Humans need not apply

[Zor]

Link to the video

Zor

[Iroscato]

Fascinating stuff. I've never really thought about how abundant bots already are in the job market. Seeing as engaging in Youtube debates is akin to sodomizing your brain with a potato peeler, what do our resident economists/futurists/seers think the job market, and indeed the wider economy will look like in 10, 20, 50 years time because of the trend towards automisation?

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not a specialist but I foresee three possibilities:

0) SINGULARITY RAAAA! This possibility has been adequately covered in the past.

1) Present trends continue linearly. The majority of the population becomes long-term unemployable or severely underemployed, supported by the salaries of the handful of productive people. Welcome back to the model of one breadwinner per 2-3 dependents, just with different jobs and, in most cases, the breadwinner probably being female. Welfare programs of various kinds become a necessity because there are too many jobs that don't support a whole family... and someone's got to put the next generation of kids through college.

1a) Present trends continue linearly. The majority of the population becomes long-term unemployed and unemployable, but are not supported because NO LIBRUL WELFARE QUEENS RAAAGH. Riots and political chaos threaten civilization as we know it in the affected countries. If the riots are suppressed, the long-term unemployed raise a generation of undereducated, ignorant children. We learn to our shock that technical infrastructure can't be managed by said undereducated, ignorant children when they grow up. Civilization as previously known either collapses or is taken over in self-defense by the robots who need maintenance.

[1a is less likely in my opinion, but may happen to a nation or two]

2) Present trends toward shorter work weeks continue. The jobs where having a human being doing it actually matters are subdivided further and further until we have 2-3 people working 20 hour weeks instead of one person working forty plus overtime.

[Iroscato]

Well that seems pretty bleak. I'd love to think that it would cause fundamental shifts in society to alleviate the pain of mass unemployment, but I have a sneaky feeling most people will try and cling to the old model and make almost no adjustments or preperations.

[Guardsman Bass]

I watched it. They claim that This Time Is Different, but at the same time robots that could truly replace humans are far off, if possible*. Instead, we've got the same situation that's been present with technology since forever, which is technology replacing human labor in particular tasks - and there is no finite supply of tasks that people can think of, as we've seen with successive waves of mechanization and automation.

In fact, one of the frustrating aspects of having this debate is precisely that you can't point to the tasks that will replace the existing ones being automated, since we just don't know beforehand what they will be. Nobody in 1900 could have predicted a fair number of existing jobs that exist, and so forth - or even whether they'll be "jobs" in the traditional sense** (a lot of the concept of a "job" in the modern sense came into being with the Industrial Revolution). All you can point out is that we actually have been here before, while the other side gets to point out how the robots are doing all kinds of new tasks they couldn't do before.

* Not interested in a debate over whether it eventually will be possible.

** This tends to get understated. The whole "working for an employer" thing is a relatively recent phenomena in historical terms - in the US, most people either farmed their own farms and supplemented it with side work, did odd jobs and seasonal farm work (like temps), or were the equivalent of business owners in the form of skilled trades/professions/actual business owners. If robots truly become super-cheap and capable, then what it means to be a "worker" could be vastly different, maybe something akin more to an independent contractor who owns robots who do work for you.

1) Present trends continue linearly. The majority of the population becomes long-term unemployable or severely underemployed, supported by the salaries of the handful of productive people. Welcome back to the model of one breadwinner per 2-3 dependents, just with different jobs and, in most cases, the breadwinner probably being female. Welfare programs of various kinds become a necessity because there are too many jobs that don't support a whole family... and someone's got to put the next generation of kids through college.

Depends on the country. I'm not convinced this will lead to mass unemployment/major labor force participation rate drops in the US, since we have pretty flexible rules about part-time and temp work. What's more likely is that most people end up working a bunch of part-time and temp jobs to try and add up to a full week's worth of hours. Assuming it happens at all, since I'm not convinced it will - we had 4% unemployment and rising labor force participation in the US in 2007, and back in the late 1990s we had that plus rising wages across the board. If we end up in a perpetual slow growth period then it's more likely.

I'm not so sure about our western European friends, especially the French and Spanish. During boom times the unemployment isn't too bad, but during down-turns they end up with much worse unemployment (and especially youth unemployment). That could translate into a lot lower labor force participation over time.

