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Same thing will happened that happened like 6000 years ago, 200 years ago and 50 years ago: Jobs will just move up maslow's hierarchy (or rather, modern versions of similar ideas) and everyone will complain that all the new jobs are just frivolous and all the real jobs are gone until a generation passes and it just ends up it was actually better after all.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:29
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Mozi posted:You think the 3 million transportation workers in this country are all going to go back to college to become automation engineers? A society with that level of automated vehicles that it can replace 3 million drivers is a level of automation that would reshape society so much hypothesizing what individual people would do is pretty silly. Think about how cars themselves changed everything about american society.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:43
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Cicero posted:I at least half-agree: we'll probably see more and more jobs where people specifically value the human element. Live music is an obvious, currently-existing example of this; we've had excellent sound systems and recording capabilities for some time now, but people still pay lots of money to hear their favorite bands at live concerts. Similarly, even if computers were capable of being, say, therapists, in terms of raw analytical/language ability, you'd probably still want a human to be the one actually talking to you. I'm not even thinking highly trained jobs. I'm talking about like, all the jobs that don't exist now because they are not important enough to hire someone else to do. The way cooking used to be. Maybe the la de da queen could get someone to cook for them but not the common person, they were spending hours cooking at home. Now restaurants are so easy and cheap some people die from eating there too much. I COULD make my own cloths, I vaguely know how to sew, but I don't because I can just have someone in a factory do it for me. In the future people there will be lots of jobs doing things that were not seen as worth employing people to do, since labor could be more usefully applied to more important things. That's always how it's gone.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:18
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boner confessor posted:it's not clear when you're talking about but since you're talking about the queen, labor in early modern england was so cheap that one of the stepping stone status symbols of the middle class was hiring someone to cook for you. more people had maids back then than do now, and any ease in cooking today is due to processed foods and advances in food packaging Think of an annoyance in your daily life that other people might have. Someone will have a job dealing with that annoyance in the near future because that is what always happens.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:32
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Can you come up with one or more examples of what these jobs might be, specifically? Like boner confessor, I'm not entirely convinced by the cooking argument, for I think the same reason. I am deliberately avoiding trying to be futurist and making up specific careers because that just pits my specific dumb idea instead of it being the concept that humans have a bunch of unfilled needs and every time they fill them they suddenly realize that instead of being done that all the lesser problems are needs too.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:34
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Which means people will be competing for the chance to serve the people who haven't yet been automated out of a job. 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.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:09
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boner confessor posted:"what happens to these people as there are less jobhavers over time" can't be answered through historic analysis because this sort of problem has never happened before 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. It's been fine every single time.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:58
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Death Bot posted:We're already not handling that transition well, I don't think that repeating variations of it with less and less workers needed over time is a "solution" The solution certainly isn't that we need to hold some sort of eternal empire of people driving trucks and working at arby's because it just happens that the technology from before I was born was good and the technology made since all happened to be devil magic. Basically look at your lovely racist uncle wishing it could be the 1950s again and forever, this is that, but for the 90s. Back when we use to have people working at wendys for poo poo wages and having people drive trucks cross country on meth like god designed things.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:17
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Death Bot posted:I'm not advocating that at all, merely pointing out that "just ride it out, new jobs will pop up" isn't working now and can't really be expected to work better for no particular reason. I am certainly not opposed to things like stronger safety nets and a better more liberal government. I think living and working can suck or be good in any age depending on the society they live in.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:56
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Talmonis posted:The bolded is the hard part. Conservatives aren't going anywhere, and will fight making people able to take care of themselves and family without a job to the death. Yeah, if we all end up in the gutter dying and gasping for food it's not going to be because robots TOOK OUR JEERBS any more than it is because mexicans did. It's going to be because republicans killed safety nets and programs that help people transition between life stages or recover from setbacks.
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Dec 1, 2016 21:12
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To change the conversation a bit: This conversation keeps talking about one half of the equation but not the other. LIke it seems like people can accept a robot surgeon will put a real surgeon out of work because the robot can run for less money than a surgeon is willing to work. But this sci-fi scenario is also one where someone has an autodoc that costs less than 90,000 a year to run. And the big loving deal that is. Or like conversation that all manufacturing will be done by machines and these machines will cost well below minimum wage to run per year but totally ignores what that means otherwise. Like I get the urge to say the rich will own the factory, fire all the workers and pocket the difference to become richer. But like, by definition the factory now only costs a minimal amount to run. And surgery by definition costs a tiny amount to do and lawyers are a software package and whatever. Like, if I need a service and a robot is so cheap, why don't I just buy that? and yeah, don't take that literal, I do understand that our jobs aren't being replaced by a single android that I could just have in my home, I'm trying to say that if a job gets replaced by automation that makes that job cost an extremely low amount it seems hard to imagine a realistic situation where I am forever locked out of being able to acquire that good or service for a low price. If the rich guy can make a car for 15 bucks and pocket the difference then sell it to me for 20,000 dollars maybe someone else can start a factory and make the car for 15 bucks and sell it for 2000. If everything is automated why are my expenses also not going down a huge amount? only my income?
