Depending on our economic policies, there are a few different ways automation's impact on labor can express itself. The key thing that automation does is that it substitutes for labor thereby making labor less valuable.<p>If labor is less valuable, it doesn't have to mean fewer jobs. It doesn't even have to mean fewer hours worked. It can just mean less money going to labor (i.e. lower wages).<p>If our economy is operating below its productive capacity, which it is, then our levels of production are constrained by how much people can spend. And if consumers get their incomes from labor, then automation means consumers have less spending money.<p>If consumer incomes are constrained by wages, you'd therefore expect our level of production to decrease with increased levels of automation. And because economic policies are keeping the hours worked high, you'd expect the amount of production per man hour to decrease.<p>Hence...<p><i>"1. The U.S. economy is in a productivity recession."</i><p>Furthermore, if firms need to keep production levels low in order to clear markets, you'd expect that they wouldn't have much of a need to figure out ways to boost production.<p>Hence...<p><i>"2. Companies don’t seem to be investing in technology nearly as much as they used to."</i><p>Technology and automation allow the use of resources to be more efficient. One of those resources is labor. That means that in cases where we're actually using labor for production -- instead of, you know, just as an excuse to give people incomes -- we can get that labor really cheap.<p><i>"3. Globalization is a much bigger deal than automation for work and wages."</i><p>Globalization <i>is</i> automation.<p>But because we're Americans and we believe in the American dream, we need to force the labor market to provide incomes for hard-working Americans. Naturally, since many jobs amount to little more than token busy-work, we should then expect the labor market to become exceedingly boring and uneventful. After all, these are just fake jobs propped up by economic policy.<p>Hence...<p><i>"4. The U.S. economy’s creative-destruction engine is broken."</i><p><i>"This isn’t what the end of work was ever supposed to look like."</i><p>Yes it is. This is exactly what it's supposed to look like.
> <i>For now, I think it’s hard to make the case that automation is even a tertiary concern for the 2017 labor market. But the next recession will tell us much more.</i><p>No one is claiming it is a concern for 2017, no? My understanding is that the debate is more what happens in the next 10-15 years and not about the short-term situation.
Coming.<p>I work in public digitization and we're still a lot of years from implementing things like self driving cars. We're running tests of course, but a lot of places the road markings, or lack there off, aren't good enough for the current tech. Heck, in Denmark we also have a lot of specialized road sings that the AIs can't read yet.<p>Similarly RPA and machine learning are just in the trial stages with very few human resource available to make good use of it.<p>What we can tell from all these tests and proof-of-concepts though, is that the technology is going to be viable sometime in the future.<p>No one can predict exactly what will happen of course. As I've already mentioned it'll certainly create new jobs, but those jobs will require higher educations, and I think that's the challenge which worries us in politics. Because the people that are going to be replaced by self driving cars won't be easily reschooled for something else.
Good luck buying an industrial robot right now. Anecdotal maybe, but from my personal experience all top 3 players are experiencing supply shortages due to strong demand.
Calm before the storm.<p>Regarding point 2, can this be explained by the trend of turning CAPEX into OPEX by leasing and similar? I only heard about it in passing so maybe thats just a misunderstanding on my part.
Another article about productivity from an author who can't distinguish between measurable economic TFP and the common-use concept of productivity.<p>In fact, TFP (which is what they're charting) is the mystery factor that explains why earnings grows differently than its inputs, labor and capital.<p>It makes no sense to me to talk about TFP when moore's law is making devices cheaper and VCs / ad revenue are subsidizing omnipresent software.<p>The ATMs argument is tired -- even if it's right it's 30 years old.<p>Foxconn replaced 60k workers on their shenzhen campus with robots. How can this article not cite that?<p>Weak.
I'm a fervent watcher of the show "How it's Made" and it blows my mind how an enormous amount of manufacturing is still done by hand. Particularly any seamstress, weaving, buffing, sanding or carving.<p>The show generally covers North American manufactures where you would expect far greater automation but empirically I have observed the opposite.<p>For example the other day I watched a Canadian worker skillfully weave a hammock. It looked like it could have been automated but I lacked the mechanical mind to envision how.<p>So given that manufacturing is actually a small subset of the economy but probably the most viable for automation (ie robots) its sort of disturbing to see an almost regression particularly in North America (again my empirical observations).<p>Service based jobs like hospitality I would imagine to be far harder to automate (or maybe not).
One thing the general media don't seem to understand is that the whole discussion about robots isn't so much about AI but mostly about automation. We don't need intelligent machines to get there, we're already automating jobs/tasks. In our industry for example bots are everywhere.
The robotics market isn't coming for several more years, in my opinion, so I think the reason why there is a sounding of an alarm now is because by the time we realize it and it does get here it's too late for the labor market
Quick aside from the point of the article...the "Growth in labor productivity..." and "Capital Investment in IT..." graphs are one of those fudged to present a particular point of view stats.<p>Wow, so capital investment slowed from 2007-2016. I wonder if anything happened during that time period that may have deflated these growth rates.
they're already here... but unfortunately these algorithms are becoming the masters, an increasing workforce relies on an app to tell them where to pick up customers or where to pick up amazon products.
yeah where are them? <a href="https://m.imgur.com/ZiJ0n6Q" rel="nofollow">https://m.imgur.com/ZiJ0n6Q</a><p>sheeesh of course robototization adoption is slowing, most manufacturing is already there and until the next tech generation comes we reached the optimum split between local automated vs cheap manual outsourced