The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) 267
Alana Semuels writes via The Atlantic about the parts of America most susceptible to automation: Much of the focus regarding automation has been on the Rust Belt. There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored. While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to trade, and the rest to automation. A new analysis suggests that the places that are going to be hardest-hit by automation in the coming decades are in fact outside of the Rust Belt. It predicts that areas with high concentrations of jobs in food preparation, office or administrative support, and/or sales will be most affected -- "places such as Las Vegas and the Riverside-San Bernardino area may be the most vulnerable to automation in upcoming years, with 65 percent of jobs in Las Vegas and 63 percent of jobs in Riverside predicted to be automatable by 2025. Other areas especially vulnerable to automation are El Paso, Orlando, and Louisville. Still, the authors estimate that almost all large American metropolitan areas may lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs because of automation in the next two decades.
and prison pop will go way up as healthcare will b (Score:2, Insightful)
and prison pop will go way up as healthcare will be much better there with no to very low cost. Then that shit high risk pools that you may not have the funds to pay for.
Re:and prison pop will go way up as healthcare wil (Score:5, Insightful)
and prison pop will go way up as healthcare will be much better there with no to very low cost.
Any time you want to be edumacated just visit google and search for something like "prison health care" and then cry and cry as you see prisoners not even receiving treatment for real afflictions, let alone the cosmetic surgery and shit people imagine that prisoners are receiving.
Re:and prison pop will go way up as healthcare wil (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. If the do-gooders impose higher and higher sin taxes (say on cigarettes) and then wonder why a peaceful transfer of products turns violent as people inevitably try to avoid the onerous tax.
You want a smaller prison population? Do not criminalize everything. Limit as much as possible police enforcement to violence and theft.
The corner stone of a free society is the agreement that:
"I will not try to kill you and take your stuff If you don't try to kill me and take my stuff."
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You want a smaller prison population? Quit being a thug. Quit pushing a culture that values violence, lack of education, and laziness.
Re:and prison pop will go way up as healthcare wil (Score:5, Funny)
What do you have against Trump voters?
Hi, Clinton fan! (Score:2)
N/T
Violence, ignorance, laziness == Clinton voter. (Score:2, Funny)
Quit pushing a culture that values violence, lack of education, and laziness.
The average Clinton or Sanders voter, in a nutshell.
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Quit pushing a culture that values violence, lack of education, and laziness.
The average voter, in a nutshell.
FTFY
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How about...
...we try to do both?
Why the hell do so many people believe every political issue has precisely two sides, and only one side has merit? In the real world we tackle difficult problems by relying on a number of solutions, and we care more about what works than about ideals.
Who does this impact ? Everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
If you do anything on your job which you can be automated, which is repetitive, those tasks will eventually be automated.
This does not automatically mean your job will be automated completely, but your job will change.
Or as Edsger W. Dijkstra said: higher level programming languages: People thought that those languages would solve the programming problem [make it easier]. But when you looked closely the trivial aspects of programming had been automated while the hard ones remained.
Any "Objective Repeatable Task" is automatable (Score:3)
Objective: The goal can be clearly defined in simple words. There are few input parameters to the problem that affect the output. The output is easily measured. The decision process for the input parameters has just a few steps.
Repeatable: The input parameters are similar and the outcome is similar.
Examples: Roofing. Laundry. Cooking. Manufacturing.
Re:Any "Objective Repeatable Task" is automatable (Score:5, Insightful)
When did roofing become automated?
It hasn't, but it will. We'll stop building these retarded flammable asphalt shingle roofs sooner or later, and just put up metal roofs which can absolutely be put up by a robot. By modern standards it's not even a difficult job to have a robot do. Everything the machine has to do has been done in the automotive industry for decades. And it's a really smart job to automate, too, because anything done on a roof is among the most dangerous jobs in construction, whether it's roofing itself, or solar installation.
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Asphalt shingles (or even wood) wouldn't be much harder to automate.
Re:Any "Objective Repeatable Task" is automatable (Score:5, Insightful)
I"m just picturing six people trying to get heavy equipment onto a roof, instead of the two that could do a roof int he morning with shingles like before. Metal roofs are more expensive because steel is expensive and difficult to work with, and I can't see that changing much.
