When cars were invented, a lot of horses lost their jobs. Now, there aren't as many horses as there were before.
Heck, I'd be interested in seeing the ratio between total employment numbers before the advent of the car in the late 1800s and automobile-related jobs at their peak (US only).
The only reason to automate, is because buying robots is cheaper then paying employees, for the same amount of output produced. Since those robots were built by people, who had to get paid... Clearly, at the end of the day, you are employing fewer people.
New jobs get created when the amount of produced goods grows, as happened in the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, we are currently in a supply glut - we are demand-limited.
I think it's fair to say that there are instances of technology causing variable effects on the labor market over time (particularly variable effects on different parts). That's not a particularly interesting result though :)
More broadly, economists overwhelmingly think that increases in productivity lead to improvements in quality of life of people over time. Either by improving their labor situation (better, safer jobs) or their consumer situation (cheaper goods, more choice etc).
The logical counterexample would be technology we wish we would not have created, of which I can come up with a few examples, but far fewer than the reverse.
All of which employ far fewer people (And collectively pay them far less in wages) then the assembly lines did. If they didn't, the robots would be more expensive then assembly line workers.
> Also, the jobs associated with more cars being on the road and being more reliable.
More reliable cars arguably produce fewer jobs. More importantly, per-capita car ownership hasn't changed in the US in the past 35 years.
> More broadly, economists overwhelmingly think that increases in productivity lead to improvements in quality of life of people over time. Either by improving their labor situation (better, safer jobs) or their consumer situation (cheaper goods, more choice etc).
Have these economists ever considered that automation scales non-linearly? In the industrial revolution, if you wanted to double the amount of widgets you made, you needed to double your workforce. If you want to double the number of widgets you make today, you buy more robots - this does not double your costs.
If we take automation to its logical conclusion (Wherein robots can build other robots), then its clear that that claim is nonesense. Yes, the labor situation is improved (All jobs are safe, because no jobs are left), and yes, the consumer situation is improved (All goods are now made by robots, all robots are now made by robots). Yet, it's a complete disaster - as with no employees, nobody has the money to buy all these cheap goods.
For a capitalist, the best state of affairs is when he doesn't have to employ anyone to produce products. If automation is adopted, it's because it gets a factory closer to that point.
(And let's not forget that exponential growth in the production of goods will bring about an unmitigated ecological disaster... We need to produce fewer things - not more.)
"Reliable cars" have built in positives for the consumers productivity (they're reliable).
Yes, the majority of economists have considered that and it's why they love automation so much! As costs to produce goods come down, competition (in a competitive market) forces the end price down. Then the end consumer saves money! In your example if the costs hit zero while the consumers still have money then it's a complete miracle!
For a capitalist, the best state of affairs is when everyone can consume her products with enough margin to beat other possible places to invest capital! If automation is adopted, it's because it gets a factory closer to that point.
Whatever money consumers have will be quickly siphoned up by both the non-productive rentier class, and profit margins - just because the production costs zero human labour, doesn't mean that the cost of a product will be zero. (Who would want to build a factory, when you can't make any margin?)
And cars were preferable precisely because they took less effort/expense. It was actually cheaper to build a car than raise equivalent horse(s).
Not sure how you can explain this. You're saying that we would need 1 person per robot?
That's not even true currently, let alone in 10 years.
Automating jobs requires a large up-front cost for a long-term payout. Industries have been cautious to move to full automation because for the last 20 years wages have, for the most part, favored the employer. Not to mention they can just move operations to Mexico to stave that off even further.
Governments also get upset when you destroy jobs, so it is beneficial for companies to say "boy I'd like this tax break or I might have to automate" as a way to blackmail governments for more tax breaks, less oversight, etc.
I'd love to bring up a bunch of statistics to refute what you're saying, and I may be wrong, but I don't believe many industries have actually moved over to full automation. Most of these automation processes are to improve productivity but keep jobs.
Globalists also don't want to deal with automation because that requires a fundamental change in economic systems, which significantly degrades their power. Globalist corporations and banks are probably in charge of most employment worldwide. Their reluctance to automate is basically in self-interest. Their ability to maintain jobs while improving productivity is in self-interest.
Once nimble companies thrive on automation and resist hostile takeovers, improve productivity, and drive prices down to the point where globalist bank-owned businesses have no choice but to follow suit, we will see this loss in jobs we are all talking about.
We will also see a change in the way economies work, most likely in some half-assed capitalist system that still manages to support the hyper wealthy.
I dont know, but every plant I have ever visited in the past 10 years has about no folks in the production area - most of the lines are completely automated. Yet they require lots of people for designing new lines and new products, planning for newer productions, managing inventories, shipments, etc... and all these folks are already aided in the work by software so make them more productive.
I don't see industries cutting even more jobs any time soon. Or maybe in places where labor is getting really expensive only.
No they're not. The entire point of automation to be able to extract the benefits of labor without paying for the burden of human employees. Unemployment isn't a bug, it's a feature.
More likely - all five employees are fired, and whatever skills those employees had becomes useless to them, as regards future employment elsewhere.
