
How Will Automation Affect Different U.S. Cities? - SQL2219
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/how-will-automation-affect-different-united-states-cities
======
danesparza
I completely disagree with the article's assertion that 'knowledge professions
like ... lawyers' will be relatively unaffected. 'DoNotPay' (the robot lawyer)
has already helped overturn millions of dollars of parking fines. NPR article
on the subject: [https://www.npr.org/2017/01/16/510096767/robot-lawyer-
makes-...](https://www.npr.org/2017/01/16/510096767/robot-lawyer-makes-the-
case-against-parking-tickets)

Also in reference to manufacturing processes, it appears that Toyota has
learned some hard lessons in automation and is actually moving in the opposite
direction:
[http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/02/toyota%E2%80%99s-se...](http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/02/toyota%E2%80%99s-secret-
weapon-low-cost-car-factories/)

~~~
okreallywtf
Its possible that some mundane examples will be automated, but the law is not
a deterministic code that can simply be interpreted and executed. Automation
may make the job less tedious and might reduce the numbers of lawyers needed
(or more likely, paralegals).

~~~
epalmer
Many entry-level lawyers have historically been involved in document
discovery. AI-based software and having a significant impact on the job market
for freshly minted lawyers. Software now performs ediscovery.

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609556/lawyer-bots-are-
sh...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609556/lawyer-bots-are-shaking-up-
jobs/)

~~~
dgritsko
I've heard this example bandied about every time this topic comes up, but does
this actually mean that those entry-level lawyers would be out of a job? Or
does it simply mean that they would be freed up to perform other tasks?
Wouldn't that be a win for a law firm that's presumably trying to grow and
take on more clients?

~~~
plopz
The current job market for lawyers is kind of messed up. When in law school
you can be applying and accepting job offers clerking or working at law firms
2 years before the start date.

I don't know what even more increased pressure on that job market would do to
it.

~~~
oblio
I'm not sure I understand: do you sign a contract for when you finish your
studies?

Or do you do unpaid work in the hope that when you finish you'll get a job?

~~~
plopz
You accept an offer conditional on passing the bar. But even once you're out
of school, if you want to do a clerkship you have to apply for it 1-2 years in
advance.

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justaman
Millions will wake up with no goals and no structure to their lives because
they have all of their most basic needs satisfied by UBI if the democrats have
their way. Republicans will require mandatory public service to obtain UBI.
Optimists tend to think this means more time for artistic passions and
inventive endeavors. Pessimists think people will spend more time watching Big
Bang Theory. Usually and answer is in the middle.

I will be investing in antidepressants.

~~~
grecy
There are plenty of countries that have very liberal welfare payments. They're
extremely easy to get and anyone that wants to can live on them for years and
years without ever having a job.

You could look at those examples to see how society will be impacted...

Australia is a good place to start your research.

(It's not quite UBI because you have to apply for it and do _something_ to get
it, but it's pretty close)

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Anecdotally, from family members in the medical industry who work with low
income patients, people on welfare (who could otherwise work) don't seem to
have very fulfilling lives. I think it's pretty clear that people need
_something_ to work for or towards in order to find some sort of meaning in
their life.

~~~
projektir
People with welfare are in a very different situation than UBI due to the fact
that the welfare will be lost if they do go work.

You bringing this up at this point in time as if it's relevant almost seems
trollish.

~~~
dsacco
It's definitely a relevant point. If a large group of people who are not
working seem to be predominantly unhappy, that's legitimate information that
may be useful for discussion about universal basic income. You can make a
compelling argument that the _reason_ for that unhappiness is not innate to a
lack of work, but rather due to the particular idiosyncrasies of the
implementation of welfare, but that's not obviously true _a priori._

The commenter seems to have made this observation in good faith. It seems rude
to me that you would insinuate the point is irrelevant and "almost seems
trollish" just because you disagree with it, particularly when you did the
bare minimum to mount a substantive rebuttal. It's true that we shouldn't
conflate the unhappiness associated with welfare with some sort of ennui
induced by a lack of productivity; but that doesn't preclude the point you're
disagreeing with, which could still be true.

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zwieback
I've spent a lot of time building automated assembly lines and I think the
writers of the article (and the underlying research) gets a lot wrong. I doubt
the smallest cities will be prime automation areas since areas with high
degrees of automation require a few highly-skilled robot babysitters that are
unlikely to relocate into the provinces. I think large cities are much more
likely to see high automation rates due to economies of scale and small
citiies will either stay the same or businesses will simply leave.

