Job-killing automation

[SimpleDon]

... how automation will bring the end of work as we know it,

... racing government regulations to kill off jobs, and

... the cause of our current income inequality,

... the gilded age 2.0,

... which is definitely not caused by globalization, i.e. offshoring jobs,

... by weakening the labor unions, or

... by bribing corporate executives to increase profits by suppressing wages.

In any thread about the minimum wage, globalization, the living wage, offshoring jobs, or about a possible policy to reduce the large degree of income inequality we have now like a universal basic income, guaranteed minimum income, or a job guarantee, it's only a matter of time before someone makes the solemn observation that automation will kill off the jobs because huge numbers of people will lose their jobs to robots. This is accepted as a fact by everyone in the discussion as if someone had said that the sun will rise tomorrow.

I have pushed back against these statements. But this discussion was far off of the original subject of the threads. So I swore that I would start my own discussion about Automation - the job killer. This is that thread.

Show

I designed, installed and started up automation systems in the range of industries for which my company sold heavy industrial capital machines, primarily mining and mineral processing plants. There are a lot of reasons to install automation besides eliminating employees. In fact, by installing these packages we usually saw employment increase, by the people hired to maintain the systems.

But I am reluctant to project my personal experience onto the whole economy. There are ample reasons why my experience wouldn't translate to be true for the whole economy, I haven't worked directly in the field for more than thirty years, the majority of the plants I worked in were unionized, etc. Plus I know from studying economics that the macroeconomy is often different than the microeconomy. That what is important for one is not important for the other. So ...

I turned to our friend Google to research the question. I backed into one of my favorite sources, The American Affairs Journal, searching for citations for one of the papers that studied the question of the "job-killing automation." The article is Automation Anxiety in an Age of Stagnation which I had somehow missed in the AAJ's summer 2019 issue. They allow non-subscribers to read two articles a month, but of course, you can go the web site anonymously to read as many articles as you desire.

The web site americanaffairsjournal.org was started by some Trump supporters after the 2016 elections. Their intent was to provide factual support for Trump's claims, which they recognized was solely lacking in Trump world. What they discovered won't surprise anyone here, that none of Trump's claims were backed by facts, rather than facts spoke against Trump overwhelmingly. Rather than abandon their endeavor they pushed ahead to investigate other ideas and claims from Trump and others believing that we should base our policies on facts rather than ideology, a truly novel idea.

A cursory glance at Google Trends reveals that interest in robotics and automation was far less intense throughout the last decade than an interest in proposed solutions to the problems that these technologies are supposedly creating, especially universal basic income (UBI). Automation—...—has become a key topic in the sprawling soap opera of American politics, yet the phenomenon itself is not really understood, discussed, or debated.

... The Davos crowd* takes for granted that the U.S. economy is experiencing extraordinary levels of automation and that this is the leading factor behind dislocations in various regions and sectors, as opposed to, say, trade policy or offshoring. Unwilling to question either of these assumptions, metropolitan orthodoxy* is increasingly turning to UBI as the only solution to problems such as wage stagnation and the mass unemployment expected in the not-so-distant future.

* neoliberals]​

... If anything, the more dynamic elements of conservatism accept the central premises of the popular automation consensus. Tucker Carlson, who has frequently voiced desires to move beyond conservatism's stale economic orthodoxies, did not push back on Yang’s premise that automation is going to create massive unemployment. Yang even mentioned in his interview with Carlson that automation destroyed four million factory jobs in the Midwest, though this patently contradicts a mountain of evidence, which stresses the primary importance of China’s accession to the WTO in hollowing out both high- and low-value-added U.S. manufacturing since 2000.

In short, across the political spectrum, there has been far more interest in discussing reactive measures to address the secondary effects of automation, rather than investigate the nature and consequences of automation itself. And there has been little effort from either party toward developing a comprehensive automation strategy to energize U.S. manufacturing. But such a strategy should be the first priority. Whether it comes from the Right or the Left, there needs to be a more rigorous understanding of robotics and automation, what it has done to U.S. industry, how impactful it will be in the foreseeable future, and who will benefit if America does not pursue an automation strategy.

