It reads "if a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."
The other way of looking at it is by thinking about old projections from the 1950's that by 1990, the entire female population of the United States would be employed as telephone switchboard operators. We would have more jobs than we could possibly need if it wasn't for those damned computers.
how much of the work force will automation eventually render permanently unemployed? i'm not a luddite - i think this is inevitable and there's no point resisting it. but some of the consequences might be worth thinking through.
Where will advancing technology, job automation, outsourcing and globalization lead?
Is it possible that accelerating computer technology was a primary cause of the current global economic crisis—and that even more disruptive impacts lie ahead?
This groundbreaking book by a Silicon Valley computer engineer and entrepreneur explores these questions and shows how accelerating technology is likely to have a highly disruptive influence on our economy in the near future—and may well already be a significant factor in the current global crisis.
What happens when robots can do more worthwhile tasks than a wide swath of humanity? This point doesn't seem very far away. There are tons of jobs that don't require creativity, and those don't seem long for this world.
Presumably if robots ever become that productive there will be no need for most people to work, since the robots will produce plenty of goods for everyone. Jobs are not an end unto themselves. Work is required to consume only because of scarcity. In the world you're imagining, that won't exist for most of the things people need to live. So it will be provided for free.
Somebody will own those robots and their output. Either robot owners will have to give away goods, or the government will have to forcibly redistribute it for your conclusion to hold. I actually don't think either of those are very unlikely, but it's still going to be a major change that makes the current political discourse about "socialism" seem quite trivial.
The jobs available in the post-robotic-revolution world and the necessary skills haven't yet been thought of. Once upon a time, most people were illiterate.
Most people were illiterate in the past because they didn't go to school. I don't think it makes sense to assume that some magical force will make people useful for non-automatable tasks in the future. Unless we achieve major breakthroughs in education, a large portion of society will be less capable than cheaper robots, and will therefore be unemployable.
Most people didn't go to school because they worked in agricultural jobs that didn't require education. In 1870 half the country worked on farms [1]; today it's <2% [2]. From that statistic alone you can see that half the country has been educated for new jobs over the past 140 years. Market forces aren't "magical"; they're real and they work. I don't think it makes sense to assume market forces will magically stop working in the future.
What's the difference in the marginal investment required to go from illiterate to literate vs. uncreative to usefully inventive? Assuming that the market will get you what you want because it got you something else you wanted before is dangerous and wrong.
There are lots of arguments for wealth redistribution, but they boil down to two. One of them is that socialism is just. I find that absurd--socialism is unjust.
The other argument is as follows: if there are enough of them and they get poor and desperate enough, they will burn down our houses, rape and murder our loved ones, and smash all of our things to bits. If things get bad enough, there will be a revolution and they will kill us all. That is not in our best interest.
The reason I'm replying, though, is that I wanted to opine that a Social Safety Net != Socialism.
Two of the largest vectors of wealth redistriubution in the last couple years are extended UIC and subsidized health/COBRA benefits. I think it's quite difficult to argue that we'd be better of having these 30MM unemployed people without ANY income or ANY health coverage.
If for no other reason than that's 30 MM fewer consumers.
Assume that the logical conclusion of robots doing people's job is that nobody will have a job. Since that means that nobody will eat (or buy the things that the robots are making), we will need to at some point separate the acts of earning money from doing work.
Put another way, we should aim for a world in which nobody works, as the robots are doing all the work.
That's not what this is, though. This is just factory workers that put a box on a cart for 70 hours a week losing their jobs because a robot can do it more efficiently. We're far off from robots creating robots that do things like that, so there are always going to be other jobs until then. They can find other jobs that are actually productive and worthwhile. This is why I find redistribution of wealth so ridiculous; there has to be someone working to generate wealth for himself, so why can't others just work like he is so they can generate their own wealth rather than stealing his?
This is the start of people being moved out of jobs to be replaced by robots. Think 50 years into the future.
> This is why I find redistribution of wealth so ridiculous
I don't think HN is the place for socialist vs capitalist debates. The loaded language you are using, such as 'stealing', completely ignores a massively complex debate. The correct balance of 'stealing' vs 'starving in the street' has eluded the world's smartest people for decades; I wouldn't expect to solve it in this comment box.
Since this is basically what Piggly Wiggly brought to the world of grocery retail in 1916, but with the customers replaced by robots (tee-hee), I wonder how long it will be before robots do the moving around of products at a supermarket near you?