Whenever I see people say "we could never automate this because..." it's almost entirely based on the idea that automation has to do the work exactly as we do it now.
Why would you put robots on a roof to do the job? More likely you'd manufacture the whole roof assembly with robots in a factory, and then just plunk it on top. Sure, this will be difficult for existing buildings, but it doesn't take too much imagination to see how we could shift the way we build buildings to make sense in a world of automation.
We are already moving that way with things like structurally insulated panels (SIPs). Instead of framing walls on site, insulating them, and then putting up OSB/plywood, SIPS are manufactured in a factory and then just trucked to the site and literally tipped up and bolted down. They already have all the channeling for running wires and the like. So has automation eliminated the need for people here? No, but it has greatly reduced the amount of labour needed. No more framers, less work electricians, etc.
If you can't see how something could be automated, you're not trying hard enough.
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The problem is that when something becomes a commodity, alternatives become fashionable. Styling often turns away from the easiest-to-make approach. People will wa
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or instead of the whole roof (and as compared to individual tiles right now) mega tiles that cover common flat dimensions. Then all that's needed is to hoist them into place, and do the seam work.
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Meh, I still think it will be cost prohibitive. As an architect, I can assure you that not every roof is the same, and not every detail is the same. You can't treat a membrane roof, for instance, the same as a metal roof. Nor can you treat flashing at a chimney the same as flashing at a dormer. They're simple to implement in theory, but in practice more challenging. Impossible? Ha--never. It will happen eventually. But the cost to do customized work will be insane.
Oh no doubt that the diversity in existing roofs will be a challenge. That's why we'll probably standardize more than we do now. So in some ways, this will very much limit customized work in terms of the details. At the same time, it will quite possibly expand the customization options in terms of shape. With digital fabrication you, as an architect, could upload your CAD models to the factory and the bots will cut the roof to the shapes you spec'd. The panels would be made of the same stuff from house to h
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When did roofing become automated?
When pneumatic nailers were faster and more accurate than a guy swinging a hammer.
Trump (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trump (Score:5, Insightful)
I just wonder how long it will take these people to realize that Trump is NOT getting their jobs back.
A lot of people are woefully short on imagination. They never learned to daydream for themselves, which is why they are so prone to repeating talking points verbatim. They have to have someone else's dream, because they don't have their own. All that was crushed out of them. But creativity is a key problem-solving tool; it's not enough to achieve success on its own unless the world happens to be looking for abstract artists, but it's a mandatory tool.
These people are not going to realize they've been hoodwinked until the end of the Trump presidency, or possibly just before the end.
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No, you definitely don't get it. Obama didn't have to outrun the bear; he just had to outrun Republicans.
No matter how much corruption you list, he's going to be remembered as a relatively bright spot in between two amazingly incompetent presidents. It doesn't matter if he wasn't any good. He was better.
Voting for Democrats is an extremely bad thing to do, that all voters should feel extreme shame over. Everyone knows that. But it's still not nearly as bad
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"Liberals?!" You are flaming a conservative post.
As a conservative, the reason I like Obama more than Bush? Obama didn't pointlessly start expensive wars. Obama killed or maimed fewer American soldiers by sending them to Iraq. He got Congress to pass a health care reform bill where people have to pay for it whereas Bush didn't want people to have to pay for it.
The reason Obama is better than Trump? It's pretty early, but this is already surprisingly easy. Obama didn't appoint a flat-earther to the EPA. Obam
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All of them. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a time it took 100% of humans 100% of their time to stay a live and gather enough food. Then we started to specialize.
In 1987 2% of Americans farmed, and that's was the lowest number (total) since the 1800s. In 1820, when they were reported at less than 2.1 million, or about 72 percent of the American work force of 2.9 million. By 1850, farm people made up 4.9 million, or about 64 percent, of the nation's 7.7 million workers. The farm population in 1920, when the official Census data began, was nearly 32 million, or 30.2 percent of the population of 105.7 million, the report said. So we've gone from 100 to 72 to 64 to 30 to 2% of the population need to just make food to keep our species going.
How many people did horses 'automate'? If you look at the cumulative improvements at a single task how many people with sticks [youtube.com] can a single tractor [youtube.com] replace? Think of how many 'jobs' we could bring back if we outlawed tractors? It doesn't mean that a 'farmer' has gone away, it just means they do something different. An engineer in 2017 has had most of what an engineer did in 1917 'automated'.
