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Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

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Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#161

Post by mschuster91 »

RGamma wrote: post #147
starbugs wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has anyone claimed technological changes will impact every group and subgroup on a literally equal basis? No, but too much inequality is not sustainable. Since in a democracy everyone has an equal vote, there will be a force that balances things out over time one way or another.

Democracy won't survive the tech trillionaires. At that point you can buy the executive.

We already are at the point where the ultra rich just buy politicians. Hell, we were ever since oil production was mainstreamed and the oil tycoons were able to tell the US to go to wars for oil.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#163

Post by mschuster91 »

VHRanger wrote: post #34
aczerepinski wrote: post #25

I wish I could believe that all this automation would lead to more leisure time for all of humanity, but it certainly won’t happen on its own out of generosity from the robot owners.

We've been saying that for a long time. [Keynes predicted we'd be working 15 hour weeks by now]( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12439 ) The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much. There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one right now! But you'd need to have a smaller appartment, an older c…

> The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much.

Or simply they want to live. The amount of money we gotta spend on rent is insane.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#164

Post by zmmmmm »

techdmn wrote: post #20

About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company. I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20 hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what materials they needed. It was all based on data we had: inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount of her help, I'd automated the whole t…

> That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job.

It's effectively a form of the broken window fallacy [0]. You don't actually have a closed system when you say a "job was removed". The company one way or another got more efficient - more widgets were manufactured per $ spent. It might be tiny but this saving was then passed on to every downstream purchaser of the widgets who, with that left over money .... could employ someone else to do something. By the time you add all the net effects back to regain a "closed system", economic theory says you actually have more jobs.

But the key here really is that this doesn't account for temporal effects, and especially when there is rapid disruptive change, you can absolutely have a huge dislocation and mismatch of labor supply / demand in the economy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#165

Post by jedberg »

shrubble wrote: post #152

This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality, plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home shopping. "The world's second-largest priv…

The 1000 Indians story was completely incorrect though. They has 1000 people in India tagging the videos after the fact for improvements to the machine learning algorithms. They weren't watching in real time.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#166

Post by VHRanger »

nabla9 wrote: post #40
VHRanger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been saying that for a long time. [Keynes predicted we'd be working 15 hour weeks by now]( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12439 ) The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much. There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one right now! But you'd need to have a smaller appartment, an older c…

All what you say is true, if the wage share stays constant. The "working poor" phenomenon where you can't pay for necessities like rent, healthcare etc. while working full time is the result of declining wage share. Wage share has steadily declined in OECD countries since early 1970s. In the US since 1960s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173 Wages make smaller and smaller portion of national income while…

FWIW, the wage share declining is a result of many other factors. See here:

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2008/where-has-all-th...

Health insurance and other benefits, household composition have hurt wage share. Not that it didn't decline in real terms for the lower skilled workers, just less than the naive chart you put.

Here is good reading on the topic (maybe my favorite paper of the last decade):

https://www.nber.org/papers/w25588

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#167

Post by godsfshrmn »

shrubble wrote: post #152

This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality, plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home shopping. "The world's second-largest priv…

Very true. Could be counting 50k IR sensors that count how many items pass on a belt. (Plus maybe a PIR motion sensor in the bathroom )

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#168

Post by maxsilver »

VHRanger wrote: post #34
aczerepinski wrote: post #25

I wish I could believe that all this automation would lead to more leisure time for all of humanity, but it certainly won’t happen on its own out of generosity from the robot owners.

We've been saying that for a long time. [Keynes predicted we'd be working 15 hour weeks by now]( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12439 ) The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much. There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one right now! But you'd need to have a smaller appartment, an older c…

> people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much.

We don't actually know that. Most people don't have the option.

For all but a select few industries, there is no such thing as "work a part time job, and trade the rest for extra leisure" since almost no part-time job can sustainably cover cost of living. (Heck, most full time jobs don't really cover basic cost of living today).

> There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. But you'd need to have a smaller apartment, an older car, and eat more lentils.

The average wage in Michigan is currently $21/hr. ($36k/yr after federal, city, and state taxes). The average basic 1-bed apartment here is about $1300/month or $15k/yr. Minimum income requirement to qualify for an apartment is usually 2.5x to 3x times monthly rent.

Math that out and you can quickly see that the vast majority of people simply aren't going to ever afford basic housing on 15hours a week. Or even 30hours a week.

--

And on the flip side, when it was actually possible to pull this trick off, more people used to use it. In the 60s and 70s, when you could actually live off a part time 20hr a week job, people routinely did so (and then used their free time to do things like enroll in college and pay for it on the side).

You don't see that anymore, because wages have fallen so drastically, and costs risen so drastically. It simply doesn't math out for the vast majority of folks.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#169

Post by hackerlight »

hanniabu wrote: post #102
air7 wrote: post #52

It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the…

> It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. That was true in the past, but as technology gets better that won't be the case. Yes new jobs will be created, but there'll be fewer and fewer. Technology will allow for more generalized approaches that can be quickly adapted to new solutions. So new jobs will also be replaced quicker and…

Comparative advantage will keep people employed for a while: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-...

There's a recent NBER paper that predicts wages will increase in the beginning of the AI revolution, even as AI displaces some jobs. Eventually there will be mass unemployment, but only when AI dominates humans (cost & capability) at almost everything.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#170

Post by phatfish »

SoftTalker wrote: post #127
LadyCailin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s too hard to do. What is “a robot” and “a job?” Replacing workers is easy enough to calculate that with, but what if I start a brand new factory that only ever used robots? The solution is wealth tax and UBI. Get rid of regular income tax, then do a progressive wealth tax, which is enough to pay for a progressive UBI. This way, it’s no problem if you lay off all your workers to replace them with robots. In fact…

Very few people hoard wealth. You imagine wealthy people like Scrooge McDuck with a room full of gold coins. It's almost always invested in stocks which helps companies grow or in bonds which helps finance public works.

Pretty sure a diverse portfolio will feature gold. It might not be in gold coins in the owners basement though.

Investing in stocks where most companies are doing their best to suppress worker compensation or out-right replace them with robots doesn't feel like it's doing much to help the average person either.

Public investment is on a downward trend since 2008 when governments had to save the bankers. What government spending there still is often has to filter through private service companies that are given government contracts. This usually results in good dividends and bad service.

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