[HN Gopher] Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
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Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
Author : goplayoutside
Score : 299 points
Date : 2024-04-21 09:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
| okasaki wrote:
| > The significant investment in robotics showcases Amazon's
| commitment to innovation in its supply chain and highlights the
| company's belief in the synergistic potential of human-robot
| collaboration. Despite the massive scale of automation, Amazon
| emphasizes that deploying robots has led to the creation of new
| skilled job categories at the company, reflecting a broader
| industry trend toward the integration of advanced technologies
| with human workforces.
|
| An article about robots that's written by a robot. It's robots
| all the way down.
| smcin wrote:
| Who will inform the turtles they are no longer needed?
| tacocataco wrote:
| Trust me, they'll know.
| RowanH wrote:
| > has led to the creation of new skilled job categories at the
| company.
|
| "While systematically removing the unskilled job categories at
| the company"
|
| The robot missed out that sentence for some reason.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Well given the complaints about work conditions it would be
| good if humans were given less dangerous jobs
| RowanH wrote:
| Not saying whether it's good or bad, just the obvious bit
| left out.
|
| Does really show that UBI discussion needs to be had sooner
| rather than later ...
| rickydroll wrote:
| I'm coming to think that the wages that would have been
| paid to people who robots have replaced should now go
| into a sovereign fund to help fund UBI.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Haha that is funny.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Don't forget all the robots reading it.
|
| It seems the end goal of the advertising industry -- robots
| doing, robots writing, robots reading.
|
| Like cockroaches and twinkies, one of the few things to survive
| nuclear war.
| rickydroll wrote:
| But will robots survive a nuclear war's EMP?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Military drones have to be covered in a Farraday cage layer
| to prevent jamming, so that would double as nuclear EMP
| protection. Finding a place to charge afterwards might be
| tricky though...
| exe34 wrote:
| Have you read Accelerando by Charlie stross? He talks about a
| Vile Offspring that's basically what you said!
| tacocataco wrote:
| Maybe robots should pay taxes like humans since they are taking
| the jobs and the tax base that goes along with them.
| exe34 wrote:
| Or you could tax the companies on revenue, the way employees
| are.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Sure, if you enjoy higher prices or lower wages
| LadyCailin wrote:
| That's too hard to do. What is "a robot" and "a job?"
| Replacing workers is easy enough to calculate that with, but
| what if I start a brand new factory that only ever used
| robots? The solution is wealth tax and UBI.
|
| Get rid of regular income tax, then do a progressive wealth
| tax, which is enough to pay for a progressive UBI. This way,
| it's no problem if you lay off all your workers to replace
| them with robots. In fact that's great! Because now these
| people have a UBI, which frees them up to go find (or make)
| other work. Meanwhile the factory owner's taxes should be
| going up, since his wealth is going up since he doesn't have
| to pay all the workers, unless he's still spending that money
| to further invest in things, which is also great.
|
| The biggest problem really is people just hoarding wealth. If
| they are spending or investing it, then that's not a problem.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Very few people hoard wealth. You imagine wealthy people
| like Scrooge McDuck with a room full of gold coins. It's
| almost always invested in stocks which helps companies grow
| or in bonds which helps finance public works.
| phatfish wrote:
| Pretty sure a diverse portfolio will feature gold. It
| might not be in gold coins in the owners basement though.
|
| Investing in stocks where most companies are doing their
| best to suppress worker compensation or out-right replace
| them with robots doesn't feel like it's doing much to
| help the average person either.
|
| Public investment is on a downward trend since 2008 when
| governments had to save the bankers. What government
| spending there still is often has to filter through
| private service companies that are given government
| contracts. This usually results in good dividends and bad
| service.
| rcstank wrote:
| Many people on UBI would be content enough to not search
| for more work.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| So? UBI isn't about making sure people aren't lazy. It's
| about making sure no one slips between the cracks, and
| can at least afford the basics.
| int_19h wrote:
| Good, because the whole point of taking automation to its
| logical conclusion is that there isn't more work for
| them.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| You need to start with no/little increase in taxes from
| corporations and see how that works. Previously unthought
| of loopholes will keep the status quo of low corporate tax
| payments.
|
| > The biggest problem really is people just hoarding wealth
|
| That is a pretty substantial problem and doesn't seem close
| to the biggest one.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| But will the robots be given piss bottles?
| agilob wrote:
| No, but they have free healthcare and time off to recharge
| their batteries
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Having an in-place battery swap is the equivalent of having
| to eat lunch at your workstation.
| odiroot wrote:
| Probably have wet sump.
| mc32 wrote:
| They'll just need oil cans instead.
| WillAdams wrote:
| When I worked in an Amazon Warehouse, while a bathroom break
| was considered time-off-task, it wasn't a big deal to use the
| bathroom (or take some other break) whenever one wished.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
|
| Basically, it was just a gym membership which I got paid for
| (and couldn't skip out on beyond what my available time off
| facilitated).
| naveen99 wrote:
| Maybe jobs that require moving around should be split into 2
| hr shifts, and then people with sedentary jobs can moonlight
| for getting in their cardio, instead of paying a gym, or
| walking pointlessly.
| WillAdams wrote:
| If Amazon would offer a part-time shift option where it was
| 1 day a week, I'd probably do it, mostly for the excercise,
| and partly for the extra money.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Isn't this just a thing on delivery trucks? And it's pretty
| standard industry practice, not just Amazon? And in the scale
| of worker abuses, this is pretty low on the scale and more
| pragmatic than anything.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's a good thing actually given that the worker conditions are
| pretty terrible there.
|
| But it is only a good thing if the increased productivity
| translates into better wages, increased vacations and reduced
| work days and not helping Jeff getting a bigger yacht.
|
| And for that, it must be an active government policy.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Soon Jeff will have ten yachts and his job each day will be
| choosing which yacht to use once he has automated himself out
| of work. It will be gruelling.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| I don't know for aging economics this is somewhat good. But for
| developing countries it's horrible. Where humans has to search
| work each day to find food for night
| FlyingAvatar wrote:
| I would suspect that in these countries labor is cheap enough
| that replacing it with robots would not be cost effective.
| exe34 wrote:
| And once it's cost effective for robots to do it, you might
| as well move the factories close to where the stuff is needed
| and transport raw material that's more fungible.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If we also sufficiently automated food production, there ought
| to be enough calories to feed everyone, right? Right?
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Industrialized agriculture already produces enough food to
| feed the world. The remaining problem is a question of
| distribution.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Food waste is tragic. Now no one eats that $5 iceberg lettuce
| head, and people are forced to eat unhealthy low nutritional
| carbs for sustenance.
| exe34 wrote:
| Why don't they eat the $5 lettuce? Is the argument that
| it's too expensive here? I thought fast food was more
| expensive.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Haha good one.
| onion2k wrote:
| Is humanity really at a point where we can't think of anything
| more useful than "carry things about" and "put things in a box"
| for those people to do? If that's really the state we're in
| then a bunch of robots doing it instead is the least of our
| problems.
| tacocataco wrote:
| I think getting adequate housing, food, and Healthcare is
| useful for workers.
|
| Perhaps if people didn't need to prove that they deserve
| these necessities this conversation about robots replacing
| humans wouldn't be so dire.
| humanrebar wrote:
| It doesn't seem like we are close to robotics providing
| housing, food, and healthcare for nominal costs to
| everyone. Seems like we still need a lot of humans working
| in those spaces.
|
| In particular, durable goods (and human bodies and even
| hair) need a lot of maintenance. So far, at least, robots
| aren't especially gifted at maintenance tasks.
| UberFly wrote:
| Isn't it also a problem that we've put people who's
| capabilities are equal to those kind of tasks into the
| "useless" category? Not everyone is cut out to be a
| programmer, which by the way, will also eventually be in the
| "useless" bucket. In reality, "better things to do" usually
| means just a lot of people in poverty.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Welfare systems are nationalistic. The US will tax companies
| using robots and redistribute it to Americans while the
| people assembling widgets in developing countries will be out
| of a job. I'm still optimistic that the raw increase in
| economic productivity will somehow sort everyone out
| eventually, but it could be bumpy.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| That corporate taxation though hasn't worked too well so
| far. What makes you think that having robots would change
| anything?
| kypro wrote:
| I assume this is being upvoted because HN thinks this is good? At
| least that's what I hear in AI threads...
|
| AI just allows humans to work more efficiently right? The few
| fulfilment center workers left are probably now 100x fulfilment
| workers now that they can manage a fleet of robotic workers
| instead of human ones. As HN says, these types of innovations
| historically only create new job opportunities so there's
| probably loads of new amazing jobs these replaced workers can go
| do instead.
|
| For those who are worried about the future we're creating for
| their children, don't worry, because when robotics and AI can do
| everything humans can do (and better) businesses will still want
| hire humans, because they still hired humans when the combustion
| engine was invented. I'm sure it will be the same this time.
| Don't be so anti-progress!
| onion2k wrote:
| Amazon's role in society is not to provide menial jobs to keep
| people busy though. If anything, the automation provides good,
| innovative jobs in robotics. Those are the sorts of jobs I
| think _everyone_ should have. Leave fetching and carrying to
| robots, and educate people to be useful in more meaningful,
| fulfilling, and impactful ways.
|
| Suggesting that robots are bad because they take jobs from
| people doing horrible, boring jobs just says that you want
| people to carry on doing that work. That's not a good look.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If the robots are the ones altering the position of matter at
| or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter,
| there are still roles for telling them to do so, and history
| suggests the latter work is capable of indefinite extension:
| there are not only those who give orders but those who give
| advice as to what orders should be given.
|
| (plagiarism intentional)
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >just says that you want people to carry on doing that work
|
| Or that we don't want them to starve. We are talking about
| the US where their isn't really an effective solution to help
| people without jobs.
| rcstank wrote:
| Can you share your data on starvation in the US? I'm
| sincerely curious about it.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| The people working in the low skill jobs being eliminated
| aren't capable of contributing in more meaningful, impactful
| ways. That's why they work in low skill jobs.
| techdmn wrote:
| About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company.
| I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements
| planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20
| hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what
| materials they needed. It was all based on data we had:
| inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount
| of her help, I'd automated the whole thing. She was happy, it was
| her least favorite part of her job and she desperately needed
| time for other things. I was happy, I was showing that I was
| worth what they were paying me! (Salaried at the equivalent of
| $12.50 per hour.) BUT: That project took half a job out of the
| economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job.
|
| Automation is definitely having an impact on labor demand, with
| software driving out some jobs much the way cars and trucks drove
| horses out of our economy. I think it points to an increasing
| bifurcation, with jobs being high skill / high pay or low skill /
| low pay, without much in the middle.
|
| Of course here in the U.S. this is also being driven by our
| monetary policy, our tax policy, our trade policy, our labor
| policy, I could go on. I'm in favor of UBI, but that seems about
| as likely as the use of any of those levers to reduce income
| inequality and spread the wealth our society generates in a way
| that supports most of those contributing to it.
| pydry wrote:
| There's plenty of stuff in the middle it's just been moved
| overseas and the output is sent back to the US on a shipping
| container.
|
| Chinese and Mexican factory workers != robots. It sounds
| obvious but the establishment, media, and economists do like to
| blur the distinction.