Computers have been automating computer jobs since they were invented. Compilers are just "robots" that turn high level C into Assembly. I don't even write my own C any more, Simulink does a much better and consistent job at it. The autogenerated code may be a bit verbose but it's very explicit and bester right
Re:All of them. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:All of them. (Score:5, Informative)
Once upon a time it took 100% of humans 100% of their time to stay a live and gather enough food
Nope. Hunter-gatherers had more free time than you do. Medieval serfs did get fucked over pretty hard, though. They did what they were told from sundown to sunup, and they only got time off for religious ceremonies. Even pyramid builders may have been better-paid.
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Depends what you define as "work": they were almost always working, but work mostly consisted of walking around looking for food or game, plus the constant fight against entropy when almost everything you use, wear or, live in is gradually decaying.
Medieval serfs did get fucked over pretty hard, though. They did what they were told from sundown to sunup, and they only got time off for religious ceremonies.
Sundays off, and all holy days (not just during the ceremony). Not so bad as you think, once you understand just how many holy days there were at the height of Catholicism - I believe the work week averaged 4 12-hour days. The peak weeks during harvest were a b
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Sounds about right. Did you see the thing on netflix recently... it was a cameraman that goes to tribal places and hangs with the people a couple of days. All those really distant from modernization hunter-gatherer types seem so damned happy and unstressed. Although I do remember one African tribe having the ladies fuss at the men for not bringing in a kill for a couple of days, at least I think it was on the same show. I've watched a lot of this type of stuff lately.
This guy:
BBC Natural History Unit specia
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How many people did horses 'automate'? If you look at the cumulative improvements at a single task how many people with sticks [youtube.com] can a single tractor [youtube.com] replace? Think of how many 'jobs' we could bring back if we outlawed tractors?
And how many "new" jobs have been created by the construction of the tractors and all the support they require? Many people discuss automation and lost jobs, but don't see the gained jobs in other sectors. The jobs aren't lost or new, they are just changed and moved. Retraining usually will be required.
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I want to know how many jobs directly or indirectly were created from the Steam engine.
How many people did the foundry employ to just make the things? How many mechanics were required to keep one running (early ones took more days off for 'maintenance' than they did running). Before the automated luber was invented someone was employed to make sure every single metal on metal part was lubricated (with catastrophic failures). You had thousands if not tens of thousands of jobs just from one technology. And ju
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Once upon a time it took 100% of humans 100% of their time to stay a live and gather enough food. Then we started to specialize. In 1987 2% of Americans farmed, and that's was the lowest number (total) since the 1800s. In 1820, when they were reported at less than 2.1 million, or about 72 percent of the American work force of 2.9 million. By 1850, farm people made up 4.9 million, or about 64 percent, of the nation's 7.7 million workers. The farm population in 1920, when the official Census data began, was nearly 32 million, or 30.2 percent of the population of 105.7 million, the report said. So we've gone from 100 to 72 to 64 to 30 to 2% of the population need to just make food to keep our species going.
How many people did horses 'automate'? If you look at the cumulative improvements at a single task how many people with sticks [youtube.com] can a single tractor [youtube.com] replace? Think of how many 'jobs' we could bring back if we outlawed tractors? It doesn't mean that a 'farmer' has gone away, it just means they do something different. An engineer in 2017 has had most of what an engineer did in 1917 'automated'.
Computers have been automating computer jobs since they were invented. Compilers are just "robots" that turn high level C into Assembly. I don't even write my own C any more, Simulink does a much better and consistent job at it. The autogenerated code may be a bit verbose but it's very explicit and bester right
Please stop looking at the past as any indication as to how the future will go; it's fundamentally a flawed analysis.
Yes, history has shown that automation has come along and replaced jobs. Our previous answer was to tell humans to go get an education, and go "do something different." That solution will not be applicable in the future when AI starts replacing even the educated human, and there is nothing for humans to go off and "do". Education is barely a viable answer today due to the obscene cost of i
and in the past an education was a trade / apprent (Score:2)
and in the past an education was a trade / apprenticeship with university being for the rich kids.
Now days trades have been put down and HR's people don't like them university are still very theory loaded with high costs.
