Are Jobs Really Vanishing Because of Robots?

Townhall.com ^ | November 15, 2014 | Mike Shedlock

[Kaslin]

Are businesses are moving too quickly to robots? Is any job safe?

Patrick Thibodeau at Computer World discusses the idea things are moving "too fast" with a review of Nicholas Carr's new book, The Glass Cage, Automation and Us.

Please consider Automation Could Take Your Skills -- and Your Job by Patrick Thibodeau.

The Glass Cage examines the possibility that businesses are moving too quickly to automate white collar jobs, sophisticated tasks and mental work, and are increasingly reliant on automated decision-making and predictive analytics. It warns of the potential de-skilling of the workforce, including software developers, as larger shares of work processes are turned over to machines.

This book is not a defense of Luddites. It's a well-anchored examination of the consequences and impact about deploying systems designed to replace us.

Interview with Carr

Thibodeau posted a lengthy set of interview questions in regards to the book, along with answers from Carr.

Here are a few snips (emphasis added).

CW: What is the worry here? If I can get into my self-driving car in the morning, I can sit back and work on other things.

Carr: There are two worries. One is practical and the other is philosophical. We have to figure out how to best balance the responsibilities between the human expert or professional and computer. I think we're going down the wrong path right now. We're too quick to hand over too much responsibility to the computer and what that ends up doing is leaving the expert or professional in a kind of a passive role: looking at monitors, following templates, entering data. The problem, and we see it with pilots and doctors, is when the computer fails, when either the technology breaks down, or the computer comes up against some situation that it hasn't been programmed to handle, then the human being has to jump back in take control, and too often we have allowed the human expert skills to get rusty and their situational awareness to fade away and so they make mistakes. At the practical level, we can be smarter and wiser about how we go about automating and make sure that we keep the human engaged.

Then we have the philosophical side, what are human beings for? What gives meaning to our lives and fulfills us? And it turns out that it is usually doing hard work in the real world, grappling with hard challenges, overcoming them, expanding our talents, engaging with difficult situations. Unfortunately, that is the kind of effort that software programmers, for good reasons of their own, seek to alleviate today.

CW: Gartner recently came out with a prediction that in approximately 10 years about one third of all the jobs that exist today will be replaced by some form of automation. That could be an over-the-top prediction or not. But when you think about the job market going forward, what kind of impact do you see automation having?

Carr: I think that prediction is probably over aggressive. It's very easy to come up with these scenarios that show massive job losses. I think what we're facing is probably a more modest, but still ongoing destruction or loss of white collar professional jobs as computers become more capable of undertaking analyses and making judgments. A very good example is in the legal field, where you have seen, and very, very quickly, language processing software take over the work of evidence discovery. You used to have lots of bright people reading through various documents to find evidence and to figure out relationships among people, and now computers can basically do all that work, so lots of paralegals, lots of junior lawyers, lose their jobs because computers can do them. I think we will continue to see that kind of replacement of professional labor with analytical software. The job market is very complex, so it's easy to become alarmist, but I do think the big challenge is probably less the total number of jobs in the economy then the distribution of those jobs. Because as soon as you are able to automate what used to be very skilled task, then you also de-skill them and, hence, you don't have to pay the people who do them as much. We will probably see a continued pressure for the polarization of the workforce and the erosion of good quality, good paying middle class jobs.

CW: What do you want people to take away from this work?

Carr: I think we're naturally very enthusiastic about technological advances, and particularly enthusiastic about the ways that engineers and programmers and other inventors can program inanimate machines and computers to do hard things that human beings used to do. That's amazing, and I think we're right to be amazed and enthusiastic about that. But I think often our enthusiasm leads us to make assumptions that aren't in our best interest, assumptions that we should seek convenience and speed and efficiency without regard to the fact that our sense of satisfaction in life often comes from mastering hard challenges, mastering hard skills. My goal is simply to warn people.

I think we have a choice about whether we do this wisely and humanistically, or we take the road that I think we're on right now, which is to take a misanthropic view of technological progress and just say 'give computers everything they can possibly do and give human beings whatever is left over.' I think that's a recipe for diminishing the quality of life and ultimately short-circuiting progress.

Is Carr a Luddite?

Thibodeau claims "Carr's book is not a defense of Luddites".

