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PostPosted: 02/07/17 10:05 pm • # 1 
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Just a few excerpts from a lengthy article that's well worth reading - so next time someone talks about bring the jobs back you'll know it can't happen

Those jobs are gone forever. Let’s gear up for what’s next.

“Generals always fight the last war.” — an old World War II saying

Manufacturing jobs were a huge part of America’s post-World War II economic miracle.

In the early 1980’s, 20 million Americans worked in factories, assembling consumer products like cars and appliances.
Well, what happened after that?

There are two narratives here. The shorter story arc is about globalization. American corporations moved all the old manufacturing jobs off-shore to relatively poor countries that still had OK education systems (like China).

This is the story that most people think of when they realize that, as of 2017, your average high school graduate can no longer own a home and raise a family on a single income.

But there’s a second narrative — one that arcs back centuries, to 1794 when Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin. This story’s plot is more complicated, and has quite a few twists that have yet to unfold. It goes something like this: technology keeps making individual workers much, much more productive than they ever were before.

And when one worker — with the help of a robot army — can do what used to require 100 workers… well, you don’t need 100 workers anymore. You just need one.

So here’s the real story of American manufacturing over the past 70 years, told in a single chart:

Image

And robots aren’t just boosting productivity in rich countries like the US. They’re starting to affect countries like China, too.

Dongguan — a city near Hong Kong that’s basically the manufacturing capital of the world — recently launched their first automated factory.
The Changying Precision Technology Company manufactures parts for mobile phones. It has 60 robot arms that work on 10 production lines that run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Each production line has 3 human workers who monitor the robots.

Before these new robots arrived, the factory needed 650 human workers to be able to operate. Now it just needs 30.

Since this factory laid off 95% of its workers, and handed over the task of manufacturing to the machines, its defect rate has dropped by 400%, and its overall output has nearly tripled.

More production, fewer people.

This is part of a massive automation initiative in China with the twin goals of cutting costs while improving the quality of manufactured goods.

And keep in mind— we’re not talking about the US, where the humans manufacturing workers earn an average of $20 per hour. We’re talking about China, where the average factory worker makes closer to $2 per hour.

snip ...

[Then there's] the full side-effects of subsidizing an industry.

Real-life case study: America’s steel industry in 2002

In 2002, American steel was being undercut by cheaper Chinese steel. We tried to keep the American steel industry alive by passing tariffs on foreign steel.

In the end, more than 200,000 people who worked outside of the steel industry lost their jobs due to the macro-economic effects of our artificially inflated steel prices. That means more people lost their non-steel industry jobs than the entire US steel industry employed at the time (187,000 jobs).

In other words, taxpayers spent billions of dollars to destroy jobs, so they could keep even fewer jobs — jobs that were dangerous and low-skill — from inevitably leaving the country. For a few more years, anyway.

More - much more in the article

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/we-cant ... .xl9w5tdu3


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PostPosted: 02/08/17 12:36 am • # 2 
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People The deplorables will pretend that this isn't the case and blame Obama... or the Tooth Fairy
.


Last edited by oskar576 on 02/08/17 9:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: 02/08/17 9:19 am • # 3 
oskar576 wrote:
People will pretend that this isn't the case and blame Obama... or the Tooth Fairy
.


And they'll type their disgust out on their Chinese-made ipadpodphonethingamajiggy.


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PostPosted: 02/14/17 4:39 pm • # 4 
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Worth reading the entire article (not long) but a couple of sentences jumped out at me.

The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class

Quote:
At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back, thanks in no small part to their own research, which will eliminate so many other kinds of jobs in the years to come, as well. At Asilomar, they looked at the real US economy, the real reasons for the “hollowing out” of the middle class. The problem isn’t immigration—far from it. The problem isn’t offshoring or taxes or regulation. It’s technology.


Quote:
In the US, the number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979 and has steadily decreased ever since. At the same time, manufacturing has steadily increased, with the US now producing more goods than any other country but China. Machines aren’t just taking the place of humans on the assembly line. They’re doing a better job.


Quote:
most new jobs are either at the very low end of the pay scale or the very high end.


Quote:
the coming revolution in AI would eliminate far more jobs far more quickly than he expected.

Indeed, the rise of driverless cars and trucks is just a start. New AI techniques are poised to reinvent everything from manufacturing to healthcare to Wall Street. In other words, it’s not just blue-collar jobs that AI endangers.


Quote:
Some fear that after squeezing immigration—which would put a brake on the kind of entrepreneurship McAfee calls for—the White House will move to bottle up automation and artificial intelligence. That would be bad news for AI researchers, but also for the economy. If the AI transformation slows in the US, many suspect, it will only accelerate in other parts of the world, putting American jobs at even greater risk due to global competition.


https://www.wired.com/2017/02/ai-threat ... dle-class/


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PostPosted: 02/14/17 5:51 pm • # 5 
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Governments need to adapt as well. If they don't there will be widespread rebellion by the masses who haven't the resources to subsist.
It will make the French Reign of Terror look like a Sunday school picnic.
Better start looking at the Nordic model before it's too late.


