Automation Will Change Every Job, but Only 25% Are on the Chopping Block

People really need to understand the difference between manufacturing and other industries.
They understand it just fine.

Why in the world do you seem to think that somehow only jobs related to manufacturing would be effected?

Automation will be everywhere and there is no reason why it would be constrained to any one sector either so you're not making sense no matter what here.
 
Cool then you will understand this. I mentioned manufacturing, because that's what I was originally referring to in my first post. Yes automation displaces everyone, but I specifically mentioned manufacturing as an example that wasn't catastrophically affected. Heck it's been declining for decades and we're still the second largest manufacturer in the world. I see a similar thing happening for all the other industries .
 
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Shareholders won't care because most don't think more than a quarter or 2 ahead.

For the ones that do think farther ahead remember that during the run up to the GFC when already skeevy MBS's were being turned into blatantly obviously fraudulent CDO's and CDO's Squared the reasoning frequently given for what they were doing was IBGYBG (I'll Be Gone You'll Be Gone).

They knew it'd all blow up they just figured they'd be long gone before it happened and some other Greater Fool would get screwed instead.
Fine and after a few quarters of no growth and low sales, they'll care. I'll add that most individual investors do not look just a quarter ahead. That's traders, not investors. Most individuals are likely investing in ETFs and they will absolutely notice the S&P crater when 25% of consumers can't afford to buy anything.
 
I "love" these stupid predictions. Specifically 25%, are you sure it's not 26% or maybe 24? These clickbait "studies" have zero merit, no they're actually harmful as they spread FUD and FUD both!
 
Any centrally planned solutions will fail, as they always do. Basically, a mass die-off of excess humanity must occur. UBI won't work; we can't pay millions of people just for existing—it's pointless and wasteful.
 
See, stuff like this is why I'm not a libertarian.
So you support an ongoing transfer of trillions in wealth to people who produce nothing? Let the human population keep increasing and just keep paying them to eat and breath and make more babies?

I would accept something like UBI only if those receiving it agree to be sterilized in exchange.
 
I mentioned manufacturing, because that's what I was originally referring to in my first post.
OK but how does that matter or is relevant to the article or the general trends involving automation at all? If everything gets effected and the tech is flexible enough to take the place of people in many new jobs than you can't just go blowing this off because the past was different with different tech.

Heck it's been declining for decades and we're still the second largest manufacturer in the world.
Which is due to automation and not the workers who've been losing their jobs.

So its great for the companies that own the factories but terrible for workers and the towns that were centered around these industries. Just look at the Rust Belt or what has happened to upstate NY. Those areas have been devastated economically and never recovered.
 
Fine and after a few quarters of no growth and low sales, they'll care.
By the time sales begin to plummet and growth stalls out it'll be too late to care. But even then they won't. They'll be looking for a bailout not reform.

Realistically you have to implement the drastic changes well beforehand to have a relatively smooth transition when changing the economy. Like years ahead of time. These people won't support that sort of thing and will in fact actually try to block it for as long as possible because it'll hurt their bottom line now.
 
Any centrally planned solutions will fail, as they always do. Basically, a mass die-off of excess humanity must occur. UBI won't work; we can't pay millions of people just for existing—it's pointless and wasteful.
Hahahaha so your grand solution is mass die offs??!

And just who is supposed to choose who lives and dies? You? A random bunch of corporations?? Are people just supposed to volunteer themselves and families for euthanasia to support the wealth of the rich? Wealth that many of them effectively stole at that??

Also a reminder that the last time we had anything like the necessary die offs you may be thinking of (Black Death) the rich were essentially forced to do wealth redistribution anyways because labor (via Guilds) forced them to. And that was back in what was still very much the feudal era too BTW where the nobles (aka rich) had incredible power over the average peasant or serf.
 
https://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnists/2019/01/454812/hidden-automation-agenda-davos-elite

THEY’LL never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.

I know this because, for the past week, I’ve been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. And I’ve noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening.

In public, many executives wring their hands over the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers. They take part in panel discussions about building “human-centred AI” for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — Davos-speak for the corporate adoption of machine learning and other advanced technology — and talk about the need to provide a safety net for people who lose their jobs as a result of automation.

But in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own workforces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.

All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitised, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see AI as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen.

“People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, president of Infosys, a technology and consulting firm that helps other businesses automate their operations. “Earlier they had incremental, five to 10 per cent goals in reducing their workforce. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with one per cent of the people we have?’ ”

Few United States executives will admit wanting to get rid of human workers, a taboo in today’s age of inequality. So they’ve come up with a long list of buzzwords and euphemisms to disguise their intent. Workers aren’t being replaced by machines, they’re being “released” from onerous, repetitive tasks. Companies aren’t laying off workers, they’re “undergoing digital transformation”.

