Are we focusing too much on analyzing exactly how many jobs could be destroyed by the coming wave of automation, and not enough on how to actually fix the problem? That’s one conclusion in a new paper on the potential affects of robotics and AI on global labor markets from US think tank, the Center for Global Development (CGD).
The paper’s authors, Lukas Schlogl and Andy Sumner, say it’s impossible to know exactly how many jobs will be destroyed or disrupted by new technology. But, they add, it’s fairly certain there’s going to be significant effects – especially in developing economies, where the labor market is skewed towards work that require the sort of routine, manual labor that’s so susceptible to automation. Think unskilled jobs in factories or agriculture.
As earlier studies have also suggested, Schlogl and Sumner think the affects of automation on these and other nations is not likely to be mass unemployment, but the stagnation of wages and polarization of the labor market. In other words, there will still be work for most people, but it’ll be increasingly low-paid and unstable; without benefits such as paid vacation, health insurance, or pensions. On the other end of the employment spectrum, meanwhile, there will continue to be a small number of rich and super-rich individuals who reap the benefits of increased in productivity created by technology.
Whether masses of people become unemployable or are forced to accept increasingly crappier and lower-paying jobs, while a rich few get ever richer, the end result will be massive social upheaval. We’re already seeing the consequences of mass inequality in many countries in the world, and it isn’t pretty. Expect things to get worse.
Much worse.
The assumption that agriculture in developing countries is “unskilled” work is naïve and a bit racist.
I think places where there is poor infrastructure and workers are exploited with very low wages won’t be automated soon : Picking cotton, coffee, cocoa or bananas.
More disruptive is automation and computers in developed countries destroying many jobs in factories, retail, customer service, …
…that’s not what that sentence means.
“unskilled jobs” IN “factories or agriculture” is not the same as “jobs in factories or agriculture” ARE “unskilled”.
It seems that anything that doesn’t jive with the lefties view nowadays is racist.
In fact with what they’ve turned the word racist to mean, I guess I’m proud to be racist!
Doesn’t help when the rightist parties keep managing to attract real racists. There’s something wrong with your message if racists are attracted to it.
Edited 2018-07-03 05:01 UTC
There, fixed that for you because both racists and me are attracted to the message of “free food”
(just trying to de-escalate a simple “all cows are animals but not all animals are cows” conversation from turning into a left/right rascist discussion)
Edited 2018-07-03 13:30 UTC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo
There are racists in every culture and people – not just “whites”..
Actually the whole word “racist” is racist ..
_People are people_ .. Go from that starting point and youre not racist ..
Now – evil people, and hating people, that will probably also include “racists” .. But always labelling people leads to more trouble.
Edited 2018-07-05 02:22 UTC
Even where jobs can be automated, that doesn’t mean they will be – automation only happens if it’s cheaper to get a machine to do the job than to employ humans. So where wages are cheap and machinery expensive, you’re unlikely to see machinery – you’ll see humans.
As an example from my own travels – in developing countries, public transport is often quite good, but you won’t see fancy payment systems in use. You’ll see human ticket collectors taking cash, because employing an extra human on every bus or train is much cheaper than spending a fortune on card readers and all the support infrastructure to support electronic systems like a “modern” city would have.
Many, if not most, of these very low wage jobs are not cost-effective. They are simply job creation schemes.
A friend of mine worked as an accountant in Indonesia back in the 1980s. He was legally required to employ a housekeeper, gardener and driver. None of them were necessary or even particularly useful.
REPEAT
Edited 2018-07-04 04:35 UTC
Not just price, but also: efficiency, higher quality of work, flexibility. Availability of workers can be a problem too aka automate because you can’t find enough qualified people.
In 1964 Der Spiegel ran a front cover story about how robots would cause mass unemployment. It ran an identical front cover story in 1978. And it ran the same front cover story in 2017.
Once upon a time tractors were going to cause mass unemployment because so many people worked on the land, and so many worked tending horses and they would see their work replaced by machines. When mechanisation of production started in England during the Industrial Revolution the original Luddites said that all human craft and skills would disappear as machines replaced skilled craft workers. In fact the work force in a modern developed economy is far more skilled and educated than in the past.
The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation released an interesting recent report entitled “False Alarmism: Technological Disruption and the U.S. Labor Market, 1850–2015”, that examines in detail the claim that modern technologies are destroying skilled jobs at an increasing rate and found, based on voluminous data, that such claims were false.
The report is here:
http://www2.itif.org/2017-false-alarmism-technological-disruption.p…
Focusing on technology as a prime driver of the deterioration in the wages, job security and working conditions of large chunks of the workforce is a red herring. The reason the deterioration has occurred is because organised labour was soundly defeated in the 1980s and trade unions were severely weakened as a result. That defeat (grounded in the severe economic and political crisis of the 1970s) was a political defeat and can only be remedied by political action.
Focusing on robots, AI and automation distracts from focusing on building the political conditions that can re-empower working people, it’s also politically dangerous because it creates the impression that those concerned with the conditions of working people are somehow opposed to (inevitable) technology development. Demanding the end to insecure working, proper job contracts for all workers, improved wages and the end to obscenely high bonuses for top managers has nothing to do with technology, its a political issue.
Edited 2018-07-03 23:25 UTC
Sorry that was meant to be entitled Deja Vu but using diacritics cocked something up
Tony Swash,
None of them were wrong, automation did cause mass unemployment in their respective farming/industrial jobs. However the critical difference at those times was that there were always other jobs to pick up the slack. The problem now is that is that most companies are able to scale up without hiring more workers and even letting qualified workers go. The fastest growing sector for the middle class workforce, the low paying service jobs, are overloaded and don’t pay sustainable wages. Many degree holding graduates who would have been recruited even before graduating in years past are entering a market where they may have to take menial positions to fill long term employment gaps. And now more than ever, even tech jobs are being impacted by redundancies and consolidation. Companies are not in a hurry to hire us like they used to be.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2016/09/retired-apple-engineer-apparently-…
Due to endless consolidation, it’s going to be an economy where only very few will be able to prosper. The middle class dying is not a figment of our imagination. It’s only going to get worse if we ignore it, we may already be past the tipping point.
