INNOVATION (INCLUDING ROBOTS) WILL ELIMINATE 5 MILLION JOBS BY 2020, STUDY FINDS

[Gingersnap]

INNOVATION (INCLUDING ROBOTS) WILL ELIMINATE 5 MILLION JOBS BY 2020, STUDY FINDS
Innovation (including robots) will eliminate 5 million jobs by 2020, study finds


KABC
Wednesday, January 20, 2016 12:23PM
Robotics are going to cause changes to the workforce in the next five years, but don't start running with those robot-takeover conspiracy theories just yet.

About 5.1 million jobs will be lost by the year 2020 because of "disruptive labour market changes," predicts the World Economic Forum in a new study. Many of the factors driving change are technological, like the Internet, big data and robotics.

The types of jobs most negatively affected by market disruptions are office and administrative, manufacturing and production and construction and extraction, according to the study.

One of the biggest changes workers can expect to see is a change in the kind of skills they're required to use.

"Technological disruptions such as robotics and machine learning -- rather than completely replacing existing occupations and job categories -- are likely to substitute specific tasks previously carried out as part of these jobs, freeing workers up to focus on new tasks and leading to rapidly changing core skill sets in these occupations," the report explains.

Those skill sets will be highly social, the report predicts.

"Overall, social skills -- such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and teaching others -- will be in higher demand across industries than narrow technical skills, such as programming or equipment operation and control."

The report also predicts the creation of jobs that we may not have even dreamed of yet.

"By one popular estimate, 65 percent of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don't yet exist," the report reads.

As for the jobs that already exist, the types that can expect the highest growth by 2020 include business and financial operations, management and computer and mathematical.

I think the cheery optimism in this article is misplaced. As someone who has seen the job collapse in administrative, management, and low level field operations, I am less optimistic.

The people we displaced with software didn't revamp and become creative/social employees. They just attempted to compete for a dwindling number of jobs.

The truth is that the need for creative/social job slots is very narrow and it will always be narrow since one person can use tech to do an outreach that 50 people would have done before.

As we migrated to high tech and an increased use of telemetry, we shed good, skilled jobs for both college educated people and people who had hard skills out of the military. We didn't shift them to marketing. Marketing shed a bunch of people itself as the tech allowed us to do better outreach. They didn't go into admin since that had also collapsed as each person did their own travel, over-time sheets, memos, conferencing, etc. Management didn't take on new people at our our place since one manager could oversee many more people and projects with technology.

Those people went to retail. There's only so much self-stocking and cashiering to go around.

ABC

[80zephyr]

This is a problem I have been hammering for years. I believe in capitalism. But, I also believe that very soon(if not already) we have made life so easy that there will not possibly be enough jobs to go around.

That means that we will have a PERMANENT number of people who are unemployed.

Capitalism is not "built" to respond to such a scenario.

It is a problem that is unsolvable under the construction of our current society.

And it makes me ask why we need to keep bringing immigrants in to this country?

Mark

[Gingersnap]

This is a problem I have been hammering for years. I believe in capitalism. But, I also believe that very soon(if not already) we have made life so easy that there will not possibly be enough jobs to go around.

That means that we will have a PERMANENT number of people who are unemployed.

Capitalism is not "built" to respond to such a scenario.

It is a problem that is unsolvable under the construction of our current society.

And it makes me ask why we need to keep bringing immigrants in to this country?

Mark

So fewer Americans will hustle off welfare.

[80zephyr]

So fewer Americans will hustle off welfare.

Actually, it will be more. If I'm understanding you correctly.

Mark

[scott]

I think the cheery optimism in this article is misplaced. As someone who has seen the job collapse in administrative, management, and low level field operations, I am less optimistic.

The people we displaced with software didn't revamp and become creative/social employees. They just attempted to compete for a dwindling number of jobs.

The truth is that the need for creative/social job slots is very narrow and it will always be narrow since one person can use tech to do an outreach that 50 people would have done before.

