
Robot automation will 'take 800M jobs by 2030' (2017) - Futurebot
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42170100
======
caseymarquis
I think the article has it backwards. The US and similar nations will be the
least affected by this. Nations like India will be hit the hardest.

Humans are flexible. Machines typically aren't. The more automation exists in
a facility, the less flexible it becomes.

Until we hit AGI, I think there is a cap on how automated a facility should
(not can) become.

A critical piece of this is that highly automated systems are expensive, and
difficult to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion. Thus, using humans to tie systems
together limits the amount invested in automation, and can save you money in
the long run. US manufacturers are already aware of this, as some are dealing
with the effects of aging overly automated production lines.

All of this depends on what you're making and what quantity, but until we
reach AGI, over-automating is a mistake manufacturers have made and will make
again.

In the US and similar, we've automated about as much as we could given
existing technology. Newly available technology raises the automation cap a
bit, but not that much.

Contrast this with nations which are just getting to the point where mass
automation is available and have a spiking per capita income. They're much
more likely to see massive amounts of automation, proportional to their
increasing wages.

~~~
vinni2
> Nations like India will be hit the hardest.

Which is why India is banning things like self driving cars.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40716296](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40716296)

~~~
kamaal
That is not the kind of productivity that is the problem. People are talking
more on the lines of factory and industrial automation. Please note in
countries like India, land fragmentation, and lack of machinery to do mass
farming/industrializing food production is the core of the problem.

There are also a range of things that might have to be done. Including taxing
agricultural returns, defragmenting land ownerships, and changing nonsensical
laws like letting only the farmers progeny be farmers. Then of course letting
import of equipment to industrialize food production etc etc.

But India being India, I expect these things to happen at the very last
moment. Like when everything is about to melt.

------
scottlocklin
"Nanotech will be a trillion dollar business by 2015" -source NSF document in
2001

[http://www.wtec.org/loyola/nano/NSET.Societal.Implications/n...](http://www.wtec.org/loyola/nano/NSET.Societal.Implications/nanosi.pdf)

------
randomacct3847
I wonder if the yellow vest protests in Paris and other European cities is our
first taste of the kind of revolt that will happen when this really starts
happening

~~~
Flavius
Maybe, but we've been losing jobs to robots for over 300 years now.

~~~
jedberg
Up until now, they have mostly been replacing physical labor, which allowed
the workforce to shift to service and mental labor.

But now the machines are replacing service and mental labor. There is no where
for a human to shift to this time.

~~~
hutzlibu
"But now the machines are replacing service and mental labor. There is no
where for a human to shift to this time."

As far as I know, computers on their own are not very good engineers,
programmers, physicians, etc.

I also believe creativity in general is a kind of unsolved problem. The
art/music computers made so far ... not worth mentioning. (except as awesome
research projects)

~~~
harshreality
The number of jobs requiring that kind of creativity is very small. Of course
there will be a need for engineers, and physicians, to interface with other
humans and to integrate answers from narrow, specialized AIs into real-world
solutions, but that's not the bulk of everyday work even in high-skill jobs.
If AI cuts the amount of work someone has to do in half, the outcomes are on a
continuum between two extremes: either effective hourly wage for work doubles
and people work half the time, or the job market shrinks by 50%. But what
would actually happen is closer to 33% less work and the job market shrinks by
25% too. "People are still smarter and more adaptable than narrow AI" is
completely irrelevant. What matters is the workload reduction offered by the
narrow AI.

The OP didn't say all jobs by 2030, it said 800M. Obviously there will still
be lots of jobs, but not enough. Too many people unemployed and broke,
combined with not enough of a social safety net for food, housing, and medical
care, will result in social unrest and, if that's not dealt with well enough,
it will progress to social breakdown, which either means a revolution (to
institute a new government that _does_ implement appropriate safety nets) or a
martial-law type of scenario, neither of which is pretty.

Below-average doctors, engineers, and lawyers will be at risk of being out of
work. On-site blue collar jobs are safer, as a percentage. Robots can prefab
things in factories, but it will be a long time before automated robots can
build or repair anything on-site with the efficiency of humans + power tools.