If that happens, then you'll see a lot more support in the ballot box and streets for back-stopping jobs and wages with subsidies, and possibly even a Basic Income (something I strongly approve of). That's what we'd need, at least, since if you're going to have an economy where most people are only temporarily working for particular companies, then you need something to guarantee a degree of stability in household income.

[Lagmonster]

This is an interesting topic that people I work with are worrying about professionally. Namely, what the hell to do with people once we perfect androids. From our perspective - agriculture - it will be both great for humans and lousy for humans.

One of the most fascinating scenarios I heard discussed was that of the multi-generational household. The idea being that we have three problems intersecting: First, people are living much longer lives. Second, more children are surviving childhood. Third, wage labourers will be virtually unemployable and everyone else will be entering the job market VERY late in life, because androids are doing most of the work we normally assign to inexperienced young people.

So they suggested that android-civilization communities will consist of, for lack of a better term, tribes. Four or five generations all living in android-assisted communities under the wage of the one or two adults in your tribe who qualify for whatever jobs remain (someone joked that in this future, the most common paid job for people under 25 is 'porn star'). The androids do most of the work, functioning as labourer (construction, agriculture) and physician.

[Simon_Jester]

The question then is, is the capital cost of the robots low enough for such a household to exist in stable form?

Well that seems pretty bleak. I'd love to think that it would cause fundamental shifts in society to alleviate the pain of mass unemployment, but I have a sneaky feeling most people will try and cling to the old model and make almost no adjustments or preperations.

I'm not sure they can. That's the thing about changes in society that impact your ability to make basic necessities of living happen: it's hard to stop people from finding a way to adapt to them. There can be a lot of discomfort and chaos associated with the process. But people usually aren't stupid enough to screw up their children's lives significantly worse than their parents screwed up theirs.

I watched it. They claim that This Time Is Different, but at the same time robots that could truly replace humans are far off, if possible*...

In fact, one of the frustrating aspects of having this debate is precisely that you can't point to the tasks that will replace the existing ones being automated, since we just don't know beforehand what they will be... All you can point out is that we actually have been here before, while the other side gets to point out how the robots are doing all kinds of new tasks they couldn't do before.

The main issue in my eyes is that we may see a shift in the kinds of tasks that are in demand. The Industrial Revolution didn't actually do all that much to change the balance of demand for physical versus mental labor; it just meant that a lot of farmers turned into assembly line workers. The Information Revolution (still underway) has changed that- because physical jobs are usually (not always) easier to automate than mental ones, and of the mental jobs the low-skilled ones are the easiest meat.

Technical specialists entering the workforce now at 25 will probably have secure employment opportunities up to or near retirement age on the strength of their specialization. But taxi drivers and paralegals and so on may simply not be in demand in 2055, to anything like the same degree.

In which case the question becomes: will we have inadvertently "kicked down the ladder" of low-skilled jobs by which people build up something recognizable as a career as some sort of high-skilled professional?

And will we be able to take the people in the 25th or, God help us, the 10th percentile of overall intelligence and life competence, and teach them to do a job that will still be too complex to automate in 2055? The real reason I expect at least some countries to end up with massive underemployment or unemployment is that I honestly don't know if their educational systems are up to turning everyone in their population into someone a 2030 or 2040 employer will still want.

Depends on the country. I'm not convinced this will lead to mass unemployment/major labor force participation rate drops in the US, since we have pretty flexible rules about part-time and temp work. What's more likely is that most people end up working a bunch of part-time and temp jobs to try and add up to a full week's worth of hours. Assuming it happens at all, since I'm not convinced it will - we had 4% unemployment and rising labor force participation in the US in 2007, and back in the late 1990s we had that plus rising wages across the board. If we end up in a perpetual slow growth period then it's more likely.

Well, I suspect that between rising energy costs, general incompetence of governance, and difficulty figuring out what the hell we want from our school systems... slow growth is pretty likely in the US.

I'm not so sure about our western European friends, especially the French and Spanish. During boom times the unemployment isn't too bad, but during down-turns they end up with much worse unemployment (and especially youth unemployment). That could translate into a lot lower labor force participation over time.

If that happens, then you'll see a lot more support in the ballot box and streets for back-stopping jobs and wages with subsidies, and possibly even a Basic Income (something I strongly approve of). That's what we'd need, at least, since if you're going to have an economy where most people are only temporarily working for particular companies, then you need something to guarantee a degree of stability in household income.

I don't disagree.

