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Owlofcreamcheese posted:No, you are right, no one REALLY blames the machines, it is really just regular old anti-intellectualism, and a disdain for the stem fields and developers and inventors and that sort of educated. But people have a distaste for admitting that and will push that they absolutely love researchers and pull out some researcher or engineer from their ancestors 150 years ago or whatever that was good. I think I'm gonna print this out and hang it up next to the ASTM standards in our lab.
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Mar 30, 2017 01:36
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Brainiac Five posted:Then I want to know how the billionaires can just eliminate jobs if automation doesn't save labor. Employment levels are as good as they have ever been, everyone has jobs as much as ever. It's just that the benefits and pay are not as good as they were and it's easy to tell people "I *WOULD* have paid you better but my hands are tied because robots" instead of just admitting that they figured out once you lost your job they could give you a new worse job. The US no longer has an unemployment problem, the problem is that the jobs have bad compensation and the higher ups just suddenly got more compensation and then told you someone else (hispanics or robots) stole that compensation so you can't have it.
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Mar 30, 2017 01:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Employment levels are as good as they have ever been, everyone has jobs as much as ever. It's just that the benefits and pay are not as good as they were and it's easy to tell people "I *WOULD* have paid you better but my hands are tied because robots" instead of just admitting that they figured out once you lost your job they could give you a new worse job. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor force participation rates peaked around the year 2000, and we have declined back to the level of labor force participation of 1977. Looks like you're as trivially easy to prove wrong as ever.
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Mar 30, 2017 01:42
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:No, you are right, no one REALLY blames the machines, it is really just regular old anti-intellectualism, and a disdain for the stem fields and developers and inventors and that sort of educated. But people have a distaste for admitting that and will push that they absolutely love researchers and pull out some researcher or engineer from their ancestors 150 years ago or whatever that was good.  I have a STEM degree. I have literally spent the last year writing software for a client that is deeply involved in warehouse automation. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about and you're so threatened by anyone who seems to be criticizing technology (which, coincidentally, is not what I've been doing at any point in this thread) that you come across like an actual insane person.
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Mar 30, 2017 01:48
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I think he's right in a way. We could have tons of okay paying jobs, jobs for everyone with 'New Deal' mega projects. Maybe we can get low-skill people planting trees, demolishing old abandoned infrastructure, materials cleanup, etc.
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Mar 30, 2017 03:39
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Blockade posted:I think he's right in a way. We could have tons of okay paying jobs, jobs for everyone with 'New Deal' mega projects. Maybe we can get low-skill people planting trees, demolishing old abandoned infrastructure, materials cleanup, etc. Those jobs are generally temporary and the ones you're describing aren't really low-skilled. But sure, we could force people to work for a basic income at bullshit jobs, or we could just establish a basic income on the way to direct material distribution via overproduction and encourage volunteerism among all the people with sudden free time.
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Mar 30, 2017 03:48
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Blockade posted:I think he's right in a way. We could have tons of okay paying jobs, jobs for everyone with 'New Deal' mega projects. Maybe we can get low-skill people planting trees, demolishing old abandoned infrastructure, materials cleanup, etc. Even there, automation drastically reduces labor needs, though. Back during the days of the New Deal, digging a ditch required a team of people with shovels and picks. These days, all you need is one guy with a ditch-digging machine. Today, one person operating a tree-planting machine can plant trees as quickly as ten people doing it by hand. A lot of construction and infrastructure work doesn't require nearly as much manpower as it did in the CCC era.
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Mar 30, 2017 04:40
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Paradoxish posted:I'm assuming we're talking about the US, in which case: Go back farther, you're showing us a bubble in one generation. A single peak and valley doesn't make a trend. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000
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Mar 30, 2017 07:10
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Main Paineframe posted:Even there, automation drastically reduces labor needs, though. Back during the days of the New Deal, digging a ditch required a team of people with shovels and picks. These days, all you need is one guy with a ditch-digging machine. Today, one person operating a tree-planting machine can plant trees as quickly as ten people doing it by hand. A lot of construction and infrastructure work doesn't require nearly as much manpower as it did in the CCC era. 30 years ago construction would use a lot of people moving around materials by hand. Where now they use machines to move materials has much has possible. Today, when some professional build something, he use many specialized machines, like lasers to control levels, or electric screwdrivers. They may not make the same job with less people, but they can do more work in a single day, so the effect can be the same. ( 4 people doing the work in a week, that would have required 8 people, 30 years ago).
