Automation in the Workplace

[Isabeau]

The response of Guardian's economics editor, Larry Elliot, to statements made at the World Economic Forum concerning robots in the workplace. The WEF basically said that they won't take away jobs but create more employment opportunities.

Don't believe the World Bank – robots will steal our wages - The Guardian

 

[Lianne Marten]

Yeah that's why we need to make more socialist policies and a universal basic income. We're long past the point where jobs should be required to live.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

The WEF report suggests new technologies have the capacity to both disrupt and create new ways of working, similar to previous periods of economic history such as the Industrial Revolution, when the advent of steam power and then electricity helped spur the creation of new jobs and the development of the middle class.

I think this is a popular argument among economic conservatives who don't know anything about technology. I just about flip my lid whenever I hear it. It's a really absurd comparison. Old fashioned steam engines required constant human labor. Modern robots can sometimes operate for many hours or years without a human going near it.

What's more is that not everyone can learn to be a programmer. All throughout history, a good portion of the population just did simple, repetitive labor. Steam "automation" of the past didn't threaten labor in general in the way that modern robots do.

 

[danielravennest]

Yeah that's why we need to make more socialist policies and a universal basic income. We're long past the point where jobs should be required to live.

UBI doesn't scale. See section 2 of my paper Bootstrapping the Future: Smart Tools & Self-Expanding Systems

Without earned income, the unemployed don't pay income and payroll taxes. They don't buy as many goods, so sales taxes also go down. Therefore governments will lose a share of the revenue they need to function. Lower government revenue means social programs and government employment also decrease, further lowering economic activity. The businesses the unemployed no longer patronize also lose income and employment, even if they use smart tools. The owners of such businesses lose a share of their income too. Lack of enough paid work is then a systemic problem for a capitalist economy which depends on it as an integral part. Such spirals of contracting economic activity are called recessions or depressions, and cause large-scale unhappiness and even civil unrest.

 

[Noodles]

Yeah, anyone claiming the AI revolution will be like the Industrial revolution has no clue what they are talking about. This isn't going to shift jobs of hard labor to jobs of maintainers because it takes like a few dozen coders to maintain the AI for thousands of machines, if that. It's not even close to 1:1 on any level.

This doesn't even get into the idea of reusable code. The same adaptable AI based code that makes a car could make pretty much anything with some adjustments. So now maybe a few hundred coders can manage the AI workforce equivalent of millions of jobs.

 

[Lianne Marten]

UBI doesn't scale. See section 2 of my paper Bootstrapping the Future: Smart Tools & Self-Expanding Systems

You're supposing quite a lot of everything with those statements, with zero evidence. UBI has never been tried.

People still want nice things. People also want to do things. If a UBI is enough so that a person can have a place to live and food and minor entertainment why is the assumption that everyone would stay there and choose not to work and just veg out all day? They might want a nicer tv a lot sooner or a trip to australia and get a job for a few months to pay for those things. You're equating UBI with mass unemployment when they are nowhere near the same thing. With the threat of homelessness and death gone jobs can be about fulfillment and desire instead. Capitalism isn't the end all be all final state of human society that we need to look at everything through the lens of needing.

99% tax on all income over $250k. UBI. Done.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Yeah that's why we need to make more socialist policies and a universal basic income. We're long past the point where jobs should be required to live.

Exactly, trying to stop automation is like those luddites who thought the answer to the steam engine was to destroy it. Automation is happening. At some point pretty much every job will be automated. Some will go faster than others but it is just a waiting game because there is really no job out there that will not be replaced eventually.

UBI is no longer a pipe dream, it is an economic necessity. Let the machines do the work and let people just do whatever they want within the law (make art, go on vacation, whatever). Even UBI is just a temporary measure. If anything can be produced by those machines given free energy and mass then what is the point of even saying "this costs xyz dollars"?

 

[Kara Spengler]

UBI doesn't scale. See section 2 of my paper Bootstrapping the Future: Smart Tools & Self-Expanding Systems

UBI would not be a permanent solution though. Why would ANYTHING cost if we had free energy?

 

[danielravennest]

You're equating UBI with mass unemployment when they are nowhere near the same thing.

You wouldn't be saying that if you had read the paper beyond the quote I posted here.

My quote is about the systemic effects of mass unemployment on the current capitalist system. We had one such event in the past, the Great Depression. Smart tools (that use AI, software, robots, and automation in some combination) might cause mass unemployment in the future. No matter the cause, unemployment causes systemic reductions in income across the whole economy. Government revenue depends on individual and corporate income taxes, employment taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. With mass unemployment, those revenues will dry up. So government won't have the funds to pay a UBI from.

