Car manufacturing: We still build cars here, but we don't employ nearly as many people.
Logging: contrary to popular belief, the spotted owl didn't destroy logging jobs. Machines that let 1 person replace 20 did.
Manufacturing is the easiest, first place to replace workers, but AI will replace lots of people in America. It looks like trucking and taxis are on the short list - that's a few million workers - but fast food restaurants are up next (and those innovations will move up the chain to fancier restaurants).
Over the last 200 years, there was almost always a new role for people when their job was automated, but over the last 20 years a lot of those new roles were lower paying service jobs.
No way is our consumer culture actually based on small scale production and artisan touches - and not that many of those artisan touches are made by people or machines in China. That may be what you notice, but most of America's paycheck goes to the regular old normal stuff.
No more lumberjacks.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luygMuoFnXs [2] http://www.ponsse.com
The manufacturing in western nations in many cases is already as automated as it can get (yes there is always a room for more optimization but industries that have been automated since the 70's will and are already hitting diminishing returns), what has not been automated are mostly tasks that we choose not to automate for various reasons, many of which are cultural.
And yes most of the stuff we buy is mass produced, generic, and already highly automated but it's also not made in the US, the US consumer doesn't care about Chinese workers or unemployment in China, and it won't buy a 250$ hand crafted anything in China unless they are caught drunk in a tourist trap. And that's exactly the point artisan crafting and manufacturing has been developing in the US and it is pretty much immune to threats from automation and the AI/Machine Learning revolution because we as consumers are making a conscious decision to buy it. And even when we do buy mass produced generic crap just look at how many products are marketed today by selling you the human story from shoes to coffee beans it's all the same.
Most the stuff we buy isn't stuff - it's services, lawyers, finance, insurance, health care. AI will dramatically reduce employment in every single one of those industries. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#G...)
[0] http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/dozen-modern-day-car-wash-sl...
Self serve shops where one staff member supervises 20 registers with shoppers doing the shop work!
These were the jobs that young people used two learn how to work at a job. I worked the register when I was a teenager and it taught me well and "can be trusted with money" is an important resume tickbox.
The main exception is the few states that don't let customers pump their own gas and the service stations that still exist.
Like we've got a ton of truck drivers, who'll surely disappear within a few decades, which is just one at most two generations. In terms of policy planning this is a short-term timeframe.
Same for most people who work in retail, from clothes shops to supermarkets.
But even higher-level jobs will change massively. I highly doubt education will stay as labour-intensive. And I've got family members who are attorneys, and when I speak to them they'll tell me a ton of their workload is simply going through legal documents to look up stuff, and then preparing mostly template legal documents. A lot of this is manual work that'll disappear sooner than you'd think. We've already seen examples in this field with the automated bot that helps void parking tickets.
The amount of people that work high-skilled labour is really small if you ask me. I think a decent first order approximation is to compare the amount of people that work at the Walmart or Amazon headquarters, versus their stores and warehouses. For Amazon I've seen numbers that it's roughly 24k vs 240k, and consider that this is a tech-oriented company that's already automated a lot. For walmart it'd likely be 1:1000. Take a Facebook with 12k employees, a leader in a high-skill industry, and it's the margin of error of the employee count of a leader in a low-skill industry, not in China, but right here in the west, like say Walmart (> 1m employees) or say a franchise like McDonalds. These are also Dutch or Canadian workers.
An anesthesiologist friend of mine went back and got his MBA because he's certain that machines will dramatically reduce the amount of jobs for anesthesiologists; you'll have one anesthesiologist supervising X machines instead of X anesthesiologists.
Artificial intelligence was now out-performing the capabilities of junior
lawyers and paralegals in due diligence, discovery and document drafting.
Upcoming predictive analytics would be able to assess the outcome of court
cases while legal diagnostics systems analysed legal problems and provided
advice.
I bet there will be a lot of refinancing of mortgages if the closing costs were $500 and the process was one click.