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Mar 30, 2017 10:57
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ElCondemn posted:Go back farther, you're showing us a bubble in one generation. A single peak and valley doesn't make a trend. Also a chart that is labeled from 85 to 80% so it looks like a massive crash when things go from 84% to 81%.
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Mar 30, 2017 12:48
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ElCondemn posted:Go back farther, you're showing us a bubble in one generation. A single peak and valley doesn't make a trend. No, I'm not. Your link is labor force participation as a whole, which will capture people leaving the labor force as they retire or changes in how many people enter the labor force after high school vs. entering college and delaying entry in the job market. I was using the prime age labor force participation (25-54) rate to specifically rule out those effects. I chose to limit the graph to around 1998 since that's where the trend starts and the huge number of women entering the labor force over the preceding 40-50 years made it more difficult to see the relatively subtle trend of the last couple of decades. Here's the graph for as far back as the data goes:  You can see that 25-54 labor force participation doesn't have the same generational peaks and valleys as labor force participation as a whole. Any decrease at all over multiple decades is actually unprecedented. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 13:12 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 12:59
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Paradoxish posted:You can see that 25-54 labor force participation doesn't have the same generational peaks and valleys as labor force participation as a whole. Any decrease at all over multiple decades is actually unprecedented. Like what was it gonna do? Keep rising at the same rate and break through 100%? Is a labor participation rate over 90% even a thing that is good or that anyone wants? At least a single digit percent of people 25-54 should be allowed to be early retired millionaires/totally disabled/dying/a house husband/taking a sabbatical/traveling around/focusing on their health while their husband works/raising their kids full time at any given time I'd think.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:49
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Dude, what point are you even trying to make here? My post that started this absurd derail was in response to ElCondemn saying that the labor force has grown as population has grown. This is demonstrably false in the US if you're looking at the labor force rate as opposed to its absolute size. This: Owlofcreamcheese posted:Employment levels are as good as they have ever been, everyone has jobs as much as ever. Is also flat out untrue. The lowest relatively recent unemployment minimum was in the late 90s, when it was close to a full percentage point lower than it is right now. Combined with the lower labor force participation, this literally means that a smaller portion of the population is working right now than they were only 20 years ago. I also specifically said that I don't believe that this is necessarily the fault of automation, but it's pretty clear at this point that you're not actually reading the thread.
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Mar 30, 2017 18:31
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Paradoxish posted:Dude, what point are you even trying to make here? That joblessness is not the particular problem our economy is facing right now.
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Mar 30, 2017 20:11
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Sensors and a computer play umpire in a pro baseball game
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Apr 4, 2017 22:08
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That doesnt really mean anything, though. How many people are employed as umpires? Is that technology applicable to other jobs and careers? I still think its going to be a very long time before a significant amount of jobs are threatened. We can make programs and robots that can do very narrow things but they cant handle unpredictable stuff. And lots of jobs have unpredictable aspects. Even a fast food job has unpredictability.
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Apr 6, 2017 04:59
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Blue Star posted:That doesnt really mean anything, though. How many people are employed as umpires? Is that technology applicable to other jobs and careers? Do you really not think that a set of sensors and a computer that can process a live-action sporting event has no applicability outside of 120+ umpires? We're not even talking whole-sale replacement here
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Apr 6, 2017 05:18
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Pressing a button to cycle a load of fries is totally automation. It is always a step further that allows more work to be done by an individual that is paid dog poo poo to do the thing. Edit why would allocating hours be immune to a quickbooks algorithm?