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PostPosted: 02/14/17 6:50 pm • # 6 
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oskar576 wrote:
Governments need to adapt as well.


The question is how they adapt (or maybe react). As the article points out, if Trump or some other Luddite politician decides to limit technology all it means is that the advances will come elsewhere in the world and Americans will be further disadvantaged. People are already worried about the impact of his travel ban on research and education.


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PostPosted: 02/14/17 7:07 pm • # 7 
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His supporters want to dig for coal.


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PostPosted: 02/14/17 7:12 pm • # 8 
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That's the thing - they want high paying low skilled jobs but they're gone for good. The days or turning a wrench on an assembly line at $20 or $30 an hour are not coming back no matter what Trump says or does.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 7:47 am • # 9 
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A warning from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking

Quote:
“The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.” — Stephen Hawking


There’s a rising chorus of concern about how quickly robots are taking away human jobs.

Here’s Elon Musk on Thursday at the the World Government Summit in Dubai:

Quote:
“What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better [than a human]. These are not things that I wish will happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen.” — Elon Musk


And today Bill Gates proposed that governments start taxing robot workers the same way we tax human workers:

Quote:
“You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort of at once. So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, there’s quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the next 20 years [will go away].” — Bill Gates


Jobs are vanishing much faster than anyone ever imagined.

In 2013, policy makers largely ignored two Oxford economists who suggested that 45% of all US jobs could be automated away within the next 20 years. But today that sounds all but inevitable.

Transportation and warehousing employ 5 million Americans

Those self-driving cars you keep hearing about are about to replace a lot of human workers.

Currently in the US, there are:

600,000 Uber drivers

181,000 taxi drivers

168,000 transit bus drivers

505,000 school bus drivers


Image

As of 2014, “Truck Driver” is the most common job in almost every state in the US.

There’s also around 1 million truck drivers in the US. And Uber just bought a self-driving truck company.

As self driving cars become legal in more states, we’ll see a rapid automation of all of these driving jobs. If a one-time $30,000 truck retrofit can replace a $40,000 per year human trucker, there will soon be a million truckers out of work.

And it’s not just the drivers being replaced. Soon entire warehouses will be fully automated.

I strongly recommend you invest 3 minutes in watching this video. It shows how a fleet of small robots can replace a huge number of human warehouse workers.



There are still some humans working in those warehouses, but it’s only a matter of time before some sort of automated system replaces them, too.

8 million Americans work as retail salespeople and cashiers.

Many of these jobs will soon be automated away.

Amazon is testing a type of store with virtually no employees. You just walk in, grab what you want, and walk out.



A big part of sales is figuring out — or even predicting — what a customer will want. Well, Amazon grossed $136 billion last year, and its “salespeople” are its algorithm-powered recommendation engines. Imagine the impact that Amazon will have on retail when they release all of that artificial intelligence into brick-and-mortar stores.

US restaurants employ 14 million people.

Japan has been automating aspects of its restaurants for decades — taking orders, serving food, washing dishes, and even food preparation itself.



And America is now getting some automated restaurants as well.



There’s even a company that makes delivery trucks that drive around and start baking pizzas in real time as orders come in.



Automation is inevitable. But we still have time to take action and help displaced workers.

Automation is accelerating. The software powering these robots becomes more powerful every day. We can’t stop it. But we can adapt to it.

Bill Gates recommends we tax robotic workers so that we can recapture some of the money displaced workers would have paid as income tax.

Elon Musk recommends we adopt universal basic income and give everyone a certain amount of money each year so we can keep the economy going even as millions of workers are displaced by automation.

And I recommend we take some of the taxpayer money we’re using to subsidize industries that are now mostly automated, and instead invest it in training workers for emerging engineering jobs.

The answer to the automation challenge may involve some combination of these three approaches. But we need to take action now, before we face the worst unemployment disaster since the Great Depression.

I strongly encourage you to do 3 things:

Educate yourself on the automation and its economics effects. This is the best book on the subject.

Talk with your friends and family about automation. We can’t ignore it just because it’s scary and unpredictable. We need a public discourse on this so we can decide as a country what to do about it — before the corporations and their bottom lines decide for us.
Contact your representatives and ask them what they’re doing about automation and unemployment. Tell them we need a robot tax, universal basic income, or more money invested into technology education — whichever of these best aligns with your political views.
If we act now, we can still rise to the automation challenge and save millions of Americans from hardship.

Thank you for reading this, and for caring about this. Help me raise awareness of this important issue that our politicians aren’t talking about.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 9:43 am • # 10 
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This seems to belong here - Amazon has a stranglehold on online shopping - even tho brick and mortar stores have generally expanded into online shopping there is no way they can compete

https://www.localfirstaz.com/news/amazon-stranglehold


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 10:27 am • # 11 
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So far automation has created as many or more jobs than it has replaced. No question they are different jobs and not always in the same place creating serious dislocation and retraining for a lot of people. I can remember sociologists back in the eighties and nineties warning that people had to plan on having two or three careers during their lifetimes. That is one prediction that may hold true.

