Future jobs

[Mondo]

Or the lack of them... scary for our kids and their's

 

[xcarguy]

. . . . . . . :ack::willy_nilly:

[rx7locost]

OK. That video was depressing. At some time in the future, I won't even get to drive my Seven? Some BOT will be doing it for me?

 

No thanks!

 

Oh wait, instead of building fun cars, we can all be building our own DIY version of the BOT. "How to build a Stig-BOT for 250 million pounds Sterling - and race it" I'm all in now!

[slngsht]

Unlike the horse, humans will adapt and invent. Except those looking for a "living wage" working a minimum wage job for a career.

 

What is the alternative?

[xcarguy]

. . . . . What is the alternative?

 

Newtons' law (lessness). :jester:

[powderbrake]

It proves once again, the key to a job is more education. Somebody has to be the guy who invents, buys, or directs these machines...... be that guy.

[NVP66S]

It proves once again, the key to a job is more education. Somebody has to be the guy who invents, buys, or directs these machines...... be that guy.

 

I absolutely agree with your second sentence. As for the first, some education is necessary, but that's not the sole determinant. The least effective person in my company has a PhD. One of my jobs is interviewing prospective engineers, and it's gonna be a looong time before *that* job is replaced by a machine. I screen for creativity, and that's also something machines are not suited for. Unfortunately, it's also something the schools don't teach.

[slomove]

Unlike the horse, humans will adapt and invent. Except those looking for a "living wage" working a minimum wage job for a career.

 

What is the alternative?

 

Honestly, I don't know what the alternative is. But I guess we need one. And I kind of feel bad that I am personally contributing to the problem. As Operations Manager it is MY job to save cost and make the company more profitable and accordingly we put in some automation (mechanical/handling, or or just more computerized functions) as well as just better and more effective processes that reduces labor in all areas. The company (electromechanical measurement equipment) has doubled in output since the 90s but still the same number of employees. At least we are still in the US and did not move offshore.

 

The call for better education, while essential for the country , may help but will not solve the problem of making people redundant. Some people just don't have it to be an engineer or any other of the fabulous new technology jobs without their own fault or being lazy. Some of the people whose jobs are lost may have the smarts but are too old to be employable after a career change (say...40). I am not talking about the people who beat the odds but the majority.

 

So, if there is nothing left for them to work what are they supposed to do? Obviously they could start a criminal career or go on welfare or shoot themselves. And guess what, that is what you can see happening. For the rest of the simpler work that is still done by humans, the market price drops to below a minimum to exist and since we don't usually let people starve, these folks need public assistance, too.

 

As mentioned in the beginning, I have no clue how to fix this. But I see a growing problem that we undo all the improvements of fairness and equitability of the last 100 years.

[coffee break]

In the last century in the US of A after WWII, manufacturing was king. There was pent up demand for consumer goods and cars. Europe and Japan could not supply the goods, the majority of their factories had been destroyed (thanks to US and British bombers). Manufacturing jobs paid well so the workers could afford what they were making. That lasted for a little while.

 

As manufacturing has become more automated, the person becomes less important and integral. As automation increases, the volume of goods increases to generate a good ROI. With advances in transportation, goods can be sent anywhere, so they can be made, anywhere. So, when cheap labor is all you need, that's where you go to manufacture.

 

Of course there other costs that may or may not come to bear, minimum wage, clean air & water standards, health & safety laws, all those things that keep manufacturing from killing or poisoning the workers.

 

In some ways, we modern people may have become victims of our own success.

[slngsht]

Honestly, I don't know what the alternative is. But I guess we need one. And I kind of feel bad that I am personally contributing to the problem. As Operations Manager it is MY job to save cost and make the company more profitable and accordingly we put in some automation (mechanical/handling, or or just more computerized functions) as well as just better and more effective processes that reduces labor in all areas. The company (electromechanical measurement equipment) has doubled in output since the 90s but still the same number of employees. At least we are still in the US and did not move offshore.

 

The call for better education, while essential for the country , may help but will not solve the problem of making people redundant. Some people just don't have it to be an engineer or any other of the fabulous new technology jobs without their own fault or being lazy. Some of the people whose jobs are lost may have the smarts but are too old to be employable after a career change (say...40). I am not talking about the people who beat the odds but the majority.

 

So, if there is nothing left for them to work what are they supposed to do? Obviously they could start a criminal career or go on welfare or shoot themselves. And guess what, that is what you can see happening. For the rest of the simpler work that is still done by humans, the market price drops to below a minimum to exist and since we don't usually let people starve, these folks need public assistance, too.