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Apr 6, 2017 08:30
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Grognan posted:Edit why would allocating hours be immune to a quickbooks algorithm? Quickbooks doesn't focus on that end of payroll, but not for lack of ability. There is third-party software that allocates hours which you can integrate with Quickbooks. But that's child's play compared to Human Resource Management Systems. TLDRing the Human Resource Management System Wikipedia article there are programs that already: schedule hours, analyze resumes, handle certain employee grievances, automatically reviews contracts to determine what benefits an employee is or isn't entitled to, identifying potential recruits, and so on. Edit: Oh, there's also a service that specializes in being an automated middleman between employers and freelancers. Employers pay a fee to hire freelancers from the service. The freelancers demonstrate their abilities to get jobs done in order to get better jobs. Everyone is happy. Well, the freelancers would probably prefer a job that gave benefits. But because they aren't employees of the service the freelancer benefits are entirely up to whoever happened to hire them at the time. RandomPauI fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Apr 6, 2017 |
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Apr 6, 2017 11:01
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Blue Star posted:That doesnt really mean anything, though. How many people are employed as umpires? Is that technology applicable to other jobs and careers? The trick is to make robots do all the predictable aspects, so you can fire all the human workers that used to do them and just keep a couple people around to handle the unpredictable bits. Few occupations are going to be 100% automated anytime soon...but automating away even half the manpower requirements is enough to have a significant impact on employment.
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Apr 6, 2017 15:02
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If you have a company with 100k employees, and you can automate away 2 hours a week of a common task, that's 5k jobs you can replace. You didn't need to actually create an AI that could do the job of those 5k people. The larger the company the easier its going to be because you have more overlap between employees.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:10
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paternity suitor posted:If you have a company with 100k employees, and you can automate away 2 hours a week of a common task, that's 5k jobs you can replace. You didn't need to actually create an AI that could do the job of those 5k people. The larger the company the easier its going to be because you have more overlap between employees. Yes, a big example of that is email. You used to need legions of people to answer phones and deliver inter-office memos. Now people just email each other. Companies that used to have one secretary for every exec now frequently get by with a single department coordinator or office manager.
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Apr 12, 2017 00:12
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paternity suitor posted:If you have a company with 100k employees, and you can automate away 2 hours a week of a common task, that's 5k jobs you can replace. You didn't need to actually create an AI that could do the job of those 5k people. The larger the company the easier its going to be because you have more overlap between employees. I think this sometimes gets lost in these discussions - everything that saves anyone time doing their job is the same as automation. Microsoft Office, far from AI, might have wiped out more jobs than anything else
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Apr 12, 2017 01:42
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In large corporations, there's a nice ripple effect too, because they're so layered. If you can shed, let's say 500 employees, that's also probably about 25 highly paid people in management that can go. Less employees, less oversight needed. You don't get rid of a whole department, you just consolidate two of them when they shrink enough, so that they only need one manager now, and then put the two managers together in a room with one knife. Less employees also allows you to thin out HR and IT. Lose enough HR and you can lose some HR management. And so on. In a large enough facility, you might be able to get rid of some security, nurses, cafeteria workers, janitors, people who maintain facilities, and any extra, now unnecessary management that goes along with all of them. And that's how a nurse and a plumber lose their job to automation.
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Apr 12, 2017 03:14
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Most likely though, these people would be eventually replaced with someone still valuable to the company. I.e. lay off 500 pencil pushers, hire 100 salespeople or developers or whatever. Business grows, hire more people, etc. If this weren't the case, all companies would be down to, like, one guy by now. Based on experience though, even this rarely happens. Our systems are constantly improved and automated, and whenever you no longer have to spend hours on stupid poo poo because it's now automated... there's always other stupid poo poo that needs to be done. Presumably it's also valuable so the business grows.