Another point, more competition at non-auto-jobs (Score:2)
What's more, as large parts of the labor force are put out of work, even the educated worker will find his skills devalued, unless those who control resources start demanding a lot more creative work.
It's pure market forces: if there are fewer jobs out there, more people will bid on the work, driving prices down.
Already, despite huge increases in productivity per hour, the worker is paid 50% of the share of corporate productivity that the worker got in 1973. If labor had the same fraction as in 1973, labo
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Yeah, learning from the past is useless. Believing tales about the future is what wise people do. In the future, only AIs will learn from what already happened.
First, of all, I never said learning from the past is useless. We humans never seem to learn from history, so perhaps your statement is more pointless than previously thought, even smacking of sarcasm.
Applying how automation shifted solutions in the past will not be as applicable in the future was my point. If the cost of education continues to skyrocket, "go get an education" will certainly not be the proverbial answer for the masses to "fix" the problem of unemployment. Population growth will continue
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Yet another neckbeard so certain of the future without understanding of the vast professional job market or where AI is really limited.
The world is flattening more and more every day, and politicians standing on podiums spitting out hollow promises of job creation will hardly keep pace with the demand of a growing population that is now wired to succeed as a professional, and seek the best for themselves.
My point was more centered around the fact that automation and AI will accelerate the issues that are already coming. 30 years ago, there was a "vast" market for many types of accounting jobs. Then came MS Excel automation, which grew in
Re:All of them. (Score:4, Insightful)
Research has shown that hunter gathers work (hunting and gathering) far less than people in industrialized societies.
Think 2-6 hours a day depending on the group studied.
http://www.rewild.info/in-dept... [rewild.info]
John Deere Tractor DMCA DRM the literal worst (Score:2)
I learned a lot about DRM from this website when I was much younger. It has only gotten worse since then, with DRM infesting not just DVDs etc but now John Deere tractors, which are hostile architecture black boxes preventing farmers from optimizing their super expensive machines. So there is no free software or open secondary market for GPS data gathered (i.e. something that would sense micro conditions and efficiently apply another tech). This is hugely dangerous to the human race at large since we are de
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There's a simple solution: Boycott buying food from farmers that use them.
Roboism could be the next big thing (Score:2)
It's time for a I-hate-technology politician to run for president. "I'll build a Turing Test center, and Google will pay for it!"
Society is beginning to crumble. (Score:5, Insightful)
Automation isn't the enemy it's a very helpful tool. Unfortunately, this tools is displacing people significantly faster than new job opportunities being created. The industrial revolution had this problem and many farmers faced near starvation while the rest were forced to survive working in factories. People seem to think it was a time of great progress but the truth is that it was a time of mass exploitation. [bcp.org] We are going to have a similar outcome if we do nothing to prevent it. There are people who balk at the very idea of Universal Basic Income in a heartless manner because they do not grasp the breadth and level of widespread suffering that is coming. I hope that humanity has the wisdom to understand what is happening but I fear that our selfish tribalism is going to leave tens of millions to die.
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Technology in the form of automation is making the future of employment uncertain, while at the same time continuously increasing the amount of death and sufferi
That's the political left for you. (Score:2)
Technology in the form of automation is making the future of employment uncertain, while at the same time continuously increasing the amount of death and suffering an individual can unleash against others.
That's Silicon Valley. If geology decided to rip a new one such that Silicon Valley (and the Bay) disappeared, while causing something to do similar with Seattle/Vancouver, we'd probably be in a better position to keep work versus losing it.
And to top it off the left is trying to currently trying to keep rolling back healthcare for millions of people with the ACA, while making access more uncertain as providers pull out.
The GOP is actually trying to bring healthcare back, not remove it. On the other hand, their opponents would rather have a law that diminishes access and lowers the quality of what jobs are left (29ers).
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A few points I'd like to add to the discussion:
1.
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Yet somehow, with all that automation, we are at less than 4% unemployment, lower than the number considered by economists to be "full" employment. I'm not ready to run for cover from the falling sky just yet.
Misleading. It's more like 10-20%. (Score:3)
Once you include the displaced, the involuntarily retired, and unsuccessful new entrants, you get a number more in line with reality - especially with regions that have seen consistent decline.
