But it’s also true that higher skilled persons won’t be needed in many fields as artificial intelligence (AI) develops more capability. Immigration in general should be dialed [...]]]>
But it’s also true that higher skilled persons won’t be needed in many fields as artificial intelligence (AI) develops more capability. Immigration in general should be dialed down severely with the automated future in mind. When technology experts say 30 to 40 million American jobs are at risk of being eliminated, we should pay attention even though the employment economy is quite healthy today.
Young people planning careers and middle-aged persons considering a change should understand that some of today’s jobs may not exist in a decade or so.
But as a recent Time article notes, employment will certaInly not disappear entirely.
]]>AI Is About to Spark a Radical Shift in White Collar Work. But There’s Still ‘Plenty of Work for People to Do’, Time magazine, January 23, 2020
The story of automation in America has long been told in shuttered factories and declining Midwestern cities. But the latest wave of advancements in artificial intelligence may be bring the prospect of machine replacement beyond blue collar work. Developers are creating algorithms that promise to take over vast amounts of work in white collar fields like law and medicine, potentially upending traditionally high-status fields. For people in those once-secure positions, the questions are whose jobs may be changed, how soon, and what new opportunities may arise to take their place.
Knowledge work that involves repetitive tasks or large amounts of data, such as lawyers’ often arduous document discovery process, is particularly ripe for disruption from AI, experts say. Tasks that require human-to-human interaction or some element of creativity are likely to be safer. “Pattern recognition in general is something that these technologies seem good at,” says Mark Muro, one of the authors of a recent Brookings Institution report that suggests high-paid, educated workers will be highly exposed to new AI technology. “That is a contribution to a lot of white collar activities.”
MIT economics professor David Autor says middle management positions are particularly susceptible to this new wave of automation, particularly in fields like finance and inventory management, where humans are in charge of translating data into concrete business decisions. But he also argues that displacement from machine learning is likely to create new opportunities.
“Historically, tons of new work comes into existence as a result of automation,” Autor says. “The whole industrial revolution came about as a result of the automation of artisanal tasks, but it would have been impossible for anyone at the dawn of that period to foresee where that would go.”
That optimism may come as cold comfort for the artisans of 2020: the millions of paralegals, human resource managers, IT professionals and other knowledge industry workers whose positions are prime targets for a new wave of automation. McKinsey predicts across-the-board cuts in such fields over the next decade. Some fields, like office financial support personnel, are likely to lose more than one in four positions.
Some economists predict even more dramatic changes in the coming years, including a radical shift in top-tier white collar work. Richard Baldwin of the Graduate Institute in Geneva argues that AI, coupled with outsourcing enabled by new advances in telecommunications, will sharply reduce white collar employment. He believes those twin drivers could displace professionals in elite sectors from media and finance to architecture and law, at least until people find new ways to put themselves to work.
“What we have is displacement being driven at the pace of digital technology, but job creation being driven at the pace of human ingenuity,” Baldwin says. “What I’m worried about is that job displacement driven by digital will outstrip job creation driven by ingenuity.” (Continues)
In fact, a 2013 investigation by the Associated Press found that [...]]]>
In fact, a 2013 investigation by the Associated Press found that good jobs lost in the economic downturn aren’t coming back: AP IMPACT: Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs. Companies chose to become more efficient by laying human workers off and substituting automation and software for a range of employment from farm pickers to educated office workers.
We can therefore expect similar behavior in the next recession, as is forecast in a Washington Post article, reprinted in the Houston Chronicle, linked below.
The piece utilizes the recent Brookings report, Automation and Artificial Intelligence. It presents a reassuring tone, suggesting that robots “will bring neither an apocalypse nor utopia.”
So forget about those scary predictions like the shocker on a recent Sixty Minutes show that “in 15 years, [automation is] going to displace about 40 percent of the jobs in the world.”
All in all, the best course is probably to bet on the profit urge among business executives — and when machines become cheaper than workers to perform a task, the humans will go.
The Post article observes, “Hispanic workers are more exposed than any other race or ethnic group” to the automation threat, though without connecting the educational component or ability to speak English.
Immigrants are not mentioned at all in the Brookings report, although the recent batch of illegal aliens from Honduras won’t be suitable for any useful work before too long. Foreigners whose skills consist of Third-World farming techniques will not be employable even at menial labor when the cheap robots come galloping into the workplace.
The coming automation spurt will likely bring enormous welfare costs because of crazy liberal immigration of unskilled persons.
]]>When the next recession comes, the robots will be ready, By Andrew Van Dam, Washington Post, January 25, 2019
In this May 3, 2018, file photo a worker lifts a lunch bowl off the production line at Spyce, a restaurant which uses a robotic cooking process, in Boston. Robots aren’t replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of today’s work, according to a new Brookings Institution report published Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019.
Robots’ infiltration of the workforce doesn’t happen gradually, at the pace of technology. It happens in surges, when companies are given strong incentives to tackle the difficult task of automation.
Typically, those incentives occur during recessions. Employers slash payrolls going into a downturn and, out of necessity, turn to software or machinery to take over the tasks once performed by their laid-off workers as business begins to recover.