 

As mentioned in the beginning, I have no clue how to fix this. But I see a growing problem that we undo all the improvements of fairness and equitability of the last 100 years.

 

Well, what would you do if you were out of a job and couldn't land somewhere doing what you're comfortable with? You'd adapt, right? Learn something new, take a pay cut, do something else and climb again. This is not a hypothetical for me - i've lived it twice.

 

I don't believe I'm any better than anyone else. It is not my job to solve other people's problem, with the exception of the disabled, elderly - people who are truly unable to take care of themselves.

 

It is perfectly natural for someone who used to be successful at making a living in a certain field to be out of work due to innovation or market forces - no fault of their own. The more society is expected to protect their job, the worse off we all are. Same goes for minimum wage. The idea of minimum wage jobs becoming a career is ridiculous. Those are supposed to be undesirable jobs to people with work experience. Starter jobs.

 

Anytime you find yourself needing to "protect" a job sector, by definition you're doing something that you're not very efficient at (some other country or technology is doing it better). Everyone is better off by not protecting their uncompetitive sectors. It's simple logic.

 

There is only one "fix" . remove barriers to market force and let the market sort it out. Fiddling with the market does not solve any problem. It just shifts problems from one part of the economy to another, and in the process creates a bigger central authority - one that can be bought, lobbied, etc... The example is right in front of us now.

[slngsht]

It proves once again, the key to a job is more education. Somebody has to be the guy who invents, buys, or directs these machines...... be that guy.

more importantly, don't put policies in place that makes it very very difficult to be that guy.

[NVP66S]

This is an old discussion. The industrial revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries saw lots of these stories. Cobblers were going out of business because of shoe making machinery. Farm hands were being put out of work by traction machines. The word sabotage comes from workers throwing their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machinery. But it all came with a higher standard of living for everyone in those cultures.

 

Are we seeing something fundamentally different now? I honestly don't know. My sister-in-law was a manager for Burroughs Electrodata, a company that couldn't compete. After she laid off 300 employees, she couldn't take the stress and laid herself off. Now she has a landscaping company with 2 employees. I see that as the purest form of capitalism. The world frankly doesn't need the products that company made, so why prop it up? There's an example of a potentially interesting job that doesn't require much education and is hard for robots to do.... creative landscaping. Not cutting grass, but working with an architect to present a landscape plan. Lots of similar examples.

 

But I sure wish an artificial intelligence would tell me why the MegaSquirt quit in my Westfield but the reinstalled factory ECU works fine...:banghead:

[Manshoon11]

Same old union tripe......

 

 

A voice from from decades past sheds some light.

 

 

 

Economics in One Lesson

 

by Henry Hazlitt

 

The Lesson Applied

 

The Fetish of Full Employment

 

 

THE ECONOMIC GOAL of any nation, as of any individual, is to get the greatest results with the least effort. The whole economic progress of mankind has consisted in getting more production with the same labor. It is for this reason that men began putting burdens on the backs of mules instead of on their own; that they went on to invent the wheel and the wagon, the railroad and the motor truck. It is for this reason that men used their ingenuity to develop a hundred thousand labor-saving inventions.

All this is so elementary that one would blush to state it if it were not being constantly forgotten by those who coin and circulate the new slogans. Translated into national terms, this first principle means that our real objective is to maximize production. In doing this, full employment—that is, the absence of involuntary idleness—becomes a necessary byproduct. But production is the end, employment merely the means. We cannot continuously have the fullest production without full employment. But we can very easily have full employment without full production.

Primitive tribes are naked, and wretchedly fed and housed, but they do not suffer from unemployment. China and India are incomparably poorer than ourselves, but the main trouble from which they suffer is primitive production methods (which are both a cause and a consequence of a shortage of capital) and not unemployment. Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself. Hitler provided full employment with a huge armament program. World War II provided full employment for every nation involved. The slave labor in Germany had full employment. Prisons and chain gangs have full employment. Coercion can always provide full employment.

Yet our legislators do not present Full Production bills in Congress but Full Employment bills. Even committees of businessmen recommend “a President’s Commission on Full Employment,” not on Full Production, or even on Full Employment and Full Production. Everywhere the means is erected into the end, and the end itself is forgotten.

