
The Automation Paradox - ergest
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/automation-paradox/424437/?single_page=true
======
riskable
Are you kidding me? The article stopped making sense right at the beginning:

> But, perhaps surprisingly, electronic discovery software has not thrown
> paralegals and lawyers into unemployment lines. In fact, employment for
> paralegals and lawyers has grown robustly.

WHAT?! The statistics they chose from the US Department of Labor were cherry
picked and out-of-context. Lawyers are _seriously hurting_ right now:

> The national unemployment rate for law graduates has grown for the sixth
> year in a row to a whopping 15.5 percent, according to a report by the
> National Association for Law Placement. This unemployment exists despite
> soaring law school tuition.

Taken from:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natalie-gregg/mamas-dont-
let-y...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natalie-gregg/mamas-dont-let-your-
babie_2_b_6457898.html)

More:

[http://qz.com/206705/the-us-lawyer-bubble-has-
conclusively-p...](http://qz.com/206705/the-us-lawyer-bubble-has-conclusively-
popped/)

Another good read (don't have to watch the video to get the gist):

[http://abovethelaw.com/2013/10/this-pretty-much-sums-up-
the-...](http://abovethelaw.com/2013/10/this-pretty-much-sums-up-the-plight-
of-the-unemployed-lawyer/)

~~~
jsprogrammer
You are talking about newly minted lawyers. If they have never a held paid
position as someone's representative, or in some other way practiced law in
exchange for money, they would not be able to get into any unemployment line
as a lawyer.

------
beat
Automation will be used as much as possible, up to the point where a human
must be involved, either to exercise judgment or because that human's job
hasn't been automated away yet.

Consider the farming industry. In a couple of centuries, it has gone from 90%+
of the population to a couple of percent, while the number of people being fed
has increased several times over. That's automation at work, pretty fast in
human terms. Did it cause a massive dislocation and unemployment when 90% of
the human population was more or less replaced by machines?

~~~
maxerickson
Yes, it did cause a massive dislocation. And it isn't over yet, people are
still moving to cities.

~~~
beat
Yep. I didn't phrase that well - it caused dislocation, but not permanent
unemployment. Society adapted, and new careers came into being that couldn't
have existed when we were devoting all our human capital to manual labor on
the farm.

------
Animats
Here's US employment by category: [1] Only 14.1% of the workforce makes
"stuff" \- that's agriculture, mining, construction, and manufacturing
combined. Those are shrinking slowly. Most of that is already automated. A
century ago, that was 90% of the workforce. That's the "hollowing out of
America" people talk about. The US manufactures more stuff than ever, but with
far fewer people.

The big sectors remaining are retail, professional/business services, health
care, and state and local government. (The Federal government is tiny - 1.8%.)
Health care is growing. State and local government (which is mostly teachers
and cops) is down a bit. Retail is declining slightly. There's a little growth
in professional/business services.

Retail is struggling. America is littered with dead malls. (See
"deadmalls.com") Online ordering hasn't crushed brick-and-mortar retail yet;
it's still only 7.4% of total retail sales.[2] It's gaining another 1% or so
each year. There's still a future in retail, but the jobs are low end.

"Professional/business services" is the category IT automates. It's where most
of the good middle class jobs are. 12.7% of the workforce now. (This doesn't
include finance, at 5.3%, down a bit, and also highly automatable.) This is
the sector likely to clobbered next, as machine learning gets going.

That's what's going on. Take a good look at those numbers and evaluate your
future.

[1]
[http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm](http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm)
[2]
[https://ycharts.com/indicators/ecommerce_sales_as_percent_re...](https://ycharts.com/indicators/ecommerce_sales_as_percent_retail_sales)

------
ergest
According to the article, when computers start doing the work of people, the
need for people often increases. I simply cannot take anymore the doom and
gloom of the supposed AI revolution and how it will make us all jobless.

~~~
geggam
You should visit some manufacturing plants. Ask them how many people used to
work there and how many do now.

Companies have a social responsibility to the communities they profit from.

~~~
rogerbinns
Because fewer people are involved, they can generally make the products to a
more predictable standard ("quality") and cheaper. Lets say the item the plant
made with all those people used to cost $10 for consumers to buy, but the
efficiency improvement from the manufacturing plant now means that it costs $5
for consumers to buy.

All over the town/country/world, people who used to part with $10 now only
part with $5. They now have an additional $5 to spend in their community. The
manufacturing plant has enabled many others to have their money go further -
how is that a bad thing?

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Hang on, why would you drop your prices when your margin just increased? Why
let "the community" keep their extra $5 and not pocket it yourself instead?

Financially speaking: what's the incentive?

~~~
repsilat
Say you have an idea of what the demand curve looks like. For the sake of
argument, let it be (100-p), so 100 people would want it for free, and none
would want it at $100.

