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Flaxbee

(13,661 posts)
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 12:42 PM Jul 2012

When Machines Do Your Job

Automation and robotics are very interesting from a technology standpoint, but increasing "efficiency" = many, many fewer jobs in the future.



Are American workers losing their jobs to machines?

That was the question posed by Race Against the Machine, an influential e-book published last October by MIT business school researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The pair looked at troubling U.S. employment numbers—which have declined since the recession of 2008-2009 even as economic output has risen—and concluded that computer technology was partly to blame.

More: http://www.iqvote.com/

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Gregorian

(23,867 posts)
1. As a machine tool student just as CNC was beginning, we asked this question.
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 12:55 PM
Jul 2012

We believed that there would still be room for machinists, as attendants of sorts, and programmers. I now see that the truth is that the computer driven machine has actually taken the place of a worker. A machine by itself doesn't really take away work. A machine used to be operated by a human. Now it's operated by a computer.

So really, computers are taking over our jobs.

Flaxbee

(13,661 posts)
2. My husband visited Chinese manufacturers about 15 years ago, and then about 5 years ago ...
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 01:18 PM
Jul 2012

15 years ago, the floor was covered with workers. Most recent visit, there were maybe 10 people overseeing the robots, machinery, etc.

Computer are machines, so to speak. Any way you look at it, humans are being substituted.

And really - what the heck are we going to do when unemployment reaches 30% or more?

Gregorian

(23,867 posts)
5. I feel like apologizing for my repetition regarding this subject, but
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 01:29 PM
Jul 2012

It started out that we were seeing machines as doing the jobs we didn't want to do. Picking cotton, for example. And it's true. However, there is an elephant in this room that everyone is ignoring. When we talk about unemployment, the issue is more people than jobs available. And I suggest we think about the future situation where there are yet a billion more people on the planet, and what that situation will be in terms of unemployment, among many other things.

I'm saying that machines aren't the problem. What we're seeing are symptoms all over the place. And everyone seems to be perfectly willing to toil away on fixing the symptoms while the problem is getting worse.

My point is that up to a certain point in population, machines are great. Beyond a number, the number of machines per capita begins to make a ratio whereby people are left out in the cold without jobs.

moondust

(19,917 posts)
8. Yup.
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 01:44 PM
Jul 2012

Previous generations of automation had people operating newer, better machines; now a computer does it. Once a computer has the code to perform a task it will keep doing it with only minimal, if any, human intervention required. I sense that a lot of computer programmers are now or at some point will be facing employment difficulties because so much code has already been written and may only need minor modification from time to time. And a lot of programming jobs have already been shipped off to India. (Weren't those "high tech" jobs supposed to replace the offshored "low tech" manufacturing jobs?)

Brynjolfsson was on Eliot Spitzer's show last week. Looks like an interesting book.

FreeJoe

(1,039 posts)
3. Absolutely
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 01:28 PM
Jul 2012

I've been in IT, mostly programming, for my entire career. A large percentage of my projects get funded by the reduction in labor costs that will result fromt he project.

Hasn't it always been this way? Haven't the buggie makers, telephone operators, weavers, computers (people who compute for a living), et al moved on? Lots of jobs are clearly on the way out. We automate more and more work every year.

That's one reason (cheap natural gas being the other), that I think manufacturing will have a resurgance in the US in the next decade. It won't be accompanied by a big growth in jobs. The capital investment to build a factory will so dwarf the labor costs to operate it, that low skilled/low labor cost countries will struggle to compete.

So what happens when the need for labor is much lower than it is today? That's the big question. I wish I knew the answer.

 

Tierra_y_Libertad

(50,414 posts)
4. "Labor saving devices" are really "Labor replacing devices".
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 01:28 PM
Jul 2012

I just watched a documentary about why Mexicans come to the USA to work. It focused on a small agricultural town in Mexico that used to produce pork, wheat, beans and strawberries. After NAFTA, they can no longer compete with American imports because they don't have the technology that American farmers have. So, Mexicans are buying American produced pork, wheat, beans and strawberries. What to do for the displaced workers? They go to America to find work.

 

Comrade_McKenzie

(2,526 posts)
6. It'd be a good thing if our entire society wasn't built upon...
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 01:31 PM
Jul 2012

Doing meaningless, mundane bullshit just to survive.

Let the machines work for us while we leisurely enjoy life.

But that won't happen until we get rid of this outdated class system.

Spike89

(1,569 posts)
7. The future?
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 01:32 PM
Jul 2012

There is no doubt about this and it most certainly isn't just an American issue. There have been people talking about this for decades, if not centuries. The term Luddites came from one of the first highly visible revolts against automation (mechanized looms) in the 1800s.

