The following chart demonstrates tremendous apparent success in America but for a great many it's not real.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
The chart comes from an article in The Guardian, Are robots going to steal your job? Probably, and the article isn't so much about robots but what happened to the jobs.
Note: we have written previously about robots supplanting humans in various ways but that thinking in a more long-term sense such as robot painters, etc. Robots in the context of the article are for process automation in factories, etc.
An error in reading the chart is the assumption it's talking about the same jobs in the seventies as they exist today but it's reviewing the population of jobs and not what any specific jobs are doing. For example, if union jobs were robotized in the seventies and the workers subsequently went to work at Wal-Mart, productivity would stay the same but real wages would take a dive while net employment does remains unchanged.
It seems some Event happened in '73 or '74 and from that point forward to present time real wages did not increase despite an ongoing growth in productivity. Various contributing factors to the situation are presented but nothing emerges clearly as the Event we can blame for what is happening now and whose influence has had the same effect for over forty years.
This is specifically where the illusion of success exists because America looks on paper to be booming and that's true in terms of its productivity and, presumably, its profits but that has had no effect on the workers. This is also where conservatives and liberals are likely to bark since conservatives tend to look at business for the definition of the national health whereas liberals tend to look at the workers. Looking at things one way, everything is great; looking at them the other, everything sucks. Both viewpoints are true.
(Ed: what do you want to do about it?)
Making a factory to employ skilled workers is great until one of the management whizkids decides to robotize it and then the cycle starts all over again.
There's a bigger problem than a fast answer like that because robots are coming in more subtle ways as well and examples were cited previously of robot software which analyzes medical charts to perform diagnostic functions and another one 'painted' its thought of what the next Rembrandt would have been.
The larger problem appears to be the Age of Robotics isn't going to slow and only Luddites would try anyway. The bigger question is what will you do when a much larger population of skilled people is displaced by robots. When it comes to replacing a human with a robot, the case will always be in favor of the robot because humans, even quite bright ones, if performing a repetitious task will make some number of errors. If you're such a wise guy and think you won't, let's see you quickly transcribe a long list of numbers. A robot won't make a mistake but I will ... unless I'm incredibly attentive, etc. Even then there will be a greater tendency to error than with a robot.
It's not such a distant view of a situation in which a great many humans are really not needed that much. There are only so many service jobs to be performed and manufacturing to an increasing extent gets robotized. There is no horror in it if the society anticipates it because, keep in mind, the productivity of the country is still booming except at that point machines will be doing most of the work. Profits will likely increase as this continues but a whole lot of people won't see it and probably won't be able to get jobs doing much of anything.
The immediate Socialist answer is a stipend to people who do not work. The GDP of the country will support it because the robots are doing the work instead of humans and productivity continues to increase. Therefore the profits exist to support the stipend even if the people do nothing.
That it's Socialist is enough to make people hate it but that begs an immediate question: what else will you do?
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
The chart comes from an article in The Guardian, Are robots going to steal your job? Probably, and the article isn't so much about robots but what happened to the jobs.
Note: we have written previously about robots supplanting humans in various ways but that thinking in a more long-term sense such as robot painters, etc. Robots in the context of the article are for process automation in factories, etc.
An error in reading the chart is the assumption it's talking about the same jobs in the seventies as they exist today but it's reviewing the population of jobs and not what any specific jobs are doing. For example, if union jobs were robotized in the seventies and the workers subsequently went to work at Wal-Mart, productivity would stay the same but real wages would take a dive while net employment does remains unchanged.
It seems some Event happened in '73 or '74 and from that point forward to present time real wages did not increase despite an ongoing growth in productivity. Various contributing factors to the situation are presented but nothing emerges clearly as the Event we can blame for what is happening now and whose influence has had the same effect for over forty years.
This is specifically where the illusion of success exists because America looks on paper to be booming and that's true in terms of its productivity and, presumably, its profits but that has had no effect on the workers. This is also where conservatives and liberals are likely to bark since conservatives tend to look at business for the definition of the national health whereas liberals tend to look at the workers. Looking at things one way, everything is great; looking at them the other, everything sucks. Both viewpoints are true.
(Ed: what do you want to do about it?)
Making a factory to employ skilled workers is great until one of the management whizkids decides to robotize it and then the cycle starts all over again.
There's a bigger problem than a fast answer like that because robots are coming in more subtle ways as well and examples were cited previously of robot software which analyzes medical charts to perform diagnostic functions and another one 'painted' its thought of what the next Rembrandt would have been.
The larger problem appears to be the Age of Robotics isn't going to slow and only Luddites would try anyway. The bigger question is what will you do when a much larger population of skilled people is displaced by robots. When it comes to replacing a human with a robot, the case will always be in favor of the robot because humans, even quite bright ones, if performing a repetitious task will make some number of errors. If you're such a wise guy and think you won't, let's see you quickly transcribe a long list of numbers. A robot won't make a mistake but I will ... unless I'm incredibly attentive, etc. Even then there will be a greater tendency to error than with a robot.
It's not such a distant view of a situation in which a great many humans are really not needed that much. There are only so many service jobs to be performed and manufacturing to an increasing extent gets robotized. There is no horror in it if the society anticipates it because, keep in mind, the productivity of the country is still booming except at that point machines will be doing most of the work. Profits will likely increase as this continues but a whole lot of people won't see it and probably won't be able to get jobs doing much of anything.
The immediate Socialist answer is a stipend to people who do not work. The GDP of the country will support it because the robots are doing the work instead of humans and productivity continues to increase. Therefore the profits exist to support the stipend even if the people do nothing.
That it's Socialist is enough to make people hate it but that begs an immediate question: what else will you do?
6 comments:
So I get paid to do nothing because a robot does a job that I used to do. Not a stipend,today they call that welfare.
This goes way past welfare as there won't ever be jobs for these people. Corporations won't bring the union jobs back and robots will continue to take jobs in other ways. Old-style thinking will not answer how to deal with this.
Just as America has moved away from an industrial nation to a service nation. The economy will change. No reason to pay for not working that system can never work. Unions jobs are not a panacea. They are the reason corporations wanted to develop robots so quickly. In every sci fi movie people still had jobs no matter how many robots populated the society
I don't agree about an endless supply of jobs because the ability of robos to intuit things improves steadily and humans aren't so difficult to replace. It's in the corporation's interest to do it because robos are cheaper, at least over the long-term because you never have to retrain them and they're not expensive to fix when they break.
The examples of the radiological diagnostician robo and the Rembrandt painter robo shows they're getting into much higher levels of thought than bolting fenders on cars. There's so much research in this area, it seems inevitable there will be more and more of these types of intelligent devices. It's the basic sci-fi nightmare that robos will build themselves and likely they will although we can lose the robo conspiracy part because it's the CEO who will be directing that. When he can make the product cheaper, he is under a conservative mandate to do so.
The object isn't to be ridiculously pessimistic but I do mean to be realistic about the expectations for jobs which I see continuing to decline except for service-type jobs but even those will max out eventually.
In your scenario, just eliminate humans as they become useless
It may be surprising but I'm not regarding that as one of the best possible outcomes!
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