I have been frustrated recently with my inability to efficiently participate in discussions of automation which crop up online and in person. The purpose of the post is to refine a conversational presentation of what I believe to be the salient concerns; the chief goals are brevity and clarity, but obviously corrections of fact supersede this.
I think the current wave of automation will be different from previous ones, in ways which make it more disruptive. There are three reasons for this:
No Fourth Sector: The economy has three broad sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, and services. The first wave was in agriculture, and people could find adjacent work or switched to working in manufacturing. The second wave was in manufacturing, and people could find adjacent work or switched to work in services. The current wave is affecting services, but there is no fourth sector of the economy left for workers to switch to.
Skills Over Jobs: Agricultural automation was largely about tasks: a digging machine, a seeding machine, a pulling machine. Manufacturing automation took this to the next level, with robots performing defined sequences of tasks. But in both cases these were specific - any task or series of tasks which had not been specifically automated was still work to be had. The new wave of automation is entire skillsets, like apply this pattern or the ability to speak. This means when a job is lost to automation, all similar jobs are going away at the same time. There will be no adjacent work for people to switch to.
Speed: When automation was physical machines, they had to design them, and build them, and ship them, and customers had to rebuild their own factories to use manufacturing robots. Modern automation is largely software driven, so design and build are the same process, which is then practically free to copy and distribute. As soon as the method is ready, it can be picked up by businesses as fast as they can rent server space to run it. This gives local economies and institutions like government very little time to respond.
Automation is different this time because the problems we experienced last time will be more severe, and more widespread, and happen faster.
Bardivan on January 19th, 2018 at 16:09 UTC »
looks like we are all just goin yo have to become twitch streamers
bcanddc on January 19th, 2018 at 15:48 UTC »
This why I switched careers 5 years ago. I was in the automotive industry, retail side. Sales and general sales manager were my last positions.
The internet took away the profits but the lousy hours stayed, that was the first strike. Next was the coming driverless cars and Uber etc. I could see that young kids were not interested in cars the way previous generations were and it was obvious to me even 15 years ago that cars were going to be self driving. It was time to get out after 21 years.
I looked around at what would be very hard to automate? Trades like plumbing and electricians, who repair existing systems will be nearly impossible to automate. The installation of new, standardized systems and the repair of those new systems could be but to program a robot to go into a 60 year old house, diagnose the issue, find the problem and fix it will not happen in my lifetime.
So bring on the UBI, I'll collect that and keep working at the same time.
Calamari_Tsunami on January 19th, 2018 at 14:37 UTC »
Automation wouldn't be an issue, but a boon, if we could find a purpose for the countless human hands. If the government would play it right, then even education could become cheaper. Having electronic appliances doing work that produces something a hundred times more useful than the bit of power it took to do the work, it sounds like the key to winning as a species. If half of what humans currently do is done by machines, and if the folks in charge could give meaningful work to the people who were replaced by machines, that could be the start of a new age. But I don't feel like we'll ever benefit from automation as much as we could, simply because those in charge don't know how to use it in the grand scheme of things, in order to benefit humanity. I feel like the government would rather put restrictions on how much can be automated than actually use this to its fullest, educating people and giving people work that machines can't do. It'll always be "the machines took our fast food jobs, looks like we need to create more fast food jobs for the humans"