| K0balt wrote:
| This sounds a lot like one of the last projects I worked On,
| where some significant operations were to be assigned to "AI"
| which was meant to mean Artificial intelligence for marketing
| slicks but everyone knew it would be "Actually, Indians" for
| the foreseeable future.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _drove horses out of our economy_
|
| A graph of the process is in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39604784
|
| (it also includes a bifurcation: between draft and
| sport/companion horses)
| exe34 wrote:
| I enjoy automating the boring parts of my job - plus if I
| don't, somebody else will. At least now I can just go on to
| automate the next thing.
| capybara_2020 wrote:
| Assuming the world is moving towards more automation and high
| skilled(not sure this is the right term. But places where you
| need to be more adaptable and think more) jobs. Also assuming
| for a moment todays adults are the transitionary generation.
|
| How do we prepare the next generation for what is to come? It
| feels like schools are still stuck in the industrial age. How
| do we teach them not math and science but the actual act of
| learning/adapting. Our parents could not predict what the world
| would look like today, neither can we. How do we educate the
| next generation on the foundational skills rather than specific
| skills which they can learn on their own depending on what the
| situation calls for?
|
| This is an idea I am thinking about, so I would love to hear
| other opinions and thoughts.
| Loughla wrote:
| >How do we teach them not math and science but the actual act
| of learning/adapting.
|
| This is literally what they're trying to do. People complain
| about the way things like math (concepts instead of rote
| memorization of facts) and spelling (stems and etymology
| instead of rote memorization) are taught. People complain
| that kids aren't learning cursive and other things like that.
|
| But schools are trying to teach critical thinking and how to
| reason your way through problems, rather than blanket
| "facts".
| doktor_oh_boli wrote:
| I, personally think teaching kids critical thinking is
| great. Here in Eastern Europe they are only taught useless
| facts and not to think too much on their own, remnant of
| the past I guess...
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh you require a lot of factual knowledge to know how to
| think. I mean humanity has been pretty smart for the last
| 10k years or so, but without understanding of scientific
| laws and a massive amount of world knowledge
| breakthroughs were very slow compared to the last 300 or
| so years. We need these facts + philosophy + critical
| thinking, but it seems like no one knows how to teach
| this.
| simonw wrote:
| I have been contributing to open source software for more than
| 20 years. My contributions have always been to help save other
| developers time.
|
| How does the impact from that on jobs differ from the impact
| had by AI tools like LLMs or robotic automation?
|
| It certainly /feels/ different, but I'm having a little bit of
| trouble explaining why.
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| With better oss tools, we've been able to achieve more with
| less people but for a long time there was more demand for
| skilled developer than what is available in the pool, hence
| the decent salaries coming from the market squeezing that
| pool. If robot takes over and the pool of available labor
| expand instead of shrink, the effect is the exact opposite,
| pressure on salaries from the remaining participants, worse
| conditions, ...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one
| at that, a nice cushy desk job.
|
| Or it allowed the employee to shift to more valuable,
| interesting work rather than menial tasks that could easily be
| done by a computer.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| I would disagree with the inference that menial tasks are
| automated and interesting work isn't. I can clearly see a
| future where the pleasure is automated away leaving the
| stressful uncomfortable tasks to the human.
| wvenable wrote:
| AI is making art, books, poetry, music, software, and
| movies but I'm still here folding my own laundry.
| 0xedd wrote:
| But, some already operate at their peak. Then, you automate
| that and they can only shift to unemployment. The
| conversation shouldn't be about replacing the most skilled
| workers. The conversation should be about what happens to the
| average worker. That has an average IQ level. That can't
| learn something to compete with the automation. These people
| have families. These people will suffer.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Has anyone claimed technological changes will impact every
| group and subgroup on a literally equal basis?
|
| Some will have better prospects and others will have worse.
| Since roughly half the population must have below median
| average prospects by definition.
| starbugs wrote:
| > Has anyone claimed technological changes will impact
| every group and subgroup on a literally equal basis?
|
| No, but too much inequality is not sustainable. Since in
| a democracy everyone has an equal vote, there will be a
| force that balances things out over time one way or
| another.
| RGamma wrote:
| Democracy won't survive the tech trillionaires. At that
| point you can buy the executive.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| We already are at the point where the ultra rich just buy
| politicians. Hell, we _were_ ever since oil production
| was mainstreamed and the oil tycoons were able to tell
| the US to go to wars for oil.
| golergka wrote:
| Are your sure these were the oil tycoons and not voters
| who remembered 70s gas issues?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How does this relate to the parent?
|
| Plus the point seems confused, far from every adult
| impacted by technology has a vote.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > The conversation should be about what happens to the
| average worker. That has an average IQ level. That can't
| learn something to compete with the automation.
|
| There are many tropes to unpack, including that IQ is
| somehow fixed and people's fate, and that even the
| "average" person "can't learn something". Also, it of
| course glorifies and cements the power of the wealthy who
| think they are smart and very special and deserving of
| everything.
|
| Also, history has shown that people overwhelmingly that
| people can learn higher skilled jobs en masse. Just look at
| universal literacy - did anyone say, 'the average person
| can't learn to read'.
|
| The US has long believed that anyone can achieve and
| succeed with hard work. That's been my experience, but that
| the limit is almost always in opportunity.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| That's a good point but things do change. Malthus was
| correct about humanities past but won't about the future
| (from his point in time).
|
| Even aside from that, Learning takes time for everyone.
| At a certain point we're automating new tasks faster than
| humans can learn them.
|
| Scaling works against humans too. 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Not "or", "and". Without the automation they would have
| needed to hire another person.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| That is not a given at all. Automation merely changes the
| ROI, which might result in more people being hired.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| By that logic every backhoe constructed removes hundreds of
| jobs of men with shovels.
|
| But we instead build.mpre and bigger things using our tools.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one
| at that, a nice cushy desk job.
|
| It's effectively a form of the broken window fallacy [0]. You
| don't actually have a closed system when you say a "job was
| removed". The company one way or another got more efficient -
| more widgets were manufactured per $ spent. It might be tiny
| but this saving was then passed on to every downstream
| purchaser of the widgets who, with that left over money ....
| could employ someone else to do something. By the time you add
| all the net effects back to regain a "closed system", economic
| theory says you actually have _more_ jobs.
|
| But the key here really is that this doesn't account for
| temporal effects, and especially when there is rapid disruptive
| change, you can absolutely have a huge dislocation and mismatch
| of labor supply / demand in the economy.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
| wvenable wrote:
| > It might be tiny but this saving was then passed on to
| every downstream purchaser of the widgets who, with that left
| over money .... could employ someone else to do something.
|
| So a company used technology to automate someone out of a job
| but some downstream company isn't also going to do that with
| their new money?
|
| The reason technology lead to more jobs is because it created
| exponential growth. The lesson of the last 200 years is that
| we can grow indefinitely. But that is already falling apart.
| The growth that is happening now is _optimization_. And it 's
| happening at every level of society and it's not good for
| workers.
| aczerepinski wrote:
| I wish I could believe that all this automation would lead to
| more leisure time for all of humanity, but it certainly won't
| happen on its own out of generosity from the robot owners.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Why does the Ampere-Maxwell law, the largest of Maxwell's
| equations, not simply eat the other 3?
| VHRanger wrote:
| We've been saying that for a long time. [Keynes predicted we'd
| be working 15 hour weeks by now](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co
| m/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12439)
|
| The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their
| labor time for leisure time all that well. They value
| consumption too much.
|
| There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one
| right now!
|
| But you'd need to have a smaller appartment, an older car, and
| eat more lentils.
|
| While people say they want to work less, their [revealed
| preference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference)
| is that they value buying stuff above having more leisure.
| seper8 wrote:
| How detached from reality are you that you think people can
| make ends meet while working 15 hours a week?
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Some people do do that. Try stepping outside of your
| bubble.
| ameister14 wrote:
| The average hourly wage in the United States is $30, so
| 15 hours a week is $450 pre-tax. Live on that with a
| family.
| rfwhXQ5H wrote:
| If you don't think that there aren't people doing that
| already in this country, get out of your bubble. How much
| do you think farmers are making?
| maxsilver wrote:
| Farmers (i.e., Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural
| Managers) make a lot more than $450 a week. Average
| salary for these folks is $70k/yr.
|
| A _farm hand_ only makes like $15 /hr on average, which
| puts it on par with a job at McDonalds or such.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I concur. They're not looking in the right places.
| Musicians and artists would know about these sorts of
| hustles, but not your typical HN bubble dweller.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I know at least a dozen artists, and not one of them has
| found a side hustle that lucrative.
|
| Instead, they get a Master's degree, and use it teach at
| 2 universities, _and_ work a third job part time so they
| can afford rent.
| dehrmann wrote:
| There's a youtuber I've seen who I think is mostly legit
| who spent not much money on land in the middle of nowhere
| and built himself a one-room cabin and an outhouse on it.
| He's up-front that he isn't actually living off the grid
| or even in the cabin full-time, but his point is that if
| you live a very modest life and are handy, you can live
| on just a side hustle. Like you said, you're unlikely to
| meet people like this in the (sub) urban tech bubble.
| nabla9 wrote:
| All what you say is true, if the wage share stays constant.
|
| The "working poor" phenomenon where you can't pay for
| necessities like rent, healthcare etc. while working full
| time is the result of declining wage share.
|
| Wage share has steadily declined in OECD countries since
| early 1970s. In the US since 1960s.
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173 Wages make
| smaller and smaller portion of national income while capital
| share increases.
| VHRanger wrote:
| FWIW, the wage share declining is a result of many other
| factors. See here:
|
| https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2008/where-has-all-
| th...
|
| Health insurance and other benefits, household composition
| have hurt wage share. Not that it didn't decline in real
| terms for the lower skilled workers, just less than the
| naive chart you put.
|
| Here is good reading on the topic (maybe my favorite paper
| of the last decade):
|
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w25588
| int_19h wrote:
| Your first link points out that income inequality is
| still growing, however. Which unambiguously means that
| those at the top are increasingly taking larger and
| larger slice of the pie.
| xemra wrote:
| Or maybe it's the security net that comes with it.
| dpflan wrote:
| What if you bring the ideas of measuring productivity and
| wage growth of employees? How have productivity, wage growth,
| and corporate profit changed over the decades since Keynes?
| What was that 15 hour work week, how "productive" and paying
| is it supposed to be?
| Adverblessly wrote:
| > There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one
| right now!
|
| Not without a 90% pay cut (i.e. as opposed to the ~60% pay
| cut you'd expect for working 40% of the hours), I've checked.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| Agreed. I think this is clearest when you look at benefits,
| e.g., the many American companies that only offer health
| insurance benefits to their full-time workers, but you see
| it in terms of pay, too. Most middle and high-paying jobs
| are exclusively full-time (and some expect 50, 60, or even
| more hours a week).