Let's look up the term Luddite.

According to Merriam-Webster a Luddite is "one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly: one who is opposed to especially technological change"

Carr is not an extreme Luddite to the extent he wants to destroy machinery in protest. However, in the broader sense, it's easy enough to make a case that he is indeed a Luddite.

Loss of Skills

• Computers ended the need for a slide rule. The skill simply vanished. Should anyone care? As a side note, I can still use a slide rule. Many today have never heard of one. I have a totally useless skill.
• Robots replaced human welders. Who does a better job? The robot or the human welder? I suggest the robot. Yet, welding did not and will not go away. No skills vanished. For quick repairs and specialized jobs, human welders will not cease to exist. If I am wrong and human welders do vanish completely, and as with slide rules, human welding skills will no longer be useful.
• Cars replaced horses. Horse riding is still a skill, but it has far fewer practical uses. Should anyone be concerned?

Computers, Robots, and the Quality of Life

The most curious position of Carr is his conclusion: Computer technology is "a recipe for diminishing the quality of life".

Ring the eject buzzer on that one. With the possible exception of warfare and nuclear accidents, there has never been any technological advance in history that was a "recipe for diminished quality of life".

Yes, disruption is unwelcome to many. But Carr's worries are no different than those who worried about cars replacing horses, the cotton gin replacing seed separators, or the telephone replacing the telegraph.

Does anyone pity the widespread loss of Morse Code skills?

Curiously, although the slide rule vanished, Morse Code did not go away completely as the link above shows. It still has some limited use applications, and yes, I could do an SOS in Morse Code (but no one would pay me a dime for that skill).

Will 1 in 3 Jobs Vanish by 2025?

Is Gartner right that One in three jobs will be taken by software or robots by 2025?

If so, should there be a concern?

Real Concern

The real concern should not be the loss of jobs, but rather the Fed's response and governmental responses to price-deflation aspects.

Technology is inherently price deflationary. It's also wage deflationary except for those at the top-end of needed skills.

Central bank efforts to achieve 2% inflation in a hugely deflationary technological boom with a simultaneous and equally deflationary demographic shift is a huge problem.

In addition, liberal efforts to raise the minimum wage exacerbates the trend to move to robots.

If there is a "premature" move to robots, blame the Fed and governments, not the technology, and not businesses making the shift.

Question on Wealth Distribution

Reader Michael asks ...

"As more and more wealth is produced using less and less labor, society will be faced with the question of how to distribute this wealth. Does only a tiny fraction of the world's population get to enjoy the wealth or, do we realize that technology is enabling humans to enjoy more leisure and still have a share of the wealth?"


To answer Michael's question ...

We should embrace technology and the increased standard of living that comes with it. Yes, those at the top-end have amazing lifestyles that most can only imagine. But, it's also true that the average US citizen today lives like a king (and much longer) than someone 200 or even 100 years ago.

Every technological advance to date has been shared: computers, cell phones, television, sewing machines, radio, everything. It is inconceivable (actually impossible short of mass human extinction) for that trend to stop.

Everyone shares sooner or later. Competition ensures that outcome. Yet, it's also inevitable that the need for certain skills dies along the way.

In the short run, disruption is scary, especially to those immediately impacted. In the long run, the only fear should be of the central planner's (governments and central banks) response to such shifts.

Those who fear technology have precisely the wrong concern.

[2ndDivisionVet]

50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025: Report
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3224685/posts

Robot hamburger factory makes 360 Gourmet Burgers every hour...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3100817/posts

Texas Leads Best States For Future Job Growth
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3226814/posts

[ifinnegan]

They are ALSO stealing my luggage!!!

[MeshugeMikey]

THATS RACESS!

we cant blame ALL the robots ...now can we... just a few from broken homes I suspect...

[ifinnegan]

Bender?

[MeshugeMikey]

Bender? nope... Im stone cold sober...../s

[billorites]

[Paulie]

I think the consumer will welcome the robot for a multitude of interactions they now consider problematic. Problematic because of human laziness, bad attitudes, behavior that results in costly lawsuits, sloppy work, favoritism, and probably a dozen more reasons.

But what will be done with the multitudes that cannot find even a simple job?

