I disagree about the "blue collar labor" aspect as well. Aren't many lumberjacks in my neck of the woods these days, but woodworkers aplenty.
Let's take another example. Perhaps McDonald's goes 100% automated, and a sub shop next door adopts automations for things like cleaning, but still cooks the food by hand. Sure, it doesn't take too much to make a sandwich, but it's the personal aspect that makes it more appealing. And maybe you go there because you like chatting with the people who work there. Couldn't get the same from a machine.
I think before we get ahead of ourselves on AI we should re-read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and remember that the organic will always value the organic more than the inorganic.
To add to your point and take it a couple steps further. The continuous automation of physical muscle and mind muscles will reduce white and blue collar work.
I didn't say replacing labor with automation, I said replacing mundane, inglorious labor with automation. I agree with you. What I am saying is that we will choose which labors we do by hand, based on an emerging, re-emerging set of ethics and values.
That is not 'just life'; that's the puritanical work ethic that you're describing. Life absent of a need for labor-intensive work to produce basic goods and services is better than the system we have now. The issue is not automation; the issue is who benefits from making manual human labor obsolete, and in our capitalist system I doubt it will be the workers it displaces.
I think we also have to consider conservatives who believe that there is inherent value in certain lifestyles that is independent of the products of those lifestyles. Automated labor will also free us to compete in whatever inefficient way we want. Just as garment technology has not stopped people from knitting, automated labor will still allow people to choose to be Amish.
Personally, I think we can find better things to do than work most jobs that exist today. We need to be open to the idea of perpetual changes in what we can and should do with our time.
Consider welding. It is a blue collar job that can pay pretty well, if you are fast on piecework or have in demand skills like tig welding titanium. I employ two guys welding manually, and I also have a 7 axis Panasonic PA 102S welding cell.
I have one high volume product that we sell, that I calculated the labor cost per part to be about 6 cents if we ran the robot at normal speed for 40 hours per week. When that part was manually welded the labor cost per part was about 50 cents per part. Incidentally, the guys were happy when that part went automated, since doing a high volume part is boring, mind numbing work. (1)
In the case of this little part, because the labor cost went down, and as a factory owner I know the part is more precise and can be made in an easily calculable window (it yields 8 parts per minute now), then I was able to cut the retail price by 50% and sales tripled. We can now bid on jobs that would have overwhelmed our capacity before.
So who won? I made more money, the workers job got better because some drudgery was removed, the workers income went up because we have a profit sharing program, the consumer pays less, and because the price was lower more consumers get to enjoy the product.
I am no economist, and I have no well researched and linked rebuttal to the article. In my little microcosm of the world everybody wanted the automation. Me, the guys, the customer. Everybody has won. Nobody involved would prefer to go back to the old way.
1. personally I find it annoying when academics talk about labor vs automation. Some jobs suck to do (dull, dirty, dangerous), and often the worker is the happiest when it no longer has to be done by a human. The worker is usually pretty happy to have extra time to do that other thing they have been wanting to do for long time. Who on this forum misses setting up a blog the way you had to before Fantastico came along?
Any human worker will increase the cost of labor compared to automation. Even at slave wages, automation wins every single time. Employers are, and long have been, 100% incentivized to automate the instant it becomes technologically feasible.
Even if something like food service at McDonald's is automated, it's tough to argue that we should be getting humans to work on things that can be automated.
Imagine working 40 hours a week then seeing that the machine both prepared more product and made fewer mistakes than you, or feeling like you're doing work just because someone (the government) pities you enough to force some jobs to remain non-automated.
Working with more complex, higher-skilled work that makes you feel like you're improving the lives of others is what our brains crave, not repeating menial tasks over and over again.
You don't seem to realize that allowing labor to move from critical/essential work to nonessential work is a good thing. That's how the system is supposed to work. What would you call sommeliers, chefs who create Michelin-rated restaurants, movie stars/writers/producers, surfing instructors, etc if not nonessential?
Automation makes things cheaper. Look at food, it was the largest expense for most families for a very long time. Now for most families in the US it's not even close. We have taken the jobs that used to be in that area and gotten rid of them, and instead moved them into service industries like the ones I referenced above. Making things cheaper means more disposable income to be spent on luxury/nonessential items, which creates a market which didn't really exist, which in turn creates jobs. This is not hard stuff here.
