It's almost 300 pages long. I'm not even sure what's most interesting so far. Largest job decline? Data entry clerks, Administrative and executive secretaries, Accounting, bookkeeping and payroll clerks, Security Gauards and Building caretakers and housekeepers are the top 5.
Largest job growth? Agricultural equipment operators is number 1, followed by truck/bis drivers, then Vocational teachers, Mechanics and Business development professionals
I would imagine "smart" surveillance cameras which can do all kinds of coordinated motion sensing and tracking, and possibly keyless entry systems which eliminate the guard at the front door.
There is a fair amount of new tech coming out soon. Ring sells their drone security camera, and I expect to see outdoor patrolling drones soon. There is also the new WIFI tech that can detect people via mesh network signal interference. One company is already selling a home security network that leverages it. We will soon see plenty of cheap mesh systems that can count the number of people on the property and recognize types of motion.
>We will soon see plenty of cheap mesh systems that can count the number of people on the property and recognize types of motion.
hmm, at first I was thinking burglars gonna have a hard time if their target is big businesses but I guess it's the same as today - you break in, you enter the code that you know somehow OR you break in, after dismantling security in some way?
I guess though it would be a good tool for outdoor security, but then the main deterrent of a security guard there is they have a gun and come running when you're stealing the stuff.
My first thought for big businesses would be smart badges with positioning and biometrics. That way their system could cross-reference the number and location of known individuals with detected people.
"Technology is also not the only factor at play when it comes to job disruption, according to WEF. In fact, it comes sixth on the list of factors leading to net job creation or elimination."
It's always frustrating to me, the headline about the destroyed jobs. Very rarely any mention of the new jobs or the fact that the jobs that were destroyable were also often not a whole lot of fun in the first place. Or that we are maintaining the good things we have with even have human capital available to accomplish ever more (hopefully) important things.
The issue with destroying the boring menial tasks is that as a society, we have not come up with a replacement for them. Some people rely on those for their livelihood and have not had the good fortune of an education that allows for higher qualifications. And those people are left behind - society could educate them, just pay them a living stipend, whatever. But in the end, the profits gained from the eliminating these jobs go in the pockets of the high qualified and to a massive extend to those that own the capital.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The benefits of increased productivity go to all of society that can now get more of their wants fulfilled as less people need to be devoted to fulfilling said want.
99% of humanity used to spend their lives farming and now it’s 1%. I don’t bemoan that 98% of farmers are now out of work.
We are at historically low unemployment. People have found new desires to be fulfilled and created businesses to fulfill them, forever and ever.
I’m not disputing that society as a whole may win - but the gains are not equally distributed. Look at all the gig economy jobs that are thriving because the other jobs are even more exploitative. Look at the Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers that pee in bottles and shit in bags. Are they profiting? They’re clearly not. They may be able to buy a bigger phone or a larger tv, but in the end, they’re often worse off than what a worker at ford or gm had on the factory floor.
I think if you ever spoke with these people supposedly peeing in bottles and asked if they liked their jobs, what they did before, what their goals are, you would get a very different opinion about how miserable the American work force is. They are not miserable.
The language of socialists / Marxists - “workers are ‘exploited’” etc. is very inflammatory and inaccurate. It is like once you get this worm in your brain that all work is just evil exploiters taking advantage of the workers, you became a bitter cultist and can’t see how backwards your thinking is.
If you’re right and the gains from productivity improvements were equally distributed among the populace, you’d expect the Gini coefficient which measures inequality to stay level - that is neither rise nor fall. And it’s clearly not for the US https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
So either the top end of the bracket is pocketing more or the bottom end is loosing some. But it’s definitely not equal. Acknowledging that and considering that a problem is neither a Marxist standpoint nor a sign of a rotten mind. And neither is acknowledging that there’s a whole class of people that are exploited by society.
You're focusing on the benefits of increased productivity squarely from the perspective of a consumer. It's true increased productivity means consumers benefit from more goods, however, producers are not benefiting. Take programmers today, we are more productive than ever before due to increased computation power and a vast collection of open source libraries. When it comes to building CRUD apps one developer today can produce in a day what would have taken a week or more ~25 years ago. So if a programmer is ~5 times more productive today, why are we still working 5 days a week? Why not 1 day a week? Why do we need H-1B's and other salary suppressing nonsense? The problem is these technology gains are not benefiting producers, only consumers and C-suites.
