
More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production - drtillberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-more-robots-fewer-jobs/
======
ideonexus
While the scope of the article is confined to manufacturing, which impacts
less-specialized labor, I felt a sense of dread reading it for what it means
for people losing their jobs to software. Fresh out of college in the late
1990s, one of my first "high tech" jobs was manually building HTML pages for
job listings, copying-and-pasting advertisements from word documents all day
long. One day, I recommended the company contract a programmer-friend of mine
to automate the process and two weeks later I was looking for work--my job
replaced by a script that ran a few minutes every morning.

Over the years I've watched various professions devalued to search engines and
spreadsheets, from paralegals to accountants. I don't think it's a bad thing.
It's progress and it's freeing up time. The bad part is that we live in a
society with an antiquated work-ethic, where your value is measured in capital
and the number of hours you put in each week at your job. Automation isn't the
problem, living is a culture incapable of valuing leisure time is what needs
to change.

~~~
s73ver
"Over the years I've watched various professions devalued to search engines
and spreadsheets, from paralegals to accountants. I don't think it's a bad
thing. It's progress and it's freeing up time."

I absolutely despise this argument, because it usually forgets that you can
have all the time in the world, and it won't matter if you can't pay your rent
or buy food.

~~~
phkahler
>> I absolutely despise this argument, because it usually forgets that you can
have all the time in the world, and it won't matter if you can't pay your rent
or buy food.

Why should one be forced to pay rent or buy food? Just try to live
independently in the US, it's not possible. If you want to buy land and grow
your own food, the first thing to notice is that property taxes are actually a
rent paid to the state. In many areas you're forced to hook up to the city
water/sewer system, which is another form of rent.

People keep bringing up "basic income" which I think is crap. How about we try
to reduce the cost of existence instead, so people can get off the economic
treadmill? Then we can work up to our level of comfort rather than have people
at the bottom struggle to survive. Everyone would be happier except those who
strive to exploit the labor of others.

I do not advocate welfare with this, just elimination of as much financial
pressure as possible. Eliminating rents is the first step IMHO. This includes
phasing out mortgages, which are rents on money that only serve to inflate
home prices thereby increasing demand for loans. On this point I am not
totally convinced, but I think gradually reducing the percent of sale price
than can be borrowed would be a start. I don't know if lowering that to zero
is actually optimal, but I suspect 50 percent would be better than where we
are today.

~~~
s73ver
"Why should one be forced to pay rent or buy food?"

Well, you're not. You don't have to exist. I kinda like existing, though.

Yes, yes, utopian society and all that. It's the way things exist now, and
while it can be fun to imagine a world without it, it's not entirely practical
when trying to figure out a problem for those displaced from automation.

"I do not advocate welfare with this, just elimination of as much financial
pressure as possible. Eliminating rents is the first step IMHO. This includes
phasing out mortgages, which are rents on money that only serve to inflate
home prices thereby increasing demand for loans. On this point I am not
totally convinced, but I think gradually reducing the percent of sale price
than can be borrowed would be a start. I don't know if lowering that to zero
is actually optimal, but I suspect 50 percent would be better than where we
are today."

So nobody but the uber wealthy can buy houses? And how do you eliminate the
rent when I live in an apartment?

~~~
phkahler
>> So nobody but the uber wealthy can buy houses?

Adjust that so nobody but the wealthy can afford to build a NEW house. We
already have it that the poor generally buy used cars (or buy with bad deals,
negative equity etc...). If there were no loans then there would probably be
an eventual housing shortage, but we currently have people over extending
themselves just to get in the game.

As housing prices fall, your rent will too. But I'm in favor of doing as much
as possible to eliminate rentals as well.

