This is the general trend that pervades tech. Using algorithms to automate business tasks is good, but using the same technology to reduce demand for unskilled, backbreaking labour is somehow bad.
I think its because it leads to uncomfortable future scenarios, like how the economy of the future will be completely dominated by skilled and educated workers, and there will be much less requirement for unskilled labourers.
Bad for those who are unable (and/or unwilling) to adapt. Not as bad for those who will learn the skills of the future and convince employers to hire and retain them.
There used to be so many jobs that were in existence and now have been automated away-- dockyard and factory line workers (robotic arms), ice merchants (refrigerators), analog technicians (digital).
It is a sad reality that though these workers are capable of re-skilling, many employers will not see fit to hire them.
That's the problem that needs to change really, and it's entirely due to human biases.
While it's a great idea to train people for the job skills that are on an upward trend, I feel like the article is being fairly short sighted.
Automating away 50% of the workforce won't happen in a vacuum. It will come with major changes to the political, economic, and social systems.
Maybe we decide to let tech do everything while we go fishing (the oft-cited technology utopia that never seems to happen). Maybe we switch to a fixed-income economic model, where it's fine if people decide not to work. Maybe we decide not to automate some components (gasp!). Or use all that extra manpower to philosophize, make art... or war.
To say "it's going to be a big problem if 50% of the workforce is made redundant, we better start educating people now!" is exactly what you would expect from an (or 'the') economist. Economic rules are based on people's desires, and people desires may also be revolutionized if most of what they do is done by computers.
I don't think it's fair to just wave away such concerns. Automation lowers the number of people necessary to create something. This shrinkage of the available labor pool only happens faster with computer automation. The way the world currently works, this is a problem - people need jobs for money.
As entire classes of skilled labor evaporate, there will be significant societal implications. There is also the problem of the significant centralization of power and money that comes with a future where AI performs the work.
This seems a bit backwards. Most demand for automating existing jobs is driven by the specific goal to reduce workers and labour costs, so of course there will be fewer jobs afterwards than before - otherwise the automation didn't fulfill its goal from the companies' POV.
This is so spot on.
Before were able to automate away all this work we'll augment peoples abilities with really smart tools. This concept will end up not necessarily destroying entire job sectors but their job definition will be dramatically different, in the same way a computer used to be a room full of people doing math.
What you're describing is what's behind (in part) the growth in the economy; but nothing you said has anything to do with what the parent comment was talking about, which is that people who are automated out of work generally aren't participants (and recipients) of that growth.
This isn't a new problem by any stretch of the imagination. Almost every technological advance has had the same effect (pretty much by definition: if a tool is more effective at a job then less humans are necessary/cost-effective for the job). In modern history though, the (obvious) response has been to educate the population to leverage the skills that humans are still better at (c.f. the US gov't literacy drive and the post-WWII GI bill, both of which smoothed the path to an increasingly white-collar labor force). Sometimes this also includes providing a soft-landing (in the social welfare sense) for those who are old enough that it's unlikely they'll be able to easily switch out of their obsoleted industry, but this is less common.
But it also systematically replaces low-skilled jobs with high-skilled ones. You can't expect a low-wage factory worker to change into control engineer overnight, nor a clerk will be able to program automated checkout machines.
Nowdays new jobs are simply not accessible to the people who get replaced. I think what people don't get when discussing it is that historical (XIX century) examples don't apply because our computer-based automation is something different than their mechanical automation; robots can do any low-skilled thing humans can, which wasn't the case during Industrial Revolution. It's not just about doing stuff faster.
While the scope of the article is confined to manufacturing, which impacts less-specialized labor, I felt a sense of dread reading it for what it means for people losing their jobs to software. Fresh out of college in the late 1990s, one of my first "high tech" jobs was manually building HTML pages for job listings, copying-and-pasting advertisements from word documents all day long. One day, I recommended the company contract a programmer-friend of mine to automate the process and two weeks later I was looking for work--my job replaced by a script that ran a few minutes every morning.
