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Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

#51

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

vivekd wrote: post #21

Silicon valley is full of crap is what happened. Some jobs have been reduced - bank teller, cashier etc. There are also lots of jobs that could be replaced but aren't beause of weird regulations and such - lawyer etc. But most jobs - making hamburgers, cooking, laying brick, pouring cement, packing stuff in warehouses or assembly lines - stuff that matters, automation looks as far off as ever. Sure machines do a lot…

In terms of warehouses there's a fair bit of automation which replaces quite a few jobs - at my former employer's warehouses the pickers had robots drive all the stuff to them, and they were trying out robot pickers (they were able to handle ~30% of orders due to limitations in agility, SKUs had to be specifically whitelisted). You still need people to handle e.g. dangerous goods and handle the various fuckups in the system (e.g. due to poor master data), but when I was leaving they were not planning on any new "classic" warehouses.

I don't want to disclose where I worked, but you can take a look at Ocado, they are in a similar space (although focused on a different target market) and expanding from being online grocer to making those FCs for other companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E

Re: Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

#52

Post by tluyben2 »

As long as people are cheaper than robots, not much will happen anyway. I think a lot of jobs can be replaced by robots with enough money, but for that money (and the maintenance costs etc), you can get so many cheap (and more flexible) human employees that it is not worth it. If that goes up a lot, maybe it will be tempting; think the pressure is not high enough (yet)?

Re: Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

#53

Post by simonh »

It's not at all clear that automation destroys jobs overall at the economy level. It seems like there are two main effects behind this. One is that it increases the productivity of the economy and drives down the cost of goods, which increases overall wealth in society, which drives consumption and growth. The other effect is that somebody needs to build, install, maintain and operate the automated systems. It's fewer people in that particular sector, but it's higher value technical jobs. There's also a possible effect where automation reduces the costs in a sector which increases demand for those goods and services. There's good evidence that companies that automate more employ more people in the long run than their less automated competitors, but across the sector it's not as clear. Between these effects, the result seems to be either a wash or possibly a net positive. The problem is it's hard to tease out all these effects in an economy, and different forms of automation have different effects.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2021/09/02/does-auto...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2021/09/02/does-auto...

At the global level we've been automating away jobs for 200 years now, and while predictions of the end of employment have been a constant, if you look around now it really doesn't seem to have worked out that way. I grew up on 200AD comics in which the Judge Dredd and Halo Jones strips depicted a world of 95%+ unemployment because the robots had taken all the jobs, but back then in the 80s we did have mass unemployments in the UK as the economy went through a painful transition, so such a future seemed more credible.

Having said all that, any shift in industrial and employment patterns creates winners and losers. I'm all for social support to ease and manage such transitions, but trying to slow down and block change of this kind as a strategy has a really poor track record. It's incredibly expensive and inevitably fails anyway.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

#55

Post by imtringued »

pid-1 wrote: post #17

It turned out Luddites are still wrong after 200 years. Automation destroy jobs, but others are created. The belief in job stealing robots is mostly tech bro lore and not based in science nor empirical observation.

Luddites were unemployed people and their protests were struck down by police and military forces. The story that luddites were some Amish/religiously motivated people against machinery is just a myth.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

#57

Post by imustbeevil »

They took the jobs people would have had, they didn't take the jobs people currently have.

Amazons factories would have employed every human on Earth if they had to use humans. That's what happened to the robots taking our jobs. They took them from the future, decades ago, and you didn't even notice.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

#58

Post by lupire »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #13
pukexxr wrote: post #12

Touchscreens have replaced lots of human jobs. Self checkouts have replaced lots of human jobs. I worked in one of the very first grocery stores to have a self checkout added. They told us it wouldnt affect our jobs. If you go into any grocery store in the country you will see ~25% staffing compared to the late 90s/early 2000s. If you are askibg this question you are just too young to have noticed, or perhaps of a so…

But they're not robots - they've just outsourced the checkout job to the customer and made it so they require minimal training. Technology has made this easier, but it's not robotics.

There are too kinds of automatic: logic automation to replace worker training, and physical automation to replace worker movement.

Self checkout is logic automation, making the checkout job easy enough that customer can be trusted to do it.

Checkout used to have two jobs: a checker and a customer standing around waiting. Self-checkout merged those two jobs into one.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

#59

Post by lupire »

easytiger wrote: post #47
pukexxr wrote: post #12

Touchscreens have replaced lots of human jobs. Self checkouts have replaced lots of human jobs. I worked in one of the very first grocery stores to have a self checkout added. They told us it wouldnt affect our jobs. If you go into any grocery store in the country you will see ~25% staffing compared to the late 90s/early 2000s. If you are askibg this question you are just too young to have noticed, or perhaps of a so…

That's just turning the screen around and making the customer do the same thing as the employee based off the fact that CCTV systems will work with people's decency so as to not steal. It's not automation, the same actions still occur.

That only works because of the previous success in semi automating checkout, and scaling up the efficiency of security via CCTV.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

#60

Post by sexy_panda »

mikewarot wrote: post #16

Automation has been eliminating jobs since the 1960s, which is why Richard Nixon was ready to propose a form of universal income in 1969. He backed out because of racism. Look at real wages of the working class since then, vs productivity. Workers keep generating more profits, and don't get more pay.

If we can automate away further jobs, we will need a UBI in some form.

We pretend to be able to keep up with technological progress and most people do. Unfortunately not everyone has access to good schooling or the mental / physical capability.

If enough low to mid level jobs are automated away without securing people from getting lost in society, we could be facing anti-technological groups rising.

It seems like science fiction now, but will it?

Politics need to grow with our capabilities.

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