A 2017 survey by Deloitte found that 53 per cent of companies had already started to use machines to perform tasks previously done by humans. The figure is expected to climb to 72 per cent by next year.

The corporate elite’s AI obsession has been lucrative for firms that specialise in “robotic process automation”. Infosys, which is based in India, reported a 33 per cent increase in year-over-year revenue in its digital division. IBM’s “cognitive solutions” unit, which uses AI to help businesses increase efficiency, has become the company’s second-largest division, posting US$5.5 billion (RM22.67 billion) in revenue last quarter. Investment bank UBS projects that the artificial intelligence industry could be worth as much as US$180 billion by next year.

Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI Superpowers and a longtime technology executive, predicts that artificial intelligence will eliminate 40 per cent of the world’s jobs within 15 years. In an interview, he said chief executives were under enormous pressure from shareholders and boards to maximise short-term profits, and that the rapid shift toward automation was the inevitable result.

“They always say, it’s more than the stock price,” he said. “But in the end, if you screw up, you get fired.”

Other experts have predicted that AI will create more new jobs than it destroys, and that job losses caused by automation will probably not be catastrophic. They point out that some automation helps workers by improving productivity and freeing them to focus on creative tasks over routine ones.

But at a time of political unrest and anti-elite movements on the progressive left and the nationalist right, it’s probably not surprising that all of this automation is happening quietly, out of public view.

In Davos this week, several executives declined to say how much money they had saved by automating jobs previously done by humans. And none were willing to say publicly that replacing human workers was their ultimate goal.



One common argument made by executives is that workers whose jobs are eliminated by automation can be “reskilled” to perform other jobs in an organisation. They offer examples like Accenture, which claimed in 2017 to have replaced 17,000 back-office processing jobs without layoffs, by training employees to work elsewhere in the company. In a letter to shareholders last year, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said more than 16,000 Amazon warehouse workers had received training in high-demand fields like nursing and aircraft mechanics, with the company covering 95 per cent of their expenses.

But these programmes may be the exception that proves the rule. There are plenty of stories of successful reskilling — optimists often cite a programme in Kentucky that trained a small group of former coal miners to become computer programmers — but there is little evidence that it works at scale. A report by the World Economic Forum this month estimated that of the 1.37 million workers who are projected to be fully displaced by automation in the next decade, only 1 in 4 can be profitably reskilled by private-sector programmes. The rest, presumably, will need to fend for themselves or rely on government assistance.

In Davos, executives tend to speak about automation as a natural phenomenon over which they have no control, like hurricanes or heat waves. They claim that if they don’t automate jobs as quickly as possible, their competitors will.

“They will be disrupted if they don’t,” said Katy George, a senior partner at consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Automating work is a choice, of course, one made harder by the demands of shareholders, but it is still a choice. And even if some degree of unemployment caused by automation is inevitable, these executives can choose how the gains from automation and AI are distributed, and whether to give the excess profits they reap as a result to workers, or hoard it for themselves and their shareholders.

The choices made by the Davos elite — and the pressure applied on them to act in workers’ interests rather than their own — will determine whether AI is used as a tool for increasing productivity or for inflicting pain.

“The choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.” NYT
 
I'm 46 and have been in IT for over 20 years. I know exactly where this is going. Automation in our arena isn't going to be robots. It will be AI, scripting, and automated management in cloud services. The effect will be the same, though.

For systems administration, cloud services and automated deployment will centralize jobs. There will be fewer and fewer local admins and more "cloud support" techs. This will both reduce the number of jobs because the resources will be centralized and require less management and less work will need to be done by people. This, in turn, will reduce the average pay because there will be more people with the skills to do it, and thus more competition. If you adjust for inflation, system admin pay is already down to the level of desktop support pay from 20 years ago. With the improvements in AI recently, that is likely to take a nosedive as AI takes our place.