If you're dead set on favoring consumers over producers, then consider by freeing the producers time up they'd be able to produce more passion projects for consumers to enjoy. Today's consumers don't necessarily get the highest quality "stuff" but rather the "stuff" that is "safe" and guaranteed to maximize profits (see Hollywood movies). If socialism/Marxism ever did take hold, then I agree that there would be less "stuff" to consume, however, the "stuff" that is produced would be of higher quality because it would be made with passion and love of the craft. True builders will build anyway regardless of whether there are financial gains. It would be quality over quantity.
I think this is slightly wrong in the other direction. How does people doing things "for the love of the craft" inherently lead to better quality "stuff"? There are plenty of examples of people doing things already "for the love of the craft" either because they're wealthy, or at least doing well enough for it to be a serious hobby. But that doesn't mean they beat our professionals every time.
Hollywood movies seem to be to be one of the least able kind of task to be done "for the love of the craft" across all thousands of people involved in a blockbuster. How does that coordination work out across everyone who's interested "in the craft"? Ever see fan productions? It can be done, but they're also often driven by people actually doing tasks for cash that was gathered via donations.
I also might point to the people who are so well liked and famous that they basically can "write their own ticket" - George RR Martin is an example. His first few books were considered amazing, but it's also considered that given no real impetus anymore - he's unlikely to finish the saga ever. As a whole then, is an unfinished saga really "higher quality" than one finished to make a buck? The answer IMHO isn't obvious.
> I think this is slightly wrong in the other direction. How does people doing things "for the love of the craft" inherently lead to better quality "stuff"?
You're correct that a passionate hobby does not necessarily translate to higher quality output. These sorts of discussions are handwavy by nature because the truth is never black and white. In fact, I can easily provide an example that contradicts my own assertion that there would be "less stuff" in a socialists/Marxists environment: Wikipedia. Before Wikipedia, when I wanted a digital encyclopedia, I purchased software from Encyclopedia Britannica. The nice thing about their encyclopedia was the articles were high quality, vetted by experts. The problem is the number of articles was limited, updates and additions were infrequent, and it cost money. By comparison, Wikipedia has a massive number of articles, frequent updates, and is freely provided by a non-profit foundation. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the same vetting as Encyclopedia Britannica and so the quality is inconsistent. So here the "socialists" Wikipedia offers consumers more "stuff" to read, albeit with inconsistent quality, than the "capitalists" Encyclopedia Britannica.
> I also might point to the people who are so well liked and famous that they basically can "write their own ticket" - George RR Martin is an example. His first few books were considered amazing, but it's also considered that given no real impetus anymore - he's unlikely to finish the saga ever. As a whole then, is an unfinished saga really "higher quality" than one finished to make a buck? The answer IMHO isn't obvious.
Why did George RR Martin lose his passion?
Was he only after fortunate and fame?
Did the dopamine hit he received from said fame outweigh the hit he received writing books?
Questions like this are far more revealing because they touch on a deeper truth.
> There are plenty of examples of people doing things already "for the love of the craft" either because they're wealthy, or at least doing well enough for it to be a serious hobby.
What makes someone a natural builder? Why aren't there more engineers like Ton Roosendaal who, when asked why he gave his creation away for free, is quoted as saying "Money doesn't mean anything. It's not interesting. I call myself a maker; I want to make stuff." Why aren't more physicians like Dr. Frederick Banting who, after discovering insulin, sold the patent for $1 because he believed "insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world."
Human nature can be less-than-stellar and economic systems like capitalism attempt to channel it into something constructive.
Is this channeling necessary and at what point does it become counterproductive?
Humans are a product of their environment and experiences. On this very board many folks idolize CEO's...but why CEO's and not folks like Ton Roosendaal and Dr. Banting? I think the real truth, the deeper truth, is the "revolution" starts with the culture itself: rather than TV shows like Shark Tank lets have programs emphasizing non-profit founders, rather than hero worshipping CEO's, let's encourage emulating folks like Ton Roosendaal and Dr. Banting, then...maybe...capitalism will fade away on its own.
>The benefits of increased productivity go to all of society
They havent though. They've gone to shareholders and landowners.
It would theoretically be nice if the productivity gains were evenly distributed but in practice to make that actually happen would probably require a great deal of violence.
I mean that huge pools of capital actually represent the interests of a lot of people, such as Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fund and CALPERS which collectively fund the retirements for millions of people. And there are 401ks and IRAs, and even social security which is backed by the dollar which requires a healthy economy to maintain its preeminence.
It’s hard to just point the finger at this thing or that thing and pretend it’s just “the 1%” who benefits and they are causing all the problems. The economy, and society itself, is far far more complex and trying to do something extreme like destroy private business has enormous knock-on consequences.
