Rise of The Machines

Politics and religion
1

We’ve been talking about how robots are going to supplant so many jobs, and it’s time for a dedicated thread.

To start it off, is this aptly titled Washington Post article that takes a peak inside of one business who is having difficulty finding people who want to work on its manufacturing line - and they are resorting to putting in robots simply to keep the lines going.

Within this article is some interesting observations on the people who work there.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rise-of-the-machines/2017/08/05/631e20ba-76df-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html?utm_term=.7dd0d3fbb481

The line was intended for 12 workers, but two were no-shows. One had just been jailed for drug possession and violating probation. Three other spots were empty because the company hadn’t found anybody to do the work. That left six people on the line jumping from spot to spot, snapping parts into place and building metal containers by hand, too busy to look up as the forklift now came to a stop beside them.

The robots were coming in not to replace humans, and not just as a way to modernize, but also because reliable humans had become so hard to find. It was part of a labor shortage spreading across America, one that economists said is stemming from so many things at once. A low unemployment rate. The retirement of baby boomers. A younger generation that doesn’t want factory jobs. And, more and more, a workforce in declining health: because of alcohol, because of despair and depression, because of a spike in the use of opioids and other drugs.

2

Teach your kids math, folks, or they are gonna be turned into bio sludge to power my robots.

3

IMO, we as a society need to prepare for this upcoming onslaught of automation. Truck Drivers, Taxi Drivers, Line cooks, Manufacturing lines, even lawyers are being automated.

How are we as a society going to handle the displacement of the workers that will be replaced by Robots?

In my limited view, only a few jobs will increase - A robot repair person, who I believe will be able to command a premium - because let’s face it, businesses will have very little patience if one of their lines go down is an obvious choice for a future job. A computer programmer to program the machines, is going to be needed in droves. Installers & robot movers will increase.

I’m being very biased in stating the majority of tasks that robots are going to replace are jobs held by lower educated people and I really wonder what society’s plan is.

Bill Gates would like to tax businesses and use the proceeds to fund job retraining

I’m not sure job retraining is going to work - who has a crystal ball to say what’s good to retrain on that will last more than 5-10 years? The economy is just moving too fast. Or are we always retraining?

4

I ate here last week. The food was made by robots and I ordered and paid on an iPad. $6 for a curry bowl made from real food, because they don’t have to pay humans.

https://www.eatsa.com/

5

I’m an optimist so I think we’ll figure it out. It will be painful for many people.

There is no limit to human desire so there will always be work to do. Always. What may go away is well-defined, secure, full-time occupations.

6

Soylent products.

7

But robots are already better at math…

8

But that’s a big problem in and of itself, too, as the psychological costs of poorly-defined, insecure, part-time or “gig” employment are, I think, very high.

We have a culture that values nothing but profit, and the actions that increase profit, regardless of cost. Look at the Google engineer’s manifesto decrying diversity; at its core, it seems he’s carrying the battle standard for a view of productivity that is measured entirely and solely by the ROI for the owners. Sure, the people doing the work get the so-called benefits of their labor, in terms of monetary compensation, but it’s sort of like professional sports. A very, very few get to the top. A whole slew of people sacrifice everything to get a shot at the big leagues, fail, and end up flipping burgers, with a ton of mental and physical issues to deal with on top of that. But the people in charge love it, because they have a never-ending supply of willing hopefuls.

That’s how business works increasingly. Hire young people, pay them nothing but the promise that, if everything goes right, they’ll make it big, big BIG! The 5% that do set the standard for the 95% that don’t, and there’s always another one waiting in the wings to work those 80 hour weeks. If, mirabile dieu, they manage to survive well enough to continue on but don’t make it big enough to retire at 40, well, fire them, because they cost too much and people at that age with families in particular aren’t going to do 24/7 crunch time all year. Tons of stories you can find in the press, general and business, about how hard it is for people over 40 to find jobs. No one wants to invest in workers because it’s cheaper not to, and the only thing the vast majority of businesses care about–because the system pretty much demands this–is ROI, and it makes zero sense to pay high wages to an older, seasoned worker who can be replaces with two or three underpaid but over-worked young bucks. Disposable young bucks, to boot.

So yeah, robotics may be the least of our worries.

9

“The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.”

10

Not correct.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/wesurvived-spreadsheets-and-well-survive-ai-1501688765

11

Oh wow, so jobs are good now. No problem. Good to see believe the future holds no issue. Carry on.

(the WSJ is behind a paywall, so can’t read)

Those are just opinion pieces. You’re smarter than that. It isn’t what we have today, but what 5 years down the road is going to bring.

12



Since we’re using the WSJ.