“Everything is automated” is similar to “finished software”. It just doesn’t happen.
Besides that there are many services you want to purchase where interaction with the other is part of the value of said service.
Think of going to a barber or a nice restaurant. Think about education, designers.
There is also artisanal products. People pay a pretty penny for a teapot made by a master ceramist even though perfect products are made in much more automated ways.
I’m pretty hopeful about people having to work less. Maybe even about most people not having to work at all.
But being able to afford luxuries like having a master chef cook your dinner from time to time is likely to require you do to some paid work and I think there will be plenty of work left for us humans.
Disagreed. No matter how much you automate, there will always be more work to do, even if you don't as a species "climb up the value latter" which of course we will do.
This is due to the fact that once basic meets are met, whether by manual labour or mechanisation, then more sophisticated needs will evolve for the markets to satisfy.
The same fears have been around during industrialization. How about thinking again about some basic principles that are unlikely to change from one technological/civilisatory wave of change to the next?
Automate that work as much as possible and richly reward those who pursue it.
One of the oddities of modern work is that the lowest paid jobs are mostly those nobody wants to do.
Sure, we're not at replicator level, but farming of many crops require far fewer people than many imagine.
Personally I find that many things that could be automated are not yet automated because humans are cheaper. Think cashier, waiter/waitress, and so on.
In white collar work land, an amazing number of jobs could be automated, but are not yet because it's cheaper to use humans. These are the people who essentially just move numbers from one computer to another with a small amount of work in between.
It doesn't really make sense to talk about jobs being created or destroyed, it makes more sense to talk about labor being made more or less valuable.
While the combination of AI and increasingly efficient mechanical automation certainly makes some labor more valuable, it's hard to see that as labor that is (or can be) as common, in terms of people able to supply it, as is the labor it makes less valuable.
I think we'll be better off as a society if we spend time and resources into automating the jobs that are currently done by humans in dangerous and hazardous situations, rather than automating the job of coffee or pizza making just because "As we see the rising costs of labor, it just makes sense" which employ a large number of unskilled/semi-skilled labor.
I don't think it has as extreme an impact as the people posting images of a self-service menu imply it does. I will concede that a lot of my aversion to the argument is from the disdain for people with lower-class jobs that I read into it.
But while I agree there is an impact, I also don't think we should avoid automation simply to have someone doing a mindless job if it could effectively be automated. People don't necessarily need jobs, they need the resources that having a job allows them access to.
It's simply not economical to automate every job yet, although that time is fast approaching. Do you not see automation getting cheaper, more reliable and more accessible in the future? Would you put your own money on that prediction and invest in people-forward manufacturing companies instead of companies like ABB? Regardless of your feelings towards how I presented it or your value judgement or meaning, this change is coming, and we need to prepare. We can pretend it's not and get lapped again by countries that do, or we can lean into it and get there first, build a society around it where people can still create value and meaning even if menial and manual labor is automated.
Products produced by manual labor will be more expensive than ones that aren't. They largely already are. If the US wants to double-down we'll need to tax robots and apply tariffs to artificially raise the cost of goods produced through automation to even out the discrepancies in efficiency. Is that the path we want to go down? Or would you rather face facts and structure a society, take the yoke off the proletariat (haha) and allow all your fellow countrymen to benefit from the gift that is not having to do manual labor? Wanting your fellow man to toil away in a factory to support your lifestyle is the ultimate elitism.
It's like saying we should go back to the slide-rule because there's good jobs in making them, and you get that down home country feeling using one. I'm not going to be putting my money into slide-rules, I'll stick with Intel.
Let's take another example. Perhaps McDonald's goes 100% automated, and a sub shop next door adopts automations for things like cleaning, but still cooks the food by hand. Sure, it doesn't take too much to make a sandwich, but it's the personal aspect that makes it more appealing. And maybe you go there because you like chatting with the people who work there. Couldn't get the same from a machine.
I think before we get ahead of ourselves on AI we should re-read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and remember that the organic will always value the organic more than the inorganic.
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