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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm not even thinking highly trained jobs. The reason those jobs don't exist now isn't because the economy just can't spare the surplus labor for them, it's because most people don't have the money to hire someone to do them. Automation decimating the middle class will destroy low-wage work, rather than helping it - restaurants and other service jobs depend on a certain number of people having a certain amount of surplus money that they can spend on unnecessary services. The issue is not the importance of the jobs, but the number of people with the ability to pay to have them done.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:01
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Okay, but that is the same as the US going from 90% farmers to 9% farmers over a generation. It's not everyone just slaving to serve the few remaining farmers, it's people running off to make teeshirts and arby's burgers and stuff for eachother. Stuff that wasn't worth doing. No, it's people having the money to buy shirts and burgers, due to the formation of a real middle class. Clothes and food were always worth having, it's just that now more people can afford to pay for those things.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's literally happened over and over a bunch of times that the dominant "profession" rapidly shrinks to be a small percentage of the population who can do it for everyone due to technology. Yeah, the Gilded Age was absolutely fine, right? Actually, the wholesale demise of entire categories of employment typically leads to considerable economic upheavals which seriously affect large portions of the population unless remedied by considerable government action.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:03
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Pollyanna posted:Why? What could possibly be their reasoning? There's a long-standing belief that a decent lifestyle should be earned, not given. There's also an associated belief that someone who is diligent and works hard is guaranteed to get that decent lifestyle in the end, and that any economic problems they have are just short-term periods of bad luck or misfortune that they'll surely overcome in the long run as long as they're truly hard-working. There's another aasociated belief that help for those who don't work (regardless of the reason) is unfair and an insult to the virtues of the people who do work. It's like the just world fallacy, but applied to economic outcomes.
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Dec 1, 2016 22:35
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Paradoxish posted:People probably aren't going to become unemployable because of automation. Low-end jobs are always going to be around unless we start seriously raising the minimum wage, so what's more likely is a constant downward pressure on middle- and lower-end wages as the share of people qualified to work "good" jobs shrinks. If wages drop, that endangers the service industry as well. The "would you like fries with that" industry relies on there being an ample number of people who feel that they have sufficient extra money to buy fries on a semi-regular basis. Bhaal posted:I have a question for when you encounter someone who smugly congratulates people fighting for 15 on causing fast food automation to come and replace them. You know, as though the automation is a punishment invented for them having the greed of wanting a living wage, rather than the automation having been unavoidable and the workers have always been completely and totally hosed. The reason fast food jobs haven't been automated isn't because of cost, but rather because of versatility and because of the human element. There have been partially-automated fast food restaurants for years, it's just never caught on in a widespread fashion in the US or major European countries. A human worker can be moved to any job in the McDonalds or sent home, and can respond to arbitrary customer questions, while specialized robots are unitaskers that never go off-duty. You can't tell Burger Flipper 5000 to go clean the toilet after lunch rush ends, and it's helpless if someone wants a different toy in their Kids Meal. In real restaurant work, there's less flexibility but much more human interaction. I once saw an article in which an Apple exec defended their offshoring practices by insisting that it wasn't because of the cost, but rather because of the flexibility it offered. As an example, he cited a situation where a last-minute design change had been put into play the night before production was due to start, and the factory supervisor was able to go around to all the worker dorms in the middle of the night, wake up the workers, and bring them all into the factory to start immediately training them on the change, so that they could begin production in the morning without any delays. With specialized, purpose-built manufacturing robots, it would have taken time to reprogram them or possibly even modify them; human workers just needed a quick talking-to. Owlofcreamcheese posted:I guess I just don't get this sci-fi story where everyone is unemployed because of machines but the machines can only be owned by a few people and those people are somehow using the machines to sell stuff to unemployed people? Like how is the guy making cellphones for 8 dollars each in a very cheap factory making money if no one has money? Why does he even need money if everything is made in factories that cost so little above raw material costs anyway? If the machines are actually expensive and actually cost a lot to run why isn't some sneaky capitalist getting rich hiring everyone to work in his factory and undercut everything? The part you're missing is that everything doesn't stay the same - past a certain critical mass level, it means that the economy as we know it essentially ceases to be. Unfortunately, just like climate change, the enormity of the long-term consequences doesn't stop people from ignoring it completely in the pursuit of short-term profit, which is why we're discussing what needs to change and what the future economic paradigm will have to look like.