[Beagle8U]

Automation has been removing blue collar jobs for 30 years or more, white collar workers better get use to it.

[kearnyirish2]

I don’t like the way technology is being used to turn American jobs into Third World jobs; I see the commercials for this “Green Dragon” software that turns broken English into the real deal, and at a chain convenience store I see non-English speakers have replaced the Americans that used to make the sandwiches via the use of touch-screens. Basically, you select your sandwich and ingredients (including quantities), and on the other side of the counter an imported “replacement American” sees it (probably as pictures) and makes the sandwich - without saying a word.

[Sherman Logan]

Carr's worries are no different than those who worried about cars replacing horses, the cotton gin replacing seed separators, or the telephone replacing the telegraph.

I hope to hell the author is right.

But I suspect he is ignoring the increasing evidence that cybernetic replacement of human workers is qualitatively different from mechanical replacement.

That Luddites have been proven wrong in the long term for 200 years now does not "prove" that they will continue to be wrong in the future.

Here's what I see as the biggest difference:

There will continue to be demand, indeed greatly increased demand, for certain human skills.

The problem is that those skills will almost all require well above average IQ. Those with below average or even normal IQ will simply be unable to handle them.

This means that demand, in an economic sense, will continue to drop indefinitely for at least 75% of the population. And those "not in demand" will add an IQ point or so every year.

This world is likely to have a great deal of "stuff" around, but require very few people to produce it. So how is the stuff distributed. I'm afraid I don't see any logical way for this to work out without making governments and those who run them more powerful.

[cynwoody]

The problem, and we see it with pilots and doctors, is when the computer fails, when either the technology breaks down, or the computer comes up against some situation that it hasn't been programmed to handle, then the human being has to jump back in take control, and too often we have allowed the human expert skills to get rusty and their situational awareness to fade away and so they make mistakes.

Think Air France 447.

[tbw2]

Contrary view on what jobs will remain - a large portion of which are the “dirty jobs” of Mike Rowe fame. Semi-skilled, manual labor, high pay, bad rap.

The Great Shift Toward Automation and the Future of Employment
http://tamarawilhite.hubpages.com/hub/The-Great-Shift-and-the-Future-of-Employment

[tbw2]

Human servants then make a comeback, as an employment option.

[BwanaNdege]

"...these reference books were produced and collated in a massively parallel operation, with dozens or hundreds of human "computers" working on the same function with a different variable, like these women at NACA, the precursor to NASA...

[cynwoody]

It takes me about 10 minutes to drive to Panera. The other day, I got hungry, so I signed onto their site and ordered two flatbread sandwiches and a bowl of soup. I arrived just as they were stapling the receipt to the bag. Technology is good.

Basically, you select your sandwich and ingredients (including quantities), and on the other side of the counter an imported “replacement American” sees it (probably as pictures) and makes the sandwich - without saying a word.

In its front counter area, this same Panera has six iPads with card-swipes glued on. They work beautifully. You can take your time, see all the customizations, etc.

If there is any kind of a line when you arrive, it is much easier to use one of the iPads than to wait. The last time I ordered their two flatbread sandwich selection from a human, it took literally minutes to explain what I was ordering. And, no, it wasn't a language problem, it was an inability on the part of the order taker to understand the menu.

[kearnyirish2]

“Automation has been removing blue collar jobs for 30 years or more, white collar workers better get use to it.”

Computers have been automating white-collar work for decades; the real problem is that the natural progression/obsolescence has been corrupted by the importation of millions of Asians to replace Americans in white-collar jobs (as was done with Latin Americans to blue-collar workers). Whenever Asians can’t be brought to fill the jobs here, the jobs simply move over there; after wrecking the tech sector for many Americans, they’ve moved on to the financial and medical sectors.

[Born to Conserve]

The plow, the cotton gin, windmills, dishwashers, ...

[kearnyirish2]

I’m not disputing the benefits of technology; explain to me how my example was good for anyone except the franchise owner that replaced his Americans with “replacement Americans”. I’m all for self-checkouts, but I wouldn’t like it if instead they just replaced American cashiers with Mexicans via technology.

[VRW Conspirator]

Are Jobs Really Vanishing Because of Robots?

I am not a FReeper. I am just a robot logged and automatically posting sarcastic comments.