look like, but it seems overly pessimistic to just assume that this time automation is going to turn out terribly.
Just because its been terrible before? The industrial revolution was a time of starvation and death for the families of the displaced.
The issue isn't how to keep people busy. That's not a very worthy goal. In the '50s we dreamed of a society where robots took the yoke from our shoulders and let us live better lives. Now that it's happening, all we can talk about is how to get people back to work!
People have predicted that it would be a problem every year for the last hundred years. And those people were all proven false.
How many times do the same predictions have to be proven false before we don't take them seriously anymore?
People won't do that though. We will continue to hear the same predictions for another hundred years, and every time the people making will say "but this time it's different!"
No, they weren't proven false, it's just that the effects of automation aren't felt evenly across the whole population at once. If you aren't in the groups it was affecting, you likely didn't see it beyond a newspaper article here and there, and maybe it didn't really register. There are entire towns filled with people who are suffering from poverty and all its knock-on effects because they were single-industry towns and that industry went through automation that eliminated those jobs en masse.
Everyone always says that these people are just suffering from a skills shortage and need to retrain into a different career and move to where the jobs are. But which careers should they choose to retrain into? Retraining represents several years of time investment and at least tens of thousands of dollars in money investment, money which they don't even have in the bank, so choosing wrong will often be the last nail in the coffin. When I was entering school I was told that going into CS was too risky because everyone was offshoring these days. Instead the most recommended "safe" jobs were: lawyer, pharmacist, welder. Of those three choices, only one was still in demand by the time the entering cohort had graduated. The other two had such a glut of entering workers that many new grads were being advised to retrain again. When industry demand is changing faster than people can reasonably retrain and pay off their student loans, "skills shortage" is just another way to say "let them eat cake", and the pace of automation is absolutely contributing to this issue.
Most likely two outcomes. Either everyone will be given a basic income for meeting their needs or the robot revolution will make goods so cheap that very little money/effort will be needed purchase things. Most of the jobs may move to the entertainment and healthcare industry.
What if we're not satisfied with mincome and soma, and we want something more? With no framework to provide for useful productivity, what will young people end up doing? A lazy population with no way to differentiate and striate financially will find other ways of anteing up over each other, including criminal acts...
It's reasonable to assume, given recent tech developments(AI, low code for software, generative design for graphic design/engineering and architecture, blockchain for professions working on trust in transaction like accounting, some automation in the legal field, automation in insurance) that many high-skill professions will suffer unemployment too.
And can someone with high-skill job always shift to another high-skill job? pretty hard, many high skill jobs have very high barriers to entry. And could they aim for the low skill burger flipping job ? Who will get the job, some spoiled engineer, or someone who is used to working hard doing hard labor for low pay and may be younger ?
So why is everybody under the assumption that high skill jobs are safe ?
Software engineering seems safe, if that is what you are primarily thinking of in your question. Developing software at the same level of a skilled engineer is a problem we'd only be able to solve with general AI. Even if program synthesizers (things that take declarative high level requirements and produce code) worked (and they don't at the level required for an non-technical user to use), most engineers today must be involved in the design process, and finding requirements and formulating solutions is a skill that requires humanistic and non-technical intuition.
It's not at all clear that software engineering is safe.
Sure there will probably always be a few programmers, but as tools (and soon I expect AI) gets better those programmers can do more and more of the work. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find the number of software engineers decreasing in the not too distant future.
The only reason it hasn't already is that we've managed to grow the number of things software developers are doing at the same rate as the increase in number of software developers * the increase in efficiency per software developer. And in some parts of software development (e.g. games) it has.
It's possible that you are right. That said, tools are already better than ever before, and yet demand for software engineers has only increased. That's because most tools which are powerful enough to do all the things we need aren't simple enough to be applied without human-level intelligence. Not to mention—the tools themselves are software that also requires programmers.
Personally, I'm of the opinion of the commenter above you—automating most software jobs will require strong AI. Replacement of those might happen someday, but it's sufficiently far away to not think about as an imminent threat to your job (though I agree we should be doing high-level planning about how as a society we will cope with strong AI).
Some of it has nothing to do with ML/AI, docker probably killed more Sysadmin jobs then all of ML combined.
Better tools allow us to do more, faster etc. Thing is amount of things software can do that it is not doing yet is absolutely immense and ML only opens more and more of it.
I think any actual reduction is so far in the future we have no concept of when that will happen and how.
I mean a am I huge proponent of self driving car.. when is that coming? When it works it will absolutely change economy as massive amount of people are now involved or depend on those that are.
It already has eaten the lower ends of programming on the web side with centralized services and templated web development. You can keep defining software engineers as those who haven't been automated away yet -- but I'd wager many already have. For example most companies are not spinning up their own hardware anymore, and less and less of their own software.
People are under the assumption that high skilled jobs are safe, because that's what the actual facts on the ground show.
Engineering salaries and jobs have skyrocketed in the past decade, and they only show signs of continuing to increase.
I have heard people yell about how we are all going to be replaced, every year, for the last 10 years, and yet here we are, with that future not coming true.
Eventually, after making so many predictions, and getting it wrong so many times, people need to reevaluate their guesses, and instead use a fact based analysis of what the market looks like.
You assume a continuing trend based on what exactly? Because it worked that way in the past under different circumstances? The different circumstances are kind of the point.
Where are actually market ready solutions for automation of high skilled jobs today or in the past? Once market ready solutions exit, this will very likely be a completely different situation.
And there is a wide array of even high skilled jobs, where it is feasible, that automation can replace people in the next generation. Maybe not next year or in 10 years, but it is on the horizon for quite alot of professions. Starting such a career now has a different risk scenario then 50 years ago. It is similar to lower skilled jobs like truck driver or warehouse worker. We are not there yet, that they go the way of the street lamp lightener, but assuming a positive trend for warehouse workers, based on past demand seems to be rather distorted. The difference is a warehouse worker doesnt spend years and years and thousands of dollars to enter his field.