~~~
lev99
I think you'll find enough highly skilled baby sitters in the provinces living
there for personal reasons. McDonald's shouldn't have any problem finding
someone in a city of 50,000 to watch their burger flipping robots machines.

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SlowBro
There is a presupposition in this article: The automated jobs will leave a
vacuum. That is, routine jobs will be taken away with no other jobs to replace
them.

What if reducing routine jobs frees up minds for higher pursuits? In the same
way that high level programming languages such as Python have increased the
amount of programming jobs, as contrasted with writing in assembly. A quick
search on Dice shows Python jobs outnumber assembly 8 to 1.

This might actually lead to a jobs _explosion_.

~~~
caymanjim
You only have to go back a little over 100 years to a time when agriculture
accounted for over 50% of human labor. Now it's under 2%. Yet unemployment is
still under 5%.

While agriculture likely represents the largest shift in labor during the
1900s, there were a huge number of jobs automated away during that time.
Assembly lines, factories, and automation have been displacing workers since
the dawn of the industrial age.

75 years ago there were basically no information technology jobs, and now it
represents nearly 10% of the workforce, or four times the level of
agricultural employment.

In summary, I agree with you; freeing people from mundane labor will lead to
an explosion of jobs for which people are better suited; jobs which are more
engaging and fulfilling as well.

There are always people who fail to adapt and get left behind, but the rest of
the world moves on. People like to work.

~~~
maxerickson
There's not much to learn from agriculture. People left farms for better jobs
in factories. That's not a story of unemployment and displacement.

If a new source of jobs pops up that can employ 50% of the population at
higher wages than they are currently earning, no one will complain about it
(except maybe for the employers at their current jobs, but they will probably
just buy the proverbial tractor).

~~~
sp332
Factory jobs started out being awful, and workers had to physically fight and
die to get basic protections. Eventually we got a 40-hour work week, less
child labor, etc.

~~~
brewdad
And yet people lined up around the block in hope of getting one. I'm not quite
sure what your point is here.

~~~
sp332
Well it's still better than watching your family starve, sure. Reshaping our
society to accommodate a lot of people who don't have to work (because
machines are doing the work) is going to be a long and painful process.

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crankylinuxuser
No matter how you shake this, we're looking at 60+% additional unemployment
for every city. Some fare much worse. And I remember from my history studies
that the Great Depression was officially around 33% unemployment.

I've listened to the national talking heads and political figures, and nobody
publicly is talking about this. Not the Republicans, and not the Democrats.
However, the Dems seem to have a better idea by bolstering all sorts of
subsidy and welfare programs. Those work well and good for keep individuals
out of poverty, but falls short when working with communities of impoverished.
These end up counting on, and using tax revenues from well-to-do areas. And
these unemployment numbers show that there won't be 'well-to-do' areas.

The WPA was one such way out of mass unemployment. But given how effective
automation is, I question its use this time around, if the current political
atmosphere would even have the stomach to discuss such things.

This is one result from capitalism. Accelerate until we hit the wall. And this
wall, is that we will no longer need "labor" provided by humans. So, what do
we do with the 95% of people that must work? That's the $64,000 question.

My personal plan: I'm learning electronics from the ground up. I'm teaching
myself control systems theory. I'm learning how things are put together -
electronics are very similar to code libraries. You do a function block to do
something, and you chain them together. This means that I'm untraining
specialities, and learning how to analyse and fix quickly. I guess being a
sysad also helps in that. I'm not putting much trust in the national or state
level government. I see more done at the local levels, but without tax
revenue/money, they're up shit's creek as well.

~~~
rubidium
60% is unrealistic. It's still very expensive to make anything as reliable as
a human being if we're talking about anything other than pick-and-place (and
that was really expensive the first time around).

For a business to automate, it must invest substantial resources into the
automation process and product. It must work in an industry where consistency
is the most important quality customers are looking for.

Automation already affected most of what it's going to do in manufacturing.

