
Predictions of massive job losses to automation miss data that show the opposite - hodgesrm
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/10/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-capital-account.html
======
paulpauper
_The doomsayers say this time is different, that technological change is so
profound and so fast that millions of workers will end up on the dole or
consigned to menial, minimum-wage mobs._

Isn't that already the case? I read that most of the jobs created since 2009
are in the low-paying service sector.

The problem is the financial crisis permanently gutted a lot of middle-class
professional jobs.

This has less to do with automation and more to do with structural changes in
the labor force and economy.

~~~
oren_thrall
I think we have yet to see the worst of it for now. But make no mistake, huge
sections of jobs are going to evaporate if not by 2019, then in the decade
thereafter.

Not just elevator operators and dirigible pilots. A massive chunk of economic
activity is going to look silly in a decade. Pretty much everything regarded
as a summer job for high school teenagers is game, and that leaves a
considerable number of normal, employable adults out in the cold too.

Magazines are pretty much already dead, and everything that went with them
shrank. Music and movies have imploded hard enough to show signs of serious
stress. Shops, department stores and big box retail are off balance, and will
fall over before 2030.

It's going to be pretty rough. Think about your first job, and the summer jobs
your high school classmates had. Will your kids hold the same jobs? I doubt
it.

~~~
dugditches
One can hope that the next generation of children won't have to hold a 'job'
at all.

~~~
intended
Not going to happen - unless all jobs disappear at about the same time.

The simple conclusion is that unless you have something to provide in
exchange, no one will give you anything in return.

>He (Amartya Sen) presents data that there was an adequate food supply in
Bengal at the time, but particular groups of people including rural landless
labourers and urban service providers like haircutters did not have the means
to buy food as its price rose rapidly due to factors

As long as someone owns the factory or the company, they expect to be paid.
Thats not going to go away overnight.

And since robots are not going to be perfect, there will always be jobs that
human beings will be employed to do. The employers will in turn expect to get
their money's worth for those jobs.

Instead of jobs going away, theres going to be a concentration of wealth in
the hands of a few.

------
SirensOfTitan
The Economist remarked the same thing in their report on automation a little
while back. The automation fears espoused by Bill Gates and Elon Musk are
purportedly premature. Automation isn't spreading fast enough.

One other note, while I do believe that automation will cause massive job
losses eventually, there exists an alternative narrative. Centered around the
knowledge that: 'you don't know you don't know,' we just have no idea which
jobs will emerge as a result of new industries powered by automation.

What does seem evident is that concentrated education at the beginning of an
adult's life is unlikely to be enough in the future. Investment in education
reform and adult education seems critical, whether or not automation causes
large scale unemployment.

~~~
m12k
> we just have no idea which jobs will emerge as a result of new industries
> powered by automation

The question is, if you believe AI will eventually catch up with all jobs that
exist today, what skill could a significant portion of the population possibly
have at that point, that the AIs would not also match?

Perhaps we'll have social constructs to provide jobs, similar to how people
are willing to overpay for designer goods instead of copies (e.g. maybe 'hand-
crafted' will take on a whole new meaning). But from a solely economic
perspective, it seems like a matter of when, not if, an AI could more
efficiently do most jobs.

~~~
valuearb
If AI and robotics can do everything cheaper than humans, how is that not the
greatest thing ever?

~~~
te_chris
If the United States of America - the wealthiest society the world has ever
known - can't even provide healthcare for its citizens, what hope is there
that, in a world where all profits accure to the owners of robots (capital),
anyone other than these people get any of the benefit? History is not exactly
rich with examples of such.

~~~
valuearb
The US obvuisky does provide healthcare for its citizens, we are just in a
messy argument over who should pay for it. Reagan mandated over 40 years that
hospitals had to offer care to everyone.

~~~
jmanderley
Being able to visit the emergency room and having to pay whatever they want
isn't remotely the same as "provide healthcare for its citizens".

------
xg15
> _The alternative is a tightening labor market that forces companies to pay
> ever higher wages that must be passed on as inflation, which usually ends
> with recession._

Higher wages, god beware!

More generally, the article seems to follow a pattern I've seen in a number of
"there is no problem" articles: They concentrate stoically on the present.
Maybe we don't have massive job loss due to automation just yet (and even that
is disputed), but we also don't yet have self-driving cars in widespread use
(not to mention trucks), the retailers haven't yet gotten rid of their
cashiers and Amazon's warehouses are still mostly run by people - yet all
those things are predicted to happen in a the next decades.

So think a discussion about future developments is more useful than stating
that everything is fine right now. (Though even that seems questionable to me.
If we're in such a job miracle as the article states, why did so many people
vote trump? Mass delusion?)