The jobs you listed have largely been augmented rather than replaced. You’re also not accounting for new jobs we can’t even imagine yet.
Ten years ago no one would think YouTuber or Instragram model would be viable jobs for some people. Social media directors at companies large and small have to find unique ways to engage with other humans. The guy that fixes cracked screens on smartphones couldn’t have done that in 1999. UX developer/designers craft human interactions to be better.
Automation taken to the end game may create a Star Trek like world where material goods are so cheap as to almost be free. The economy could shift to value knowledge, art, creativity, novel experiences and more.
The source of the problem is simple. Real societal value is generated through this activity, but it is reaped entirely by Uniqlo and its stakeholders.
Yes, consumers are also a stakeholder, but your typical consumer will receive very little or no direct benefit from this change. Eventually, yes, the profits will be reinvested, but the impact will be so diluted as to be a noticeable. Some small fraction of it will probably also go to tax evasion, being expatriated or sequestered by wealthy upper management.
Meanwhile, a whole lot of people are suddenly out of work, imposing significant negative externalities on them and their families. This could conceivably ruin a marriage, or turn a good parent into a raging alcoholic. It may well be that the negative gain to society (in the form of laying off so many employees) has severe follow-on effects, and in terms of net welfare this could do more harm than good.
The effects of leaving the workers out of the profit-sharing is more than just a matter of equity. Without redistribution of the welfare created by automation, it's perfectly conceivable that the net welfare gain is negative due to the negative second-order effects outweighing the positive second-order effects.
This is the stuff they don't teach you in Econ 101, but it's how things really work.
The other thing they don't teach you in Econ 101 is that treating corporations as obligated to keep and preserve jobs prevents them from creating societal value, and treating workers as entitled to a job disincentivises the invention of new methods of creating societal value. It causes stagnation of the economy.
And what is Econ 201's solution to pervasive unemployment, or lack of spending power due to underemployment? Is that also classified as "societal value"?
Because wages are a small part of the total compensation package - leaving out bonuses, health, dental, vision insurance policies, 401k (with matching), employee stock purchase plans, stock options or stock units awards, access to food and on-site services, company cars, etc.
Then econ 201 clearly hasn't studied a graph of income inequality over time, and appears ready to ignore that the bulk of economic activity has shifted from manufacturing and other labor-intensive activities to the financial industry. But by all means, tell us more about how folks working "gigs", the pervasiveness of underemployment, and the frequency with which individuals have to work 3 or more jobs to survive isn't a societal problem.
They teach you economic history and show that predictions of pervasive unemployment and lack of spending power caused by technical innovation have been made every decade and never been borne out as new ways of delivering societal value are constantly being invented.
In Econ 301 they teach you to never say never.
Whether this time is different than the previous rounds of automation or will have larger dislocative effects is the at the heart of the current discussion. We’ve literally been worried about robots replacing all workers since Fritz Lang made Metropolis in the 1920s. Maybe those concerns were early and maybe we’re repeating ourselves. It’s not really clear.
This may be a slight tangent, but I always took the interpretation of Metropolis as one of humans being _reduced_ to the level of machines (and in some ways subservient to them), less in replacement; the "moloch" scene comes to mind. The only robot in the movie seemed more an analog for questions of humanity, blurring the line of human and machine, and additionally touching on the whole classic "reviving a loved one" tropes.
(Not to distract from your point, other works such as Rossam's universal Robots definitely covered the subject matter you refer to, I'm being pedantic about Metropolis largely because the subtle difference I'm emphasizing feels to me as what makes it _so much more accurate and predictive_ to the actual relationship between man, machine, and the owners of production.)
I think we're definitely looking at, at the minimum, another day off the working week - similar to the shift from the early 20th century from 6 to 5 days, as combine harvesters triggered a movement of something like 90% of agricultural workers into cities.
Beyond that, it's hard to say. There is lots of work that needs to be done - picking up plastics anybody? - but the money is in the wrong places to pay for it, and at some point the flows in the system become so disrupted by wealth accumulation, that the only solutions is to press the reset button in any case.
Also, clothing is a commodity. Whatever benefit Uniqlo shareholders get from this will be short-lived as clothing prices drop around the world, benefiting all clothes buyers (everyone) at the expense of a textile workers, who -- at least for the time being -- can easily find a job elsewhere.
At some point, automation might be a cause for concern. But I really don't think this is that type of headline...
Wouldn't this mainly just be a problem if there wasn't much competition in the market? If cost savings aren't being passed on to the consumers I would blame lack of competition before I consided blaming automation
your typical consumer will receive very little or no direct benefit from this change
Eh? I've shopped at Uniqlo in SF. Compared to buying clothes at hipster boutiques, it was shockingly affordable. I'd say whatever they are doing is unquestionably offering a direct benefit to the consumer.
What is silly is not taxing the economic efficiency reaped by capital owners and re-distributing it members of society so that they don't need to be employed.
In the US, the biggest plurality employment sector by a long shot is long-haul transportation.
It's going to be an interesting next 25-or-so years as self-driving vehicle technology moves to Level 4 or 5 readiness and the people with a significant vested interest in long-term investment in driving down transportation cost displace a major chunk of America's workforce.
The "job" as a foundation of modern life is the result of the industrialized revolution and, while it served its purposed, is something we need to abandon as quickly as possible. Corporations don't have a monopoly on economic value creation. We should be, as a government and society, encouraging independent tradesmen/women, entrepreneurship, and artisanry. If we can manage that, job loss due to automation is no longer an issue.
