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No Recent Automation Revolution

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Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#111

Post by Nextgrid »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #7
Swizec wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go This is perhaps the only thing socialism got right. At least the flavor we had in Yugoslavia and the remnants it left on the psyche of my parent's generation. You do your job, then you go home and live your actual life. The job exists as a way to "pay your dues" in society, but it isn't yo…

> We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life. When I was younger and naive, I judged the Amish. As I've grown older and wiser, I realize they had the right idea all along. Family, loved ones, community first. Everything else serves those.

Regarding the Amish, I admire their approach to technology. Technology is only accepted if it benefits them without distracting them from their main duties (family & church).

This inherently makes them immune to the majority of the downsides we see in today's tech such as addictive patterns, advertising or "broken by design" tools as they would just not become accepted in the community to begin with.

Given the current, often user-hostile state of technology I think this is an example we should at least consider.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#112

Post by Nextgrid »

kristianp wrote: post #100
gigel82 wrote: post #73

I don't know enough about industrial automation to form an opinion, but RPA is definitely coming for the rank-and-file office drones. You'd be surprised how many "paper pushers" still fill the cubicles of this world (their job literally to copy stuff from this ERP to this CRM or to this legacy Access / Excel / BI system). This is the low hanging fruit of job automation and enterprises are quickly figuring out what ki…

RPA?

Robotic Process Automation, presumably.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#113

Post by buboard »

dgudkov wrote: post #110

Automation happens not where many expect it (including the media). It is frequently expected that automation will come as replacement for humans, while it actually is coming in the form of better tooling and assistance to humans. This theoretically should be reflected in work productivity, not in employment numbers.

when people talk of automation they mean replacement, not just better tools, for that has been happening since the beginning of time

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#114

Post by ilaksh »

kristianp wrote: post #100
gigel82 wrote: post #73

I don't know enough about industrial automation to form an opinion, but RPA is definitely coming for the rank-and-file office drones. You'd be surprised how many "paper pushers" still fill the cubicles of this world (their job literally to copy stuff from this ERP to this CRM or to this legacy Access / Excel / BI system). This is the low hanging fruit of job automation and enterprises are quickly figuring out what ki…

RPA?

Robotic Process Automation.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#115

Post by Nextgrid »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26
jsmith12673 wrote: post #19

Economics noob here: the paper concludes that past automation is predicted by 2 key factors: pay and employment. What does that mean exactly? Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated? Or the other way around? Also what does 'employment' refer to exactly? Is measuring how well the demand for labour is being met in a certain job?

> Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated? Yes. "Simple economic theory predicts that, all else equal, employers are more eager to automate jobs with higher pay and more workers. So these two factors should predict job automation. And we do in fact see such effects in Table 3, though more consistently for pay than employment." > what does 'employment' refer to exactly? Number of…

For automation to make sense from a business point of view the cost of developing & running the automation should be less than the cost of doing the work manually over an equivalent timeframe.

This is why for example there are a lot of bullshit office jobs that can be automated fairly easily but will not be because there's plenty of cheap labour to do it manually (for cheaper than what developing & maintaining the automation would cost) and it also earns them PR points about "creating" jobs.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#116

Post by totetsu »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
hirundo wrote: post #3

The horrors of the automation revolution have been on our collective mind for a long time. In the '70s this was one of my dad's favorite jokes: "It's terrible, my father lost the job he had for decades. He was replaced by a clever mechanical gizmo just six inches long. And then my mom got one." It plays on the fear of being emasculated by technology. Maybe that leads us to exaggerate the threat.

The fear is very real, not about emasculation, but a loss of identity in a society where "you are your job". I have seen this first hand in both people who weren't "essential" during COVID shutdowns (to their horror), and people who were deemed "essential" but it was, in their words, "bullshit". Automation is rapidly accelerating into the wall that is identity beliefs at scale, and there is evidence that these belief…

Doesn't the often given argument agains UBI that, 'work is important for dignity' have its roots in Christian ethics?