The main support for the idea that automation in general and robotics specifically is a job killer is without question [url="https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdly The Future Of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?[/url] (pdf download) by Frey and Osborne, 2013, with over 4000 citations. The article takes this paper on directly.

These conjectures are based on Frey and Michael Osbourne’s 2013 paper that has come to define the debate on robots and automation’s impact on society. The projections they laid out were daunting, with the authors suggesting that up to 47 percent of U.S. jobs and 35 percent of UK jobs were at risk of automation through 2035. More than any other study, Frey and Osborne’s analysis formed the basis for a number of public reports, including one from the Bank of England.

In the years since, however, there have been multiple studies contradicting the findings of Frey and Osbourne, with two coming from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).3 Both OECD studies found the risk of automation to be significantly lower, with the first study finding only 9 percent of jobs at risk of automation across the OECD. The second found that 10 percent of jobs in the United States were at high risk, while 12 percent of British jobs were at high risk.

A major reason for the disparity was that the OECD studies broke jobs down into tasks and considered not just whether the technology could hypothetically automate a task but whether it would be profitable. Frey and Osbourne’s 2013 paper did not analyze the issue at this level of granularity.

Links to the OECD papers are included at the bottom of the article. Continuing ...

... The mainstream media has also frequently promoted the standard establishment talking points arguing that anyone pointing to trade rather than automation as the source of job losses “simply does not understand economics.” This is a popular message among the punditariat, to the point where publications like the New York Times misrepresent academic studies to propagate the notion that U.S. manufacturing employment was not destroyed by the China shock but by rapid technological innovation. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) highlighted one instance in which the Times referenced a 2017 paper by economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo to assert that automation was responsible for the majority of the decline in manufacturing employment over the last fifteen years. Restrepo and Acemoglu’s work actually indicated that robotics led to a mild decrease in U.S. employment (670,000 jobs between 1990 and 2007, or 40,000 jobs each year, a 0.34 percent decline in the share of the working-age population with a job). In the same report, the two economists actually found that Chinese accession to the WTO had at least three times the negative impact of robotics, contradicting the way the paper was presented in the Times.

Acemoglu and Restrepo also found that capital investments as a whole (including non-robot IT) were neutral in regard to their effect on employment. Josh Bivens of EPI asserts that there is near zero evidence that robots displace jobs or significantly lower wages, with much more evidence pointing to offshoring and reduced bargaining power for unions. Further work from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation finds that the churn of jobs lost and gained by technological disruption has been at a record low in the United States.

Regardless of whether the impact of robotics on U.S. employment was incrementally negative or positive, a scholarly consensus is emerging that it was dwarfed by the offshoring of jobs to China following WTO accession. Another study co-authored by Acemoglu found that competition with Chinese imports cost the United States 2.4 million manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011.11

They go on to detail that not only don't the robots cause widespread unemployment, but there is also a neutral to a slightly negative correlation between the application of robotics and employment. That the countries who have applied more robotics, like Germany and South Korea, have lost less manufacturing employment than countries who have been less enthusiastic about applying it, like the US and the UK. Continuing ...

If robotics do not have a significant negative effect on employment, then what has been ailing the U.S. economy? Contrary to elite conventional wisdom, it is the opposite of too much automation: key industries have experienced long-term stagnation, and America is losing the ability to compete in critical technology subsectors.

Establishment commentators still insist that the main losers of the 2000s were low-value-added sectors like apparel, and despite lower job numbers, productivity has risen due to automation and capital investment, in essence making the United States more competitive than ever. Neoliberals and free traders assert that nothing would have stopped the loss of jobs to China and that their value was minimal. But this view is contradicted by numerous metrics.

First, consider the scale of the decline. In 2000, the United States produced about 18 percent of the world’s manufactured exports; by 2012, that number had fallen by half, to around 9 percent. Even relative to the EU and Japan, the U.S. decline has been precipitous. During the same period, China’s share rose from about 5 percent to 18 percent.