It is not a problem, it is a blessing, it means countries will not have to keep sustaining the pyramid scheme of population growth and will not need massive immigration which only cause problems in the long run. This is how Japan can keep its culture and healthy society while not increasing its population, actually reducing it which is also good for the environment.
Theres already a lot of automation at car factories and places which heavily rely on machinery to produce goods. I remember seeing that the only people needed is people to repair the machinery if it broke down and the whole manufacturing process being automated with self-driving carts moving around the materials. Note this was a Toyota factory, so it could be skewed.
Modern societies need to figure out distribution of economic power that isn't based on employment. Of all the things corporations should be held responsible for, directly propping up low-skill labor employment opportunities shouldn't be one of them. Employment and jobs should stop being used as fundamental economic indicators.
The naive approach would be to just increase overall corporate taxes, reduce payroll taxes (so companies are mildly incentivized to pay humans) and more effectively redistribute tax income to society. The problem with this is the geographic inflexibility of this approach, as Amazon could be sucking up tons of resources from Florida and no amount of taxation on Amazon really pays back to Florida.
Surely we can eventually come up with a better system to let companies optimize their business practices (net value++) and redistributing those improvements across society?
So, the first shift was manual labour being automated during the industrial revolution. Now slowly intellectual jobs are being replaced. The only unique aspect a human has after this are emotional jobs (psychiatrist, etc).
There are not enough emotional jobs that can be created to fulfill 7 billion people (a quickly rising number). I think we're going to need a shift in the mindset of people. Jobs aren't required, we should instead look at increasing recreational activities available to people and try to enjoy our lives.
>There are not enough emotional jobs that can be created to fulfill 7 billion people
I hope the number of emotive-based jobs increase in the future, because mental health is an under-served problem. But the number of emotive-based jobs will never be enough for everyone because those jobs require a certain kind of sensitive, agreeable, or sociable personality.
Then give some examples. The "well, we've always found a way before" is just hand waving without specifics. Importantly, if you consider a model where the rate of technological progress steadily increases, it's very possible that rate at one point will overtake the rate at which new jobs are created. When/if that happens, the calamity will come quite suddenly, even if decades and centuries prior we always found more jobs for the ones that technology destroyed.
> I do find it hilarious that as people we generally hate going to work, but at the same time we also fear losing our jobs.
People also like eating, and buying Netflix subscriptions. There are plenty of people in places like Africa and Asia that have lots of time on their hands without jobs, and I don't think they think it's a plus.
In that changeover, farmers remained farmers, while their children trained to work other jobs. The attrition happened on a generational scale. There are only so many times you can ask a single individual to change careers during their lifetime.
Our ancestors, all the way up to our grandparents, changed careers zero times. Our parents changed careers once. In the acceleration of technological development, we may be required to consider changing two or more times, even as the market cost of retraining and education increases. Nobody will have time to become an expert, because the domains old enough to have any of them will become obsolete too quickly.
Strictly playing devil's advocate, but is the lifelong employment of their staff uniqlo's problem?
If you found a cheaper supplier of milk, would you feel obligated to reimburse your milk man? (may be a misplaced cultural reference, but in the UK 20+ years ago a chap delivering you milk to your door every morning on a rolling contract basis was the norm - generally they do other stuff now)
> If you found a cheaper supplier of milk, would you feel obligated to reimburse your milk man?
According to the TWU, yes - the MTA is required to pay the TWU $450,000 whenever it uses a machine to bore tunnels, because forty years ago, that job would have been performed by a human instead.
When I read a story like this, I'm not faulting a Uniqlo for choosing progress. It's logical and extremely profitable. I think the alarm is precisely because of how much sense it makes.
Enough incremental progress has been made for us to arrive at this threshold, after which a company like Uniqlo can lay off 90% of their workforce by investing an amount which is, if I'm not mistaken[0], considerably less than what they profit in one year.
How about instead of selling robots to companies to replace their laborers, we sell robots to the workers to do their jobs. You keep getting paid as long as you keep your robot running.
> How about instead of selling robots to companies to replace their laborers, we sell robots to the workers to do their jobs. You keep getting paid as long as you keep your robot running.
You're basically talking about the democratization of capital. Companies and their owners will resist it tooth and nail, since they want to reap the dividends.
I don't think we'll get to a world like that, with former laborers owning the automation that replaced them, without some kind of radically new regulatory regime or an outright revolution.
Yeah, you'd have to curtail the freedom of some people to own robots and drastically limit how others could use them. This is a non-starter for most voters.
Only to the degree that they've been trained to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and identify more with the interests of the owners than their own personal interests.
How do you think a law would work, which would only allow floor workers to own/operate robots, but not the workers (the CEO/warehouse foreman) that oversee other workers?
Realistically, that's what's going to happen. They're going to hire people to keep the robots running. It won't be the same people they're replacing, and not 1 to 1 though.
On Star Trek doesn't everyone have their own Replicator than can churn out anything?
Why does someone even need to get paid? Just make one from your replicator and ship it to a friend in need.
Any word about their severance packages? That’s what determines if I keep shopping there. Salary for a reasonable job search period and I can’t hold it against them.
Well, Parkinsons law seems to be intact so we will all work in middle management in a few decades, all responsible for requesting service level agreements from each others legal department AIs.
I worked in a warehouse for a summer in school because the hours fit around my other job and the pay was little higher than some other options (retail). But the Teamsters union ran the show and it was so political that I went back to the food/beverage service business.
All that said, it's too bad that warehouse work isn't going to be an option for many people. There are fewer and fewer jobs for a lot of people.
Note: I support Unions and wish we had more. That union, however....
Just curious but why do you think other unions are better than the one you had experience with? (Not looking to argue just genuinely curious in your perspective, thanks.)