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Dec 2, 2016 17:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I guess I am questioning the assumption that once automation happens the rich will have everything and the poor unemployed will not. If everything is truely so cheap to manufacture that everything costs less than minimum wage to make then why are the poor without? If everyone is poor who are the rich and what are they buying and selling? The whole story makes no sense. Labor is not the only cost or even the primary cost in most businesses. Even if a Car-O-Matic 3000 costs five bucks, you still have to be able to afford raw materials, designs, testing facilities, and regulatory requirements, not to mention having the space to run it and to store inventory. Infrastructure, raw materials, and availability of skilled workers to handle the few un-automatable jobs gives a major advantage to large manufacturers. And the Car-O-Matic 3000 doesn't cost five bucks. Over the long run it might be cheaper than human laborers, but unlike human laborers, the machine requires a large up-front investment. It's easier for Joe Schmoe to hire a set of workers that cost $10,000 a month than it is for him to buy a machine that costs $100,000 up-front and costs $500 a month to run; the machine will pay for itself in a couple of years and be much cheaper than the workers in the long run, but it requires the buyer to be much richer at the beginning. When the poor are too poor to buy things, what are the rich selling? Well, in the short-term, they shift production to luxury stuff to compensate for flagging consumer demand, but as you guess, that's unsustainable and before long all their businesses would collapse as the entire economy melted down around them. The thing is, just because it's unsustainable and would eventually lead to a nonfunctional economy doesn't mean it won't happen anyway. Just like with climate change, it will happen, because we're not going to see a meaningful number of companies nobly sacrificing their own profit margins for the sake of everyone else.
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Dec 2, 2016 23:03
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:If labor was such a teeny tiny part of the economy already right now how is it a big deal for the economy to lose it then? Labor isn't a tiny part of "the economy", it's a tiny part of "the costs of producing items". If you're not going to bother paying attention to details, you have no one but yourself to blame for being confused.
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Dec 2, 2016 23:27
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LeJackal posted:This is an interesting take.. Sounds like it was written by someone who's never worked fast food. The manager's role isn't to efficiently tell people how to do things, it's to efficiently yell at people who are doing things wrong, and to adapt to unforeseen situations. "Manna", as described, is basically a glorified scheduler which estimates when things should be done based on statistical analysis and rudimentary sensors - except for some reason it has a synthesized voice, and for some reason the writer thinks the employees would be thrilled to be wearing location trackers so that an annoying computer voice could micromanage their every footstep.
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Dec 5, 2016 17:35
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turn it up TURN ME ON posted:I think you're missing what the other people are saying. They're software engineers or automation engineers, and they're saying that more jobs like theirs will be created. They're saying that when a menial job is created it will be replaced by a job maintaining whatever thing replaced them. Automation would be pointless if it meant replacing twenty minimum-wage burger flippers with five well-paid autonation engineers and fifteen decently-paid robot fixers. The whole point of automation is to reduce the number of employees necessary to do the same amount of work. Your friends would likely respond that rather than doing the same amount of work, the business would use the cost and efficiency savings to expand their operations, doing so much more work that they end up with the same amount of employees as before (doing other work that expanded along with the main business) because they're so much more profitable. To that, though, the answer is simple: where's the demand? That answer works okay for manufacturing, where demand is pretty elastic, buying more than you need is no big deal, and oversupply just drives down prices and makes the company have to pay for warehouse space. Not so much in food service - the demand for food isn't nearly as elastic, so the room for market growth and capacity increases is somewhat more limited. And a lot of non-capacity investments, like building improvements and marketing, are also things that can be largely automated. The core assumption of automation as a public good is that the productivity improvements will lead to economic expansion that gets invested back into non-automatable labor. As more and more work gets automated, and the labor market and economy both get sicker and sicker, that critical principle gets less and less true.