Furthermore, the United States has become a net importer of high‑technology products. A 2015 report by the Brookings Institution found that the United States ran a $632 billion trade deficit in advanced industries in 2012. This is not what one would expect in a country that is supposed to be replacing low-value industries with high-value ones.

Productivity cannot be the answer, either. The idea that robots are putting people out of work presumes that declining job numbers are due to productivity growth. But gains in U.S. labor productivity have slowed in recent years. Between 1995 and 2002, labor productivity growth was 3.3 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, while from 2007 to 2016 productivity growth was just 1.3 percent. When considering manufacturing productivity in the United States, the decline is even more pronounced in recent years, with multifactor productivity declining 0.8 percent between 2007 and 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

It is as I have been saying, neoliberalism is the biggest threat to capitalism in the US right now. Much bigger than the threat from the Democrats' supposed socialism. Capitalism works best when everyone has to work for their rewards. And that includes the corporations. Neoliberalism has made it too easy for corporations to make a profit.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Difficult to tell crybabies the truth. So, say nothing.

I'll give the reason why no one posted any response to this (until now).

It is possible that automation and free trade (foreign cheap labor) both cause some job loss. There's no way to prove it, but simple common sense/logic suggests that they could cause net job loss.

It would happen because both automation and global trade cause the production to become more efficient, which means that the uncompetitive production has more difficulty surviving. Both automation and free trade result in an improvement in the production, which includes elimination of some of the less efficient or uncompetitive production, meaning less competitive workers and companies take a hit.

There is a de facto religion, in the U.S. and perhaps in all countries, that we must protect all the workers and companies. 2 slogans of this religion are "job creation" and "economic growth" -- both of which ignore competition and efficiency and just worship the "jobs" and production per se, even if it's inefficient and wasteful.

So no one wants to refute the "jobs! jobs! jobs!" and "economic growth" blabber, even though they know these slogans are only needed to protect uncompetitive crybabies who need the government to subsidize them one way or the other.

It's typical for some economists to insist that automation and free trade cause job creation. But in reality the new jobs created might be outnumbered by the old (less competitive) jobs being eliminated. Likely the new jobs caused by the improved production, better technology, cost savings are offset by a greater number of uncompetitive jobs eliminated by the more competitive conditions.

Everyone knows that the improved production is a higher priority than "jobs! jobs! jobs!" just for the sake of the jobs (babysitting slots), but it's politically incorrect to say this. We're not supposed to question the "jobs! jobs! jobs!" religion.

So when someone complains that global trade or automation are costing jobs, the response is silence. When crybabies whine that they need the state to intervene to protect their uncompetitive company or job, political correctness imposes silence, so we don't offend the crybabies by pointing out to them that the only reason they're losing their job is that they were uncompetitive and thus not worth what they were being paid, which you're not supposed to say to someone.

Sort of "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."

We're supposed to revere our factories and factory jobs for their function of providing babysitting slots for uncompetitive crybabies. And it's not nice to say to the crybabies that their job is a net cost, not benefit, to society and that they are parasitic rather than productive in our economy.

It might even be dangerous to tell them the truth. They might throw a tantrum and go on a rampage.


A further point: the comparison of jobs lost due to automation vs. jobs lost due to global trade.

Which one is the greater culprit destroying our jobs?

In this comparison, it is much easier to demonize trade rather than automation. Some trade-bashers / China-bashers / labor union crusaders etc. will concede the need for automation while continuing the crusade against trade. It is difficult to side with the crybaby Luddites who smashed the machines in order to protect their jobs.

So automation might be given a pass while the crusade against trade gets the real attention. The main driving factor in this is xenophobia. It's easier to make cheap appeals to PATRIOTISM and nativism, and to blame the damn foreigners for "stealing our jobs" than to blame science/technology.

Probably both are job "killers" and there's no way to measure which is the greater culprit. Both make our society better off, despite the loss of the inefficient jobs.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Probably both are job "killers" and there's no way to measure which is the greater culprit. Both make our society better off, despite the loss of the inefficient jobs.