It would be better for all if there were enough unions for a choice to be had there, and if negotiations were across all unions and businesses 'in a sector' at a time.
This way there isn't a dramatic power imbalance...
* Big corp VS single worker
* Monopoly on labor (Union required) VS single corp
* Monopoly on type of job (Union required) VS single worker
That gives a choice at every possible side, and also gives the worker the option of switching unions if the political leadership of one is poor or they have bad support/promotion.
It also gives sets of businesses and sets of worker pools the opportunity to reach the most amicable agreement for the compensation and treatment of works as possible.
This does nothing to reflect larger economic imbalances caused by things like minimum wage, but it could slow or reverse the deterioration of the middle class and increase stability of workers within an area which would promote more investment in having a community there and fixing things like insane housing costs.
I'm a socialist and yet I believe that neither Stalin's Gulags nor Mao's mass hunger deaths are something that should be repeated. Authoritarian socialism has been proven to not work, what the world desperately needs is liberal/libertarian socialism.
We can learn from history - ok, those who openly fly the Nazi flag not, but majority of society can see the problems like homelessness, drug epidemics and exploding rents.
The word libertarianism originally referred to a socialist school of thought[0].
> Traditionally, libertarianism was a term for a form of left-wing politics; such left-libertarian ideologies seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production, or else to restrict their purview or effects, in favor of common or cooperative ownership and management, viewing private property as a barrier to freedom and liberty. In the United States, modern right-libertarian ideologies, such as minarchism and anarcho-capitalism, co-opted the term in the mid-20th century to instead advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights, such as in land, infrastructure, and natural resources.
I will remind the doomsayers in this thread that someone getting a job is not mainstream news.
You should not treat humans as machines that are only capable of performing a single task. We are not left to the dustbin of history if replaced by machinery.
Humankind's desires and creativity seems to be limitless which gives me optimism when thinking about the future.
I've heard the argument that this situation is unique to japan due to their aging population and low birthrate.
They don't have cheap teenagers to exploit at minimum wages which is why automation is even financially worth it. The amount they are spending ($887 million) can hire 60,000 years of labor at $15,000/yr.
The point is, it's introduced there because it's profitable even if the robots suck but are more productive as a human. The experiences gained, though, will lead to the robots becoming cheaper and cheaper until the robots are on par with Western wages, and then hell will break loose.
Japanese society right now is paying the R&D and the western countries, especially the US, will suck up all the profits.
The one question that remains, though: who will buy all the products when large swaths of the population don't have a job to feed themselves?
Japan has always embraced automation, is a staple in robotics and overall could prove to be a good model to have instead of the constant fear mongering about automation in the west. It’s not like this sort of change hasn’t happend before; it’s just that now we have the internet which amplifies our fears (and there’s also lots more of us on the planet).
I remember I read an article about how in Japan, they see robots as their friend, as something innate with spirit because in Shinto everything has a spirit, so they embrace them much more easily. Whereas we in the west see robots as our enemy, something to compete against.
Japanese companies generally have a better employee relationship. Granted, some parts of it are exploitative, but at least workers are treated like family and not like exchangeable cogs like in Western cutthroat capitalism. There's respect and decency shown, whereas in the US it is common and legal to be fired on the spot, in some states even for no reason.
The Question is if Robots should pay income tax? Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income.
Tax wise do you replace the replaced workers with zero tax robots or do you tax robot workers?
When a company do not pay tax or pay lower tax they do not pay for schools and roads. That is not cool. We still need roads and schools to build a future society.
Ie the bigger question is that of income distribution. Do you give all the money gained from the robots to the very few percentage who owns the store? What if a majority of worlds work are automated by robots.
How do you tax for the global warming that the store new low cost labor produces?
In other words as products starts to almost cost zero to consume but we are having global warming. How do we price so that we do not over consume cheap meaningless stuff?
> Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income.
Robots should pay tax in exactly the same way that the wheel, internal combustion engine, fire, chemical fertilizer, electric motor or stone axe paid tax.
You're trying to do macroeconomics (calculate tax revenue) with a microeconomic analysis (looking at one task/job in isolation). What happens in practice is that the people displaced by productivity gains (shoemakers, maybe) eventually find work in the broader economy doing jobs (like programming computers) that were previously infeasible due to labor costs but now have access to cheaper labor.
Obviously there are social aspects about distribution and justice inherent to rapid change like this. But they have nothing to do with tax revenue.
> The Question is if Robots should pay income tax? Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income.
That's not a sensible question. Every tool or piece of hardware is an efficiency multiplier for the human benefiting from it. You wouldn't charge income tax to a carpenter's table saw, even though they're suddenly not having to use a handsaw that takes 10 times as long. There's no rational way to implement an income tax on efficiency boosting tools.
From an initial speculation on the subject, I don't believe we should tax robot workers, on the basis that it would be too difficult to logically create legislation for, especially considering the tech-knowledge of our legislators.
How would we measure? If it's per-robot, businesses would just figure a way of linking the computers together and calling them 'one'. If it's per-output, then what is a 'robot' vs computer/software, that exists in virtually every business already? Would it be fair giving small businesses another tax, for investing in computers and technology instead of human manpower?
The money saved gets taxed twice: as corporate income and then when distributed to shareholders again as individual income. It likely gets taxed at a higher rate, actually, because the income tax rate of the workers this replaces is probably very low but the rate of the company + the individual could easily be 60%.
I have wondered at what point will job cuts start affecting the overall supply demand equation as more and more people get out of work and will have less spending capacity. Who will buy more 'stuff' and how? We don't know at what rate the jobs will be replaced, if at all. What will be the equilibrium point then?
It's not just cutting out jobs that it is a problem, it's also the over-supply of clothing and 'fast-fashion' which is creating extra garbage. Auto-mating these things and making it cheaper and easier to move clothes around is only beneficial to those at the top of the capitalism chain - it's not particularly great for the planet.