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Apr 12, 2017 09:51
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EDIT: Don't know what the gently caress just happened there.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:02
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paternity suitor posted:If you have a company with 100k employees, and you can automate away 2 hours a week of a common task, that's 5k jobs you can replace. You didn't need to actually create an AI that could do the job of those 5k people. The larger the company the easier its going to be because you have more overlap between employees. If I heard some baker found out a new trick to bake a cake in 1 hour instead of 2I'd think about how big that business would be. Not that it would be the end of it for most of the staff.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:08
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The Japanese Volleyball Association is now using a robot volleyball player to help out during training drills
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Apr 12, 2017 17:05
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:If I heard some baker found out a new trick to bake a cake in 1 hour instead of 2I'd think about how big that business would be. Not that it would be the end of it for most of the staff.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:30
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mobby_6kl posted:Most likely though, these people would be eventually replaced with someone still valuable to the company. I.e. lay off 500 pencil pushers, hire 100 salespeople or developers or whatever. Business grows, hire more people, etc. If this weren't the case, all companies would be down to, like, one guy by now. That's not always the case. Companies don't expand their business just because they can, they expand their business because there's unmet demand they can fill. For example, replacing old-fashioned cash registers with POS systems didn't decimate overall cashier employment because the retail market was rapidly expanding during that period. Positions per store may have been down, but companies like Walmart and Kmart were opening stores all over as they quickly grew from small newcomers to industry heavyweights. Likewise, although ATMs reduced the number of employees per bank branch, banks were building a lot of physical bank branches at the time, so overall bank employment continued to rise and the labor savings simply fueled faster expansion. Today, though, it's a different story. Retail is in a slump, with many companies cutting back their physical presence as the availability of retail stores now exceeds demand. Likewise, banks are cutting back their physical presence and closing their branch locations as customers shift more and more toward online banking. Any labor savings from automation in those industries right now won't be plowed into expansion, because they're not expanding and have no desire to expand - instead, they'll just further feed the cutbacks.
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Apr 12, 2017 18:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:If I heard some baker found out a new trick to bake a cake in 1 hour instead of 2I'd think about how big that business would be. Not that it would be the end of it for most of the staff. Let's assume demand stays constant. There are other bakeries. Think about thier staff is they don't automate in the same way. Then once they all do, think about the staffing. Now if bread gets cheaper because of all this, demand will probably rise for it. But likely not enough to keep the same staffing level in the whole industry.
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Apr 12, 2017 19:03
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BrandorKP posted:Now if bread gets cheaper because of all this, demand will probably rise for it. But likely not enough to keep the same staffing level in the whole industry. Also supply and demand doesn't work that way.
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Apr 12, 2017 19:09
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Think of it not as a single bakery, but the cake-making industry as a whole. If one bakery gains a serious competitive edge due to lower labor requirements, it's going to take over a greater and greater market share - a market share that used to be serviced by less labor-efficient bakeries. That results in the number of jobs in the industry contracting, even if the specific bakery that knows "one weird trick" expands its labor force. Okay, so why didn't that happen? All the hundreds of times bakeries improved tools or techniques over the last 6000 years? Why wasn't the peak in bakers in Paleolithic times when it required the absolute most labor to bake?
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Apr 12, 2017 20:31
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Why wasn't the peak in bakers in Paleolithic times when it required the absolute most labor to bake? It'd be interesting to graph the number of bakers per capita between then and now.