Only if those without jobs can still avail themselves of the increased production and efficiency, hence why social welfare programs become more and more needed. One possible future is a UBI like situation in which we all enjoy the fruits of this increased production and efficiency. Another is that the rich continue to get richer and keep all that to themselves. As Yang puts it, GDP is growing to record highs, but GDP isn't a really a good measure of how good society is.

 

[Harry Bosch]

... how automation will bring the end of work as we know it,

... racing government regulations to kill off jobs, and

... the cause of our current income inequality,

... the gilded age 2.0,

... which is definitely not caused by globalization, i.e. offshoring jobs,

... by weakening the labor unions, or

... by bribing corporate executives to increase profits by suppressing wages.

In any thread about the minimum wage, globalization, the living wage, offshoring jobs, or about a possible policy to reduce the large degree of income inequality we have now like a universal basic income, guaranteed minimum income, or a job guarantee, it's only a matter of time before someone makes the solemn observation that automation will kill off the jobs because huge numbers of people will lose their jobs to robots. This is accepted as a fact by everyone in the discussion as if someone had said that the sun will rise tomorrow.

I have pushed back against these statements. But this discussion was far off of the original subject of the threads. So I swore that I would start my own discussion about Automation - the job killer. This is that thread.

Show

I designed, installed and started up automation systems in the range of industries for which my company sold heavy industrial capital machines, primarily mining and mineral processing plants. There are a lot of reasons to install automation besides eliminating employees. In fact, by installing these packages we usually saw employment increase, by the people hired to maintain the systems.

But I am reluctant to project my personal experience onto the whole economy. There are ample reasons why my experience wouldn't translate to be true for the whole economy, I haven't worked directly in the field for more than thirty years, the majority of the plants I worked in were unionized, etc. Plus I know from studying economics that the macroeconomy is often different than the microeconomy. That what is important for one is not important for the other. So ...

I turned to our friend Google to research the question. I backed into one of my favorite sources, The American Affairs Journal, searching for citations for one of the papers that studied the question of the "job-killing automation." The article is Automation Anxiety in an Age of Stagnation which I had somehow missed in the AAJ's summer 2019 issue. They allow non-subscribers to read two articles a month, but of course, you can go the web site anonymously to read as many articles as you desire.

The web site americanaffairsjournal.org was started by some Trump supporters after the 2016 elections. Their intent was to provide factual support for Trump's claims, which they recognized was solely lacking in Trump world. What they discovered won't surprise anyone here, that none of Trump's claims were backed by facts, rather than facts spoke against Trump overwhelmingly. Rather than abandon their endeavor they pushed ahead to investigate other ideas and claims from Trump and others believing that we should base our policies on facts rather than ideology, a truly novel idea.



The main support for the idea that automation in general and robotics specifically is a job killer is without question [url="https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdly The Future Of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?[/url] (pdf download) by Frey and Osborne, 2013, with over 4000 citations. The article takes this paper on directly.



Links to the OECD papers are included at the bottom of the article. Continuing ...

... The mainstream media has also frequently promoted the standard establishment talking points arguing that anyone pointing to trade rather than automation as the source of job losses “simply does not understand economics.” This is a popular message among the punditariat, to the point where publications like the New York Times misrepresent academic studies to propagate the notion that U.S. manufacturing employment was not destroyed by the China shock but by rapid technological innovation. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) highlighted one instance in which the Times referenced a 2017 paper by economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo to assert that automation was responsible for the majority of the decline in manufacturing employment over the last fifteen years. Restrepo and Acemoglu’s work actually indicated that robotics led to a mild decrease in U.S. employment (670,000 jobs between 1990 and 2007, or 40,000 jobs each year, a 0.34 percent decline in the share of the working-age population with a job). In the same report, the two economists actually found that Chinese accession to the WTO had at least three times the negative impact of robotics, contradicting the way the paper was presented in the Times.

Acemoglu and Restrepo also found that capital investments as a whole (including non-robot IT) were neutral in regard to their effect on employment. Josh Bivens of EPI asserts that there is near zero evidence that robots displace jobs or significantly lower wages, with much more evidence pointing to offshoring and reduced bargaining power for unions. Further work from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation finds that the churn of jobs lost and gained by technological disruption has been at a record low in the United States.