Over the years I've watched various professions devalued to search engines and spreadsheets, from paralegals to accountants. I don't think it's a bad thing. It's progress and it's freeing up time. The bad part is that we live in a society with an antiquated work-ethic, where your value is measured in capital and the number of hours you put in each week at your job. Automation isn't the problem, living is a culture incapable of valuing leisure time is what needs to change.
Regarding your points on automation - it's an inherently contradictory position. If automation didn't save time/money/labor costs, we wouldn't invest in it. Carpentry being in demand has to do with external factors, not technological factors. There was no demand for carpentry in 2009, for example.
New industries will have to spawn from generative AI for there to be a net positive. Most IT and tech jobs are lower level coding positions. This will all but eliminate these roles. SWEs especially top ones will likely be safe. But that doesn't solve the societal problem.
Regarding layoffs - we've barely touched the surface. We haven't even entered recession yet, and a financial crisis looms. Most are on hiring freeze now and just in the last 2 weeks both meta and amazon slashed additional jobs. More will be coming. The industry won't completely collapse because it's a mature industry now - FAANGs are now like Coke. Blue chip. This says nothing about its workforce though - there's nothing these companies would love more than to be able to reduce the cost of their software devs.
A lot of that subconciously assumes the doomsday outcome - machines and automation will sweep people aside, and then the reasoning becomes circular.
> At a certain point we're automating new tasks faster than humans can learn them.
That assumes the pace of automation is increasing, but similar concerns have been around for a long time, going back to the industrial revolution. Read Dickens or HG Wells (though a specific cite doesn't come to mind), or look at the 1927 silent film, Metropolis.
But right now businesses can't find enough employees.
> Say it takes 1 year to train a human in something, and 1 year for a robot/AI. well it might take 1 year for the first AI, but copying software is easy. Training the next person takes another year. Even if it's parallelized and you save some time, the cost of training the marginal additional person is was larger.
That's how automation works. Then the people go on to the higher skilled jobs that the machines can't do, including designing, manufacturing, operating, and servicing the machines. Cars made the entire horse industry redundant; calculators and computers put lots of human calculators out of work.
Yet today, with a much larger population, employers can't find enough workers.
If things like that didn't happen, then productivity wouldn't increase and we would be able to afford more shelter, food, healthcare, education, etc.
Historically, machines replaced humans in nearly every job at an astounding rate. Machines are almost always much faster and cheaper than humans, and there's almost no incentive for a business to not take that savings. It hasn't even been that much of a problem until very recently.
Now we have vast swathes of our economy in jobs that we considered "safe" from being automated from underneath us. Suddenly these LLMs appear and offer a very credible threat that a large number of these jobs will be automated in the very near future. Coupled with current social and political issues, a lot of people are going to suffer greatly.
The next couple of decades are going to be a mess. If we automate too much too fast, we'll have to actually figure out what to do with an enormous population of unemployed people. Maybe we'll finally figure out social welfare, or invest in sweeping New Deal type projects.
It's certainly going to be interesting, but god damn am I tired of living in interesting times.
I think in large part, automation/technology has made most work unimportant. I mean, remember how people used to have secretaries? Now that's a luxury for only the elite. And it makes sense, when you have email and voicemail and so on, you don't really need a secretary. Nice to have, sure, but that's a job that technology has pretty much marginalized.
I wish I had a reference, but I remember reading a story about a steel mill that has like 1/5th the workforce it did 30 years ago, but is producing the same volume. That's one example, but I really don't think it's isolated. Everything is getting more efficient. There's this notion that more efficiency always creates more opportunity, but I find that idea suspect. Sometimes, sure, but at a certain point, sometimes things are just good enough.
Even knowledge work is susceptible. On one hand, it's great that things like programming are becoming a lot easier, but on the other hand, if your programmers are 10x more productive in Ruby than they are in C... well you probably don't need as many programmers. Remember the great recession? I think one of the interesting things that happened there is that a lot of jobs got eliminated out of necessity... and then they never really came back. The popular opinion is to blame a weak economy and I'm sure that's a factor, but I think a lot of it was, companies got rid of those people and then realized they didn't really need them.