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Dec 2, 2016 14:22
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Tei posted:I am not sure If I understand your logic. The way our societies work now if you are unemployed you have expenses but not income. You may have some money saved but it will not last forever. Once your bank account is empty, you will have expenses that you can't pay, and thats the problem. 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? 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?
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Dec 2, 2016 16:31
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Brainiac Five posted:You're right. In such a situation the majority of humanity would be starved to death by the rich and their mechanic class. Okay but what are the rich doing to get money and what are they spending that money on? Like this all reads as that D&D thing where magic and dragons exist and are common but somehow everything else is just a society of eternal medieval europe somehow because it's not fun to worry about how that stuff would change. Like people are talking about a level of automation that changes the whole employment structure of the entire world but somehow still makes money selling to no one to support rich people that are buying apparently expensive things that are somehow made by extremely cheap machines? What are they buying? who are they buying from? Who builds the stuff they consume and what resources are the things they are buying taking that make their stuff so expensive for rich people?
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Dec 2, 2016 16:43
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Death Bot posted:The question you're asking is "in a world with incredibly cheap goods but no jobs, how does capitalism work" even though the actual point of the thread is.. that question. 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.
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Dec 2, 2016 18:31
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Paradoxish posted:What about 25%? You can keep on being rich by selling to the people who still have jobs and money. Hell, you could probably do that right up until the point that things get so bad that society collapses. Okay, what is a world where 25% of adults have their jobs replaced by machines? Your imagination of that sort of wild buck rodgers singularity is "I don't know, everyone is poor"
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Dec 2, 2016 19:39
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Death Bot posted:You are right, that scenario doesn't hold forever, but that is the trend: production and big business is up, while middle and lower class income and jobs aren't keeping up. I agree very strongly that the poor and middle class are in economic trouble. Stuff is getting worse and will get worse and economic inequality is a major issue right now. I just don't buy the "robots takin our jerbs" idea. It's a sci-fi story that doesn't add up. It's a fantasy. But a weird one where everyone is displaced by automation enough to reshape society but the products of this automation apparently vanishes into the sea or something and doesn't also affect society. Like people can imagine the part a heart surgeon loses his job because a robot does it cheaper and better, but somehow that sci-fi story never also has the part where everyone now can get cheap heart surgery. And like the knee jerk is the rich will keep the money for themselves, but the whole premise was about how amazingly cheap this machine would have to be to displace the dude. So why can only the rich afford to have or run them? Why can't the community hospital buy one? Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 21:35
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BobTheJanitor posted:The same reason you can't formulate Daraprim in your basement and sell it on the street corner for its actual value instead of the 5,000% increased cost that Turing sells it for. To be fair, entire countries seem that they ARE doing that. Manufacturing generics. Like america being a poo poo country that does bad things seems like a separate issue than worrying about robots. Robots don't seem to help or hurt america's ability to gently caress people.
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Dec 2, 2016 22:41
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Main Paineframe posted: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. 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? It's this constant playing it both ways I'm not buying. Automation is going to reshape everything but also everything will stay exactly the same in every way.
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Dec 2, 2016 23:22
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Veskit posted:Uhhhhh, no why would you ever automate a project manager? That's crazy difficult to do. Is this a joke? You wouldn't automate the project manager, you'd automate the project.
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Dec 23, 2016 17:32
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BobTheJanitor posted:It seems like UBI almost requires a functional economy in order to start it rolling. If we wait and try to implement it when it appears to be a necessity, after 50% of the population is out of a job and monetary circulation has flatlined, it would probably be too late. What transactions are you going to tax in order to fund it? 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. like you can't dream of living that far into a sci-fi story but pretend that wouldn't change anything else in society.