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I live in a country where health insurance is individual,
| not employment based, so maybe that's part of why we
| offer 80% (most common) but also 60 and 40% positions?
| paxys wrote:
| > There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one
| right now!
|
| What 15 hour/week job pays enough to afford rent, food,
| medicine?
| timClicks wrote:
| That was the prediction at the start of the 20th century as
| thinkers considered the consequences of increased
| automation and therefore productivity.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their
| labor time for leisure time all that well. They value
| consumption too much.
|
| Or simply they want to live. The amount of money we gotta
| spend on rent is _insane_.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for
| leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much.
|
| We don't actually know that. Most people don't have the
| option.
|
| For all but a select few industries, there is no such thing
| as _" work a part time job, and trade the rest for extra
| leisure"_ since almost no part-time job can sustainably cover
| cost of living. (Heck, most _full time_ jobs don 't really
| cover basic cost of living today).
|
| > There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. But you'd need
| to have a smaller apartment, an older car, and eat more
| lentils.
|
| The average wage in Michigan is currently $21/hr. ($36k/yr
| after federal, city, and state taxes). The average basic
| 1-bed apartment here is about $1300/month or $15k/yr. Minimum
| income requirement to qualify for an apartment is usually
| 2.5x to 3x times monthly rent.
|
| Math that out and you can quickly see that the vast majority
| of people simply aren't going to ever afford basic housing on
| 15hours a week. Or even 30hours a week.
|
| --
|
| And on the flip side, when it was _actually possible_ to pull
| this trick off, more people used to use it. In the 60s and
| 70s, when you could actually live off a part time 20hr a week
| job, people routinely did so (and then used their free time
| to do things like enroll in college and pay for it on the
| side).
|
| You don't see that anymore, because wages have fallen so
| drastically, and costs risen so drastically. It simply
| doesn't math out for the vast majority of folks.
| fragmede wrote:
| > There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one
| right now!
|
| Try talking to recruiters and tell them you want to work 2
| days a week as a software developer and see how far you get.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I work full time, make triple the minimum wage, and can
| barely afford to live in a 256 square foot micro studio
| apartment.
|
| You're dreams are not my reality.
| nabla9 wrote:
| If things go as before, wage share continues to decline while
| unemployment does not increase.
|
| Wage share has steadily declined in OECD countries since early
| 1970s. In the US since 1960s.
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173 Wages make
| smaller and smaller portion of national income while capital
| share increases.
| ed_balls wrote:
| It would in places where robot owners care about. To avoid
| social unrest they will be forced to pay for UBI.
|
| The two remaining problems would be:
|
| - purpose and identity.
|
| - places like Bangladesh where industries like textile will
| disappear.
| int_19h wrote:
| They certainly talk about UBI a lot, but somehow it never
| materializes. What does materialize, however, is tax cuts on
| corporations.
|
| Perhaps they believe that you can automate policing as well,
| at least enough so that social unrest can be suppressed
| effectively?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Be careful what you wish for. Humans tend to do poorly when
| they have a lot of leisure time. Especially young people,
| especially males.
| air7 wrote:
| It's clear that technological development creates a _shift_ in
| jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a
| result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is
| debatable.
|
| The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs
| require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace
| 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers
| to maintain). So by definition, the average intelligence
| requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated
| directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a
| growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are
| capable of doing. [o]
|
| What's the proper social response to that, I don't know.
|
| [o] If and when AGI comes along, that will be all of us.
| exitb wrote:
| Jobs are a byproduct of capital owners needing labor to sell
| things and services with a profit margin, so they can buy the
| good stuff. I'd argue that once the capital owners possess the
| technology that brings the cost of labor near zero, they will
| have no need for an economy at all, not to mention other people
| - unless it's something more akin to a zoo.
| acestus5 wrote:
| This reminds me of the Chinese white monkey jobs.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _once the capital owners possess the technology that brings
| the cost of labor near zero_
|
| Most Americans are capital owners. You're describing a world
| in which most Americans live in a utopia.
| dhosek wrote:
| A quick google says that 53% of Americans own publicly
| traded stock, but that means that 47% do not. There will be
| some fraction of that 47% who have their own businesses,
| but I'm guessing that these would be people at the bottom
| end of the business scale. Would it really be fair to call
| the guys driving a truck through the alleys collecting crap
| metal capital owners who would live in a utopia?
|
| The same article that cites the 53% number also says that
| the top 10% of income earners own 70% of the stock market.
| That doesn't really sound like a recipe for utopia.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that
| means that 47% do not_
|
| Does that include 401(k)s and pensions?
| dhosek wrote:
| Yes. 401(k)s but not pensions. The latter are defined
| benefit programs where participants are not responsible
| for making investment decisions.
| foolofat00k wrote:
| Very probably, yes. I'd be shocked if more than 60% of
| Americans even have a 401k/pension, let alone one with
| any meaningful sum invested.
| jkhanlar wrote:
| https://youtu.be/FID0BLkZXuY?t=2058s
|
| > 34:24 "Markets are efficient because of active managers
| setting the prices of securities, firms like Citadel,
| firms like Fidel.....lity (Fidelity) [...] trying to
| drive the value of companies towards where we think they
| should be valued." - Kenneth Cordelle Griffin, Citadel
| Securities, November 2023
|
| I thought Amazon was a public company, not private, and
| since supply and demand is dead and real price discovery
| is gone, that unless it becomes a private company it
| likely will not survive, unless there are enough retail
| investors to DRS directly register shares in their name
| so that DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation)
| and Cede & Co do not hold all the assets for retail in
| street name to then bankrupt and collect all the assets
| leaving retail investors holding worthless securities,
| but I don't see that Amazon is private? Maybe I missed
| something that happened and it's a private company now?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _thought Amazon was a public company, not private_
|
| Parks, libraries and military bases are publicly owned.
| Amazon is a private company whose shares are publicly
| traded.
|
| > _since supply and demand is dead_
|
| This is wrong.
|
| > _so that DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing
| Corporation) and Cede & Co do not hold all the assets for
| retail in street name to then bankrupt and collect all
| the assets_
|
| This is nonsense. (For starters, not how bankruptcy
| works.)
|
| > _Maybe I missed something_
|
| Mankiw's _Principles of Economics_ is a well-regarded
| introductory text [1].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economi
| cs_(Man...
| int_19h wrote:
| And for most Americans who own publicly traded stock, the
| income that is derived from it is supplemental, not
| primary.
|
| You're not really a full-on capitalist unless you can
| stop working and still have sufficient income derived
| from economic rent collected from somebody else who _is_
| working to sustain you in perpetuity.
| gnz11 wrote:
| > they will have no need for an economy at all
|
| Who is going to buy all of their crap then?
| rcstank wrote:
| They won't be selling anything by that point.
| jkhanlar wrote:
| I noticed NVIDIA skyrocket from billions to trillions
| market cap, so wouldn't NVIDIA be able to help deploy some
| a.i. simulatedly autonomous homo borg genesis to engage in
| scripted automated consumer lives to replace traditional
| homosapiens/humans consumers and takeover what otherwise
| was economy and market for human people but now they are
| replaced by redefining human and people to be displaced by
| the automated scripted a.i. controlled ones? This is
| already happening, right? Or did I just give them idea to
| make this a reality? lol, wait, why am I getting raided by
| the FBI right now? What's going on? HALP!
| quaintdev wrote:
| It's time we take on bigger and harder problems to solve.
| Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company
| is working on that. We need multiple such companies tackling
| bigger problems. Solving climate change, dealing with plastic
| are other bigger problems.
|
| I beleive there's no shortage of jobs. What if we start
| cleaning earth or reverse effects of human civilization on
| earth to make it more sustainable. The amount of people needed
| for that job are huge but we can't pay them at all because how
| our economies are structured. We need tectonic shift in how the
| world works today. Machines are taking human jobs, good. Now
| humans are free to do the work which machines can't do.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one
| company is working on that.
|
| There's an organization called NASA working on it.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Does NASA have any planetary colonization program?
|
| They do plan the Artemis mission, but AFAIK that is about
| establishing a tiny scientific base on the Moon, probably
| with regular exchange of the crew. I don't think they
| proclaimed an ambition to settle massive amounts of people
| there.
|
| For me "living on another planet" is only really SpaceX's
| goal. Build a semi-independent nation on Mars, with a
| million or more people necessary.
|
| That is very different from a scientific base project.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Proclaiming things is very easy.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| SpaceX aren't just proclaiming things. They are building
| a skyscraper-sized fully reusable rocket with completely
| new engines to get away from the Earth cheaply.
| skissane wrote:
| The first crewed mission to Mars is very likely going to
| be a join SpaceX-NASA mission... to set up a crewed
| research station. Basically the same thing as Artemis
| Base Camp, except further away.
|
| Yes, SpaceX wants to ship millions of people to Mars, but
| realistically they are several decades away from even
| _starting_ that. You want to get a small permanent
| settlement on Mars (like a crewed research station), and
| get some experience with operating it, before you start
| sending heaps of people. And probably the initial focus
| will be just on growing that crewed research station
| (from 20 people to 200 people to 2000 people). And only
| then will you have enough information to really plan
| making it significantly bigger. I doubt we 'll get there
| until some time in the second half of this century.
|
| In the medium term, I think the Moon is a more realistic
| target for the private sector. The total cost per a
| person-year of a crewed lunar base is a lot less than a
| crewed Martian base, so you can pay for a much bigger
| lunar settlement for the same budget. You can also sell
| lunar surface tourism to the ultra-rich, and hope that
| economies of scale will gradually drive the price down;
| your average billionaire can spare a couple of weeks for
| a trip to the Moon, not the almost 3 years a Mars round
| trip would take. How about Hollywood filming on-location
| on the Moon? Reality TV shows? Professional sports
| competitions? All a lot more feasible given the much
| lower travel time (about 3 days) and light distance (a
| bit over 1 light second). I doubt any of these would be
| massive revenue sources (at least at first), but they'll
| be economically feasible _long_ before their Martian
| equivalents become so.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't think anyone can say what will 'very likely'
| happen, but NASA often hires many contractors and also
| does much work internally (e.g., at JPL) for a major
| project. Also, there may be other national space programs
| partnering in the mission.
| skissane wrote:
| My point is - I doubt the first crewed mission to Mars
| will be a purely private SpaceX-led venture. Almost
| certainly be done in cooperation with NASA, quite
| possibly some partner agencies such as ESA, maybe some
| other firms involved too (e.g. Axiom). And that mission
| is essentially just going to be "Artemis Base Camp on
| Mars", a long way off Musk/SpaceX's dream of sending a
| million people there.
|
| Not saying the dream won't eventually come true, but it
| if it does, it will take many decades. Come 2100, I think
| there will be a lot less than 1 million people on Mars.
| jfyi wrote:
| ...and they are building it for NASA's Artemis program.
| SpaceX evaporates the moment the juicy billion dollar
| public contracts dry up.
|
| Mars is still a pipe dream. You might as well give the
| credit to Edgar Rice Burroughs for as far as realizing it
| has come.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "SpaceX evaporates the moment the juicy billion dollar
| public contracts dry up."
|
| So, not in the foreseeable future, given the new Space
| Race with China.
|
| Ofc the government is an important customer for any
| launch provider (not just SpaceX), given that a lot of
| current space activity is military in nature. That just
| comes with the territory.
|
| Edgar Rice Borroughs died before the first man-made
| rocket reached the orbit. Writing about Mars isn't the
| same as building a ship that can reach it.
|
| I am not a native speaker of English, so I am not sure
| how much deprecation does the term "pipe dream" contain.