[Death Zebra]

Do we even have the material resources to achieve such large scale automation? I vaguely remember reports of increasing scarcity of various minerals and other substances. In fact, I remember a news story from last year where some experts thought that the Earth was tapped already (though admittedly that was on Yahoo news and that could have been just been a reposting from another unreliable news source).

[Zor]

Do we even have the material resources to achieve such large scale automation? I vaguely remember reports of increasing scarcity of various minerals and other substances. In fact, I remember a news story from last year where some experts thought that the Earth was tapped already (though admittedly that was on Yahoo news and that could have been just been a reposting from another unreliable news source).

That probably refers to Rare Earth minerals. The thing is that they are not actually that rare, but the process for extracting them tend to pollute alot. For that reason most of the Rare Earth mineral processing industry got shipped to China.

Zor

[TimothyC]

Yep, this is a thing:

A company called Momentum Machines has built a robot that could radically change the fast-food industry and have some line cooks looking for new jobs.

The company's robot can "slice toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible." The robot is "more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour." That's one burger every 10 seconds.

The next generation of the device will offer "custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem."

Momentum Machines cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas told Xconomy his "device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them." Indeed, marketing copy on the company's site reads that their automaton "does everything employees can do, except better."

This directly raises a question that a lot of smart people have contemplated: Will robots steal our jobs? Opinion is divided of course. Here's what Momentum Machines has to say on the topic:

The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment. The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy.

If we are to undertake the lofty ambition of changing the nature of work by way of robots, the fast-food industry seems like a good place to start, considering its inherently repetitive tasks and minimal skill requirements. Any roboticist worth his or her salt jumps at tasks described as repetitive and easy — perfect undertakings for a robot.

Here's a schematic of what the burger-bot looks like and how it works. It occupies 24 square feet, so it's much smaller than most assembly-line fast-food operations. It boasts "gourmet cooking methods never before used in a fast food restaurant" and will even deposit your completed burger into a bag. It's a veritable Gutenberg printing press for hamburgers.

[AniThyng]

One thing that strikes me about reading these boards is that there are quite a few very highly educated members who are working jobs at the lower end of the value chain in spite of their qualifications. It really does sound like there will be a new underclass. Though presumably one that is somewhat better fed and entertained than the last generation...

[Zaune]

Basic Guaranteed Income looks more attractive every time I read one of these threads.

[Borgholio]

[url=http://www.businessinsider.com/momentum ... bot-2014-8]Yep, this is a thing:

So McDonalds will have to decide whether to pay it's burger flippers $15 per hour, or fire them entirely and buy one of these things. Not looking too good for the burger flippers at first glance.

[Lagmonster]

I once read something to the effect that the last thing capitalists will ever sell is a device that does all of our work, and thus makes communism/socialism mandatory for the continuance of human civilization. Wish I could find that quote now.

[Zixinus]

I think the same thing will happen that happened in the past, during the Industrial Revolution: there will be large sections of the population that will be forced to do illegal or otherwise socially disruptive jobs for no other reason that they cannot get any other kind. They were born to educational values that became obsolete by the time they reached adulthood (for example: you don't need to know how to read, but you need a plethora of skills needed around the farm and you'll always have work). For example, there will be a large number of women who will have no other option but prostitution if they wish to make a living simply because they cannot find any other job.

We have been here before and of course the lessons learned there will be ignored. The large number of unemployable people who want to be employed, will be looked down upon as scum. And because they will be treated as scum they'll end up as scum sooner or later. They'll tie the right to vote to having a regular income. They'll make up pseudo-scientific ideas as to why unemployable people are unemployable due to some inherent failure or fault on their part and thus deserve their status. Then they'll just ignore the large number of unemployable people as they have done in the past. The police will be given the right to treat all of these people like criminals, as they do with certain minorities. Then politicians will have the bright idea to just exterminate the unwanted, inherently-criminal, useless underclass through forced sterilization, letting an epidemic run through, raising food prices or whatever.

Then again, I'm fatalistically pessimistic about the future.

I once read something to the effect that the last thing capitalists will ever sell is a device that does all of our work, and thus makes communism/socialism mandatory for the continuance of human civilization. Wish I could find that quote now.

Except that the capitalist will not sell the device, they will rent it. To the capitalist, the best device is one that once brought will replace all human labor the capitalist has to pay for. Then the capitalist will have nothing to do but sit back, earn pure profits and complain about how he is unfairly taxed by the government so welfare-queens can live off his honestly-earned money.