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if you are a starving farmer, then you might not be as good at farming as you thought
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Automation isn't the enemy it's a very helpful tool.
Unfortunately, Watson (the AI that betrays humanity, like the original one that betrayed NCR's John H. Patterson) needs to meet its burning end [time.com].
Labor intensive versus captial intensive (Score:4, Insightful)
While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to trade, and the rest to automation.
This could only possibly be true if one utterly fails to recognize the difference between labor intensive manufacturing and capital intensive manufacturing. Labor intensive means that labor costs are a relatively high proportion of the total cost of the product. Capital intensive is the converse. The vast majority of job losses for labor intensive products (textiles, basic assembly, etc) are entirely due to production moving to low labor costs locations. For capital intensive manufacturing, automation is the big driver. US manufacturing has been capital intensive for several decades now so further job losses will often be due to automation.
Any time you hear a politician talking about "bringing back manufacturing jobs" they are almost always talking about bringing back labor intensive production. Problem is that unless US wages fall by a LOT, production of those products is never going to come back to the US. They will be made wherever labor costs are lowest and no amount of politician's promises will change that fact. The days when someone without a college degree could go straight from high school into an assembly plant and make a big wage are long gone.
You underestimate the power of regulation (Score:2)
production of those products is never going to come back to the US, save for regulatory pain making it easier to manufacture in the US.
FTFY.
The days when someone without a college degree could go straight from high school into an assembly plant and make a big wage can return with sufficient regulation.
FTFY.
Only to a point (Score:2)
The work-for-money cycle will need to change (Score:5, Interesting)
I imagine that things are going to be very rough once automation _really_ starts cutting into employment in ways that haven't been seen previously. The ironic thing is that the "knowledge worker" is the target for this round, as most large-scale US factory work is offshored or automated by now. All that money people are paying to get themselves the education they need for a job is never going to be recovered if employees aren't receiving salaries to make it worth going in the first place.
I graduated high school in 1993, and even by then, everyone was being told that there was no longer a viable career path that didn't go through college. And this was in the Rust Belt city I grew up in, where just 20 years prior it was possible to guarantee a lifetime of work by joining a union's apprenticeship program and working in a factory for your whole career. I distinctly remember events at the end of high school that were basically send-offs into the "grown-up" world like the prom and a formal senior dinner -- as if to say that for at least a chunk of the graduating class, this was the last time they'd ever see the education system again. Wind the clock forward, and we're requiring college degrees for receptionists and the few factory workers that are left. So now we have a more educated workforce, who may no longer have anything to do that will allow them to make money, start families, buy things, etc.
I've done most of my career working directly for or contracting with large companies -- think companies big enough to have a huge corporate campus, parking garages, etc. Even in 2017, there really are a ton of corporate jobs that could go away in this next round of automation. Lots of jobs we IT people support involve taking input stacks of work, performing some sort of process on them, and putting them on the output stack. Look at how mega-corps lay people off in huge numbers -- HP/HPE just got rid of more than 30,000 people last year. I'm sure a lot of that was just idiotic MBA spreadsheet jockeying, but how many of those 30,000 people were doing one of these easily automated jobs? Each one of those 30,000 people probably owned a house, paid property/school taxes, some of them had kids, they bought cars, and basically contributed to society. Now, we're saying that even high end positions like healthcare workers are in for a big restructuring as more stuff gets automated.
With no way for educated people to make money, what happens to the work-money-consumption cycle we've been used to for ages? Some people propose paying people regardless of their employment status, and I think that's one way to bridge the gap. But what happens on the other side? Will we have a Star Trek utopia where everyone does what they're best at instead of driving to MegaCorp every morning to file papers? Or will we have a Hunger Games style existence or go back to feudal serfdom?
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I'm a deep STEM person now in a more bureaucratic job, and a lot of the people around me are boggled by the automation that I'm doing. Quick scripts to parse Excel files, co-editing Google Docs to create final drafts in 1/4 the time it used to take, creating Google Sheets that automatically parse data and make pretty graphs, all sorts of utterly trivial things that massively boost productivity. It's just that nobody in this office ever had the skills or knowledge to do this.
Now, we're saying that even high end positions like healthcare workers are in for a big restructuring as more stuff gets automated.
I don't think that even the low-
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Even if we could retrain the folks that mundane office automation and machine learning will replace to be healthcare workers, if those jobs are gone, what then?
