Blue Collar Workers Getting Replaced With Machines

Branching off the self driving cars topic:

Fighteer summed it up pretty well. What's your guys' opinion on this matter? Any ideas for possible solutions with what to do with unspecialized workers?

Personally, I can't blame companies for using machines since, well, it's the logical thing to do, cut costs and such. One person suggested everyone who didn't work get the flat minimum wage, which, well, seems like too much incentive to not work period in too many cases. Would society really benefit from being inefficient on some level and artificially supplying these people with jobs?

EDIT: It occurs to me I managed to make a typo in the title. It should be "Workers".

edited 10th Jun '11 10:16:34 AM by Usht

inb4 somebody says let them starve.

The problem is that idle hands are problematic enough on their own, idle hands who have unmet needs are highly unlikely to let that just happen. Even if they are not able to formulate an effective plan on their own, they can always be led.

edited 10th Jun '11 10:17:55 AM by blueharp

edited 27th Sep '13 12:26:45 AM by JosefBugman

Perhaps the government could gives businesses an incentive for using less automatic machinery, like cap and trade.

Subsidizing pointless and inefficient work is the same thing as the classic "pay people to dig ditches and fill them back up".

Also, I mentioned this in the other thread but we already have robot scientists too. Theoretically, it's not just blue collar jobs being threatened.

FWIW, I don't see getting only the minimum wage as incentive to voluntarily not work except for the really lazy, as it's very hard to make ends comfortably meet on it unless you live very sparingly.

Indeed, but more people are generally employed in "blue collar" positions, hence why we need to address that problem first.

To my mind a national "back to work" or "retraining" program alongside an encouragement to corps to employ these newly retrained individuals and to provide on the job training Might help.

More training programmes. More R&D.

Being able to do more with less means more resources to expand what you're doing.

What will it take for society to realize that with technology advancing the way it is, money is becoming decreasingly meaningful and thus only research and space colonization will require any human input in the forseeable future?

Robot. Scientist. While obviously it had to be programmed and designed by human scientists with very specific goals, enough of these things or some sort of template could easily eliminate humans from the majority of research too. I would say Art is much more likely to stay in the domain of humanity.

Get robot farmers going. Yay, enough food for everyone to eat. Plus, we end up crating a job sector - repairing robots - until that gets replaced by more robots. I'm all for robots becoming domestic servants and stuff, too.

edited 10th Jun '11 10:53:27 AM by pvtnum11

Getting people to work in the entertainment industry. Oh and encourage robots to come up with a way to get humanity into space as fast as possible.

Generally they need to have a new industry to work in to get new jobs.

It's hardly the latter part of the the 20th century. This problem has occurred throughout history of mankind. You think things like water wheels didn't replace hordes of slave workers toiling in the fields?

New technology is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to unemployment. If it is a cost cutting measure, it increases unemployment. If it is a new industry, it introduces new employment.

But you know, into the future, yeah, everyone is just going to have to be more educated and smarter because more and more manual labour is being replaced by machines. It's not useful to hold ourselves back just because of unemployment. If you can get more stuff using less resources, we as a whole should be richer and individually we should be better off. If that's not the case then I think your economic arrangement is flawed. That should be the problem that is investigated.

Why subsidise pointless work? Yes, there are some things for which you at least need some human input, but why not automate pointless work? The unskilled worker should, preferably, be enrolled into training programs to give her skills.

There are a number of reasons. Keeping people busy. Keeping skills available. Because it costs less in the long term.

And why people think retraining is a magic wand, I don't know. Believe it or not, some people cannot learn what you think they can.

edited 10th Jun '11 11:02:48 AM by blueharp

Organ harvesting?

I think improved training and large scale dissemination of contraceptives are the best solution. We already have an excess of population *

Then we let those people starve.

edited 10th Jun '11 11:12:04 AM by Deboss

^^ "Keeping people busy" is not a good reason; one may as well employ them to dig ditches to fill.

Skills such as...? Yes, some skills must be maintained; others, not so much.

Costs less in the long term? Er, no. Machines require an unskilled operator (who, as they are unskilled, can be paid less than a skilled worker) and occasionally must be repaired. What you may mean is "short term", in which case, probably. The machines probably have a relatively high initial cost.

Retraining is not a 'magic wand', but promoting inefficiency is not either.

edited 10th Jun '11 11:27:39 AM by AllanAssiduity

Ultimately, with enough automation the idea of cost itself becomes meaningless. Cost is relative to the amount of materials and labor something takes. The extraction of materials is also ultimately a function of labor (assuming that the materials exist at all). However, all labor is being done by robots that, unless they were programmed very oddly, have no desire to be compensated for their labor. Thus, labor becomes "free" and cost becomes meaningless. The whole idea of "work" becomes obsolete and people just do whatever they feel like doing.

That's the ideal. Not gonna happen anytime soon, if ever, but that's the ideal. Work isn't a necessary part of the human condition (as the upper classes of most societies throughout history can verify). Work is just something we need to do to survive. If the works gets done without us doing any work, then we don't need to work. It's that simple.

edited 10th Jun '11 11:33:52 AM by Clarste

Sometimes they can't. In which case there should be other otions for learning skills. And if they can't learn any skill at all than I am kind of wondering what their purpose?

Not too sound ludicrously harsh, but just "dig ditches" is not something that is any good, getting people to do SOMETHING is far less important than getting people to do something USEFUL.

Agreed.

And when that does happen Clareste I hope that we have new worlds, because a population that isn't doing anything is kind of has the potential to go badly wrong.

edited 10th Jun '11 11:35:07 AM by JosefBugman

You're not getting the reasons why I think keeping people busy has value, because as I explained much earlier in the thread, idle hands don't stay idle. Nor do people just let themselves starve. They go out and take food. You want to stop that? Guess what, it can cost plenty for security and so forth.

That is why it can cost less in the long term to find other ways, including putting people to work, even if the work isn't particularly needed. Skills which it is desired to retain depends on the future needs, just think of all the old Cobol workers who got put back to work when they needed to fix those machines. Or if you want, try the movie Space Cowboys for a fictional example. There's a specific term for it, but my mind is blanking on that at the moment.

And if people don't think retraining is a magic wand, then they might want to show a little recognition that it isn't always suitable for everybody, there might not even be available jobs no matter what retraining is around. Yet I see people here treating it like a panacea.

edited 10th Jun '11 11:40:05 AM by blueharp

Well only if we discover that the act of doing "work" in general causes humans to be happier, I don't see a point in maintaining low unemployment for the sake of low unemployment.

I think most people have hobbies. Not working doesn't mean doing nothing.

Yes, but its better if people are doing something constructive. People who are just engaged in labour for no purpose are not contributing anything and generally don't feel like they are doing anything.

"Not suitable for everyone" does not mean "Might not be suitable for a lot of people". And offering courses in various areas that have the potential to be more helpful seems an awful lot better than saying "NO ONE WILL WORK AFTER RETRAINING!".

You know, given the recent difficulties of getting home ownership coupled with the lack of blue collar jobs, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of "domestic work for room and board" jobs started popping up again.

Who knows? In twenty years, you too could have your own personal maid and butler.

edited 10th Jun '11 11:47:37 AM by TotemicHero

Now I'm imagining a world where every butler has their own butler who has their own butler eventually recursing around...