
How many jobs do robots really replace? - jonbaer
http://news.mit.edu/2020/how-many-jobs-robots-replace-0504
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JoeAltmaier
Is automation happening in the USA? Yes, at breakneck speed the last 15 years.
My niece is an automation engineer (as is her husband). She's had all the work
she could handle since graduating 8 years ago. Been all over the country but
mostly in lonely cornfields far from big cities, changing some factory over to
total automation at the cost of every job in whatever small town is nearby.

During lockdown, it's been totally hectic. Everybody wants to go full speed
ahead on automation.

You want a guaranteed job and interesting work? Do the automation engineer
thing. Some physics, some materials science, some computers, some pneumatics
and electronics, a lot of controls, a little bit of everything.

Her husband is not in batch processing; he's in continuous processing. Read
that: oil refineries. He's been totally overbooked shutting down lines that
haven't shut down since they were built. Sometime soon he'll go back and start
them all up again. But it takes 2-4 weeks to start just one. Stage by stage,
bringing up pressure and temperature and monitoring for problems, thru 100 of
stages. Nothing is going to come back quickly after this is over.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
I spent the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine wondering what I could do now
that I couldn't do before. Instead of focusing on the negative, what
opportunities could come out of this?

Then I realized it was already happening, but not obvious. The big redesign of
an automation product for a customer at the day job? Going full bore when we
expected that COVID would slow it down. They're breathing down our neck asking
when it'll be done.

My side project work that helps with machine tool retrofit? Same thing: my
customer says by the time I'm done with the latest design change and have
prototypes ready, they'll have sold more systems already.

I'm counting my blessings, but this is not what I expected :-)

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partingshots
> The study does suggest, however, that robots have a direct influence on
> income inequality. The manufacturing jobs they replace come from parts of
> the workforce without many other good employment options; as a result, there
> is a direct connection between automation in robot-using industries and
> sagging incomes among blue-collar workers.

Jobs will never fully disappear, but at some point, the vast majority of the
human race will be classed out of work. Net wealth will continue to increase
but will be increasingly concentrated into a smaller group of people (i.e. the
people who own the automation and the people with PhDs who make the
automation). I believe at a certain point, some kind of universal basic income
will become necessary to support the people that will fall outside this small
group.

~~~
valuearb
Automation eliminated 90% of farm jobs over the last 200 years, and the
American middle class became immensely wealthier directly because of this.

Automation creates better jobs and it’s benefits lifts up everyone over time.

~~~
aiscapehumanity
Contrasting 200 years with the 4th industrial revolution(s) seems erroneous.

~~~
valuearb
It’s not 200 years, it’s the entire history of the human race. Automation
produces wealthier societies by improving their productivity.

Every single time automation has done this it’s eliminated jobs, yet replaced
them with better ones. If you demonstrated the personal computer with a
spreadsheet to bankers and accountants in the late 70s, they could easily see
the jobs that these terrible new automation tools would destroy, but few could
predict the jobs they’d create.

When plows, combines, tractors came to farming, each time it was easy to see
what jobs were no longer necessary. But it was impossible to know what jobs
would be created. Each of these tools made food cheaper and more plentiful,
freeing more disposable income to be spent on new products and inventions that
created better jobs than the ones we lost.

It’s arrogant to think that after this has happened thousands of times, that
our time is any different. Or to pretend that the clarity we see the jobs we
will lose to robots is something new, and that our inability to forsee new
jobs to replace them somehow means that this time there won’t be any. We’ve
never been able to foresee them but they always will come.

If robots make things cheaper and better, those savings will create new
products, markets and jobs. And if they don’t, robots won’t steal anyone’s
job.

~~~
partingshots
First, our muscles were replaced. But that was alright because we could still
use our minds.

What happens though when our minds become obsolete as well? There’s nothing
left to transition to.

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at-fates-hands
This feels like the second technological revolution. I remember my Dad in the
1970's working with some of the largest companies to update all their old
analog stuff with the new shiny computer databases. The stories he told me for
years just blew my mind.

I figure the 70-90's were the first wave, this is easily going to be the
second wave. It will have all the disruptions and human job loss, frantic
movement of people to other industries and a ton of other misery just as the
first one did.

Full disclosure: I'm also in automation. I'm currently doing RPA (Robotic
Process Automation) development and our team is swamped with requests from
teams who are trying to cut the fat out of their departments and reduce head
count to try and save the company billions over the next five years.

------
sbuccini
I'd recommend looking into Acemoglu's full body of work[0], the papers are
quite readable and investigate some hypothesis that others had only spoke
about in generalities, including the impacts of demographic shifts,
automation, regulatory impact, and more.

[0]
[https://economics.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/paper](https://economics.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/paper)