As we migrated to high tech and an increased use of telemetry, we shed good, skilled jobs for both college educated people and people who had hard skills out of the military. We didn't shift them to marketing. Marketing shed a bunch of people itself as the tech allowed us to do better outreach. They didn't go into admin since that had also collapsed as each person did their own travel, over-time sheets, memos, conferencing, etc. Management didn't take on new people at our our place since one manager could oversee many more people and projects with technology.

Those people went to retail. There's only so much self-stocking and cashiering to go around.

ABC

I agree with your analysis. The "knowledge worker" bubble has burst. Who knew that all it took to be a Six Sigma Black Belt was some passing skill at working a process? Those six-figure jobs are gone forever now that it doesn't take 18 levels of management control to successfully buy and ship 100,000 very specialized microchips.

So now what? The general theory of sociologists in the 1990s was that there would be more of a need for sociologists (duh) and other people in the "soft sciences" but that hasn't worked out very well. Most of them are full of shit and they can't even manage their own checking accounts. Education as a bubble has burst. With proper respect to actual Scientists that teach Science (DJ), the educational system has become a bureaucracy of and for the advancement of those in the business of administration - and they aren't even very good at that.

So now what?

I think human conflict is a constant so there's always the industry of defense. Criticize the PNAC folks but they have been accurate on their threat assessments - horrible at their plans for how to move forward, but this is the big problem of the "New American Century."

I also think that people just need to get smarter and more adaptive as we did in the times before we got here. My grandfather "never saw fit to learn the computer" but he made sure all his kids knew how to learn anything new because their ability to do so was key to their sustainability. Now it seems like the old unsustainable model that has been subsidized so much is how people think the world works. It doesn't and never has. We have all sorts of technically savvy people who can easily adapt to new technology but still can't figure out how to manage their own personal bank accounts. They can hack an Xbox to make a whole new ecosystem of pirated movies - so much that it's disrupting Hollywood more than Napster disrupted the RIAA but they can't figure out how to make their far superior interface and hardware work commercially. People would pay for an updated version of TiVo. Most people who run Kodi actually bought a pre-configured box so technically they paid for it too. But the folks selling these boxes can't figure out how to cut a deal with Hollywood to do micro-transactions?

This is one of the areas where I think government has a genuine role. We need the government to stop fighting the last war and playing the politics of entitlement and actually start looking out for the general welfare.

I'm fine, but I don't think my grandkids are going to fare all that well. We aren't a connected family, and it appears that's how things are going - people connected to the right political masters get the chance to provide services while everyone else gets the benefit of subsisting on government provisions. So my grandkids will be fat and healthy until their treatment becomes too expensive and then they'll be kept comfortable until they die. Yay.


Now how do we feed a billion people collectively while also innovating? First, reduce government. It's too big and too inefficient. The same innovations that caused the decline of the management class (ironically invented by the government) need to be used by the government. There is no reason to have the IRS in its current incarnation. Since the IRS already knows how much we all spend and where, let them send us an automated "first look" tax return. If it's implemented properly (which means firing almost all off the current staff), it would be accurate for 90% of the returns. That means we can get rid of at least half of their clerks, help desk, and field agents. But we can also get rid of the many levels of supervisors, supervisors of the supervisors, and supervisors of those supervisors. Believe it or not, most of the IRS budget is consumed by the 1940s era structure.

At the same time we do the same thing with Defense. There is absolutely no reason to have so many levels of checks and balances (both with the same biases) on the other checks and balances all so there can be a chess game between the 5 major Prime Contractors. Set the budget, define the requirements, bar anyone who doesn't deliver.