Start making it outright painful for employers to offshore, contract out, automate, or avoid long-term/displaced.
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If we stop having to work for money, society will collapse. Then we won't have an automation problem any longer.
People only appreciate the things they have to work for. It's easy to see this in anyone's children who never had to work for anything. They are called "spoiled" for a reason.
Work is a critical need for humans to thrive. It's hard to transition from one kind of work to another, but it can be done. We've done it many times since the start of the industrial revolution. We will do it again.
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I imagine that things are going to be very rough once automation _really_ starts cutting into employment in ways that haven't been seen previously. The ironic thing is that the "knowledge worker" is the target for this round, as most large-scale US factory work is offshored or automated by now. All that money people are paying to get themselves the education they need for a job is never going to be recovered if employees aren't receiving salaries to make it worth going in the first place.
Offshoring and automation aren't inevitable.
One can start by making it harder for employers to avoid hiring humans directly, especially those displaced by trade and automation.
13% trade/87% automation? Hard to belive. (Score:3)
The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs hovered in the 17-18 million range for about 30 years, 1970-2000. NAFTA was signed in 1994, GATT/WTO treaty was signed in 1995. Five years later, the number of people employed in manufacturing in the U.S. started a precipitous decline, going from ~17 million to under 12 million in the course of the next ten years.
It's hard to believe that only 650k of those jobs were lost because of the trade agreements and the other 4.35 million were lost due to some huge wave of automation.
Then slow it down to human tolerable speed (Score:2)
Given that it is taking from too many at too fast of a rate and leaving way too many people in a long-term displacement, it is beyond time to pull the brakes.
You want automation, fine. Just make it a royal PITA to not bring in the displaced.
Hit both trade and automation (Score:2)
[allegation that trade is less than automation]
Then hit both, hard. Their allegations only paper over trade-related losses with more prosperous regions.
How long until Herbert's Dune plays out? (Score:2)
Herbert's Dune spoke of a large uprising against AI that crushed it completely. Centuries of progress went out the window just because someone couldn't use it responsibly.
If those behind AI/ML forget about or underestimate effects of the mass displacement of individuals, they may end up losing everything - where Ned Ludd not only wins, but does so gloriously on a global scale. If they depart from that path and start including humanity, especially the short/long-term displaced, they might live and see thei
Automation engineer here (Score:2)
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so in the usa runup an 100K loan to get masters (Score:3)
so in the usa run up an 100K loan to get an masters. While an overseas guy's has and masters with only an 5k-10k loan that can be discharged.
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Re:Useless article, half baked.. (Score:5, Insightful)
A $50,000 robot uses maybe $5,000 in parts and electricity annually. Compared to a worker earning $50,000 a year and needs vacation time that robot can work 24 hours a day 6 days a week every week and be maintained by 1 guy(who does a dozen other robots too.
I sell the robots the best business case for robots is two fold. First while upfront costs are higher maintence and long term costs are way down, and a robot can scale production up and down as a business needs it to. This month you need 5000 parts daily. No problem. Next month you need 500 parts daily no problem.
Being able to ramp up and down according to sales is the future.
The future is a combo of 3D printing and just in time manufacturing keeping humans out of the production loop.
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Safety systems and guarding go away when you eliminate the need for humans to be in the plants anymore. You just lock the door and keep meat sacks away from the real workers.
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When you replace 100 people with automation, you don't get 100 robot repair jobs out of them. That's the whole point of automation.
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We'll just move from being a service economy to being a robot service economy. Someone will have to supply the services to the robots. So most people will get jobs in the robot banks, robot pubs and restaurants, robot shops and giving massages to robots that are tired after a hard days roboting.
Re:Useless article, half baked.. (Score:5, Interesting)
You know what I'm tired of? People who have no sense of scale, like at all.
Yeah, yeah, there will still be niches where people will be needed, but that's just it, niches. In the past one large manufacturing plant could employ thousands, or even tens of thousands of workers. Where do you see all these little niche employers popping up in order to swallow all these people? And note, now the automation is no longer restricted to manufacturing. Now, in fact for quite a while, we've been automating services too, like banking, ticket sales, etc, etc. Where are the "surplus" people supposed to go, really?
