DOING THE JOBS THAT AMERICANS DON'T NEED TO DO!
Posted on 02/13/2017 10:04:30 AM PST by SeekAndFind
This is a good thing. I help companies reduce the administrative tasks in complex processes. What took 8 full time people to do, we do with a part-time person.
The typical thinking about automation is: there will be no human burger-flippers.
In reality, a lot of very high-level jobs are going to disappear. This is going to really be a problem because a lot of people (low skilled trouble-makers as well as bitter people with graduate degrees) are going to find that the world simply has no need for them.
The classic response is: “We will invent new jobs; we always do.” This response leaves me cold. There are no guarantees. There is no logical reason to think that we will suddenly develop a brand-new industry. And NO we cannot all be robot repairmen. It seems pretty damn obvious to me that robots are going to be repairing the robots.
Are they talking about the decision makers or the guys on the floor who wore funny colored jackets and flashed what looked like gang signs to each other and then wrote down the trades on paper? The second seemed archaic in the 1970s.
I would love it if my company did more of that. I have to change my tax withholding and I’m thinking it might be easier to make estimated payments to the IRS rather than track down who handles W-4 forms.
600 jobs to 202
that’s fine
Yep, one company I went to and reworked part of the main application they were selling. When I got there 3 people were full time doing “tech support” and one doing training (which they made money on). After a little straightening out the code, getting rid of bugs, and UI rationalization, it was one person part time on tech support, and three making money doing training (and selling while training).
Better for the company, better for the customers. Bad for their competitors.
Automation doesn’t bother me.
Multiply this many, many times and you have one huge reason why we are losing manufacturing and other service sector jobs in many states.
China and Mexico and all the other countries that are “stealing” our jobs are small factors in the scheme of things.
Milton Friedman Shovels vs. Spoons Story
While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.
“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.
I hope their new techies are better than the one I have seen. I smell a big loss coming.
On a different note— if we automate everything, who’s going to buy the things that are made. Automation is not just for goods and low level services. Is your work safe? I bet these traders though so.
DOING THE JOBS THAT AMERICANS DON'T NEED TO DO!
Yes, I think we’ve talked about this before, you and I, and I share your concern.
Since the invention of money, we’ve basically had one way for people who had none to get some, and that was by selling their labor.
When the society no longer needs their labor, that virtuous act of working gives way to idleness that has great societal costs. If the only way to distribute money is just by government checks, and the people sit by and wait for those checks with nothing to do, society will break down. Clearly in the communities where that is already the main profession, it already has.
Forget all the hubbub about "Fake News." We might wake up one day soon and realize that our 401Ks, IRAs, and retirement savings was Fake Money. There are deep, deep flaws in our financial systems, the global economy, and the markets. A match lit to the derivative bomb alone could blow it all sky high.
The ones with HB1 visas can always get a job at Starbucks.
Something in between the decision makers and the guys on the floor of the exchange.
Basically the old model was that there would be a big money manager, say it was at Fidelity. He decides he wants to sell AA and buy AMR. He has a salesman at Goldman Sachs whom he calls and says to do the trade. The salesman calls the cash equity trader. Because it’s such a good customer, maybe the the trader tells the salesman that the trade can be done at certain prices, but he does not go into the market with the transaction, he holds onto both positions, GS is now long of AA and short of AMR. It’s up now to the cash equity trader skilfully to get out of both positions at profitable levels using either Goldman’s sales force, or by trading into the exchanges.
That’s as recent as 10 years ago.
Today, pretty much none of that would happen. Fidelity has its own computers, and its own access to all sorts of off-market exchanges. There, using algorithms to disguise their interest (buy v sell) and the size they want to get done, Fidelity can execute those trades very efficiently without anyone front-running the order and only paying a tiny commission relative to what Goldman would have taken back in the day.
Lots of markets are working this way now. The NYSE conducts a relatively tiny percentage of all trades in NYSE listed stocks.
Something in between the decision makers and the guys on the floor of the exchange.
Basically the old model was that there would be a big money manager, say it was at Fidelity. He decides he wants to sell AA and buy AMR. He has a salesman at Goldman Sachs whom he calls and says to do the trade. The salesman calls the cash equity trader. Because it’s such a good customer, maybe the the trader tells the salesman that the trade can be done at certain prices, but he does not go into the market with the transaction, he holds onto both positions, GS is now long of AA and short of AMR. It’s up now to the cash equity trader skilfully to get out of both positions at profitable levels using either Goldman’s sales force, or by trading into the exchanges.
That’s as recent as 10 years ago.
Today, pretty much none of that would happen. Fidelity has its own computers, and its own access to all sorts of off-market exchanges. There, using algorithms to disguise their interest (buy v sell) and the size they want to get done, Fidelity can execute those trades very efficiently without anyone front-running the order and only paying a tiny commission relative to what Goldman would have taken back in the day.
Lots of markets are working this way now. The NYSE conducts a relatively tiny percentage of all trades in NYSE listed stocks.
I think there is a good chance that this will happen. The entire global financial sector may turn out to be a massive work of fiction. Who owns? Who holds? Who owes? Who is owed? I think that if anyone started questioning the system it may all just blow up because I don't think it makes any sense.
And if it blows up, everything changes.
It will be rocky, but I think the inevitable realization (probably within 10 years) is going to be that all debts -- I mean: ALL debts -- will be cancelled. A Global Jubilee / A Global Default.
And then we rebuild a global economy that is based on reality. As part of this: I think the nation state disappears and we will end up living in something closer to a City State. Something close to self-sufficient.
No surprise. Any menial or physical job that can be replaced by a robot will be replaced over time. People will need to adapt.
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