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Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

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Re: Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

#31

Post by petra »

rhino369 wrote: post #20
Animats wrote: post #9

Actual OECD study: [1] The study says that, for the US, 9% of people are at "high risk" of automated out of a job. (That probably means "replaceable right now".) But 38% of people are potentially replaceable. There's an assumption in the OECD report that the entire job of a human must be replaced. But that's not how automation works. We're seeing this in the more advanced law firms. What used to take a senior attorne…

One for one replacement is a flaw, but also it doesn't take into account that efficiency often times leads to more work being done. Like accountants. Excel and other software resolved a ton of their work. You didn't see a collapse in the number accountants. They just crunch more numbers, do more analysis. uber made taxi's more efficient and I now ride in one 10X as often. >We're seeing this in the more advanced law f…

What about neota logic ? they seem to build pretty capable software for legal.

Also, as for your claim that "works fills the available time", what about competition, new models of billing(fixed-fee), etc ?

Re: Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

#32

Post by pasquinelli »

rhino369 wrote: post #24
daveguy wrote: post #5

Hm. The subtitle is "Destruction of large numbers of jobs unlikely, says new OECD Study", but the very first table gives a list of percent of jobs automatable by country. It ranges from 7-12%. That is a HELL of a lot of jobs. The argument is, "have no fear! it won't be 47% of jobs automated!" -- only 10%. 10% job loss is a labor crisis. Of course if you have all of those retrainable as other jobs (including automatio…

Something like 70% of Americans worked in agriculture in 1850, and like 5% did in 1950 (many of whom were probably migrant workers from Mexico). We've gone through radical change before.

how it goes down is important though. if automation follows after labor begins to move to something else then that's one thing, but the reverse, automation putting people out of work, mean there might not be anything for them to realistically move to.

Re: Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

#33

Post by loup-vaillant »

Their conclusion doesn't follow from their numbers.

> Overall, we find that, on average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 % of jobs are automatable.

As in, right freaking now? Blimey, what about the next few decades, then? Not to mention that 9% is already a big number.

That being said, the more automation the better. We just need something better than punishing the jobless with poverty.

Re: Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

#34

Post by Bartweiss »

infogulch wrote: post #19
arcticfox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If driverless trucking takes off, why would the gas station need to be full service (staffed with humans)? Compared to building an autonomous truck, autonomous refueling seems like the easy part.

Think of it this way: Right now, to move one trucks' worth of cargo for one hour requires one man hour. i.e.: 1 man-hour per cargo-hour. If you have a single human that full-services 200 self-driving trucks in one day, you have: 1 man-hour per 200 cargo-hours. Sure, autonomous refueling is easier than self-driving, but self-driving trucks also makes the human relatively way cheaper to employ.

My thoughts exactly.

The usual standard for automation, I believe, is 18-24 months salary - if the capital cost can be recouped in two years automation is worthwhile. For hundreds of well-paid truckers that's a relatively generous target, but automating a reliable gas pumping system just to save on one minimum-wage gas pumper looks like a much lower ROI.

Re: Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

#35

Post by Bartweiss »

Shivetya wrote: post #23
arcticfox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If driverless trucking takes off, why would the gas station need to be full service (staffed with humans)? Compared to building an autonomous truck, autonomous refueling seems like the easy part.

Until the automate the process of inspection and refueling it would be a good job to place people. Treat it like an airplane coming in from a flight. Support crew go out to verify the condition the truck thinks its in, fix minor things the truck called out, and refuel it. Sign off on the paperwork stating truck meets all acceptable Federal and State laws.

This is definitely part of it - humans are great at flexible-requirement tasks. Gas the truck, kick the tires, squeegee off the sensors, make sure nothing is obviously falling apart. Rather than paying one human per truck, you pay one human per ~200 trucks to do all of the minor, unpredictable service tasks needed.

Re: Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

#36

Post by ChuckMcM »

The actual study is a bit more detailed and it suggests some interesting things.

One is the evolution of work and jobs over time. As a pretty relevant example, the migration of shopping to "online" vs in store means two things; First you don't need the goods in a metro area, and second you need to get them to the customers. If you replace all current "shopping" traffic with "delivery" traffic it really cuts into the buyer's experience (waiting for delivery) but drone delivery allows the delivery component to scale. Of course drone delivery has to be reasonably local, but needn't be closer than a 10 miles or so, that means a "town" outside of the city that is well served by cargo container delivery can then provide the point where bulk delivery switches to individual delivery. That implies a economies with the movement of containers above and beyond the current system of trains and trucks. Either additional rail networks or lots more trucks. If those trucks are automatable, well that helps as well.

So if we imagine some "delivery only" roads where only robotic trucks are allowed, that lead to warehouses where end product dispersal is done, to smaller warehouses where local delivery can be queued/expedited. Walk that backwards to figure out the things you need in order to deploy that.

At which point it would be interesting to evaluate the energy efficiency of that system over the current one to make sure what you get back in efficiency by automation you don't spend on additional energy.

Re: Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

#37

Post by rhino369 »

petra wrote: post #31
rhino369 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One for one replacement is a flaw, but also it doesn't take into account that efficiency often times leads to more work being done. Like accountants. Excel and other software resolved a ton of their work. You didn't see a collapse in the number accountants. They just crunch more numbers, do more analysis. uber made taxi's more efficient and I now ride in one 10X as often. >We're seeing this in the more advanced law f…

What about neota logic ? they seem to build pretty capable software for legal. Also, as for your claim that "works fills the available time", what about competition, new models of billing(fixed-fee), etc ?

I'm not sure what Neota Logic does. Looks like it's a best practices guide prepared by Litter Mendelson turned into software.

This could be a good example of advancements creating more work. My firm does a ton of employment law advising. My coworker in that department is always bitching about HR workers in her clients organization making dumb legal choices on their own. This software is designed for that sort of thing. The HR drones will instead use this software instead of their intuition. And I'm willing to bet this drives legal work when the HR drones run into issues that aren't clear (much of the law has no clear answer). Before the HR people wouldn't even know they had a legal issue to talk about.

Nobody was ever paying 500 dollars an hour to a firm to ask general compliance questions. In fact, compliance work is generally not considered legal work. They had an HR person making their choices before, not a lawyer.

Though I think my firm sometimes prepare best practice guides for clients. I'm not entirely sure if they are paying it, but I suspect they do. So maybe that software would reduce that sort of work.

>Also, as for your claim that "works fills the available time", what about competition, new models of billing(fixed-fee), etc ?

You'd think it would have a bigger impact, but we see this in many industries over a long time. Clothing got cheaper, and now we own a lot more clothes.

It's really shocking how much lawyers get away with charging based on how many unemployed and underemployed lawyers there are. I think it's partially because a lawyer is only worth something when they are experienced, and unemployed lawyers never get experience.

but also the value of legal work is really hard to objectively value. I can't even tell if the quality of work actually pays real world dividends.

Re: Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

#38

Post by snowwrestler »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #4

This piece is utter trash founded on baseless assumptions. >Arntz, et al. argue that the estimated share of “jobs at risk” must not be equated with actual or expected employment losses from technological advances for three reasons. So in other words, the title is false. Actual employment loss is what is at issue here. >The utilisation of new technologies is a slow process, due to economic, legal and societal hurdles,…

The hard question is not whether certain jobs will get automated out of existence--they will.

The hard question is why that automation will not result in the creation of new industries, which themselves will create new jobs. This has happened throughout human history. To say that won't happen anymore is a high bar.

That's why the pace of change does matter. If jobs are destroyed much faster than they are created, then there might be social unrest in the lag.

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