The problem is, society hasn't caught up. So everyone feels the need to prove they're doing /something/, and firing someone is an awful experience, so I think most people are employed because they have to be employed, and because their employers don't really want to have to cut them loose unless they have to.
Even startups aren't really immune to this. Sure they have to be lean, but how many startup exist because the founders think they need to be doing, well, something.
There are certain jobs that are just always bound to be automated (any work near a bandwagon or a phone), instead I think the bigger issue is how our economic model is so reliant on maximum acceleration of adoption that we never stop and ask if people are fine with the jobs they have, for instance there's a very well known phenomenon in the military where a lot of soldiers don't really wants to climb the ranks because it means it stops being a field job and instead turns into a desk job.
Its funny how 10 years ago the luddities were usually seen as out of touch or just greedy dumb while the CEOs was seen as pioneers.
And now slowly we see people sympathize with the luddities.
What I wonder is will this automation cause yet another labor movement? If so how different will it be?
As automation gets better and better, the difficulty of the remaining jobs for humans goes up. Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer, doctor, or lawyer. We have to deal with the fact that people of average (and below average) skills and intelligence still need to support their families.
I think hampering technological progress to protect jobs is the wrong approach though. We need to contend with the fact that traditional supply-side economics will start to break down as we enter an era where most or all human needs can be met with automation.
Most company's right now want to automate all skilled labor away as quickly as possible. CEOs don't want innovation, they want a saleable product with the highest profit margin and the least risk. Removing people was always the goal.
I've worked at two jobs were in the first week I was told my goal was to automate myself so I could progress my career... Yup okay then...
I don't really understand this point of view. The day demand for software developers diminishes, but demand for manual laborers remains, I will start to automate manual labor.
>Predictions that automation will make humans redundant have been made before, however, going back to the Industrial Revolution, when textile workers, most famously the Luddites, protested that machines and steam engines would destroy their livelihoods. “Never until now did human invention devise such expedients for dispensing with the labour of the poor,” said a pamphlet at the time. Subsequent outbreaks of concern occurred in the 1920s (“March of the machine makes idle hands”, declared a New York Times headline in 1928), the 1930s (when John Maynard Keynes coined the term “technological unemployment”) and 1940s, when the New York Times referred to the revival of such worries as the renewal of an “old argument”.
>As computers began to appear in offices and robots on factory floors, President John F. Kennedy declared that the major domestic challenge of the 1960s was to “maintain full employment at a time when automation…is replacing men”. In 1964 a group of Nobel prizewinners, known as the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, sent President Lyndon Johnson a memo alerting him to the danger of a revolution triggered by “the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine”. This, they said, was leading to a new era of production “which requires progressively less human labour” and threatened to divide society into a skilled elite and an unskilled underclass. The advent of personal computers in the 1980s provoked further hand-wringing over potential job losses.
and based on a simplistic understanding of how automation impacts the demand for labour.
Automation reduces costs, and this increases consumer spending on more difficult to automate goods/services. [2]
That has been the pattern for 200 years, and why wages today are 20X what they were in 1800.
Unfortunately, ideas like yours are very common [3] and lead to terrible government policy.
I know that the suggestion that these are going to eliminate human positions is an unpopular sentiment here at HN because economics. However, are we really so sure that there will always be a human labor demand to effectively meet the human labor supply?
What do we do when there is an excess of human labor? Everyone here is opposed to make work for good reason. But a suggestion that solves the moral issue of what to do with an unemployed human who is not contributing due to a lack of labor demand has not been proposed in the general case. It is typically waved away by saying, "There will be a new industry." But can we really not imagine that this new industry will remain un-automated for long? What about the new industry that begins by being automated?
I am not opposed to automation in the slightest. I think that if we can automate every task in the world, that would be the best thing. If anything I am just opposed to insisting that as technology changes, we must maintain the same social values and behaviors.
I think its because it leads to uncomfortable future scenarios, like how the economy of the future will be completely dominated by skilled and educated workers, and there will be much less requirement for unskilled labourers.
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