------
faragon
Industrial automation is very expensive, and human labour, with semi-automated
processes, is very productive and flexible. So fully automation is far for
happening, except for massive production.

~~~
Houshalter
That's why general purpose robots will change everything. With recent progress
in AI, we will soon have robots that can be trained to do a job just like
humans.

~~~
faragon
They will, but it will not be anytime soon.

~~~
collyw
Agreed. I can't reliably get a bluetooth speaker to connect to three different
computers, so I think "everything will be automated" is a lot further off than
some people are claiming.

------
ricw
Anecdotally I can only state that this can also be seen by searching for
"robotics engineer" or related job openings. I was doing just that a year ago
and the findings are slim. There just aren't many jobs out there, which to me
indicates that there is little demand and consequently little development in
that regard.

Ever since, I've stopped believing that we'll have massive job losses due to
automation (self driving cars are the only big counter example).

~~~
imh
From the article:

>“Robot” is shorthand for any device or algorithm that does what humans once
did, from mechanical combines and thermostats to dishwashers and airfare
search sites.

"Software engineer" counts in some ways too, and that's sure growing.

~~~
ricw
Software engineers are distinctly different from robotics engineers. To build
robots, you need to be at the intersection of software, electronics and
mechanical engineering. A robotics engineer would typically intersect at the
software and electronics part.

From personal experience, I can tell you that transitioning from software to
robotics is not trivial. It's also very frustrating. Software is typically
much faster and cheaper to debug and fix than anything hardware related...

~~~
Sharlin
But the GP's point was that a lot of automation doesn't need robotics at all.
It just needs software, running on commodity hardware. How many jobs there are
open for robotics engineers is not a good proxy for how many jobs are being
automated.

------
paulddraper
In 1850, 70% of American jobs were farming. Eighty years later, it was 25%.
_Half of America 's jobs vanished in one lifetime._

This trend has been hard on farmers; I happen to know several. But I don't
think we want to return to that time.

Nor do I think basic income/farm subsidies is a good answer.

~~~
bamboozled
You know what, we've not really walked away unscathed after the transition to
modern agricultural approaches just yet.

The environmental cost of modern agricultural approaches is very high and is
having knock on effects, food quality isn't always of the highest nutritional
quality and crops will suffer as dead humus from petro-chemical based
fertiliser retains no water, more water means higher food costs as it grows
more scarce due to climate change and over population.

Maybe it wouldn't hurt society if a few more "skilled farmers" worked
with/closer to the land.

~~~
valuearb
Yea, no. Food quality and quantity is higher than ever. Our world is also
awash in water, the fact that California gifted control of its water supplies
to opportunists a hundred years ago not withstanding. There is no water supply
problem that cannot be solved by finally applying free markets.

~~~
slg
>There is no water supply problem that cannot be solved by finally applying
free markets.

Do civil wars[1] count as "free markets"?

[1] -
[http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241)

------
DanielBMarkham
The "robots are taking our jobs!" folks seem to miss one very important point:
commerce is not about the production and trade of things to keep people alive.
In fact, that's an extremely small part of it. Most all commerce is because
humans are social and like trading for social reasons. That's not going
anywhere.

So _activities_ that provide needed social capital aren't going anywhere. In
fact, some may become quite more valuable. Things like white water rafting or
fashion consultant. Things that involve the rote production of life-sustaining
_products_? Sure. If your job can be replaced by a robot, it will be. There
are many, many jobs that can't -- and my money says there are a lot more of
those kinds of jobs coming down the pike.

If that doesn't persuade you, imagine a world with strong AI where robots can
produce anything you like. Would humans suddenly stop trading for things or
collecting things? Of course not, in fact, it would become highly more
nuanced. We're going to see industries emerge that seem incredibly stupid by
modern standards, but which will be immensely influential as time goes on. The
fact that we can't predict the future is a feature, not a bug of our
existence.

Having said all of that, it's certainly possible that we'll see a lot of
economic stress in the coming few decades. Just like in the previous few
decades. Perhaps even as much stress as we had during the Great Depression.
But it's always been like that.

------
darkhorn
This debate was hot too like ehen print come to Ottoman Empire. They feared
same thing, destroying jobs of hand writers. So the nation lost several years
due to "print ban".

------
apeace
As a software engineer, I often reflect on how much my own job prevents or
cuts existing jobs for humans. At least in my case, it seems that cutting out
human work creates more jobs.

Let's imagine I build a feature that makes it twice as fast for us to close a
sale in our pipeline. Do we cut half our sales force? Of course not--we would
rather keep all the people and make double the sales. This brings us even more
revenue, which we use to hire more sales people and more software developers,
growing the company and providing more jobs.

Perhaps this simple logic can't apply to all cases, but I've certainly seen it
apply a lot!