| But I don't think that manned flight to Mars is wild and
| unattainable fantasy. I would say that it is on the same
| level as manned flight to the orbit by 1945 - not yet
| here, but technically and economically feasible in a
| decade or two.
| jfyi wrote:
| "So, not in the foreseeable future"
|
| I agree, but the point was they are tied to NASA and
| NASA's projects for the foreseeable future, not that they
| are going away tomorrow.
|
| "But I don't think that manned flight to Mars is wild and
| unattainable fantasy"
|
| It wasn't too long ago you were talking about
| colonization. So which is it? Colonization or a manned
| flight?
|
| Yeah I believe a manned flight is possible. If we were
| really motivated it would have been possible before my
| lifetime, certainly before SpaceX.
|
| Colonization is leaps and bounds beyond that.
| robofanatic wrote:
| > Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one
| company is working on that.
|
| There's a lot of unknowns in that and ROI can take very very
| long time. Not many people can or are willing to take that
| risk. If that one company is successful then you'll see that
| space flooded with new companies.
| quaintdev wrote:
| Our generation is highly advanced but we have become very
| short sighted. We have made a mess of our world because of
| it.
|
| I remember a story about Oxford. When it was built they
| planted entire forest of Oak trees so that in 500 years
| when Oxford will need repairing they have ample amount of
| wood available. In that age people were capable of thinking
| 500 years ahead. And we with all our advancement can't even
| think beyond ROI. Living on other planet should not be seen
| as choice but something that is necessary.
| robofanatic wrote:
| The problem is resources and money are not unlimited.
| pixl97 wrote:
| And that's why 1% of us must hold on to 50% of that money
| and resources.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| All of that money is working as part of the economy,
| paying salaries and such. It's not at all obvious that
| it's less efficient in an economic sense (although
| obvious not ideal from social sense)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new
| jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't
| displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires
| 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the average
| intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though
| never stated directly). This means that as time and technology
| progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that
| they are capable of doing.
|
| You might look up what economics has to say; this issue is
| well-addressed there. Some fundamentals:
|
| The comment above assumes a static marketplace - the same
| technology, needs, etc. - and one that addresses the entirety
| of economic demand, rather than a dynamic market where those
| things change and resources are scarce (thus when resources
| become available, they are applied to other unfilled needs).
|
| For example, which skills are in demand changes but there is
| still growing demand: If you look at the jobs performed 100
| years ago, you'll see that most of them are no long needed. Yet
| not only are most people employed today, we have ~3-4x as many
| people - most of the jobs disappeared, yet, 3-4x people have
| jobs.
|
| And yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but
| that's good because that work comes with higher pay.
| ameister14 wrote:
| >yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but
| that's good because that work comes with higher pay.
|
| The problem, of course, is that wages stagnated from '99 to
| 2014 and the job participation rate has been decreasing since
| 2000 while cost of living and general production increased;
| so no, in a dynamic market work does not necessarily come
| with higher pay. It actually wouldn't really make sense for
| all new work to come with higher pay; if you have changes in
| supply (which is what we are really talking about) that come
| with associated lower labor costs, the people that used to
| provide higher cost labor for the initial supply level will
| have to accept significantly reduced salaries in their
| industry.
|
| That's what happened with the industrial revolution. Wages
| overall increased because people entered the workforce for
| the first time as skill requirements went down, but the
| average wage of previously employed people went way down as
| artisan and highly skilled labor was outcompeted by factory
| work.
| bamboozled wrote:
| _while cost of living and general production increased_
|
| This is a major problem! Why ? Corporations chasing profits
| without enough competition ?
| wordpad25 wrote:
| wages stagnated, not total compensation which continued to
| grow employee preferred form of compensation has just
| shifted towards other benefits
| genedan wrote:
| Technology can also reduce the skills needed for jobs. For
| example, you no longer need to have an entire city's streets
| memorized to be a taxi driver.
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think there was ever a taxi driver shortage because
| city streets are too difficult to memorize.
| genedan wrote:
| Rideshare and delivery apps have enabled more people to do
| those jobs than before.
| layer8 wrote:
| Because of less skills required? What are you basing this
| on?
| bombcar wrote:
| More like because of the non-necessity of supplying a
| livable wage.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Prior to the advent of GPS, taxi drivers in many cities
| were tested on their orientation skills and had to memorize
| a lot of streets. I would be surprised if no one ever
| failed this part of the exam.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Until you get replaced by a robot taxi.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Wait a minute. Higher skill jobs? For at least a decade, the
| place jobs shifted to was Amazon. If you lost your job because
| Amazon put your company out of business, you could get a worse,
| more humiliating job working at an Amazon warehouse, or as an
| Amazon driver. It was not higher skill jobs the market shifted
| to, it was Nomadland jobs. Now that Amazon is switching to
| robots, where are those people Amazon is putting out of work
| supposed to go?
| ranger_danger wrote:
| That's the point.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Not by my reading of the original comment. Seems like
| they're saying that layoffs result in higher skilled jobs.
|
| And here's my basis for that conclusion:
|
| > The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new
| jobs require by definition, a higher skill set.
|
| And what I'm saying is that there may not be new jobs, and
| if they are they may be lower skill jobs if history is any
| indication.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| My understanding was that they're saying it's the act of
| replacing the worker with a robot that requires more
| skilled workers to maintain/design/manufacture/etc., not
| that it merely resulted in a layoff.
| downrightmike wrote:
| USA stem grads are too expensive, so companies are just
| opening body shops in asia/south america.
|
| So stem education was largely just a grift to get
| everyone they could into college.
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| Your first statement doesn't really match your second
| statement
| downrightmike wrote:
| Get a stem(tm) education! It'll get you a job! Wait.. you
| cost too much now, so we're not going to hire you,
| instead we'll outsource.
| starttoaster wrote:
| The robots replaced the frontline laborers, yes. But
| someone now needs to maintain, build, and engineer new
| robots. Hence they said the laborer's job was replaced
| with one that requires fewer people at a higher skill
| (and probably pay) level. Or at least that's what I
| picked out from their comment.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Please note that while the robot is replacing local jobs,
| the people engineering, building, and maintaining robots
| could be ln the other side of the plant also. In a world
| that's seen a huge amount of consolidation we are likely
| to see further consolidation.
| starttoaster wrote:
| It is not uncommon to move across the United States for
| work. Across the planet might be a different story.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| The fact that you can now warehouse with robots lowers the
| barrier of entry for warehousing, which creates new companies
| that will host competition against Amazon, offer contract
| labor for Amazon, and in both ways create jobs that are
| superior to the previously needed entry level pick and
| packer. The same laborer can now be promoted at a new company
| to a higher pay job that requires no greater skill set,
| simply because there are now more of those better jobs at
| more companies. We can't all be managers at Amazon. But we
| can all be managers at 100000 different warehouses that
| previously didn't exist. That's where they are supposed to
| go.
| oblio wrote:
| That's assuming the warehousing robots are commodities,
| which they aren't and maybe they'll be in a few decades.
|
| It also assumes the moat to warehousing isn't huge, which
| seems kind of silly for such huge capital investments.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| The moat is definitely smaller when labor, your biggest
| cost, is smaller. You can finance a purchase that's much
| larger if you are able to make the monthly payment
| because you don't have high labor costs. Purchasing has
| an ROI, and labor doesn't.
|
| What am I missing?
| oblio wrote:
| The fact that warehouses are huge and need a lot of
| supporting infrastructure?
| karaterobot wrote:
| That seems wrong. Why would robot warehouses lead to more
| and better warehouse jobs for humans? Fewer humans would be
| necessary overall in the existing warehouses, and it's not
| obvious to me why a lot more warehouses would be created.
|
| Did replacing manufacturing jobs with robot assemblers in--
| for example--the automotive sector, lead to more auto
| manufacturers and better jobs for auto workers? I don't
| believe it did. There may be more manufacturers now, and
| more jobs, but they aren't high skill or highly-paid jobs,
| and they aren't staffed by the people who were laid off
| originally (because they were mostly moved to other
| countries, where people can work more cheaply than the
| countries where the jobs were lost).
|
| For capital intense upgrades like robots, why wouldn't the
| advantage go to a few big players, rather than a ton of
| small ones?
|
| I also don't understand why the number of new skilled
| workers in this new world would somehow equal the number of
| warehouses workers laid off. What's the connection between
| those two seemingly unrelated phenomena? Why wouldn't it,
| for example, be a lot of laid off low-skill workers, and a
| just a few new, high-skilled workers?
|
| Or for that matter, why the next generation of robots
| wouldn't just replace those higher-skilled warehouse jobs
| in a few years. And so on.
| 6510 wrote:
| Let me help you with that one.
|
| Fewer jobs & lower pay > fewer orders > fewer warehouses.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| Because warehouse workers are the primary customers? I
| think you're trying to be funny.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| It's the biggest cost in the distribution chain.
|
| That means there's room for competition.
|
| You aren't going to trust moving 100 million in product
| strictly to robots for a long time. And that's just a
| small business. And there's a lot of them.
|
| > _why wouldn 't the advantage go to a few big players,
| rather than a ton of small ones?_
|
| Because it's still way way cheaper than labor.
| Maintenance means you're paying for one guy's medical
| benefits instead of 20 guys, for example. The _labor_ is
| the cost that 's difficult to overcome and gives the
| bigger players an advantage. When that's stripped away,
| it's possible to compete against the bigger guys.
|
| Cheaper than existing labor costs, loans can overcome
| capital entrance, and you can afford to pay on them when
| there's a smaller operating cost, plus they have some
| fixed ROI. Existing need for more warehouses, combined, I
| don't see why we wouldn't see more warehouses. Of course
| we will.
|
| Look at middle America. Almost every metropolitan in the
| country is building warehouses in and around their
| airports. Some indeed are Amazon's and other big
| suppliers, but the majority are not. They are small
| storage and shipping outfits. Don't forget who supplies
| Amazon!
|
| Also, the push for more condensed housing means fewer
| people per household which means more duplicate junk per
| person as they won't share with another household,
| obviously.
|
| Growth means warehousing. There's no way around it.
| Unless we will manufacture domestically, that demand
| isn't going anywhere.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was
| Amazon.
|
| It wasn't so much the jobs that shifted there as the
| customers, and the reason for that is that Amazon had better
| prices. Then people complained about the jobs they did offer
| because they're mechanistic and exhausting, so they automate
| them and then people complain about that. But that too should
| result in lower prices -- Amazon's retail operation doesn't
| make any money, it's all going to competition with Walmart,
| who is doing the same things to lower costs.
|
| But lowering prices creates jobs. People pay less for a dress
| or a phone case and then spend the money on something else.
| New jobs are created doing the something else.
|
| Where this becomes a problem is for the things where the
| prices don't come down, like real estate. You have extra
| money and now you want to buy a house, but zoning laws
| inhibit new housing from being built, so instead if people
| have any money the monthly payment you need goes up or the
| landlord increases your rent. Or you have to buy something
| from some monopolist who can raise prices to eat your
| disposable income. Then the money goes into some corporate
| holding company that just keeps growing their hoard and never
| spends it on products and services.
|
| The problem isn't robots, it's certificate of need laws and
| high tuition.
| alvah wrote:
| I wish I could upvote this comment more than once.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| I gotcha!
