City am

I do think the anti-immigration bunch have got hold of the wrong end of the stick rather…

If anything’s going to increase inequality it’s the replacement of people by machines for doing low-skilled jobs. Look at your Tesco and Sainsbury Local’s for e.g. – hardly any staff and loads of self-service tills.

Of course, new industries and jobs will replace the lost jobs – who went to uni in the 90’s and ever wanted to be an app developer or social media marketer? But the transition period, especially for the lower-skilled, may not be much fun

Cool, they can start with mine.

10.8m sounds like the very top end of an estimate to me, I’d expect much less.

And new jobs would be created as you say, not necessarily skilled jobs. Some things are very, very hard to get a robot to do – e.g. bar tender, coffee barista – typically service jobs with human interaction. Though there is research addressing this (google “James robotic bar tender” for example) it’s a long way off actual deployment.

Personally I’m all for the rise of the machines, but then I develop robotic systems and AI for a living…

IT failed to explain what this 1/3 of jobs were that were replaced by robots

Further research provided this

Job areas at high risk include admin, transport, construction, production and sales, with low risk roles including computers, engineering, legal, finance, healthcare, media and the arts.

And the figure is a the worst case scenario

Barista?! 😆

Of course, new industries and jobs will replace the lost jobs – who went to uni in the 90’s and ever wanted to be an app developer or social media marketer? But the transition period, especially for the lower-skilled, may not be much fun

It’s not always the lower skilled that are affected.

Think about engineering, or accountancy, or medicine or a lot of other middle class professional jobs. They’re often relatively simple tasks based arround a set of rules. You could probably write a bit of software that would design a bridge, and given the costs of concreet, steel, manpower and equipment etc come up with the cheapest design at the click of a button.

There was an article moonths ago (no idea where sorry) that postulated a very bleak picure of mass unemployment and huge inequality as nearly every job could be done by a computer within the next few years. Paying a human to do it would be seen as a luxury (e.g. seeing an actual doctor privately Vs a computerised NHS), the thin end of the wedge being a bean to cup coffee machine macking your latte Vs going to a coffee shop and paying an actual person to do it.

The saving grace was that society and the economy would only tolerate a certain level of inequality as you can’t make everyone unemployed otherwise theres no one to buy the stuff being made by the robots.

I recall back in the 80s when I was a kid that the world of the future was often promised to have robots, etc doing many tasks which would mean people would have much more ‘leisure time’. I realise now that in fact, that means unemployment.

It’s an interesting question though, isn’t it – if significantly more people are unemployed then who will actually pay for the robots to do the tasks if there’s no one to buy their services/products. The concern is obviously that social injustice (eg rich/poor divide) significantly widens and we end up with the sorts of scenarios in many books/films with a massive underclass living on subsistence benefits and controlled by the lucky few very rich.

Is this a bad thing? Wouldn’t it be great if ALL jobs were done by robots and we could have 7 days a week off. Not quite sure how the finances would work. I think we’d need some kind of socialist, utopian society.

Not quite sure how the finances would work.

Well in that vision of the future, we don’t need money (or much money) as food, housing etc. is all basically free due to near-zero labour costs. Who repairs the robots? Well the repair robots obviously…. etc.

And if we were as close to such widespread adoption of automation, autonomous systems, AI and robotics as that article implies, then I’m pretty sure I’d be being paid more and there would be a far wider choice of jobs for me! There isn’t that much work out there in autonomy*

(flip side of this of course is that it’s a very specialist field, I’m not struggling for work)

And Houns – that machine doesn’t produce coffee. I think of them as “coffee simulators”. Looks like coffee, smells like coffee… tastes like “the very strainings of the devil’s jock strap”*

*5 points to anyone getting the reference.

*signs up for Robot Repair course*

Automation is only one part of an ongoing process of change which will effect the number of jobs, the other main ones being higher productivity i.e. less people expected to do the same amount of work and of course offshoring which is happening at considerable speed esp in the service sector.

barista?

if you want proper shit coffee, you need..

Yeah…. but think of the areas where mechanisation has gone into reverse.

There are some very interesting stats regarding car manufacturing – we produce many more cars now with far fewer people

I do think the anti-immigration bunch have got hold of the wrong end of the stick rather…

So more people with even fewer jobs is a good combination ? I’d say this research reinforces the need for controlled immigration so we admit those with the skills we need and the skills for the future

Are you aware that this has already happened? In fact it has been happening continuously for the last 200 years?

James robotic bar tender

You want some more?

Can any of them make sandwiches? And if so, could they tell the Daily Mail?

*signs up for Robot Repair course*

*signs up for maintenance course for Robot Repairing Robots*

*signs up for maintenance course for Robot Repairing Robots*

You really want to be training the people that are learning to fix the robot repairing robots… 😉

You really want to be training the people that are learning to fix the robot repairing robots..

My plan for world wide robot sabotage has to start somewhere 😉

its all relative I never thought I would get a job after I left school when I saw this

When 10.8m robots become self-aware, we’re **** 😯

Think about engineering, or accountancy, or medicine or a lot of other middle class professional jobs. They’re often relatively simple tasks based arround a set of rules. You could probably write a bit of software that would design a bridge, and given the costs of concreet, steel, manpower and equipment etc come up with the cheapest design at the click of a button.

Yeah I’ve seen Iron man too… ou do know Robert Downey Jr is only an actor right…

I get to work with some of these wondrous systems now and do you know what? they sort of work, up to a point, and then don’t talk properly to each other and/or people get in the way, and it will always be thus…

Automation of complex cerebral work for the most part just complicates the job, we just don’t trust machines enough to let them simply crack on and design and substantiate everything…

That dusty old git who memorized Roarks, the Machinery’s handbook and BS2573 will always trump whatever some whizzkid with Ansys says at a design review IME…

But is this really news?