As an example, look at the housing bubble forming in the bay area. If people
had to put down 50 percent of the purchase price, they would not be able to
afford todays prices and the prices would come down.

~~~
s73ver
"Adjust that so nobody but the wealthy can afford to build a NEW house. We
already have it that the poor generally buy used cars (or buy with bad deals,
negative equity etc...). If there were no loans then there would probably be
an eventual housing shortage, but we currently have people over extending
themselves just to get in the game."

Housing shortages tend to RAISE prices, not lower them. And no, I'm not going
to adjust my statement, as it reflects current reality. You adjust your
response.

"As housing prices fall, your rent will too."

There's not much to indicate this would be true.

"But I'm in favor of doing as much as possible to eliminate rentals as well."

So while I'm busy not being able to buy a house, where do I live?

"As an example, look at the housing bubble forming in the bay area. If people
had to put down 50 percent of the purchase price, they would not be able to
afford todays prices and the prices would come down."

That's assuming there aren't people buying those houses.

------
60654
Glad to see they're framing as a capital/labor question, because there are
additional important considerations about robots replacing labor, in addition
to increased productivity:

1\. Robots are capital, and therefore investment, while labor is a pure
expense. Capital will generate income that can be reinvested back into more
capital etc, generating more wealth for the owner, and they can sell those
robots later to turn that investment liquid.

But labor is purely an expense, and the money that a manufacturer pays to
employees is wealth that they've transferred elsewhere, it doesn't compound,
and it can't be owned and controlled like capital can.

2\. In terms of taxation, governments in Europe and US tend to: 1. Tax labor
relatively heavily (income taxes), 2. Tax capital gains relatively lightly,
and 3. Do _not_ tax capital ownership as such. So it's rational for capital
owners to try to replace labor with capital if it can perform the same tasks -
with tragic effects for labor.

Following Piketty, it seems to make sense to introduce a small but nonzero tax
on the ownership of capital (not just on capital gains at the time of a sale)
to offset these changes.

~~~
gech
>labor is purely an expense

Unless you expand the view and see that an employee that gets paid has money
to participate in the economy and buy your goods.

Economics is a sham science.

~~~
paulpauper
The savings from automation and outsourcing far exceeds what Apple (a common
example) could earn from the increased purchasing power from US Apple
employees if some of those employees had slightly more money to buy Apple
products. The odds of employees taking their increased wages and ONLY buying
your goods, is slim, and this logic does not work for companies such as Boeing
, that make products that no possible employee could ever afford.

~~~
TimJYoung
You have to keep going and not stop at the first level (for example, who buys
airline tickets ?). What you'll find is that, eventually, it all comes back to
consumer demand.

~~~
bryondowd
But the people making decisions at any one company can't go beyond that level
for their decision-making. While it would be beneficial to the company if
consumers in general had more spending power, each company's decisions can
only make a negligible influence on that, and would in fact just be providing
a tiny subsidy that the rest of the market would likely eat up without
returning the favor. Most owners and shareholders and such wouldn't stand for
that, and whatever few eccentrics who would, wouldn't reach the critical mass
necessary for it to benefit anyone much. I don't know of any way to resolve
that short of government intervention or massive employee unionization, which
are both rather far-fetched in the current environment, but perhaps will
become more plausible as more people get their jobs automated.

~~~
TimJYoung
Yes, it is absolutely a problem along the same lines as the Prisoner's
dilemma:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma)

And yes, I agree, we're going to need a countervailing market mechanism to
stop it from proceeding to its logical conclusion: a persistent, severe
recession. Whatever the mechanism, it's going to need to be dynamic and
adaptable, or it's "dead on arrival" as a solution.

------
Animats
There's a 90-year old book on this, "Chapters on machinery and labor".[1] This
analyzes three industries drastically changed by new machinery - printing,
glass bottle making, and stone planing.

\- Printing was the "good case". Before the Linotype, typesetting was a very
slow process, with people picking type slugs from a case one letter at a time.
The Linotype had a keyboard and ran as fast as the operator could type. This
made shorter-run print jobs and thicker newspapers practical. Printing, and
employment in the printing trades increased substantially.

