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Automation and the changing face of our economy


pyrohornIII

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7 hours ago, OatmealRaisinCookie said:

Maybe because I'm not very smart, but I can't wrap my mind around a UBI.

Are we basically stating that we are going to have a ton of people we should feel sorry for because we've created a world where they can't do anything to add value, so we should just pay a bare minimum to feed and clothe and house them so they don't revolt and the world devolves into hypothetical chaos?

Sounds like the root cause then is overpopulation?

 

It doesn't have anything to do with feeling sorry for someone, it is for the basic construct of society.

There's also lots of value added by people other than just economic. This is one area the world has actually devolved. We used to be much better at being patrons of music, art and myriad other things.

As I said previously, this is actually a good thing, and the apotheosis of what human existence could be. People can be freed from menial existence to pursue more complete lives.

And I say all this as an arch-Capitalist. Capitalism is the only vehicle that could have delivered us here.

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11 minutes ago, G650 said:

 

It doesn't have anything to do with feeling sorry for someone, it is for the basic construct of society.

There's also lots of value added by people other than just economic. This is one area the world has actually devolved. We used to be much better at being patrons of music, art and myriad other things.

As I said previously, this is actually a good thing, and the apotheosis of what human existence could be. People can be freed from menial existence to pursue more complete lives.

And I say all this as an arch-Capitalist. Capitalism is the only vehicle that could have delivered us here.

I like the idea of being free to worry about existing to do what you love, the only thing is the world would not have any lawyers left, just millions of bad writers trying to write best selling thrillers.

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9 hours ago, OatmealRaisinCookie said:

The financial industry has already been affected. BFSI's were adopting automation when most of us had no idea what it was, 5, 6, 7 years ago. Your JPMorgan Chase, Citigroups, BOFA's, Goldman's are all very mature in their automation practices already. I lived it and saw it, when I was in NJ on the b-team desk for a firm, for a bit of time.

Oh I understand that, I mean more on a macro level to the industry itself.  I mean as long as we are focused on replacing layers that add little or no value, the financial industry seems like the mother lode.

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12 hours ago, Celery Man said:

having $50-100k+ in debt right when you enter the working world (maybe to a job that isn't paying particularly well and even that was difficult to get, as many people who graduated in 08-09 did) instead of just gradually sinking into overwhelming debt is more shocking to the system.  I think the younger millennials and gen y or whatever is next are maybe a little more aware.

 Wait until they figure out they dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fackin education they coulda' got for a dollah fifty in late charges at the public library.

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4 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

 Wait until they figure out they dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fackin education they coulda' got for a dollah fifty in late charges at the public library.

You mean that place where homeless people masturbate and shit? 

Edited by Js1
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One real step to deal with automation is a 16-hour work week. (Either 2 8-hour days or 4 4-hour days)

In 2014: Wages were at 109% of 1973 levels while productivity (measured in terms of income generated per worker hour) is at 239% of 1973 levels. The rising tide doesn't lift all boats, it only lifts a few.

People need work for their minds. They don't need grinding horror jobs in retail. They don't need soul-crushing and family-destroying hours, but they need things to do and a purpose. They need something to take pride in. I'm not sure how much Cookie is worth responding to anymore, but the idea that people will all start writing novels is hilariously stupid. Sure, a tiny percentage of the population will decide to become artisinal bong makers, but what people will do is (1) raise families, (2) upkeep their homes/neighborhoods, and (3) start small side businesses.

Get the moms out from behind the counter and into the homes and streets with their kids.

What many of us are really dealing with is nothing more than a failure of imagination. We see the world and economy as constituted right now and think, "Well this is basically the way it MUST be."

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4 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

 They need something to take pride in.

This is literally the stupidest line of reasoning ever. The whole "we need jurbs for our dignity" is a load of nonsense.

Dignity comes from within. The reason people have no self worth is because they lead worthless fucking lives. It has nothing to do with their job.