Regardless of whether the impact of robotics on U.S. employment was incrementally negative or positive, a scholarly consensus is emerging that it was dwarfed by the offshoring of jobs to China following WTO accession. Another study co-authored by Acemoglu found that competition with Chinese imports cost the United States 2.4 million manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011.11

They go on to detail that not only don't the robots cause widespread unemployment, but there is also a neutral to a slightly negative correlation between the application of robotics and employment. That the countries who have applied more robotics, like Germany and South Korea, have lost less manufacturing employment than countries who have been less enthusiastic about applying it, like the US and the UK. Continuing ...

If robotics do not have a significant negative effect on employment, then what has been ailing the U.S. economy? Contrary to elite conventional wisdom, it is the opposite of too much automation: key industries have experienced long-term stagnation, and America is losing the ability to compete in critical technology subsectors.

Establishment commentators still insist that the main losers of the 2000s were low-value-added sectors like apparel, and despite lower job numbers, productivity has risen due to automation and capital investment, in essence making the United States more competitive than ever. Neoliberals and free traders assert that nothing would have stopped the loss of jobs to China and that their value was minimal. But this view is contradicted by numerous metrics.

First, consider the scale of the decline. In 2000, the United States produced about 18 percent of the world’s manufactured exports; by 2012, that number had fallen by half, to around 9 percent. Even relative to the EU and Japan, the U.S. decline has been precipitous. During the same period, China’s share rose from about 5 percent to 18 percent.

Furthermore, the United States has become a net importer of high‑technology products. A 2015 report by the Brookings Institution found that the United States ran a $632 billion trade deficit in advanced industries in 2012. This is not what one would expect in a country that is supposed to be replacing low-value industries with high-value ones.

Productivity cannot be the answer, either. The idea that robots are putting people out of work presumes that declining job numbers are due to productivity growth. But gains in U.S. labor productivity have slowed in recent years. Between 1995 and 2002, labor productivity growth was 3.3 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, while from 2007 to 2016 productivity growth was just 1.3 percent. When considering manufacturing productivity in the United States, the decline is even more pronounced in recent years, with multifactor productivity declining 0.8 percent between 2007 and 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

It is as I have been saying, neoliberalism is the biggest threat to capitalism in the US right now. Much bigger than the threat from the Democrats' supposed socialism. Capitalism works best when everyone has to work for their rewards. And that includes the corporations. Neoliberalism has made it too easy for corporations to make a profit.

If neo-liberalism is our greatest threat, let's keep Trump in office. Keep the lord in charge.

 

[DBT]

Isn't it the basic point of automation to cut costs and increase reliability and service? Things like wages, sick pay, holiday leave, maternity leave, days off, etc, being eliminated by automation, why would a business not go with that option over the alternative if it could do so?

 

[SimpleDon]

Krugman's column today is about this subject and he argues that the threat of automation on jobs, has always been with us along with the hysteria surrounding it. That it is less of a threat than it was previously. I suspect that he has been reading recent studies on the subject. The column is here.

 

[Metaphor]

The threat of automation is an imaginary one. The last 100 years saw more advances in technology than any period in history, and yet not only is the unemployment rate still around 5%-6%, workforce participation is historically high, and the vision of a four hour workweek remains a fantasy.

Automation has made the world a better place for most people alive than the world has ever been throughout history.

 

[SimpleDon]

I'll give the reason why no one posted any response to this (until now).

It is possible that automation and free trade (foreign cheap labor) both cause some job loss. There's no way to prove it, but simple common sense/logic suggests that they could cause net job loss.

Yes, both can produce job losses. But they are different types of job losses. Automation creates job losses in a specific industry but not across the whole economy. The dynamic of the industrial revolution has always been to make goods more efficiently which means with less labor and fewer workers. This has been the case since the beginning. And yet the jobs lost have never shown up across the entire economy because the more dynamic industrial economy created more jobs than were lost.

Why? Because the efficiency of the mechanization of the jobs and the efficiency produced lower prices for goods in the economy and the money freed up by the lower prices stayed in the economy and was used to buy more different products or was invested in the manufacturing of new products.