\- Glass bottle making was the "production way up, wages down" case. Bottle
making by hand glassblowing required a skilled team of about six people
working in close coordination, manipulating molten glass and molds. It took
years to get good at this. Bottles were expensive. Once an automatic bottle
making machine was developed, it took a semi-skilled machine tender to feed
the machine and take the bottles away. The skilled trade was destroyed. Bottle
cost went down, production went up, and wages went down.

\- Stone planing was the "almost everybody gets fired" case. Brick houses used
to have stone lintels over doors and windows. These were chiseled flat by
people with big hammers, big chisels, and big muscles. Then a machine for
planing stone flat was developed. This was much faster and cheaper. But the
size of the stone lintel market was determined by the rate of house
construction, and cheaper lintels didn't affect that much. So almost all
workers lost their jobs.

Those are still the ways automation plays out.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Chapters-Machinery-Labor-George-
Barne...](https://www.amazon.com/Chapters-Machinery-Labor-George-
Barnett/dp/067473064X)

------
treyfitty
The stark job loss by industry infographic is quite somber, across those
manufacturing industries. Everyone likes to quip "Relevance: gotta retrain to
remain" when it comes to automation, but people fail to realize the implicit
costs of doing so at an individual level (the time commitment and energy
required to face this anxiety all the time).

The rate of "innovation" has grown so fast, that we may very well be at a
place where your retraining itself may not be relevant by the time you are
finished being retrained.

Robots are meant to serve one purpose- cost reduction. It was the case that
Robots replaced monotonous tasks, but it just seems like that inchoate stage
in robotics is over. Software seems to be aimed directly at doing much more
than that- It's not a coincidence that Artificial Intelligence and Machine
Learning are both trendy right now and revolve around "thought" in their
respective monikers. Once these data scientist achieve their goals... what's
next? Won't they be replaced by metarobots too? A traditional supply and
demand framework doesn't apply here where retraining to meet the demand is the
solution to one's labor woes- it just defers the problem until the next
"retraining."

I don't have a solution, but we should remain vigilantly aware what the end
goal in Robotics is: Providing capitalists with more ways to accumulate
capital, at the expense of our labor.

~~~
VLM
"at an individual level"

And the irrelevance at the large scale.

General life advice is not to mix micro-economic problems and solutions with
macro-economic problems and solutions.

Obviously on a micro-individual layer, if the bottom 90% are getting fired,
getting yourself into the top 10% cognitive elite is quite useful. Its also
completely useless as macro-economic societal level advice, there's no point
telling the bottom 90% getting fired that they should all work harder to be
one of the 1 in 10 still employed.

This is aside from the problem of most of the people IRL giving advice to
retrain just coincidentally happen to have a financial interest in signing up
as many retrainers as possible, or in calming the masses into not rolling the
guillotine out yet because of those fantastic retraining benefits. On a large
scale as the job cognitive requirements increase over time, eventually you'll
reach a limit where most of the community doesn't have the cognitive power to
determine who's a retraining scammer and who's legit at which point the
confidence-job scam collapses. Arguably we're pretty close to that with higher
education right now, we are at the point now of investing trillions of loans
and a tenth of young peoples productive lives into an end result of poverty
stricken baristas, waiters, and NEETs, which can only go on so long before the
plug is pulled on the system. What do I as a taxpayer get out of spending my
tax dollars so my waitress was able to obtain her unusable education degree?
It certainly doesn't make her a better waitress.

~~~
treyfitty
> What do I as a taxpayer get out of spending my tax dollars so my waitress
> was able to obtain her unusable education degree? It certainly doesn't make
> her a better waitress

Eh... Taxes are a tricky subject. I think it's unproductive to make arguments
based on what is owed to you in return for your contribution to taxes. Sure,
our taxes pay for infrastructure, and we have an expectation for that
infrastructure to work properly. But, when you extend it to matters such as
"paying for someone else's education" and expecting something in return, it
just doesn't sound "right."

No one owes you anything, even if an indiscernible amount of that was funding
that person's education. Taxes are a social construct allowing our elected
officials to allocate resources to what's needed.