“Un/Low-Skilled” jobs have been superseded by various sorts of automation/mechanisation for the last few hundred years haven’t they? I mean look at agriculture these days a handful of people can farm huge areas thanks to machines, go back a couple of hundred years and there were far more farm labourers essentially doing the same jobs but by hand…

More recently, Cars are now welded together by robots, We no longer have typing pools since the advent of the word processor (with integrated spelling and grammar check) and we don’t have huge armies of draughtsmen since CAD became a far more common and efficient tool… it’s happening constantly.

Ultimately what you find with any of this stuff though is that we become “Slaves to the machines”; a document that would have taken a week can be written in a day, that design that twenty men would have poured over for months one fella can do in a week.

Once driverless Cars are approved for UK roads say goodbye to your favourite cabbie his role is now pretty much redundant…

The tools get quicker and smarter hence the expectation becomes that the users will work longer and harder to keep up, rather than liberating us from the shackles of work, automation tends to have the opposite effect IMO…

I don’t consider the statistics to be hyperbole.
Lady T warned about this back in the day.
Automation is the reason Silicon Valley has so many billionaires.
At least the singletrack massive have a hobby for filling all those extra leisure hours.

Take cars for an example. People who don’t make cars have managed to find work elsewhere. The cars they would’ve made are now cheaper and better thanks to mechanisation. This means that people can now commute to new places of work to get jobs.

In other words, freeing people from having to build this crap has made the crap cheaper and allowed the economy to grow in other ways. For example, there are probably hundreds of ‘baristas’ in Cardiff now, whereas in the 90s there were hardly any. So the shoppers get a better service than they used to, and the factory workers are now serving coffee. Is that better? Well, personally I’d FAR rather work a flexible job in Starbucks than slave away in a factory.

Complex issue I think.

Since i started work, accounts have become computerised, less staff requied

cook chill has become almost accepted for hospital food, no chefs, just servers,

Underground trains dont have guards and neither do freight trains,double manning has been abolished.

bus conductors have gone,

typing pools have disapeared in most officers as people type their own reports,

stores are being computerised with just in time deliveries,

cars and commercial vehicles are being built by robots, along with a lot of conmsumer products,

speed cameras and cctv are taking away the role of police enforcenment of traffic laws,

and many more jobs are being lost or will be just by mechanisation or by robotic programed machines.

Mechanisation/automation only makes sense if we can get the population back to a level where having freedom from labour and limitless free time actually makes sense from a quality of life point of view. What is the point of not needing to work and having limitless time to do other things if 6 billion plus other people ore trying to do the same thing at the same time. Until world population goes into major net decline then I propose we look for novel solutions than require less automation and more meaningful employment for everyone. Almost all automation & mechanisation relies on use of finite resources (metals, fossil fuels etc), while replacing the one resource this planet is currently not short of, manpower.

Not sure what you are getting at farmer.

The point about free time is that people find they can do more work to fill it, because a 5 day week is considered acceptable. Therefore more people have more money, so prices inflate (or wages drop) to cancel it out again – so people still have to work 5 days.

10.8m jobs set to be replaced by robots

So if those 10.8 million jobs are lost, what are those people going to be doing to earn money ,to buy things and buy food, and pay for all those robots and sheds to house them.

Project, what happened to the weavers, the farm labourers, the car makers, the typists, the filing clerks etc etc etc?

Molgrips, all those people you mention are now working in NGOs and as consultants making up rules and regulations/red tape, in order to justify their high paid jobs, which are then forced onto the ever fewer remaining people out there actually creating wealth for the country. 🙂

But the good news from the same article

The research unsurprisingly finds new jobs will be created, with new profitable industries expanding and taking advantage of the advance in technology. According to the research, two to three per cent of jobs a year in London are lost but are then replaced by more valuable higher skilled jobs.

NGOs weren’t around in 1810 farmer 🙂

I think that everyone who is replaced by a robot will get an Admin job

They can then spend all day sending and receiving e-mails about which system does what and which bit of data goes were and then repeatadley entering the same data in ever more systems

Project, what happened to the weavers, the farm labourers, the car makers, the typists, the filing clerks etc etc etc?

The same thing that happened to all the miners/mining towns.

Really?

So you are saying that they stayed unemployed? Has unemployment been rising steadily since the industrial revolution?

Hmm… It’s gone up and then crashed a fair few times, but still overall pretty close to what it was 150 years ago.

molgrips – Member
NGOs weren’t around in 1810 farmer

Yes they were, they were just called something different like ‘xxxx society’ or similar.

molgrips – Member
Really?

So you are saying that they stayed unemployed? Has unemployment been rising steadily since the industrial revolution?

You’re confusing aggregate trends with the experience of sub-populations. There are too many people made unemployed in the past who never got a job again. As Tom_W1987 says, visit some mining towns or simply look up the statistics of where the economically inactive are.

This is the important thing:

You’re confusing aggregate trends with the experience of sub-populations. There are too many people made unemployed in the past who never got a job again. As Tom_W1987 says, visit some mining towns or simply look up the statistics of where the economically inactive are.

At a macro level, jobs will be destroyed and jobs will be created but not at the same time necessarily or requiring your skills. If it’s your job that’s destroyed, do you have the ability and time to retrain to one of the new jobs?

e.g. a London cabbie – what else can he do when self-driving cars take his job. does he have transferable skills and is he at an age when he can retrain to a new job at the same income level and does he have the savings to live off in the meantime. Doubtful.

The new jobs will be in the software and hardware design of all the kit that does the self-driving – likely to go to a recent graduate…

This was done by the Graun in April. Here
Somewhat more far reaching than the current piece.