* They could create the money out of thin air, but that would cause continual inflation.

* They could try to tax the wealthy and corporations more (like that would happen), but that would just encourage them to move to tax havens more than they already do.

My answer is to *use* the smart tools to provide the basics (food, shelter, utilities) to people directly, without routing through government and taxes. This is scalable, because smart tools, with the help of people, can make more smart tools, until there are enough for everyone. You don't need an income to supply the basics if they are already covered by tools and machines you own directly, or own shares of the output from for the larger items.

 

[danielravennest]

UBI would not be a permanent solution though. Why would ANYTHING cost if we had free energy?

There will still be scarce goods, like beachfronts, penthouses, and original old masters paintings. Land in general is scarce. Some people will still want personal service, whether server in a restaurant, sex worker, or whatever. You can imagine basic goods (food, shelter, utilities) reduced to trivial cost/effort, the way we have reduced fire to that level (turn a knob on a stove, cigarette lighters, matches). Tending a fire used to be a time-consuming job for someone. But I don't see eliminating the cost for *all* goods.

What I imagine as a near-term possibility is a "smart tool co-op" in the sense of my electric company and credit union are co-ops. I don't know how to operate an electric company, or a credit union, but many people together can hire the people and fund the assets to do so. The smart tools (robots, automation, etc) would produce the basics people need to live at nominal cost, and a few people would keep them running, like a few people work at the power company or credit union an keep it running.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Japan is the country with the highest grade of automation in the work place world wide. The unemployment rate is around 2,9%.

It's a special case, since there's huge demand for labor and not many possible workers around, so there's a huge gap between the two. There's are also not many immigrants, and it's a rapidly aging society.

So far, it has worked out for Japan quite well - without UBI.

 

[eku zhong]

Japan is the country with the highest grade of automation in the work place world wide. The unemployment rate is around 2,9%.

It's a special case, since there's huge demand for labor and not many possible workers around, so there's a huge gap between the two. There's are also not many immigrants, and it's a rapidly aging society.

So far, it has worked out for Japan quite well - without UBI.

don't believe any statistics coming out of Japan.
Most of the manual labour workforce is filled by 'interns' from China and SEAsia.
Many young Japanese can only find 'temp' jobs because of this and cannot afford to get married and have children (hence the huge drop in birthrate).
There is an astoundingly high number of people who 'live' in places like net cafe's and Manga Kissa Cyber-Homeless Japan

The avarage salary in Japan is now lower than it was 30 years ago.

and as far as automation goes hahahahahahahahaha fooled you there too.

What Japan shows the world

Akashi Caterpillar Factory

Which is where the stuff is ASSEMBLED. But the parts for the assembly are made in places like this

Where the average wage of a Japanese worker is about 200.000 yen before any deductions and more than 50% of the staff is made up of Chinese and Vietnamese interns who are paid about 500yen an hour.

In case you want to say this is not true, yure works at the place in the second picture. Last year they cut everybody's salary by 50% with a suck it up or fuck off announcement. They then brought in more interns and laid off a bunch of Japanese.

Most people I know are working poor here in Japan. There no longer is lifetime employment. Most people who own property are in negative equity. Property bought 15~20 years ago is now worth less than a quarter of the original value. (Not talking about 1980's bubble prices.. and if I were, then the properties would be worth less than 10% of what they were in bubble times).

Japan shows off automation as a face of its industry but in reality most of the work is done in sweatshops at minimum wage to the locals or by interns who receive just over 50% of the present minimum wage.
Japan Minimum Wage

 

[Soen Eber]

Since the 90's recession Japanese businesses have been in exploitation overdrive. I remember comments from the Japanese corporate sector in the 90's about how the new generation was "soft" and needed to "toughen up", so I suspect this has been part of the plan for a long time.

 

[EmpressOfCommunism]

What automation could be: "Machines are doing it, lets divide the spoils semi equally and then everyone can live well without working themselves to death"

What automation is probably going to be "We laid off most of the workforce, why can't they afford food and consumer goods? Bail me out plz government and lets hire researchers to study this phenomenon"

 

[Lianne Marten]

You wouldn't be saying that if you had read the paper beyond the quote I posted here.

My quote is about the systemic effects of mass unemployment on the current capitalist system. We had one such event in the past, the Great Depression. Smart tools (that use AI, software, robots, and automation in some combination) might cause mass unemployment in the future. No matter the cause, unemployment causes systemic reductions in income across the whole economy. Government revenue depends on individual and corporate income taxes, employment taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. With mass unemployment, those revenues will dry up. So government won't have the funds to pay a UBI from.

* They could create the money out of thin air, but that would cause continual inflation.

