Comment Re:Sure, to lower paying jobs (Score 1) 674
Enh, wait until after. Or for even more fun you could work in university admin.
What is of more concern is that the proliferation of technical jobs is gradually excluding people of less than average intelligence - a nontrivial fraction of the population.
Exactly. Because nothing ever goes wrong with millions of stupid, angry people with lots of time on their hands.
You'll be able to leave your job at McDonald's and get a job cleaning the offices at the robot manufacturing plant!
Are you kidding? They have an industrial-sized Roomba.
That's one way of defining the average (mean) standard of living, yes. But that does not necessarily mean that the median standard of living also increases in the same scenario, without stronger assumptions on the distribution.
Grade-school level statistics actually showing themselves to be useful. My fifth-grade self's jaw just hit the floor.
I'm more inclined to believe in the second possibility. Social pressure would not permit the former IMO. But regardless, my post was just to criticize this idea that because Luddites were wrong once, during the industrial revolution, that their idea of jobs being lost to automation would be forever false. It is bound to happen sometime this century. We will eventually need to find an alternative to our current economic and monetary system based on a jobless (yet productive) society.
I think we share the same hope, though Bangladesh is a good case study of #1 being enacted as we speak.
Also, the reason we 'need' so many telemarketers is because we can't use autodialers for telemarketing. Government regulations stop robots from taking that field.
...which is obviously an unfair intrusion by government into a problem (i.e. spending all that money on employees) that could be solved by the market.
In my area, we now have garbage trucks that pick up (standardized) trash cans. Presumably, this leads to fewer "garbage men" - who used to be the archetypal unskilled laborers. But the few garbage men that remain now must be skilled as truck drivers.
I actually know a guy who worked as a garbageman who got replaced by automation. It paid good money, because he had qualifications that most people didn't. He had the strength and agility to lift 70 lb barrels into the truck, hang on for dear life at speed, tolerate a "variety" of weather conditions and a living situation that allowed him to go to work at 4 or 5 AM. Unfortunately, when the demand for those skills and qualifications evaporated overnight, there weren't that many package handling jobs to absorb the influx, and his earning ability dropped just as quickly. Kinda sucks to be forced into a 6-12 month unpaid vacation while trying to find money to get trained for something else at wages that will never match what he made before. No way around it, of course, those jobs are just gone and he understands that. He's got another job, so I guess you could say his job wasn't "killed," it just became something else that didn't pay as well even after becoming proficient.
And now we have a potentially very angry man who has the strength and agility to lift 70 lb barrels into the truck and hang on for dear life at speed. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
You're essentially increasing the productivity of mankind per capita. There's nothing wrong with *that* - the one thing wrong is that once we have that productivity, we randomly deny the output to others even though nothing prevents us. Well, I guess that societies can get outdated as much as business models and technologies do.
Of the 10 of you, we've replaced 9 of your jobs with a machine. Steve can keep his job, unless someone amongst you is willing to do it for less. Oh, and we're not gonna feed anyone who's not hauling his weight.
It also fails to take into account that the skills required for the jobs that disappear are entirely different than the skills required for the new jobs that replace them. This means you lose everything you've worked for, career-wise. I might have 30 years in as a buggy whip craftsman, but that doesn't mean I have the skill set required to assemble an automobile. It also means that the salary I've been building up disappears. Even if the jobs are equivalent pay ranges, a senior buggy whip architect probably makes a lot more than a junior steering column technician.
If I started at $40,000/yr 30 years ago and make $75,000/yr today and suddenly lose that because my entire industry has been obsoleted -- including my retirement possibly -- and can now only take a new job at $50,000/yr... I'm still screwed.
I'm not arguing we should stop inventing, but its hugely callous to ignore the difficulties inflicted on people when this kind of thing happens.
"Callous" is really the only possible word I think we can use here. Look, I respect people's understanding of the benefits of capitalism. There are some brilliant capitalists around here. But when the problem is "solved" by market forces, there's another problem left over-- lots and lots of now-unqualified, unemployed people. Just using their children's hunger as a whip to scramble for a new job may again be a market force in action, but it's certainly not kind.
And then you run into the problem of... if we're all broke on our asses, who is going to buy your products?
Telemarketers are the scum of the earth. If you meet one kick them in the head.
Enh, usually they're already regretting every life-decision they've ever made that landed them in that job in the first place.
Who are we kidding? Developers don't start at grade B, they clearly start at grade F.
And if you're like me, you basically remain at Grade F and then go become an English major.
Very simply our standard of living = (production - consumption)/(numbers of citizens) Robots increase production, which is good.
It is good. But the fruits of that production aren't distributed to the entire population, but rather to the owners of those robots to distribute as they see fit.
Man, I could see the above sentence turning redder and redder even as I was typing it. Just gonna call myself out on that one.
Tech most certianly does kill jobs. It may make even more in the long term, but they are very different jobs. For the 50 year old newly laid off factory worker with kids he has to put through college now, the fact that there are suddenly lots of new jobs in robot design isn't a lot of comfort.
Exactly. And even if he were a sharp-enough wit to retrain in another field, the cost of the kids alone going to college is going to use up all the funds that he would need to go back and get his skills up to date. When the only answer to obsolescence and unemployment is training, the only result is a new job + a load of debt you accumulated to get it.
And what happens when McDonald's introduces an automatic fry-cooker, or a machine that makes hamburgers? Just because we currently have a lot of low skill service jobs now doesn't mean that they won't be replaced by technology in the future. With the advances in robotics we can all see where this is going.
Let's assume we can separate all cooks into Grade-A, Grade-B, Grade-C, and Grade-D cooks. Grade D cooks haven't spent much time practicing cooking, and are just barely good enough at it to get a job at McDonald's, while higher grades have worked longer and harder to acquire skills. A machine comes along and replaces all the Grade D cooks. They're pissed that they don't have a job, but they haven't really sunk much time into it, so they go find a different job. But now a machine comes along and replaces the Grade C cooks. A few may just be naturally talented, but by and large they've spent a lot more time (that they can't get back) training to be better cooks.
So they go to look for a new job as a pencil pusher, and sure enough, there are Grade A-D pencil-pushing jobs. Well, there were, except the grade-D pencil-pushing job has also been mechanized. Only people who start off with enough experience to get a Grade C job can get it.
So now we have someone who has trained, but their training is no longer useful. And to compound the problem, we put the onus (and the financial burden) on this person to get themselves retrained, assuming they even have the natural abilities to be a pencil-pusher.
Thankfully, technology has created a new job: computer developer. But this job only starts at Grade B, and then you can go to A and A+. To get to Grade B you need training, education, and experience, and all of that you are expected to acquire on your own time at your own expense. Also, since all those Grade-C and B pencil pushers are out hunting for work, there's increased competition, which means that employers can get you for less. So more training, but lower wages.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