It may be now, though, that robotics are actually going to diminish the number of jobs available. But, if we maintain our current societal structure, that diminishing might be self-limiting. Contrary to Ronald Reagan's trickle down theories simply building stuff does not mean it will be sold. There's no sense in having a robotic producer that can churn out a thousand widgets if you can only sell a hundred of them.

Taxing robots might be an idea but somehow that money - or at least the goods being produced by them - would have to make it's way to real live people who may not have sources of income. Conversely we may soon see a revival of the Luddite movement.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 10:31 am • # 12 
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shift, in an effort to steer clear of "fair use" questions, do you have a link for your #9 post?

Sooz


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 10:37 am • # 13 
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Oooops ....

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/bill-ga ... .vymvcldpi


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 10:40 am • # 14 
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shiftless2 wrote:
This seems to belong here - Amazon has a stranglehold on online shopping - even tho brick and mortar stores have generally expanded into online shopping there is no way they can compete

https://www.localfirstaz.com/news/amazon-stranglehold

I confess I'm guilty of using Amazon ~ :o ~ you can find anything you're looking for on Amazon ~ it's most recent expansion is [local] grocery and restaurant deliveries, with [often] free delivery ~

Sooz


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 10:44 am • # 15 
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Thanks for the link, shift ~ having spent my entire working life at a top/major law firm, I'm all for avoiding legalities whenever possible ~

Sooz


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 11:19 am • # 16 
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The issue remains of what to do about those whose jobs have disappeared. They still need food, clothing, shelter, education, etc. and the current administration has turned its back on them.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 12:18 pm • # 17 
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What similarities are there with today's situation and when the U.S. began moving from an agricultural nation to one of industry in the late 1800's/early 1900's?

Any thoughts about that?


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 12:46 pm • # 18 
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John59 wrote:
What similarities are there with today's situation and when the U.S. began moving from an agricultural nation to one of industry in the late 1800's/early 1900's?

Any thoughts about that?


I haven't studied that in a long time, but at least those farmers could get jobs in the industrial sector, right? At that time the manufacturers would train a person for a job. I doubt any of the manufacturers who start to use robots will be offering technical training. Just a couple of thoughts. Very busy today.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 2:34 pm • # 19 
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but at least those farmers could get jobs in the industrial sector, right?

Not really. It was better in the US where industrialization came later and the frontier was still open, but if you look at what happened in Europe it was a different story. It wasn't as if there were masses of industrial companies just screaming out to employ all those displaced agricultural workers.

What actually resulted was massive poverty, massive social disruption and absolutely disgusting employment practices. The only real positive was that itinerant agricultural laborers were probably slightly better off.

Don't forget that the "Dark, satanic mills" were really dark and satanic.

But when ever I see this kind of argument I always reflect on the fact that I can think of a huge variety of things that could be done to improve the wellbeing of all of us. That's the disconnect that strikes me: the difference between potentially useful work that could be done, and the lack of jobs ins those areas.

Don't forget that another effect of all this automation is that GDP per Capita continues to rise.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 3:01 pm • # 20 
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Don't forget that another effect of all this automation is that GDP per Capita continues to rise.

And where it's going will be the undoing of the US unless they start looking at a more equitable distribution of assets.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 4:04 pm • # 21 
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totally true. we will become a feudal society.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 4:21 pm • # 22 
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As post #4 says, most new jobs will be at either the low end or the high end of the pay scale. Many (most?) of the jobs that just require a strong back will disappear - look at the automated warehouse in the video above - very little human involvement.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 5:07 pm • # 23 
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And that pay scale is set in stone?

I still think that there is plenty of work that needs to be done - there are massive possible improvements at every level of our social and environmental existence that could be made.

Maybe that is the best way to deal with the massive imbalance in the distribution of wealth is to start doing those jobs that we have left by the wayside: essentially creating and improving the social, economic and environmental infrastructure that provides us all with the opportunity to live reasonable lives.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 5:45 pm • # 24 
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Quote:
Not really. It was better in the US where industrialization came later and the frontier was still open


I was talking about the US

Quote:
Maybe that is the best way to deal with the massive imbalance in the distribution of wealth is to start doing those jobs that we have left by the wayside: essentially creating and improving the social, economic and environmental infrastructure that provides us all with the opportunity to live reasonable lives.


I guess people can pick the crops that are left rotting in the fields with the roundup of "illegals". :sarcasm

Seriously, the jobs of today and especially of tomorrow will require higher education that is so far out of reach for many it's impossible Perhaps the best start would be to guarantee some form of free higher education.


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PostPosted: 02/20/17 6:03 pm • # 25 
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I would suggest that the main reason for so many "illegals" (as opposed to refugees) is that USians would rather whine and be on welfare than do those jobs the "illegals" do.


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