Wages and employment are discussed as if they had no relation to productivity and output. On the assumption that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done, the conclusion is drawn that a thirty-hour week will provide more jobs and will therefore be preferable to a forty-hour week. A hundred make-work practices of labor unions are confusedly tolerated. When a Petrillo threatens to put a radio station out of business unless it employs twice as many musicians as it needs, he is supported by part of the public because he is after all merely trying to create jobs. When we had our WPA, it was considered a mark of genius for the administrators to think of projects that employed the largest number of men in relation to the value of the work performed—in other words, in which labor was least efficient.

It would be far better, if that were the choice—which it isn’t—to have maximum production with part of the population supported in idleness by undisguised relief than to provide “full employment” by so many forms of disguised make-work that production is disorganized. The progress of civilization has meant the reduction of employment, not its increase. It is because we have become increasingly wealthy as a nation that we have been able virtually to eliminate child labor, to remove the necessity of work for many of the aged and to make it unnecessary for millions of women to take jobs. A much smaller proportion of the American population needs to work than that, say, of China or of Russia. The real question is not how many millions of jobs there will be in America ten years from now, but how much shall we produce, and what, in consequence, will be our standard of living? The problem of distribution on which all the stress is being put today, is after all more easily solved the more there is to distribute.

We can clarify our thinking if we put our chief emphasis where it belongs—on policies that will maximize production.

 

 

 

 

 

Think about it.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iJVSVSOhzC0/T-9KXCaVurI/AAAAAAAAAWc/oZ-KGI7skoo/s1600/US+employment+by+sector+1840-2010.png

[NVP66S]

I hadn't seen that before. Thanks for sharing. There was a new buzz slogan going around when I entered the 'real' workforce. It was 'work smarter, not harder'. That slogan always pissed me off because it insinuated that I was not already working smart. So I coined a derivative "Do less work. Get more done.'

[Mondo]

I'm sorry but we can't all be entrepreneurs... someone has to buy the product/service. Saying the answer is more education is incorrect because, as the video demonstrates, computers are learning faster than what is being taught. Or better said, it's getting easier to teach a computer than a person.

The real question is what do we do when there is not enough demand for labor (including management)? Can't keep cutting wages due to abundant workers; who's going to buy products? Technology is advancing at an ever increasing rate. I see the have/have nots gap increasing. Some type of huge dynamic social change is going to have to occur. This is not the same as previous advancements. It probably won't affect most of us much but the next generation is in for quite a change.

[Manshoon11]

I'm sorry but we can't all be entrepreneurs... someone has to buy the product/service. Saying the answer is more education is incorrect because, as the video demonstrates, computers are learning faster than what is being taught. Or better said, it's getting easier to teach a computer than a person.

The real question is what do we do when there is not enough demand for labor (including management)? Can't keep cutting wages due to abundant workers; who's going to buy products? Technology is advancing at an ever increasing rate. I see the have/have nots gap increasing. Some type of huge dynamic social change is going to have to occur. This is not the same as previous advancements. It probably won't affect most of us much but the next generation is in for quite a change.

 

This is what I ask every one who argues a point along those lines. Do you or do you not want to go back to the economy of the past when things were supposedly more fair and wages were supposedly more in line with productivity?

 

We must all understand that we have insufficient information to answer all of these questions. And it becomes abundantly clear when we talk about the policy solutions to cure this supposed problem.

 

So we hand over the reigns to politicians? Well sure why not, they are advised by "the economists". Few ever ask which economists. Of which persuasion?

 

Every one learn this and learn this quick. You don't know anything about economics. There are forces at work that no one understands. This is not an attack on any one. It is a humbling lesson though. If you don't believe me, then just put yourself in the shoes of someone living in centuries past. Consider all of the technological improvements coming on board. Consider that most of the population was involved in some type of agricultural work. In a very real sense, all of their livelihoods was threatened. But the forces at work defied the prognostications. The increased productivity improved our lives. Demand didn't collapse. Our future has something in store for us which no one can fathom. I say we should embrace it. In saying that one must consider that their particular employment may become obsolete. Prepare now.

[NVP66S]

I'm sorry but we can't all be entrepreneurs... someone has to buy the product/service.

 

Let's take one example that's relevant to our cars, detailing. Current state-of-the-art in car detailing is automatic car washes. They remove the average dirt and add scratches. Nothing on the inside because cars are too different there. Let's stipulate that in the future it becomes possible to build a robot that does a far better job. Let's also stipulate that robot costs 1 million dollars. Will any individual or organization buy that piece of capital equipment and start a car detailing business with it? Nope. The return on investment won't be there. So you can either be an entrepreneur and invest $500 and start a car detailing business, or you can go find someone else who already did that and ask for a job detailing cars.

