Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they’ve declared a different winner: the robots.
The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots.
These effects are only “negative” effects because of the way our society currently works. Nobody is going to stop automation, but automation is going to make our capitalist systems wholly and deeply untenable. Those countries who recognise and adapt to this fact the earliest, will be the ones coming out on top once the dust settles.
Countries that look backwards and thereby artificially stunt their economic growth by investing in wholly outdated and destructive industries… Well. Good luck.
Undoubtedly it is a complex topic, I, for one, don’t think that Trump’s anti-green decisions will have a negative impact on US’s competitiveness in robotics, on the contrary it aids America. Energy policies and automation are two different things. In addition if he really tries to bring production back to the US, he will push companies to automate further. One can argue that automation is one of the great risks against American workers, but cheap Chinese workforce can be considered as the greatest enemy of automation.
Though I care about CO2 emission and most probably during Trump’s tenure it will increase, from a green energy standpoint his stance on nuclear power might be actually useful. Building huge structures like nuclear power plant do not only make his ego bigger, but they slash CO2 output, create jobs, and can fuel electric cars at the same time.
(Btw, isn’t it ridiculous that we have a big nuclear failure every 25 years with 40 year old reactors and instead of going all clean nuclear and emission free, it’s those venerable green organisations are responsible for because of green organisations responsible for increasing our CO2 emissions? I say OK, maybe solar/wind can work, but what if we get along emission free until we figure out how to do it…)
feamatar,
The problem is if we eliminate CO2 emission caps, as I expect the government to do under current leadership, then the business case for nuclear power stations throughout the US is greatly diminished compared to unregulated dirty power. You’re probably not going to like this news, but private nuclear power companies all over are in dire financial trouble:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/29/investing/westinghouse-nuclear-bank…
https://atomicinsights.com/nuclear-plants-losing-money-astonishing-r…
http://wrvo.org/post/nine-mile-nuclear-also-losing-money-wants-stat…
(I used to live near the Ginna station referenced here)
A big reason for this is that fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions dollars per year in the US alone. It may be hard or impossible for nuclear, wind, or solar to become competitive when government policy puts them at such a big disadvantage.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X16304867
“…then the business case for nuclear power stations throughout the US is greatly diminished.”
You really don’t get the Powers You put at Government, doesn’t it?
Certainly during the Trump administration it is not the motivating factor, this is why I mention that these are big, ambitious projects that suit his ego on the one hand, and big job generators on the other hand, so we might get more nuclear stations, and once Trump is gone, it is easier to revert to clean energy.
The problem is the very same people who advocate wind and sun and reduced CO2 emissions are the people who prefer coal to nuclear, all because of their ungrounded fears.
feamatar,
That’s not really the case for me. The main problem with wind and sun is that their power output isn’t stable, which makes them rather supplementary. Hydroelectric is really fantastic in this regards because it can act as both a natural power source and a battery to store excess power, although not everyone likes the ecological consequences of building dams.
I started thinking about this as a teenager (in the 1980s) reading about the philosophical debates about robots from the 1950s and 1960s, when science and technology seemed to offer the possibility of a utopian future. (Most of this was explored through science fiction writing, of course.)
One of the main questions was: If robot do all the work, and the humans have nothing but idle time, how would we occupy ourselves, and what effect would it have on our happiness / mental state?
Even at that age, I realized that this missed a major point: Who owns the robots? Would everyone have a robot that “went to work” for them, while they stay home, collecting the robot’s paycheck? It was utterly naive even at the time (for several reasons), and events took the obvious course, where the wealthy own all of the robots and use them solely for their own financial gain.
The bottom line is that Thom is right; there are two ways of dealing with the problem – ignore it or figure out some way to spread the benefits across society more evenly. (Beno~A(R)t Hamon’s ideas about taxing robots seem ridiculous in the current neoliberal environment, but it’s the kind of thing we need to start thinking about.)
Unfortunately, mankind doesn’t have a good track record of making the right choices before it’s too late to prevent catastrophe (often not even afterward).
Haha. Also agree. ‘Who owns your cellphone?’ Anyone stupid enough as to believe ‘everything going to be different’ Propaganda?