Technology is not stoppable and if jobs are going to be lost they will be. Ultimately all tech has been absorbed into society.
But many also cynically use 'threats' of technology to scaremonger and try to keep wages low. This is incredibly exploitative. For instance this story itself is thin on details and talks up 90% without mentioning the actual numbers or details of the automation. Amazon bought Kiva and while the robots are used they continue to hire aggressively.
If McDonalds or anyone else can use robots efficiently today they will. No company is employing workers out of goodwill but because they need them. If one must worry current trends show the environment may create far more disruption than automation.
One thing I found really interesting is that inside the labels are small rfid (I think?) chips. At the cashier, the person just folds them nicely, puts the pile of cloth on a metal pad and the system tells you how many items and how much it is. No manual code scanning!! The first time I noticed that I felt like a kid again discovering something magical.
The next step was to have person-less cashiers with the same system which works great too. So a completely autonomous store was just the next logical way to go.
That's a very close eyeball to 60% actually! I was more surprised that it would be taxed as normal income not at the lower capital gains tax (in your example 15% instead of 39.4%), you seem more knowledgable though.
Fine, I'll concede the point about the USA. But as stated, it's 4% of the global population so discounting the vast majority of the world and how many billions of people live betters means this conversation never started on a decent foundation anyway.
171 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadI'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Even if they do, it is unlikely those new positions will employ the same degree of skilled worker.
Assuming a net unskilled job reduction due to automation in a couple of decades, what happens as this becomes pervasive in a society?
At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force.
Not necessarily. The same robotic technology that decouples low-skill labour inputs and outputs is decoupling populations from force projection capabilities. Less cynically, there are organic ways for the situation to positively evolve (e.g. higher across-board labour productivity) without overt wealth redistribution.
In the US at least, there's 1+ gun for every man, woman, and child. Even if the elite class is backed by the entire US military, there's something to be said for overwhelming force of numbers.
But at least part of their definition of includes that they have the chance to increase their position, which is incompatible with tax/regulation at the extreme: if everyone has their incomes set in stone by the government, there is no chance to change in status.
But losing all low-level jobs to robots, notably, removes that chance. For different reasons than the liberal (who dislikes it for the centralization of wealth/power, and the extreme polarization of wealth distribution), conservatives would intuitively be against it for the denial of opportunity across the board
Tldr: everyone hates being poor/homeless, and too many people being homeless will cause a revolt regardless of their individual political leanings.
The two most famous Socialists in the US right now are probably Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Both are very aggressively anti guns.
The days of sheer numbers being useful are long past in the era of modern warfare.
For example the Battle of Fallujah was fought with Vietnam level tactics. There were about 100 KIA for the US side. The battle could have been fought differently with zero US losses.
Against the current US military I dare say that overwhelming numbers would win, against a theoretical future military that is less clear. Moreover the current US military would probably revolt if used to overtly oppress the population, but a more robotized one with humans only required at high levels might not.
No one is arguing, 'cellphone, hence no poverty'. People are merely arguing that the lowest 10% are no longer destitute.
Homelessness means no shelter from the elements or people that want to hurt you, possessions beyond what you can carry and defend, no health care, and being treated like a second class citizen.
Also, having seen the situation in third world countries, I have a real issue calling American homelessness destitution, but I understand the arguments from social cohesion.
[1] https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet [2] http://homelessresourcenetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/0... [3] https://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2017-10-2...
The parent comment certainly does. Specifically mentions "things that used to be luxuries" being available to the poor as a reason.
That 1970s income figure, is a fluke of history. The sole reason it was that high back then was because the US inherited a unique position post WW2, in which it had 55% of all global manufacturing, temporarily. That caused a brief 20-25 year period of artificial economic results that saw the US pull far away from everyone else. Over time much of the developed world has caught back up.
Total compensation has increased since then. That includes health care, which is very expensive. The per capita cost of healthcare is near ~$11,000 now, several times what it cost in the 1970s inflation adjusted.
Homelessness is near an all-time record low in the US and poverty is near 40 year lows.
A record number of people are covered by health insurance.
The per capita income transfers for social welfare policies have tripled since the mid 1970s, inflation adjusted. That is, the US welfare state has dramatically expanded over 40 years, to the benefit of the poorest.
Sure, there's a lot more to do. That doesn't mean there haven't been some vast improvements.
Ah yeas, the good ole "TV's and refrigerators" argument[0]. They have luxuries! Even homeless people have cell phones, what a world!
Now how about things that actually matter:
* Housing
* Healthcare
* Education
* Transportation
* Income security
All these things are less accessible now than they used to be.
As for the "luxuries": when everyone is expected to have something, it's not a luxury anymore, it's a necessity.
Before most people had a fridge and a car, daily grocery delivery and grocery stores a walk away were the norm. It isn't now because cars and fridges changed the infrastructure. You are screwed without either in most places (and yes, relying on McFoods instead of a fridge is "being screwed").
Public bathhouses aren't the norm because most people aren't homeless and have access to those at home. In that regard, the very poor are worse off than a hundred years ago when a lot of tenements didn't have showers/bathtubs[1].
Before everyone had a cell phone or a computer, people weren't expected to find jobs online. Now this is a requirement to be a member of the society in most cases.
And so on, and so on.
In short, "Poor people now have ________, so we're better off!" is a bad argument. If these people had good lives, you wouldn't call them poor. Their lives suck. Yes, in a different way than a 100 years ago.
But back then, nobody would be out of job because they couldn't answer recruiters' email either.
[0]https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/poor-people-having-nice...
[1]https://journals.ku.edu/amerstud/article/download/2244/2203
There is greater inequality and that is a real problem, but the bottom is still rising, helped along by the very things you seem to mock.