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Dec 6, 2016 01:30
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override367 posted:The conundrum to me is that if automation replaces any significant portion of the work force without an alternative, the resulting economic collapse will gently caress all those companies that just bought robots because nobody's buying their poo poo anymore Yes, absolutely. But due to various weaknesses in the way businesses assess the consequences of their actions, they don't take that into account. The lesson they take away from that isn't that they shouldn't automate, it's that they should lead the pack in automation so that they can accumulate maximum profit from that automation before the economy crashes from everyone else automating. That's why government intervention is needed. Ocrassus posted:When we get to artificial general intelligence (a kind of medium between current weak AI and strong AI), piloting as a profession is out the window, alongside a poo poo tonne of other jobs that are otherwise 'safe' in current projections. The only reason piloting as a profession is still around now is for regulatory and liability reasons. The commercial airline industry is tremendously regulated, scrutinized, and unionized. As a result of those pressures, the industry faces very high barriers to automation. INH5 posted:The thing is, ATMs enabled that expansion by reducing the cost of opening new branches. We basically ended up with Jevons's paradox, except with bank tellers instead of coal. The thing is that in most industries, there's a limit to the amount of extra output that the economy can accept. If someone today invented a machine that halved the number of employees necessary to keep a physical bank branch open, overall bank employment would drop, because there's not enough unmet demand to double the number of physical bank branches in the US. The number of branches would grow somewhat, but not nearly enough to compensate for the number of jobs eliminated. When the ATM was invented, banks were already interested in expanding the number of physical branch locations for various reasons, and ATMs simply made it cheaper and faster to engage in the growth they were already planning. There's no such plans today; indeed, banks are already cutting branches as it is. A labor-saving automation tool introduced in this environment would decimate bank employment, as they use it to extract maximum savings from the cuts they're already engaging in rather than taking advantage of it to expand the operations they're currently shrinking due to flagging demand. As more and more industries are automated, the US will be less and less able to absorb the impact of that automation, particularly as population growth and economic growth both slow to a crawl and industrial expansion brings output up against the practical and economic limits of customer demand.
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Dec 6, 2016 20:54
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SaTaMaS posted:What about the claim by companies that there aren't enough people trained in Advanced Manufacturing in the US, so they have to go to China or Mexico instead? Accurate or bullshit? As a general rule of thumb, if a company claims there just aren't enough X workers to meet their demand, what they really mean is that there aren't enough X workers interested in what they're willing to pay for X, either because the company insists on underpaying for the level of skill or experience they're asking for, or because there's some massive distortion of the labor market going on (for example, the main cause of the "programmer shortage" is the massive over-concentration of tech companies in one specific place, oversaturating the local labor market).
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Dec 8, 2016 14:46
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SaTaMaS posted:Yes I realize that, but on the other hand there's a record low employment participation rate. Getting paid $35/hour for what people in Germany get paid $55/hour for isn't great, but it's much more than the average salary and it doesn't even require a 4-year degree. The machinists aren't sitting around unemployed, they're working at the US companies that do pay $55/hr, and the companies that can't attract any talent because they're paying $35/hr are the only ones complaining about a "shortage". It's the same with the pilot shortage. The only airlines complaining about a shortage are smaller regional airlines that have been engaged in a race to the bottom on price for so long that they pay a third of what major airlines would pay for the same qualifications and experience, so theyre constantly scraping the bottom of the barrel and getting only the dregs that the major airlines won't touch.
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Dec 8, 2016 18:45
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, but once you are living in the singularity to the point that 50% of all jobs are replaced by robots money as a concept is obsolete. So at what point does the wizard wave his magic wand and instantly change society? When 20% of jobs are automated? 30%? 40%? Hell, who's even been counting how many jobs have been automated away over the past five or ten years? Social change isn't something that just magically happens - it's something that has to be pushed for. We can't just sit back and say "well, if the problem gets REAL bad I'm sure someone will solve it". Hell, look at how well that's worked for climate change.
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Dec 23, 2016 23:35
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:And robots were the secret cause of this and the giant economic crash in 2008 was just a cover story to hide the robots or something? The economic crash motivated employers to look at streamlining their workflows and making better usage of the automation they already had, as well as identifying ways to consolidate the workload onto a smaller number of people using the software they already had. That's the problem - it's gradual change, heavily focused around moving people from medium-wage jobs to low-wage jobs, with the effect intensifying as automation gets cheaper and endangers lower-wage jobs.