Whether I shop at a warehouse store, or I go to the big department store and or supermarket chain stores that are all evolving into the same kind of 150,000+ sq. ft. 'everything' store (i.e. warehouse stores with better product packaging and shinier floors), I can see that retailers are already doing warehouse-sized volume in cities all over the planet.
Wait, they fly airplanes full of diapers to the West Coast!? I wonder what quantity of jet fuel exhaust gets spewed into the atmosphere, just so you can get diapers the next day. Even with the increased per-worker efficiency, is the overall environmental impact worse or better than cloth systems, or simply getting them from the corner store?
Cloth diapers are worse for the environment compared to disposable, no matter how you get it.
(Disposable uses landfill space of which we have unlimited quantities, but cloth uses water which is in short supply. Also cloth uses more energy.)
But it's easy to tell if this method is better or worse for the environment: You have to pay for jet fuel, or truck fuel, or whatever. All forms of energy cost about the same. If it's cheaper to get it delivered via next day air, then it must have used less energy.
Provided the nappies get re-used, you have a moderately good washing machine and don't tumble dry all the time then cloth are better - it's a very detailed study.
In addition if one has an A+ rated washer always line dries, reuses nappies for a second child (eg we bought ours 2nd hand on ebay and reused them and will sell them on or use them as clean-up cloths) then cloth nappies are substantially better.
>If it's cheaper to get it delivered via next day air, then it must have used less energy.
This appears to be specious reasoning. A company can charge more or less for delivery for competition purposes the actual cost of transportation is usually obscured. I can fly the 200mi to my in-laws more cheaply than taking the train, I don't believe it uses less energy to fly.
See for example http://www.seat61.com/CO2flights.htm which gives a figure of 90% CO2 saving by train (CO2 emission correlating with energy expense seems reasonable).
If trains use 90% less energy, then why aren't they 90% cheaper? I mean the cost to run a train is almost entirely fuel, and the same is true for an airplane. (There is some staff, but it's about the same for both.)
So without even reading the study I'm already sure it's wrong.
And I found it - they assumed a load factor of 100% for trains, but 72% for airplanes. When actually in the real world airplanes are pretty full and trains are not - but they run them anyway. And trains will probably use more fuel if they were full, so their entire study is worthless.
(They do it a lot in the study - they use realistic or worse case number for planes and cars, but best case numbers for trains. And explain it by saying "This is how we can make the rail system better.")
Oh, and BTW the study they rely on doesn't say 90% anywhere. They just pulled that number out of thin air.
>And I found it - they assumed a load factor of 100% for trains, but 72% for airplanes. When actually in the real world airplanes are pretty full and trains are not - but they run them anyway. And trains will probably use more fuel if they were full, so their entire study is worthless.
Fair enough, I can't be bothered to check your analysis, just like I cherry picked the citation. However assuming that the trains are full and aeroplanes aren't isn't really a problem here. Most long distance trains I've been on here are standing room only (except in 1st class). I've been on a few half full flights though most of the budget airlines are pretty good at getting full capacity.
There is a lot of competition in internal flight routes here but none on train routes. Train routes are monopolies. They do very strange things with train pricing - sometimes my MiL can get to us cheaper (via London, about 750km as the crow flies, 1 ticket) than we can visit the next town (about 20km, 4 tickets). Flights are priced using a scarcity model that makes early bookings almost the same as the taxes and later bookings as much as traditionally priced airlines.
If it's cheaper to get it delivered via next day air, then it must have used less energy.
Big if. No shipper ever reveals their true costs to you, they always build in some margin. An amusing illustration of this is UPS. Internally 2-day shipping costs more than overnight (they have to pay for warehouse space to keep the packages around for a day), but they charge more for 1-day.
In the case of Diapers.com, no option is provided to let you get any other kind of shipment speed. That's because they see their competition as regular retail stores. And the cost savings of eliminating the retailer are enough that they can justify much higher shipping costs.
>The average 2006 disposable nappy would result in a global warming impact of
approximately 550kg of carbon dioxide equivalents used over the two and a half years
a child is typically in nappies. The global warming impact from disposable nappies use
has decreased since the previous study due to manufacturing changes and a 13.5 per
cent reduction in the weight of nappies.
and then for cloth nappies
>For reusable nappies, the baseline scenario based on average washer and drier use
produced a global warming impact of approximately 570kg of carbon dioxide
equivalents. However, the study showed that the impacts for reusable nappies are
highly dependent on the way they are laundered.