ETA:

I think you overestimate the number of people required to handle most of the
problems you think need work. And the current free market doesn't agree that
they need more work, or it would price those jobs higher and more people would
jump into those labor pools. In some cases, the jobs require serious
specialization (maybe not advanced degrees, but a fair amount of training) and
not just anyone can do them... in which case even the optimal labor pool size
would barely scratch the surface of the coming AI-caused unemployment crisis.

Even a massive public works effort to employ tens of millions of workers to
deal with aging infrastructure, or to build green tech, is not a permanent
solution. Most of those jobs would be gone in a decade, and then you're right
back to where you started, only worse because AI will have gotten better.

Massive government spending (including on temp public works projects) is
essentially UBI for a lot of able-bodied people. I don't object to that, but
it needs to be limited to public works projects that are really necessary, and
then you have to figure out where you're going to get the money to pay for
them when the govt is already running trillion-dollar deficits. Is 5% debt
inflation per year not good enough? Should we try 10%? 15%?

~~~
hutzlibu
"Robots can prefab things in factories, but it will be a long time before
automated robots can build or repair anything on-site with the efficiency of
humans + power tools. "

Thats the point. Robots are and will be for quite some time if not forever,
pretty dumb amd needs human supervision for any complex task that cannot be
encapsulated.

Also .. with climate change etc. etc. ... there is so much needed work to be
done.

And population gets older ... and needs much more medical therapeuts,
physicians etc.

So much pollution and garbage.

So much ugly things all around.

There is an endless amount of needed work around. And if the current economic
system does not adjust for that, then there is something very wrong with that
and not that robots doing shitty jobs.

------
whack
[https://outlookzen.com/2019/01/05/prosperity-comes-from-
elim...](https://outlookzen.com/2019/01/05/prosperity-comes-from-eliminating-
jobs-not-saving-them/)

> Prosperity Comes From Eliminating Jobs, Not Saving Them

------
open-source-ux
I'm a bit cautious about this prediction. When the web became popular, I was
convinced it would be the end of Estate Agents (Real Estate brokers) and
Recruitment Agents. But both have thrived in an online world and seem as
numerous today as they've ever been.

Other automated changes for manual jobs would require substantial changes to
infrastructure. For example, refuse collection using underground tubes to suck
away rubbish is already a reality (e.g. Envac system designed in Sweden) but
it's unlikely to be retro-fitted to existing housing developments. On the
other hand, things like housing construction and crop picking I can imagine
will continue to see improvements in automation.

------
nojvek
Robot Automation wouldn’t do jack shit in the larger scale in 10 years. May be
50 years yes, not 10.

Robots right now are bulky and incredibly expensive devices which don’t even
come close to human dexterity, intelligence or flexibility.

Look at self driving cars. First DARPA driving challenge happened in 2004 and
self driving cars are still very dumb and have killed a few people on the
road. Simulation hours don’t count. Real driving hours without human
engagement count.

Sure in soft intelligence like speech recognition, language translation,
vision we’ve done big advances. Deep Surveillance is going to be a real thing
where every individual/car is tracked through the city.

But replacing a ~billion jobs with robots. Not going to happen.

Unless we have huge advances in bio manufacturing and computing. Doing it like
DNA does it. Building machines from the same fabric we’re made of. Grow the
machines from watery goo at scale. Make artificial muscles that are strong,
fast, accurate, light and quiet.

Now that would be the stuff of science fiction brought to reality.

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crdoconnor
Robot automation will take 800M jobs, says consultancy typically brought in to
reduce headcount.

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jrs95
A lot of people are into UBI as a solution to this, but I personally don't
think that will work. The social issues that would come from having that high
of a level of unemployment, even with a UBI, would be enormous. I think it
would be valuable to consider a more drastic departure from a capitalist
system rather than applying yet another band-aid fix to it.

~~~
_i____ii_______
What social issues have been postulated?

~~~
cantthinkofone
"Idle hands are the devil's workshop." The more people that are economically
sidelined, who nave nothing to do and no prospects for self-advancement, the
more appealing radical ideologies will become and the more social unrest there
will be. A major source of social cohesion is the belief that if you work hard
you will be able to succeed, but if it's structurally impossible to find work,
and all you have is a UBI which doesn't afford much, you can expect that mass
stagnation to provide ample breeding ground for a colorful assortment of
social ills--drug abuse, suicide, crime, and finally, once the individual
angst finds collective expression and organization, revolts and political
radicalization.

Work is one of the major sources of purpose people have. Earning an income and
putting food on the table is fundamental to one's self-respect. Like
educational achievement, it gives the impression that there is some way to
advance beyond your lot. Take that away and it will cause a mass existential
crisis unless there is something to fill the void. All the blights of the rust
belt and other economically overlooked areas should be expected to spread.