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Dec 26, 2016 17:01
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Front-of-house is never going to be fully automated. Automation is already making inroads as an option at many places - I've been to restaurants that have little touchscreen ordering devices on the table, complete with card swipes for payment - but it will never fully replace waitresses and cashiers. A lot of people do value the human element, often in ways that they don't fully realize consciously and in ways that machines can't possibly replace. However, automation still poses a risk to waitresses and cashiers and such. While those jobs can't be fully replaced by machines, they can partially be replaced by machines (some people are fine without the human element), and that decrease in FOH jobs per location is unlikely to be accompanied by an increase in the number of locations because labor is a relatively small percentage of food service running costs anyway. Besides, it's the back-of-house jobs with no real human interaction, like dishwashing, that are really under threat from automation. While the public obsesses over self-checkout stations, the supermarket companies are waiting with bated breath for Amazon to figure out automated shelf-stockers.
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Dec 27, 2016 15:53
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rscott posted:The distributive productive aspect of social media has basically killed traditional journalism and print media, the consequences are writ large in who is the president elect of the United States of America Not really. Crowdsourced news is really good at some things, like ensuring that many police shootings and protests are livestream, but really bad at stuff like investigative pieces.
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Dec 28, 2016 16:15
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rscott posted:I didn't say it was a good thing, the double edged sword is as you describe. Fact remains most news doesn't come from traditional media sources anymore. The ubiquity of our mobile devices have allowed social media sources to supplant TV and print media in a way that neither could do to each other. Plenty of news comes from traditional media sources. Crowdsourced high-quality news isn't that common, and - importantly - isn't very reliable.
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Dec 28, 2016 21:25
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"Mapping every inch of roadway in the world with ground-penetrating radar" isn't even close to being a practical solution. It's just brute-forcing the problem with highly detailed mapping, which is not practical on a global scale.
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Jan 10, 2017 23:38
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Car companies make cars that kill more people than any other product ever created. Why are they the gatekeepers on the one true source that can keep us safe? We are told the dead are the eggs that needed breaking to make the omelette of the modern world but we don't really have anything to check that against. Or at least when car companies tell us 1.5 million corpses a year need to be fed into the fire to keep cars running we don't actually know that is actually true and they are really our friends and that it couldn't be 1.1 million if they tried better. Those 1.5 million corpses a year aren't the price we pay for the modern world, they're the price we pay to not have to sit on the bus next to those people, or even live in the same neighborhood as them. Getting around without cars has been a solved problem for a very long time, right down to the "and it would work so much better if we just spent a bit of money on infrastructure" part.
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Jan 11, 2017 17:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The hard limit of traffic is every car moving at 150 miles an hour with a micron between the bumpers nonstop forever. The laws of physics limit is so much absurdly higher than the practical limit of roads, the drivers are the actual limit that matters. No it's not, because there are physical limitations on how quickly a car can change its speed. Speed limits and distances between cars don't exist because of inefficient human reaction times or something, they exist because of physical limitations on how fast a car can decelerate from a given speed. Even with literally instant reaction times, a car going 150 mph still requires a specific amount of time and distance (based upon its mass and other factors) to decelerate to safe speeds. No amount of automation is going to change that. Self-driving cars could possibly result in slight increases in traffic throughput due to more efficient driving...but it would also result in dramatic increases in congestion because making driving more convenient causes more people to drive, and the increased number of cars on the road would well outweigh any efficiency gains from better driving.
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Jan 17, 2017 21:01
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Because the "supply" of a road is based on how people use it and there is certain things people will do forever in every traffic situation forever that are always a mistake every single time. Which causes congestion that would be avoidable if people did it right but can never be expected for people to just magically "do it right" after all this time across every culture showing people just do it wrong because that is what people do. No, the throughput of a road is based on various physical realities. If a car accident blocks half the lanes, traffic is going to slow to a crawl, because there is a physical bottleneck suddenly cutting the capacity of the road in half. Automation doesn't change that.
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Jan 17, 2017 22:11
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Okay, but notice how that is literally not at all what happens? Do you not understand the word "bottleneck"? 50% of lanes means a lot less than 50% of throughput, because four lanes of cars becomes two lanes of cars all of a sudden. Squeezing four lanes of cars into two lanes all at once imposes significant extra burdens on throughput - not because humans are bad drivers or something, but rather because of significant physical limitations on merging in congested situations. It's a kind of traffic flow that isn't supposed to happen, and goes against major principles of road design.