So, the problem isn't so much that your taxes aren't being utilized to give
you something in return (the frivolous education of your barista), but the
underlying problem is the excessive funding to education that exacerbates all
the waste to happen.

------
paulpauper
Detroit lost so many jobs, not because of robots, but due to the decline of
the domestic auto manufacturing industry. The modern auto assembly line, which
uses human-assisted robots, existed a couple decades before Detroit's
precipitous decline. The Detroit riots during the 60's and 'capital flight'
also didn't help. The argument of robots destroying jobs, imho, has a lot of
holes ..the hysteria seems overblown [http://greyenlightenment.com/why-robots-
wont-take-all-the-jo...](http://greyenlightenment.com/why-robots-wont-take-
all-the-jobs/) The printing press put scribes out of work, but then the entire
publishing industry exploded.

~~~
lurker10000
Many people (including me) believe the problem isn't overblown. A common
counterargument to your point is that humans have always had the ability to do
work at higher abstraction levels than the machines replacing them. Scribes
become unemployed but can retrain as typographers, press operators, digital
layout artists and so on.

The problem comes when robots begin to perform these higher order tasks. What
happens to individuals when they have no "higher" place to move into? What
happens to society when automated replacement becomes commonplace?

~~~
bduerst
Jobs are not zero sum - the demand for labor is a function of supply. People
will begin to fill more niche and variable-demand jobs where capital
investments don't make sense, i.e. a shift towards a consultant economy.

Keep in mind that the specifics of this is very hard to predict. A large
number of the jobs we have today would have seemed absurd 20-40 years ago, but
to us they feel like they were inevitable.

~~~
petra
What popular jobs.that we have today would seem absurd 20-40 ago ,for
someone.with an eye into.the future , say a science fiction writer?

~~~
paulpauper
There are people who make money with ASMR videos, people making money eating
old military rations, etc and posting it on YouTube. I am not saying these are
viable career options, but are examples of 'jobs' that seem absurd but exist
because of recent technology

Web design, coding, app design, site reliability engineers , debugging, user
interface testing, so many new jobs

------
msluyter
For a mathy discussion related to this topic, I ran across this interesting
and depressing paper a while ago:

[http://www.danielsusskind.com/research](http://www.danielsusskind.com/research)

The depressing conclusion: " In a static model, increasingly capable machines
drive down relative wages and the labour share of income and force labour to
specialise in a shrinking set of tasks. In a dynamic version of the model,
labour is driven out the economy at an endogenously determined rate, forced to
specialise in a shrinking set of types of tasks, and wages steadily decline to
zero."

------
Jabanga
Industries that lose jobs due to automation cause job growth in more slowly
automating industries:

[http://www.vox.com/new-
money/2016/10/24/13327014/productivit...](http://www.vox.com/new-
money/2016/10/24/13327014/productivity-paradox-innovation-growth)

This has been the pattern for over 200 years of labour-saving automation:

[http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-
luddite...](http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite-
fallacy/)

~~~
djschnei
Unfortunately, this myopia is and will always be perennial. I think in large
part it's a misunderstanding of what the goal of an economy _should_ be; many
think it's maximum employment - it's not. Maximum employment is a side effect
of a healthy economy, not the goal. The goal of an economy _should_ be maximum
productivity. When maximum employment is the priority, you tend to get less of
everything. It's a subtle difference, but with it comes an unbelievably strong
basis for misunderstanding.

Would the economy be better off if we replaced excavation equipment with
spoons? Surely this would create tons of excavation jobs, but would the effect
ripple outwards past that specific job type? Would it be a positive ripple or
a negative ripple? It's a ridiculous hypothetical, but accurately illustrates
the point.

~~~
jstanley
"The economy" shouldn't have a goal. The economy consists of individuals, who
all have individual goals, which may or may not align with each other. But
"the economy" as a whole should have no goal.