If your marginal cost is $50, to maximise profit you'd set the price equal to
$75 and make $625 net.

If your marginal cost is $40, you'd set the price at $70 to maximise profit
and make $900 net.

------
panzagl
Number of jobs is only half of the equation though- are the wages of all of
those new jobs the same? If automation replaces expensive skilled labor with
inexpensive labor than there is still plenty of room for concern.

------
ThomPete
Most people are grossly simplifying this discussion. The worst for me still is
those who yell "Luddite Fallacy" whenever this discussion comes up.

What most people are missing is that it's not so much automation but rather
digitalization which allows for a completely differen kind of automation thats
not just mechanical but instead has some kind of intelligence embedded in.

The point is that technology is simulating higher and higher levels of
abstraction and thus are replacing not just human physical abilities but also
our intellectual ones.

And if you want to understand what that means. Then ask yourself what
profession did the horses enter once cars made them obsolete in
transportation.

It's also interesting to notice that the last 100 years only new kind of job
have emerged and that's computer scientists. Most other jobs today are really
just modernized versions of older ones.

The luddite fallacy is in itself a fallacy and everyone who subscribe to that
view really should explain exactly what new kind of areas humans will be going
into. Surely they should already exist today.

And if you want to claim that new jobs are being replaced when technology
takes some away then you really need to explain this graph.

[https://plot.ly/~BethS/8/job-growth-by-decade-in-the-
united-...](https://plot.ly/~BethS/8/job-growth-by-decade-in-the-united-
states/)

~~~
jacquesm
> It's also interesting to notice that the last 100 years only new kind of job
> have emerged and that's computer scientists.

I think you're missing a couple there, the number of professions that hold a
sizable number of people has absolutely exploded since the 1950's.

Ranging from all the jobs that were created by the electronics revolution, the
transportation revolution, all the new media and the IT revolution is much
more than just 'computer scientists'.

How do I know this? Because at some point I was responsible for maintaining a
table that mirrored the Dutch bureau of statistics annual table with the names
of all the professions. The number of new professions that were recognized
each year was absolutely staggering, but if you went back over time you could
see an inflection point somewhere just after world-war II.

~~~
ThomPete
Which jobs are you talking about? I am talking about fundamentally new types
of jobs.

~~~
jacquesm
If you want to be pedantic, even computer scientists were around 100 years ago
(Ada Lovelace, for one).

Really, if you want to discount all the fields I've named on principle because
to you those jobs are not 'fundamentally new types' then computer programmer
also doesn't qualify as a fundamentally new type of job.

Assembly line worker wasn't a profession in 1912 either, it only became one in
1913 when the assembly line was invented.

Classes of professions have not been invented since about 500 years ago,
typically the classes of professions that are recognized haven't changed much
at all, and yet, you'd be hard pressed to find 'tour-operator', 'social media
strategist', 'geneticist', 'nuclear reactor operator' and so on in a list of
jobs from the early 1900's. And by that reasoning 'computer scientist' is just
a sub-class of scientist, actually one of the oldest professions we have.

'Fundamentally' is a cheat, there are no new 'types' of jobs, there are only
jobs that did not exist before and there are jobs that nobody holds anymore.

~~~
ThomPete
I don't see how that is pedantic at all.

Bringing up Lovelace however is quite pedantic and I think you know that very
well.

Assembly line worker did not require any new skills. Instead it required a
subset af the previous skills people had whether welders, blacksmiths,
carpenters, painters etc.

So you haven't really pointed to any new jobs and no fundamentally new type of
jobs isn't a cheat.

Furthermore I am not really sure what you are trying to prove. Even if I had
missed a few (which I haven't) it wouldn't change the facts.

~~~
jacquesm
I'll supply astronaut instead and see you argue around how that really is just
another form of 'traveler'.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'll bite. An astronaut is basically a highly trained horse carriage
passenger. Most of spaceship operations are already controlled by machines
anyway, and they do it better than humans. Hell, when you see discussions
about manned Mars missions, the recurring question is, "why bother with people
when machines can already do it better?".