I presume that this is the case with a lot of professional services. In that sense service based economies are better situated than manufacturing based economies.
Already there are a lot of junior lawyers being replaced [0].
Check out what a former CEO of McDonald's said about robots and the fast food industry [1].
> “I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry – it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging french fries,” the former US chief executive Ed Rensi told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html [1] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/25/former-mcdona...
I think a lot of the service sector automation that will happen in the next 20+ years is analogous. Anything customer-facing is bound to stick around as long as people have spending money, while anything that's not customer-facing will slowly become automated.
E.g. The person at the counter in a McDonalds is the easiest person to replace -- all you really need is an iPad and a couple accessories. But if I were a betting man, I would bet that McDonalds will replace food prep jobs before replacing humans with kiosks in most locations.
Except that most people are REALLY BAD at operating a kiosk. You want a person at the kiosk so that they can gently guide the SUV driving suburban wife with the high maintenance order gently out of the way of the rest of the customers.
The backend jobs will be the first to get automated.
McDonalds has to compete with other chains and prices are already bottom barrel. In McDonal's case, taking human interaction out of the equation seems like a losing proposition.
It uses pictures and text. I will have to watch next time I'm in there to get coffee and see how well people use it.
My success rate for getting my order correctly at fast food restaurants is somewhere south of 50%.
Even if that's the case, you could still plausibly turn three to four people manning a register into four kiosks and one person to assist.
Panera Bread proves you wrong. Go into any corporate-owned store (not the franchise ones, they're behind), and they have iPad kiosks for taking your order. The food is still prepared by hand. They frequently even give you a bonus, like a free cookie, if you order with the kiosk instead of going to the human. And the kiosk does a far better job too: there's little or no line, you can easily look up your old orders or favorites and re-order them, you can easily make changes to your order (more or less salt/pepper, more or less lettuce, different bread selection, etc.) which you can't easily do with a human because the human won't present dozens of different options to you when you order, they just ask "what do you want?". Visual communication systems are far more information-dense than verbal ones.
Really fucking cool, and the coffee is excellent, too.
* A good barista will notice when they screw up the shot and pull pull another.
* A good barista will not burn or under-steam milk.
* A good barista will make sure you have the proper amount of milk and foam. (Getting a perfectly consistent result when steaming milk isn't really possible using a dead-reckoning controller or when using simple sensors like temperature AFAICT.)
* A good barista will make sure the drink looks as good as it smells and tastes.
* A good barista will have no problem customizing drinks.
Totally. But the current generation of dead-reckoning-and-maybe-a-bit-of-very-simple-sensing style of control for grinding/tamping/steaming/pouring won't be sufficient. I would be unsurprised if substantially improved sensors (perhaps even vision) are necessary before we see computers over-taking the best baristas in an abssolute sense.
And unfortunately I don't think there's much demand for that sort of investment for the reasons outlined in other posts on this thread (even if robotic baristas could smash the human competition in coffee making, they still wouldn't displace the neighborhood coffee shops.)
But it is just interesting, from a technical/hacker perspective, that good barista work is a pretty hard robotics problem!
Go into any "artisan" coffee shop and the barista would pretty much look identical, many of them will engage and have their own "shtick" to make the experience of drinking their coffee "unique". The coffee it self is also going to be heavily branded and sold to you as some fantastic story with many images which again will be heavily focused on the people who were involved in the entire process from growing the beams to your cup.
This is what we are buying now, 20$> an ounce "fair traded organic beans" with some nice retro photographs of Bolivian coffee farmers combined with some 20 year old millennials inspecting the beans to make sure you get the "best" ones in your cup.
This is what you can't replace, brewing the coffee and even foaming milk is something that a machine can do easily, and arguably better than most people, heck even latte drawing can probably be better done with a 2-axis drip nozzle than a barista with a bamboo stick but when you pay 7$ for a cup of coffee you aren't paying for coffee you are paying for the experience that no machine can actually give you simply because you don't want it. You want the human contact because at least in my personal belief that is a coping mechanism we have adopted to make for the isolationist life style that many of us live today in which we spend more time with our phones than with people, and so we care now more about how our coffee and burritos are being made and by whom than ever before.