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8 minutes ago, G650 said:

This is literally the stupidest line of reasoning ever. The whole "we need jurbs for our dignity" is a load of nonsense.

Dignity comes from within. The reason people have no self worth is because they lead worthless fucking lives. It has nothing to do with their job.

Eh, this is kind of true. Dignity does come from within however, for some, having a job gives people purpose and a sense they are contributing to something greater than themselves.  That has value.

However, in the grand scheme of things, all lives are equally worthless.

 

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9 hours ago, OatmealRaisinCookie said:

McKinsey (I know, I know, gross! strategy consulting) talks about the idea of "failure demand" which is an interesting concept, which basically speaks to how when people make errors (in compliance or just human errors) the work created to fix the missteps is added somewhere and on to some human's existing workload (and a lot of times exponentially in a bullwhip effect) and that is what is known as failure demand. That, along with the idea that with the digital transformation and evolution every G2000 has had to engage in, the same amount of people are tasked with doing an ever increasing workload that is essentially the 21st equivalent of pushing paper (but data). The idea is to automate that stuff (and maybe not backfill some of the lowest of the low skill positions), at least from my vantage point.

The broader discussion here is very interesting and obviously goes much farther than what I think of from my little worldview (trying to bring modern devops practices to a software organization) when I hear "automation".  Which is essentially getting rid of the digital paper pushing you refer to (which is a pretty apt description).  Computers are good at executing steps/sequences of actions, and with the tools that exist there's less and less reason to have a group of humans spending time (and fucking up) manually performing a process that can be scripted out (and can be scripted out to be adaptable and rigorous).  On top of that, first with virtualization and now with the various cloud platforms, digital infrastructure is increasingly (almost completely) abstracted from physical hardware and able to be managed as code.  Or abstracted from even the idea of a "computer" as a box that exists and does things for you.  Gilfoyle tending to Anton like an overworked engine during the pee drinking video episode of Silicon Valley - less of that and more of managing how your system scales automatically to meet demand and maintain performance while also keeping your aws/azure/etc bill from getting unwieldy.  Not a handful of large and disruptive deployments a year that cause fires to pop up everywhere, but thousands of deployments a day that are seamless and invisible to the end user.  Performing this type of "transformation" can be years of work even if you were able to focus only on doing that thing, and it's not like the world stays still or the industry ceases to evolve.  In my very small set of experience working on this kind of thing, a lot of people were really able to elevate their position and a few people who couldn't or wouldn't either moved on to doing what they used to do in other orgs, or moving from operations to support.  And the larger group is able to do more and more things, with the overhead of digital paper pushing and managing boxes of compute gradually coming down.

But I think this discussion is a lot larger than what automation means to me, and it's interesting to see how it relates to things like offshore drilling (or data science?).

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13 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

One real step to deal with automation is a 16-hour work week. (Either 2 8-hour days or 4 4-hour days)

In 2014: Wages were at 109% of 1973 levels while productivity (measured in terms of income generated per worker hour) is at 239% of 1973 levels. The rising tide doesn't lift all boats, it only lifts a few.

People need work for their minds. They don't need grinding horror jobs in retail. They don't need soul-crushing and family-destroying hours, but they need things to do and a purpose. They need something to take pride in. I'm not sure how much Cookie is worth responding to anymore, but the idea that people will all start writing novels is hilariously stupid. Sure, a tiny percentage of the population will decide to become artisinal bong makers, but what people will do is (1) raise families, (2) upkeep their homes/neighborhoods, and (3) start small side businesses.

Get the moms out from behind the counter and into the homes and streets with their kids.

What many of us are really dealing with is nothing more than a failure of imagination. We see the world and economy as constituted right now and think, "Well this is basically the way it MUST be."

That was just a joke about how every lawyer I have ever known (and probably same for y’all) wishes they could make the same living doing something else and always has a side project or idea they are working on to try and get out of lawyering...and they all think they can write well.