Then let's nationalize basic subsistence but keep it basic. We already convert corn to fuel eventhough we don't need to do that to keep us from being dependent on Middle Eastern Oil. And without the government subsidies corn is more valuable as food than fuel these days. Corn should ALWAYS be more valuable than fuel, it's food. We can't eat fuel. So since we now have enough corn for everyone to eat and burn vast quantities of it as fuel, let's cut out the fat. Let's eat the corn and burn the fuel. If it's that easy to grow, give it away. Make sure nobody starves because they can always get some corn products. Make it easy and efficient to get basic subsistence but not lobster or prepared soups. Give away the cheap stuff. If someone wants to subsist on the basics, make that possible. But make it basic.

So how does this fix our problem? Easy. You only get the basics here. Affluence is earned. If everyone eats then Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs applies. The problem today is that our social safety net has become a hammock (hat tip to Boog) and the political engineering of entitlements have overtaken the usefullness of our political leaders. People on the government dole are affluent from all levels of the proverbial and rare "welfare queen" to Sen. Boxer's husband. If people on welfare are fat it means they have more than enough. I get that part of the idea was to let them get fat and die early thereby making sure nobody starved to death as some sort of sick eugenics experiment but that one failed. Make food free (since we are actually burning food at an economic loss) and let's go from there.

Now here's the question for Celeste - would you agree to a plan that makes subsistence-level food for free to anyone in exchange for a plan allowing people to take ownership of half of their Social Security funds? Half of the funds they contributed are theirs to do with what they wish and their benefits are adjusted accordingly. If basic food is free, doesn't that discount the need for so much cash outlays?

[william the wierd]

The half life of education is shrinking rapidly and often out of date when taught for example when I got my degree in finance I was assured of many things and I am not irritated about those things that are now known to be false but the ones that were known to be false then. Most PhDs and a fair number of Nobel laureates do not know the math and material science outside their own little area. An extremely simple rule to keep in mind when playing with your 401K is:

Always remember
To buy in November
Then sell in May
And Walk away

The odds of better than average returns for the year with that rule are 17 to 3 in your favor.

You can do even better than that by adding another simple rule

If the put/call ratio is below 1.3 puts/1 call the company is more likely to go down than up. The further above that number the less likely the company is to go down at least relative to the market as a whole. In combination the odds are 43 to 1 in your favor.

Both of these rules were known when I was in college but neither was taught in class. Nor was the fact that an iterative map would show a witch hat distribution but that was learned after I goy my degree.

I have no doubt that this kind of incompetence is widespread throughout all skill areas. Worse yet this is getting worse.

[scott]

The half life of education is shrinking rapidly and often out of date when taught for example when I got my degree in finance I was assured of many things and I am not irritated about those things that are now known to be false but the ones that were known to be false then. Most PhDs and a fair number of Nobel laureates do not know the math and material science outside their own little area. An extremely simple rule to keep in mind when playing with your 401K is:

Always remember
To buy in November
Then sell in May
And Walk away

The odds of better than average returns for the year with that rule are 17 to 3 in your favor.

You can do even better than that by adding another simple rule

If the put/call ratio is below 1.3 puts/1 call the company is more likely to go down than up. The further above that number the less likely the company is to go down at least relative to the market as a whole. In combination the odds are 43 to 1 in your favor.

Both of these rules were known when I was in college but neither was taught in class. Nor was the fact that an iterative map would show a witch hat distribution but that was learned after I goy my degree.

I have no doubt that this kind of incompetence is widespread throughout all skill areas. Worse yet this is getting worse.

I'm not sure if you intended this, so forgive me if I offend you.


This simple rule that I've known about for decades is exactly what I'm talking about. It's a contrived rule, and one without any proper logical basis. You probably have the proper education to declare this and you probably have a few million examples of past history to show it's true. But it's only true in the past and your rule only works in a static situation of everyone on the consumer side selling when their brokers say "It's May" and then working their deals on the side.


If you're saying this always happens because it has always happened, which is the position of most of the "technical traders" then I'll refer you to May 2009. It would have been very bad to be in a ^DJI index fund selling in May 2009. Of course that is the other problem, and the reason I don't speculate the the stock market anymore. There's a huge difference between the overall performance of a tracked index and the performance of an individual portfolio.

