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AI are taking jobs

economist.com

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Re: AI are taking jobs

#61

Post by mediaman »

forensic wrote: post #37
chc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a mobile to have a phone. On the extreme side, you could take public transportation everywhere, use the Internet at the library when you needed it and just have home phone service. This is actually sufficient for most jobs in a lot of places, though it is a lot less convenient. If you want slightly more convenience, you can (for example) get a decent car that will take you from point A to point B for a…

$5000? You are so out of touch. Most people I know who are having trouble either have no car or a $400 beater car. A $5000 car would be considered lavish. You have a trust fund or something don't you? A mobile phone is absolutely a requirement to get a job. Employers expect you to have it and expect you to answer when they call. Guess what happens if, after a job interview, you don't answer your call. "Sorry boss, I…

I respect the particulars of your situation but it is not standard.

I own a manufacturing company with >100 employees, a mix of manufacturing and office/service jobs, and I don't expect answers from home from anyone except a couple top execs and the sales team, who are all based out of their home anyway and have company provided smartphones.

According to benchmarking data our company is not lavish, pays competitive wages but not way over the market, and has good productivity numbers.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#62

Post by bluedanieru »

maeon3 wrote: post #11
Permit wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there are not a lot of people capable of doing engineering/programming jobs. It is one thing to make the transition from a farmer to a factory worker, but another entirely to move from a factory worker to an engineer. The learning curve for the jobs that may be created might be too steep for those whose jobs were displaced.

Yes, the cotton pickers will need to be forced to go to high school and learn something that hasn't been automated. To the argument that this can't be done, take away their food, they will adapt. Mercy can be used in exceptional cases. I don't like the argument: "This human has such an aversion to learning that they must be supported forever like a pet". I suppose you wait for them to die and the problem solves itsel…

They'll adapt alright, but remember that the goal of the adaptation is to provide for themselves a quality of life that is comparable to that of their peers, not necessarily to contribute to society in a way that you would find useful. That is, they're just as likely to kill you in a riot and take your things, as they are to commit to a few years of school in their late thirties or forties.

People are not rational actors.

In a sense libertarian ideals are quite virtuous and moral depending on your values, but they're terribly impractical. They take as many liberties with human nature as does pure communism.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#63

Post by 6ren »

Ancient Rome had slaves - with actual intelligence.

What can we learn from how they handled it? Our civilization already seems more similar to their's than any other.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#64

Post by [deleted] »

marquis wrote: post #53
noonespecial wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. Nearly all of the articles I've seen of late that tackle this theme reduce to "but how can all of the X's that are now unemployed find work if the economy will never again need X's". Its a simple failure of imagination. When 50% of the people were farmers, not many of them could imagine being airline pilots. A combine harvester must have seemed like a fearsome thing indeed.

>When 50% of the people were farmers Farmers are highly entrepreneurial and work very hard, a combine is a welcome invention. It's the hired farm hands who are worried about the combine harvester. It's a very interesting question, what will happen to our society when we have less and less need for manual and rote labour.

[deleted]

Re: AI are taking jobs

#65

Post by [deleted] »

patio11 wrote: post #42

If you actually dig into the statistics, the 9% of America with persistent unemployment problems are mostly not e.g. bank underwriters who got creamed by FICO scores making them totally obsolete. That makes for a great newspaper piece, because well-educated people are not supposed to end up unemployable, but it bears little relationship to reality. Unemployment is dominated by sectors directly connected to the real e…

[deleted]

Re: AI are taking jobs

#66

Post by yummyfajitas »

gvb wrote: post #55
DavidSJ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the other side, let's say I make $X but only need $X/2 to live. Try finding an employer who will let you work half time for $X/2. It's pretty tough, especially if you make $X at something "professional", rather than, say, digging ditches. Rather than working ~20 hours a week, work ~40 hours a week, half your life.

...except nobody can tell me accurately when half of my life is over so I can retire at the right time. Note particularly that statistics only work when applied to large enough populations. I will not be 70% dead at 70, I'll either be 100% dead or 0% dead. http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/2011/04/statistical-single...

...except nobody can tell me accurately when half of my life is over so I can retire at the right time.

So work 40 hours/week for until you pile up enough money to buy a lifetime annuity, and let the insurance company do the averaging over large populations.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#67

Post by _delirium »

sliverstorm wrote: post #27
simonsarris wrote: post #7

I don't see this as a bad thing, except: In the 1950's people wondered what the future generations would do with all their free time. They predicted, correctly, that worker productivity would rise immensely. They also assumed that people would be just as wealthy while working much less. People are wealthier in some ways. In america, its pretty much standard issue to own at least one car (partially perhaps because a c…

it does not seem like the average worker is as well-off as the past had predicted Well, we may not all be working 8-hour weeks and vacationing in Hawaii and Mexico, but the simple truth is that people on average are a lot better off than in the past. The only stat I have in my head right now: Infant mortality has dropped from 2.6% to 0.6% since 1960. A hundred years ago, poor people had dirt floors. That's unheard of…

There hasn't been quite the flexibility and utter non-dependence on material livelihood that techno-utopians predicted, though. By some estimates, we've had something like a 50x productivity improvement during the 20th century. If you assume that in 1900 the average person was a subsistence farmer (a conservative assumption), spending 100% of their time to earn basic shelter and 2000 calories/day, then with 50x productivity improvement, someone should be able to get basic, 1900-style food/shelter by working only 2% of a full-time job, i.e. almost negligible work, only a few days a year. Hence the widespread predictions made by early-20th-c authors that by 2000, basic needs (shelter/food) would be essentially free.