~~~
jacquesm
If we're going to be strict then there are two basic forms of work: thinking
and moving stuff around. Everything else is a variation on those two.

~~~
ThomPete
Thats not even true.

Crafts are neither just thinking or just moving things around.

------
inanutshellus
The example is a bit cherry-picked. You could argue that the process went like
this:

* 1980s - "takes a lot of time and money to churn through old legal docs, let's hire a paralegal"

* 2010s - "it's easy to churn through old legal docs, making it much easier to manage multiple legal cases in parallel. Let's hire a paralegal to help me juggle all of these cases."

...

* 2020s - I've hired HireASuperParalegal.com to do all of my paralegal sleuthing. They help me manage the workload of four paralegals for the price of one.

Meanwhile, how about telemarketers? Have their numbers increased in droves
like--apparently--paralegals? I suspect not.

Anyway, @ergest mentioned that the doom-and-gloom is tiresome, and it
certainly is. Personally though, I just find it a fun thought-exercise to
think through how we'll matter in the long-run. In the meantime there'll be a
"new" class of workers whose jobs move from paper-pushing to being specialized
software-users and from there... what? Certainly "computer-or-software fix-it
guy" jobs will be universally useful from now into the foreseeable future, but
will they pay well? :-)

------
InclinedPlane
I'm still a bit mystified by the people who believe that automation can, or
will, destroy jobs. It takes a very weird view of the economy to see it as
fundamentally static, fixed in a given form that can't be changed other than
who or what does the work that's already been done. In nearly every corner of
the economy there is an infinite amount of work that needs to be done, but of
course not all of it can be done so only some of the available work actually
gets done. But if you automate some of that work it's not like the undone work
goes away, it's not like people won't pay good money to do that undone work.

~~~
IanCal
> I'm still a bit mystified by the people who believe that automation can, or
> will, destroy jobs.

There are certainly huge local issues that happen when you shut, say, a steel
plant or coal mine. We know that this happens. What would happen if we were to
do the same thing to a whole tranche of jobs all at once?

Perhaps you're talking on much longer scales, but you shouldn't ignore the
shorter term (which is still long in human scales, it's not like these things
sort themselves out after a couple of weeks).

> But if you automate some of that work it's not like the undone work goes
> away, it's not like people won't pay good money to do that undone work.

If they'd pay more for that undone work than the work that's being done, why
don't people shift jobs?

------
nefitty
Yes, it is easier to find the dead-end roads when speaking of future societal
changes. It is easy to panic about massive global unemployment in the face of
automation. The fact that a conclusion is easy to come to doesn't make it any
less likely. The patterns we see now are based on recent, past trends. What we
can't see, or extrapolate from what we've experienced already, are the effects
of accelerating exponential change in the tech sector. What I get from this
article is the beginnings of the political rationalizations for denying basic
guaranteed income. When your spreadsheets say there isn't a problem, when your
economists tell you that work for humans is actually increasing, it is much
easier to ignore the needs of the people on the ground.

I have been wracking my brain about this problem for a few years now, and I
still can't seem to find the essential leverage point human labor would have
against automated, robotic labor. I once thought it was our ability to
synthesize and generate novel solutions to problems that would keep us in a
dominant position within the economy, but that is quickly turning out to be a
naive delusion. I don't fully understand the direction neural networks and
machine learning are moving, but it looks like they will match us in those
"uniquely human" areas of cognition very soon.

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
that is the thing though, why should we care about human labor having a
leverage point? If all labor was automated, it would be a great net positive
for humankind as a whole AS LONG AS it is not a requirement to be a laborer to
receive a livable wage.

The problem is that as time goes on it seems less and less labor is available
that can be done by the majority of the population, while the requirement to
labor in order to earn a wage is not changing.

There is an infinite amount of work that can be done by humans that cannot be
done by machine, but that kind of work usually does not command livable wages:
learning to play a musical instrument, and becoming moderately competent at
it, learning to build furniture with hand tools, and becoming moderately
skilled at it, learning to be a good spouse, and being there when your partner
needs your help.

It is easy to see how a large amount of occupations still available today can
be automated, it is harder to see how the large number of people displaced by
this automation will be able to manage.

Once automobiles became widespread, were the horses able to "retrain" into
"the new jobs that became available"? Improving the cart is not the same as
making the horse replaceable.

~~~
nefitty
"If all labor was automated, it would be a great net positive for humankind as
a whole AS LONG AS it is not a requirement to be a laborer to receive a
livable wage."

This is where I am pessimistic. The political will is not there, not too
mention the glacier speeds at which governments move in comparison to
technological innovation.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
_While electronic discovery software has become a billion-dollar business
since the late 1990s, jobs for paralegals and legal-support workers actually
grew faster than the labor force as a whole, adding over 50,000 jobs since
2000, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The number of lawyers
increased by a quarter of a million._

I'm not convinced by this. Maybe paralegal jobs grew more than other jobs, but
what does that say? Weren't other jobs also automated? Why then, if automation
was what fueled the paralegal jobs' growth did it not also fuel other jobs to
grow at the same rate? Might there not have been another reason why paralegal
jobs in particular grew more?

For instance- did that growth in paralegal jobs have nothing to do with the
growth in lawyers' jobs? Could it just be that a quarter million more lawyers
needed at least 50,000 more paralegals? Is it possible 50,000 paralegal jobs
are actually too few for a quarter million lawyers?

Also- just growth over a period on its own doesn't mean anything. Was growth
more than what was expected? What was the trend in the decades before and
after the "late 1990s"?

Or more generally: is that amount of growth really surprising? And why is it
surprising?

------
hyperpallium
"Commoditize your complements"