This is the same dynamic that you claim benefits our economy from the lower cost Chinese products replacing the American produced products. But there are crucial differences in your free trade model.

• A high labor cost country like the US is always going to lose jobs by participating in free trade with a lower labor cost country like China.
• When jobs are in foreign trade the wages that those jobs paid are lost from the economy.
• When jobs are lost to automation the lost wages are balanced by the costs and wages to design, build, install, operate, and maintain the automation.
• There is no comparative advantage from free trade that bestows benefits on all who participate in free trade, there is only absolute advantage in favor of the lower wage country.
• There has to be a reason other than the economics of trade for the high labor cost country to participate in free trade with a lower labor cost country, such as;
  1. As a form of benevolent foreign aid, for example, if we wanted to prop up Chinese communism and were willing to increase our national debt in order to do it.
  2. If we wanted to reduce the illegal immigration from Mexico we could enter into the free trade with them to provide jobs in Mexico so that there is less pressure to illegally immigrate to the US.
  3. If we wanted to convert wages in the US into profits for the corporations.
  4. If needed to reduce demand in the US because inflation was too high, wages are the demand in the economy and profits largely leave the economy by going into savings.
  5. If we wanted to delay the application of automation in the US and to transfer the gains from the eventual application of automation to China rather than the US.

My money is on #3.

#1 is improbable, we certainly had no reason to rescue communism in China or anywhere else by pumping 300 to 400 billion dollars a year into their economy.

#2 is also improbable because no one in power was bothered by illegal immigration as the number of illegals in the US surged from three million after the Reagan amnesty bill was signed in 1986 to nearly 12 million in 2008.

Likewise, #4 is also improbable because while inflation was high in the 1980s no one would accept the killing of demand in a demand-led economy, would they? There is a much easier way to reduce inflation, by the government running a budget surplus.

Hopefully, #5 is also improbable. Since they moved production to China its low costs of wages reduced the pressure to automate repetitive, manual tasks. It is hard to automate these tasks when the production facilities are half-way around the world, hence the Chinese will now do it and will benefit from it.

So unless you have another reason that you have been sitting on through all of these discussions, and you don't agree with the improbable ones above, I have to assume that you agree with me that the powers that be wanted to raise corporate profits and the incomes of the wealthy.

This also highlights why your free trade with a lower wage country is never a good idea. The main impact on the higher wage country isn't lower prices for the goods but higher profits for the corporations. There are no other reasons for the corporations to invest in China than higher profits.

 

[DBT]

If people don't have a sense of purpose and a reasonable income, sooner or later society falls apart.

 

[fromderinside]

If people have no sense of purpose extinction is at hand. Ergo there is no way one hasn't a sense of purpose. Even those living things who don't have cognizance of purpose are purposeful. Money isn't necessary for purpose. Family isn't necessary for purpose. Humans will find a means for having goals and purpose. It's kind of why human proliferated across almost the entire world. I see no archaeologist has ever found a prehistoric bank so we can close the door on economy as necessary for purpose.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The threat of automation is an imaginary one. The last 100 years saw more advances in technology than any period in history, and yet not only is the unemployment rate still around 5%-6%, workforce participation is historically high, and the vision of a four hour workweek remains a fantasy.

Automation has made the world a better place for most people alive than the world has ever been throughout history.

Automation kills a lot of jobs--but technology keeps creating new ones.

The problem is that the new jobs are generally higher skill than the destroyed ones--while things overall balance it's a shift up the ladder and those at the bottom can be in trouble.

 

[DBT]

We are still in the early days of automation, how things develop in terms of work availability for the average citizen over the next few generations is hard to predict.

 

[fromderinside]

First I think it is already clear that physical labor and material thought are being overcome by information science. Automation is only one aspect of human based economic endeavor in decline. I think we need to other than money incentive for reward to human ingenuity now that we've played physical and mental work into the dumper re man using that approach.