Given the capital and talent being deployed, automated driving is on the way.
Most other industries are not seeing similar talent and capital being invested
into automation. Long-haul trucking is the industry I have the greatest
concern for. Most of the others (e.g. short order cooks) will be fine for
quite some time.

~~~
phil21
I have to admit I disagree strongly. How could you have this opinion and be in
the workforce over the past 20 years? Automation isn't one day a human-looking
robot shows up and does 100% of your job better than you did it and now you're
unemployed.

Automation is we got a new machine in the shop that increased throughput, and
we never replaced Betsy and George when they quit. It's getting that new
cashier system that is idiot-proof and has pictures to tap of dollar bills vs.
a keyboard or requiring any sort of math skills. It's redesigning the
bathrooms to make cleaning take 30% of the previous time using basic
automation and techniques.

It's a long slow reduction and dumbing down of the workforce that won't happen
overnight, but has already been happening and on an accelerating pace for
20-30 years or so now.

Compare the skills needed to run a short-order cooking station 30 years ago to
today - it's not even comparable. We would call such a position skilled or
semi-skilled this day in age, as the average kid off the street couldn't be up
and running in 6 hours of training. It would take months to replace that
worker with someone in-kind, where now your labor pool for such jobs is
basically "anyone who can show up on-time and sober" which of course pays
considerably less.

I see automation as the long slow destruction of semi-skilled labor. You
either are effectively a cheap very flexible human robot, or you get paid well
in a highly skilled position. The middle is being hallowed out rapidly.

~~~
chrisweekly
hollowed (emptied) not hallowed (sacred)

------
bytematic
I have always wondered how automation will adapt to things like ice on
roads/parking lots/equipment, or salt everywhere like in Minnesota/Wisconsin.
Is this being considered in sunny California/Texas?

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dmritard96
I would love to see a breakdown by country. Given the endless rhetoric around
manufacturing reshoring/offshoring/etc., it would be great to see if thats
even something we should care about given how much automation already exists
and how much more is about to come online. Owning the robots and supply chain
will obviously have some value, but politically speaking, the value is often
measured in jobs which seems like its minimally shortsighted if not downright
disingenuous.

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lucasnichele
There is a lot of confusion between "automation" and "artificial
intelligence", I believe that automation facilitates, and modifies the
professions in the short term. AI is something that should be discussed in a
broader sense.

