
Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization - muzz
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-suggests-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization
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TelmoMenezes
I find it disturbing that we are stuck with a type of economy where this is a
problem. The purely rational response: yay, now we don't have to work so much!
But this never happens. Why? Why isn't there a market pressure to reduce the
number of hours that people work (for the same pay) once more things get
automated? Why is it that technology could bring us closer to heaven, but we
choose over and over again to live in hell? How could the right incentives be
created?

~~~
hannibal5
If for each two jobs automation removes, it creates one new job. The one new
job pays less than two previous jobs. This changes the balance between capital
and work. Workers share from production has been in steady decline in all OECD
countries over two decades.

To achieve the goal of working less, you need to own capital. Technology
changes the capital vs. work equation towards capital at the same time when
there is increasing global supply of educated workforce. It's just supply and
demand. Workers are simply competing towards bottom.

To get to position where you need to work less you would need to have:

1\. Change taxation from work to capital.

2\. Basic income.

~~~
Kiro
The new job pays less but also raises the margin which in a healthy market
lowers product prices. Purchasing power increases and everyone is happy.

~~~
pmichaud
Even if we had a healthy market, which we don't, the people who lost their
jobs don't have "marginally less" income. They have zero income. They are not
happy.

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venus
UR says it best:

> All subterfuges and evasions to the contrary, the basic economic problem
> faced by 20th-century governments (somewhat less in the 19C; far more in the
> 21C) is unemployment. The cause of unemployment is simple: in an industrial
> economy, most human beings are economically useless. They are not productive
> assets at all. They are liabilities. For a brief transitional period, they
> could still be used as industrial robots. This period is close to its end.

[..]

> as the Singularity nears, the future of work becomes clear - there is an IQ
> threshold below which any human, no matter how cheap to feed, is a
> liability. Classic unskilled manual labor remains productive in some domains
> - gardening, housecleaning, and so on. Perhaps this will be true for another
> decade or two. It will not be true indefinitely.

It's a big problem all right, and we'll start to face it for realz by the end
of this decade, IMO.

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Tloewald
The way I put it to my coworkers is that we are rapidly approaching the point
at which we must choose between a society which redistributes the benefits of
automation and one where the majority subsist on garbage dumps. But as long as
many people don't vote, and a large number of those who do vote are distracted
by idiotic "moral" issues we'll drift towards enclaves and garbage dumps.

~~~
frostmatthew
The power of the people (via voting) you're suggesting relies on a) candidates
that are willing to make the changes needed and b) actually being able to
enact those changes once in office

Sadly we very rarely see candidates in set A and even less so of set B.

~~~
Tloewald
True, but if the voting public paid attention at least there'd be a small
chance of fixing things.

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devx
We should definitely embrace the future as fast as possible, instead of trying
to hold it back so we "don't lose (the old) job".

The problem is a lot of people need to be retrained, since things are changing
so fast, and their jobs aren't lasting their whole lifetime, like they used
to. And I think neither the government, nor the private education sector is
properly equipped to handle that yet, nor are they making much progress in
that. But they need to, and soon, because this is only going to get "worse"
(for the people who aren't trained for the new types of jobs).

This is just machines and automation "disrupting" human jobs, which means us
humans need to keep moving "up market" (doing stuff machines can't easily do
yet, which tends to involve right-brain type of jobs). But it's only a matter
of time before the machines/automation catches up to us there, too.

Hopefully, by that point, we'll be having a society where food is easily and
very cheaply created by "replicators" for everyone, and it will be a society
where money has less importance, and we don't need to "work for a living"
anymore, and we can just be free to follow our passions.

I think all of this will happen in five decades to a century, but it will be a
very tough ride, as we try to quickly adapt and keep pace with technology, as
we try to make a living.

~~~
pfisch
What makes you think the future will be better than the present? If history is
the judge then it is more likely that we will end up in a situation where
10-20% of the people have everything and everyone else lives in super poverty
relative to them. Most of history and even the present reflect that situation.
Also it will require far fewer people to have absolute systems of control than
it ever has before.

Or AI could take over singularity style.

I don't know why you assume the future will be better than the past. So far it
honestly seems more like computers and robots have created a situation where
most of the middle class is now useless to society. We seem to be reverting
back to a system where there is only an upper class and a massive pool of
peasants. For us to really replace the higher end of the workforce will
require a singularity type of event.

Of all the possible futures it really takes a lot of optimism to not see some
kind of dystopia.

Just look at the current privacy situation. Look at what the NSA is doing.
Look at how google and facebook have been allowed to build a massive database
of every action that we engage in with technology, and they are then allowed
to sell it to 3rd parties without most people even knowing they do this and
sharing none of the profits with us for selling our information. That is the
reality of the future. Add largely automated robot armies and much more
powerful systems of control plus finite resources.

~~~
icebraining
_I don 't know why you assume the future will be better than the past._

50 years there were full blown dictatorships in Europe and South America,
dozens of millions were dieing in China, and Soviet officials in submarines
were blocking the launch of nuclear missils. Oh, and Vietnam war, Kent State,
etc.

70 years ago we were in a world war, smashing half of Europeu to pieces and
blowing up full cities in Japan, plus, you know, the holocaust.

80 years ago there was the Great Depression, and all of its effects. My
grandmother, in an western European country, lived without electricty, running
water, education and barely enough food.

And this is just a self- serving European perspective written in five minutes;
there were plenty of horrors I probably don't even know about.

The NSA? it doesn't come even close.

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MisterNegative
A useless article since we don't get to read the actual paper.