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Jan 17, 2017 22:45
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Oh so you are saying that roads can't use 100% of their possible capacity because of inefficiency? I wonder what could reduce that? Well, for one thing, we could give cars the ability to drive sideways. Or, as long as we're fundamentally changing the design of a transportation system, we could just put jump-jets in every car so they could just jump right over the accident. Hell, why not put big armored cowcatchers on the front of cars so they can push disabled vehicles (and animals, and pedestrians) out of their way?
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Jan 17, 2017 23:41
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I just don't understand why this claim is even controversial. Human's are basically never good at shaping their individual behavior to optimize group behavior. People don't even think about that stuff when driving. People are barely even ABLE to think about that sort of thing. It takes researchers in labs running simulations to even be able to say what even is optimal traffic behavior. A system that is mostly or entirely automated cars can maneuver in the way that traffic models say is most efficient for traffic as a whole instead of "however you feel like" the way people do. Not even mentioning cars that potentially communicate with each other and with live traffic data. Because the net effect of all of that is trivial compared to the impact of the physical limitations cars operate under, and you've absolutely refused to acknowledge that those limitations even exist - every time someone points one out to scuttle one of your hypotheticals, you immediately change the subject without acknowledging it and whine about how no one will accept the potential of technology. Even with literally instant reaction times and perfect group behavior, knocking out two lanes in a four-lane road is still going to cause serious slowdown, because no matter how smart the autodrive is, cars still obey the laws of physics, space, time, and road design.
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Jan 18, 2017 01:17
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Where the hell are you driving where you are pushing against the physical limitations of your cars or biology? No matter how fast your reaction time is, it takes your car a certain amount of time - and distance - to stop. The higher the speed, the longer the time - and distance. On top of that, various aspects of road design take expected speed into account. Posted speed limits are often set too low, but don't pretend that means there's no difference between driving 50mph and 150mph.
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Jan 18, 2017 02:53
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Blue Star posted:Im still not convinced that automation is actually happening. Go into any store like Wal-Mart, Target, or into any food place like McDonalds, it's still the same. There may be self-serve kiosks but the technology is still very primitive. Artifical intelligence doesnt exist. Robots are still dumb and clumsy. People are still going to be driving trucks and taxis, making and serving food, selling stuff to other humans, etc for a long time to come. I go on the internet and its OMG automation, but when i go outside into the real world, it's the same as its always been. So it seems like this histeria over automation and robots and ai is just bunk. There's already plenty of automation in those jobs that has significantly reduced the number of workers needed - it's just so commonplace now that you don't even think of it as automation because it's rare to see those jobs being done without that technology. Barcode scanners, for example, were a major labor-saving invention. They seem quaint by our standards today, but they were revolutionizing grocery stores just a couple decades ago. Back in the 70s, each individual item had to have a price sticker on it, and the cashier would have to manually enter every price into the cash register. The deployment of retail barcode systems meant that cashiers could check out customers much more quickly - and therefore fewer cashiers were needed to handle the same volume of customers in a reasonable period of time. It vastly simplified inventory management as well, noticeably decreasing the manpower that was needed to keep shelves stocked, prices updated, and restocking orders placed. To this day, many plans for further automating grocery stores, like self-checkouts and portable carry-around scanners, still rely on barcode technology.
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Jan 19, 2017 17:06
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Tei posted:Having the refrigerator automatically refill the milk bottle is against some of our instincts. You will not eat or drink something without looking at it at least once. Is a miracle that people trust soda companies like Coca Cola, but I think is because every coca cola taste exactly the same and you have not heard of anybody finding a dead rat inside his cola bottle and dying for that. Ordering milk is the easy part. The hard part is getting it from your front porch to your fridge in a timely matter. That's why automated ordering of perishables never really took off. You can order soda online because it's non-perishable - it doesn't care about sitting outside on a hot summer day for six hours. The reason there are soda vending machines and not milk vending machines is simply because the soda companies put a lot of money into marketing and ensuring the wide availability of their products. Milk occasionally shows up in vending machines, but the fact that the milk companies don't make milk vending machines is a major contributing factor to its rarity.
