Automation and the Job Market

So my mom and I recently had an "discussion" {well it's more of an argument then anything, but that's normal for us; considering what we usually talk about) about how the growth of machinery and robotics will put an lot of people out of an job, unemployment rates will soar, and the only job left besides engineering new machines and maintaining them) is to just push an button like George Jetson to get the assembly line started.

Granted, it'll probably take an few decades or an century before her worst-case scenario happens considering the prohibitive costs and natural resources required t manufacture an robotic workforce. But you have to wonder though since history has an habit of repeating itself. Just look at what happened to the automotive industry: At first there was people doing everything on an assembly line, and now an lot of them have been replaced by mechanical arms.

Given the general economics thread spends about half of its time talking about automation, I suppose it makes sense to have a thread dedicated to it.

As far as how automation effects the job market, a better comparison is horses. Once, they were an essential part of the economy, now, they exist only as novelties and pets as they were superseded by machines. The economy exists for the benefit of humans, so barring something really unpleasant, we're not going to see a similar drop in the human population as was seen with horses.

Your time frame is also rather pessimistic; within a decade, it is forecasted that around 40% of all jobs in America will be economically viable to automate; with some sectors like transportation being hit particularly hard. This particular wave might very well create more jobs than it displaces, but the economic shock is not going to be pleasant.

Down the line 30+ years and the real fun starts; that's when pretty much all manual labor centric fields are going to be obselete, with some exceptions:

50+ years and even the most skilled fields are going to start feeling the crunch, beyond that and eventually we'll achieve general artificial intelligence, at which point humans are really and truly obselete.

What we end up with, assuming civilization doesn't collapse due to the impending climate change crisis in the late 21st century is an economy that is very different from our modern strongly capitalist leaning mixed-economy. It's probably still a mixed economy, but much closer to socialism than capitalism, though I personally doubt it'll be identified as euch.

edited 21st May '16 9:55:32 PM by CaptainCapsase

It is definitely important to note that robots are not going to steal your job—unless you work in a factory. Or you drive for a living. Or you farm for a living. At least until after all the factory and road jobs are gone. Next are going to come the service jobs. And only then will office jobs be in serious jeopardy. And then it will still be many years before the important parts of the entertainment industry get hit. And even then, politicians will take forever to replace.

Jetson the button pusher is a myth. Button pushing is the easiest job to automate.

Any job that requires speaking to someone face-to-face is very safe. The classic example is self-serve checkouts at the grocery. Lots of people use them, sure, but lots of people also use the manual checkout. Same with ATMs. Of course, sometimes it's hard to say where a job will fall. Basic trucking will probably be automated relatively quickly (though truckers' unions will slow that down), but what about food delivery? Taxis?

Then there's the whole "a rising tide lifts all boats" thing. Say all trucker jobs are automated, putting millions of truckers out of work. Transportation costs will bottom out, everything will be cheaper, and people will have to work less to pay for things. It's like the move from subsistence farming to true agriculture. Yes, the shift is difficult and not everyone survives it. But in the end, everyone has more wealth and leisure time.

With the ubiquity of smartphones, when driverless technology matures, taxis would probably be one of the easiest things to automate. Book/summon cab on phone or computer. Once in vehicle enter destination on portable terminal. Once at destination, by via card or built in cash machine.

Things like fast food delivery might be a bit trickier since you need to a) add functionality to indicate that the food has arrived and to go get it and b) make sure that the right order is given out, especially if multiple deliveries are being made on one trip. The first is doable, the second is probably not insurmountable but definitely something that will need some thought.

You also need to make sure that the customer has put the right address and that the robot can get to the customer, especially in somewhere like an apartment block where access may be restricted.

This makes me wonder what some people believe robots (as well as machinery, tools and technology in general) are designed to do.

"Oh no! This machine I built to do my job for me is stealing my job!"

The thing of, usually, they didn't build the machine.

Robots will be seen as a tool of corrupt (Big) Business and Government (the Establishment), depriving hard-working people out of honest work and leaving them unemployed.

Didn't we already go through this same exact thing about two centuries ago? We'll have to adapt, as always.

This is something fundamentally different from the industrial revolution. Industrializarion overcame the limitations of the human body, but still required the human mind.

Automation and artificial intelligence removes that requirement:

Not relay, it just moves the mind requirement to programming the AI.

The low end service industry is probably one of the highest at risk groups from automation, or at least partial automation. You won't see a full 10 checkout lineup (with 10 workers) replaced with 40 self-checkouts with 0 workers, but you are going to see the 10 checkout lineup replaced with 4 checkouts (with 4 workers) and a 24 self checkouts which are supervised by 3 workers.