~~~
mac01021
Are you saying that, if we ever arrive at a technologically advanced, post
scarcity society where there is no money and everyone has access to as much
education, entertainment, and material stuff as they want without having to
work, then we'll all fall into a nihilistic despair and commit suicide or
become heroin junkies?

~~~
telemechanical
I think they're saying that's the inevitable result of the current paradigm,
not the natural trajectory of a human being. I do think there are a lot of
people who define themselves by their work and by the (frequently flawed)
notion that what they're working toward is a promotion, a pay raise, a title-
bump. In a post-scarcity world there might still be that mentality and
opportunities to satisfy it, but the implication is that more people will need
to redefine their personal concept of success and fulfillment.

------
FabianBeiner
Getting replaced by a robot is a greater fear than I've ever anticipated. I've
once build
[https://www.replacedbyrobot.info/](https://www.replacedbyrobot.info/) for
fun. It turns out, the basic version back then got visited a couple of
hundred, if not thousand times per day. I've since then built a more useful
interface, and the traffic just increases day by day. I've even got
interviewed by Vice once about the page.

------
DeonPenny
Yeh but it will help move production closer to home, so it won't be as bad as
most people think. Don't realize a lot of the things that american companies
build oversea wouldn't need to be there if robots could do them. You'd also
get faster deliveries and on-demand production.

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monkeydust
As someone who works in a product management role building automation software
what I am observing is that automation is helping to automate tasks not jobs.

Jobs that humans do are being altered as a result focusing on more cognative
and social tasks.

Retooling / reskilling policies should be getting more attention.

------
Rexxar
I wouldn't be surprised automation has already destroyed 2 or 3 more jobs that
there is inhabitants in industrial countries over the last century. What is
important is the balance between creation and destruction.

------
mabbo
The total world productivity will be up and the total human labor to achieve
that level will be down. This _should_ be a good thing! ... but we don't share
very well.

Capital is making more money than labor. The 'hard working man' ethos makes
less and less sense. You can't work your way out of poverty anymore.

No sane person is arguing for full-blown communism here, but a shift towards a
more socialist system is going to become the only way to keep society from
breaking down. We need the benefits of this revolution to benefit all and not
just those who were born wealthy.

And it's going to be a very long road to get there, as political power today
in most nations is most easily accessible to those with wealth, those who
would lose out if such a shift were to take place.

------
craftinator
Ah I can't wait, I'm so excited for early retirement!!

~~~
imtringued
Don't worry. Someone else will retire earlier for you so you don't have to!

------
bedhead
There are 3.5 million truckers in the US. Think about that.

Politically, I'm fairly conservative/libertarian, and I generally accept the
economic realities of things like creative destruction. And even with those
overarching views, I am terrified of the social impact of autonomous vehicles.

When you take a step back, it is nothing short of disturbing how aggressively
and proudly Google and Uber (et al) are pursuing the destruction of the
livelihoods of those 3.5 million households in this country. Just a bunch of
mostly honest, hard-working folks who live in the exurbs or rural towns, with
absolutely no backup plan when a robotic truck either creates tremendous wage
deflation or takes their job completely.

And for what? So we can all save a few cents at Target. So a couple
billionaire founders can toss some more on the pile. So a handful of engineers
can make more millions. So paper-pushing fund managers can make a few more
bucks from their stock going up. It's like watching a horror movie in slow
motion.

Creative destruction has been a fact of life for centuries, but overall,
societies have thrived. My sense - and I have no data to back this up - is
that we are approaching a tipping point where the gains from technology are
accelerating way beyond society's ability to reallocate those resources to
other productive places in the short and even medium-term. That steady-state
of frictional unemployment caused by technology is about to be _majorly_
upended, and it just scares me. Societal problems are going to get very, very
bad.

