
‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is - ourmandave
https://gizmodo.com/robots-are-not-coming-for-your-job-management-is-1835127820
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micheljansen
This is a very semantic argument and ultimately it does not matter if the
robots are coming for your job because management invited them to or
otherwise.

There is, however, a more fundamental argument to be made against the notion
that this kind of technology is neutral and that you can somehow stop
management from making these kinds of decisions. It's not and you can't.

If technology exists to lower the operating cost of a type of business through
automation, it's only a matter of time before one of the players in that
business adopts that technology, to get ahead of their competition. As soon as
that happens, all other players are pressured to follow or face the
consequences. Often they cannot avoid adopting the technology as well.

The flip side of this is that if you can be the first to create and market
this kind of technology, there is a good chance it will be very lucrative, so
there is a lot of pressure to do so. It's almost like the technology wants to
be born.

As a result, if it is possible for a robot to be created to take your job and
do it cheaper, it is very likely that someone will do just that at some point.
We could of course all agree to not create such technology or use or buy it
(if we think this is better for everyone), but this makes it even more
lucrative for some other company to come along and break that agreement
(prisoner's dilemma).

So far, robots are mostly taking menial jobs that most people do not enjoy a
lot. I am not convinced we should prevent that. What I do believe is that we
should offset the loss of income so people who lose menial jobs can be
compensated and pursue another occupation that is – hopefully – more
meaningful than what the robots took.

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jeena
At 19 when I started working at a factory which right before my eyes replaced
a brigade of humans with big machines which were all operated by one human I
wondered why we're not taxing the machine work as we taxed the human work
before. I still haven't found a answer to that. Don't the humans lose a lot of
tax income when machines replace humans? And couldn't that money pay the
replaced humans at least a decent life outside of what we call in German
'Erwerbstätigkeit'?

(Google Translate calls it 'gainful employment', no idea if it's the right
translation. What I mean is work for which you're getting paid money which you
need to use to survive.)

~~~
Kalium
We do tax them! We tax the value of the factory, we tax the company's profits,
and we tax the goods the robots when they are sold. The robots were also taxed
when they were purchased.

As I understand it, the human work probably wasn't directly taxed. I'm
guessing that what was taxed as the incomes of the humans. This may seem like
a meaningless distinction, but the humans have other opportunities to earn
taxable incomes.

All that said, you seem to be getting at the notion of a Universal Basic
Income. It's an increasingly popular idea in some political circles.

~~~
rajampoc
Human work is taxed. It's called the income tax. There's little opportunity to
earn money by working and avoid income taxes.

~~~
mreome
You can do any kind of work without pay and you don't get taxed. If you do
nothing all day but are paid for it, you still get taxed. Income tax taxes
income, not work.

I think the point Kalium was trying to make is that it's not possible to
quantify the value of human labor without pinning it to the income someone
earns from doing it. A programmer's job is less physically labor intensive
then a farm worker's, who obviously earns less. And there are numerous skills
and fields more complex then programming that nobody will pay as much, or at
all, for someone to do.

For a machine, it's value is directly tied to the profits gained by it's
operation relative to it's operating costs, which is the business income that
is already taxed. I think the taxing of machine "work" jeena was asking for
would basically just be an increase in taxes on corporate profits, perhaps
with some variation based on how many people they employ relative to their
profits.

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dahart
> this decision is not made by ‘robots,’ but management. It is a decision most
> often made with the intention of saving a company or institution money by
> reducing human labor costs

Right. And the same is true of immigrants and outsourcing. The idea that
foreigners are "stealing" jobs is a narrative that intentionally deflects from
the conscious decisions company managers make to reduce costs.

Ultimately, the cheaper solution will win, but why be angry at the rich people
making these decisions when we can take it out on robots and poor people just
trying to get by?

~~~
conanbatt
I do find some perversion in the way the market tackles this issue: the market
attacks the lowest paying people first, trying to automate the low-skill jobs,
as opposed to attacking things like CEO compensation at 100 million, or
software engineers making 200k in silicon valley.

I think the market is being inefficient here, and I don't know if its a market
failure (lowest paying people have the lowest bargaining power, cultural
power, etc) or a regulatory challenge (you cant automate away doctors,
lawyers, VC capital, management, investment votes, etc).

Probably both.

~~~
notme77
It's targeting what is easiest to automate. This happens to be mostly low
skilled workers.

Software engineers constantly cannibalize their own jobs, but there are so
many positions for software engineers available (or potentially available)
that we (software engineers) don't feel the affects.

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mbrumlow
Seems like CEOs could be replaced with a spread sheet. As far as I can tell
most CEOs basically follow a spread sheet provided by the PE that owns the
company. So I never knew why PE would ever seek to fire the 30k a year office
manager, when they could fire the 7 figure CEO and half his management team --
if meetings need to be had, we can still have meetings rooms and all the
spread sheets can show them self on the projectors -- automated and all.

~~~
notme77
The CEO is the CEO because he makes profitable decisions. You have to replace
her with someone / something that makes at least equally good decisions.

~~~
hakfoo
From that perspective, the big question is if their decisions statistically
more profitable than cheaper alternatives.

There are some companies on a very predictable path. You could replace Eddie
Lampert or Johnny Ive with a D20 mapped to management tactics and get pretty
much the same outcomes at least on a short to mid term.

Plenty of competent companies have enough self-contained knowledge that you
could make good decisions simply by surveying the on-the-ground employees,
weighting them in some way, and generating policy that way. One would hope a
widget factory with a combined 200,000 man-years of widget industry experience
would know more about the widget business than a drop-in CEO that had to look
up what a widget was on Wikipedia before he made his introduction speech.

I suspect the real justification for the wildly overpaid C-suite is that you
need someone to be a scapegoat for Wall Street's whims.

A local and autonomous team that knows their market and is competent is not
going to sack half of their own to finance a stock buyback, but a $30 million
a year stuffed suit can impose it from above.

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barberousse
Quite frankly, most of American politics is deranged by the fact there is
almost a _ban_ on class discourse, my guess a remnant of McCarthyism since
there was a strong socialist discourse prior to WWII which almost disappears
afterwards.

~~~
jandrese
What a shock that the multi-millionaire owned media companies don't want to
discuss class except to rile up hatred of poor immigrants and minorities.
Something like Occupy Wall Street gets only lightly covered, and mostly to
discuss how smelly and filthy the bums are.

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fearai
the software robots informing the humans will come for your repetitive job

