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Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

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Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#31

Post by wlesieutre »

ars wrote: post #21
bluedino wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation eliminates jobs - that's the whole point. One robot replaces 20 workers and you only need 1 person per every 20 robots to manage them. Sure, you've got jobs in robot building and such but when a robot shop with 20 employees turns out 200 robots in one year and displaces 4000 workers...

You need to go to the next level. People automate things not to eliminate jobs (that's not the whole point), but to save money. So now the product is cheaper. So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend - which opens whole new fields of products and services for them, which will (at first) be run by humans and have jobs. It's a cycle that repeated many many times in history. It's just happening faster now.…

The customers as a whole don't have more money, because half of them just got automated out of their jobs. Maybe enough new jobs come around that it isn't a long term problem this time, but there will come a time when essentially every job could be done by a computer. What then?

Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#32

Post by ameister14 »

ars wrote: post #21
bluedino wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation eliminates jobs - that's the whole point. One robot replaces 20 workers and you only need 1 person per every 20 robots to manage them. Sure, you've got jobs in robot building and such but when a robot shop with 20 employees turns out 200 robots in one year and displaces 4000 workers...

You need to go to the next level. People automate things not to eliminate jobs (that's not the whole point), but to save money. So now the product is cheaper. So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend - which opens whole new fields of products and services for them, which will (at first) be run by humans and have jobs. It's a cycle that repeated many many times in history. It's just happening faster now.…

That's not really how things end up working, though; if you're living hand to mouth you end up spending all you make. If you're wealthy, you save much of your wealth.

Yes, people have more money to spend, but no, trickle down economics doesn't really work out for the jobless.

Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#33

Post by byoung2 »

codegeek wrote: post #6

Another report: As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up. So net effect: not much. Point being that for centuries, we have been automating things that were done by humans at some point in time. Not much different even today. Take one example of cellphones. It probably eliminated many "jobs" for people working in landline industries in the last decade or…

the point is that the number of jobs themselves do not dimish

I agree there. Think of the jobs that have been lost over the years as stores have closed due to competition from the internet. During my lifetime, I've seen independent bookstores merge and disappear, and even the mega-chains go away (e.g. Borders). Music stores - gone (Tower Records, Wherehouse, Sam Goody). Video rental - gone (Blockbuser). Big box electronics - going (Circuit City, Good Guys, Tweeter).

Despite all of this, unemployment stayed relatively constant, aside from the spike during the recent economic downturn (and these jobs were not lost as a result of automation).

Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#34

Post by owenmarshall »

acgourley wrote: post #24

A thought experiment: Imagine a pre-singularity world with near-intelligent anthropomorphic robots which can do most manual tasks - including resource mining, food production and building more of themselves. Imagine most menial white collar jobs have been replaced by clever software written by people on this site. There are still some jobs for humans to do - in game design, fashion, service, music, etc. But any way y…

> So if you think my thought experiment can come to pass - we need to be very concerned.

We only need to be concerned if we make the assumption that societal expectations won't adjust as well. "Hard work" is seen as a virtue; someone who takes government assistance is pitied at best, considered "parasitic" at worst.

If we take those views into your world it will be a disaster. But instead the real question should be "why does everyone need to have a job?" If we provide for the needs of people displaced by the new machines, we'd free people up to pursue arts, philosophy, or even simple leisure. We'd be living in Bertrand Russell's paradise of 'idleness'.

Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#35

Post by VLM »

The train example is a pretty bad one, I'm the first in four generations not to work for the local railroad and five union dudes on a train crew pretty much went away in the 1970s. You do typically have two guys and you really need two for safety as sometimes you need human eyes looking out both windows at once (freight trains have poor visibility compared to trucks).

A freight train with one dude strikes me as unlikely. The few single person trains out there have excellent visibility for the one driver. So you'd have an interesting capital expense if you tried that with freight trains. I do know some small switcher locos run single person but thats in a barb-wired switchyard well away from the general public. So you'd "have to" eliminate all grade crossings or something, another big expense.

Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#36

Post by cygwin98 »

On the referenced pdf[1], there are two professions related to us:

130 0.042 Software Developers, Applications

293 0.48 Computer Programmer

The former has 4% probability to lose to automation, while the later is 48%. What is the difference between the two?

[1] http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/fil...

Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#37

Post by yummyfajitas »

randomdata wrote: post #3

Somewhere around 90% of U.S. Jobs were automated out of existence in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Is this time different?

This argument is a bit of a fallacy. See the following (schematic) graph, which illustrates the fallacy:

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/human_vs_machine_prog...

Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#38

Post by yodsanklai »

codegeek wrote: post #6

Another report: As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up. So net effect: not much. Point being that for centuries, we have been automating things that were done by humans at some point in time. Not much different even today. Take one example of cellphones. It probably eliminated many "jobs" for people working in landline industries in the last decade or…

"As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up."

That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job?

It seems to me that either we have to accept that a proportion of the population doesn't work, or we have subsidy manual jobs to compete with developing countries with cheap labor.

Either way, the ones benefiting from automation have to pay for the unskilled to survive.

Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#39

Post by [deleted] »

IvyMike wrote: post #19
randomdata wrote: post #3

Somewhere around 90% of U.S. Jobs were automated out of existence in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Is this time different?

I guess it feels like there were other manual labor jobs to move to back in that day and age. But if nearly every manual labor and semi-skilled labor job is going to be automated, I don't know what those people will do. The people who dig ditches or drive trucks today are not going to be happy or excel in office jobs.

[deleted]

Re: Report: 47% of U.S. Jobs At Risk of Being Automated Out of Existence

#40

Post by [deleted] »

VLM wrote: post #35

The train example is a pretty bad one, I'm the first in four generations not to work for the local railroad and five union dudes on a train crew pretty much went away in the 1970s. You do typically have two guys and you really need two for safety as sometimes you need human eyes looking out both windows at once (freight trains have poor visibility compared to trucks). A freight train with one dude strikes me as unlik…

[deleted]
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