
Experts say demographic shifts, not AI, create the biggest challenges for work - gyre007
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/misplaced-fear-job-stealing-robots
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Liquix
Is quality of life / general happiness considered when we talk about how many
jobs there are in the service industry? I know a few people who have been
steadily employed in such industries but are unhappy and don't see any way
out.

Imagine a society with two classes - an upper class creating & sustaining
'services' like horse-walking or tinder coaching, a lower class forced to
choose between unemployment and being the other class's glorified servants.

We need to be looking at ways to level the playing field - provide opportunity
and education to those who were not fortunate enough to be born into it.
Celebrating the stability of jobs which make people feel like second class
citizens feels like shrinking away from the problem.

~~~
deogeo
> glorified servants.

I think they're the opposite of glorified. A servant is someone you personally
know, that your children may grow attached to, that, ideally, you feel some
mutual obligation towards. Workers in the gig economy are faceless,
replaceable cogs.

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coralreef
Some people see servants as faceless, replaceable cogs.

Abuse of servants happens every day all over the world.

~~~
deogeo
And the gig economy marketplaces expands that 'some' to 'all', since it's
near-impossible to find out what's happening with any one gig worker once your
brief interaction with them is over. Thanks to all that smart tech that
automatically matches buyers to sellers, they probably don't even have a
manager to notice they got sick.

The more you reduce human contact and any chance of forming a relationship,
the more cog-like workers will be treated. And reducing human contact in the
name of efficiency is exactly what all those gig economy services do.

Just because some servants are already abused, doesn't mean gig economy won't
make it _worse_.

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owens99
This argument is old, and pretty lazy.

Basically, they are saying that AI both creates and destroys jobs. Well no
shit.

The problem is, the average truck driver isn't going to retrain and relocate
to San Francisco. He will just be out of a job.

~~~
gabbygab
I agree. And to add to your point, we are bombarded with the demographic
problem message every day. So what's the solution from these experts? Are we
supposed to continuously grow the population forever? I've read our social
welfare programs to private industry are being threatened by demographics
change and the solution is more people. Okay, then what? What happens in a
generation? We are back to the same demographic problem. Is it really a
solution if you are just pushing the problem one generation into the future?

Seems like the problem isn't with demographics but the economic system if the
problem is perpetual and impossible to correct.

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Latteland
Yes, it seems stunningly obvious that we aren't creating new jobs that pay a
reasonable living wage fast enough, for a long time. AI (and plain old
automation) accelerates that even more. So where are those new jobs coming
from? There's no easy new job for the truck driver that pays as well, but even
for the young person who is potentially easier to train for a new field, we
keep producing more with less human effort, the general outlook is poor, we
won't have as many jobs.

It seems to be qualitatively different than when people left farms to go to
factories, or factory jobs to office jobs.

(edit: typo, added last sentence)

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xster
I feel like there's strawmanning going on too. I don't know of any 'AI
alarmists' that are saying gardening and hospitality staff are going to be
replaced anytime soon. What are being discussed are radiologists, financial
analysts, call center staff etc.

~~~
britch
There's a great interview with Ellen Shell about this exact thing[0].

The argument is obvious in retrospect but, call me a dummy, I hadn't
considered it until I heard it.

The act of automating is expensive, regardless of the work involved. You want
a big return on investment. so You're going to automate the expensive, high-
skill jobs first and work your way down. Radiologists, and financial analysts
are expensive so we automate away their jobs.

If you want a decent paying job for the foreseeable future, become a plumber.

[0] [https://www.recode.net/2019/1/28/18199981/ellen-shell-job-
au...](https://www.recode.net/2019/1/28/18199981/ellen-shell-job-automation-
work-labor-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast-interview-transcript)

~~~
areoform
You might enjoy a talk that I gave on this very topic in early 2018;
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/5j9hofavm58d2mi/Gorillas%20don%27t...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/5j9hofavm58d2mi/Gorillas%20don%27t%20play%20go%20%5Banon%5D.pdf?dl=0)

The thesis was that everyone keeps getting automation wrong, and why the
coming revolution will be far more different than what has come before. I even
tried to extrapolate and show from the history of AI, just how wrong we've
gotten it before and the few things that we keep on systemically
underestimating.

Hope you enjoy this!

~~~
xster
I agree more with your slides than the OP article.