It's like asking what the goal of "nature" should be. Nature consists of
individuals who have their own goals, but nature has no goals of its own.

~~~
djschnei
Economic systems and theories are absolutely devised with goals. Entirely
agree the economy is nothing but individuals, that's why capitalism is so
ingenious, but that doesn't mean the system doesn't have a goal.

~~~
thesagan
The goal is diffused and spread out among ~8 billion people. Theorizing goals
is fun, but it doesn't make it a goal anymore than Darwin made "survival" a
goal for nature (or life, more narrowly); which isn't always true. (Some
species self-sacrifice for reasons outside of self/individual preservation.)

There may be a prevailing ideology, I'll admit. In the west, and now most of
the world, it seems to be material wealth, as measured in exchange tokens. In
the future, in some places, maybe other forms of well-being will come to
dominate, perhaps measured in stranger tokens.

~~~
djschnei
We're getting caught up in pretty meaningless semantics here... but maybe your
conflating natural individual self interest with the goal of an economic
system? They are different things. Capitalism (the economic system) looks to
channel individual self interest towards it's most mutually beneficial ends.
It looks to maximize productive output of the overall system by channeling
natural individual tendencies.

~~~
thesagan
Econ and politics is rife with semantics, and they're very important, and
sometimes central to the conversation.

Either way, I think you're the one making the claims that need substantiation.
Years of studying econ hasn't provided me clear evidence that upholds the idea
that "economies have goals" other than "economies tend to grow in material
wealth" – and even that has subtleties too many to thoroughly discuss on an
internet forum.

~~~
djschnei
Economic systems have goals. They're systems devised by men. They don't just
throw spaghetti against the wall and call it an economic system. Socialism was
designed to accomplish some set of goals, capitalism was designed to
accomplish some set of goals. Not really sure how this is an argument...

~~~
zxcmx
We totally do throw spaghetti at the wall and call the results an "economic
system".

Neither "capitalism", "communism" nor "socialism" exist except as ill
described definitions and abstractions that are misused and abused by
academics, politicians and the general public alike.

The actual systems we have are a patchwork of contradictory laws, policies and
actions by a ton of different parties.

~~~
djschnei
ok, guys. You win. Individuals don't look at public economic policy through
ideological lenses and these ideological lenses certainly don't have loosely
definable goals. A capitalist and a socialist ideologue, while advocating for
public policy, definitely don't have a desired state they are shooting for.

~~~
zxcmx
I apologise, I think I ended up talking past you.

When you wrote "economic systems" I read that as a statement about actual
economies instead of what you actually wrote.

~~~
djschnei
No worries, don't think I said "system" in my original comment, enough blame
to go around :)

------
jawns
I live in the Wilmington, Delaware, area which, according to this article, is
the East Coast hotbed of robots-replacing-workers.

Our liabilities, in terms of industries ripe for automation, include the
chemicals sector (DuPont is headquartered here and is our largest for-profit
employer) and the pharmaceuticals sector (AstraZeneca is our third largest
for-profit employer). We also used to have several large auto manufacturing
plants, but they all shut down during the study period, and those displaced
workers struggled to find new jobs. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate has
more or less reflected the larger U.S. rate, which has slowly dropped since
the Great Recession.

Obviously, a lot of people in the software industry are worried about what
will happen if their jobs become automatable.

I just heard a talk at the Open Data Science Conference that addressed this
worry, and the speaker's basic point was that the people who are most at risk
are those who are resistant to change, or who can't cope well with change.
Robots and automated processes are still very much in the "highly capable of
performing task X" stage. So, while you can construct a specialized robot
that's very good at doing one particular thing, we humans remain the supreme
generalists. That may one day change, but for now, automation, by and large,
replaces _tasks_ , not _people_.

Granted, if you're a person who only knows how to do a handful of tasks, then
you're at risk. But if you are able to change and adapt to new tasks that
aren't (or aren't yet) automatable, then you'll be able to continue to stay
ahead of the automation wave. At least, for a good long while.