We still have purpose motivators like service and creativity that can serve as the lynch pin for reward and note for instance. I'm sure there are other significant motivation avenues available to human societies that can underpin our needs for recognition and worth. So all is not lost for continued integration and expansion of societies. I still see one world one race as the ultimate goal for society.

If we stay hard over on money for labor we're not only be going down the rabbit hole on climate but for social distribution machinery as well. Societies exist because people can agree that what they do in them is worthwhile, In addition there are common values, think morality and reason, keeping us together. The solution requires that we remove money from the center of how society runs. Yet, we need to find ways to continue distribution of material and commodities so we need to find ways to use service and respect as the new centers or machines driving of the realm.

On this last point it might be possible to transfer reward based on service. So think changing the lynch pin underlying the motivational basis from economic to something else we settle on a general social motivator. As you are obviously seeing this is not an easy thing for us who are so conditioned to the idea that competition is best served by financial gain

Still I keep coming back to service. It fits with current demographics where populations are aging because we can survive as societies with fewer offspring per generation. Aging imposes undeniable burdens on younger members which should drive invention and opportunity as grease for purpose and differentiation among us. Service can ease societies out of things because much needs to be discovered and invented to support any aging model of society. Service society needs to provide new underpinnings for organization and value such as honor and respect, replacing money and personal excess, before they come to underpin the new basic model. What is wonderful about what I've just noodled is that respect and honor are both parts of what we already aspire to as human beings.

So think of what I've just written as a modification rather than a rejection of current society.

 

[SimpleDon]

The threat of automation is an imaginary one. The last 100 years saw more advances in technology than any period in history, and yet not only is the unemployment rate still around 5%-6%, workforce participation is historically high, and the vision of a four-hour workweek remains a fantasy.

Automation has made the world a better place for most people alive than the world has ever been throughout history.

Yes, you are correct, except the workforce is not at a historical high, a minor point. See here.

There have always been people afraid of progress. The only problem that I see is that the workers aren't gaining anything from the progress. All of the gains from innovation and improved productivity are going into profits and wages are static. The workers are much more responsible for these things than the stockholders or owners are.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

If people have no sense of purpose extinction is at hand. Ergo there is no way one hasn't a sense of purpose. Even those living things who don't have cognizance of purpose are purposeful. Money isn't necessary for purpose. Family isn't necessary for purpose. Humans will find a means for having goals and purpose. It's kind of why human proliferated across almost the entire world. I see no archaeologist has ever found a prehistoric bank so we can close the door on economy as necessary for purpose.

Yes, people need purpose, but purpose can be defined and redefined, by those people, and need not have anything to do with working a 9 to 5 job contributing to GDP.

 

[SimpleDon]

Isn't it the basic point of automation to cut costs and increase reliability and service? Things like wages, sick pay, holiday leave, maternity leave, days off, etc, being eliminated by automation, why would a business not go with that option over the alternative if it could do so?

The more complicated the task is the more expensive the automation is to do it. The current state of the art in automation is not very versatile. It costs a lot of money to "retrain" a robot. You could build a robot to assemble an iPhone 10 but there is no reason to believe that it could assemble an iPhone 11. It is hard to program a robot to make a judgment, if say the paint film depth is sufficient, for example.

I worked on designing and starting up an automated assembly line for diesel engines. The line finally was successful, it was an integrated line that could build different sizes of engines, but finally, it didn't reduce the number of people who were working in the factory, they just did different jobs, mainly feeding parts into the assembly line and maintaining the equipment. We were always the failure of a single machine away from zero production. If a man didn't show up to work the other workers could cover his work which in the worse case slowed down the assembly line.

 

[Metaphor]

Yes, you are correct, except the workforce is not at a historical high, a minor point. See here.

I mean in a general sense, though in Australia there doesn't seem to have been the drop-off in recent years that is shown in the American data (see here).

There have always been people afraid of progress. The only problem that I see is that the workers aren't gaining anything from the progress. All of the gains from innovation and improved productivity are going into profits and wages are static. The workers are much more responsible for these things than the stockholders or owners are.

In a "post scarcity" society (which won't happen for anybody alive right now), there will need to be some alternative to replace paid work, probably some kind of universal basic income. It will be viable in the future, presumably, because robotics will have driven down costs of goods and services to very low levels.

