How many jobs do robots really replace?
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
During lockdown, it's been totally hectic. Everybody wants to go full speed ahead on automation.
You want a guaranteed job and interesting work? Do the automation engineer thing. Some physics, some materials science, some computers, some pneumatics and electronics, a lot of controls, a little bit of everything.
Her husband is not in batch processing; he's in continuous processing. Read that: oil refineries. He's been totally overbooked shutting down lines that haven't shut down since they were built. Sometime soon he'll go back and start them all up again. But it takes 2-4 weeks to start just one. Stage by stage, bringing up pressure and temperature and monitoring for problems, thru 100 of stages. Nothing is going to come back quickly after this is over.
Then I realized it was already happening, but not obvious. The big redesign of an automation product for a customer at the day job? Going full bore when we expected that COVID would slow it down. They're breathing down our neck asking when it'll be done.
My side project work that helps with machine tool retrofit? Same thing: my customer says by the time I'm done with the latest design change and have prototypes ready, they'll have sold more systems already.
I'm counting my blessings, but this is not what I expected :-)
Jobs will never fully disappear, but at some point, the vast majority of the human race will be classed out of work. Net wealth will continue to increase but will be increasingly concentrated into a smaller group of people (i.e. the people who own the automation and the people with PhDs who make the automation). I believe at a certain point, some kind of universal basic income will become necessary to support the people that will fall outside this small group.
Tyler Cowen has some good articles on this.
Artisanal beer, cheese are already part of big-city hipster culture.
It can apply to clothes, food, restored/modded/customized vehicles, custom furniture(vs. ikea), etc.
Automation creates better jobs and it’s benefits lifts up everyone over time.
Every single time automation has done this it’s eliminated jobs, yet replaced them with better ones. If you demonstrated the personal computer with a spreadsheet to bankers and accountants in the late 70s, they could easily see the jobs that these terrible new automation tools would destroy, but few could predict the jobs they’d create.
When plows, combines, tractors came to farming, each time it was easy to see what jobs were no longer necessary. But it was impossible to know what jobs would be created. Each of these tools made food cheaper and more plentiful, freeing more disposable income to be spent on new products and inventions that created better jobs than the ones we lost.
It’s arrogant to think that after this has happened thousands of times, that our time is any different. Or to pretend that the clarity we see the jobs we will lose to robots is something new, and that our inability to forsee new jobs to replace them somehow means that this time there won’t be any. We’ve never been able to foresee them but they always will come.
If robots make things cheaper and better, those savings will create new products, markets and jobs. And if they don’t, robots won’t steal anyone’s job.
What happens though when our minds become obsolete as well? There’s nothing left to transition to.
I figure the 70-90's were the first wave, this is easily going to be the second wave. It will have all the disruptions and human job loss, frantic movement of people to other industries and a ton of other misery just as the first one did.
Full disclosure: I'm also in automation. I'm currently doing RPA (Robotic Process Automation) development and our team is swamped with requests from teams who are trying to cut the fat out of their departments and reduce head count to try and save the company billions over the next five years.