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#117

Post by Cthulhu_ »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
hirundo wrote: post #3

The horrors of the automation revolution have been on our collective mind for a long time. In the '70s this was one of my dad's favorite jokes: "It's terrible, my father lost the job he had for decades. He was replaced by a clever mechanical gizmo just six inches long. And then my mom got one." It plays on the fear of being emasculated by technology. Maybe that leads us to exaggerate the threat.

The fear is very real, not about emasculation, but a loss of identity in a society where "you are your job". I have seen this first hand in both people who weren't "essential" during COVID shutdowns (to their horror), and people who were deemed "essential" but it was, in their words, "bullshit". Automation is rapidly accelerating into the wall that is identity beliefs at scale, and there is evidence that these belief…

While correlating your identity with your job is probably not a good thing in a general sense of the word, I think looking a bit broader, having purpose in life is important; for a lot of people, that is their job / career.

In addition to automation, I fear there are a lot of bullshit jobs out there right now that people cannot see as their purpose; it's a job, they take it because they need to make money, and because there isn't a living to be made in what they themselves are passionate about.

There's a LOT of people who would love to make a living in the arts - writing, drawing, etc - but there's just not enough money in it because people aren't willing to actually pay for it, so they have to move their passion to a hobby while working a dead-end job where they are just a number in a payroll system - i.e. they are replaceable. McJobs, if you want.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#118

Post by Cthulhu_ »

dpenguin wrote: post #88

It’s basically modified Parkinson’s law at play - work will expand to most available workforce. With increased automation, either new jobs are created(thereby increasing the overall output of the economy) OR expectation for individual productivity is reduced, decreasing individual stress. History is your proof. Automation has been constantly increasing forever and there’s no job loss en masse because of that. Empiric…

While the adage is true, you also have to consider the quality of work. There are a LOT of people in the US right now with a college degree who can't find any jobs related to their majors, so they end up as baristas or Amazon order pickers - their education, talents, passions being wasted, their future pretty much on hold because jobs like that don't pay enough money to pay off student debt or buy a house.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#119

Post by lmm »

> Two metrics created by groups trying to predict which jobs will get automated soon did predict past automaton, but not after we included 25 mundane job features like Pace Determined By Speed Of Equipment and Importance of Repeating Same Tasks

This sounds like a thoroughly fallacious argument? Automation is progressing not by automating jobs in the exact form that they were previously done, but by more automatable (and therefore more automated) forms of job displacing less automatable forms of those jobs. Isn't that exactly what we'd expect?

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#120

Post by ncmncm »

ashtonkem wrote: post #58
Zaskoda wrote: post #10

Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program. We did in months what we had originally planned to do in years. As we are able to open our operations center further, it's clear that we'll be providing fewer jobs than we did before. At least some part of that is the result of automation. I can't help but think this same pattern is playing out at other companies right now.

This kind of thing happens all the time; a crisis in economic terms forcing companies to aggressively pursue cost savings measures that never go away once the economic constraints are lifted. A similar process happened with oil rigs, where automation was available, but only pursued once the price of oil crashed. Those jobs also never came back.

During the last crash, in 2008, my employer at the time, Aspera (since bought out by IBM), boomed as customers moved to cut costs.

The customers replaced shipping disk drives (or, in DoD's case, boxes of analog videotapes!) with transferring files over fiber and satellite links. NYT switched from reading stories aloud over bad phone connections to transferring files via satphone.

This displaced fedex package handlers and mailroom personnel, and stenographers.

In DoD's case, a physical library of surveillance drone videotapes, and everybody schlepping tape cartridges, was replaced with a remote-accessible video library. Nowadays digital video is streamed to Nevada and Utah in real time, and copied off there.

Similar stories apply for numerous other customer industries. These were all permanent changes. Aspera grew to a hundred-some employees in 2014, but must have displaced thousands.

Does this count as automation?

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