The Boy Who Cried Robot: A World Without Work

[jimmy olsen]

We really need to figure this out and quick, or way crazier folks than Trump are going to be elected in the first world.

http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/careers/the-inconceivable-truth-our-jobs-are-not-coming-back/news-story/b920569e34edbb9c9a618a17175a95bb

The inconceivable truth: our jobs are not coming back

November 23, 2016  6:53am

MILLIONS of jobs are about to disappear, and we have no idea how to replace them.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said last week that there will be winners and losers from the economic reform necessary to keep Australia competitive.

What he didn't say, what everyone talking about the unrest of the working and middle classes sweeping Trump, Brexit and One Nation into the political forefront aren't saying, is all the jobs that once kept people in safe employment are gone. And not only are they not coming back, millions more are going to go in the next few years.

The latest report from CEDA states that "40 per cent of Australian jobs that exist today, have a moderate to high likelihood of disappearing in the next 10 to 15 years". And it's not only unskilled jobs we're losing.

A MICRO EXAMPLE OF A MACRO PROBLEM

Two of my friends just quit their nice, stable jobs and bought a bar. Neither of them have ever worked in a bar before and, on the surface, this seems like a mad thing for safely employed professionals to do.

Or it would, if there was any such thing as safe employment.

They're not buying a cash register for the bar, they're buying a point of sale system. It tracks every drink sold, tells them which ones are the most profitable and at what time of day they sell best. It can order in new stock when they're running low, prepare their BAS every quarter, and spit out everything they need to do their tax return.

So, they don't need a bookkeeper, they could probably get by without an accountant, and taking all that admin time out of their day means they can cut down on bar staff.

It's just one tiny bar, and they've dropped three or four jobs with a simple iPad app.

THE JOBS THAT WILL BE NO LONGER

Uber is investing in driverless technology and Amazon is already experimenting with drone delivery. Within a very short time, the thousands of Australians employed to drive taxis, delivery vans, trucks and trains, will become redundant.

Foxcon, tech suppliers to Apple and Samsung, replaced 60,000 workers with robots earlier this year, and that's just in one factory.

Two years ago, an American company produced a machine that can make 360 hamburgers an hour, finely modified to each customer's requirements. The fast food industry employs more than 150,000 people in Australia, and we don't need them anymore.

And it's not just what we used to think of as unskilled work being supplanted by robots.

A hospital in California has replaced all their pharmacists with machines, which work faster and more accurately than humans.

IBM's supercomputer, Watson, famous for beating a human Jeopardy champion, is now a doctor. It doesn't get tired, forget things, or mistakes because of bias or over confidence. It doesn't need to spend years learning, and it doesn't have to specialise in only one medical field. It's cheap to replicate, and it can operate anywhere in the world.

Thousands of lawyers, accountants, paralegals and mortgage officers, once the heartland of the comfortable middle class, have lost their jobs to robots that work more efficiently and far more cheaply.

Even journalists are not immune. Associated Press has robots writing sports reports and finance updates for mainstream press right now. And most of us probably couldn't tell the article we're reading was written by a computer.

CAPITALISM IS STARTING TO DEFEAT ITSELF

We could argue that people don't want all their daily interactions with people replaced by robots, and this is true to some extent. It's what's future proofing my friends at the bar, people in a tight-knit community want to walk into their local and be greeted by someone who knows their name, what they drink, and can give them a friendly ribbing about their football team's loss.

They don't go there to press a button and be served by a computer.

But human beings are enormously adaptable. The first iPhone was released less than 10 years ago, it's now so ubiquitous that we panic when we leave the house without more computing power in our back pocket than was used to send Neil Armstrong to the moon.

The point of capitalism is to be innovative with ideas, and to increase the profitability of selling those ideas.

Human labour is expensive, inefficient and prone to error. Replacing humans with automated processes makes perfect sense in a capitalism model, but we've reached the tipping point now, and capitalism is starting to defeat itself.

The problem is not convincing people to accept robots doing jobs once done by humans, we've already done that. When the ATM is broken and we have to go deal with a human bank teller, it's not getting better service, it's annoying and inconvenient.

The problem is how we move money around the economy if we no longer need to give it to people in exchange for time and skill.

To put it another way, if you replace all the human jobs with robots, how do humans obtain money to pay for the things robots make and do?

The reason politicians and corporate leaders are not talking about this question is that no one has an answer yet.

The theory of a basic income, where corporations that own the robots give money to governments to distribute to the populace so they can pay for goods and services, has been touted about for a while.

And while it's a nice idea (elegantly explored in Tim Dunlop's book, Why the Future is Workless) it would require a radical change in how we understand our lives, our work and our economies.

