Is automation taking our jobs

[ALine]

Just wanted to create a new thread to stop posting in a dedicated UBI thread. Sorry about that again by the way.

[DrP]

Has automation taken your job?

[Sensei]

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Is automation taking our jobs

Yes, automation can take jobs, which are repeatable, but replaces them by advanced jobs for programmers, engineers, designers.. It's nearly impossible to replace job in which somebody has to be creative. Majority of people hate their jobs where every day is the same, undistinguishable from yesterday, week ago, month ago, or year ago.. They stupefy people.

2 hours ago, DrP said:

Has automation taken your job?

Solution: learn programming, engineering, or other hard to automate job. But it requires much more effort at early stage of life.

[dimreepr]

7 hours ago, ALine said:

Just wanted to create a new thread to stop posting in a dedicated UBI thread. Sorry about that again by the way.

Does it matter?

[Scott of the Antares]

I think it is obvious that automation is reducing some employment. Big global companies driven by huge profits aren’t that concerned with employing as many people as they can. To them profit >>>> welfare.

[Ten oz]

What is the data supporting the idea that automation is taking jobs at a rate faster than technology and the abundance created by automation can replace them?

 

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The World Bank only publishes data on absolute poverty from 1981 onwards, but researchers have reconstructed information about the living standards of the more distant past. The seminal paper on this was written by Bourguignon and Morrison in 2002.4 In this paper, the two authors reconstruct measures of poverty as far back as 1820. The poverty line of 1.90 int.-$ per day was just introduced in 2015, so the 2002 paper uses the measure of 'one dollar per day'. This difference in the definition of poverty should be kept in mind when comparing the following graph to those discussed in other sections of this entry.

In 1820, the vast majority of people lived in extreme poverty and only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living. Economic growth over the last 200 years completely transformed our world, with poverty falling continuously over the last two centuries. This is even more remarkable when we consider that the population increased 7-fold over the same time. In a world without economic growth, an increase in the population would result in less and less income for everyone. A 7-fold increase in the world population would be potentially enough to drive everyone into extreme poverty. Yet, the exact opposite happened. In a time of unprecedented population growth, we managed to lift more and more people out of poverty.

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

 

 

[DrP]

4 hours ago, Sensei said:

Solution: learn programming, engineering, or other hard to automate job. But it requires much more effort at early stage of life.

That is not for everyone. I was asking if the OP had lost his job to a robot or something. I was wondering why he felt that way.

Ideally the robots would do the jobs we do not want to do....  in practice though they will probably just do the jobs where it is cheaper to have them do it.

[CharonY]

I think most macroeconomic papers seem to suggest that the net impact of automation on the overall labor market is either small or may have a net benefit. However, automation will be disruptive for many jobs and there will be growing pains. The short to mid-term effects are dependent on a number of factors, including penetration speed. A study put out by McKinsey looked at an aggressive automation rate and predicted an overall decrease of ~13% of the workforce to maintain productivity. Traditionally, similar shifts have been already observed (e.g. in agriculture business) and have been eventually been absorbed by the overall labour market. 

Much is still speculative, of course, but some projections indicate that jobs requiring interpersonal and certain technical skills are likely to be favored in the future.  These shifts could be movement to other sectors, or a shift of responsibilities within a sector.An already existing example within a sector are ATMs. Rather than eliminating banking jobs the result was A) that opening became cheaper, and more branches opened and B) bank employees did less money handling but had more customer interaction roles. Similarly, there are predictions that due to automation but also demographic shifts, there will higher employment in health sectors, but also education, for example.