~~~
johngalt
Jevons paradox applied to employment.

------
rdlecler1
There are two things here (1) A lot of people involuntarily dropped out of the
workforce which not captured by simple unemployment rate (2) What's important
is quality of jobs which is what you can buy with your income. We may have an
abundance of food and LCD TVs at the moment -- goods that may have faced
inflation before their production was less mechanized/automated but these
efficiency gains have been more than eaten up by inflation in housing,
education and healthcare which all are associated with competition for a
scarce, less elastic, resource.

------
vannevar
The other implication of this study is that technology doesn't contribute
nearly as much to economic growth as many people think. Which also means that
the 'normal' baseline for economic growth remains stable over long periods of
time, and the recessions that followed unusual spurts of higher growth in the
80s and 90s may have been inevitable.

------
zanny
Of course they aren't, there is a huge capital cliff to make it happen.

Automation is not something that happens slowly in this context. Self driving
car research has no impact on the auto industry until the moment tremendous
savings can be had _in this financial quarter_ at which point we see the
destruction of millions of jobs.

Cell phones were not a slow burn advance. The Internet did not slowly take
off. These things exploded in (economically speaking) blinks of the eye, and
the same happens in every other industrial capacity for automation.

The barrier is the up front opportunity cost to bring down the wall and take
the costs to that short term economic projection - as long as it costs $150k
to replace a $50k truck driver, no publicly traded company is going to do that
en masse. It hurts _this_ quarters results too much to accept.

The fervor is not about slow burn automation. That has been happening since
the industrial revolution, but it is important to not conflict role
optimization with role obsolescence. We don't have elevator operators anymore.
We still have farmers. The foresight is to see that we _will_ have innovations
that eliminate labor classes overnight, that they won't have an impact until
they are deleting industries, and that the opportunity cost to get there is a
pill few are willing to swallow so the outcomes get delayed. But we can see
they are inevitable, in the same way climate change is an inevitable
catastrophe that to many seems not to matter until New York City is under
water and we have a billion humans dying of famine in a desertified equatorial
region.

We are very good at creating bullshit jobs[1] to fill the gradual innovative
automation. The job optimization that creeps through every domain constantly
pounds us so we create more bullshit jobs to keep the economic system afloat.
Instead of looking at statistics relating to peak employment, look at worker
satisfaction and confidence that what they do actually means something. Those
numbers are telling on how many people actually feel like they are making a
real economic contribution[2].

[1] [http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-
jobs-d...](http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-
graeber/)

[2] [https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-
meaningles...](https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningless/)

I just want to postfix this with anyone can make up numbers or just use the
numbers out there to rewrite history into their favor. You can make a
legitimate argument that automation is fake, that worker satisfaction is high,
and that this is all fearmongering. If so, I would ask why there is so much
civil unrest surrounding it globally. The statistics and numbers might all be
bullshit commissioned by biased interests, but the macroscopic behavior of
people can reflect the reality. The entire global movement towards
isolationist nationalism and totalitarianism is centralized on the
obsolescence of people and the rise of bullshit work. People feel abandoned,
unfulfilled, or forgotten. It is a _growing_ trend. It is valuable not to
ignore why that might be.

~~~
Atheros
If it cost $150K to replace a $50K/year truck driver then VCs would fund it.
They'll then sell the solution to the publicly traded companies.

> We are very good at creating bullshit jobs[1] to fill the gradual innovative
> automation.

Midnight pizza deliverymen and administrators who decide how to spend
resources are not bullshit jobs. They are both helpful and useful.

> The entire global movement towards isolationist nationalism and
> totalitarianism is centralized on the obsolescence of people and the rise of
> bullshit work. People feel abandoned, unfulfilled, or forgotten.

Your post doesn't make sense. The people doing the "bullshit work" aren't the
ones feeling abandoned and unfulfilled. The ones promoting isolationism and
nationalism are the ones lamenting the loss of their coal mining and steel
production jobs, for example, which employ workers who are confident that what
they do means something. Perhaps you mean that they lament the loss of these
jobs? That would make sense but it doesn't seem to be very highly connected to
the "bullshit jobs" argument- only the loss of satisfying jobs.

~~~
LoonyBalloony
> Midnight pizza deliverymen and administrators who decide how to spend
> resources are not bullshit jobs. They are both helpful and useful.

I appreciate the recognition as a pizza deliveryman. It's actually my dream
job. It took me a decade of searching for work that made me happy to find it,
and I was as surprised with were I found it as you (and my friends and family)
are.

Every day its like I'm food Santa Claus bringing joy and happiness to the
whole city. Every day is food Christmas. Everyone is always so pumped to see
me when I show up, and that pumps me up. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling
inside.

Every other job I had I had this sense of dread going to work. Hating being
there, hating a large portion of my life and wishing for my life to go faster.