Nothing more than an old fashioned joke at the legal professions expense, what used to be a time honored and universal bonding point in America :(

 

 

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9 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

The broader discussion here is very interesting and obviously goes much farther than what I think of from my little worldview (trying to bring modern devops practices to a software organization) when I hear "automation".  Which is essentially getting rid of the digital paper pushing you refer to (which is a pretty apt description).  Computers are good at executing steps/sequences of actions, and with the tools that exist there's less and less reason to have a group of humans spending time (and fucking up) manually performing a process that can be scripted out (and can be scripted out to be adaptable and rigorous).  On top of that, first with virtualization and now with the various cloud platforms, digital infrastructure is increasingly (almost completely) abstracted from physical hardware and able to be managed as code.  Or abstracted from even the idea of a "computer" as a box that exists and does things for you.  Gilfoyle tending to Anton like an overworked engine during the pee drinking video episode of Silicon Valley - less of that and more of managing how your system scales automatically to meet demand and maintain performance while also keeping your aws/azure/etc bill from getting unwieldy.  Not a handful of large and disruptive deployments a year that cause fires to pop up everywhere, but thousands of deployments a day that are seamless and invisible to the end user.  Performing this type of "transformation" can be years of work even if you were able to focus only on doing that thing, and it's not like the world stays still or the industry ceases to evolve.  In my very small set of experience working on this kind of thing, a lot of people were really able to elevate their position and a few people who couldn't or wouldn't either moved on to doing what they used to do in other orgs, or moving from operations to support.  And the larger group is able to do more and more things, with the overhead of digital paper pushing and managing boxes of compute gradually coming down.

But I think this discussion is a lot larger than what automation means to me, and it's interesting to see how it relates to things like offshore drilling (or data science?).

You certainly do have a unique perspective based on your job and being in IT you’ve lived and seen nascent automation more than any of us it seems.

Your description of those who can’t adapt and just go on to doing what’s comfortable in other places until they are eventually extinct is a tale as old as time. In everything, not just the workplace, one must adapt and evolve or risk extinction. (Unless coal miner and political populist props you up for perceived political wins, apparently)

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you guys read history?  i find that shit fascinating 

for hundreds of years people have talked of this type of shit. working less hours and huge amounts of displaced jobs. the only places (in history) where people experienced true pain are places that embraced protectionism

when i started college in 95 we just gotten email mainstream. i barely used the motherfucker. we didn't give a shit. pussy and booze. now we each have our computers all connected and we can communicate and learn 10X faster than previously, and you know what? we still fucking try to. and i still work 10 hour days. 

(and i study this for a living - the technology that is - not the eggplants)

QjZX2n.gif

 

 

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1 hour ago, G650 said:

This is literally the stupidest line of reasoning ever. The whole "we need jurbs for our dignity" is a load of nonsense.

Dignity comes from within. The reason people have no self worth is because they lead worthless fucking lives. It has nothing to do with their job.

I don't know how you look at a post in which someone advocates for a 16-hour work week and take "we need jurbs" as the message unless you're being purposefully disingenuous.

As for the bolded part: No, it doesn't. Dignity is a social concept and cannot be disconnected from that larger social context. That is what "dignity" is. You might be thinking about "pride"?

Human beings are social creatures. That's just how it is. We do not need to work for other people to maintain a sense of purpose and dignity, but we need to do things and we will do things. (To wit, "Sure, a tiny percentage of the population will decide to become artisinal bong makers, but what people will do is (1) raise families, (2) upkeep their homes/neighborhoods, and (3) start small side businesses. ")

The argument from the wage-capitalist perspective is that without the threat of imposed starvation we would all just lie on rocks staring at the sun; I am merely stating that this is nonsense and that personal industry exists outside of an economic/wage system specifically because it's natural for us to give ourselves labor.