With desktop support, more problems will be fixable automatically by operating systems. Windows has already made progress in this area. Most people don't realize just how much automated system file fixing Windows 8 introduced. The system file checker automatically triggers for many errors, and is completely hidden from the user. As much as UAC is hated by people, it has prevented a great many problems with poorly written programs. The number of help desk tickets per computer per year has gone down by over 50% since Windows 7 was introduced because of its ability to automatically adjust compatibility settings for programs. This will proceed, as Microsoft has put a concerted effort into it. In addition to all this, there is a movement toward VDI, where users just use automatically deployed virtual machines with roaming profiles from a thin client. If a VDI user has a problem with a VM, the system can just deploy a new one and delete the old one, automatically. This will all significantly reduce the number of technicians needed to support users. Pay is already dropping to the point of nearing minimum wage in many instances. AI is already being used to automatically correct many infrequent errors with programs. It won't be long before even the best support techs won't be able to make a living from it. It will become another high schoolers' part time job industry very soon.

The only direction to go is up. Our jobs are going to be replaced, and quite soon. Study up on web site development and database server usage. If you can get into cloud services support, as I have recently, do it. The jobs involved will be reduced over the next several years, but if you're good at it, it could be a safe haven. Just be prepared to deal with less income. That part if going to be unavoidable no matter where you look in IT.
I think you are spot on. I work in IT and part of my job is to implement automation. My company has been acquiring new companies - yet we are not expanding out IT department. It's pretty lean and automation will help keep it lean (and could eventually make it leaner...)
Right now, management is using automation to try to make certain jobs better/more efficient. Example: when you come in to work, why not have certain tasks already completed so you can use your cognitive abilities to make sense of it? Why not automate some of the tedious crap that takes a lot of time. Once the low hanging fruit is harvested, I will not be surprised if we move on to to other areas.
A few I can think of already: security, HR (largely automated in many companies now, but it can be taken further), certain types of customer support (again, think of calling an automated number - it's already here), sales, parts of accounting, etc.
Anyone remember the days of computer operators? Large help desk teams? Those jobs are largely gone already. Moving to cloud, I see less demand for system administrators. Software lets fewer sys admins do a lot more work than in the past. When a system fails now, good chance it is a virtual system and the image just moves to another instance.
I've learned a lot in the last 15 years. I have been at companies that fell down hard. My takeaways - be nimble and don't get attached to any particular job. Don't be loyal to your employer - they are not loyal to you. Try to plan on the next 5 years of your career - it's too hard to look past that as things change so fast.
 
I think it might be time to rethink why we work.

Societies fall when they become unable to fix the problems they created by solving other problems that they created.
If 25% of the workforce becomes unemployed, or "free", that is a large number of potential manpower to throw at problems to try and solve them, rather than letting them rot away doing nothing.
 
DIsagree. Shareholders will care, because if nobody buys products, then there are no profits.

This is why a lot of smart people think we're going to have to have a minimum pay come from the government. My guess is if that happens, it will come out of corporate profits, which will at least partially offset the benefits of eliminating jobs.
If 25% of jobs go away, there has to be some sort of solution for those people. Maybe the government takes that money and uses it to improve infrastructure and hires blue collar workers to fix roads, bridges and rails.
Look at Toyota and GM where Toyota spent years to build up their brand while GM went super cheap on theirs. The result is that GM is probably going to file for bankruptcy while Toyota is looking to expand. Or just look at Nvidia who is now charging $350 for a mid range RTX 2060 and Apple who has over $1k iPhones. Makes for good profit today but will probably kill your business in the long run.
 
DIsagree. Shareholders will care, because if nobody buys products, then there are no profits.

...

Taxing corps will become very popular if 25% of their jobs killed.
So what you are suggesting is that shareholders will want their corporate profits severely taxed in order to be redistributed to the general populace so they can buy their product to increase corporate profits... Right. Chicken before egg scenario. Those profits coming from the taxes can't be exponential increases shareholders are looking for unless the tax revenue is exponentially increasing which decreases profits which is what you said they wanted to avoid by taxation.

Either way, you said taxation well become very popular when 25 percent of the population has no job. However that 25 percent of the population will also likely be the lowest IQ portion as they'll have the most trouble adjusting to rapidly changing job demands.

I wouldn't be surprised if axing or jailing (by gender so no breeding) the lower 25 percent isn't as popular of an idea as mass taxation. Corporations would love if being unemployed for 6 months meant jail time or death. Many people in the automation environment would be terrified to quit no matter the wages and conditions.
 
I, for one, welcome our robot overlords and look forward to the day where I may live from my Minimum Standard government issues stipend.
 
I think it might be time to rethink why we work.

Societies fall when they become unable to fix the problems they created by solving other problems that they created.
If 25% of the workforce becomes unemployed, or "free", that is a large number of potential manpower to throw at problems to try and solve them, rather than letting them rot away doing nothing.
They will not be doing nothing, but they will not likely be put to any sort of meaningful endeavors. Crime will be what those idle hands get to.