Hand-waving does you no good, nor does denial. This is a real problem, and we'd better figure out how to solve it. Because the alternative is going to be really ugly. But then I guess that's what the real purpose for the apparatus which is being put in place to fight "terrorism".
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Yeah, yeah, there will still be niches where people will be needed, but that's just it, niches. In the past one large manufacturing plant could employ thousands, or even tens of thousands of workers.
And people looking back at history seem to gloss over the number of niches that have always existed. How many niches existed at the height of steam power to keep a locomotive on the tracks and running?
With respect to the trades there wasn't just one type of woodworker unless you lived in a small town. A person that specialized in cabinet building would have a completely different set of tools and skillsets than someone that built homes. One person could probably do both but would do neither as well as the p
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This is true to an extent, but the jig is up once a robot can be programmed to learn. CGPGrey said it best. Humans will become like horses. Employable mostly for recreational and ceremonial purposes, but replaced with machines for getting real work done. And in general, populations decreased precipitously after they were no longer as useful... Luckily this appears to be somewhat self correcting as wealthier populations tend to have less children and even an apparent negative growth rate.
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Umm, TFA said "automatable by 2025". Note that it's not 2025 yet, and that "automatable by 2025" in no ways implies "automatable right now"....
Re:Useless article, half baked.. (Score:4, Insightful)
but even today, robochefs are still a novelty,
Denial denial denial! At one time automobiles were a novelty! Just as they have become indispensable to the needs to society, so too can improvements in robotics become indispensable to the fast food industry. You can't make the claim because it happened happened yet, then it won't. That's just pulling the wool over your own eyes.
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I doubt it. Even with food prep, even though things have advanced, if robot chef technology is good enough, it would have been moved to every fast food joint by now, but even today, robochefs are still a novelty, at best making a "custom" pizza.
It has gotten good enough in the past few years, and it is currently being moved to fast food joints. The transition isn't instantaneous.
Re:Useless article, half baked.. (Score:5, Informative)
robochefs are still a novelty, at best making a "custom" pizza.
Yeah, you're not aware of how automated food production is, are you? Sure, that hand-tossed, wood fired pizza you're getting is not going to be done by a robot anytime soon. But Tombstone and Red Barron pizzas haven't been hand assembled in decades. The same goes for all the processed food you find in the store. Bread, pasta, frozen dinners, anything that comes in a cardboard box, can, or jar probably has never been touched by human hands. The only exception is that some of the veg might have been picked by migrant workers.
Now, what does the vast proportion of the US population eat? All that stuff. Maybe you're like me and have the money, skills, and time to buy fresh ingredients and make stuff by hand, or go out to nice restaurants. But nobody is filling frozen burritos by hand, stuffing cheap sausage or hot dogs, or hand making 99% of the bread that gets eaten.
There is still a future of places where people are needed.
I'd like to know where/what that that is. Because everything I can think of our truck drivers, cabbies, food service workers, warehouse workers, service industry folks, and office drones doing instead of their jobs is also getting automated. What can't be done better and cheaper than automation and machine learning that can employ millions of people?
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I am tired of the "blame the robots" thing.
It will stop when businesses stop writing off the displaced. Otherwise, it will continue and grow to an unstoppable pace.
Same thing with offshoring.
Humanity, and its ability to provide significantly compensated gainful employment, must be preserved at all costs.
cut full time down to 32 hours with an roadmap 20 (Score:5, Insightful)
cut full time down to 32 hours short term with an road map to making it 20 longer term
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that will only hurt the middle class and cost the upper class nothing, only increasing the gap between rich and poor
unless you can magically mandate that everyone getting their hours cut gets a commensurate boost to their wages in which case you may as well do the sensible thing and just implement a basic income funded by an income tax which amounts to the same thing.
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He's the safety guy
Re:Nowhere! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, automation is a real observable phenomenon that's actually occurring, more and more so because it's often even more cost efficient than outsourcing. If outsourcing was not happening at all, automation would proceed at an even faster rate, because the benefit of replacing N highly paid western workers with a machine is far greater than replacing N workers of the same skill set working in some less developed country with a fraction of the pay.
No-one's been claiming that. Of course the concept of automation is not new, but the way automation can and is implemented has changed entirely with modern computers and data-driven manufacturing and production optimization.
