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‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

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Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#121

Post by knieveltech »

ams6110 wrote: post #109
knieveltech wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without exception the people crying about programmers and engineers want the market flooded so they can pay lower salaries. If there really was an epic shortage of programmers we'd all be getting executive level compensation.

Not really. There's a maximum value on the worth of programming work, as defined by the demand for the product the programmers are producing. It's the flip side of why high minimum wages cause more unemployment. Some work activities are just not worth $15/hr.

That high minimum wages cause more unemployment is not a settled question, and there is research that suggests that this is, in fact, a myth.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#122

Post by notahacker »

dragonwriter wrote: post #84
knieveltech wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true if you define "middle-class" as white collar. Welders make decent money, 35-60k on average for bog standard fabrication work. Easy to double those figures working for the oil and gas industries. Welders that can cert to Nuclear industry standards can easily triple those figure, and underwater welders can make over $300k in a year.

"Welder's generally aren't middle class regardless of income" is true if you define middle class in the way it traditionally is in relation to capitalist and modern mixed economies, that is, the middle class are those for whom both capital holdings and labor provide a substantial share of their income, usually because they derive the bulk of their income.by applying Thier own labor to.their own capital (though the mi…

I don't think definitions of "middle class" which refer solely to proportion of income derived from capital have ever really been more mainstream or useful than "white-collar"/"blue-collar" or salary-range based distinctions. Even Marxists whose entire economic philosophy is based on capital relations are usually happy to bracket wage-compensated managers alongside smallholders in the petit-bourgeoisie on the basis that they represent the interests of capital as opposed to because they actually own any.

The relevance of class distinctions which place Uber drivers - whose income is derived from applying labour to their own capital - in a higher economic class than doctors or SV programmers [who haven't exercised their options] is pretty minimal, and it isn't a capitalist conspiracy that other definitions of "middle class" are generally preferred.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#123

Post by dragonwriter »

wavefunction wrote: post #116
chrisseaton wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's only true if you define "middle-class" as white collar. Isn't that how everyone defines it? University educated, cultured, white collar workers? To me, middle-class means a doctor, lawyer, teacher, regulated professionals, things like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22gCw4iDdu4

Folks who worked in manufacturing plants like automobile factories were considered part of the middle class, before neoliberal globalism reduced their earning potential and employment opportunities.

For a while, people who worked in manufacturing jobs, saved and invested surplus income over a career, etc., could often reach the classic capitalist-economy definition of middle class (neither predominantly dependent on wage labor nor having enough capital to meet support needs plus accumulate more capital purely by renting others labor to apply to the capital) by late in their career.

That is no longer as attainable as it once was. (Neoliberal globalism is part of the problem, but in the US specifically domestic tax reform to shift the burden from upper income earners to lower-to-middle-income workers over time, particularly the enormous shift under Reagan, is more specifically the problem, and not really connected to neoliberal globalization except that there is some overlap in political support.)

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#124

Post by ska »

vostok wrote: post #53
nickthemagicman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering and Medecine seem to be the only safe places atm.

Traditional elite jobs such as sales, banking (not trading), and management seem to have also resisted automation for the time being.

None of those jobs are categorically elite - they have a small fraction of elite positions. One plausible scenario is that in a lot of areas the "elite" positions will stay somewhat stable, but there will be a huge drop in demand for 2nd tier and below.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#125

Post by rokosbasilisk »

snarf21 wrote: post #62
CodeSheikh wrote: post #11

"To counter these trends, the U.S. must invest in raising the skills of the workers most likely to be affected by the disappearance of routine jobs..." Not sure how's that going to play out for example a welding machine operator can't become a mechanical engineer in a short span of time because those routine jobs are eventually going to be consumed by automated robots, per this study. Why not motivate people to look…

You are exactly right. Who is going to take care of all these people as they age? (Huge problem in Japan right now. They are basically paying people to have kids because they know they'll be needing population to fill that role). People taking care of other people is going to be harder to automate than shipping and logistics. But still there is going to be cost/wage differences between companions vs light nursing (sh…

Wow didnt know japan is paying people to have kids in an age where robots are taking jobs seems like bad long term idea. Maybe robots taking jobs should lead to a natural population decline.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#126

Post by rokosbasilisk »

gspetr wrote: post #100
syshum wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surgeons are but one small and very specialized part of the Health Industry, just because Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate) does not mean the other jobs in Healthcare are as immune, GP's, Nurses, Lab Techs, etc are all targets. the comment I replied to was wanting to take People in Job A, and retrain them for Job B in healthcare as a second career do to Job A being automated. You are not likl…

> Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate) Which part would you like to debate? Is it the "soon" part or do you believe the Surgeon role will be gone entirely? Even with significant AI advances I'd argue that a Surgeon will still retain at least a guiding role (i.e. what to cut and what to do in case of complications) to the machine.

wavefront lasik is mostly automated already.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#127

Post by tptacek »

vinceguidry wrote: post #103
tptacek wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the "logic" I took from that comment too, but it still doesn't make any sense. We spend money on all sorts of things that don't "contribute" (in this weird, narrow sense) to the economy. But of course, most things we spend money on do in fact contribute to the economy: the money goes into the pockets of the people providing the service, who go on to buy things with that money and fuel the economy. That's wha…

An economy can be based around digging holes and moving the dirt between them, if that's what people wanted to happen . We literally pulled an entire nation out of a depression in order to go to war . Fighting a war has to be the least "productive" activity imaginable for humans to engage in, yet we did it and it managed to do the opposite of break the nation's back. The only criteria is that lots of people need it a…

If the holes are being put to productive use by the people demanding them, then sure. Given how little HN likely understands about agriculture, I'd be wary of trying to use "hole digging" as a kind of absurd example.

But this also illustrates how dumb it is to single out elder care as somehow economically unproductive. We pay for elder care because we desperately want our elder family members to be comfortable. If there were labor shortages in this sector, we'd be taking on the work ourselves, at substantial opportunity cost. It's one of the great things about market economies that this work can instead be done by people who have chosen to specialize in it --- they do the work more effectively, at lower cost, and derive more personal satisfaction from doing it.

There is a really weird undercurrent to this subthread that I find unsettling. The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#128

Post by danso »

tarunm wrote: post #118
danso wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be penalized by Google? One of the factors in the SERP algorithm is how accessible a page is when someone clicks-through from Google, including load times, page-covering ads, and so forth. Google also punishes pages that show one thing to the crawler and another thing to human visitors who click through on the search results, i.e. "cloaking" [0]. That is not the case here. edit: Maybe your question is ac…

Well I did some clicking around and came to know that this falls under their First Click Free [0] option. The details sounds more unfair to me. Example - 'A user coming from a host matching [ www.google. ] or [ news.google. ] must be able to see a minimum of 3 articles per day.' Isn't this a net neutrality violation? Because of their monopoly, they are able to force a work around to get access to content and a better…

Net neutrality applies to services like broadband, which are argued to be common carriers. If Comcast is the only Internet provider in my area, I have no easy alternatives if Comcast decides to block all Time Warner affiliated content. Just like it's not trivial to deal with PG&E arbitrarily shutting off my gas and electric.

This isn't the case with search engines. If Google were to blacklist wsj.com, I have many easy options to get to wsj.com. Which is why Google and any search engine has wide latitude to heavily discriminate against content. That's literally the point of PageRank, or any ranking algorithm. Where they have gotten in trouble is when they're accused of promoting Google-made content above other content (especially when the Google content consist of scraped info from other sites).

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#129

Post by zepto »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #24
zepto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to 'take' people and teach them skills?

We can start with the ones crying about a shortage of programmers and engineers (read, ones that think the cost of employees is too high). If you can impart a skill for $X at a discounted salary of delta(Y) so long as X ~ Y you're breaking even or making money over the the 1-2 year time frame the average person spends at a job. Note this is how finance has been hiring line engineers for years.

If it is so simple, why aren't they already doing it?

And if they are not already doing it, how do you 'start with' them?

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#130

Post by tptacek »

VLM wrote: post #74
metaphorm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

elder-care cannot possibly be a solid basis for the economy. they are not in their working years and are not (on the average) contributing positive sums to GDP or tax revenue. there is a humanitarian case to be made for improved quality of life for elderly people, but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it, unless you're arguing that the elder-care industry is just an elaborate sub…

Consider even more traditional methods of elder care such as apprenticeships and village elders. It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they ne…

I don't understand how we continue to dignify the premise that elder care in our existing marketplace isn't a fair trade. We want our elderly family members to be comfortable. If nobody was available to perform these services, we'd do them ourselves, at great personal cost. Instead, we exchange money for the services of specialists. Everybody comes out ahead.

We don't need "the kids to derive considerable value from the old people" to justify these economic transactions.

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