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Feb 5, 2017 17:34
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Malcolm XML posted:I just ordered milk and bread online and a dude came in a refrigerated truck and handed them to me. Some of us work for a living, and the logistics of that get complicated fast when you're not just sitting at home playing videogames all day.
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Feb 5, 2017 18:37
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serious gaylord posted:My weekly shop is delivered between 9 and 10pm on a Tuesday. Its about as complicated as ordering anything else on line. Paradoxish posted:Uh, almost all grocery delivery services that I know of schedule delivery with an hour window at most, run deliveries until at least 8pm, and deliver on weekends. "All grocery delivery services I know of" isn't the same as "all grocery delivery services". Where I live, the only grocery delivery service I've found has two-hour to six-hour windows, depending on availability and time of day, with extra charges for shorter or more convenient windows - and I live in a major US metro area.
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Feb 5, 2017 21:51
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Malcolm XML posted:IMO an acceptable trade-off The US is composed almost entirely of shitholes and sprawl. Just because something works in a major European city doesn't mean it works everywhere.
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Feb 6, 2017 01:33
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A Buttery Pastry posted:You say that like a powerful state is a certainty. No one is going to care about having full control of both "federal and state governments", if the state doesn't have the power to tell corporations what to do. Doesn't matter if people "vote left", if corporations just tell the government to gently caress off. Why don't corporations tell the government to gently caress off now, and what do you expect to change that? I think we can solidly say that no, the singularity isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future.
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Feb 11, 2017 23:45
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Unless I was a millionaire going to doctor house who might make up brand new solutions to my medical problems I'd rather have a system that searched a bunch of databases really well and scientifically applied the best available medical studies perfectly than have some guy follow his heart and emotions to pick what pills I need. Sure. But what's actually happening in the automated version is that a human is using their knowledge and skills to observe your problems, using their judgement to make decisions, and then using their expertise to condense the results of their observations and judgement into something they can enter into what is essentially a specialized search engine.
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Feb 27, 2017 00:31
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Again, maybe you go to doctor house MD and he is using his genius brain to think up brand new diagnosis and then curing them with brand new treatments. But most of real medicine is failable doctors trying to vaguely remember symptoms within the limits of human memory then poorly looking up the symptoms they don't remember then giving treatments based on whatever the research said the last time they looked at the research mixed with how they "feel" about it. The cold boring database doesn't look up medical studies on its own - the fallible doctors are the ones using the cold boring database to look them up. It doesn't matter how good the database is, because the I/O device that interprets your symptoms and complaints and turns them into search queries for the database is still a human being with medical training, and the I/O device that parses and analyzes the results of the query will also be a human being with medical training. The magic perfect database doesn't remove the human element or even meaningfully diminish the role of human doctors.
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Feb 27, 2017 20:34
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anonumos posted:Has anyone written about my gut feeling that amounts to "not all automation"? I don't think automation is inherently zero sum. Many automated systems give rise to new industries, creating more jobs than destroyed. Naturally most such positive knock-on effects are less invisible or more obfuscated than the negatives, but... The point of automation is inherently to reduce the number of workers needed to do a thing, or at least reduce the amount paid to those workers. That is often counterbalanced by increasing demand and spawning new industries related to it, but that's not always the case - it depends a whole lot on the conditions and general nature of the economy, especially since the new jobs are rarely comparable to the old ones. And even when it is the case, there's a limit to how many job losses the economy can reasonably absorb and replace. During previous major waves of automation, the number of jobs generally rose, because the economy generally had a lot of room to grow and was desperate for more workers, so rather than using labor-saving technologies to eliminate jobs, companies used them to accomplish more with the same number of workers. However, that's not a guaranteed outcome of automation, and the economy now is much different than it was then. For example, ATMs didn't cause consumer bank employment to drop, because even though it reduced the labor requirements at any specific bank branch, banks were busy with a massive expansion in the number of physical bank branch locations at the same time - there was plenty of unserved demand that banks wanted to fill. As a result, there wasn't a big loss in bank teller work, because banks were already building more branches that they needed tellers at, and ATMs simply reduced the number of new people they needed to hire to fuel that expansion. That doesn't mean that bank automation always leads to that, though. Consumer bank employment has plummeted over the last few years, because