* They could try to tax the wealthy and corporations more (like that would happen), but that would just encourage them to move to tax havens more than they already do.

My answer is to *use* the smart tools to provide the basics (food, shelter, utilities) to people directly, without routing through government and taxes. This is scalable, because smart tools, with the help of people, can make more smart tools, until there are enough for everyone. You don't need an income to supply the basics if they are already covered by tools and machines you own directly, or own shares of the output from for the larger items.

I did read it. It's about unemployment.

Which is why it doesn't have anything to do with UBI, which doesn't create or have anything to do with unemployment.

 

[Brenda Archer]

it seems to me a UBI would tend to increase self-employment and self training, as long as the program was not poisoned by rules banning the recipients from leveraging their new income to get ahead.

it might also cause a drop in resource consumption when recipients pool their means as buyers and renters, provided the program does not have punitive rules to ban it.

The punitive attitudes of current programs do lock people into isolation and poverty. A UBI with no strings would help put the poor outside the control matrix. That would help the economy become flexible as people shed unreasonable standards of living in the face of climate change. But of course, letting anyone outside the old systems of control is just *terrifying* and so unfair.

 

[Noodles]

You're supposing quite a lot of everything with those statements, with zero evidence. UBI has never been tried.

People still want nice things. People also want to do things. If a UBI is enough so that a person can have a place to live and food and minor entertainment why is the assumption that everyone would stay there and choose not to work and just veg out all day? They might want a nicer tv a lot sooner or a trip to australia and get a job for a few months to pay for those things. You're equating UBI with mass unemployment when they are nowhere near the same thing. With the threat of homelessness and death gone jobs can be about fulfillment and desire instead. Capitalism isn't the end all be all final state of human society that we need to look at everything through the lens of needing.

99% tax on all income over $250k. UBI. Done.

Yeah, UBI would be great for exploring job opportunities. I would love to say, try writing or something, or even work harder to make actual quality stuff for SL (or similar), but I don't have the time.with my job and my job is necessary to live. Can't risk it, as boring and dumb as my job is.

Not to mention that a lot of the "problems" with UBI assume the market has to always grow. Grow in price, grow in profit etc. There isn't anything with leveling off and for a lot of things if robots are doing the work, and people can't afford it on their UBI, the economics would make the price drop. You don't have the overhead of as many employees so it would be easy to drop the prices of a lot of goods.

The "problem" isn't the "entitlement of the masses" it's the "entitlement of the rich". The people on top will just see cutting the workforce as a way to quadruple profits and make more money.

On the extreme end of what we need is to outlaw being gratuitously wealthy. At some point, there is a threshold that exceeds any reasonable need and want for a lifetime. At that point, it's gratuitous.

 

[Ashiri]

My answer is to *use* the smart tools to provide the basics (food, shelter, utilities) to people directly, without routing through government and taxes. This is scalable, because smart tools, with the help of people, can make more smart tools, until there are enough for everyone. You don't need an income to supply the basics if they are already covered by tools and machines you own directly, or own shares of the output from for the larger items.

IMO the fundamental problem is that getting to that stage is going to take longer* than it is to get to the point where many people's jobs have been replaced by automation.

* if all goes well, could also be such smart tools are never available for the masses.

 

[danielravennest]

I did read it. It's about unemployment.

Which is why it doesn't have anything to do with UBI, which doesn't create or have anything to do with unemployment.

The title of this thread is Automation in the Workplace. Mass unemployment is a possible future effect of this, and UBI has often been proposed as a solution to that problem. I point out in my paper that UBI doesn't scale, and offer an alternate solution. Sorry if I didn't make the connection clear enough.

UBI in the absence of mass unemployment has been suggested as a replacement for current social programs, because without a means test, it would have less overhead to manage. A Universal Tax Credit would do this with the least overhead, since most people have to deal with tax returns anyway. Just add a tax credit to the current forms in whatever amount you want to fund a UBI. This is equivalent to sending UBI checks to everyond.

 

[danielravennest]

IMO the fundamental problem is that getting to that stage is going to take longer* than it is to get to the point where many people's jobs have been replaced by automation.

* if all goes well, could also be such smart tools are never available for the masses.

Most everyone in the US has either a computer or a smartphone (or both). That's most of what you need to make devices "smart", aside from a physical connector or wifi to the robot or whatever you want to control. New cars are coming *loaded* with smarts, and the components can be procured and repurposed to make other things smart.

I fully understand the timing problem, which is why for the last 5 years I've been working on the idea of "seed factories", the starter sets that people can use to bootstrap up the rest of what they will need. People would pool their resources, acquire a starter set, follow the instructions, and build the rest. The idea is to have the first seed factories prototyped and tested before mass unemployment hits.