"Workplace transformations"

Danielle Paquette reports in the Washington Post,

Over the next 13 years, the rising tide of automation will force as many as 70 million workers in the United States to find another way to make money, a new study from the global consultancy McKinsey predicts.

That means nearly a third of the American workforce could face the need to pick up new skills or enter different fields in the near future, said the report's co-author, Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute who studies business and economics.

...Technology could replace up to 375 million employees worldwide by 2030, the McKinsey authors estimate.

The jobs most at risk involve repetitive tasks. About half the duties workers handle globally could be automated.

Read more here.

A short-lived victory?

Stephen Green links to a story at The Blaze by Sara Gonzales in which the CEO of Carrier admits that Carrier plans to automate their Indiana plant.

CEO of Carrier’s parent company United Technologies, Greg Hayes, confirmed to CNBC this week that it would ultimately mean fewer jobs available at the facility.

“We’re going to…automate to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive,” Hayes said.

“Is it as cheap as moving to Mexico with lower cost labor? No. But we will make that plant competitive just because we’ll make the capital investments there. But what that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs.”

In lieu of moving to Mexico, Carrier decided to stay in the United States and save 800 out of 1,400 jobs at the plant, in the short-term future. Carrier would not comment on how many of the 800 remaining jobs would be replaced by automation, or when that would happen.

Read more here.

Overly optimistic?

Well here is one guy who remains optimistic about the future. S. Vollie Osborn writes,

...productivity, or output per hour of work, has quadrupled since 1947 in the United States while employment has not risen at nearly the same rate.

What this means is that many companies are producing more goods and services without having to employ more people.

Other research suggests in the next 15 to 20 years, 47 percent of all existing employment is at risk of automation. Even more startling, there’s little to suggest new jobs will be created at the pace necessary to compensate for this loss.

...As technology has replaced jobs requiring repetitive labor, we’ve seen an explosion in the diversity of creative output in the world.

...The developments and innovations produced by passion, and aided by technology, have stretched the imagination. From the realization of many concepts formerly considered science fiction, to the creation of new forms of art, we already stand in awe of what passion and innovation can achieve.

Just imagine a world where that output is expanded exponentially.

Read more here.

The impact of automation and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Image by Danomyte, via Shutterstock

Alan Boyle writes at Geek Wire about job automation,

“Job losses due to automation and robotics are often overlooked in discussions about the unexpected rise of outside political candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders,” Moshe Vardi, an expert on artificial intelligence at Rice University, said before this month’s conventions.

Vardi pointed out that manufacturing employment has been falling for more than 30 years, and yet U.S. manufacturing output is near its all-time high.

“U.S. factories are not disappearing: They simply aren’t employing human workers,” Vardi said.


Historically, employment in routine jobs has bounced back after recessions. But the past three recessions and recoveries have shown significant declines in routine jobs, which makes for “jobless recoveries.” (Credit: Jaimovich and Siu, 2015, via Artificial Intelligence Now)

...even if the next generation is in for a work-free utopia rather than a robo-apocalypse, it’s high time for policymakers and programmers to address how the automation revolution can work for us – instead of against us.

Read more here.

Find a job a robot can't do

Amazon robots ding their thing:

Fred Reed writes at Unz,

...These orange devils carry heavy racks to humans who pick ordered goods from them for shipment. Amazon is working on robots that can do the picking. Who will be left? In principle, 30,000 robots can work 90,000 shifts, plus weekends. With a predictability that makes sunrise look like a long shot, the company says that the robots do not replace but “help” humans. If you believe this, I’d like to sell you stock in my venture to make radioactive dog-food on Mars.

Automation of course means more than robots. As newspaper after newspaper goes all-digital, less pulpwood will be needed to make less newsprint, pressmen will be fired, delivery trucks will no longer needed, and so on. Such ripple effects get little attention. They should.

The capitalist paradigm in which companies think only about themselves, seeking to increase productivity and reduce costs, is going to work decreasingly well. Replacing well-paid workers with robots means replacing customers with a lot of money with customers with little money. People who are not paid much do not buy much. Robots buy even less.

The first crucial question of coming decades: Who is going to buy the stuff pouring from robotic factories?

The current notion is that when a yoyo factory automates and lays off most of its workers, they will find other well-paid jobs and continue to buy yoyos. But as well-paid jobs everywhere go automated, where will the money come from to buy yoyos? Today participation in the work force is at all- time lows and we have a large and growing number of young who, unable to find good jobs, live with their parents. They are not buying houses or renting apartments. (They may, given the intellectual level of today’s young, be buying yoyos.)