banks are shuttering their physical branches in favor of online banking and mobile banking, and market conditions aren't particularly favorable for consumer banking right now anyway. Bank of America, for example, has 25% fewer physical branch locations now than it did in 2008, and that's come with a similar reduction in headcount as well. Automation doesn't always lead to job losses, but that's something that depends on the nature of the automation and the state of the economy. The economy was able to absorb previous waves of automation fairly well, but as automation improves and the economy is forced to absorb more and more displaced workers, it will eventually run out of capacity - particularly considering the prolonged economic slowness we've been suffering for many years now, which might even be a symptom of the labor market changes caused by heavy computerization. "Well, people will just find something new to do" won't work when that "something new" can already be done by machines as soon as it's invented.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:38
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That would make a good short story. This is because the same technological and economic changes that largely obliterated agricultural work also led to things like mass production and global shipping. You're mixing up cause and effect. It's not that a bunch of people became unemployed and so the economy found something else for them to do, it's that technologies were invented that made turning an input into an output vastly more efficient, which decimated industries that had already pretty much maxed out how much input they had to process (like agriculture, since there's only so much arable land) and led to an intense hunger for workers in industries and supply chains that had plenty of unexploited input to expand into using. This wasn't an inevitable result of automation, though, that's just how things happened to settle with that particular automation and that particular economy. In the modern era, though, there's a lot less in the way of unexploited resources or unfulfilled demand, particularly at the low-skill end of things. There's a lot less economic slack to absorb the consequences of automation than there's been previously.
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Feb 28, 2017 20:27
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I guess if you mean "in the trump economy" then yeah. Mass unemployment absolutely can be a real thing. We haven't found a level of technology yet that makes economic problems not happen. otherwise labor seems like a resource as much as anything. If we get a lot of excess super suddenly that isn't great. For any resource. But if we have a huge pool of "minimum wage workers" I don't really imagine a world where someone doesn't think of a way to utilize them, any more than I am worried that the world will someday dig up some iron and have everyone say "nah, we're good, put it back, we already used all the iron we wanted" even if some giant motherlode find of iron could gently caress up the prices short term. The Trump economy? How about the internet economy? The last two decades have been just a series of ever-greater bubbles while the fundamentals of the economy rot on the vine. We don't dig up more iron than we need. We could absolutely scale up our iron mining operations and dig up more iron per day, but we don't bother because there's no point in digging up more supply than there is demand. The same's true for other resources, like oil. We absolutely do say "nah, we're good, we've already dug up all the iron we need for today, slow down production and fire a bunch of the workers to slow our iron-digging rate to match demand". One difference between labor and other resources is that there's no resource-extraction industry to control how much is labor is available and ensure that the economy is not on the hook for supporting any more labor than it needs. Unutilized labor can't be put back in the ground (without mass murder or starvation) nor can the growth of the labor market be easily restricted. As for your claim that "someone will think of a way to utilize them", that ignores a basic problem involved - as automation marches on, there'll be fewer and fewer ways to utilize the larger and larger number of people losing their jobs, because more and more of the ways to utilize them will also be automatable.
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Feb 28, 2017 22:49
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I want to change my tone for a bit. I am a bit of a one note gimmiclk poster and I know of course I was going to be the guy white knighting technology. But I think this discussion also bugs me at a political level. For the left, the problem isn't really that jobs are being stolen, the problem is that society is focused around jobs at all. Everyone needs a job to live, but there's absolutely no assurance that everyone can have a job; it's just left up to market forces to hopefully assure that enough people will have jobs to prevent social meltdown. Through happenstance, coincidence, and the labor demands of the 20th-century economy, that's more or less worked out most of the time, with the government stepping in at times to give it a bit of a kick when it fails badly enough to cause a crisis. It's never really been reliable, though, and it seems clear that it won't be sustainable for much longer as the march of progress continues to decimate the employment markets. We need to break our dependence on outdated notions like "if you don't work, you don't eat", and it'll be far better to start working on it now before the social and economic disaster lurking in the future catches up to us. Right now, the unemployment rate is still fairly low (though labor force participation and wage growth are also low). But the economy has less and less slack with which to absorb large-scale job losses, and sooner or later it will run out. When it does, the answer many will come up with is "I'm sure someone will find something for all those unskilled workers to do", but that's the wrong answer, and only a temporary fix at best even if it does work. The true answer we need to