Edited 2018-07-04 00:17 UTC
Many times when repetitive tasks get automated you get more for filling jobs.
Ironically some of the highest paid white collar jobs are particularly vulnerable to automation. The stockbroker is already practically extinct. The fund manager is next on the chopping block. Commercial lawyers are probably doomed. Some non-procedural medical specialties such as radiology and pathology are also excellent candidates for automation.
Edited 2018-07-04 04:13 UTC
Exactly, it’s repetitive tasks that get automated.
If your jobs consists only of one repetitive tasks or a few and the higher you are paid, the bigger the bounty to automate it.
Lennie,
All jobs are repetitive at some level, even those that are traditionally upper class & prestigious: lawyers, doctors, dentists. These are highly repetitive with millions of patents coming in for the same thing as millions of other patients. A well trained neural net would likely do the work better than a human. AI is increasingly playing a role in engineering original solutions to problems like building cars/rockets/skyscrapers/etc. The human engineers who used to design structures by hand, will become less competitive to supercomputers that will output optimized engineering solutions within the input parameters far faster and more accurately than humans can.
And I don’t have much faith that only repetitive tasks are vulnerable to automation, not only can the computers design a far more elaborate structure, eventually we should expect computers to excel at higher level tasks too. They’ll acquire multidisciplinary management skills and will plan out the logistics of materials and custom build robots that will be optimized for physically building the structures too. Through automation, the whole operation can likely be done safer/faster/more accurately/cheaper than with human workers.
We are not there yet, but it is where we are headed. AI + advanced automation can make the concept of “work” obsolete, but it’s really up to us to determine our economic fate in all of this because capitalism fundamentally hinges on the value of workers which will approach zero. Unless we find new ways of redistributing the wealth, we will end up with incredibly wealthy owners and poor ex-workers, who have no opportunity to earn income beyond government stipends.
In an ironic way, automation opens up two paths to the future: one where humanity achieves a blissful nirvana where no-one needs to work and we all have everything that we want, and a second path where social stratification becomes absolute and the ruling class have total power over the poor (there won’t be a “working class” any longer).
Edited 2018-07-04 17:05 UTC
http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/411962-and-then-i-said
https://imgflip.com/i/1k7ad6
😀 😀
I agree all jobs are repetitive at some level, some things are easier to automate than others and automation will ‘move up the stack’.
Computers with machine learning are already designing more elaborative structures:
https://www.ted.com/talks/maurice_conti_the_incredible_inventions_of…
I agree, we might end up with the making work obsolete. Or at least for a large part of the work force. The Great Depression was at 25% unemployment.
Lots of people say, aren’t we creating the Terminator, etc. ?
Well, if we create a huge wealth gap, I’ll quote economist Andrew McAfee: humans will rise up way before the machines do.
Edited 2018-07-05 23:35 UTC
Well I don’t think the main threat is with the machines themselves, but in having tyrants gaining control over them and using the power of unquestioning robots to conquer all opposition by force.
Dictators today have to instill fear and consequences over the people but the dictator is ultimately dependent upon those people to build their power and wealth. They could not function if enough people rebel at the same time. However assuming the AI+robots become capable of doing the majority of work, the normal population becomes highly expendable in every way. This is why I think dictators in control of advanced military AI/robots will be far more dangerous than those in the past.
Well, just inequality would hopefully get enough people up in arms to do to prevent it from happening before we get to that point.
Lennie,
You’re not wrong, but people become less smart acting out of desperation. They’ll vote for outrageous politicians like trump who say they have people’s best interests at heart and they claim to have the best solutions when in fact they have none. It’s a bunch of lies behind a facade to exploit voter desperation and prejudices. They end up passing policies that exacerbate the inequalities. Intelligent people know this is true, yet there are many intelligent people who seek to greedily exploit the situation for themselves since many are the beneficiaries of inequality.
osnews is going to close comments before we can meaningfully discuss this, but zima’s “trickle down” links wrap it up best…
http://www.osnews.com/thread?659541
Edited 2018-07-06 13:47 UTC
They will solve it with a cull,
Biological war, WW3 etc..
Even Ted Turner of CNN said
“get rid of the useless ‘eaters’ ”
And then we have the “Georgia Guidestones” –
conspiracy theory,
about a world of circa 500 million people ?
– Google the terms if unfamiliar –
Edited 2018-07-05 02:23 UTC
“Useless eaters” term seems thrown around by conspiracy theorists; attributed, without sources, to many people …don’t repeat it. ( https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Depopulation_conspiracy_theory )
And Georgia Guidestones don’t seem to be themselves a conspiracy theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones & https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones ), they “only” became a focus of some conspiracy theorists… (heh, as rationalwiki states, “Some conspiracy theorists (namely Alex Jones, who covers it in his movies) and miscellaneous religious folk have demanded that the Guidestones be taken down, claiming that they are the blueprints for the New World Order. Because helping to cover up the warning of the impending NWO takeover will certainly stop the NWO (?).” …because logic!
)
Well, the planet and humanity would be probably better off long-term if there were only a billion or two of us. Sadly the drive to breed is too strong. Only high standard of living seems to reliably limit number of children per woman, let’s hope we can get that standard high enough for enough people…
Edited 2018-07-10 00:08 UTC