A lot has been automated already, but it's nothing compared to what can and will be automated. The definition of 'low-hanging fruit' has also changed: data entry jobs were not too long ago considered impossible to automate. That's changed completely, and pretty soon the masses of people whose primary day-to-day work has been copying information from one place to another will be made obsolete by machines.
How many jobs can be automated now != how many jobs can be automated within the next couple of decades. If you told people in 1990 that in 30 or so years self-driving cars will start to emerge and threaten the jobs of drivers you'd have been laughed at by most. Similarly if you told them that call-.center jobs are being replaced by automated speech recognition and synthesis bots. Both are already happening, and are only going to keep going.
The up-front and maintenance cost by themselves are irrelevant. What mattes is how much performance you can get from the system per hour compared to humans. If said machine replaces 10 people working around the clock at 8 dollars an hour it will have paid for its acquisition in less than a year. After that at 40 000 a year it's massively cheaper than having all those people there.
You seem to be under the deluded impression that humans can somehow compere with increasingly efficient automation, even though said automation is the result of millions of hours of human engineering and designing with the specific intent of making computers that are more cost-efficient than humans at performing tasks..
It's not a meme, it's an undeniable reality of modern day life, and it doesn't have to mean the '1 % will grind us to paste', that only happens if we don't implement political changes that address the effects of increasing automation and decreasing employment, namely systems like basic income, changing taxation so that the 1 % making billions on their automated manufacturing will provide the rest of the society with money to be able to live and buy their products. Without consumers with purchasing power the consumer economy collapses which is not good for anyone, including the ultra-rich.
No, you seem more like someone sick from cognitive dissonance: on one hand recognizing the fact that increasing automat
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If you told people in 1990 that in 30 or so years self-driving cars will start to emerge and threaten the jobs of drivers you'd have been laughed at by most. Similarly if you told them that call-.center jobs are being replaced by automated speech recognition and synthesis bots.
and just for some perspective, if you had said we'd have a moon base by now, or working fusion reactors actually in the design phase / pilot phase you would have been believed.
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now as to this part:
Personally I do not dread the day when I don't have to spent a third of my day at work, but that's because I do not identify my self-worth with my profession, nor do I think employment itself is somehow the be-all-end-all state of human beings.
I also don't desire to spend ~55% of my waking time involved with my employment, but how does my life after displacement by automation compare with my life now?
Right now I am lower middle class (would be middle class, but divorce changed that).
If my job were to disappear, along with so many others, then it is reasonable to assume that attaining new employment will be profoundly more difficult (over 40, + presumed lack of jobs).
How do you propose society handles this issue? Note, I don
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Yes, yes they do. Currently around 90 % of people gain their income primarily as wages. These people already gain the bulk of their money from corporations and the spend that money on products produced by corporations. The bulk of the money in circulation in the consumer economy alrteady moves from pockets of one major company to another via the hands of consumers.
I
Re:Nowhere! (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my last jobs was a greenfield project for a new manufacturing facility. The old facility employed around 250 people making, moving, cutting and packaging, and shipping the products. This new factor was robot driven with these little robot carts that move the product from station to station where it then worked on by stationary robots. My job was to design a robust wireless network for the project and build out the the datacenter to handle the new software to run the whole thing. In the end, including front office staff the new factory employed 15 people to do the work of the previous 250 people.
How long until they close that other plant and retrofit it?
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... and let nature take its course.
[...]
What could go wrong?
If you want to all survival of the fittest, you need to remember that people will fight to survive. That means you will see an uprising most everywhere and they will slaughter their oppressors. Heartlessly discarding people will bring the dogs of war to rip out your throat.
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Because for a great many of them, their goal isn't to help the people but rather help themselves.
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World Bank Data on population growth [worldbank.org]
Overpopulation - The Human Explosion Explained [youtube.com]
The concern is that past a certain point automation stops spreading prosperity and starts concentrating it in the hands of a small wealthy class.
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The people that 'run the show' aren't doing the work themselves, only tell others how they want it done.
Methinks you undervalue the role of a good leader/manager in developing logistics, forecasting demand, managing conflicting priorities, etc.
Do they deserve some 500x the pay of the average worker? Of course not. Do they deserve to be in the top percentiles for their company's workforce? yes.