As uncertainty soars, a shutdown drags on, and consumer confidence sputters, economists increasingly predict a recession this year or next. Whenever this long economic expansion ends, the robots will be ready. The human labor market is tight, with the unemployment rate at 3.9 percent, but there’s plenty of slack in the robot labor force.
This next wave of automation won’t just be sleek robotic arms on factory floors. It will be ordering kiosks, self-service apps and software smart enough to perfect schedules and cut down on the workers needed to cover a shift. Employers are already testing these systems. A recession will force them into the mainstream.
A new analysis from Mark Muro, Robert Maxim and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, finds much of the nation will be susceptible to the upheaval caused by automation in coming decades, particularly young people, minorities and Rust Belt workers.
The total number of jobs will rise in the long run, but many workers will be forced to adapt. Robots will continue to roil the long-suffering manufacturing sector, Brookings finds. They will also move into low-skill service jobs such as food services workers once considered too cheap or too difficult to automate.
Economists generally focus on workers performing repetitive tasks, including rote mental or clerical work in an office cubicle and rote manual labor on a factory floor, to measure the influence of technology.
Middle-income work has evaporated in recent decades. Americans are now divided between the high-paid employees who design machines, the low-paid workers who sweeps up after it, or the even lower-paid service workers who serves fast-casual sandwiches to the other two.
In an upcoming paper from Review of Economics and Statistics, economists Nir Jaimovich of the University of Zurich and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia found that 88 percent of job loss in routine occupations occurs within 12 months of a recession. In the 1990-1991, 2001 and 2008-2009 recessions, routine jobs accounted for “essentially all” of the jobs lost. They regained almost no ground during the subsequent recoveries.
Firms in cities hit hardest by the Great Recession raised their skill requirements for new employees and invested more in technology, according to economists Brad Hershbein of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Lisa Kahn of the University of Rochester.
Their 2018 American Economic Review analysis of almost 100 million online postings collected by Burning Glass Technologies in 2007 and 2010-2015 found strong signs companies were replacing workers who performed routine tasks with a combination of technology and more skilled workers. The effect was especially pronounced for “cognitive” workers such as office clerks, office administrators and salespeople.
The economy is near full employment – the point at which everyone who wants a job has one. The unemployment rate has been at or below 4.0 percent for 10 straight months.
But the labor market for robots has room to grow. As wages rise and human help gets pricey, companies have experimented with alternatives.
The Washington Post’s Peter Holley has tapped into a deep vein of corporate automation efforts in recent months. Cooler-sized robots deliver food for $1.99 at George Mason University in suburan Washington. Tall, slim robot assistants patrol Giant supermarkets in search of spills and hazards. Walmart planned to install 360 floor-cleaning robot zambonis by the end of January. A start-up called Robomart hopes to start running mobile supermarkets in robotic minivans in the Boston area in partnership with Stop & Shop.
But while many businesses dabble, few have gone all-in — yet. (Continues)
Chapter One is titled Robots and provides a helpful overview of the smart machines in use now or [...]]]>
Brookings Institute has published a new book on automation titled, The Future of Work: Robots, AI, and Automation, by Darrell M. West (@darrwest). A Brookings link to the book includes the Table of Contents and Chapter One.
Chapter One is titled Robots and provides a helpful overview of the smart machines in use now or poised to be soon in environments such as restaurants, transportation, factories, retail and warehouses — here and abroad, particularly China.
Author Darrell West also compared the automation revolution to the transition a century ago from an agrarian to an industrial economy: “It took several decades to work through the resulting transformations in business models, employment, and social policy, but leaders rose to the challenge of dealing with those disruptions.”
He made a similar point during an interview with Charles Payne on Fox Business News on Wednesday (video below).
With such radical job loss facing American citizens in the near future, it would make sense to sharply reduce immigration, since we won’t need millions of unskilled foreigners to do jobs that will soon be done by machines if they aren’t already. But nobody’s talking about that.
]]>CHARLES PAYNE (starting 1:30): Without necessarily sounding like Luddites, when we say it will help a certain sector, it sounds like a euphemism, yes, and that also that means fewer humans doing the work. How do we juxtapose these two things?
AUTHOR DARRELL M. WEST: Certainly in sectors like retail, we’ll see a lot of automation. Amazon for example is experimenting with stores without sales clerks. Basically they have devices that will monitor the products you put in your shopping cart. They will automatically charge your credit card or mobile device for what you purchase. You will leave that store without having any dealings with sales clerks. But that worries people on the jobs front, in terms of these technologies are going to take jobs. There will be new jobs created. We need more data scientists, but many Americans do not have those skills. So it could be a rough transition period.
PAYNE: As the author of The Future of Work, we want to know, that transition period sounds very scary and yet at the same time, throughout history, from the very beginning, futurists told us that these robotics would free mankind up for greater pursuits beyond work. Is that too lofty of a goal at least at this stage?
WEST: It’s a lofty goal, but there is a chance in 20 or 30 years we may reach that goal. If we adopt the right policies in terms of helping workers who are going to be displaced by this, putting more effort into workforce development, revamping schools so that the young people today have the skills that will be required in the 21st century economy, I think we can do very well. Of course it will be a challenge in a very polarized and partisan environment to make those kinds of policy changes, but we need to start the process right now to help those workers.
PAYNE: I’m just worried about when the robots unionize.