But...Aren't the beneficiaries of those pensions 2 types of people: 1) retirees who technically are not impacted by the job loss that is happening or is about to happen; 2) fund managers that are "Actively managing" portfolios including pensions? Happy to be corrected.
I’m saying if you make political decisions that hurt this or that company (or all of them) you actually hurt normal people rather than “the 1%” who supposedly pull all the strings.
The rising tide may not lift all boats but it lifts a lot of them.
I don’t want to hurt anyone. I think the people at the top of the economic pie generally know what they are doing, have grown their capital because they have earned it via expertise, and making political decisions to hurt the rich ultimately hurts all of society more than the rich person.
Take Elon Musk. Even if you stole all of his money, he would start a new business, and people would back him with capital (whatever is left after the socialists stole it all) because of his background, and it would be successful, and he would be rich again.
You can’t stop talented people from making money unless you use guns.
I'd say this is a fundamental misreading of Musk. He's a good hype man, who started rich, got richer and became famous. Him starting over would be simply that he's famous and so is better at being famous and generating hype than someone who isn't already famous.
The thing is - basically being a grifter is a great skill for making money for oneself and friends, but not actually a skill that helps society as a whole. And sure, advertising is a kind of expertise, but I don't think many people actually hold it in high regard as being worth a lot in terms of "deserving".
He built Paypal, then Tesla, then SpaceX. People who think that he isn't an incredible entrepreneur and operator clearly don't know anything about building businesses. Regardless of how he started out, dismissing his accomplishments as a "grifter" or "hype man" shows you have very little understanding whatsoever.
Minor correction: SpaceX came before Tesla. Elon started hanging out with the Mars Society people after Paypal. Probably more impressive to take your exit cash and go “okay, how much to go to Mars?”
>The benefits of increased productivity go to all of society that can now get more of their wants fulfilled
Serious question, how exactly do you envision unemployed people without any renueve stream can afford to "fulfill their wants" when the goverment and landlords will yell them for their cut of the meal on taxes and rent at the end of every month, implying they've enough food savings to last up to that point?
> People have found new desires to be fulfilled and created businesses to fulfill them
What about the desiree to not die thanks to a crashed economy and inexistent safety nets? Seriosly, on what kind of cutesy fantasy spot do you think vast mayority of people live on, that they've the time to daydream about hypothetical wants instead of the real treath of being kicked out of a roof and starving to death?
Maybe, at some point in the distant future, some middle spot can be reached, but not sure not right now, society as we know it may be the verge of crashing and those holding the keys are hardly willing to care.
Not sure if this is a snarky gotcha, but is hardly worth sleeping on considering that USA isn't on a extremely healthy economic spot right now, and be sure shareholders aren't inconvincing themselves anytime soon to improve the situation. It really feels like people is suddenly trusting too much the intentions of those companies owning both these models AND the hardware is able to run on, and also can operate them at a much higher scale than anyone else could dream of.
I guess I don't see it playing out quite like that - let's say we replace a lot of creative-but-not-very desk jockeys of various kinds, lawyers, graphic designers, software devs. For the rest of society, they continue to get adequate output from those fields, now mostly from AI and a few handlers. They didn't really need more of it, and the owners of the companies producing it are unlikely to pass their new savings along. So the benefits don't seem to trickle down meaningfully? And the replaced middle-class folks can't get work doing what they trained to do, so at best they start over.
What pace? Where are the job losses caused by AI? I’ve been hearing about these forever, although previously it was called “automation” yet here we are with very low unemployment.
I’ll believe it when it actually happens because the futurists have cried wolf for too many decades.
I appreciate the assertion that we ought to solve that problem. Energy expended upon countering the positive reasons we get to do so could be better spent. No reason for you (or anyone) to expect $randomInternetStranger (i.e. me) to care but I do. I have come to believe the problem is a creativity supply problem, alongside insufficient transition supports, and incentive design problems with many beneficial human labors. I believe that we constrain our growth and prosperity due to this lack of vision and this is why I endeavor to do better, extend ladders, and so on.
Outside of scarce spots on some heavily regulated or unionized (for now) sectors, what exactly can the average worker sell or do than the huge corporation with the power of hundreds of workers that don't need to rest or social benefits can't? Being resellers? Previous means of automation still needed human intervetion because they only reduced the effort to finish some task, but couldn't do them themselves, these models only need some basic QA for as much as the business needs care.