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I'm doing my best to slowly kill in-branch banking.  But I'm now left with the worry that what the fuck are we donna do with all that real estate.  Every white guy in a visor and sleeveless patagonia vest in a Tahoe that works in real estate development...I have to stop and ask them---why the fuck do you keep building this shit?  What the fuck are we gonna do with these eyesores in 10 years?  

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1 minute ago, Lobo said:

I'm doing my best to slowly kill in-branch banking.  But I'm now left with the worry that what the fuck are we donna do with all that real estate.  Every white guy in a visor and sleeveless patagonia vest in a Tahoe that works in real estate development...I have to stop and ask them---why the fuck do you keep building this shit?  What the fuck are we gonna do with these eyesores in 10 years?  

To my untrained eye, it actually seems like bank branches are booming. And many of them are trying to offer a "Chase private client" experience for poors.

While I think automation will devastate nearly every job market at some point, I also think that customer desire for human interaction will never go away. McD's can get away with being fully automated, but people go to sit down restaurants to try the chef's food.

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Absolutely, the in-person dining experience was one of the very first business types on our planet.  And it will be one of the last.  

To your point, they are still building bank branches because most banks (particularly CFI's) think that's the way to attract new customers.  If we can take human interaction out of dating though, I'm sure as shit we can take it out of banking.  "The personal touch" is a line of bullshit spewed by community bank presidents in cheap ties to justify their salaries.  Shread your overhead so you can offer me tick up on interest and a tick down on loan fees.  The days of getting your kids dressed up on a Saturday morning to go meet the town banker are over.  Nowadays, if you pull up to the drive-thru (for some bizzare fucking reason) and there's more than 2 cars there, you lose your mind and go figure out mobile banking.  Nobody actually gave a solitary fuck about personal banking (save for the uber wealthy).  That we are social animals was a carefully crafted ruse to keep us from killing each other for food in the streets.  Between my office and the Texas Bankers Association (just three blocks away), there are three closed-down motor banking facilities.  Automation is murdering the in-person banking experience and rightfully so.  They take up so much valuable real estate and such a bloated personnel staff, they have no choice but to fuck you on loan fees.  

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UBI isn't just about feeling sorry for poor people and giving them money.   Alaska pays each resident $1100 each year because of oil revenue.   No matter how you spin it, that is a type of universal basic income.  They've agreed that the natural resources of the state belong to each resident, so each resident gets paid.     Even children receive it.

America could easily decide that the govt will pay each citizen $100 or $1000 or $10,000 each year just for being a citizen.  Obviously that payment would be funded via however the govt collects revenue including income tax.   It would be similar to how a company decides to pay a dividend to each shareholder.   

You most likely would not want to make the UBI so large that people decide to sit at home.   That's not the purpose of it.  UBI could also create the ability to eliminate welfare payments or food stamps including the administration of that system.   In a sense give everyone the cash equivalent of welfare and food stamps.   

 

 

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17 minutes ago, babysdaddy said:

We've got an Alexa in the house and the other day my son asked me if Alexa was a person or a robot.  I told him to ask 'her'.  The response from Alexa was "I don't think I can answer that right now".  It was pretty mind blowing watching my son ask a robot/primitive AI if it was a human or a robot.  

FB is fucked.

Not from this thread, but this is an excellent example of just how complex and convincing many AI/automation stacks are getting. There isn't any non-creative job that is safe from automation. 10 years ago we were struggling to make text-to-speech that was even remotely human, now we have a consumer product that has natural language processing built in and is connected to virtually limitless computational power to process you asking it to play some goofball music or turn off a light.

These small things may not seem impressive, but they're being implemented in such a general way that they can be extended to other fields and be force multipliers. 

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1 hour ago, bad_teammate said:

I don't know how you look at a post in which someone advocates for a 16-hour work week and take "we need jurbs" as the message unless you're being purposefully disingenuous.

As for the bolded part: No, it doesn't. Dignity is a social concept and cannot be disconnected from that larger social context. That is what "dignity" is. You might be thinking about "pride"?