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ajmurmann
I used to believe that automation will lead to greater unemployment. Now I
think that two things happen: goods get cheaper which lowers the minimum
amount someone needs to earn for a job to be acceptable. People who still have
a great job have more spending our. This unlocks new jobs that previously
nobody would have paid for and nobody would have accepted. But both maximum
price somebody would pay went up and minimum price someone wants to perform
went down. Recent examples are all these delivery services and obviously Lyft
and Uber, although the car services are a little more complicated since there
always were taxis.

~~~
lev99
I think there are three forces discussed here. Automation (removing work).
Decreased cost good (reduced labor costs). Increased wealth (those with it
spend more on goods and services).

Automation's effects on the economy larger depends on the pace it is achieved.
If someone released a box that replaces truck driver's tomorrow and sells it
for $1000 then there will be huge disruption. If drivers are replaced with
automation slowly over 30 years the impact will be less because the rest of
the economy will have time to absorb the impact.

Increased wealth is expanding the service industry, with petcare being a prime
example. This will create more jobs, but those jobs are both at risk of being
automated and might not be enough to replace automation.

Decreased good costs works for some things like toothbrushes and iphones, but
they don't work so well for limited resources like gold jewelry or real-
estate. It might improve quality of life in some ways, but it cannot help with
everything.

------
gregpilling
from the article: "In a small town, there are likely a few small restaurants
run by a few people who do many things—cook, clean, manage the books, etc.
“Some of these tasks are easily enough defined to soon be automatable,” Youn
says.

By contrast, in a larger city there will likely be some much larger
restaurants that require more specialized knowledge and skills—perhaps a
marketing team, or a lawyer who specializes in the restaurant industry—that
cannot be easily automated."

I have a small factory, we use a fair bit of automation. I disagree with the
above quote - I think that the larger restaurant will be more likely to
automate first, and arguably the franchise restaurant model is automated
marketing and business management. The larger places will go full robot in the
kitchen sooner, the smaller places will continue to have one person wearing
many hats for a long time. Larger places have more budget, can afford more
automation, and the smaller places would have a harder time justifying a
burger cooking robot if it would only be in use a small fraction of the time.

My welding robots are super fast. I have two so that I can reduce setup and
changeover time. The robots are so fast, the main headache is feeding them
enough jobs - selling the work. The setup and changeover is very slow. I spend
5-10 hours getting a new jig built, programmed and tuned up.

This setup time is never discussed in the media. Sure the robot will be
amazing and fast and super productive - once you spent 10 hours programming it
to do so. If the task is a 'once-only' and it only takes an hour, who in their
right mind would automate that? This setup time will be the biggest impediment
- humans are pretty quickly adapted, autonomous fleshy robots, that outperform
the best automation when it comes to setup time.

I love automation. I have 6 automated machines, and a couple 3D printers, that
you can push a button and go get a coffee, and there is the part when its
done. Sometimes one button push can make a couple thousand dollars in products
- that is a great feeling! But the setup time is massive, and this is the
greater expense over the cost of the machine.

Its like an algebra equation. y=ax+b where 'a' is the setup time, and 'b' is
the time for one unit.

With a human welding a simple part, 'a' would be 5 minutes, and 'b' would be 5
minutes.

With a robot welding cell like a Panasonic PA-750, the 'a' would be 500
minutes, and the 'b' would be 2 minutes.

If you need 100 of them, no sense in turning on the robot. If you need 10,000
of them, the robot welding cell will be done in 20,500 minutes instead of
50,005 minutes for the human welder. My Panasonic costs $2284 a month for 60
months on a lease, $1 to purchase at the end. The human costs $1000 per week
in perpetuity, with increasing costs due to inflation if nothing else. The
robot is half the hourly, and its paid for in 5 years. The human is never paid
for, it always needs compensation. In this example, the human takes 500 hours
more to do the task, and that is $12,500 more in wages over the robot. My 7
year old son can run (not program) the welding robot and make parts, which he
does for Pokemon money on the weekend.

So where does that leave the human? Doing small runs! Which is better for the
human anyway! Welding the same small part for weeks at a time makes you a
little crazy. Its like watching the same GIF every 5 minutes for weeks at a
time. Welding the same part every 5 minutes for 2-4 hours is quite doable, can
be fun to get in the groove. I think in the future that production runs will
become smaller as CNC machines proliferate. Everyone will want something
custom, which is what humans are best at. High volume will be robot welded,
because its boring and machines do it faster and better.

I manufacture in America. Using automation, I am directly cost competitive
with China and India in my core products that we have been making (and
optimizing manufacturing) for 14 years. Its 1/4 steel plate mostly, and our
cost to build is directly in line with the best quotes from Asia. Robot
welders are cheaper than any welder in Asia. We loose on thinner stuff, like
16 gauge and lower, and we lose on items that need a lot of hand work. But we
are right there for heavier items. We did a large welding job for Chinese
factory last year that was for the US market. Our price was the same, but
shipping was less since the product was already here. We got the deal over
their own factory. 28,000 units.

TL;DR - things are better for humans than these articles would have you
believe.

~~~
jimmy1
And you are underestimating the crowd that will prefer to buy "human made" and
not "cheap automated robot crap"

Not saying they will be right or wrong, but that's the current dichotomy with
US Made / Non US made goods.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
There will of course be plenty of hold-outs, but most "robot made" will
actually be better than human-made.

~~~
jimmy1
Sure, for most things. I am finding this not to be the case with things like
furniture, clothing, small finer metalworks that require something like a
blacksmith, food, soap, etc.