>or the fact that the jobs that were destroyable were also often not a whole lot of fun in the first place
Very few things in this world can be agreed to be "fun", but goverment wants taxes and shareholders rent, and they precisely don't care much about your quality of life when you don't find a way to provide them those. Can't blame the players for doing what they can.
Cars created all kinds of jobs. Gas production, gas stations, car production, mechanics, and driver's ed most obviously. An expansion in the hospitality sector as people became more able to take vacations. All sorts of small vendor jobs became feasible that previously weren't. Indeed groups of all kinds be ame feasible that weren't before, as people became more able to join each other from farther away. The invention of cars had an effect similar to the invention of cities.
> the jobs that were destroyable were also often not a whole lot of fun in the first place.
You're severely underestimating how much high education and creative jobs will be impacted. Those are the "fun" jobs, involving imagining, learning, thinking. Illustrators, architects, designers, writers (of different sorts), journalists, even programmers and musicians. In fact, manual and repetitive labour is the one kind of job not impacted by today's AIs.
It's not that you'll fully replace all of those jobs with AI. It's that if you needed 10 illustrators, or 10 designers or 10 writers, now you might only need 1 to make sure the output of the AI is ok.
There'll be new opportunities afforded by this increase in productivity, new jobs in new industries, but retraining will not happen fast enough to employ those 9 extra people. And the problem is it'll happen in many different areas of the economy and at roughly the same time, that we won't have enough new jobs to go around for everyone in a timeframe that saves them from unemployment.
I think it is fair to interpret this as admitting that we will accomplish the same societal value with a smaller proportion of the creative, well educated population. That portion of our creative population will be available to help solve these problems. Some of them will have the resolve and resources to do so. I expect we would gain from increasing the size of that population but we have seemed to struggle to do so.
In the long-term you're correct, society will rebalance itself and will make better use of the available brain power. In the short-term some jobs in the industries will just disappear and those people will not find another right away in the same industry.
It's specially hard on entry level jobs: a beginner designer would come up with a few designs and a more experienced designer would shoot some down and approve others, thus helping the beginner learn and improve. The company needed the beginner to do the leg work that would be too expensive to pay the experience designer to do. Now the experienced designer does not need the beginner at all, just the AI as they already know what is a good design, and for actually zero cost.
The beginner designer in this example will not be able to find another job in the industry, because they do not yet possess any skill that is valuable, and will never acquire the experience necessary for those skills. Maybe they'll transition to a different industry, but that will take some amount of time and for that time they may be unemployed.
And the bigger issue even is when these expert designers retire - where do we get more experts? Do we become the elohoi of "The Time Machine" where we don't know how to do anything? Is AI really going to completely replace these designers in their work lifespan?
And per another deleted comment, things like automation tools are supposedly already about simplifying automation relative to earlier configuration management systems that required a lot of specific expertise. "AI LLMs" or not, of course, better more modern tools are going to try to simplify writing automation.
If this is a true threat, I don't imagine us retaining a capitalist society for very long. AI is basically the dream for socialism, and the antithesis for capitalism (except for the capitalists that win the arms race).
In any case, I've never been one to say that technology enhancements for humanity is a bad thing. It's only the powers that be that can wield it for bad.
It's a race between unemployment and the UBI. A UBI of 1000 USD per month would cost the US around 20% of GDP even if nobody stopped working, so it's not feasible yet, but it could be within our lifetimes.
Yes hence my going straight to kill-bots. You won't starve to death, you'll get shot by a kill-bot for breaking some law on the books that permits it, like messing with the capitalist autocrat's stuff.
I'm not saying it's a guaranteed win, I'm saying I really don't see how AI is anything other than a net win for an autocrat with plenty of capital.
Sounds like something that can happen in the 3d world or China, not the West. If it were that easy people like Jeff Bezos would have a fleet of F-15s and nuclear missiles.
AI is full of bullshit hype, especially around LLMs, but they can and will use the fear of AI to lower wages, reduce benefits, etc., even if the shit doesn't actually work.
Doesn't that signal that there was an imbalance in the market though? E.g. wages and benefits went up (theoretically) in response to demand in the market.
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf
Future of Jobs Report, 2023
It's almost 300 pages long. I'm not even sure what's most interesting so far. Largest job decline? Data entry clerks, Administrative and executive secretaries, Accounting, bookkeeping and payroll clerks, Security Gauards and Building caretakers and housekeepers are the top 5.
Largest job growth? Agricultural equipment operators is number 1, followed by truck/bis drivers, then Vocational teachers, Mechanics and Business development professionals