[Tribble]

I think the same thing will happen that happened in the past, during the Industrial Revolution: there will be large sections of the population that will be forced to do illegal or otherwise socially disruptive jobs for no other reason that they cannot get any other kind. They were born to educational values that became obsolete by the time they reached adulthood (for example: you don't need to know how to read, but you need a plethora of skills needed around the farm and you'll always have work). For example, there will be a large number of women who will have no other option but prostitution if they wish to make a living simply because they cannot find any other job.

We have been here before and of course the lessons learned there will be ignored. The large number of unemployable people who want to be employed, will be looked down upon as scum. And because they will be treated as scum they'll end up as scum sooner or later. They'll tie the right to vote to having a regular income. They'll make up pseudo-scientific ideas as to why unemployable people are unemployable due to some inherent failure or fault on their part and thus deserve their status. Then they'll just ignore the large number of unemployable people as they have done in the past. The police will be given the right to treat all of these people like criminals, as they do with certain minorities. Then politicians will have the bright idea to just exterminate the unwanted, inherently-criminal, useless underclass through forced sterilization, letting an epidemic run through, raising food prices or whatever.

Then again, I'm fatalistically pessimistic about the future.

I once read something to the effect that the last thing capitalists will ever sell is a device that does all of our work, and thus makes communism/socialism mandatory for the continuance of human civilization. Wish I could find that quote now.

Except that the capitalist will not sell the device, they will rent it. To the capitalist, the best device is one that once brought will replace all human labor the capitalist has to pay for. Then the capitalist will have nothing to do but sit back, earn pure profits and complain about how he is unfairly taxed by the government so welfare-queens can live off his honestly-earned money.

I tend to agree with you there. The only reason why the upper classes tolerate the lower classes is because the lower classes are still needed to do work. If automation reaches the point where it can replace the vast majority of human labour, I don't fancy my chances very much. Why would governments want to have to take care of billions of unemployed people? That's just asking for trouble. If human labour is no longer necessary, it makes more sense in the long run to simply eliminate the vast majority of the human population, either via starvation, sterilization, epidemics etc.

[K. A. Pital]

One problem: there's always the people who write the code.

[Tribble]

One problem: there's always the people who write the code.

But do you really need 7 billion of them?

[Bedlam]

One problem: there's always the people who write the code.

I'm fairly sure we'll get to a point where computers can write their own code for most tasks or a least put together pre-written modules. Yes you might need humans for very high end stuff but that's not going to be very many.

Plus companies are willing to simply tasks to make them easy for machines when they would expect a human to adapt to whatever they were told to do.

Take the handburger making machine, if it's just left by itself with no human interaction then who's going to complain they want their burger more or less cooked than the standard setting? If it's a human they're much more expectant that they will do it differently for them with a machine not as much expectation. Sure there will still be a few crazies who try to speak to a manager or the like but less than if interacting with a human.

[sarevok2]

There does not appear to be any automation in software developement. If anything more coders may be required, more and more things are being done on computers. And there are lots of new devices appearing that require software developed for them.

Engineers who design robots and electronic devices would be required in great numbers as well. Plus technicians to maintain them.

IMHO what is being replaced is uneducated repetitive manual labor. Sort of what machines already did in 19th century. Except in 21st century machines can now also handle tasks that require rudimentary decision making as well.

People will likely adapt with new tools. For example brick laying robots are under development and there are prototype systems for assembling complex structures. So future constructor will be operating these robots instead of physically laboring hard. Just like old backbreaking labor got easier with introduction of machine in construction. People learned to drive forklifts and cranes instead of becoming unemployed.

[madd0ct0r]

There does not appear to be any automation in software developement. If anything more coders may be required, more and more things are being done on computers. And there are lots of new devices appearing that require software developed for them.

Snort. when was the last time you needed to write anything in machine code?

[Starglider]

There does not appear to be any automation in software developement.

Snort. when was the last time you needed to write anything in machine code?

Software engineering has made great progress in the ability to translate logical/mathematical specifications into executable software. Today there is a choice of thousands of languages to express yourself in and to a large degree the tooling will turn any coherent abstract program into efficient, executable code. Most programmers can use a wide variety of convenient abstractions and don't have to know anything about the details of the hardware they are using. Progress on this has naturally dropped off as we approach the ideal, of having literally any formal spec execute as if on a dedicated machine of infinite capacity. Software engineering has also created a huge toolkit of components for solving real world problems, both as code libraries and abstract techniques.