Is this true?
I'm mostly convinced about the brewing part (except that even the most meticulous machine will make mistakes, and a good barista will throw out a bum shot whereas a machine probably won't know the difference).
But I'm not convinced about the milk part. Do you have links?
(FWIW I totally agree with the tone and overall thesis of your post. And I really wish someone would deploy freshly ground-or-vacuum-sealed/fresh milk machines in airports/cafeterias/hotels/anywhere there's only a starbucks. But I also feel like better-than-average humans are still better than state-of-the-art machines.)
For human contact, just have a nice coffee shop with comfy chairs where people can sit around and read, chat, etc. You don't need humans making the food for your human contact, you just need to be in an environment with other human customers.
You can also have a human server who brings the drink you ordered to you. One human can run the whole establishment, filling in in all the ways the robots can't, but letting the robots do the more skilled work. When I go someplace for food or drink, I want to sit down and relax, not talk to the guy prepping the food. And since the food prep necessarily has to be done someplace away from the seating area (because that's where the foaming-milk machine is), I don't see any value in having a human back there when a machine can do it better. Now I do see some value maybe in being able to chat up the girl who brings the drink to me where I'm sitting. But the person behind a counter making the drink, who I can barely even see because there's a giant milk-steaming machine in the way? No, I don't see the value there.
There's still room for the human touch but sometimes you just want a decent double espresso and to be left alone.
While I have bought alcohol from a bar, the ratio of my non-bar alcohol still dwarfs bar-purchased alcohol. And frankly, even with the bar-purchased alcohol, it was social events with friends, the bartender could just as easily been a serve-yourself machine.
It's currently optional, but I could see it becoming standard fairly soon.
for essentially two reasons; a) mcdonalds treats their employees like shit. no job is better than that job ( i live in a country with social welfare) b) the person bagging the food scratched his balls just before doing so, and he sure as hell isn't bothering to use gloves now.
Too much salt on the other hand...
Bartender on a cruise ship.
[edit] then again, automation of software development tasks held back the software industry at all...
[0] http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/adidas-pulls-b...
etsy: $2.3B [0]
target: $73B [1]
williams sonoma: $5B [2]
bed bath and beyond: $12B [3]
[0] https://investors.etsy.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=253952&p=irol-new...
[1] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATGT&fstype=ii&ei=ruN...
[2] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AWSM&fstype=ii&ei=EOR...
[3] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ABBBY&fstype=ii&ei=...
I hope you like playing with Play Doh!
Won't displaced truck drivers become motivated to be owners themselves? It doesn't seem as bleak as everyone makes out. I don't really think most big companies want to own and maintain their own fleets of trucks.
The idea that everything will work out because working people can just become capital owners ignores the obvious fact that working people work precisely because they don't have capital.
Not this year. Not next year. But they will.
The problem isn't so much east vs west. The problem is technology is cheaper than people so unskilled labour is easily replaceable.
Better, smarter robots are a threat to Chinese workers, not so much to say Dutch or Canadian workers.
The west can afford and is willing to pay more even for less, just look at how many people are willing to pay 10 times the price for "Organic Fare Traded Tomatoes" or any other "artisan" goods.
The west is also not as much dependent on manufacturing and the manufacturing it does do is usually high tech, low(er) volume and highly specialized one where it both might not make sense to automate everything and where people are more than willing to pay the extra to know that something was "hand crafted".
But overall we've developed a consumer culture especially in the past decade that is pretty much focused on retro/old school craftsmanship, small scale production and "artisan" touches, it almost makes one wonder if the whole "hipster revolution" wasn't hand crafted by some cabal of shadowy figures that foresaw the "rise of the machines", because our willingness to pay 250$ for a hand crafted hemp bag on etsy is just might be the thing that would protect us from AI automation.