More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

Re:More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production by lurker10000 on Monday May 08, 2017 @11:19AM (#14292262)

Many people (including me) believe the problem isn't overblown. A common counterargument to your point is that humans have always had the ability to do work at higher abstraction levels than the machines replacing them. Scribes become unemployed but can retrain as typographers, press operators, digital layout artists and so on.

The problem comes when robots begin to perform these higher order tasks. What happens to individuals when they have no "higher" place to move into? What happens to society when automated replacement becomes commonplace?

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Re:More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production by bduerst on Monday May 08, 2017 @12:52PM (#14293343)

Jobs are not zero sum - the demand for labor is a function of supply. People will begin to fill more niche and variable-demand jobs where capital investments don't make sense, i.e. a shift towards a consultant economy.

Keep in mind that the specifics of this is very hard to predict. A large number of the jobs we have today would have seemed absurd 20-40 years ago, but to us they feel like they were inevitable.

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Re:More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production by petra on Monday May 08, 2017 @01:20PM (#14293607)

What popular jobs.that we have today would seem absurd 20-40 ago ,for someone.with an eye into.the future , say a science fiction writer?

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Re:More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production by paulpauper on Monday May 08, 2017 @03:02PM (#14294530)

There are people who make money with ASMR videos, people making money eating old military rations, etc and posting it on YouTube. I am not saying these are viable career options, but are examples of 'jobs' that seem absurd but exist because of recent technology

Web design, coding, app design, site reliability engineers , debugging, user interface testing, so many new jobs

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Re:More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production by cr0sh on Monday May 08, 2017 @04:19PM (#14295221)

While I am pretty certain there were analogues of it 40 years ago (1977), the idea of a "lifestyle coach" and similar professions would seem a bit out there back then.

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Re:More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production by bduerst on Wednesday May 10, 2017 @12:53AM (#14305985)

SEO specialist, Mobile App Developer, Etsy artist, Drop shipper, additive manufacturing engineer, HFT quant, Lyft driver, etc.

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Re:More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production by s73ver on Monday May 08, 2017 @04:18PM (#14295214)

Except there are going to be far, far fewer of those positions than there are people displaced by automation.

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Re:More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production by bduerst on Wednesday May 10, 2017 @12:48AM (#14305972)

> the demand for labor is a function of supply

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Re:More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production by Chathamization on Monday May 08, 2017 @01:05PM (#14293461)

> The problem comes when robots begin to perform these higher order tasks. What happens to individuals when they have no "higher" place to move into?

That hasn't happened though. We have no indication that such a question is more relevant now than it was 200 years ago. And it's worth pointing out that we're currently in a period of fairly low productivity growth.

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