That Siri slide also just gave me PTSD.

~~~
areoform
Do you think I should publish it somewhere?

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ThomPete
I am breaking it down like this:

Technology creates new jobs but reduces the number of people and processes
needed to do the same job.

Technology creates new value but reduces the value of the contribution humans
make.

Technology creates new markets but shrinks the amount winners in those markets

Technology compresses, through digitalization, the number of steps involved in
delivering products. (Music and movie industry to name two examples)

Technology increases your technical advantages but forces other competitors to
do the same thus reducing the advantage of the individual until you own most
of the market.

Globalization creates bigger markets and temporarily offsets the need for
technology to provide a more cost-effective competitive advantage.

Outsourcing is the step before automation.

Technology keeps improving while humans don't.

The value added by the individual in a job function is mostly only a fraction
of what the human is capable of doing.

Technology is really good at solving these simple tasks and are becoming
better and better.

Ironically a cleaning lady will be out of a job much later than a radiologist
is.

The jobs that are left for humans are low-value jobs and will be pushed down
even more as more and more humans become available to the job market because
technology renders them useless in other situations.

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Camillo
It's really pretty simple. "The jobs" didn't go to robots, they went to humans
in China. Blaming automation is just a way to sweep under the rug the results
of the last 20 years of American trade policy.

Even if all those jobs eventually get automated, at this point they will be
done by robots in China, not in America. It's still a big loss for the US.

~~~
dgzl
What are the biggest reasons companies send jobs overseas? It has always been
my impression that companies do this because regulations in the US are too
strict, and minimum wage is too high to support certain work.

~~~
zwkrt
Saying that something moves to China because minimum wage is too high has
always been an interesting topic for me. With a positive spin this argument
becomes "the American government has set a standard of living which is too
high to allow such manufacturing processes or subjective abuse of labor".
Reducing regulations or lowering minimum wage would verly likely not result in
a better standard of living, even though it would be most economically
efficient for everyone to be working for peanuts 60hr/week.

It seems to me that it is part of the governments job to say "yes this is
economically feasible, but not socially acceptable." Outsourcing breaks this
dynamic by introducing moral hazard--we can have our cake and eat it too. I
think if there were a minimum global standard of living, most cheap plastic
shit just wouldn't get made.

~~~
dgzl
Brilliant comment, I've had this understand for a while myself. We can
legislate ourselves to a higher standard of working/living, but the work then
becomes a premium and will support fewer people, as outsourcing occurs, to
automation and other workforce that doesn't demand such benefits.

What does that make the person who demands a better working condition for
themselves, but is fine that a percentage of work is outsourced to a
sweatshop?

~~~
drak0n1c
Labor and wage regulations economically function akin to a "carbon tax" on
labor. In addition to encouraging outsourcing, they are encouraging the early
adoption of technological alternatives (robots/AI) that face no such
restrictions.

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hekhtiari
The focus on "AI" and its impact on labour markets is an important one, but
definitely more "trendy" than others which may be why it tends to outshine the
rest (like demographic change) - what it IS doing is sparking a great
conversation though about the "navigation problem" that plagues certain
demographics in accessing opportunity when confronted with rapid change
(regardless of the source).

Echoing Autor's comments: "It’s a great time to be young and educated. But
there’s no clear land of opportunity” for adults who haven’t been to
college..."

We live in a world with almost infinite amounts of information, yet how we
process and use that information (including labour market information) will be
our next challenge. And understanding labour market shifts in the context of
multiple forces AND their interactions (i.e. how does a job become automated
in practice IN the context of a higher rate of retirement; what does a person
actually need to perform well in a job, etc.) will require some novel
innovation that I think data + AI can actually help us solve.

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dicroce
yes, yes, the classical economists reaction to AI is to simply consider it
equivalent to the machines of the past that replaced human labor.... in the
past workers may have had to find new work but since machines need operators
eventually everyone found a place... the problem is that AI doesn't replace
labor, it replaces operators.

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ilaksh
People are missing the point of the article which is that the number of young
people who are willing and able to do the service jobs is a limiting number.

I think that demographics will play a huge part for a decade or two. There are
two breakthroughs that I anticipate will happen and will change things.

The first thing we need is a really efficient and powerful artificial muscle
combined with truly biomimetic mobility. This is the type of thing that needs
to be invented to get humanoid robots that are truly dexterous and fast.

Along the same lines we need more general purpose AI to go in those new
robots. It doesn't actually need to be fully human-level AGI in terms of
generality or capability. It just needs to be more general purpose than
current systems and be integrated into the fast dexterous robots.

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polskibus
I'd love to know how are those experts betting on their predictions ? Do they
trust their guts enough to bet, by going long or short ? What is a good bet if
you believe what they say? Go long robotics companies? Or maybe there's
something less obvious ?

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JTbane
Seems like every economist is saying that we need more people working more
jobs to support the rapidly growing cohort of retirees- yet a massive housing
crisis still continues in most major cities.

The future ain't looking bright.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
The housing crisis is _how_ we convince more people to work more jobs for the
benefit of retirees. The cash flows towards rent winds up in the pockets of
real estate owners, and the cash flow from mortgage payments winds up in
Agency bonds largely owned by retirees.