Human beings are social creatures. That's just how it is. We do not need to work for other people to maintain a sense of purpose and dignity, but we need to do things and we will do things. (To wit, "Sure, a tiny percentage of the population will decide to become artisinal bong makers, but what people will do is (1) raise families, (2) upkeep their homes/neighborhoods, and (3) start small side businesses. ")

The argument from the wage-capitalist perspective is that without the threat of imposed starvation we would all just lie on rocks staring at the sun; I am merely stating that this is nonsense and that personal industry exists outside of an economic/wage system specifically because it's natural for us to give ourselves labor.

 

I give you credit where credit is due. You are far and away the best strawman creator on this board. It's not even close.

 

And no, "dignity" is not defined as an externalized process, perhaps my friend you are confusing it with "validation"?

Edited by G650
Punctuation is hard.
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1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

UBI isn't just about feeling sorry for poor people and giving them money.   Alaska pays each resident $1100 each year because of oil revenue.   No matter how you spin it, that is a type of universal basic income.  They've agreed that the natural resources of the state belong to each resident, so each resident gets paid.     Even children receive it.

America could easily decide that the govt will pay each citizen $100 or $1000 or $10,000 each year just for being a citizen.  Obviously that payment would be funded via however the govt collects revenue including income tax.   It would be similar to how a company decides to pay a dividend to each shareholder.   

You most likely would not want to make the UBI so large that people decide to sit at home.   That's not the purpose of it.  UBI could also create the ability to eliminate welfare payments or food stamps including the administration of that system.   In a sense give everyone the cash equivalent of welfare and food stamps.   

 

Why not? Do we really want malcontents in the workforce?

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10 hours ago, gasman said:

That's great. Until I see a robot do an entire room, including cutting pieces to fit, getting the corners right, and mudding and taping, I'm not convinced. Shit, I could hang one sheet of drywall, but I'm sure as hell not going to try to do a room.

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This is a continuation of the overall movement of innovation.

Amazon killed Borders (just one example) due to customers preferring to buy books on-line or via Kindle once it released. Barnes & Nobles damn near had to become a mini-Target to compete offering toys, exercise equipment etc to stay afloat. Also hurting publishing houses and more and more authors can self-publish via their site

Wal-Mart before Amazon killed the local economy by providing goods at scale/lower price etc than the local store could.

The cloud (SaaS) itself is killing IT staff as 15% of US data centers have shut down the past 12 mos alone.

This is a bell that has been rung as far back as the first automobile and up to LEAN/Six Sigma practices. The saying was LEAN meant Less Employees Are Needed.

Automation is big(and only getting bigger as chat bots, Machine Learning, IOT become more prevalent) but what will happen is the current landscape of jobs will shift to accommodate. Will there be people left out (as noted about car factory worker above? Of course) but many others will gain access to jobs that wouldn't have been in existence in years prior.

 

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Ok, so we change to a UBI based system and "welfare" transfer payments go away. 

 

What are we going to do about the moran who can't manage to not spend all the UBI at the local indian casino, drinking, drugs, new set of $4000 rims on a $2000 car, 6 pitbulls, finishing their sleeve tattoo, .........?

 

I would guess we end up with a new program UBI +PLUS but only for those really, really special cases.

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30 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

Ok, so we change to a UBI based system and "welfare" transfer payments go away. 

 

What are we going to do about the moran who can't manage to not spend all the UBI at the local indian casino, drinking, drugs, new set of $4000 rims on a $2000 car, 6 pitbulls, finishing their sleeve tattoo, .........?

 

I would guess we end up with a new program UBI +PLUS but only for those really, really special cases.

I would prefer a straight trade for UBI for all other transfer payments. For me, the goal should be to maximize cost-effectiveness. However, not everyone agrees with me and has their own opinions on how this should work. Which is why its important for those that favor fiscal conservative ideas to be proactive with something like UBI.

Its better to have a plan that you support so you can promote it than just oppose everything until it's too late.