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Dec 23, 2016 22:44
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Main Paineframe posted: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. Do you understand the technological progress you are talking about to talk about a world where 40% of all the jobs in US can be done by computers? Hey man, at least it's progress that I went from the only guy saying the singularity was near five years ago to all of D&D thinking that too but just deciding "but literally the only thing it might change is the unemployment rate"
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Dec 24, 2016 15:02
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Paradoxish posted:That study is saying 40% of all jobs which exist right now are at risk of being automated, not that 40% of all jobs will be done by machines or software within two decades. Some of those jobs will be replaced as they're lost and some of the innovations that lead to jobs being lost will end up creating more work. These studies aren't saying anything about the number of people will be unemployed in the future. No one is seriously suggesting that half of all work will be automated in two decades, but there are still major issues to deal with: You are talking about advancements in technology to the point most human endeavors can be done by machines for less than the price of minimum wage. Do you get the level of sci fi fantasy world that is?
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Dec 25, 2016 20:23
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Paradoxish posted:I don't know how much clearer I can make this. Nobody is talking about all human jobs going away. That 47% figure is talking about jobs that exist right now. Even if that number is accurate, we have no idea how that will translate into future employment. Like, that isn't even an unprecedented number. Go back to a time when 90% of the population was engaged in agricultural labor and you would have been 100% correct to say that a huge portion of those jobs will be automated or simply no longer exist in the future. I don't know how simple I can make this: You don't get to circlejerk about the singularity but decide the only effect it has is changing the unemployment rate. Like this is the worst D&D trend. Apparently levels of technology that approach unimaginable magic are going to appear in the next few years, able to do nearly anything a person can do and more. But apparently the only effect of this is job loss? It makes no other changes? It's like those lovely fantasy books where magic and dragons exist and are common but everyone just lives in regular old medieval villages because the author didn't want to bother thinking about the effects magic would have on society beyond whatever stupid story they wanted.
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Dec 26, 2016 02:15
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Paradoxish posted:You're the only person in this thread talking about the singularity, unless you believe that computer spreadsheets and search engines are technology approaching unimaginable magic. Yeah, everyone else is talking about magical computers that can do literally anything a person can but also are just boring old spreadsheets that don't do anything. It's a weird sci-fi story we are supposed to fret about!
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Dec 26, 2016 03:17
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BrandorKP posted:Increasing automation does not equal the singularity. Singularity is just the rapture/kingdom for the irreligious. And this thread is just the millennials version of the fear of the "robot apocalypse' but mashed into a weird place where instead of robots rising up to kill everyone as a civil rights metaphor or using nuclear bombs on us in a MAD metaphor now the robots are going to raise unemployment in a housing crash metaphor.
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Dec 26, 2016 13:10
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Paradoxish posted:Automation almost always comes in the form of labor saving machines (or software) that eliminate jobs over the long term. I have no idea why you're so focused on this weird sci-fi bullshit instead of automation as it actually exists in the real world right now. Like, the whole point is that we don't need machines that can do anything a person can do, we just need machines that can do some of what a person does in highly specific contexts. Because the software exists right now? And we have like 5% unemployment.
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Dec 26, 2016 13:12
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9-Volt Assault posted:Yes, but that 5% is anheavily manipulated number. Pretty much every job created during obama's presidency is low-paid and part time. Millions upon millions of people are stuck in poo poo jobs and are pretty much one accident, like losing their job, away from being homeless. And what does this have to do with robots? If the technology already exists to replace 40% of jobs with machines why hasn't it happened? Seems like the country is at full employment right now actually. Best it's been in a decade.
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Dec 26, 2016 15:05
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rscott posted:You do realize the labor participation rate is lower right now than at any time since (white) women entered the workforce 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?
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Dec 26, 2016 16:07
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rscott posted:Jesus loving Christ you are dumb as hell, the whole point is that seven years later there are less workers in your "full employment" scenario despite the fact that the population of United States has increased largely through the immigration of working age adults in that time frame. The point is that robots embody the people's anxieties in every age and they represented an oppressed underclass when we were afraid of the oppressed underclass then they represented world war III when people worried about world war III now they are just a stand in for millennial fear about unemployment. Like we have two threads on D&D, this one and the AI one and in the AI one we are thousands of years away from AI and progress has stopped and everything is terrible, but in this one we are 5 minutes away from robots being able to take all jobs and all problems that need to be solved to let robots do basically anything is just boring spreadsheet problems and technology is moving super fast and everything is terrible.
