AI teaches itself to use an API

Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by DrewADesign on Friday March 03, 2023 @07:50PM (#35016992)

I'm not so confident. Places that industrialized during the industrial revolution saw explosive growth as automation yielded unprecedented productivity. Factory jobs paid very well and were readily available because demand was generally high for like a century... but automation and labor passed a tipping point and now we have very few manufacturing jobs and the days of guaranteed high salaries and growth are gone. Rust belt cities are a living proof that industries get to a point where they pursue cheaper ways of making a stable income rather than endlessly innovating and leveraging a skilled workforce. For a lot of people, that situation just plain-old doesn't work out in the end.

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by raldi on Friday March 03, 2023 @08:15PM (#35017147)

As the need for cog-in-the-machine factory workers declined over the years, the labor force moved to industries like service, construction, transportation, and technology. My understanding is that if you could take a 2023 UPS driver or WalMart employee back in time and give them a day working at a factory in 1930 or 1970, they would eagerly return to the present. And those modern jobs exist today at such great scale in large part due to automation eliminating the old factory jobs (i.e., allowing goods to be produced much more cheaply).

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by DrewADesign on Friday March 03, 2023 @11:17PM (#35018122)

What you call understanding is assumption. There were retail jobs back then too and a hell of a lot of people worked in those factories. Being able to raise a family in a nice house that you own, drive new cars, and send your kids to college without crimping and retire in your early 60s with a pension is a pretty compelling reason to endure difficult work environments. Meanwhile, in some states, 3% of full-time non-elderly non-disabled Walmart employees need medicaid and food stamps. Again, the amount of poverty and decay in once vibrant rust belt cities are a living argument against the assumption that everybody just sort of figures it out when large swaths of people are rendered obsolete.

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by raldi on Saturday March 04, 2023 @01:42AM (#35018770)

The data doesn't seem to support what you're saying, e.g., even ignoring the other three and just looking at service-industry jobs, their growth alone made up for the drop in manufacturing jobs many times over:

https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/...

Also, the definition of a "nice house" in 1950 or 1975 is very, very different from today. In the 70's, a nice house often had one story and a single bathroom, a tiny kitchen with no dishwasher, no dryer, no air conditioning...

As for the poverty rate, I'm not seeing the trend you describe:

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/sites/main/files/imagecache/ligh...

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by DrewADesign on Saturday March 04, 2023 @08:54AM (#35020757)

The US population is well over 100 million larger than in the 70s. You can't just erase changes in individual communities by looking only at national statistics. Our national economy profited just fine. Even within those national numbers, jobs that have seen significant growth line food service jobs are worse in measurable ways. The wages are significantly lower, they're less likely to provide basic benefits like health insurance, let alone paid vacation and retirement. One again, my initial assertion is that a whole lot of people don't just figure it out when part of a broad population deemed unnecessary, and the rust belt is obvious evidence of that.

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by ForestCritter on Friday March 03, 2023 @08:14PM (#35017126)

The reason we have fewer manufacturing jobs isn't because of automation. It's due to moving manufacturing overseas to exploit cheap labor. Also there are still many parts of this country that have factory jobs (I live in one of them, 10 different factories within half an hour drive.) and the majority have minimal automation.

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by DrewADesign on Friday March 03, 2023 @11:36PM (#35018218)

A) That is the reason? Do you automation played no part in large manufacturers ability to drop their highly skilled artisan workforce needed to perform key tasks? Does that really matter in the context of the conversation, which is that it's pretty naive to assume everything will just work out when workers are rendered obsolete because it's logistically easy and cheaper to get it elsewhere?

B) You could live in the midst of 100 factories and that wouldn't change the decades of well-documented decline in US manufacturing jobs.

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by ForestCritter on Sunday March 05, 2023 @12:25AM (#35027126)

automation decimated the lesser skilled labor, not the high end workforce. The highly skilled artisans got replaced by the diminishing demand for high end goods over cheap automation goods.

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by DrewADesign on Sunday March 05, 2023 @12:35AM (#35027158)

>> The highly skilled artisans got replaced by the diminishing demand for high end goods over cheap automation goods.

So... cars aren't as high-end as they were during the malaise years?

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by ForestCritter on Sunday March 05, 2023 @12:51AM (#35027197)

https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/trade/article/22024...

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by ForestCritter on Sunday March 05, 2023 @01:15AM (#35027301)

here is another article outlining loss of manufacturing to other countries.

https://www.industryweek.com/leadership/article/22026136/hop...

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by DrewADesign on Sunday March 05, 2023 @01:57AM (#35027496)

Did you just pull these up from a random google search? I stopped reading the first one once I saw it's bibliography starts at the Church of God newspaper and low-quality wikipedia articles and gets less useful from there. Even though the wikipedia page for the second publication cites no sources and simultaneously claims to have been founded in the 19th century and 1970, it seems more sanely reasoned. However, I don't see how it supports your argument in any way. In fact, the author seems to be just as concerned about automation as I am, which is more than others:

William Strauss, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, stated that “on average, manufacturing output has been growing 3.1% annually over the past 63 years. Automation has enabled U.S. manufacturers to produce significantly more with fewer workers than they did in previous decades. Today, 177 workers can generate as much output as 1,000 plant employees could produce in 1950. Far from a cause for concern, the dramatic loss in manufacturing jobs should be seen as a key metric of success.”

Strauss under-plays the effect on all workers who lose in this game, and he doesn’t even mention what the loss of manufacturing will do to R& D or exports.

I wouldn't call R&D a generally low-skill job loss concern. Beyond that I didn't see anything that addressed your argument. Please enlighten me.

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by defrost on Friday March 03, 2023 @07:56PM (#35017024)

> during the industrial revolution saw explosive growth as automation yielded unprecedented productivity. Factory jobs paid very well

It's almost like you've never actually read any history at all.

https://www.historycrunch.com/working-conditions-in-the-indu...

https://firstindustrialrevolution.weebly.com/working-and-liv...

https://industrialrevolutiontwo.weebly.com/common-workers.ht...

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Re:AI teaches itself to use an API by DrewADesign on Friday March 03, 2023 @08:04PM (#35017073)

As is clear from the rest of my comment, I was talking about the manufacturing industry over time, not talking specifically about the working conditions during the industrial revolution. Feel free to address the central point of what I said rather than make an unrelated pedantic point.

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