~~~
neuromantik8086
My blue-collar cousin works for one of the companies that is responsible for
at least some of the automation in the states that the article highlights.
When asked about the workers at these factories at a family gathering, his
response was to advocate that these workers pursue more education, which I
think echoes your point- the more knowledge you have that you can recombine in
new and creative ways, the less likely you are to suffer in the long-term.

~~~
PeterisP
If 10 menial jobs are replaced by 3 high-skilled jobs, more knowledge will
help you be among the minority who take those new jobs.

However, giving extra education to _all_ 10 of those people won't help all of
them; the whole point why those 10 jobs were eliminated was to achieve the
same result with less people.

------
crusso
Wasn't there an article the other day on HN[1] regarding how we're nearing
"Full Employment"? How does that comport with the notion that somehow our
increased automation is eliminating jobs? Shouldn't we see a trend of higher
unemployment as we continue to automate?

The Bloomberg article seems to focus more on the impact in localized areas,
but at the national level, there are reallocations of jobs to new industries.

I know that eventually we'll have to contend with automation replacing all
jobs that people could reasonably do - but for now, this seems like we're
still in the "buggy whip" job displacement territory.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/upshot/were-getting-
awful...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/upshot/were-getting-awfully-
close-to-full-
employment.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-
heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0)

~~~
ThomPete
The jobs are mostly temp jobs not full time jobs. Bush changed how jobs are
defined obama continued that with the result that 95% of jobs created since
the financial cricis are temp jobs. This is a big deal in the us as it cuts of
access to ex healthcare. Its very grim whats going on.

~~~
flyingfences
Jobs are still jobs, though. If people are still employed then that means that
there are still jobs for people to do.

~~~
vkou
There are always 'jobs' for people to do. I, for one, would love to have a
dozen servants to do everything for me.

I'm just not interested in paying them a living wage.

Most of those temp jobs do not pay a living wage. They exist because of the
largess of either government subsidies for the working poor, the largess of
relatives of the working poor, or because said working poor are burning the
furniture to keep warm. (And the government will have to bail them out when
they reach retirement age.)

A job that doesn't, or can't pay a living wage is a net drain on the economy.
It expects somebody else to subsidize the person working it.

~~~
TimPC
This is true only when the alternative is a living wage job. A job that needs
a top-up of benefits from the government is economically better for the
government than that person relying entirely on government benefits. Most
companies that pay low wages would potentially not exist if they had to pay
$15+ an hour today. At a minimum the price structure of goods would radically
alter and the incentives to cut workforce would dramatically increase. The
poor aren’t necessarily better off with higher salary if that salary is paid
for by higher prices on everything they buy.

~~~
vkou
> A job that needs a top-up of benefits from the government is economically
> better for the government than that person relying entirely on government
> benefits.

Unless the government could instead be paying that person to do something
useful for all of society, instead of something that benefits only me. This
election has shown that millions of people _want_ meaningful work.

Like teaching and caring for children, filling potholes, building bridges,
laying down light transit rail, digging trenches to bring fiber to slow-
connection areas...

Every single time we talk about infrastructure, we are constrained by how
broke the government is. Meanwhile, real unemployment is at 9%, and public
funds are paying underemployed people to be greeters at Wal-Mart, and mowing
lawns at the Google campus.

I also assure you that my subsidized servants will not be bringing down the
price of bread at the grocery, for anyone - poor or otherwise.

~~~
H1Supreme
Great point. The amount of infrastructure that needs upgraded in the USA is
massive. Subsidizing shitty retail jobs is such a waste.

------
jgalt212
Automation is being over-invested in because of ZIRP. It's very easy to borrow
money to invest in plant and equipment. It's very hard to borrow money just to
hire more workers.

The Fed has f'd over the workers with ZIRP.

------
contingencies
Article is US focused. For a global perspective see [https://futurism.com/un-
report-robots-will-replace-two-third...](https://futurism.com/un-report-
robots-will-replace-two-thirds-of-all-workers-in-the-developing-world/) and
the original UN report at
[http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pd...](http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pdf)

------
rukittenme
Everything old is new again. We have thousands of years of documented history
describing our ancestors using highly advanced, labor-saving machines -- human
beings and animals. I wonder why this situation is any different from the rest
of recorded human history.