~~~
kretor
Yes. I wonder if they just looked into how many of jobs as they are right now
will eventually be repacable. That would be wrong, as how we do a job has
always changed, meaning that when we get to the point where job X would be
replacable, it has changed so much to not be replacable. Also, if your job
really gets replaced by a computer, there will also be tons of new types of
jobs created for you to take.

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_lex
I'd argue that the biggest problem is not new technology and how it replaces
workers - it's the increasing rate of change of technology, and increase in
speed of new waves that replace / commoditize industries. In otherwords, I
worry that we'll eventually get to a place where every month there's something
dramatically better/more efficient coming out that will replace the jobs done
by regular people. People take time to learn, and re-education for the jobs
available will not be instant. That means that if the group of available jobs
changes too quickly, we may find ourselves with a growing and unfillable skill
gap, since nobody can learn the new skills fast enough to actually use those
skills in production.

What are your thoughts? I'd like to pick apart this issue.

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6ren
I guess this "software is eating the world" explains github's $1 billion
valuation (which doesn't make sense to me otherwise, developer tools aren't as
large a market as say, the TV-replacing youtube, bought for around $2
billion).

~~~
graue
I wanted to say that YouTube was acquired early in its history and would
probably be worth much more today, but after looking into it, the data doesn't
necessarily back that up. In July 2006 a few months before YT's acquisition,
YT users were viewing 3 billion videos a month[1], and in 2010 it had "only"
quadrupled to about 14 billion views a month[2]. This suggests in 2006 YouTube
had already mostly caught on. So you may be onto something.

[1]
[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-16-youtube-...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-16-youtube-
views_x.htm) [2]
[http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2010/6/comSc...](http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2010/6/comScore_Releases_May_2010_U.S._Online_Video_Rankings)

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ZenoArrow
There's another way to look at this. As automation increases, the costs of
running businesses decreases, making it easier for new entrants to compete
(assuming the computing hardware and software is easily accessible). So as the
workforce becomes increasingly computerised, you could see an increase in
company owners (a job that is unlikely to be ever computerised).

There are two main drawbacks to this alternative view. Firstly, there will
still be restrictions in place of physical resources (not everyone would be
able to setup a mining company, for example), which will govern who can
compete. Secondly, there would be limits on how many companies in a certain
sector could be sustained. At some point I hope we resolve these issues by
moving beyond personal greed.

~~~
hershel
Let's look at a counter example : amazon. Is it using technology to help
online sellers ? or is it using technology to kill retail businesses ? It may
well be that the end goal of amazon is to own and automate all retail, and
even if it remains as a 3rd party platform, it could have so much power that
sellers would make almost nothing.

In an automated economy, where businesses are easily scaled if you own
capital, the amazon example could apply everywhere.

~~~
ZenoArrow
hershel, I believe you may have misunderstood me. Amazon is an example of a
company that has centralised a sizeable portion of online retail, my argument
was that technology can evolve to the point of encouraging decentralisation.
Imagine if setting up your own "Amazon" was barely any harder than setting up
a Wordpress site. A small warehouse space to store products, automated picking
and packing, an easy to setup and maintain web presence, elements of AI to
help field basic customer queries. It's all possible.

~~~
hershel
Say you set up you're "small" amazon. How can you compete with "big" amazon?
They have faster delivery times - due to local warehouses. They have wider
selection, better prices, better brand - due to their size. I don't see any
advantage to "small" amazon.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Firstly, we're not talking about 1 small "Amazon", we're talking about a large
number. Secondly, for such businesses to succeed, you do need a shift in
culture. If consumers care about convenience above everything else, then
larger businesses will always tend to dominate. However, if consumers hold
other values in higher regard, then smaller businesses have a chance. The
values that these customers hold will determine which approaches are
successful. For example, companies that offer specialist knowledge,
customisable products, a higher level of personal service, etc... could
compete.

Speaking personally, Amazon is my go to source when I don't know much about
what I'm buying, and just want something half decent. The reviews and the
speed of checkout are Amazon's strengths for me. They're not necessarily the
best on price, and if I research further I tend to find better products
elsewhere too.

Whether we have this culture shift away from large retailers is up to us. We
get what we deserve.

------
specialist
Small pendant:

automation != computerization (digitization)

Automatization is reworking processes to remove judgement. Simplification.

The systems I work on are all computerized. They are definitely not automated.
Huge amount of human intervention, decisions, and judgement every day.

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methodover
Fascinating article! I wrote a short story a couple weeks ago that explored
one possible impact of such an event from the perspective of a school teacher
whose job is replaced by a computerized solution. It's not exactly a happy
story, but it might be fun for some readers here.

Link --
[http://192.241.231.77/stories/mission/](http://192.241.231.77/stories/mission/)

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dreen
This article has a very fearmongering tone, and completely misses the fact
that economically, people will still do these jobs for a long time, because
replacing them with computers is not an easy or cheap task. Technology has
been replacing jobs ever since it existed, and the workers somehow kept up, I
see no reason why they wouldn't in future.

~~~
alexqgb
Except they don't. They haven't been keeping up for the last 30 years of
growing automation and stagnating wages. In that time the world has seen
massive population growth, which exacerbates the basic problem just as the
information revolution accelerates it.

You can tell yourself whatever you want, but that won't close the massive gap
between your perspective and actual reality.

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cognivore
Half the jobs?! Whew, that's some chunk of work. I need to get busy...

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georgebonnr
The silver lining to robots taking our jobs: remaining occupations will much
better align with, extend and fulfill us in our humanity.

