Technology displacing workers
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tik 🪀✨
ComradeCarter
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« Reply #25 on: August 10, 2013, 01:06:16 AM »

Assuming appropriate market mechanisms are allowed to work "properly," technology just changes the nature of jobs, and the relative pay scales between different kinds of jobs. So it is probably somewhat accurate to attribute some of the growing wealth inequality on technological innovation (heck back when most of the human species made about the same - just enough to keep barely alive and reproduce), but not the lack of jobs.

The problem as I see it, and I could just lack the imagination to fill in the gaps, is that technology would progress enough that there would be automatons that are intelligent enough to do just about any manual labour or service jobs (hell, even jobs that require creativity and other higher thinking). In such a situation, "appropriate market mechanisms" could utterly fail to make new kinds of jobs as the capabilities of many people would become completely worthless and disposable. Like I said, perhaps I just lack the imagination to foresee how we'd stay relevant. Humans are, after all, very adept at finding ways to make a buck or do something differently. Two hundred years ago I'm sure doom and gloom would have been being preached after a soothsayer gazed, seeing our present, in her crystal ball. Yet, here we are, and we're doing pretty alright.

To your second point - of course technology has a huge role in the lack of jobs at the moment. Just the internet has destroyed millions of jobs that used to be common as its influence rippled through society. It has created millions of jobs as well, obviously, but I don't think it evened out.

In some parts of the world even basic technological advances that are commonplace are shunned due to pressure from workers who don't want to lose their simple jobs. For example, companies have workers unload entire trucks by passing goods from one person to the next instead of simply buying a forklift. I'm not saying that Americans should do this, merely driving home that technological innovation has, is, and will play a huge role in unemployment. It's not at the root, of course. The root is always money. When it becomes cheaper to automate a process, technology displaces workers. But full employment could be acheived if many technologies disappeared overnight. Most people would be underemployed, sure, but employed nevertheless.
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Franknburger
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« Reply #26 on: August 10, 2013, 11:29:21 AM »

In some parts of the world even basic technological advances that are commonplace are shunned due to pressure from workers who don't want to lose their simple jobs. For example, companies have workers unload entire trucks by passing goods from one person to the next instead of simply buying a forklift. I'm not saying that Americans should do this, merely driving home that technological innovation has, is, and will play a huge role in unemployment. It's not at the root, of course. The root is always money. When it becomes cheaper to automate a process, technology displaces workers. But full employment could be acheived if many technologies disappeared overnight. Most people would be underemployed, sure, but employed nevertheless.

Let me illustrate the point with a concrete example: When I did a study on the Ethiopian construction sector a few years ago, I was astonished they did not use wheelbarrows to transport sand or cement on-site. Instead, such loads were carried on handbarrows held by two people.

Asking the manager about it, he came up with a simple calculation: An unskilled worker gets around 1 USD/day. Wheelbarrows would increase labour productivity by some 50% (you only need one instead of two workers, however, you can't access all locations by wheelbarrow, so you  may have to do some extra loading/unloading). As such, investing in a simple, 30 USD wheelbarrow would pay off in around three months (20 workdays/month). However, cheap wheelbarrows would not last much longer than three months, if they were not already stolen before. As such, there was no economic benefit from using them. Asides, he preferred to create jobs, local unemployment was already high enough.

Bottom line: Technology only destroys jobs, if these jobs are comparatively expensive, i.e. adequately qualified labour is relatively scarce, and/or if it improves process/output quality (unlike wheelbarrows, which are inferior to handbarrows when it comes to accessing specific points on a construction site). 
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Torie
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« Reply #27 on: August 11, 2013, 08:19:03 PM »
« Edited: August 11, 2013, 08:23:09 PM by Torie »

It is all about time horizons Franknburger. Your point about job destruction, and argument that more are destroyed than created, to the extent it is true, is more true in the short term while the market adjusts, than in the long term, after the market has adjusted, and folks move on to something else (granted it might be a job they don't want, and won't take, until desperate). Within a generation, as young folks are trained to be more adept with the new technologies, or new jobs created given the technologies that exist (e.g., folks pay for personal services that they didn't before, because machines make former services cheaper, so they money to spend on new ones, like massages and hookers, and more time at resorts, etc.), because presumably all the buggy whip making factory rats as it were will be retired or dead who were unable to learn how to repair cars.   