What we have not made much progress on is translating informal specs into formal ones, or selecting and configuring pre-existing components to meet a fuzzy need. There has been some progress on machine learning i.e. creating software directly from training examples, but it only works for simple problems in a very human-defined and controlled context. This is partially because it is a 'general AI complete' problem and partly because it just hasn't been a sexy reasearch topic since about the mid 80s.

[Guardsman Bass]

[url=http://www.businessinsider.com/momentum ... bot-2014-8]Yep, this is a thing:

So McDonalds will have to decide whether to pay it's burger flippers $15 per hour, or fire them entirely and buy one of these things. Not looking too good for the burger flippers at first glance.

McDonald's has a lot more on its menu than hamburgers, though, and they'd need to have high enough volume of hamburgers consumed per franchise location to make it cost-effective versus just working your smaller number of $15/hr employees harder. I don't see any point where it sticks ingredients on the hamburger as well, which isn't a problem for dine-in customers (you could have an "ingredients bar"), but is a problem for drive-through ones.

All that said, some places are clearly using a version of that. In-N-Out Burger pays their employees something like $12/hr plus benefits, but they make it work by having only a few things on the menu and cycling people through mass-production style. Doesn't seem to have reduced their employee count a ton, though.

My guess is that if we got $15/hr hour, fast food places would just work an existing set of employees harder and move all but one person plus the manager into the back to prepare food. That would let them keep more complex menus but reduce the need to have cashiers to take orders. Grocery stores seem to be doing the same thing with self-check-outs, with the actual number of grocery store cashiers not shrinking but instead diversifying into other tasks.

[sarevok2]

There does not appear to be any automation in software developement. If anything more coders may be required, more and more things are being done on computers. And there are lots of new devices appearing that require software developed for them.

Snort. when was the last time you needed to write anything in machine code?

You still have to write a ton of code in higher level languages and that has been the case for past 20-30 years. Certain techniques and tools help save time but it is still a lot of exhausting mental work.

[Elheru Aran]

McDonald's has a lot more on its menu than hamburgers, though, and they'd need to have high enough volume of hamburgers consumed per franchise location to make it cost-effective versus just working your smaller number of $15/hr employees harder. I don't see any point where it sticks ingredients on the hamburger as well, which isn't a problem for dine-in customers (you could have an "ingredients bar"), but is a problem for drive-through ones.

The graphic has one point where it says it slices up fresh ingredients, after it's already made the patty, so I suspect it does add the lettuce, tomato etcetera as it says at the end 'the machine produces a complete bagged hamburger' rather than 'it spits out a patty on bread'.

An ingredients bar might be an option at a more upscale place, but at a fast-food joint, there's too much concern about contamination from unwashed hands, keeping it supplied during rush periods, and twats grabbing more than their share-- homeless people coming off the street, buying a small burger and then taking a huge pile of lettuce and tomato... Things like that. There's a reason the only extras they put out are generally condiments (and even then usually only ketchup or hot sauce), utensils, napkins, cup lids and straws.

As for other items such as salads, unless they note explicitly that they're "hand made in store" or some such, they would simply start pre-packaging them; they already do that for the most part anyway.

One of the biggest assets of mechanizing production (for the corporation, not the employees) is that it enables them to control portion sizes extremely accurately. Loss from employees using larger portions than they're supposed to can be cut down. This is one of the biggest things they pound into your heads on the line-- it's almost more important than food safety. Less of an issue in burger joints than in, say, Taco Bell where you have to scoop your portions (and where I worked), but still important.

My guess is that if we got $15/hr hour, fast food places would just work an existing set of employees harder and move all but one person plus the manager into the back to prepare food. That would let them keep more complex menus but reduce the need to have cashiers to take orders. Grocery stores seem to be doing the same thing with self-check-outs, with the actual number of grocery store cashiers not shrinking but instead diversifying into other tasks.

This is probably going to be the case, but I suspect they would let more part-timers and such go and keep the full-timers on. If the food is being produced by mechanized means, then all they really need employees for is daily housekeeping and stocking, customer service, keeping the machines supplied and clean, making the occasional custom order ("Put a burger patty on top of my salad and put a fried egg on top", weird things like that).

It's either keep a small staff of full-timers, or alternatively, kick them all out except the managers and make them all part-time so they can save money on insurance. That latter unfortunately could well be the case...