Washing the nappies in fuller loads or line-drying them outdoors all the time (ignoring
UK climatic conditions for the purposes of illustration) was found to reduce this figure
by 16 per cent. Combining three of the beneficial scenarios (washing nappies in a
fuller load, outdoor line drying all of the time, and reusing nappies on a second child)
would lower the global warming impact by 40 per cent from the baseline scenario, or
some 200kg of carbon dioxide equivalents over the two and a half years, equal to
driving a car approximately 1,000 km.
FWIW we buy compostable disposables to limit landfill impact (contrary to another comment landfill area is not infinite) and bought our "real" nappies on ebay and have then reused them. We don't tumble dry nappies (UK) and practice what's considered early potty training which reduces cleaning requirements¹.
---
¹Clearly reducing nappy changing as much as possible and reducing the period of nappy wearing has a great impact.
Why focus just on global warming? Water shortage is a far far far larger problem. I know it's not you, but this obsession with global warming is horrible. There are far worse problems.
And landfill space is infinite. The earth is enormous. There are just political objections to landfills so they keep them in short supply. For example you could fill old coal mines with landfill and never run out of space. You could undo mountaintop removal by filling it with dilute garbage, then a deep layer of topsoil.
There really is an infinite amount of space - we can't make more garbage than there is matter on the earth. So whatever material we make, we automatically have room to bury it.
The linked analysis is really good and considers water usage. Water is also used to create disposable nappies as well as irrigating cotton plantations.
>And landfill space is infinite. The earth is enormous.
Landfill pollutes, run-off kills wildlife and poisons water supplies. Methane produced, as well as other decomposition gases (eg mercury bearing or radioactive gases) makes close habitation a problem. Of course methane is currently related to adverse global climate change and landfill is one (if not the?) largest source of human-produced methane.
Topsoil is certainly not limitless either, good topsoil is costly; it takes time and a proper mix of organic matter to make. You can hide your non-degradable plastics and heavy metal contaminant laced electronics under as big a heap of topsoil as you like, they're not going to magically turn into soil nutrients.
There are no mercury or radioactive gases from a landfill. Cattle is a larger source of methane. And there a LOT of it released naturally, human sources are very small in comparison.
And none of the other things you mentioned prevent making landfills. Every landfill has those problem. People talk as if we are going to run out of space - we aren't.
Use the exact same methods we use now to make a few extra landfills. They aren't even that expensive.
Of all the things you can do to help the environment, not filling landfills is the least effective.
Sorry, the futuristic rail system will arrive a little later. Two steps forward, one step back. Right-sizing the boxes goes a long way towards using extra capacity. If you don't need them the next day, is shipping them in tractor trailers that much better?
> "is shipping them in tractor trailers that much better?"
Also, having the product carried the entire way in bulk, large-scale transport filled to the brim seems a might more efficient than little single-occupancy vehicles all converging on a retailer miles from their own homes.
I suspect we'd all save a lot of fuel if somehow all products were delivered to the home instead of forcing cars and SUVs onto the road to retrieve them piecemeal.
It may be, but it's not obvious. For example you may have to clean a lot more clothing and effects than with a diapered baby that is being taught EC. If diapers were used for a brief time they'd be reusable for many more children and thus have a lower impact per user.
I'm not disagreeing just that these analyses are always extremely complex.
yeah the fact that the singularity guys are trumpeting this socially useless "innovation" is hilarious. gee now i get my online diaper order shipped next day! woo hoo!
Can you imagine working in that warehouse? A never-ending series of tasks brought to you by a being that never stops, sleeps or wants to know what you're doing at the weekend.
A job that requires no intelligence and is endlessly monotonous. That is a vision of hell. I think they have solved one problem but created a dozen others.
It's significantly less reliable, more expensive, and of extremely limited benefit to ship things to relatively unpopulated states in the middle of the ocean, or across two international borders into the Arctic. People are of course free to live in those places, but they're not free to demand the rest of the world to accommodate their decision.
I would completely agree if companies had to setup their own shipping infrastructures to ship to these places; but they don't. Companies like FedEx, UPS, etc, already do this for you and they already ship to places like Alaska and Hawaii. Just charge the customer the extra shipping they are charged by the shipper and let it be at that.
"We" for some value of "we" accept companies aiming at making money. If they're not shipping to Alaska or Hawaii, that suggests there's some reason they believe it wouldn't be profitable, right?
If Alaska and Hawaii are really under-served, that seems like an opportunity for someone -- you? -- looking to make a buck.
America lost 2 million jobs to the Chinese. But guess who the Chinese lost 15 million jobs to... the robots.