~~~
chroem-
Because only a select few have access to these new machines, and everyone else
is at their mercy. If everyone had the capital to buy their own industrial
robots and automation technology, then this would be a non-issue. However the
reality is that we have to cross our fingers that the captains of industry
will play nice.

------
HillaryBriss
interestingly, the most intense clusters of robots are in Michigan, Delaware
and Texas.

by contrast, there's not so much robotic clustering in California.

also, this optimistic note: _Some of the sectors with the biggest job losses
were ones that didn 't automate intensively, like textiles and paper products.
That goes to show that keeping out robots won't necessarily protect your job._

~~~
neuromantik8086
It makes sense to me. Historically, a lot of America's manufacturing has been
either around the Great Lakes (i.e., the Rust Belt) or the mid-Atlantic /
Georgia (i.e., where manufacturing went after those states were able to
undercut the Northeast / midwest on labor costs). I've never really thought of
California as a major manufacturing hub.

------
robotresearcher
This seems to be a popular concern right now. But consider that right now we
have:

1\. Employment very near record highs.

2\. More automation than ever before.

Automation has been increasing monotonically since the Industrial Revolution.
Employment levels go up and down, but have been very low, particularly in the
US, for the last hundred years.

Maybe something very new is happening. But it usually isn't.

------
j2bax
With the looming take over of the robots, why is the fast food industry still
largely meat powered? I would think these establishments at their scale, would
be ripe for automation, yet they aren't. Are humans still cheaper in this
particular industry?

~~~
zdragnar
meat power has one advantage in the customer service industry (including fast
food): robots aren't great at customer service. People are accustomed to being
able to talk to another person.

With the rise of the $15 minimum wage movement, a number of chains are
experimenting with replacing some or most of their employees with automated
kiosks and other devices. As they become less novel, and as wages continue to
rise, expect there to be fewer fast food jobs available.

