161–170 of 368 posts
1999-2019 is not the interesting period of automation. I'm surprised the authors think it's even relevant. 2020-2040 will be the period to watch.
An independent line of evidence looks at the formation of new occupations over time. If automation were taking over jobs, or jobs were being refactored because some tasks are automated, then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing in employment advertising and classifications such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics's. This does happen, as it has happened since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Social Media…
How many people worked on assembly lines in, say, 1910 vs. 2010? How about as a percentage of an average manufacturer's staff?
How many people worked as social media managers in 2010?
I'd bet that (adjusted for population growth) for every 100 assembly line workers in 1910 you now have 2-3 stressed out engineers plus a bunch of machinery. And maybe one social media manager every few companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 becaus…
An independent line of evidence looks at the formation of new occupations over time. If automation were taking over jobs, or jobs were being refactored because some tasks are automated, then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing in employment advertising and classifications such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics's. This does happen, as it has happened since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Social Media…
Also let's not forget that automation still means someone needs to write some code, which needs to be written, maintained, updated, synced with other projects etc. The act itself creates new jobs already. For instance: In IT we also have this. Dev is the typical product development team, Ops is the team that takes care of keeping the lights on. Now with all the automation we have a new job called Devops which is some…
If there's an engineer paid $200k + overhead for working on automation, then that only can happen if his/her job alone results in automating away ten $30k jobs.
I imagine automation will result in the creation of entirely new industries and jobs like with self-driving cars for example. Though, on second thought I guess self-driving does end up taking away a lot of taxi driver / trucking jobs. Nevermind...
Which is great for the planet, but not so great for jobs in car manufacturing industry, at least in the long run.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My current employer had a curiously very successful corona-quarter and building a solid backorder because we cannot have everyone in production right now.
We automate everything we can and still employ more and more people. We often think manufacturing when speaking about automation, but I think administration will be affected most (you won't automate anything if you fired your internal IT department).
We also build a fairly sci-fi robot to populate circuit boards for parts that cannot be fitted by reflow soldering. Great device to show off but the soldering women are just plainly faster and less error prone. And we have quite a high wage level.
But sales planning, accounting, reporting will be mostly automated at some point. Our own in-house production is steadily growing even with additional support by machines.
Of course it is bad if people out of job have no alternative. I think there should be state support for such cases instead of artificially keeping an industry alive.
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.
This is true, but better tooled, equipped humans do more work and so you need fewer of them. When your landscaping company buys an excavator, one person can now move as much earth as 15 people used to. You don't keep the other 14 on the payroll.
Producing more with less human input is how we raise the living standards of everyone in the long term.
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.
What you describe is not the quality of jobs decreasing, it's the increase in (unfulfilled, unreasonable) expectation of job quality just because you have a college degree. IMHO we have much more "good jobs" than in 1920 or 1950, it's just that the number of college graduates has grown faster than the number of good jobs. In 1920 or 1950 there weren't enough good jobs for everybody, and the good jobs mostly went to people with college degrees. But the problem was not actually in the lack of college degrees - if most people have college degrees, then all that means that college degree ceases to be the pathway to good jobs, and other filtering mechanisms inevitably need to appear (and have appeared) to select which people will get good jobs and which will be left behind despite having a college degree.
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.
Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once we manage to get rid of them.
I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.
That said, I recall reading a report that mostly middle class administrative and coordination roles are eliminated due to digitalization and dedicated software. Leading to negative wage pressure on the middle class.
These are repetitive human jobs like looking at a bunch of papers and creating a report.
Manual work is getting more productive and often shifted abroad but on a global scale is actually expanding in line with global gdp growth. https://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/employment-t...
Interesting in this report is that geopolitical instability is more destructive to jobs than artificial intelligence for now.