We’e already done this ‘experiment’ with the gentry in the 18th and 19th centuries. Liberated from work (which was performed by their servants) they spent a lot of their their time and energy trying to understand the world and trying to improve the human condition.
Yeah, they could live a life of luxury while forcing everyone else to suffer. The libertarian wet dream.
Am I the only one who wonders how the age old Western ideas of economic liberalism and quid pro quo can survive?
The idea that we can just tax automated companies and provide everyone with an unconditional basic income while keeping industry in private hands seems pretty unrealistic seeing how most industrial plants in most sectors coalesced into practically untouchable multinationals. These multinationals are so big that we even have governments of productive, well-integrated countries such as Ireland, The Netherlands and Belgium aiding them in their crystal-clear tax evasion schemes.
Also, almost all opinion-makers underestimate how far AI reaches. Creative AI is a thing. There are programs out there writing music you would mistake for a Bach work. Humans suck at heavy physical or repetitive mental labor, which is what the previous industrial revolutions were all about. This time, however, is different. Machines are becoming like us and as time progresses will outshine us in our own strengths.
I’m not sure, but I personally can’t see any other way to support humanity going further than resorting to more collectivism in the future bearing in mind these two trends. We could nationalize profitable, fully-automated industries and use their profits for a basic income. Please do correct me if I’m wrong …
There are always going to be jobs for the humans. Collectivism never works because with this you have to take from someone forcefully and give to someone else. Either taking from the robots (owned by some human) or taking from other humans directly is immoral itself.
Power. Power is almost never, voluntarily relented. The more the asymmetry, the less probable reason will prevail. [Is The Actual Level Of Asymmetry which make global instability So CRITICAL].
A true Nation – a Nation supported by her citizens – diligently look after their empowering.
Trump has 0 loyalty to his backers & American #STEM workers. He could kill 100,000+ American’s job going to #H1B foreigners.
Thom Holwerda,
Yea, ideally automation would be good for everyone and uniformly increase everyone’s quality of life. However because of how our society works, the means of production are owned by the wealthy and the benefits of automation become highly skewed in their favor. They become incredibly wealthy while the workforce who’s jobs have been eliminated are left in an economic struggle to support themselves. Even the engineering jobs that build those robots are a fraction of the jobs they just replaced.
Many workers are totally ignorant about where automation is headed:
Michigan workers hate NAFTA but love robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzoWHEaBuwc
I get it; it’s very human to want someone or something to blame as a scapegoat for one’s problems. Leaders and politicians are more than happy to provide one, in this case NAFTA. But it’s ironic that they remain so blind that don’t see that their own companies are intentionally investing in both offshoring and automation to reduce the need for them as workers.
Yes, you get it.
The main reason why people seem to think automation will spell doom for work opportunity is that people still seem to think that manual labor is the be-all end-all occupation for the majority of the population.
I don’t think so.
Services are where it’s at.
Now it’s time to watch governments actually do their jobs and co-ordinate the arrival of AI and high-level automation. It is simply unavoidable.
Now governments around the world get a chance to actually do something useful for their population.
Although, it is pretty much guaranteed that most will fail.
p13,
I agree that there’s a lot that could be done, but all to often we are impeded by government being run for corporate interests, which is the exact opposite of how it should be. Governments ought to protect the interests of the people first and foremost. Having government under the influence of corporations is extremely harmful because it allows the most powerful entities in the private world to control our public policy as well without regards for the people.
Edited 2017-03-29 14:05 UTC
‘Services are where it’s at”. Allow me to exemplify:
International prostitution, organ traffic, personal gardeners and ‘massagers’, ‘sommelier’ porno. Hunger games, on global media distribution. Lovely cared, ‘human handled’, $1K non GM melons agriculture.
Going to be great. At which side you will end: 0.01% or 99.99% ? Wish you good luck.
Untenable the correct word? Clearly there is a case to be made in defending the use of automation.
And the most extreme forms of Capitalism, are about to clash… Going to get ugly. Nasty ugly.
This is not part of my core expertise, but nonetheless I do research for a living. And the problem is so factor-variant that we are damn far from modeling it properly and being able to measure its effects.
I am quite skeptical until hard data is presented properly and beyond reasonable doubt. Climate change is presented like that already. Meanwhile, I’m a robocalypse negationist