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Dec 26, 2016 16:53
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MooselanderII posted:This is not the loving singularity, this is just how widespread refinement and implementation of currently available technology, such as self driving cars and touch screen ordering as two non exhaustive examples, will displace tons of low skill jobs without offering meaningful replacements. For god's sake, Trump's picked labor secretary is a former fast food exec that has seriously flirted with the latter. Sounds an awful lot like you are talking about the singularity, but then just pretending you are being more grown up by making it grimdark. People keep listing technologies "like self driving cars" without giving other examples or saying what technologies are like self driving cars because they don't dare to commit to what technologies they want to say are actually going to come and take all these jobs. Because their story starts to fall apart once they start actually listing what all these "emerging technologies" are and what specific jobs they are going to take. (although I think there is an element that people look down on low paying jobs and assume they must be easy, and thus it's easy to hand wave that a computer could probably clean hotel rooms or pick tomatoes or whatever)
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Dec 26, 2016 20:32
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Pochoclo posted:How about deep learning (e.g. Watson), better data-driven models, faster parallelized map/reduce, etc, and the ever improving field of voice recognition providing a better user-experience for IVRs where you can do about 90% of most frequent operations on a service line? Because that will definitely help cut back a lot on human agents required on many call-centres all over the world, and it's already happening, I know it is because I've worked on that stuff. So all we need to do is advance AI to the level it can make conversation to the point it obsoletes all call center functions then we will have reduced a job that less than 1% of americans do? Sounds simple! AI that can converse like a human will happen any second now I'm sure and have no effects other than this. I can run it on a laptop now!
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Dec 26, 2016 21:30
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bird food bathtub posted:You're loving dumb and/or disingenuous and should stop posting out your rear end in a top hat. There's plenty of poo poo on here already. No, this whole thread is just the millennial version of the robot apocalypse mixed in with a really lovely kind of classism where every low wage job is clearly super easy and some idea that they are so simple that a modern laptop could probably do it if you just loaded the right spreadsheet in excel. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 26, 2016 22:27
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Can someone explain to me what the magic technology is that makes 2016 touchscreens magically able to replace cashiers? Someone smart could probably have rigged up a good electromechanical system to relay orders from tables to the kitchen in 1890. Why is it just a threat now?
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Dec 27, 2016 01:12
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Paradoxish posted:No, there actually wasn't good technology to deal with issues like payment as the ability to accept bills (as opposed to coins) only became cheap and widespread fairly recently. Okay so why didn't they fire the whole staff in 1890 then just hire one kid to stand at the door and collect payments?
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Dec 27, 2016 01:34
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Uncle Jam posted:There are a bunch of restaurants I eat at in Japan that have an iPad ordering system, then the order comes down a belt with a RFID in the tray and comes out onto the right table. Asia has had resturants you self serve yourself plates of food then pay at the end by the number/type of plates you have forever and ever. There has never been a technological barrier to getting rid of waiters in restaurants. If restaurants dump them it's not because touch screens were some wild invention that let customers call orders out to the kitchen for the first time.
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Dec 27, 2016 04:04
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KillHour posted:That's shawarma, not kebab. it's doner kebab, a shish kebab is the thing with the stick through it
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Jan 5, 2017 19:59
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Solkanar512 posted:Oh poo poo, I totally forgot. Even then, the techbros crawled out of the woodwork like cockroaches to explain how that wasn't really a big deal. Cars kill 1.3 million and injure 50 million people a year, why only start caring now when a car kills someone?
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Jan 10, 2017 16:58
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Solkanar512 posted:Read my post again, I'm specifically speaking about tech companies that have little to no experience making vehicles or programming things that can have life altering consequences. Companies that completely lack the culture or standards to keep us safe. 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.
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Jan 11, 2017 15:40
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Solkanar512 posted:The only "gatekeepers" I've mentioned are companies that embrace and understand what it means to make safety a priority. I literally have no idea if car manufacturers do or do not take good care of us and our safety. They kill 1.5 million of us a year and I literally have no idea if that is doing a very good or very bad job. I have no idea if they have a safety priority and they could have made twice as much money if they let that slip to 1.6 million a year but care about us and protect us so strongly they don't or if they could have shaved a hundred thousand off a year but their accountants told them they could make 4 cents a year more if they didn't. With nothing to compare to it seems unknowable. Trains and planes and space ships and boats and stuff seem to all kill less people per man hour. But that isn't apples to apples either.
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Jan 11, 2017 18:45
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Cicero posted:To be fair those other modes usually have stricter licensing requirements. Sure, that is why it is impossible to know. We simply have to take on faith the fact that 1.5 million a year is the 'correct' number of deaths. We have nothing else to compare it to. If we let google or some non carmaker make cars totally separate from the car industry it's really hard to say if we would find out that the car industry actually does a super good or super bad or totally average job at protecting us. They can kinda tell us whatever they want is correct and we can't really argue right now with no other frame of referance on what should be expected.
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Jan 12, 2017 14:44
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