That's a worker reduction of around one quarter, which isn't nothing.

On a level I suspect that the most resilient will be high end service jobs, where you're paying not just for the service but also the person providing it, an automaton can't provide service with a smile (at least not until we get serious AI robots) and people are willing to pay for a smile.

And as well, I suspect an automaton won't be much help if the customer does not know what they want or how to describe it. That is where a person can help to interpret things and try to match things up into some form of order.

Even programming is going to get automated eventually (~2050+ though), and to some extent it already is. As far as service jobs go, they aren't any safer than manual labor; any task that can be broken down into a series of repeatable steps is on the chopping block, and when you get down to it, a huge portion of jobs fit that bill; around 40% of the United States's jobs based on a Harvard study on automation.

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter and smarter every day, and the problem you're describing is one that's likely not going to be a problem 30 years down the line, if not sooner.

It's important to realize that the creation of general artificial intelligence, that is to say AI that is capable of performing any mental task that a human can, is not a question of if, rather it is when, and the when is very likely going to be within the 21st century.

edited 22nd May '16 6:50:41 AM by CaptainCapsase

Not really, for a lot of jobs "make the customer feels comfortable and happy by proving human to human interaction" is one of the steps, and that's something we are a long way from being able to program. You can't currently program an AI to look pretty and make the customer feel special. You're not going to replace fashion models with Ai any time soon and for some businesses the service jobs are actually more about being a fashion model/personal but kisser then doing steps A though E.

AI is getting smarter but it's still a set of call and responces, someone has to ahead of time telling the AI how to respond to X, and not every variable is going to be programmed in. So until we get AI that's able to make judgement calls beyond pre-programmed responces, and that AI becomes cheap enough to replaced either forign workers or cheap local labour (like students) it's not gonna happen. Now that could happen in 30 years, but we really don't know.

"A lot" of jobs is perhaps 20-40% of existing jobs depending on your time frame, and there's plenty of people who simply aren't suited to the kind of service job you're describing. Even very high-skill positions like doctors and lawyers are likely to see a large portion of their workload automated, though not all of it obviously.

Also, modern artificial intelligence isn't as simple as what you're describing; machine learning has been a thing for years, and is getting more and more sophisticated as time goes on; it's not entirely implausible that people will find themselves teaching an AI to do their jobs right before they're laid off. That's already happening in some fields where automation is drastically reducing the workload.

edited 22nd May '16 7:02:51 AM by CaptainCapsase

Am I the only one who would actually like most jobs to become automated? Tax the robots, introduce a citizen salary to pay for basic needs, and gradually increase it as the robots become more common and/or efficient.

Sure, but we'll be living through the bumpy period of transition, not the glorious post-scarcity utopia.

I would, believe it or not, but I am also of the opinion that the transition to an automated economy will, if not carefully regulated, lead to disastrous social and political upheaval.

Utopias are impossible by definition. I'll settle for the slightly-less-shittier-than-now society that I'm confident could be possible within a human lifetime if people were willing.

...and considering the current somewhat uninspiring quality of current leaders Worldwide, the chances of a smooth transition don't look good.

edited 22nd May '16 10:56:16 AM by Greenmantle

Perhaps we could replace those leaders with something more efficient...

Even programming is going to get automated eventually (~2050+ though), and to some extent it already is.

Programming has been being automated since the 50s. That doesn't mean programming jobs will go away.

I'm not talking about polymorphic code, or about time-saving measures, I'm talking about the sorts of things that are likely to start happening on the cusp of the creation of general artificial intelligence. It's true that programming jobs will be among the last to disappear, it's no less inevitable than any of the positions likely to vanish in the near term.

edited 22nd May '16 4:46:09 PM by CaptainCapsase

Sapient input will always be required somewhere, even if it's just programming a program that programs. Now yes that sentient input could be a sentient AI instead of a person, but then we hit the AI slavery issue once we start creating sapient AI.

edited 22nd May '16 6:43:25 PM by Silasw

In fact, that's pretty much the history of programming.

Once upon a time "programing" meant manually punching holes on punch cards. Then programmers got sick and tired of that and wrote a program to automate that process. They wrote the first assemblers and debuggers. Later came compilers, and then more sophisticated compilers, and higher level languages.

"Programming" has been automated many times and yet here we are.

edited 22nd May '16 6:51:23 PM by storyyeller