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| > But lowering prices creates jobs. People pay less for a
| dress or a phone case and then spend the money on something
| else. New jobs are created doing the something else.
|
| Isn't this the principle supposedly behind trickle down
| economics just by another name?
| logicchains wrote:
| >The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs
| require by definition, a higher skill set
|
| No they don't. If AI reached the point where it was capable and
| willing to do all white collar work, there'd be no more need
| for humans to do that kind of intellectual work. What would
| still be needed is service jobs that rely on the "human touch",
| and trades that AI lacked the dexterity to do. We're already
| seeing that now, with AI posing a greater threat to
| programmers' jobs than to plumbers or electricians' jobs.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Oh good, now instead of creating things, everyone can have a
| fulfilling career at Starbucks.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| the job displacement could be in the care sector. that is what
| usually happened.
|
| I don't think being a caregiver necessarily is a more complex
| job than the ones being displaced.
| ben_w wrote:
| The chain of logic is falsified by the Whitney cotton gin: it
| was a labour saving device, which saved enough labour to make
| cotton much more profitable, which led to the growth of the
| cotton plantations in southern USA, which led to increased
| slavery, and those slavers actively prevented their slaves from
| learning to read.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_Unit...
|
| That said, I would also agree with the conclusion that "a
| growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are
| capable of doing", but for different reasons.
|
| I expect the abilities of AI to expand over time.
|
| IQ is a poor measure, but suitable as a shorthand especially
| for a comment like this.
|
| Imagine a general purpose AI that runs as fast as a human on
| 100 watt hardware; first one will be an idiot. Let's say IQ 50:
| only 0.1% of humans are dumber than this, nobody was employing
| them anyway. Version 2, say IQ 85: now about 16% are beaten by
| the AI, this absolutely matters, they're unemployable forever
| through no fault of their own, give them a basic income of some
| kind. Version 3, IQ 100, now half the world can't get work.
| Version 4, IQ 115, now it's 84% who can't get work, etc.
|
| Reality is a lot messier than that, so nobody needs to bother
| picking holes in the specific details such as "that's a lot of
| electricity" or "AI isn't a robot" or "comparative advantage":
| this is a comment, not a research paper.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| IQ is sort of useful to measure humans because we have
| roughly comparable skills. It's not applicable to AI at all
| in terms of measuring job fitness.
|
| If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need
| an IQ of 85 but that doesn't mean AI is doing it any time
| soon.
| mdekkers wrote:
| > If I need someone to move some furniture it might only
| need an IQ of 85 but that doesn't mean AI is doing it any
| time soon.
|
| The article and discussion are literally about machines
| moving stuff.
| alvah wrote:
| > The article and discussion are literally about machines
| moving stuff.
|
| In a warehouse, not up the stairs to somebody's
| apartment...
| kelnos wrote:
| Why not, though? Advancements in robotics happen all the
| time. If we end up with a decent AGI in 50 years, I
| expect the state of robotics to have advanced too,
| perhaps to the point where it could carry furniture up a
| stairway to an apartment.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The assumption here is that an AI with IQ 100 could do
| anything a human with an IQ of 100 could do, only cheaper.
| But that's just averages. Really it would do half the things
| better and half worse, and then people have jobs doing the
| things that it does worse.
|
| That would continue until it doesn't do anything worse, which
| may or may not ever happen, but if it did and we're all still
| alive then the result would be post-scarcity and nobody would
| _need_ a job.
| jmilkbal wrote:
| The power structures will never allow it. The conditions
| for a society of leisure have theoretically existed for
| some time now. We will simply end up with a a planetary
| ruling class that lives opulently while the other 99% live
| in abject poverty.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| That's an impossible scenario in a democracy which is
| ruled by majority. Wealthy class have hugely outsized
| influence, sure, but it's not limitless.
|
| Consider, for example, that every politician lives and
| dies by his constituents employment metrics.
|
| If population is genuinely unhappy with arrangement they
| DO vote for change. If they are extremely unhappy - they
| vote for drastic change.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think your view of our democratic institutions is a bit
| too rosy. I'm pessimistic that they'd withstand the
| social upheaval that might occur with a smart-enough AGI.
| Even now it seems like many people prefer authoritarian
| rulers -- or at least they think they'd prefer that, as
| long as the ruler is a part of their political tribe.
| They'll be in for a painful surprise later, of course.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| And that's not even factoring in the automation of highly
| targeted yet dynamic political content (not just ads but
| the consumed content itself) in order to charge/persuade
| the target to vote for the paying party
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| "The power structures" want people to need to work so
| they have to work for them. Better to keep you occupied
| with the rat race than have you spending time advocating
| for political reform.
|
| Which is why work expands to fill all available time.
| They _want_ you to have a job, because what they don 't
| want is what you might do if your time was your own. For
| some subset of "they" that represents the most malicious
| pricks.
|
| The thing that happens if they _win_ is that everybody
| still has a job even if they 're not doing anything
| useful. Which in a lot of ways is what's happening
| already.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > The conditions for a society of leisure have
| theoretically existed for some time now.
|
| Not if everyone wants to maintain their current standard
| of living. Imagine working 50% less hours, but also
| having to live off 50% of your current total
| compensation. Some here could probably manage that, but
| most would probably prefer not to.
|
| Now if you want a whole "society of leisure", you'd have
| to impose that same lifestyle choice across all of
| society by government fiat. Its easy to see why that
| hasn't happened.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Not really a realistic view of the western economy. Or
| economics.
|
| Things like 'compensation' are fluid, fairly arbitrary
| and largely unrelated to the industrial complex. It's
| whatever we decide it is, pretty much.
|
| Automation is in full swing, has been for twenty years
| and is only accelerating. Ignore that at your peril.
| Everybody will continue to have toasters, computers, cars
| even when we've automated most of us out of an
| industrial/manufacturing job.
|
| How do I know? Because that already happened. Instead of
| tens of thousands of people on assembly lines, we have
| tens of engineers and managers overseeing automation. If
| it hasn't happened in some cherry-picked example, it will
| very soon.
|
| We have to plan something for the majority of us to do,
| some way to participate in the resulting economy, without
| just throwing up our hands and saying "It's too hard!"
|
| So much to say on this subject, that doesn't fit in an HN
| text field. There's a long history of thought on this
| subject, and the comments here indicate most folks are
| still on the first page in their thinking.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Perhaps you could link to some information on this "long
| history of thought on this subject" because to me
| everything you just wrote sounds like nonsense.
|
| The idea that we can just double people's compensation
| and thereby double our total economic output (because
| compensation is "whatever we decide it is") is so wrong
| headed I don't even know where to begin. Maybe that's a
| misunderstanding of your position, but I don't know how
| else to interpret what you just said.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| On the one hand I like to have faith in humanity. OTOH...
|
| Anytime someone in power has no _need_ for someone - what
| have they done? Provided for them for the rest of their
| life? Or discarded them?
|
| The results generally lie with emotional attachment or
| sentiment. Take care of your aging parents as they become
| productively useless - sure.
|
| Take care of the abstract thousands of people who made
| [thing] but are out of work now? Somebody else's problem.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The point is that they don't end up out of work.
|
| We have more automation right now than at pretty much any
| other point in history, and the unemployment rate is not
| high.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The point is that the unemployed end up using violence.
|
| So you need to create employment to keep them out of
| trouble.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You don't have to create anything. "There are no bad
| products, only bad prices." The demand for labor
| approaches infinity as its cost goes down.
|
| Suppose that robots and AIs can't grow and distribute
| food, build housing, provide healthcare or produce and
| maintain robots. Then there will be necessary jobs for
| people.
|
| Suppose that they can. Then all of those things will be
| near-free because they can be mass produced with no labor
| cost and you'll only have to make a trivial amount of
| money to have food, shelter and medicine. The low cost of
| living causes a living wage to be so easy to achieve that
| even extremely low value work pays more than that,
| creating jobs for anyone who wants one because so much
| work is viable at that price.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they
| are capable of doing_
|
| a/ My bet is that some large fraction of people are currently
| doing jobs that are far less demanding ("robotic") than what
| they are capable of doing.
|
| b/ Also, in my experience IQ has a far bigger impact on
| length of training time than it does on the on-the-job
| performance afterwards.
| ben_w wrote:
| > My bet is that some large fraction of people are
| currently doing jobs that are far less demanding
| ("robotic") than what they are capable of doing
|
| Agreed, hence the caveat of 100 watts when at human speed:
| Humans are not capable of competing against costs of 100W *
| $0.10/kWh = $0.01/hour even when the only expense that
| human has is the cheapest available calories.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Agreed. I also forgot:
|
| c/ as far as I can tell, "jobs" have been steadily
| becoming less skilled over the centuries (because we
| expect people to switch more frequently between them?);
| can we accelerate that?
|
| So might a way out be that people do regular 100 IQ
| people stuff (yoga instructors, community theatre, etc.)
| and automation does (almost) all the heavy lifting?
|
| Bring on the Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy? If the Morlocks of
| the future are electronic, they won't want to eat us Eloi
| anyway? (burning a human for electricity is even more
| wasteful than giving it spin classes)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| TIL there are amazingly many articles online regarding
| the calorie content of an adult human body; at 125 000
| kcal I get USD ~15 per person, making me suspect that
| they can easily be put to higher NPV use than their
| carcass value.
|
| (I did not go so far as to search out tanning
| instructions for making gloves)
| mFixman wrote:
| You are saying "IQ" and "intelligence" to explain people's
| career prospects, but what you actually mean is "social
| class".
| tristor wrote:
| No, what they mean is IQ/intelligence, just as they stated.
| Social class is part of the story, more so in the past than
| it is now, but it's not the entire story. High intelligence
| is a way out of upbringing and circumstances at the
| margins, when you can capture opportunities to escape. Tech
| jobs are filled with people who didn't come from higher
| social classes, many who suffered inequities during their
| childhood even from their social peers, but persevered due
| to having drive and intelligence.
|
| Their argument is exactly what they stated, no hidden
| meaning here about social class. Not everything is class
| warfare.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > It's clear that technological development creates a shift in
| jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a
| result.
|
| That was true in the past, but as technology gets better that
| won't be the case. Yes new jobs will be created, but there'll
| be fewer and fewer.
|
| Technology will allow for more generalized approaches that can
| be quickly adapted to new solutions. So new jobs will also be
| replaced quicker and quicker.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Comparative advantage will keep people employed for a while:
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-
| in-...
|
| There's a recent NBER paper that predicts wages will increase
| in the beginning of the AI revolution, even as AI displaces
| some jobs. _Eventually_ there will be mass unemployment, but
| only when AI dominates humans (cost & capability) at almost
| everything.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| Neither computers nor cars, nor office nor photoshop decreased
| the amount of available jobs...
| chillingeffect wrote:
| But exactly as the person you replied to said, they increased
| the average intelligence needed to do the new jobs. That
| leaves so many marginal people unemployable. They could have
| maintained horses but working in cars is harder. I like this
| observation.
| ameister14 wrote:
| They actually resulted in a decrease in overall skills
| required. It takes a lot of skill to use a loom and make a
| napkin, the same is not needed for factory work yet you can
| make 100 napkins at the same time.