 

That's a job that will likely never be taken by automation, and it has a reasonable degree of job satisfaction, and it requires very little education. I argue that there will always be enough of this kind of job, and I'm not talking about Jim Croche's 'Workin' at the Car Wash Blues'.

 

Now I'll take the opposite argument and make the generalization (always incorrect) that technology is making it easier to be an entrepreneur. My ex-wife was an artist. She sold her work to galleries and at craft shows. She hated the business side of being self-employed. Then, in the 1980s, along came personal computers and she started doing the drudgework on the computer. After that, she got to spend less time doing the government required paperwork and more time doing her art. But closer to the subject thread, a few of her friends were sufficiently successful to hire help. Wedging the clay (I'm talking pottery now), stacking and firing the kiln, etc.

[slngsht]

I'm sorry but we can't all be entrepreneurs... someone has to buy the product/service. Saying the answer is more education is incorrect because, as the video demonstrates, computers are learning faster than what is being taught. Or better said, it's getting easier to teach a computer than a person.

The real question is what do we do when there is not enough demand for labor (including management)? Can't keep cutting wages due to abundant workers; who's going to buy products? Technology is advancing at an ever increasing rate. I see the have/have nots gap increasing. Some type of huge dynamic social change is going to have to occur. This is not the same as previous advancements. It probably won't affect most of us much but the next generation is in for quite a change.

 

Despite what the video shows, evidence right before our eyes shows that advancement in technology has not resulted in net loss of jobs or shortage of things to do.

 

It is exactly the same as the last generation of changes and the one before that. We will be replacing one set of problems with another. The typewriter repair man will have to find something else to do - through no fault of his own, and there will be someone starting a business replacing cracked iPhone screens.

 

If we happen to perfect the art of making self replicating machines, that market will be insanely competitive. It will drive the need for technical innovations in energy storage and many other fields that will be huge job generators. There will be whole new companies who will join the "have's".

 

The gap between the haves and the have nots - is it bigger today because the have nots have a lower standard of living than 200 years ago? 500 years ago?

 

There are countries in the world where the gap isn't so great. Are our have nots willing to move to other countries so they'll be closer to the haves? I'm betting not.

 

The focus should be on growing the pie, not debating about how to split it.

[Mondo]

I agree on growing the pile... and yes, we don't have crystal balls to know the future. But it doesn't take a professional economist to understand that it's not just manual, low skill jobs that are disappearing anymore. And actually, evidence does show the net loss of middle income jobs; with technology playing an ever increasing role. Individual examples of career changes expressed here would be hard to replicate on a mass scale (equal to the jobs being eliminated).

I can also see "whole new companies" appearing for new things.... but that wont include lots of employees; quite the contrary. Each new company will use technology to reduce the amount of employees necessary.

Don't get me wrong. I love technology and look forward to advances that make our lives easier. I don't suggest "keeping the horse and buggy" or "make work" jobs. I'm just saying that there will come a time that most things will not require human labor and we will have to recognize it's not a matter of education or people being too lazy to change that will prevent employment.

The models of the past will not apply.

Edited September 13, 2014 by Mondo

[slngsht]

I agree on growing the pile... and yes, we don't have crystal balls to know the future. But it doesn't take a professional economist to understand that it's not just manual, low skill jobs that are disappearing anymore. And actually, evidence does show the net loss of middle income jobs; with technology playing an ever increasing role. Individual examples of career changes expressed here would be hard to replicate on a mass scale (equal to the jobs being eliminated).

I can also see "whole new companies" appearing for new things.... but that wont include lots of employees; quite the contrary. Each new company will use technology to reduce the amount of employees necessary.

Don't get me wrong. I love technology and look forward to advances that make our lives easier. I don't suggest "keeping the horse and buggy" or "make work" jobs. I'm just saying that there will come a time that most things will not require human labor and we will have to recognize it's not a matter of education or people being too lazy to change that will prevent employment.

The models of the past will not apply.

I agree time will tell. I just don't see it that way. It seems to me that the more we innovate, the more we will create new problems that must be overcome. And don't get me wrong, I long for just cutting loose from the rat race and living in the mountains.

 

"evidence does show the net loss of middle income jobs"