While I know, no one really likes to talk about population resets, they do seem to be the pattern of our species. Usually via plague or war.
 
OK but how does that matter or is relevant to the article or the general trends involving automation at all?

Again, I gave manufacturing as an example of an industry that didn't implode due to automation. That is its relevance. It has been dealing with automation for years.


So its great for the companies that own the factories but terrible for workers and the towns that were centered around these industries. Just look at the Rust Belt or what has happened to upstate NY. Those areas have been devastated economically and never recovered.

No, it was bad for everyone. Something else happened to these areas. The Rust Belt for one, was an oligopoly. The companies and the worker unions lobbied heavily to avoid competition.They had little to no incentive to innovate (in this case automation would be the innovation) and became much less attractive as jobs for people. Better opportunities arose in other industries/places, and people left. That's why the towns and areas became devastated. Read up on it.
 
Like how the author makes 25% no big deal. That's a F ton of lost jobs. That will create new ghost towns

You're just supposed to take it. If you aren't a highly educated person working to support the technocracy on the coasts you're just a deplorable and, frankly, don't deserve anything.
 
So much bad info being passed around as fact in this thread, it's funny and frightening at the same time. Most of it is being pushed by those advocating a UBI, cause you know welfare has inspired people to try harder..... at finding ways to exploit the system.
 
Again, I gave manufacturing as an example of an industry that didn't implode due to automation.
Which again was due to past conditions aren't repeating themselves.

You're effectively ignoring what the new tech will do and just saying the future will repeat itself perfectly.

It doesn't work like that.

No, it was bad for everyone.
Nope. Rich people were fine. It was everyone else that got screwed.

That article is some hilarious neolib propaganda that essentially blames the victim here, no wonder your thinking is so messed up if that is what you're going by. Decisions to automate or outsource the factories had nothing to do with the labor there. They weren't even allowed in on the decision making process. That was all the factory owners who wanted to increase profits.

Most of it is being pushed by those advocating a UBI, cause you know welfare has inspired people to try harder..... at finding ways to exploit the system.
Hahahaha a few people exploiting the welfare system and costing possibly billions extra is nothing compared to the trillions the bankers/Wall St guys get.

Hell recently the rich got a trillion dollar tax cut that they pocketed as stock buy backs and all the taxpayers got out of it was a direct trillion dollar increase in national debt.

You don't actually care about who exploits the system at all.
 
Listen man, don't do that. I don't denigrate your reasons or ideas, do me the same favor. If you want to start throwing shit around you can do that all by yourself. Fact is I showed you why I said the things I have. You on the other hand have not. Just because you keep saying I'm wrong doesn't make it so. Keep living in your world and watching that sky above about to drop any second now..
 
So what you are suggesting is that shareholders will want their corporate profits severely taxed in order to be redistributed to the general populace so they can buy their product to increase corporate profits... Right. Chicken before egg scenario. Those profits coming from the taxes can't be exponential increases shareholders are looking for unless the tax revenue is exponentially increasing which decreases profits which is what you said they wanted to avoid by taxation.

Either way, you said taxation well become very popular when 25 percent of the population has no job. However that 25 percent of the population will also likely be the lowest IQ portion as they'll have the most trouble adjusting to rapidly changing job demands.

No, what i'm saying is that they will not get all of that growth from automation, because doing so will mean virtually NOBODY can buy the product. If people can't get a job, they can't buy the widgets. if they can't buy the widgets, then all that savings from automation is irrelevant.

And if you think white collar jobs won't be automated out of existence, then you're nuts. Blue collar manufacturing jobs have been going away for 30+ years. We will get to a point where most book keeping jobs will go bye bye and I wouldnt' be surprised if some accounting jobs go away too. As others have pointed out, AI is already pretty good at diagnosing some medical issues and that will only get better.

Maybe people will just migrate to something else, but I do believe that AI will replace a lot (and possibly most) non-creative jobs. I can imagine even a lot of coding jobs going away at some point.
 
Wait for the lawyers and doctors to be replaced by the tens of thousands and supported by a few hundred IT people to keep the AI online.

I'm 34 and work in IT. Desktop and server support, VMware, storage, kind of Jack of all trades. I'm kind of afraid of what automation can do the white collar jobs in my field over the next 30 years.

IMHO, replacing lawyer would be a good thing.

As for IT, I'm basically doing the same thing, everything from desktops, servers, Exchange, Firewalls, networking, and even the phone system.

Not worried about being replaced by automation. If I left they, they would probably have to hire 2-3 people to replace me. :p
 
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