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The single biggest argument against the automation scare mongering is that autopilot systems fully capable of taking off, flying, and landing a plane without any human intervention were invented decades ago and yet today we have a shortage of airplane pilots. Until someone can explain to me why this happened and why it won't happen in other jobs (especially in the favorite topic of truck drivers and self-driving trucks), I'm going to take all of these claims with a large bucket of salt. The fact that these claims often cite things that are just plain wrong as evidence doesn't help matters. For example: Tasmantor posted:There would have been a time when people thought checkout work couldn't be automated so it was safe. Now one staff member runs ten auto checkouts and no one bats an eye. Actually, self-checkout lines are falling out of use because they lead to rampant shop lifting. Yeah, Amazon claims to have found some kind of solution to this involving "computer vision." I'll believe it when I see it. Tasmantor posted:ATMs layed off thousands of bank clerks. Actually, the number of bank clerk jobs steadily increased at the same time that ATMs were adopted. INH5 fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 03:57
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Feral Integral posted:Actually, they aren't falling out of use Actually, they are.
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Dec 6, 2016 04:39
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silence_kit posted:I'm sure that the fuel and maintenance costs of a jumbo jet dwarf the pilot's labor cost. I would be shocked if the airlines would be that motivated to do away with trained human pilots. Airline salaries make up 20% of the cost of an average airline ticket. Granted, I have no idea what portion of that is the pilots' salaries compared to everyone else. Shao821 posted:Air travel (and to the same extent airframe manufacturing) is all about trust and risk reduction. Sure they have these systems. But just like self-driving cars, there will be someone behind the wheel. That is, until people become comfortable with the automated systems and the perceived risk of using them becomes negligible. At first, they'll start by retraining the pilots to allow the planes to take the wheel for certain phases of flight, just like they do now, but with more emphasis on taxi, takeoff, and landing. Then pilots will become glorified babysitters for the fully automated planes. After 20-30 years of advertising this to their customers (because everything in aviation is slow, they still don't have wireless DAL C systems yet, much less B or A), airlines may start introducing fully automated flights to see how the passengers take it. If people accept it, great. If not, then they just put in some guy with 10 hours of flight training and pay him 15 bucks an hour. Either way, the well trained, well paid pilots are doomed long term. Okay. This all makes perfect sense. But it's very different from the typical automation apocalypse scenario. In fact, it seems like one of the end points (the one where pilots get 10 hours of flight training and are paid 15 bucks an hour) could easily result in more people being employed as airline pilots, albeit for much lower wages, because the lower costs would presumably lead to lower flight prices and thus to more plane trips, more planes, and more pilots to babysit those planes. If people were talking about this kind of scenario happening elsewhere due to automation, I'd be a lot more receptive. Like, if people were to say that self-driving trucks will lead to lower wages for truckers, because once the job duties are reduced to "babysit the fully automated trucks, fight off hijackers if necessary, and maybe fill out some paperwork," the job can be done by high school dropouts for a lot less money, then I would agree that that scenario does sound very likely and like it might cause a number of problems. But instead everyone talks about how there's going to be chaos! Because there are more than 3 million truck drivers in America and every single one of them is going to be put out of work by robotrucks! And there are way too many historical counterexamples for me to take that kind of talk seriously. And to anyone who says, "but trucks are different because they usually don't carry passengers," I raise the question of why cargo planes also still have pilots. INH5 fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 05:35
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JVNO posted:Art is not a viable employment solution because it requires popularity to be economically beneficial. It relies on the fact there's only 1 mega popular celebrity making music/movies/etc. for every million regular schlubs who consume it. There will be no art based economy to replace our current paradigm of work. Recent years have seen an enormous rise in the number of celebrities and a large drop in the average ratio of consumers:celebrity. You might know these new celebrities by terms like "Youtube reviewer" and "Twitch streamer." Now, I do have my doubts as to how much this can really be scaled up, but "1 mega popular celebrity making music/movies/etc. for every million regular schlubs who consume it" is hilariously out of date. INH5 fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 05:58
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I think Owlofcreamcheese made a very good point here:Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like this whole thing feels like a bad sci-fi story where something changes all of society in one aspect but then everything just stays the same in every other aspect for some reason? For example, let's say that, contrary to my doubts posted above, we really do get robocars and robotrucks good enough to put every trucker, taxi driver, and so on out of work. Sucks for the truckers, taxi drivers, and so on. But what about everyone else? One plausible consequence is that if you don't need to drive the car yourself, you can spend the morning and evening commute playing Angry Birds on your smartphone. Which means that long commutes become a lot more bearable. Which means that the "maximum reasonable distance between home and work" is going to go up for a lot of people. Which not only increases their range of available jobs, but could also decrease their cost of housing since living in a cheap place out in the boonies would be a lot more viable. Even for people who don't own cars, a ticket for a driverless bus would presumably cost significantly less than a ticket for an old fashioned bus with a driver. And this isn't even taking into account the possibility that robocars could lead to less traffic jams, which would make everyone's commute easier... Not that that's guaranteed to happen, but it's at least as plausible as half of the scenarios I've seen about robocars taking all of our jarbs. Paradoxish posted:A few stores doesn't mean that they're falling out of favor. Every bit of data I can find on the global self-checkout market (which is unfortunately not all that much) shows it growing rapidly. I'm sure some stores are abandoning them for one reason or another, but people have been arguing that self-checkouts are going way since they first started becoming somewhat common over a decade ago. They aren't going anywhere, at least until systems like Amazon's or less complex versions like Sam's Club's Scan & Go replace them. Okay, I'll concede the point for now. I'll need to do more research on this before I make a final judgment. Paradoxish posted:Unfortunately, the only people who make money at this are the top shelf celebrities. There are tons of content creators who are just barely getting by and probably working second jobs. Here's a random article about one, but you can find plenty more. This isn't a financially viable career option for most people who want to do it. There's still a heck of a lot more people making money as celebrities than there were 10 years ago. And I don't think you can dismiss people who have to work a second job to make ends meet. 10 years ago, their current second job would probably be their only job, so they're still better off than they would be without the option of internet celebrity. And it isn't like artists working second jobs is anything new either. Even Shakespeare, or at least his family, had a side business selling malt.
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Dec 6, 2016 06:51
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i am harry posted:I'd like a historical example of a time when something caused mass job loss across multiple industries in the same decade please. The most obvious example is the Industrial Revolution, which caused massive job losses not just in farming, but also pretty much every other existing industry, because individual craftsmen couldn't hope to compete against factories. Tasmantor posted:US only article and the increase in tellers is due to the increase in branches. Australia didn't experience an expansion of branches. Banks globally are shutting branches due to the rise of internet commerce so lay offs are even forecast in that article. So no ATMs mean less clerks per branch and now that the internet is automating shopping more there's less need for branches. The original statement that ATMs led to layoffs of bank tellers is still completely wrong.
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Dec 6, 2016 17:32
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Mozi posted:OK, ATMs have led to there being fewer bank tellers necessary per branch. Which boils down to pretty much the same thing from a wider perspective. It also led to there being more branches, and therefore more bank tellers than before. So no, it isn't the same thing at all.
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Dec 6, 2016 17:56
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Paradoxish posted:Automation almost never causes large scale layoffs or job losses in a really direct way. Take this graph from the article you posted about ATMs: 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. You can argue that this is a special case and it won't happen again in other industries, but it still seems like a pretty big counterexample to the idea of automation leading to mass unemployment.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:19
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