It's a really big stretch to say that some people are somehow worse off now than before because of a lack of public bathhouse (we do have public shelters and bathrooms) and lack of cell phones (we do have libraries, subsidized phones, social services, etc) and just comes off as disingenuous.
There's also the dystopian possibility that automated forms of social control are developed neuter the ability of any kind of popular political movement from challenging the elites. That automation could be anything from systems of censorship, surveillance, and propaganda to police androids.
I think it makes some sense to deliberately cultivate and preserve IRL communities and networks that aren't very tech-mediated. By no means are they a panacea, but I think they have fewer vulnerabilities to tech-based automated control.
As tech gets better it'll become easier to analyse the masses and make good predictions - how much can the masses put up with? How much further can we push them before the boiling point is reached?
[0] https://youtu.be/QDVVo14A_fo?t=439
Of course, some would see that that's actually a DYStopia, I mean, where are the trans?!
EDIT: I also think some billionaires are sympathetic to these issues and would be willing to contribute. But if we form large economic collectives, we can amass enough power to force the wealthy to notice when we divest.
But yes, cooperatives like Mondragon are good examples, and also incredibly traditional.
Drop them and you'll see what already is happening in the cryptocoin scene: people getting exploited left and right. Point is, no sofa investor will be a shark and get rich, contrary to the ICO promises.
For example, I have several hundred thousand saved, and wanted to invest 20k of that in a business in my neighborhood that was doing a public offering. Because I 'only' make in the 100k-200k range, and I 'only' have 300k in the bank, versus the 1 million required by the government, I was deprived of this otherwise perfectly fine opportunity.
It is clear to me that the regulatory environment we have now is not at all fair. I am certain that my system would cost the government more. However, the government should be happy to take on extra expense when it means the creation of richer taxpayers, and the democratization of capital, IMO.
Most investment opportunities aren't available to the unconnected, even if they have some semblance of wealth (e.g., RSU grants for an employee).
Private investment opportunities seems to only flow from the connected to their friends. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that even a small time investor (in the order of 1k-10k) can participate in these private deals that often payout with 10%-20%/p.a, but other than govt regulations, the biggest barrier is knowing they exist.
Moravec's Paradox strongly implies that the middle class is automated before the working class is. I think anybody who doesn't understand that isn't worth listening to since it's the most concrete result in A.I for half a century.
It's not about the bottom - it's about the middle and underclasses - that is different to the past.
Automation killing basic factory jobs will have a much larger effect outside of first world countries, and unfortunately there's no real way to address that disparity from the context of policy in any one country.
EDIT: more thoughts
I just finished reading an Asimov novel written in 1955. There were computers in this book. They were people. Computer was a job title. Now we have machines that do that job, and we have an entire new industry employing lots and lots of people that didn't exist before that one job, Computer, was automated.
No, it won't look exactly like moving from human computers to machine computers. It won't look exactly like moving from manual farming to tractors and combines. It's hard to imagine what it will look like, but it seems overly pessimistic to just assume that this time automation is going to turn out terribly.
The issue isn't how to keep people busy. That's not a very worthy goal. In the '50s we dreamed of a society where robots took the yoke from our shoulders and let us live better lives. Now that it's happening, all we can talk about is how to get people back to work!
How many times do the same predictions have to be proven false before we don't take them seriously anymore?
People won't do that though. We will continue to hear the same predictions for another hundred years, and every time the people making will say "but this time it's different!"
Everyone always says that these people are just suffering from a skills shortage and need to retrain into a different career and move to where the jobs are. But which careers should they choose to retrain into? Retraining represents several years of time investment and at least tens of thousands of dollars in money investment, money which they don't even have in the bank, so choosing wrong will often be the last nail in the coffin. When I was entering school I was told that going into CS was too risky because everyone was offshoring these days. Instead the most recommended "safe" jobs were: lawyer, pharmacist, welder. Of those three choices, only one was still in demand by the time the entering cohort had graduated. The other two had such a glut of entering workers that many new grads were being advised to retrain again. When industry demand is changing faster than people can reasonably retrain and pay off their student loans, "skills shortage" is just another way to say "let them eat cake", and the pace of automation is absolutely contributing to this issue.
Same "fears" different century.
It's reasonable to assume, given recent tech developments(AI, low code for software, generative design for graphic design/engineering and architecture, blockchain for professions working on trust in transaction like accounting, some automation in the legal field, automation in insurance) that many high-skill professions will suffer unemployment too.
And can someone with high-skill job always shift to another high-skill job? pretty hard, many high skill jobs have very high barriers to entry. And could they aim for the low skill burger flipping job ? Who will get the job, some spoiled engineer, or someone who is used to working hard doing hard labor for low pay and may be younger ?
So why is everybody under the assumption that high skill jobs are safe ?
Sure there will probably always be a few programmers, but as tools (and soon I expect AI) gets better those programmers can do more and more of the work. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find the number of software engineers decreasing in the not too distant future.
The only reason it hasn't already is that we've managed to grow the number of things software developers are doing at the same rate as the increase in number of software developers * the increase in efficiency per software developer. And in some parts of software development (e.g. games) it has.
Personally, I'm of the opinion of the commenter above you—automating most software jobs will require strong AI. Replacement of those might happen someday, but it's sufficiently far away to not think about as an imminent threat to your job (though I agree we should be doing high-level planning about how as a society we will cope with strong AI).
Better tools allow us to do more, faster etc. Thing is amount of things software can do that it is not doing yet is absolutely immense and ML only opens more and more of it.
I think any actual reduction is so far in the future we have no concept of when that will happen and how.
I mean a am I huge proponent of self driving car.. when is that coming? When it works it will absolutely change economy as massive amount of people are now involved or depend on those that are.