13

If you look at the sales figures for light programmable robotics you won’t be so worried about jobs in the near term, by which I mean 5 years or so. It’s a hype-cycle deal right now, with even the better startups running low on funding. Rethink Robotics (the Baxter company) had a big round of layoffs last year, for example. Now in the long run, sure, robots will eventually take most routine labor positions. But right now they’re not flexible enough and they’re too expensive for many jobs. There certainly are some jobs that can be automated right now, but the labor economy as a whole will be stable for a while.

14

I work for a global manufacturing company. We have robots on several lines. But we’ve also continued to hire and add headcount on factory workers. Office worker/engineering/management/support staff have also increased. We do have unions that cover workers in some of our factories, but I don’t think that’s what has prevented the use of more robots. Rather, it’s the difficulty of having things so standardized that a robot can do all of the tasks involved.

As an example of what ours are really good at: tasked welding. The same parts, the same welds, every time, all the time, 24/7. An example of what it would be crazy to try to do though: wiring harnesses. There are way too many points of manipulation and attachment that have to happen, and dexterity to wire in both tight fits, as well as a little guesswork on making sure things have enough leeway at certain points.

Unless we go a long way with robots that can do ALL tasks, I just don’t see that every manufacturing job will completely go away. Not to mention, we have quite a number of staff right now that maintain the robots, the programming, setting up things in a perfect method so that they can do their work, taking those things down afterward, etc.

Just my opinion, but I think the workforce will shift, not disappear.

15

It’s notoriously difficult to predict the future (thank you, Captain Obvious!), and it’s also tough to escape extrapolating what’s going on now into what will happen then, and thus miss paradigmatic shifts that may occur (and which by definition almost we can’t accurately foresee now).

That being said, this question of automation is not new; David Ricardo, in one of the less read sections of his work from the early-mid 19th century, pretty much laid out the expectation and fear that machines would render a lot of jobs obsolete, and could potentially result in mass economic and social disruption. It scared the shit out of him, basically, so he finessed the problem by speculating that increased economic growth would keep creating so much wealth and business that displaced workers would shift into other things, and thus avoid robot Armageddon.

We now, though, tend to be a lot more skeptical about continued high levels of economic growth, so even though Ricardo has been, in effect, right, in that continued growth of the economy has minimized the impact of various labor-eliminating devices, there is no guarantee that will keep happening. To me, the big red flags were what happened during and after the economic crisis of the 2007-8 period. Companies laid off workers, and when business picked up, they didn’t hire them back, because in many cases automation and process streamlining (stuff like TPS/lean production and follow-ons like optimum post-lean production, etc.) drastically reduced the number of bodies needed to do things. And as inherent in the structure of capitalism labor is, foremost, a resource or input, and the driving imperative is to reduce the costs of such inputs, there is absolutely nothing structurally in the system to push companies to retain humans if humans aren’t the most effective tools. And that’s what has happened. Companies that employed hundreds now employ dozens, but have higher margins.

Skipper is right in that hitherto fore the workforce has shifted, and I do think that will continue. The question is the scope and scale. There is, in my view, zero chance that the large blue-collar work force we have now can shift in toto to anything remotely as lucrative or secure in the near or mid future. And one of the beauties of automation is that, yeah, you need robot fixers and programmers, but far fewer than you needed guys with wrenches and slide rules before hand. One programmer can honcho a slew of computer controlled manufacturing systems far more easily than one dude could run around the factory floor making sure the whatzamakallits kept clanking away.

16

My plan is to earn what I can while I can and hope we don’t end up destroying ourselves in the process, but if we do, I’ll take out as many of the folks responsible as I can.

17

My take is that we have been experiencing job destruction due to automation since the industrial revolution, but have done so in ways that are not visible and actually positive as a whole.

Basically, average working hours are now less than half what they were at the end of the first industrial revolution (1830), and the percentage of population in the working force has decreased (due to child labor laws and retirement). This is a welcome increase in working conditions, but the caveat is that the amount of hours of work per population unit has gone down a lot.

Expecting things to be fundamentally differently in the coming decades in the face of even greater automation possibilities seems naive. There will be net destruction of labor.

The question for me is whether the ongoing work destruction will keep improving working conditions or whether there’s a hard cap on how little a single individual can work a week and maintain performance. That is, if with extra automation two people working, say, 10 hours a week will produce as much as one person working 20 with that same level of automation.

Of course I have no answer to that question myself.

18

We are dynamic, and we shift surprisingly quickly to new things. The biggest fault in all this end-of-workers kind of talk is that we don’t take the shift of a workforce more seriously. What we lack is vision to see where this shift will be. Pay may not be the same going forward, but then again, responsibility will probably change as well. Perhaps it will be easier to work for multiple companies doing the same thing or using the same skills.

What we are tiptoeing around is the lump of labor fallacy, that when all the manufacturing jobs are replaced with robots, there will be nothing left to do. There will be new things to do. They may not be equivalent, but labor will be needed, in some way.

19

The moral danger to me, from a skeptical futurist point of view, is that the value of our labor will be primary in consumption.

20

Will be?