It is a minor inevitability; I've seen burger assembly robots that will make,
from raw ingredients (including the ground meat) burgers in a handful of
minutes. The only human intervention needed is refilling ingredient hoppers
and cleaning. Once people get used to not seeing so many other humans behind
the counter, and the capital outlay to buy / rent / install the machines goes
down (at least, relative to wages) they are likely to be much more widespread.

~~~
j2bax
>I've seen burger assembly robots that will make, from raw ingredients
(including the ground meat) burgers in a handful of minutes.

Exactly this. A machine could make a far superior product in a fraction of the
time for less money (at quantity). I worked at McDonalds through college, and
I remember people (including myself) letting the pre-cooked hamburgers sit in
the warming bins for hours passed the time they were supposed to. Gross! At a
minimum, I can't see why everything in the prep-area wouldn't already be
automated. I imagine there'd be far less waste as well with everything being
stored in a pre-cooked temperature controlled manner until the customer orders
it.

I wonder how long it would be before McDonalds followed suit if someone with
the capital built a competing shop that automated to the max and made a
superior product for a competitive price.

------
crdoconnor
"Those increases tended to mean fewer jobs. Of course, lots of factors weigh
on manufacturing employment. Foreign competition, overvaluation of the dollar
and rising productivity all play a big part, too. But even after taking all
those other factors into account, Acemoglu and Restrepo still found that
additional robots in an area reduces workers and cuts local wages."

I'd be interested in seeing (paywall, unfortunately) how they took that into
account because the last paper I read with this thesis (Michael J. Hicks and
Srikant Devaraj, Myth and Reality, CBER, Ball State U) explicitly did _not_
take those factors into account, and in fact _deliberately_ conflated the
effect of offshoring, outsourcing and automation to make their point that
automation, not outsourcing was to blame.

It's worth noting the exceptionally strong political imperative to blame the
effects of trade on automation given the profits involved, the strong desire
of business to continue to engage in labor arbitrage & maintain cross
continental supply chains. This makes automation a critical scapegoat.

More likely is that the rate of automation-related job destruction (which is
about 400 years old, not 10 years old) and automation-related job creation
(ditto) hasn't changed over the years, it's just that low skill technology
related job creation has been moved abroad to arbitrage the wage differential
and is _assumed out of this study 's model_ (correct me if I'm wrong).

For example, those million odd people working at Foxconn making iPhones are
likely not counted in this study as jobs that "could have been created in
America, but weren't" even though that's exactly what they were.

------
jimhefferon
That's the worst-fitting line of best fit I can recall seeing outside of a
classroom.

------
dmccunney
The key statement in the article is the last: "Bottom line: Robots do replace
workers. On the other hand, some industries that don't automate end up losing
workers anyway, because their costs are too high and their customers go
elsewhere. For workers, robots are only part of the problem."

There are several key underlying points:

1\. Work flows to where it can be done cheapest. It always has.

2\. Value is relative. Something is worth what someone else will pay to have
it done. That _includes_ the worker's labor. Large numbers of workers are
currently being told "What you do isn't _worth_ what you want to be paid to do
it.", as jobs relocate or get automated out of existence.

3\. Supply and demand rules. When demand is high and supply is low, prices are
high. As supply increases, prices drop.

4\. Everyone wants the best deal they can get.

Work flowing elsewhere has been going on for a very long time. Before
automation and robotics came along, and work had to be performed manually by
human workers, employers had incentives to locate where the work was done in
places with lower labor costs. Locating in non-union areas was a first step.
Moving offshore was next. (Ask what used to the the International Ladies
Garment Worker Union about it.)

China bootstrapped itself from Third World agrarian nation to First World
industrial power by leveraging low labor costs. The moved peasants off the
farm to the cities to become an industrial workforce. Unlike the experience of
Russia which did the same thing under the Bolsheviks after the Russian
Revolution, coercion wasn't needed. Those factory jobs had better hours,
better working conditions, and _paid_ better than being a peasant on the farm.
People migrated en mass to get those jobs. Chinese workers got paid a fraction
of what Western workers would get for the same jobs, but it cost far less to
_live_ in China. Those factory jobs were a step _up_ for those who had them.

But China is suffering from its own success. The supply of peasants on the
farm is drying up, manufacturers must compete for labor, pay is rising in
consequence, and China is no longer the low cost producer. A major Chinese
manufacturer announced a full court press into robotics a while back in
consequence.

The inflection point we see now is that higher level jobs than assembly line
worker can be and are being automated, and "knowledge work" is flowing to
places where it can be done cheaper, with outsourcing an increasingly common
practice.

And "everyone wants the best deal they can get" is a driver. Unless you are
one of the one tenth of one percent who doesn't _care_ what something costs,
you are probably on a budget. You have fixed costs you must pay, like rent and
food, and variable costs come out of what's left of your income. The Internet
provides all sorts of tools for locating the best deals, and _price_ will be a
factor. It may not be the only factor on which you make a purchase decision,
but all else being equal, lower price wins.

So outfits who make things or provide services have a strong interest in
reducing costs to be able to _provide_ lower prices, and lowering labor costs
is a goal. The fact that we can get many things cheaper than we used to is a
consequence of the factors mentioned above. A question I normally ask folks
who want jobs returned to the US is "How much _more_ are you willing to pay
for what you buy to see that happen? You _will_ pay more." I don't normally
get meaningful answers.

Complaints about immigration that reduce to "Those <whatevers> will work
cheaper than I do and take my job!" raise similar issues. The people who want
to buy whatever you make or do are on a budget just like you are. If the
immigrant you worry about can do the job as well as you can and will charge
less to do it, explain why they should pay you more? What's in it for them?

I don't have pat answers to the problem of job loss. I just think we aren't
asking the right questions. ______ Dennis