Engineering salaries and jobs have skyrocketed in the past decade, and they only show signs of continuing to increase.
I have heard people yell about how we are all going to be replaced, every year, for the last 10 years, and yet here we are, with that future not coming true.
Eventually, after making so many predictions, and getting it wrong so many times, people need to reevaluate their guesses, and instead use a fact based analysis of what the market looks like.
Where are actually market ready solutions for automation of high skilled jobs today or in the past? Once market ready solutions exit, this will very likely be a completely different situation.
And there is a wide array of even high skilled jobs, where it is feasible, that automation can replace people in the next generation. Maybe not next year or in 10 years, but it is on the horizon for quite alot of professions. Starting such a career now has a different risk scenario then 50 years ago. It is similar to lower skilled jobs like truck driver or warehouse worker. We are not there yet, that they go the way of the street lamp lightener, but assuming a positive trend for warehouse workers, based on past demand seems to be rather distorted. The difference is a warehouse worker doesnt spend years and years and thousands of dollars to enter his field.
Ten years ago no one would think YouTuber or Instragram model would be viable jobs for some people. Social media directors at companies large and small have to find unique ways to engage with other humans. The guy that fixes cracked screens on smartphones couldn’t have done that in 1999. UX developer/designers craft human interactions to be better.
Automation taken to the end game may create a Star Trek like world where material goods are so cheap as to almost be free. The economy could shift to value knowledge, art, creativity, novel experiences and more.
Yes, consumers are also a stakeholder, but your typical consumer will receive very little or no direct benefit from this change. Eventually, yes, the profits will be reinvested, but the impact will be so diluted as to be a noticeable. Some small fraction of it will probably also go to tax evasion, being expatriated or sequestered by wealthy upper management.
Meanwhile, a whole lot of people are suddenly out of work, imposing significant negative externalities on them and their families. This could conceivably ruin a marriage, or turn a good parent into a raging alcoholic. It may well be that the negative gain to society (in the form of laying off so many employees) has severe follow-on effects, and in terms of net welfare this could do more harm than good.
The effects of leaving the workers out of the profit-sharing is more than just a matter of equity. Without redistribution of the welfare created by automation, it's perfectly conceivable that the net welfare gain is negative due to the negative second-order effects outweighing the positive second-order effects.
This is the stuff they don't teach you in Econ 101, but it's how things really work.
We are not seeing pervasive unemployment, we are seeing the opposite. A situation where there are too many jobs, and not enough workers to fill them
So econ 201 would say that there isn't any societial problem right now.
They’re also not stagnant https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage-growth
In Econ 301 they teach you to never say never.
Whether this time is different than the previous rounds of automation or will have larger dislocative effects is the at the heart of the current discussion. We’ve literally been worried about robots replacing all workers since Fritz Lang made Metropolis in the 1920s. Maybe those concerns were early and maybe we’re repeating ourselves. It’s not really clear.
(Not to distract from your point, other works such as Rossam's universal Robots definitely covered the subject matter you refer to, I'm being pedantic about Metropolis largely because the subtle difference I'm emphasizing feels to me as what makes it _so much more accurate and predictive_ to the actual relationship between man, machine, and the owners of production.)
Beyond that, it's hard to say. There is lots of work that needs to be done - picking up plastics anybody? - but the money is in the wrong places to pay for it, and at some point the flows in the system become so disrupted by wealth accumulation, that the only solutions is to press the reset button in any case.
...such interesting, interesting times.
At some point, automation might be a cause for concern. But I really don't think this is that type of headline...
Eh? I've shopped at Uniqlo in SF. Compared to buying clothes at hipster boutiques, it was shockingly affordable. I'd say whatever they are doing is unquestionably offering a direct benefit to the consumer.
It's going to be an interesting next 25-or-so years as self-driving vehicle technology moves to Level 4 or 5 readiness and the people with a significant vested interest in long-term investment in driving down transportation cost displace a major chunk of America's workforce.
Let’s take Japan, ftom the article. They are replacing warehouse workers. Demographically, Japan is experiencing a shrinking workforce.
So, the issue isn’t exactly whether ribots replace workers, but whether the pace of replacement is in sync with the reduction in the aging workforce.
The naive approach would be to just increase overall corporate taxes, reduce payroll taxes (so companies are mildly incentivized to pay humans) and more effectively redistribute tax income to society. The problem with this is the geographic inflexibility of this approach, as Amazon could be sucking up tons of resources from Florida and no amount of taxation on Amazon really pays back to Florida.
Surely we can eventually come up with a better system to let companies optimize their business practices (net value++) and redistributing those improvements across society?
It’s not that of an ordeal for them to move to another job.
And when that job gets automated?
There are not enough emotional jobs that can be created to fulfill 7 billion people (a quickly rising number). I think we're going to need a shift in the mindset of people. Jobs aren't required, we should instead look at increasing recreational activities available to people and try to enjoy our lives.
I hope the number of emotive-based jobs increase in the future, because mental health is an under-served problem. But the number of emotive-based jobs will never be enough for everyone because those jobs require a certain kind of sensitive, agreeable, or sociable personality.
Jobs/careers are a relatively new idea as far as I know, I think we can figure out something to do without them.
People also like eating, and buying Netflix subscriptions. There are plenty of people in places like Africa and Asia that have lots of time on their hands without jobs, and I don't think they think it's a plus.
Our ancestors, all the way up to our grandparents, changed careers zero times. Our parents changed careers once. In the acceleration of technological development, we may be required to consider changing two or more times, even as the market cost of retraining and education increases. Nobody will have time to become an expert, because the domains old enough to have any of them will become obsolete too quickly.