But someone is going to have to come up with something soon, because the pace of change is only increasing, and ignoring a problem never makes it go away. Millions of people who never expected to be poor are about to lose their jobs, and they are demanding to know how they are going to continue to live the lifestyle they've been taught is normal when having a stable job is no longer normal, or even possible.

For now, the only solution I can come up with is to head down to my local, have a glass of wine, and chat to my bartender about the imminent end of the world.

[jimmy olsen]

DOOM

https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU

[Valmy]

Other: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36443512

Go Switzerland!

The US would need 9,811,200,000,000 a year to pay 2,555 a month to everyone here.

Don't worry. We will put all of Tim's robots to work making it for us.

[Ideologue]

But human beings are enormously adaptable. The first iPhone was released less than 10 years ago, it's now so ubiquitous that we panic when we leave the house without more computing power in our back pocket than was used to send Neil Armstrong to the moon.

Untrue.  As I left the house today, I realized about thirty seconds into my run that I'd left my phone, but I didn't care, because I figured the chances of getting a call were pretty slim, what with the robots having taken all of the jobs I applied to last week.

[The Brain]

Buy a robot and be a stay-at-home owner.

[Monoriu]

So far I am disappointed at the speed of restaurant automation.  I have only been to maybe two mainland Chinese restaurants where they used ipads for ordering food.  I guess too many people just don't want to spend time studying the menu and making decisions on food choice.  Lots of people just sit down, focus on the talking, and expect the waiters to pick their food. 

[Valmy]

Amazon is opening that store in Oregon where you go in, get your shit, and computers see you take it and then charge you on the way out automatically. No checkout or human interaction required. I thought of you Mono.

[Monoriu]

Amazon is opening that store in Oregon where you go in, get your shit, and computers see you take it and then charge you on the way out automatically. No checkout or human interaction required. I thought of you Mono.

I read that in the news too.  What I don't understand is, what if I take something from the shelf, then change my mind and decide I don't want it any more? 

But otherwise I think this is a great idea.  I hate the long queues at the cashier counters.  Self-scanning the goods doesn't work very well because it actually takes some skill to do that speedily.  A tiny but material percentage of goods can't be scanned at all. 

[Razgovory]

I read that in the news too.  What I don't understand is, what if I take something from the shelf, then change my mind and decide I don't want it any more? 

Metal snakes crawl out of the ground and bite you.

[DGuller]

I read that in the news too.  What I don't understand is, what if I take something from the shelf, then change my mind and decide I don't want it any more? 

Metal snakes crawl out of the ground and bite you.

That's actually not true.

[Monoriu]

I think people worry too much.  Robots will improve human welfare immensely.  Doctors who get the diagnosis rught.  Drivers that get into accidents less often.  Restaurant ordering systems that are ready all the time instead of waiters who always too busy, delivery robots that actually deliver stuff rather than lying about deliveries that didn't make.  The world will be a better place.

[Razgovory]

I read that in the news too.  What I don't understand is, what if I take something from the shelf, then change my mind and decide I don't want it any more? 

Metal snakes crawl out of the ground and bite you.

That's actually not true.

Damn Berkut, you caught me.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I think people worry too much.  Robots will improve human welfare immensely.  Doctors who get the diagnosis rught.  Drivers that get into accidents less often.  Restaurant ordering systems that are ready all the time instead of waiters who always too busy, delivery robots that actually deliver stuff rather than lying about deliveries that didn't make.  The world will be a better place.

Yes, it will be a massive improvement in many ways.

In terms of policy I think we need to look at education and re-training. Many jobs will be lost and the redundant workforce will not match the new jobs created very well. There needs to be a generosity of spirit towards those who are retraining and an acceptance that, say, a 45-year-old, might go back to college and receive public support whilst gaining new skills.

[Monoriu]

Yeah I wouldn't mind setting up some sort of basic income that everybody gets if there are massive job losses due to automation.  This may actually be cheaper to run than a whole bunch of welfare and assistance schemes offered by different departments with different rules. 

[Ideologue]

I think people worry too much.  Robots will improve human welfare immensely.  Doctors who get the diagnosis rught.  Drivers that get into accidents less often.  Restaurant ordering systems that are ready all the time instead of waiters who always too busy, delivery robots that actually deliver stuff rather than lying about deliveries that didn't make.  The world will be a better place.

Yes, it will be a massive improvement in many ways.

In terms of policy I think we need to look at education and re-training. Many jobs will be lost and the redundant workforce will not match the new jobs created very well. There needs to be a generosity of spirit towards those who are retraining and an acceptance that, say, a 45-year-old, might go back to college and receive public support whilst gaining new skills.

Please provide a list of useful skills in an automated economy.  Bonus points if they're skills you can plausibly learn in adulthood.