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1 minute ago, F250 said:

I would prefer a straight trade for UBI for all other transfer payments. For me, the goal should be to maximize cost-effectiveness. However, not everyone agrees with me and has their own opinions on how this should work. Which is why its important for those that favor fiscal conservative ideas to be proactive with something like UBI.

Its better to have a plan that you support so you can promote it than just oppose everything until it's too late.

Precisely.

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8 minutes ago, F250 said:

I would prefer a straight trade for UBI for all other transfer payments. For me, the goal should be to maximize cost-effectiveness. However, not everyone agrees with me and has their own opinions on how this should work. Which is why its important for those that favor fiscal conservative ideas to be proactive with something like UBI.

Its better to have a plan that you support so you can promote it than just oppose everything until it's too late.

I oppose UBI.  

I support limited, defined welfare under a structure that requires work for benefits.

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1 hour ago, Incredulity said:

I oppose UBI.  

I support limited, defined welfare under a structure that requires work for benefits.

Until we get to 30% unemployment or just a rapid loss of jobs then yeah, but until then UBI will be useless.

Edited by workswithseed
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On 11/15/2018 at 4:46 PM, BrazilHorn said:

This is a continuation of the overall movement of innovation.

Amazon killed Borders (just one example) due to customers preferring to buy books on-line or via Kindle once it released. Barnes & Nobles damn near had to become a mini-Target to compete offering toys, exercise equipment etc to stay afloat. Also hurting publishing houses and more and more authors can self-publish via their site

Wal-Mart before Amazon killed the local economy by providing goods at scale/lower price etc than the local store could.

The cloud (SaaS) itself is killing IT staff as 15% of US data centers have shut down the past 12 mos alone.

This is a bell that has been rung as far back as the first automobile and up to LEAN/Six Sigma practices. The saying was LEAN meant Less Employees Are Needed.

Automation is big(and only getting bigger as chat bots, Machine Learning, IOT become more prevalent) but what will happen is the current landscape of jobs will shift to accommodate. Will there be people left out (as noted about car factory worker above? Of course) but many others will gain access to jobs that wouldn't have been in existence in years prior.

 

I know it doesn't fit the contrived acronym, but:

imgur

I have automated away a fair number of jobs with growing mixed emotions.  I’ve been well compensated, but the real winners have been the executives and stock holders.  I have yet to encounter a situation where any of the increased profits have been reinvested into the employees that were made expendable.

I don’t see how that pattern continuing unabated ends well.

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On 11/15/2018 at 5:14 AM, AUinHsv said:

Construction workers also - no robot is going to hang sheetrock

This past summer,  a robot mowed my yard. 

Anytime I was out with it, a lawn service guy would invariably stop to ask about it.  I would assure them that it's only a toy that couldn't really compare to having a person take care of your lawn.  

Of course, I was lying. Mowbot was just plain awesome.  

It's just that I hated to see the fear these guys had at seeing the writing on the wall.  

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  • 3 weeks later...

A complete POS fluff piece paid for and written about Walmart to ease the growing concern in the workforce about being replaced by AI or robots, and how Walmart is leading the way to use these new marvels to make every walmart employee richer and happier.   

https://qz.com/1393361/how-ai-will-empower-the-retail-worker-of-the-future/

Quote

eaders like Walmart are perpetually adopting this futuristic technology to help employees with repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus more directly on providing a great customer experience. And while this is great for shoppers, these efforts might raise the blood pressure of current retail workers who may be nervous about the reach of technological change: A majority of Americans worry that the growing use of AI may lead to job losses. However, Walmart’s approach to AI better positions employees to contribute in a new competitive digital economy. The retailer is leading the way in developing tools that boost efficiency while also improving the work life of employees.

While there’s no denying that AI will change the nature of some retail positions—there’s simply no need for human hands to perform tedious, time-intensive tasks like changing prices or verifying product expiration dates—the gradual evolution of certain job categories doesn’t necessarily mean retail workers will become obsolete.

 

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