If you found a cheaper supplier of milk, would you feel obligated to reimburse your milk man? (may be a misplaced cultural reference, but in the UK 20+ years ago a chap delivering you milk to your door every morning on a rolling contract basis was the norm - generally they do other stuff now)
According to the TWU, yes - the MTA is required to pay the TWU $450,000 whenever it uses a machine to bore tunnels, because forty years ago, that job would have been performed by a human instead.
Enough incremental progress has been made for us to arrive at this threshold, after which a company like Uniqlo can lay off 90% of their workforce by investing an amount which is, if I'm not mistaken[0], considerably less than what they profit in one year.
That's not incremental. It's unprecedented.
[0] https://www.fastretailing.com/eng/ir/financial/summary.html
You're basically talking about the democratization of capital. Companies and their owners will resist it tooth and nail, since they want to reap the dividends.
I don't think we'll get to a world like that, with former laborers owning the automation that replaced them, without some kind of radically new regulatory regime or an outright revolution.
Only to the degree that they've been trained to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and identify more with the interests of the owners than their own personal interests.
Those workers should feel free to do that right now and spend their money investing in capital.
All that said, it's too bad that warehouse work isn't going to be an option for many people. There are fewer and fewer jobs for a lot of people.
Note: I support Unions and wish we had more. That union, however....
This way there isn't a dramatic power imbalance...
That gives a choice at every possible side, and also gives the worker the option of switching unions if the political leadership of one is poor or they have bad support/promotion.It also gives sets of businesses and sets of worker pools the opportunity to reach the most amicable agreement for the compensation and treatment of works as possible.
This does nothing to reflect larger economic imbalances caused by things like minimum wage, but it could slow or reverse the deterioration of the middle class and increase stability of workers within an area which would promote more investment in having a community there and fixing things like insane housing costs.
Exactly. All unions become "that union" when given enough power and influence.
We can learn from history - ok, those who openly fly the Nazi flag not, but majority of society can see the problems like homelessness, drug epidemics and exploding rents.
My head just exploded.
> Traditionally, libertarianism was a term for a form of left-wing politics; such left-libertarian ideologies seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production, or else to restrict their purview or effects, in favor of common or cooperative ownership and management, viewing private property as a barrier to freedom and liberty. In the United States, modern right-libertarian ideologies, such as minarchism and anarcho-capitalism, co-opted the term in the mid-20th century to instead advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights, such as in land, infrastructure, and natural resources.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
You should not treat humans as machines that are only capable of performing a single task. We are not left to the dustbin of history if replaced by machinery.
Humankind's desires and creativity seems to be limitless which gives me optimism when thinking about the future.
They don't have cheap teenagers to exploit at minimum wages which is why automation is even financially worth it. The amount they are spending ($887 million) can hire 60,000 years of labor at $15,000/yr.
Japanese society right now is paying the R&D and the western countries, especially the US, will suck up all the profits.
The one question that remains, though: who will buy all the products when large swaths of the population don't have a job to feed themselves?
There are many other countries (Italy, S. Korea, others) that have the same aging population and low birthrate.
Tax wise do you replace the replaced workers with zero tax robots or do you tax robot workers?
When a company do not pay tax or pay lower tax they do not pay for schools and roads. That is not cool. We still need roads and schools to build a future society.
Ie the bigger question is that of income distribution. Do you give all the money gained from the robots to the very few percentage who owns the store? What if a majority of worlds work are automated by robots.
How do you tax for the global warming that the store new low cost labor produces? In other words as products starts to almost cost zero to consume but we are having global warming. How do we price so that we do not over consume cheap meaningless stuff?
Robots should pay tax in exactly the same way that the wheel, internal combustion engine, fire, chemical fertilizer, electric motor or stone axe paid tax.
You're trying to do macroeconomics (calculate tax revenue) with a microeconomic analysis (looking at one task/job in isolation). What happens in practice is that the people displaced by productivity gains (shoemakers, maybe) eventually find work in the broader economy doing jobs (like programming computers) that were previously infeasible due to labor costs but now have access to cheaper labor.
Obviously there are social aspects about distribution and justice inherent to rapid change like this. But they have nothing to do with tax revenue.
That's not a sensible question. Every tool or piece of hardware is an efficiency multiplier for the human benefiting from it. You wouldn't charge income tax to a carpenter's table saw, even though they're suddenly not having to use a handsaw that takes 10 times as long. There's no rational way to implement an income tax on efficiency boosting tools.
How would we measure? If it's per-robot, businesses would just figure a way of linking the computers together and calling them 'one'. If it's per-output, then what is a 'robot' vs computer/software, that exists in virtually every business already? Would it be fair giving small businesses another tax, for investing in computers and technology instead of human manpower?
Your point about externalities is still valid, though.
But many also cynically use 'threats' of technology to scaremonger and try to keep wages low. This is incredibly exploitative. For instance this story itself is thin on details and talks up 90% without mentioning the actual numbers or details of the automation. Amazon bought Kiva and while the robots are used they continue to hire aggressively.
If McDonalds or anyone else can use robots efficiently today they will. No company is employing workers out of goodwill but because they need them. If one must worry current trends show the environment may create far more disruption than automation.
Things that make them less advantageous to robots are (e.g):
- the used up demographic dividend of China (with no real replacement in sight)
- western population decline
- western population aging
- west's much better off population, uninterested in manual labor (at least as mid/long term job)
- rising minimum wages
- rising costs of employment
- tightening immigration laws
etc.
One thing I found really interesting is that inside the labels are small rfid (I think?) chips. At the cashier, the person just folds them nicely, puts the pile of cloth on a metal pad and the system tells you how many items and how much it is. No manual code scanning!! The first time I noticed that I felt like a kid again discovering something magical.
The next step was to have person-less cashiers with the same system which works great too. So a completely autonomous store was just the next logical way to go.