Enthusiasts of the free market say that I do not understand economics, that there will always be work for people who want to work. But there isn’t. There won’t be. There is less all the time. Again, look at the falling participation in the work force, the growing numbers in part-time badly paid jobs. Short of governmentally imposed minimums, wages are determined by the market, meaning that if a robot works for a dollar an hour, a human will have to work for ninety-five cents an hour to compete , or find a job a robot can’t do–and these get scarcer.

From a businessman’s point of view, robots are superb employees. They don’t strike, demand raises, call in sick, get disgruntled and do a sloppy job, or require benefits. Building factories that are robotic from the gitgo means not having to lay workers off, which is politically easier than firing existing workers. Using robots obviates the Chinese advantage in wages, especially if America can make better robots–good for companies, but not for workers in either country. That is, production may return to the US, but jobs will not. In countries with declining populations, having robots do the work may reduce the attractiveness of importing uncivilizable bomb-chucking morons from the bush world.

...As standards of living decrease, unrest will come. I will guess that much of Donald Trump’s popularity arises from the sending of factories to China by the corporations that rule America. Now the robots are going to take the remaining jobs. Economists will chatter of this principle and that curve and what Aristotle said about Veblen, but in a free market for labor, robots will win. If we have a high minimum wage, business will automate. If we have a low minimum wage, they will automate, but a few years later.

...The obvious solution, one I think inevitable within a few decades unless we want a revolution, is a guaranteed minimum income, enough to live on comfortably, for everyone. Whether this is a good idea can be debated, but it seems likely to be the only idea. Capitalists will tell me that I do not understand markets, or capital flows or pricing mechanisms, and that I am against freedom. I will respond that they need to wake up and look around. And I will point out that economics has become a tedious form of Left-Right metaphysics, Keynes versus the Austrian School, capitalism versus socialism, all unconnected to onrushing reality.

What would be the effects of a guaranteed income? Godawful, I would guess. Some people, probably including those who read columns on the web, would read, listen to music, drink wine and talk with friends, hike in the Himalayas, scuba dive, and earn doctorates in physics. But most would get up every morning, bored, without purpose, anticipating just another of unending days of television, beer, tedium, no driving desire to do anything but discontent with nothing to do. Would the young even go to school? They would have no need. What has happened among the welfare populations that in effect have a guaranteed minimum income?

See? We are doomed. It warms the cockles of a curmudgeon’s heart. Whatever a cockle is.

Read more here.

Will rises in minimum wage spur automation?

Randall Parker writes at FuturePundit,

A gradual rise to $15 per hour puts LA on course to a $15 per hour minimum wage along with San Francisco and Seattle.

I expect this move will spur more venture capital funding for start-ups trying to automate fast food restaurants, janitoral work, retail stores, movie theatres, and other places that employ lots of minimum wage workers. This will widen an already large gap in employment rate by educational level. But it will only change the rate at which this gap is widening.

At any give moment in time there is a gap between the average productivity in an industry and the potential highest level of productivity given current technology. The size of the gap varies with time. A recession or other external shock can cause a sudden shift in business practices to narrow the gap by quickly adopting the latest tech. For example, automated ordering kiosks are slowly getting rolled out to fast food restaurants. McDonalds rolled out ordering kiosks in Europe a few years ago but has been slow to do it here. A high minimum wage will change that.

One of the biggest changes for customers will be a reduction in interactions with service workers. No more telling counter help at Carl's Jr what you want. You'll type in your order in a kiosk pad and slide a card or wave your phone (or maybe smart watch) to make your payment. Or, even better, you'll order your burgers and fries on your smart phone before you get to CJs (saving time just like you can already do with Domino's Pizza). By the time you arrive your order will be done. Your order will be popped out after an automating id'ing machine (palm reader or iris reader perhaps) determines it is you.

Read more here.

The robot future

Jonah Goldberg writes,

People don’t go into business to create jobs; they go into business to make money. Labor is a cost. The more expensive labor is, the more attractive nonhuman replacements for labor become.

None of this is necessarily bad. Machines make us a more productive society, and a more productive society is a richer society. They also free us up for more rewarding work. As Wired’s Kevin Kelly notes, “Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines.”

He gives some examples of machines taking the place of workers, and suggests some possible solutions.