|
| Similarly, we had the rise of the service industry in the
| US - manufacturing required a lot of skilled labor; retail
| and wait-staff do not require the same skill.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not convinced that _animal husbandry_ is less skilled
| than working in cars. Different skill, and as I 've never
| done it I can't be certain, but horses are wet and messy
| biology with brains that are terrified of anything they've
| never seen before. Production line work I did do as a
| summer holiday job during my A-levels aged 17 or 18, it
| wasn't skilled work but also that was HVAC production line
| not cars.
| bombcar wrote:
| The specialization has certainly taken off - people are
| much more specialized in their jobs now whereas "farmer"
| was really a jack-of-all-trades with passing capabilities
| in many different skill sets.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Yes and it's not at all obvious to me that being a jack-
| of-all-trades farmer (builder, mechanic, etc) requires
| less intelligence than learning Python.
| oblio wrote:
| There is a thing to say about "unnatural-ness". Handling
| horses up to a point had to be more intuitive and more
| approachable, we've been around horses and other mammals
| since forever. Around spreadsheets? 40 years, max.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You do realize that most governments run massive jobs
| programs to ensure this number of available jobs stays high,
| right? In the US we give massive tax breaks in exchange for
| hiring numbers.
|
| Computers may have very well reduced job numbers but we're
| running a contrived system at this point.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Source?
| wvenable wrote:
| As a software developer, I've personally eliminated many
| jobs. Software was eliminated entire classes of jobs. Almost
| all investment in technology by businesses is about cost
| reduction and the number one cost is labour.
|
| I think we're past the point where technology is making new
| jobs -- all that low hanging fruit has been gone for decades
| now. Growth now is all about optimization.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's undeniably true, but not the point: obviously new
| technology eliminates entire classes of jobs (not much call
| for telephone switchboard operators these days), but
| ultimately if more jobs are created than are lost, we're
| fine.
|
| I personally do wonder, though, if many of the new jobs
| that are created are _worse_ jobs. For example, I have not
| yet taken any work in the "gig economy", but most of it
| seems pretty miserable, with shit wages.
| wvenable wrote:
| > but ultimately if more jobs are created than are lost
|
| For people who believe more jobs are created, it seems
| like they rely in chaos theory or something. They can't
| see how or where these new jobs will be created or how
| automation leads to it. We automated physical labour so
| we increased intellectual labour. Now are automating
| intellectual labour too so what's being increased now?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > It's clear that technological development creates a shift in
| jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a
| result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is
| debatable.
|
| It's not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological
| development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total
| number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human
| population growth over that time.
|
| In addition, the nations driving the most technological growth
| domestically have experienced the greatest job growth over that
| time. With the result that many of them, like the U.S. and UK,
| have had to develop robust immigration programs.
|
| Even within a single nation, like China, there is temporal
| correlation between technological development and job creation.
| As China has leaned into tech over the past few decades, job
| creation accelerated there.
|
| > So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for
| jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This
| means that as time and technology progress, a growing
| percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of
| doing.
|
| Again, the evidence shows the opposite correlation:
| technological development results in more people working, not
| less.
| simonsarris wrote:
| > It's not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological
| development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total
| number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human
| population growth over that time.
|
| 200 years ago the town [severely mentally disabled person]
| could chop wood and carry water. What's he doing today?
|
| There are ~9 million people on SSDI (disability) and ~5
| million on SSI (considered _completely_ unfit for work, the
| US version of basic income), and ~50 million retired.
| Retirement conceptually slowly became a thing around the late
| late 1800s. Many of these people are in one of these three
| categories because there is no job that would be a good fit
| for them, especially SSI, which most Americans don 't even
| know about.
| rdedev wrote:
| The key point being it's created more jobs so far but we
| cannot extrapolate the same thing if AGI comes up tomorrow.
| Like let's say open ai comes up with a new LLM that is
| capable of replacing a human in let's say software
| development. What new jobs would it create?
|
| All technological advancement so far has created new jobs
| because you need someone to actually work on it, like a chip
| factory or doing devops. As far as I can see an AI is general
| enough that you don't need much effort to specialize it and
| with how things are currently going, only a few players have
| the capability of building and deploying it.
| thechao wrote:
| I'm sorry, why would an AGI be interested in programming?
| My kids are AGI, and they're not interested. I think
| there's a real moral conundrum when we say "programmer AGI"
| because, I think, we're implicitly talking about
| terminating every non-programmer AGI, to meet our labor
| force whims. Replace "programmer" with intellectual task of
| your choice.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Your kids are artificial general intelligence?
| thechao wrote:
| Fine. Artificial intelligence. I'm still waiting on the
| General.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| Poor countries have with little physical or financial
| infrastructure have high unemployment. You'd think there
| would be more jobs because there is a lot more opportunity
| to grow, but no, it's the opposite, there few jobs and they
| are bad jobs. Because there is little opportunity to create
| actual VALUE, in economic sense.
|
| Technology brings efficiency and brings jobs. Say entire
| tech sector, software developers and IT get fully automated
| - well, now all the VALUABLE services those companies
| provide are much much cheaper. All the savings are passed
| on to their customers (B2b and B2c) who will now spend
| those savings doing things they couldn't afford to before -
| and THOSE industries are where jobs will move to.
|
| For a more simplistic example, imagine cost of electricity
| (or some raw materials) dropped 10x, would it lead to fewer
| jobs or more jobs? Of course more jobs, since you'll be
| able to do a lot more now.
| rdedev wrote:
| While I understand your point it seems to only focus on
| one side of things, a bit like trickle down economy.
|
| Let's say the IT sector is completely automated. What
| would all those devs do? Now keep automating medicine,
| legal and everything else and ask what would those people
| do? What's remaining are probably manual labor jobs for
| which we don't need so many people.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| As with any productivity boost - if you need 100x fewer
| IT jobs, it doesn't mean you will cut your IT by 100x,
| you will instead increase just grow your IT department
| 100x or however much until you hit a growth bottleneck on
| the business side, then some jobs will shift there.
|
| Just like my raw materials/energy cost example before, if
| you something becomes cheap - you don't consume less of
| it, you try to do more with it. Maybe, so much more that
| you can now do things which were completely
| impossible/unaffordable before!
|
| It's very possible we will have MORE IT jobs due to new
| opportunities and efficiencies.
|
| A decent software developer costs $40/hr. Let's say you
| can make your small iPhone app idea in 100 hours, that's
| $4,000. If developer with 100x as productive, now that
| costs only $40. That doesn't only mean more people can
| afford to build their ideas, but you could build BIGGER
| ideas, on a $4,000 budget you could now build $400,000
| worth of an application! Think of all the opportunities
| for everyone!
| echelon wrote:
| > It's not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological
| development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total
| number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human
| population growth over that time.
|
| That isn't some immutable law of the universe. 200 years is a
| short sample size relative to geologic time.
|
| Once we have robots doing the cooking, cleaning, heavy work,
| etc., what becomes of the Waffle House and Walmart worker?
| There will be a lower bound capability threshold, and
| automation will eventually exceed that.
|
| I think a smart comparison would be to look at what job
| opportunities are available to the intellectually
| disadvantaged.
|
| Then what happens when that lower bound inches higher?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ya, when people use this argument ask them "the population
| of humans always grows right?" Because up till recently
| that was the consensus unless something drastic or terrible
| happened. Then in the past few decades we see people having
| far fewer children then even replacement rate.
|
| Upsetting the labor market is leading us into unpredictable
| territory, much like at the start of the 1900s and the
| automobile set off a string of events that lead to two
| massive world wide wars.
| coderenegade wrote:
| In principle, they could probably just buy their own robots
| and start their own businesses. Locality is its own quality
| for SMEs. Whether or not that happens in practice is
| anyone's guess.
| bamboozled wrote:
| But how do you know what that future looks like? For example,
| What if we use AGI and make _ourselves_ smarter and more
| capable as Kurzweil has argued ?
|
| You can't imagine what that will look like so why worry about
| jobs ?
| starbugs wrote:
| > You can't imagine what that will look like so why worry
| about jobs?
|
| I'd rather worry about what that would look like given the
| current trends in tech and society.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >What if we use AGI and make ourselves smarter
|
| I mean a large portion of people on the 'information highway'
| seem to use it to make themselves dumber.
| PKop wrote:
| Eugenics
| oblio wrote:
| Sure, who's volunteering to be the first one? For sure I
| won't volunteer for it :-)
| Nesco wrote:
| If it comes through rna/dna editing it will be a good
| evolution
| polski-g wrote:
| The embryos I just had implanted in my surrogate are the
| result of eugenics. I hand picked the egg donor based on
| SAT. When the embryos were created, I got their 23andme
| reports and validated that the ones implanted had the
| appropriate SNPs for intelligence by cross referencing
| snpedia.
|
| Almost everyone does step 1, but very few people do step 2.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| How do you intend to be any more successful than the last
| several thousand years of attempts at eugenics?
| fragmede wrote:
| Just like the Turing test turned out to be the wrong problem,
| AGI is the wrong goal. As long as AI can stoichastic parrot its
| way to success, who cares if it's AGI? My washing machine broke
| and I want my robot to fix it. it doesn't need AGI to diagnose
| and fix the problem, it just needs to have seen that in the
| training data.
|
| The real shift comes when the robots are dexterous enough to
| fix each other. that's when no new jobs will be created to fix
| them because they can do it themselves.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > dexterous enough to fix each other.
|
| Dexterity isn't the issue, it's the lack of training content.
| Also, I would be happy with a real-time feed of a robot
| telling ME, a dexterous being, what I should do to repair
| something. I don't have access to such technology.
| hackerlight wrote:
| When intelligence becomes truly abundant and cheap, then human
| intelligence won't be valued by the market. You only get paid
| well because your intelligence is scarce, but that won't be the
| case in a future with ASI.
|
| It's hard to predict what will be valued, maybe personality
| traits that lend themselves to jobs like social media
| influencer, politician or actor, because people may still value
| real humans in these jobs.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > What's the proper social response to that, I don't know.
|
| Universal basic income of some kind.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| I don't agree with this take. A more accurate and precise way
| to describe the effects of automation is that it creates more
| human-centered jobs, some of which may require higher IQ but
| many that do not. Your average massage therapist does not have
| a higher IQ than your average Amazon line factory worker, for
| instance.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new
| jobs require by definition, a higher skill set._
|
| I don't think that's necessarily true.
|
| A taxi driver of 20 years ago had to memorize roads and routes,
| and become familiar with traffic patterns at different times of
| the day. (Many taxi drivers sucked for various reasons, but
| that's neither here nor there.) Today, anyone can be an
| adequate taxi driver, without really any knowledge of the areas
| they work in. Slap a smartphone on your dashboard and you're
| good to go. That's a _lower_ skill job.
|
| > _You wouldn 't displace 100 manual labor workers with a
| machine that requires 105 workers to maintain_
|
| Sure, and that's part of the problem. You lay off those 100
| manual workers and hire 5 workers to maintain the machinery.
| It's not at all clear that those 100 manual workers are going
| to then find higher-skill jobs, especially if they need
| training to get them.