~~~
sokoloff
Human made soap is better?

~~~
megaman22
For the purposes of being a Veblen good, yes.

------
geebee
Looks like software application development is listed as having a relatively
high automation "risk", around 21%. Anyone know how this was calculated.
Doesn't have to be a link for this particular site, just some good reading
material.

My initial reaction was that this number is hard to nail down because on
reflection, so much of what I do gets automated. That's the nature of
software. When I started programming for money in the late 90s, I still
managed memory. That's automated now through garbage collection (for me). I
also used to do a lot of direct network and socket programming, also automated
away. I managed my own database connection and pooling. JDBC came along and
abstracted that away, but a decade later, I heard someone who used an ORM say
he wouldn't want to write all that "low level" jdbc code ;) I guess you're
getting old when the high level leaky abstraction of your youth becomes the
low level code for a new generation of programmers.

My whole career has been one long progression of getting automated away, by
this perspective. I remember when I proposed getting a web server up and
running for a project in college, and a professor remarked on what I was
doing. There was a time, he recalled, when doing a "spreadsheet" was fairly
advanced and took some serious technical chops. The same would happen to web
servers - but for the few years then they required specialized skill and had a
big impact on business, this knowledge would be very valuable. The moment
would pass, but something new would come up, and that would create all kinds
of new apps that require an app developer.

To me, the moment when nothing new comes up - ie., when there is no new moment
for human app developers, all software development is now automated - that is
the moment when we _replaced_ by automation. I wonder if that's what this
article is talking about? If that's the case, 20% might seem high, though not
out of the question. But by a more general definition, the one I discussed
above, I'd ay the odds that my current skillset will be automated away is
roughly 100%. I want to be clear I'm not (necessarily) talking about churn,
I'm talking about new breakthroughs that fundamentally change the job. That
kind of change I don't mind at all, I enjoy it, it's probably why I'm in this
field. Churn, on the other hand, is what makes me want to quit.

I'm rambling on here, but it occurs to me that software development probably
isn't that unusual. It's the jobs that don't change as much that are unusual.
Lawyers, for instance, have certainly changed over the years, but we expect
people to still be lawyers in 100 years. How many horse and buggy drivers
expect that job to still be around? How many lathe operators or truck drivers
expect this?

I'm thinking, maybe the best metric isn't the odds that a particular job will
be automated, since for many (most?) jobs, that's pretty much 100%. The
question is, what are the odds that a job will be automated with no path to
the next thing. That's the fundamental transformation going on here. And yeah,
it actually is happening. A horse and buggy driver can become a bus driver,
but what happens when the concept of a drive goes away completely? Will
anything emerge?

Another aspect of automation I'm interested in is the complete bindside.
Music, I think, was one of the interesting automation stories of the last 100+
years. There were various attempts to replicated the human mechanical process
of playing an instrument, and they all appeared very unlikely to do much
replacement. Yeah, piano rolls made an appearance, and you could try this I
suppose by hooking up some contraption to make a flute play.

But what happened instead was that it turned out you can actually store music
physically in various materials and play it back. Music went from 100% live to
less than 1% live in about 50 years. But we didn't really automate music, we
replaced it with a similar product.

My guess is that this will be the story with software development. It seems
absurd to me that this could happen through automation, but that's because I'm
locked into one way of thinking about it. Kind of like trying to imagine how a
crankshaft could power a bunch of strings tied to a bow and some pegs to try
to recreate the physical process of playing a violin. It won't happen like
that. Something utterly mind blowing, like storing music in grooves of
different depth in vinyl, of all things, utterly unanticipated. Yeah, that's
generally how this massive shifts happen.

~~~
fapjacks
Yes, I'm right there with you, and the cool part about our jobs being
automated away -- besides not having to write all that boilerplate -- is that
when the automation takes a steaming shit, we get to be heroes. I'm fine with
this. I guess until it doesn't matter anymore, but then I suppose by that
time, it won't matter for a whole lot of people, and we'll have something
worked out.

------
caymanjim
I find it bizarre that they single out fishing as a job that's likely to be
automated away. I don't see this happening any time soon. Fishing crews are
already pretty streamlined, and many things on fishing ships are mechanized. I
can see automation replacing more of the post-catch processing on giant
factory ships, but I don't see robots costing many other fishing jobs in the
near future.

~~~
TomMarius
Could you elaborate more? From my very amateur point of view, fishing seems
like something that could be completely automated pretty easily, but it seems
like I'm not seeing the complexity.

~~~
zanny
A large part of it is liability. In theory you could just send a self-driving
boat out with a giant net to scoop up a few tons of marine life to bring back
to shore and stuff in a processing plant. Or even better maybe make a self-
sufficient platform that uses current to turn turbines and just scoops up
fish, sorts them, and puts them on ice for cargo carriers to come by and pick
up.

The problem is the same one as self driving cars on a more massive scale -
accountability. When you have human bodies at every step of the process you
have someone to blame if you "accidentally" kill a protected species, overrun
your quotas, put tainted meat in the market, etc - if everything is operating
on its own you get the same situation where self driving car operators are
going to try to blame the software engineers if something goes wrong, while
the company gets to take the fallout.

And the fines on illegal fishing are _actually_ legitimate compared to the
token paltry fines in other industries (depending on the country, of course).

The economics are completely on automations side here, you could get 97% good
fish for a tenth the price with some substantial up front investments today.
But that 3% false positive / sorting error case with the inability to blame
line workers kills the business.