Granted I'm still a corporate wage slave, don't have health insurance/care,
and prison is my retirement plan (healthcare/housing/food all free, and its
not like the old folks home lets you leave whenever you want when you're old
and senile anyways). But at least I can be a happy pizza wage slave.

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting having this come just after the "Guaranteed Minimum What"
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326505))
article was posted and commented on.

------
gumby
Debating whether the number of jobs will actually go down or not is
irrelevant.

The fact is on the human lifetime timescale, jobs go away (farming from
1900-1940; various factory jobs in the late 1980s, coal mining 1970s-2000s
etc). People with decades in these jobs may not be able to move into
equivalent (in renumeration & status) replacement jobs as their skills are
likely not transferable.

Thus to the tractor manufacturer in her 50s it is irrelevant whether there is
high demand for experienced web designers or not. Perhaps her kid can go into
the job, but she very likely can't. This is part of the reason for the demand
for low-skill (and low paying) jobs.

So either way we have to plan for rolling mass unemployment. The only question
is the shape of the derivative.

~~~
randomdata
_> So either way we have to plan for rolling mass unemployment._

Interestingly, each time we have lost jobs, we have diversified into many more
types of jobs that cannot be swept away with a single automation breakthrough.
~90% of workforce were once farmers and almost every single one of them lost
their job when mechanization came. Now, with self-driving cars, we are worried
about the ~2% of the workforce who drive for a living. That is already a big
change from the past, and each iteration how shown that a smaller and smaller
portion of the workforce will be affected by automation at any given point in
time. That is not to say that everyone will go unscathed, but mass
unemployment becomes less and less likely.

~~~
autokad
> ~90% of workforce were once farmers and almost every single one of them lost
> their job when mechanization came

It was very easy to go from one job to the other. weather it needs to be
required or not, many jobs today effectively require 20 years of education
(12+ school, 4 undergrad, 2 masters, 2 years experience).

we talk about coal mining jobs going away as if they should have seen it
coming, but tech can also be vulnerable. people forget what it was like to
search for a tech job even years after the 2001 bubble burst.

also, the reason why people are worried about automation isn't the number of
people effected by each iteration. it was widely accepted automation would
destroy jobs and more than what was destroyed would come.

the 2001 and 2008 recession seems to indicate that is becoming less true. i
would categorize those recessions as mass unemployment, thus mass unemployment
is not becoming less and less likely.

~~~
valuearb
Virtually zero jobs require 20 years of education or degrees, 99% of jobs can
be learned with a boot camp.

~~~
sumoboy
I sure don't want any of that 99% being a doctor or lawyer just finishing a
boot camp.

~~~
adpirz
Boot camp is hyperbole for medicine, but the medical field itself is beginning
to recognize (at least in the US) that the path to becoming a physician is
much longer than need be, especially given the shortage we have especially for
GPs.

~~~
c0nfused
My impression is that the medical field is mostly increasing the number of new
MDs but not the number of residency slots. This means that soon medical school
will end up like law school where you can get a law degree but not a job. You
need at least a year of residency to be able to practice medicine in any
state, to get a real job you need to finish.

[http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-
blog/healthcare/266610-sho...](http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-
blog/healthcare/266610-shortage-of-residency-slots-may-have-chilling-effect-
on-next)

~~~
maxerickson
It would be easy to fix. Current spending on residency programs is something
like 10 or 15 billion dollars. With more than 3 trillion dollars in healthcare
spending, a 10 billion dollar experiment aimed at lowering costs is cheap.

(and of course it isn't necessary to immediately double the number of slots in
order to soak up the extra MDs)

------
rch
Unreadable

------
zulln
Non-paywall link:
[https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/ro...](https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-
arent-destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982)

~~~
10165
Non-paywall, non-Facebook link:

[https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/robots-arent-destroying-
eno...](https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-
jobs-1494434982)

as in

    
    
       fetch -4o 0.htm https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982

------
MilnerRoute
Here's a non-paywalled link:

[http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/10/robots-
arent-...](http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/10/robots-arent-
destroying-enough-jobs-capital-account.html)

~~~
dang
Thank you. We switched to that from [https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-
arent-destroying-enough-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-arent-
destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982).

We also changed the title to the subtitle, which is less baity. The text
itself is pretty substantive.

------
andrewtbham
Downvote. This is a political and ideologically motivated article and it has
little to say about technology and lacks any insightful speculation into the
future. It is backlash against all the liberal hand wringing about the
impending robot apocalypse.

Such as...Obama's reports... Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the
Economy
[https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/12/20/artific...](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/12/20/artificial-
intelligence-automation-and-economy)

Or bill gate's ridiculous suggestion to tax robots.