And sure, we need policies in place that make sense, to deal with technological shocks.
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tik 🪀✨
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« Reply #28 on: September 15, 2013, 07:35:13 AM »

http://m.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-suggests-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/

Researchers have concluded that as many as 45% of current jobs are vulnerable to automation in the next two decades. Obviously that does not equate to 45% unemployment, but it does equate to an enormous burden on the creativity of society to sustain an economy where tens of millions of people have less disposable income. There is no plan from either side to combat this problem. Of course, it's impossible to accurate gauge the future. 45% seems particularly high, for starters. To combat or grow in such an environment, the article suggests outlawing automaton in some industries (for the former) and shifting our educational focus towards creative and highly social skills (for the latter).
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Franknburger
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« Reply #29 on: September 15, 2013, 03:21:10 PM »

http://m.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-suggests-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/

Researchers have concluded that as many as 45% of current jobs are vulnerable to automation in the next two decades. Obviously that does not equate to 45% unemployment, but it does equate to an enormous burden on the creativity of society to sustain an economy where tens of millions of people have less disposable income. There is no plan from either side to combat this problem. Of course, it's impossible to accurate gauge the future. 45% seems particularly high, for starters. To combat or grow in such an environment, the article suggests outlawing automaton in some industries (for the former) and shifting our educational focus towards creative and highly social skills (for the latter).
While I am not able to point out at specific weaknesses of the cited study for lack of information on details, I think the 45% figure is a gross overestimate. I have done an estimate for Germany, based on the latest available detailed employment breakdown by sector (end of 2012), and grouping sectors according to their likelihood of jobs being replaced by automation:

Low automation risk (49.4% of total employment)Sad
- Professional services, consulting, IT (actually, they should continue to show job creation)
- Equipment & devices, including their installation and maintenance: Automated performance monitoring should considerably reduce maintenance. Otherwise low automation potential in manufacturing. As they should be the ones to build the automated devices, overall employment in this sector is more likely to increase then decrease.
- Health & care (for Germany, a lack of up to 1 million professionals is predicted until 2050)
- Education & training
- Construction
- Facility management (security, cleaning, gardening etc.)
- Agriculture & Food (already heavily automated, except for quality control, which requires specific sensoric skills)
- Quarries, glass, ceramics
- Forestry, wood processing, furniture
- Waste disposal & recycling
- Personal services (hairdressing, cosmetics etc.)

Medium automation risk (36.4 % of total employment)Sad
- Trade & repair (incl. vehicles): Low risk for the repair and online trade parts, quite a risk for wholesale, substantial risk for stationary retail. Unfortunately, available sub-sectorial breakdowns do not always follow the above lines, so I had to aggregate figures and put the total into "medium risk".
- Hospitality: Substantial automation risk for fast-food. Otherwise (restaurants, entertainment, hotels, etc.) low automation risk.
- Metallurgy, metal processing, vehicle building, chemicals & pharmaceuticals, plastics, textile & clothing.
- Public administration, interest representation, churches, etc.

High automation risk (14.2%):
- Transport & storage (not so sure about the storage part, in fact, especially when it comes to commissioning for delivery in internet-based retail).
- Banking and insurance
- Time-work: These people are the first to go when jobs are automated. OTOH, they are typically hired to cover demand/production peaks, so maybe the category rather belongs into "medium risk".
- Publishing & printing
- Utilities (automated metering & performance control).

All in all, I think for Germany we are talking at maximum about some 10-15% of jobs being endangered. This has to be compared to some 3% new job creation in care (that is where the fast food workers will go), plus substantial job creation in IT, machine-building etc.
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