The question isn't "will it happen?" but what to do about it. Eventually, we will have near total "black box" manufacturing...think the replicators in Star Trek...that can and will produce virtually everything. The issue is what do we value, what are humans good at, what is the point of "work", and how do we design a society built on the concept of plenty rather than the age-old scarcity model.

I've heard vague "service economy" reassurances, and there is something to the idea that as social creatures we can "earn" our place in the world/village/group by providing services. However, there has never been a shortage (scarcity) of people willing to be sociable and therefore the old model made those jobs almost without value. Can that be changed?

The other "solution" I keep hearing is reducing standard work hours from 40 to maybe 25 or 30. This is really not a solution, but a bandaid and one that would only work for the jobs most likely to totally disappear first. Highly skilled jobs, those either requiring a high degree of training or a special (rare) talent (surgeon, architect, scientist, etc. and artist, musician, athlete, etc.). The second category obviously shouldn't be limited (do we really want Shakespeare to write on 2/3 of the plays, Elvis Costello to sing less, Michael Jordon to play only the 1st half?)

For the first category, the training is becoming so rigorous and the window for putting that training to use so short, that limiting their hours isn't practical. For instance, brain surgeons probably don't get out of training until they are about 30 and may be at their peak (experienced and physically sharp) for about a decade, maybe two. We're already training that person for longer than they're likely to actually be doing the job.

Maybe that is another part of the solution, train/educate people for a much longer time and retire them much younger.

 

Egalitarian Thug

(12,448 posts)
11. You're right on to the issue. There is an insurmountable and fundamental failure in our currency
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 01:58 PM
Jul 2012

system. Eventually this system will have to be replaced, but that is going to take generations. In the meantime we need the bandages and if we're clever, we can make the bandages assist in the conversion.

 

randome

(34,845 posts)
10. Do you see the irony that they published this as an e-book?
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 01:51 PM
Jul 2012

Bypassing the agents and publishers that normally do that job.

The2ndWheel

(7,947 posts)
12. Will everyone be one thing in a world like that?
Tue Jul 17, 2012, 02:43 PM
Jul 2012

Is it that way today? Was it that way in the past?

Some will call that a world of freedom, others will call it a prison. Some people will excel in such a world, others will struggle. Some may find it better than any alternative, others may find it completely pointless. Some will find their place, others never will. Some may end up as philosophers or artists of the highest regard, the people who just didn't have the time to pursue those interests in a different world. Other people may drink or drug themselves to death, maybe because they just didn't have the time to do that in a different world. Then of course anything in between.

Spike89

(1,569 posts)
13. Huge social/philosophical questions you've raised
Thu Jul 19, 2012, 04:21 PM
Jul 2012

I wrote a fairly long response to your post detailing the approaching singularity (our tools doing everything, even building and improving themselves), but it then occurred to me that addressing the utopian/dystopian perspective was more interesting.
I think the one inevitable mistake we always make when imagining the future is assuming we won't be affected individually and socially by the events along the way. Alternately, we tend to hold onto many positions/traditions that no longer make sense once we've "become" our future selves.
For instance, we (you and I right now) are immersed in a culture that often has trouble understanding its own social changes in the relatively recent past. In 1820s America, an overwhelmingly rural/agricultural society based very much on a combination of muscle-based labor and near-endless drudgery (think little house on the prairie with "Pa" wrangling a plow, hand sawing lumber etc. while "Ma", just to do "a load of laundry", physically hauled water, built a fire to heat it, gathered materials and made soap, then hand scrubbed, wrung, and hauled them all outside to hang on a line, only to bring them in later, build another fire to heat an iron, then iron and fold the clothes).
In that society, having lots of children meant "free" labor in many ways. Although I know I'll take grief for this, in that society it even made some sense to talk about "man's work" and "women's work". By the middle of that century, the actual changes that made those social "norms" useful were already well established. As people moved to the cities, the social forces changed dramatically, but social expectations certainly did not.
So, everything changed, but the people who moved to the cities. They had lots of children, Dad went off to work and Mom (who was usually pregnant) stayed home and did housework. Those children expected to be just like their parents in those ways--get married, have a passel of kids, Dad gets a job, and Mom is a homemaker.

Even a hundred and fifty years later we're still dealing with the social ramifications. It took many generations for the 2.3 children family to become common. We still haven't fully adjusted to the gender roles around labor.
The future folk living in a world without "need" are going to be different, but our biases probably make it impossible to understand just how different.

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