 

[DBT]

Isn't it the basic point of automation to cut costs and increase reliability and service? Things like wages, sick pay, holiday leave, maternity leave, days off, etc, being eliminated by automation, why would a business not go with that option over the alternative if it could do so?

The more complicated the task is the more expensive the automation is to do it. The current state of the art in automation is not very versatile. It costs a lot of money to "retrain" a robot. You could build a robot to assemble an iPhone 10 but there is no reason to believe that it could assemble an iPhone 11. It is hard to program a robot to make a judgment, if say the paint film depth is sufficient, for example.

I worked on designing and starting up an automated assembly line for diesel engines. The line finally was successful, it was an integrated line that could build different sizes of engines, but finally, it didn't reduce the number of people who were working in the factory, they just did different jobs, mainly feeding parts into the assembly line and maintaining the equipment. We were always the failure of a single machine away from zero production. If a man didn't show up to work the other workers could cover his work which in the worse case slowed down the assembly line.

It's likely that many lines of work will remain in demand. But it's still early days in the development of technology and automation, as I'm sure we all realize. So the question appears to be; how far will automation go and how many jobs will be lost to technology as it becomes more advanced, the use of AI becomes widespread, etc.

 

[RVonse]

Isn't it the basic point of automation to cut costs and increase reliability and service? Things like wages, sick pay, holiday leave, maternity leave, days off, etc, being eliminated by automation, why would a business not go with that option over the alternative if it could do so?

The more complicated the task is the more expensive the automation is to do it. The current state of the art in automation is not very versatile. It costs a lot of money to "retrain" a robot. You could build a robot to assemble an iPhone 10 but there is no reason to believe that it could assemble an iPhone 11. It is hard to program a robot to make a judgment, if say the paint film depth is sufficient, for example.

I worked on designing and starting up an automated assembly line for diesel engines. The line finally was successful, it was an integrated line that could build different sizes of engines, but finally, it didn't reduce the number of people who were working in the factory, they just did different jobs, mainly feeding parts into the assembly line and maintaining the equipment. We were always the failure of a single machine away from zero production. If a man didn't show up to work the other workers could cover his work which in the worse case slowed down the assembly line.

It's likely that many lines of work will remain in demand. But it's still early days in the development of technology and automation, as I'm sure we all realize. So the question appears to be; how far will automation go and how many jobs will be lost to technology as it becomes more advanced, the use of AI becomes widespread, etc.

If you listen to people like Elon Musk, it is very likely AI will go way past anything humans can do today. There will eventually be no jobs at all that humans can do better than automation. And like when mankind first learned to harness the atom, AI will be able to do either great harm or good.

 

[fromderinside]

If people have no sense of purpose extinction is at hand. Ergo there is no way one hasn't a sense of purpose. Even those living things who don't have cognizance of purpose are purposeful. Money isn't necessary for purpose. Family isn't necessary for purpose. Humans will find a means for having goals and purpose. It's kind of why human proliferated across almost the entire world. I see no archaeologist has ever found a prehistoric bank so we can close the door on economy as necessary for purpose.

Yes, people need purpose, but purpose can be defined and redefined, by those people, and need not have anything to do with working a 9 to 5 job contributing to GDP.

So you must have enjoyed this

On this last point it might be possible to transfer reward based on service. So think changing the lynch pin underlying the motivational basis from economic to something else we settle on a general social motivator. As you are obviously seeing this is not an easy thing for us who are so conditioned to the idea that competition is best served by financial gain

and this

Still I keep coming back to service. It fits with current demographics where populations are aging because we can survive as societies with fewer offspring per generation. Aging imposes undeniable burdens on younger members which should drive invention and opportunity as grease for purpose and differentiation among us. Service can ease societies out of things because much needs to be discovered and invented to support any aging model of society. Service society needs to provide new underpinnings for organization and value such as honor and respect, replacing money and personal excess, before they come to underpin the new basic model. What is wonderful about what I've just noodled is that respect and honor are both parts of what we already aspire to as human beings.