|
| > _What 's the proper social response to [hypothetical AGI
| displacing more and more jobs], I don't know._
|
| Easy: universal basic income, plus free higher education and
| vocational training programs for people who do want to work in
| a field that still needs humans in the loop. We need to drop
| this inhumane view that people who can't (or even simply don't
| want to) work somehow don't at least deserve a basic standard
| of living. And I think we'll find that if we remove financial,
| housing, and food insecurity, more people will actually _want_
| to find meaningful ways to participate in society. Some people
| won 't, and maybe that's a shame, but for the sake of _all_ of
| us, they should still be housed and fed, comfortably enough.
| pjmlp wrote:
| So much for IA helping to create jobs.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| If the jobs is moving boxes around, then I think we are good.
|
| monitary and fiscal policies will keep employment high
| regardless of AI and robotics.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Wishful thinking.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| are you saying that employment is low now because of the
| automation we have seen over the past 100 years?
|
| are you saying that interest rates are not being lowered to
| allow kapital. investment for job creation?
| ben_w wrote:
| Doesn't say much about that either way, as Amazon in particular
| already had a known problem of running out of people willing to
| work for them: https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-
| amazon-memo-wareh...
|
| The last 200 years of automation being followed by new jobs is
| slightly stronger evidence that further automation will lead to
| new jobs, but I don't see any way that could remain true once
| AI is _actually_ human performance when on hardware that runs
| under some appropriate electrical power threshold. Induction
| and Turkeys.
| 0xedd wrote:
| My guess it has to do with shit conditions. I mean, shit
| break must be off the clock? F that.
| ben_w wrote:
| Likewise, but "we pissed everyone off and they refuse to
| work for us any more so we had to invent and manufacture
| robots at a huge and expensive scale" is very different
| from "we made robots for funsies with our big pile of money
| and you're all redundant now".
| pjmlp wrote:
| It turns out that for the time being robots don't complain to
| be handled like slaves.
|
| The real problem is when others follow Amazon in scale,
| leaving humans to survive in a new order.
| ben_w wrote:
| > The real problem is when others follow Amazon in scale,
| leaving humans to survive in a new order.
|
| No, the problem is if humans _in the set of those who have
| to work_ are able to keep ahead of the creation of new
| automation.
|
| UBI short-circuits the problem because then nobody would
| need to work. "Who pays for UBI?" you may well ask... well,
| Amazon can't ship anything when nobody has any money to buy
| stuff with.
|
| Separately from that, AI currently needs a lot of examples
| to learn from, relative to humans, so "business as usual"
| with no further AI breakthroughs will mean lots of people
| shifting employment every few years. That scenario doesn't
| force the world economy to choose between UBI and
| collapsing due to all the jobs being automated and
| therefore nobody having any money to buy the products made
| or delivered by the automation.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only from the selected few allowed to work as druids on
| the AI tower, after the letcode trials, while remaining
| mankind struggles with what is left as jobs from a
| corporate managed government.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| They certainly have no shortage of recruiters with weird ass
| names to spam me.
| batch12 wrote:
| Is there an index that ranks companies by their benefit to
| society? Something like amount of taxes paid, number of
| employees, benefits, environmental impact, etc?
| starbugs wrote:
| There's ESG. But that comes with its own challenges.
| rcstank wrote:
| Who would create the weights that balance this system?
| batch12 wrote:
| Whoever managed the index, I imagine.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| In today's news, Microsoft outbid Amazon to maintain the
| index.
| batch12 wrote:
| What index? The question was does it exist.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Value delivered or increase of value per unit of labour is very
| murky to measure, but something to think about. In some sense
| Amazon improving efficiency of retail could be a good thing in
| general improving the purchasing power of average consunmer.
| batch12 wrote:
| Good point
| notyourwork wrote:
| Amount of taxes paid is a benefit to society? Does that mean
| anyone who uses deductions is less valuable to society?
| batch12 wrote:
| Any company? Maybe. It depends on what the company does.
| Either way, that was just an example of a metric off the top
| of my head to support the question, not a proposal for a
| solution.
| paxys wrote:
| Every attempt to algorithmically boil down a complex economy
| into a single number does more harm than good. Figure out your
| own priorities and decide for yourself.
| batch12 wrote:
| Do most people have the time to evaluate every company they
| choose to do business with? Is there something in the middle?
| seydor wrote:
| Wait until amazon replaces china
| shrubble wrote:
| This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were
| watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores?
|
| Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company
| narrative to do so.
|
| I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't
| laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality,
| plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home
| shopping.
|
| "The world's second-largest private employer employs 1.5 million
| people. While that's a lot, it's a decrease of over 100,000
| employees from the 1.6 million workers it had in 2021"
|
| I think a bit of skepticism is in order, is all.
| jedberg wrote:
| The 1000 Indians story was completely incorrect though. They
| has 1000 people in India tagging the videos _after the fact_
| for improvements to the machine learning algorithms. They weren
| 't watching in real time.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| I have a question: was the customer billed based on whatever
| the machine learning algorithm determined, or based on what
| humans decided after the fact? In other words, was the
| humans' job to just provide training data for future versions
| of the machine learning algorithm, or to manually fix the
| algorithm's errors and prevent over-billing?
| entangledqubit wrote:
| IIRC, they could correct your bill after the fact.
|
| I used to joke with others that shoplifted items should be
| retroactively free - as long as you self report after the
| fact. (Extra useful training data...)
| paxys wrote:
| There are reports that 70% of the sales had to be manually
| reviewed by the team in India
| (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-
| actual...), so no, they weren't just training algorithms.
| jedberg wrote:
| That article in particular was the one that was debunked.
| It was based on a false rumor.
| paxys wrote:
| Debunked where? The only response is from Amazon (in the
| same article), who are disputing the number but still
| admitting that the team did intervene when needed.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| And they did not give their own number, so even the
| dispute is very weak.
| jedberg wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-
| walk...
| r00fus wrote:
| Can you please produce any evidence that it was debunked?
| I can't find anything.
| jedberg wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-
| walk...
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| Please provide evidence of your claim.
| jedberg wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-
| walk...
| waltbosz wrote:
| Having not read the original story, this makes more sense.
|
| "1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go
| stores" ...
|
| Conjured up picture in my head of an Indian man inside an
| Amazon Go store sitting behind a registerless counter. What
| his purpose would be, I don't know.
| WWLink wrote:
| Funny story. The amazon go stores do have a register at the
| counter now.
|
| But as far as I can tell, they rotate positions. There's
| never really anyone standing at that counter. If you walk
| up to the counter someone will come from the sandwich
| counter or restocking the shelves or whatever.
| aimazon wrote:
| For what it's worth, I purchased from one of these Amazon
| stores every day for over a year. After leaving the store, it
| would typically take 2+ hours before my purchases were
| registered in the Amazon app. I agree that there probably was
| a large degree of automation but based on how the store
| worked, there didn't need to be an army of "real time"
| reviewers for humans to be involved in each individual
| purchase... it's totally plausible based on what I
| experienced that Amazon did have an army of people involved
| in the standard purchase path.
| mFixman wrote:
| Same here.
|
| My theory is that purchase tracking is done automatically
| via AI, while humans are on the loop to check the feed of
| people taking each item and verifying that the amounts are
| correct before charging.
|
| It makes sense. Even if your entire AI system is 99.9%
| accurate, you want a human to detect and remove that one-
| in-a-thousand mistake.
| jkhanlar wrote:
| I think it was from a video I watched a day or two ago,
| describing how with those uber and lyft and other order
| delivery services that consumers apparently are placing
| those orders wtih the services, picking up the items
| themselves and walking out, and then when the actual
| delivery person arrives, order is gone, reported as
| missing, the consumer also reports similarly, even though
| they picked up the orders themselves, that this is
| apparently happening more widespread commonly that still is
| vulnerable with business infrastructures to not prevent the
| exploit from taking place, I am curious how this may affect
| industry standards with regards to this concept because I
| never witnessed it but I wouldn't be surprised if it is not
| even that widely realized about the issue yet thereby
| enabling more theft and loss and damages and whatnot.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Wonder if you could some how arbitrage your own food
| delivery...
| Clent wrote:
| How many times can one's order be 'stolen' like this
| before a pattern emerges and the account is banned? This
| is also fraud and because it requires using the internet,
| it's going to lead to felony charges.
| godsfshrmn wrote:
| Very true. Could be counting 50k IR sensors that count how many
| items pass on a belt. (Plus maybe a PIR motion sensor in the
| bathroom )
| actuallyalys wrote:
| > the height of at-home shopping
|
| I wondered that, too, but I did see that Amazon revenue has
| continued to grow since 2021. Of course, it's possible AWS and
| other divisions are compensating for a decline in physical
| goods sold. Unfortunately, I don't have time to find revenue
| numbers for specific divisions.
| hattmall wrote:
| That's from inflation. Look at CVS revenue growth and that's
| with a declining customer volume. Fewer customers buying
| fewer items, but fairly massive revenue growth.
| Animats wrote:
| Because of massive price increases due to a monopoly.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Can you share more on this? What monopoly?
| Animats wrote:
| CVS/Walgreens
| jairuhme wrote:
| > remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at
| the Amazon Go stores?
|
| > Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their
| company narrative to do so.
|
| I think you, like many others, fell into the trap of just
| looking at the headline. The 1k people were labeling training
| data, not watching you shop like a puppet master..
| Kerbonut wrote:
| Per the articles I read, they did more than label training
| data. They also did other things to facilitate the checkout
| process. They didn't get into what those things were however.
|
| > "Associates may also validate a small minority of shopping
| visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine
| with complete confidence an individual's purchases," the
| spokesperson said.
| fragmede wrote:
| "may also" still doesn't suggest that the remote observers
| were doing all the work and the computer vision systems
| didn't work and it was all a farce though. spot checking
| that the system works isn't the same thing as doing the job
| of the whole system
| paxys wrote:
| No one is suggesting that. The question is _how_
| automated was the system? According to the article 70% of
| all transactions were manually checked out because the
| algorithm didn 't have enough confidence in its
| prediction. Amazon has disputed the number, but not the
| fact that the manual intervention was happening.
| ehsankia wrote:
| The whole discussion around that headline has always been
| so confusing. It's honestly unclear. What I'd like to know
| is, what % of actual costumer checkouts required a human
| being vs what % was 100% automated.
|
| Some of the headlines and negative discussions make it
| sound like 100% of the checkouts required human approval.
| If that is true, then that's clearly terrible. If on the
| other hand it was anywhere below 5-10%, then I think that's
| a fair target for training the model in more difficult edge
| cases.
|
| Something like Waymo also has humans constantly monitoring
| and helping, but I don't see much discussion about that
| being "controlled by humans".
| tialaramex wrote:
| > Something like Waymo also has humans constantly
| monitoring and helping, but I don't see much discussion
| about that being "controlled by humans".
|
| Constantly doesn't really make sense, riders can call for
| support and get a near instant response, but it's pretty
| obvious from some of the mistakes that humans aren't
| watching every ride in real time. There's video from
| inside a Waymo which is stuck in a lot repeatedly
| looping, discovering the exit it wants to use is blocked
| and then just driving to another exit before deciding
| hey, perhaps the exit I want to use is open (nope, it
| isn't) and returning again, and again, and again for
| example.
