[HN Gopher] Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs
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       Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs
        
       Author : blopeur
       Score  : 12 points
       Date   : 2022-01-25 22:00 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
        
       | bottesting wrote:
       | sounds interesting
        
       | axiomdata316 wrote:
       | Previously posted here:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067249
        
       | contingencies wrote:
       | What drives the adoption of automation is not "labour is
       | expensive" but "labour is unavailable", "labour is too slow to
       | obtain/train", "labour is imprecise", "labour is dangerous",
       | "labour is untrustworthy" or "labour is unreliable".
       | 
       | Generic industrial automation solutions are still very expensive
       | to integrate unless simplistic. Furthermore, if you automate one
       | unit operation, the rest of your process line also needs
       | automating or the adjacent operations will simply become the new
       | choke points.
        
       | timkam wrote:
       | Isn't the real development that automation and efficiency
       | improvements move more and more people into bullshit jobs? So
       | instead of becoming entirely obsolete, we continue working, not
       | knowing what value we contribute, if any. That's why my intuition
       | (and fear) is that in such BS jobs, the rewards will become more
       | and more skewed. So instead of a 9-5 corporate BS job, one gets a
       | highly competitive BS job (evaluated using metrics that are poor
       | predictors and assessors of individual quality of work) in a
       | high-pressure environment.
        
       | akoster wrote:
       | https://archive.is/L6TDA
        
       | blacksmith_tb wrote:
       | I cringe when I see an analysis begin with a trite conflict of
       | interest argument like "Warning people of a jobless future has,
       | ironically enough, created plenty of employment for ambitious
       | public intellectuals looking for a book deal or a speaking
       | opportunity." Yawn - that's charmingly glib, if factually
       | dubious, public intellectualism is not a growth industry in
       | general, let alone for bot-doubters.
       | 
       | 1: https://archive.md/L6TDA
        
       | vorpalhex wrote:
       | This strikes me as the "AI will replace..." problem. Everyone
       | understands AIs are anything except intelligent.
        
       | bjelkeman-again wrote:
       | My take on it is that it is too early to tell. The automation
       | envisaged has not arrived, yet. (Maybe it will take a long
       | while.) Self driving trucks or book keeping systems without data
       | entry are still not widespread.
       | 
       | At the same time, automation sometimes produces other results.
       | Not many executives in medium sized companies have secretaries,
       | rather the type their own messages, on a phone.
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-25 23:00 UTC)