17 thoughts on “Automation”

1. I agree with one of the commenters there: the left hand side of the bell curve will be unemployed. This is already happening in machining as 5-axis CNC machines become the norm; the jack leg machinist is getting replaced by those who have the skills (including the math) to help program and troubleshoot the CNC machines. There are a lot of people who won’t be able to learn those skills. I don’t know what we do about it.

   1. Buggy whip manufacturers got other jobs. The economy is an ecosystem, and people not only fill niches but expand the number and size of niches. Nobody was employed as a blogger twenty years ago.

      1. Are you saying that there will always be enough jobs for those on the low cognitive end of the populace (say, IQ 85 and below, i.e. mean – 1-sigma)? Jobs that pay well enough (without minimum wage meddling) for people to get by? I’m not seeing it; ISTM that there is already a shortage of those jobs, as reflected by the people who have given up looking for work. The people on the right hand side of the IQ distribution, especially, say, mean + 1-sigma, will seldom have trouble finding a job.

         1. Should have added that none of this should be a surprise if you read The Bell Curve.

            1. Oh, well, we’re not allowed to read that, because racist.

         2. People don’t want jobs, they want the things jobs pay for. Why would you want a job if you can make most of those things on a 3D printer in your garage, or on an asteroid using local raw materials?

            Jobs, in the form we knew them in the industrial era, are going away. And that’s a good thing.

         3. Hey, people are employed as bloggers at Jezebel, aren’t they? Doesn’t every major company have a HR department? Ever been to the DMV? Obviously there’s plenty of jobs available for the IQ85 crowd.

      2. Yuh, after this weekend’s box office results, maybe there is an underground market for buggy whips?

         1. Buggy whips are probably too long for that purpose but a Google search for “riding crop” (in quotation marks) returns over half a million hits.

      3. People were not employed as a blogger twenty years ago but plenty were employed as journalists. It was even common for people to self-publish their own newspapers at one point. Thomas Edison did it when he was a kid.

2. For me, the annoying thing is if automation is such a bad thing, then why do we as a society work so hard to discourage the low skilled from working and the businesses from employing these workers?

   For example, there was the research claiming that Walmart gets $6.2 billion per year from the federal government (recently) in subsidies, which turn out to be federal assistance for employees of Walmart. What’s particularly perfidious about the above claim is that the people making it would likely approve of the subsidy – if it weren’t going to Walmart. After all, who wouldn’t want to subsidize employment of low skilled workers? Well, now you know.

   I’ll be more concerned about heavy automation when society starts treating it as a problem rather than a desirable state to be in.

   1. Walmart employs a lot of people with mental or physical handicaps. I’d wager a big portion of those subsidies are from programs designed to help the disabled gain or keep employment.

3. If you’re familiar with the Dune novels-Butlerian Jihad time?

   1. Yeah. But there they develop intelligent robots to do basically everything. Warhammer 40K also rips off that piece of the Dune plot. You can also find elements of it in the Settlers vs Spacer conflicts in Isaac Asimov’s Robots and Foundation universe.

      The piece about the Buthlerian Jihad is kind of interesting. The whole thing starts out as a rebellion where a small amount of people, the Titans, basically enforce a tyranny over everyone else by subverting the robots programming. Eventually the Titans themselves end up enslaved by an AI. People tacitly accept this enslavement until the robots start actually killing people. That’s the start of the Btuhlerian Jihad.

4. A man is always worth what he can produce. The current unemployment problem relates directly to various gooberment programs that raise the costs of employing someone, often above what a man is worth.

5. “he doesn’t see the recently vanished jobs coming back.”

   That’s cool but how many of those jobs were actually replaced by automation?

   ” look at my daily experience, most notably in terms of dealing with people in order to deal with organizations. In a nutshell: very few of the commercial transactions I engage in (buying things, paying for services, signing up for services) involve interacting with humans.”

   Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Could all of those jobs be automated? Maybe but they aren’t now so it doesn’t makes sense to blame our poor eployement rebound on a situation that doesn’t exist yet.

6. Robots are a capital investment and not universal (or generalized.) So every application requires a human to make the robots work.

   Those humans do not all require high IQs, it depends on the application. Most robot training does not involve new programming.

   McDonald’s has vastly more automation than when I worked for them as a teenager but employs just as many (including Indians when you use the drive-thru at some locations.)

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