|
| All the humans involved can see what's wrong here, but
| the Waymo driver software doesn't get it and so I think
| eventually a human (Waymo employee) has to drive the car
| out.
|
| And yeah, there's definitely in San Francisco for example
| some people who believe it's all a Mechanical Turk again,
| even though that doesn't make any sense. In their heads,
| driving is another of those "uniquely human" abilities
| and so the only way to have AI cars would be fully
| general AI, and the real explanation has to be off-shore
| remote driving.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Would it even be feasible to provide a taxi service with
| remote human drivers? I get the remote driver
| occasionally dealing with slow movement, but I think full
| time driving at speed would be impossible due to latency
| issues. It's not a remote piloted drone that is in the
| air and so has much less of a chance of hitting something
| by accident.
|
| Otherwise you think someone would have tried offering
| taxis driven by people in India or the Philippines
| already.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I believe there's a startup saying they'll deliver cars
| to you, so, cars with no people inside them driven
| remotely, once there's a human inside the human is
| driving. I don't recall the name.
|
| Waymo itself is clear that it has no remote driving
| capability whatsoever. The Waymo driver is in your
| vehicle, so any technical issue (e.g. phone network drops
| out, satellite fails, whatever) won't affect the
| vehicle's self-driving. It may _give up_ and pull over
| and let you out, but since it 's local any situation
| where the driver is disabled would be similar impact to a
| human driver - if a block of concrete drops off an
| overbridge and smashes the Waymo driver, that could
| easily happen to your Uber driver the same.
|
| Hence their choice to employ humans to attend in person
| and drive a Waymo which gets into trouble. In fact the
| humans sometimes have had to "chase" a Waymo car that,
| unless it has been specifically told to stop, assumes it
| should try to complete the journey once it can figure out
| how. Waymo's remote support can reach into the driver's
| model and tweak it e.g. to label a stray traffic cone as
| just trash, not actually off limits - but they aren't
| driving the car.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Claim was around 70%. Amazon disputed but didn't provide
| own numbers.
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-
| power...
|
| Maybe it was 69% XD
| WheatMillington wrote:
| People keep saying this despite it being not true.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| If they were labeling data the stores would still be open
| filoleg wrote:
| All the Amazon Go stores that have been open near me for
| the past few years are still open. Went to one last Friday,
| in fact.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| They've also laid off a lot of office workers, who were not
| replaced with robots... so we can't correlate the robot number
| and all of the changes in head count.
| varenc wrote:
| Agreed. These numbers are being cherry-picked. From Amazon
| quarterly filings[0][1], here's their employees count:
| - Q3 2019: 750,000 employees - Q4 2019: 798,000 employees
| - Q1 2020: 840,400 employees - Q2 2020: 876,800 employees
| - Q3 2020: 1,125,300 employees - Q4 2020: 1,298,000
| employees - Q1 2021: 1,271,000 employees - Q2 2021:
| 1,335,000 employees - Q3 2021: 1,468,000 employees
| - Q4 2021: 1,608,000 employees - Q1 2022: 1,622,000
| employees - Q2 2022: 1,523,000 employees - Q3 2022:
| 1,544,000 employees - Q4 2022: 1,541,000 employees
| - Q1 2023: 1,465,000 employees - Q2 2023: 1,461,000
| employees - Q3 2023: 1,500,000 employees - Q4 2023:
| 1,525,000 employees
|
| The 1.6M count was a clear seasonal/stay-at-home blip.
|
| [0] https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx
| [1]
| https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/...
| shrubble wrote:
| Thank you for taking the time to break this out.
| LUmBULtERA wrote:
| Wow, that shows a surge of about 800k employees from Q4 2019
| to Q4 2021, just two years! Wild.
| j-cheong wrote:
| Hard to say how much is seasonality vs laying people off due
| to increases in robots based on historical numbers. Thanks
| for breaking this out.
| callwhendone wrote:
| Wonder what the job is like fixing those robots.
| mandibeet wrote:
| Robotic future is coming
| Animats wrote:
| As Amazon really using that humanoid robot in production? Or is
| that just a demo?
|
| The first big breakthrough was when Amazon bought Kiva, which
| makes those little mobile platforms that move racks of goods
| around. Those are mechanically simple and cost-effective, and
| have been very successful. Amazon is now making about 1000 units
| a day of the current model.[1] This is about 10% of the human
| birth rate in the US.
|
| Moving standardized totes around automatically is decades old.
| Picking things out of bins has been difficult, and gets better as
| computer vision gets better. Amazon is still struggling with
| that.
|
| Amazon Prime Air drone delivery starts soon.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-
| robotics-...
|
| [2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-
| prime...
| Nevermark wrote:
| Automation can eliminate lots of jobs without replacement jobs.
|
| But other times will also created new higher level jobs.
|
| Especially when automation impacts a companies total cost for a
| high-demand independently consumed service or product. So that
| decrease costs can translate into decreased pricing for an
| upwardly elastic demand. And the revenue growth results offsets
| the need for fewer workers per revenue.
|
| --
|
| But most jobs within a company are only part of a product or
| service. With other parts not as automatable.
|
| In this case, even automation that produces higher level jobs is
| likely to produce far fewer of them. Since savings in part of a
| value chain increase profits but impact total costs, and
| therefore pricing, at a much lower percentage. So increased
| demand is less likely to offset job reduction.
|
| This is also true for any product or service from one company
| whose demand is anchored to any complimentary services or
| products from other companies.
|
| --
|
| Worse still, automation taking over only part of a high employee
| count, low skill job is very bad for employees. The number of
| workers is likely reduced, and as the job becomes simpler, their
| replacability goes up. Their value, and therefore pay and
| respect, go down.
|
| They start to get managed ruthlessly, like just another part of
| the overall automation.
|
| I expect the vast majority of Amazon's headcount, across each of
| its logistical divisions, fall into that latter category.
| xg15 wrote:
| 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.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Automation is to reduce cost per revenue, by reducing jobs
| per revenue.
|
| Which is not quite the same as an absolute desire to
| eliminate jobs.
|
| The result is initially lower employee count, but in cases
| where the automation significantly impacts total costs, and
| therefore pricing, of an independently consumed product or
| service, with upwardly elastic demand: the lower cost &
| pricing will trigger growth that also creates a job growth
| effect.
|
| But those are special conditions.
|
| As I point out, and you do too, in most situations
| efficiencies reduce jobs and improve profits, more than they
| increase demand that would create more (or mitigate lost)
| jobs.
| xg15 wrote:
| Yeah, that's essentially saying, "yep, your slice of the
| pie will become ever smaller, but that's fine, because what
| you get in absolute terms will stay the same - the pie just
| has to keep growing exponentially forever".
|
| It's obvious that this is not a sustainable solution.
|
| (And that's assuming the company fully passes the reduced
| labour costs on to the consumer and doesn't just pocket it
| as increased profit margins)
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| But, now that amazon is saving money on labor costs, where
| does that extra money go? Into the pockets of shareholders,
| who may then go out and use that to start other businesses
| which hire people, or increase their consumption of goods and
| services which also results in greater employment.
| SMAAART wrote:
| Whether the article is accurate or not, that is the trend.
|
| And we've seen it coming for a while now.
| socketcluster wrote:
| The thing that's missed here is that it's not clear that robot
| purchase, maintenance cost and depreciation would be cheaper than
| paying 7.5 people a salary... Not to mention that the robots
| aren't going to be spending part of their salaries at Amazon as a
| worker might. Also, robots won't be eligible to vote in elections
| to support Amazon's political aspirations which give it access to
| billions of government contracts.
|
| It seems we have gone to the opposite extreme since the days of
| Henry Ford where he wanted to pay his workers enough for them to
| be able to afford the cars they made.
| cactusfrog wrote:
| The jobs robots replace aren't good for the human soul
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| Until investment funds can sell souls as a commodity they
| will remain without value.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Being homeless and unemployed isn't good for the human soul
| either.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| We have record employment currently. There are other jobs.
| int_19h wrote:
| Those two things don't have to be correlated. It is our
| choice as a society to make them so.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| Ford was a ruthless capitalist and antisemite. He never cared
| for workers affording his cars, only that they bought them. His
| union busting gangs were some of the worst.
|
| Ford offering higher pay and better working hours were for
| employee retention which was important at the time.
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| Apart from the possible cheaper cost of robots instead of human
| employees, one key aspect is that robots don't unionize.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| That belief about Henry Ford is a myth. It doesn't even pass
| the smell test, if a company is only selling to their own
| workers they can never make a profit (note that any company,
| even a large one like Ford or Amazon, is different from an
| entire economy).
|
| Ford raised wages and cut hours because his annual turnover was
| 300%. He ended up making more money through savings in hiring
| and training costs and workers staying long enough to gain
| experience.
|
| In a way it was an expression of worker power. Which only
| applies because workers are humans, robots don't get tired,
| they don't have feelings, they don't leave for a competitor
| paying more. The best ones are more expensive than humans right
| now, but robots get cheaper over time. Ideally we don't want
| human labor to get cheaper over time.
| acureau wrote:
| I don't think it was implied that Ford's entire customer base
| was his own employees, just that he paid them enough to
| afford the cars the company manufactured. I agree with the
| rest of this though.
| CircuitMaestro wrote:
| With the rise of AI, the entire economic structure will undergo
| even more significant changes.
| btbuildem wrote:
| It's difficult to hold the paradox evident in most of the
| commentary here: both the desire to free people from the
| unhealthy repetitive tedium they are bound to participate in
| daily, and the overarching need for "jobs".
|
| I'm much happier watching robots take over dangerous, mundane
| tasks, than seeing them edge into creative, intellectual, and
| decision-making work. Wasn't that the dream? That robots do all
| our work and we just chill, enjoy a life of leisure and
| fulfilling activity?
|
| Looking back in history across all the -isms, the surplus created
| by those labouring has rarely gone to benefit them (unless we
| look as far back as hunter-gatherers). I don't know that
| advancing technology is the credible threat here; I think the
| misalignment is deeper than systemic even, as it persists across
| lifespans of civilisations.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| A life of leisure is the mirage-like carrot that the PTB dangle
| in front of our noses. Simultaneously, they intensify
| advertising to keep us on the hedonic treadmill, and thus
| trapped in a life of debt peonage.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _I don 't know that advancing technology is the credible
| threat here_
|
| The thing most people don't realize is that the robots in
| question aren't really even taking jobs that existed prior to
| the ecommerce model, and the work the robots are doing used to
| be handled by the consumer.
|
| Details:
|
| 1-The robots are taking over the job of moving goods from the
| storage shelf to the packer.
|
| 2-This is pure "walking" time when humans do it, 10 miles per
| day in a typical DC, not value add.
|
| 3-Before ecommerce, with brick and mortar, the goods were
| picked in bulk and shipped to stores and placed on the racks,
| and the consumer was the person that walked to get the item and
| bring it to the packer (cashier). Some of the walking was done
| in the DC, but not nearly to the same extent.
|
| 4-There are multiple different ways to solve this problem of
| humans walking all over the DC to pick one+two piece orders in
| a way that is efficient. "Robots" in the form of moving shelves
| (Amazon), or conveyors+sorters with bulk pick then sort by
| order, or etc.
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