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Apr 12, 2017 21:00
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I could the revolution in cake making playing out in a few possible ways: 1) CakeMaker2.0 sells cakes at such low prices, hardly anyone can compete. A few continue to get by because they make bespoke custom cakes that aren't worth CakeMaker2.0's time, so they stay in business. Their other cakes are a little more than CakeMaker's, but since people are in the store, they still buy a few. Unless CakeMaker2.0 hires a massive marketing team to promote cakes as a new superfood, the demand for cakes is the same though. Cakemaker2.0, takes business from other less efficient bakeries but overall cake consumption is static. For every employee CakeMaker2.0 adds, smaller bakeries lose 2 or 3 though. The Cake-conomy shrinks. 2) CakeMaker2.0 decides they don't want to be customer facing, so they sell their cakes directly to bakeries. It's really hard for bakeries to justify making their own cakes now, so they buy 90% of their cakes for CakeMaker2.0, except when they make their own very unique and custom cute cakes. This is like custom cakes with giant dicks on them. Very nice you should see. Or maybe niche ethnic bakeries stick around because CakeMaker just can't make the bread like a momma used to make. Since the bakeries are buying so many of their components, *cough cough*, sorry I mean cakes, from subcontractors though, they don't need as much staff in these new streamlined operations, so they layoff a bunch of bakers. The Cake-conomy shrinks again. 3) CakeMaker2.0 decides, you know, gently caress making a giant company that sells cakes. I actually hate cakes and I don't want to deal with making a giant business. I'm going to sell my cake making method, and anyone willing to pay me $1 per cake can use my IP. Since it saves $5 in labor for $1 in IP, bakeries jump at that poo poo. And since the demand for cakes is pretty much the same, but now take half the time, a bunch of employees find themselves sweeping floors instead of making cakes, and soon enough they are laid off. Sad. Main Paineframe posted:That's not always the case. Companies don't expand their business just because they can, they expand their business because there's unmet demand they can fill. For example, replacing old-fashioned cash registers with POS systems didn't decimate overall cashier employment because the retail market was rapidly expanding during that period. Positions per store may have been down, but companies like Walmart and Kmart were opening stores all over as they quickly grew from small newcomers to industry heavyweights. Likewise, although ATMs reduced the number of employees per bank branch, banks were building a lot of physical bank branches at the time, so overall bank employment continued to rise and the labor savings simply fueled faster expansion. Right - demand for some things is static. Like for example if you provide specialized services, like an accounting firm. Hey guys, we can do your books twice as fast! Want us to do them twice?
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Apr 12, 2017 22:46
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Okay, so why didn't that happen? All the hundreds of times bakeries improved tools or techniques over the last 6000 years? Why wasn't the peak in bakers in Paleolithic times when it required the absolute most labor to bake? Wait, what is it that you're trying to say here? It's one thing to suggest that automation has no long term effects on employment because positive economic growth will always create more jobs, but it's another thing entirely to suggest that employment within a particular industry is unaffected. The agriculture and manufacturing sectors are indisputable proof that automation has a negative effect on employment within the industries that it's used in. The only question is whether that effect is offset by the larger economic gains.
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Apr 13, 2017 00:00
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ElCondemn posted:Also supply and demand doesn't work that way. It'll be cheaper relative to other goods one might eat as a starch, that's going to change demand for bread? Edit let's put it this way, did the industrial production of soy beans eventually affect demand for soybeans?
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Apr 13, 2017 00:47
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Paradoxish posted:Wait, what is it that you're trying to say here? It's one thing to suggest that automation has no long term effects on employment because positive economic growth will always create more jobs, but it's another thing entirely to suggest that employment within a particular industry is unaffected. The agriculture and manufacturing sectors are indisputable proof that automation has a negative effect on employment within the industries that it's used in. The only question is whether that effect is offset by the larger economic gains. Someone was talking about a dark future where an AI could make something take 2 hours less a week resulting in mass layoffs. But literally all of history is the invention of tools that cut 2 hours a week off tasks. It evidently can't simply be a force for unemployment if it's always happened through all of history.
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Apr 13, 2017 01:51
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Someone was talking about a dark future where an AI could make something take 2 hours less a week resulting in mass layoffs. But literally all of history is the invention of tools that cut 2 hours a week off tasks. It evidently can't simply be a force for unemployment if it's always happened through all of history. Your'e not getting it. The story of history and economic growth is unemployment. Productivity has wiped out entire professions multiple times over. It pushed people out of agriculture into manufacturing and then replaced that with a service job. Unemployment and productivity and automation are the same things. The new fear is that old jobs arn't being replaced by new ones.
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Apr 13, 2017 02:09
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Someone was talking about a dark future where an AI could make something take 2 hours less a week resulting in mass layoffs. But literally all of history is the invention of tools that cut 2 hours a week off tasks. It evidently can't simply be a force for unemployment if it's always happened through all of history. The issue with automation is not robots taking away our jobs, the issue is, how are our institutions are arranged.
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Apr 13, 2017 02:29
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