Operation, maintenance, cleanup, admin, etc. gets farmed out to contractors for a fraction of those former employees' salaries, or else shared by the remaining employees. A few people wind up reaping the benefits, everyone else becomes surplus to requirements.
Some of this is just blatant credentialism and signalling - what insignificant fraction of office jobs really require a college degree? But on the other hand, you're never going to turn somebody like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, who could get by working as a farm-hand in a pre-mechanized agricultural economy, into a software engineer.
Maybe we can simplify the process and tools enough that more people are capable of working with very complex things and being productive, but it's hard making abstractions that don't leak.
Yes, but we'll need a lot less of them...otherwise, what's the point in having automation?
I'm not saying that the job won't be automated eventually, but the actual driving is only a part of the job. And even when the automation begins to happen, I think there will be time for them to transition into new roles.
Long haul trucks are loading dock to loading dock, so you don't need the driver to do loading.
Uber is another fleet: they just want to do transport-as-a-service so they HATE drivers as overhead. They have signed up to buy 100,000 Mercedes (future autonomous upgrade). They've indicated interest in 500,000 Teslas.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-ord...
http://www.autoblog.com/2015/07/08/uber-tesla-self-driving-c...
I cringe when ever I hear Programmers left of out of the, "Where will these people go." Guys like Willie Brown are alwready wondering what San Francisco is going to do with the new homeless that will be hitting the streets--when this current bubble ends.
Yes, the Rock Star Programmers will always have a job, but that's a minority of you.
Following your reasoning, the difference with those buggy drivers is the level of education you need to cover the new jobs. The education funnel left a lot of people behind.
Exactly. It seems like most people on HN reason with the "work revolutions" being zero-sum games or something. It's been proven over and over again it never ends up being like that, despite the numerous revolutions the Human Race has seen. It's getting a little old.
You are uninformed if you believe these jobs are staying. There is no way, mark my words, that our economy doesn't experience a net negative in jobs during this next revolution.
It's not all bad though, it could push us towards UBI, maybe a supply based economy. Otherwise we're basically saying jesus take the wheel.
A guy can dream.
The world is changing, faster than it has in the past. No one know exactly what will happen, but there's a whole new generation of people who have no idea what it used to be like, and they will do their best to survive.
The economy, and life, will find a way.
At some point you have to admit that there is a limit to the potential jobs that a society can support. You can hope these hypothetical new jobs get created, but I don't know how you can prepare for them.
I sincerely believe there is no way to invent enough jobs, by convenience or necessity, to replace the amount of jobs that will be destroyed by automation.
How about the people Google and Facebook and Twitter employ ? That's a huge workforce and these jobs were not predicted by anyone 15 years back.
And I'm not even talking about the network effect, i.e. businesses and freelancers and individuals who were able to build their businesses on top of the services offered by such companies.
And that's just a single industry. Look at how the solar panel industry is growing, or the smartphone industry (it did not exist 10 years ago), and look at all these companies living off it making apps and services around those.
Seriously, opportunities arise by themselves.
Ford alone employs 200,000 people, with a market cap of... 48 billion. And a profit of ~7 billion. GM also employs ~200,000 people. With a market cap of... 50 billion. And a profit of ~7 billion.
Tech employs very few people, compared to the amount of money it brings in.
People were saying the exact same thing when sophisticated machines were introduced in automotive industry manufacturing. Sure, some people could not convert and lost jobs, but everyone else moved on to be productive in other areas.
This prophecy of Doom is happening every 10 years or so.
Tell this to the midwest, where the lie of our government's unemployment reporting is most obvious. It's honestly kind of offensive that you said that as I am from Michigan.
And as I have said in other comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12605690), there are factors like the stagnant minimum wage and self-interest at play that have kept jobs in these companies that could be replaced currently let alone in 10 years.
I am not here to convince you to change your mind about potential job loss. Understanding the technology, our current economy, and the political atmosphere around jobs should be enough to convince you of this truth.
As others have said, maybe there are imaginary jobs that will be invented to make up for these losses. I'm sure the banks will do their best to make sure that happens.
Is there some demand for the general skills of former lathe operators, that we've all missed?
Should millions of people start building websites that make money by advertising other websites that make money by advertising other websites?
If you're answer is "fix robots", that's fantasy. If these people had the capacity for highly technical jobs, they wouldn't be working as burger-flippers. And for the few exceptions who might have the capacity for it, they're not doing it because they don't have money to go to school instead of work, and that's not going to change either if society has the mindset of refusing to adopt UBI.
Almost every major manufacturing industry is now automated, we don't have to go to the future to see the effects of automation.
These assembly line workers had to have gone somewhere, because if they haven't, we'd be experiencing extreme unemployment now-let alone the future.
Born and raised and still live around Detroit. There is staggering unemployment.
I'm amazed that anyone believes otherwise...
If things like Robots take over blue collar jobs, I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Computers, anyone ? And yes, may be AI will change things a bit more but I am sure we will come up with a way to manage that as well.