But obviously that hasn't happened: there is no real route by which I can put in 2% of full-time work, which by productivity gains is supposedly equivalent to 100% of 1900's full-time work, and live a basic 1900-era lifestyle. If there were, a lot of homeless people would take that option, working one week a year and earning themselves basic 1900-era accommodations/food.

It's just not an option you can actually pursue. Heck, even if you want to take some of the productivity gains in quality improvements: let's admit you don't have the option today to live like a 1900-era citizen, but have to, at a minimum, live 10x better. Then I should still be able to live ten times as well as the average 1900 citizen while putting in only 20% of a full-time job's worth of labor, thanks to that 50x productivity improvement. But that isn't really an option, either. Instead it seems that, if that 50x figure is indeed real, the only way to realize it is to take the dividend as material wealth, living 50x better rather than putting in less labor.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#68

Post by gambler »

chc wrote: post #60
forensic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5000? You are so out of touch. Most people I know who are having trouble either have no car or a $400 beater car. A $5000 car would be considered lavish. You have a trust fund or something don't you? A mobile phone is absolutely a requirement to get a job. Employers expect you to have it and expect you to answer when they call. Guess what happens if, after a job interview, you don't answer your call. "Sorry boss, I…

Frankly, I think you're out of touch. I don't have a trust fund, and I acknowledge that there are people to whom my statements do not apply. I pretty explicitly said I was talking about the common case, which is not "unemployed and looking for a $10/hour job." You are talking about a very specific situation which is much poorer than average, statistically speaking. Anyway, though, I suggested that $5000 car (which is…

The point is that most devices that would have been a luxury some time ago are merely a way to keep up with certain demands of the society today. Just because you didn't have a cell phone 15 years ago and have one now doesn't automatically mean your life quality became higher in this respect. Because life is different. (BTW, landline phones are more expensive. They are the luxury now.) That was grandparent's point, and I do not believe you've presented a convincing argument against it.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#69

Post by ghshephard »

marquis wrote: post #53
noonespecial wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. Nearly all of the articles I've seen of late that tackle this theme reduce to "but how can all of the X's that are now unemployed find work if the economy will never again need X's". Its a simple failure of imagination. When 50% of the people were farmers, not many of them could imagine being airline pilots. A combine harvester must have seemed like a fearsome thing indeed.

>When 50% of the people were farmers Farmers are highly entrepreneurial and work very hard, a combine is a welcome invention. It's the hired farm hands who are worried about the combine harvester. It's a very interesting question, what will happen to our society when we have less and less need for manual and rote labour.

The farmer scenario is interesting. On the one hand, (speaking as one who comes from a family of farmers) - they are amazingly early adopters of technology - to a degree that I think might shock your average denzien of HN. DGPS, Real-Time weather reports feeding into Options Plays on their Crops (I learned more about calls, puts, and commodities markets in one evening around a campfire in banff, than 2 years of economics classes and endless surfing of thestreet.com ever taught me), chemical systems for fertilizers, satellite displays on the hydration levels of their fields - these are all fairly common tools of your farmer that has more than four or five sections.

But what they lack is capital, scale, vertical integration, and access to enterprise IT systems.

The first casualties of technological advances were the manual laborers, but, as technology advances, and automation evolves further, the "independent farmer" will cease to exist in North America outside of the smaller retirement/sustenance farms (that are numerous, but don't contribute that greatly to the food supply) and niche areas that supply "Organically Grown", "Locally harvested" markets.

The Very Large Farms (that is, those farms doing > $500K sales/year) will continue to grow as a percentage of total farms, and those will increasingly become larger, and, as a result, eliminate farming jobs.

Farmers are stubborn, and resilient, so it won't happen quickly - but as those farms are lost to the mega-agricorps, they won't come back into the family. Average age of a farmer in the United States is around 57 - so, in about 10 years from now, as we see wider deployment of automated vehicles, yet another segment of the american job market will begin its permanent decline.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#70

Post by nazgulnarsil »

"The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product."

yeah, it's not like increases in productivity could simply create a surplus that is then directed into other sectors. I write for the economist and cannot into economics hurrdurr. This is like saying that a machine that lets me do laundry faster is bad because I don't need to do 20 loads of laundry per day.

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