come to is "well, now that the economy can no longer reliably employ everyone, maybe it's time to fundamentally change the way in which we depend on employment"...and that is what the people blaming job losses on immigration and such are trying to distract you from. They're trying to convince people that the economic woes are merely temporary issues caused by bad trade or immigration policies, rather than an inevitable and critical failure of capitalism. flashman posted:This is true if that level of automation was implemented wholly and instantaneously but it will be more gradual than that. The rapid increase of women in the labor force over the past 50 years has lead to dual income families climbing from 25 percent to 60 percent. This increase in income has by and large been gobbled up by consumer debt, rising home costs, childcare etc. I don't think it's out there that over a 50 year horizon with automation that the reverse won't happen and the extra jobs you've seen creating these 2 income families disappearing to revert back to a single earner system. The extra jobs will disappear...but many of the extra costs won't. Childcare's one thing, but the soaring costs of things like homes and healthcare aren't things that are going to go down just because there's less jobs. Also, in a society dependent on work, being a single-income family permanently limits the economic prospects of the non-earner. For example, if the earner gets hit by a car and the non-earner has to start earning in their place, then they have a harder time finding a job because of the gap in their resume, they get paid less when they do find a job because they have less work experience, and they now have to bear extra costs like childcare in order to work. And that's before you even get into the rampant gender discrimination in our society. flashman posted:I'm not sure I understand you by nature in a single earner culture equitable alimony is a requirement. In my (anecdotal) experience divorce settlement have been pretty fair, even without children involved. So, what, it doesn't matter if someone is completely dependent on their spouse's earnings because they can just get divorced if they don't like it? That doesn't sound socially toxic at all!
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Mar 1, 2017 16:38
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flashman posted:Housing costs aren't based in any inherent value of the home though... Rather in what will be paid for it. Do you not believe that much of the "increases" in housing values are simply caused by the doubling of income to the household? They're also caused by crappy zoning, a preference for builders to construct more profitable luxury housing rather than lower-cost homes with a slimmer margin, high land costs and overhead in general, and so on. That aside, while costs would likely fall at least a bit if the majority of double-income families became single-income families, it will still be a net loss for the single-income families unless almost all double-income families became single-income...and the costs wouldn't drop until after a large number of double-income families have given up one of their incomes. Just read your own previous post, in which you lament that you can't afford to go down to single-income and wish that every other double-income family would drop down to single-income first to drive costs down to where it would be affordable for you to do so. Guess what - every other dual-income family has that exact same problem.
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Mar 1, 2017 16:48
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flashman posted:Do you think that there will be similar levels of employment in 50 years time? In 50 years time, either employment will be optional or we will live in a corporate dystopian hellscape where unemployment is punishable by death. A move to single-earner households wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of "the economy no longer needs all available labor and is leaving the excess labor to starve". At best, it's just buying time. Besides, without any government assistance or incentive for the transition, it would be a brutal transition whose early adopters would be the yucky sufferers rather than people willingly toning down their commitments. flashman posted:I disagree that single income relationships are as bad as you portray them. I would stay home in an instant if it was economically feasible and I'm sure my wife would prefer it. And what happens when you need to buy something and your wife says no, and you have to put up with it because she earns all the money and you earn none? A single-earner household creates a lot more potential for abusive relationships because the person who doesn't earn doesn't have any lifeline or escape - even divorces cost money, particularly if your abusive spouse is willing to spend their money on a pricey divorce lawyer and fight you for every inch.
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Mar 1, 2017 23:39
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Boon posted:Last I heard, net jobs has always increased with automation. The qualitative factor is the issue (a subset tend to be very high paying, while the majority of jobs generated by the new industry tend to be lower). That's because automation tends to have the impact of simplifying a large swathe of a given process, while itself being very complex. Historically, that's the case, but it's neither a guarantee nor an inherent consequence of automation. Previous waves of automation happened in times when there was a lot of room for the economy to expand. For example, the same automation technologies that decimated farm employment also massively increased the potential throughput of industry, fueling incredible expansion in an economy that was only just beginning to come up with ideas like "mass production". Today's economy doesn't really have the same kind of slack to absorb the impact of automation - we've pushed a lot of things to their limit in ways that we hadn't in previous major automation waves.
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Mar 3, 2017 21:19
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