For the most part anyone with less than $100 million is going to lose or gain but they'll feel better about either situation if they know someone else "credentialed" made it happen.

[william the wierd]

Actually the reason the May-November meme usually works is it tracks economies of networks, which are derivatives of Gauss' law ([N+1]/2) N and there are a bunch of them. The major stock exchanges are in the northern hemisphere where June through August is the legacy harvest school break. May, Sept and Oct are the preferred vacation times for those with either adult or no children. Market efficiencies decline exponentially as participant numbers decline. I forget the name of the guy who did the study proving this effect but he was from New Zealand and the most surprising finding was that there without the larger northern stock exchanges to arbitrage out anomalies southern hemisphere exchanges have the same problem.

The clincher was that larger exchanges, all other things being equal, are less volatile at least in percentage terms. Smaller exchanges like Newfoundland before Canada took it over and Iceland during the meltdown are more prone to catastrophic collapse that take the country with them. New Zealand almost experiencing this after WWII may have been the inspiration for this study but I do not know that.

[Celeste Chalfonte]

So how does this fix our problem? Easy. You only get the basics here. Affluence is earned. If everyone eats then Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs applies. The problem today is that our social safety net has become a hammock (hat tip to Boog) and the political engineering of entitlements have overtaken the usefullness of our political leaders. People on the government dole are affluent from all levels of the proverbial and rare "welfare queen" to Sen. Boxer's husband. If people on welfare are fat it means they have more than enough. I get that part of the idea was to let them get fat and die early thereby making sure nobody starved to death as some sort of sick eugenics experiment but that one failed. Make food free (since we are actually burning food at an economic loss) and let's go from there.

You're way off-base on that one. Senator Boxer's political career was initially supported and often sustained by Stewart Boxer's position as one of the best litigators in his field, and the founder and name partner in one of the largest and most lucrative law practices of its kind. I believe he is now retired, but he has a very substantial personal retirement income derived from his partnership, and his political connections were well established before you ever heard of Barbara Boxer.

Now here's the question for Celeste - would you agree to a plan that makes subsistence-level food for free to anyone in exchange for a plan allowing people to take ownership of half of their Social Security funds? Half of the funds they contributed are theirs to do with what they wish and their benefits are adjusted accordingly. If basic food is free, doesn't that discount the need for so much cash outlays?

I'd have to see the plan, but probably. Of course, half of what they contributed wouldn't give them much to work with. And the ones who would take that half are either those who already don't need Social Security benefits (because they're wealthy) or those who will blow it and end up living in government housing on government corn when they're too old and/or disabled to work at a low-paying job.

[scott]

You're way off-base on that one. Senator Boxer's political career was initially supported and often sustained by Stewart Boxer's position as one of the best litigators in his field, and the founder and name partner in one of the largest and most lucrative law practices of its kind. I believe he is now retired, but he has a very substantial personal retirement income derived from his partnership, and his political connections were well established before you ever heard of Barbara Boxer.

I stand corrected. It's Sen. Feinstein's husband.

I'd have to see the plan, but probably. Of course, half of what they contributed wouldn't give them much to work with. And the ones who would take that half are either those who already don't need Social Security benefits (because they're wealthy) or those who will blow it and end up living in government housing on government corn when they're too old and/or disabled to work at a low-paying job.

Probably is good enough. The problem with Social Security today is that it's unsustainable. It's no longer a retirement supplement, it's the sole source of income for far too many people. Addressing the long term liability will happen one way or another. My Dad is far from wealthy but the rate of return for his and Mom's Social Security benefits is negative and will be unless he lives to be 90. If he had half of his and Mom's 40 years' contributions in a safe annuity it would be about $500,000 now generating more income than his current Social Security check. He would have wealth to pass on.

[Lady Marva]

Peoples-eples. That robots are going to need programmers. The robots are going to need tester. The robots are going to need builders. They're going to need service and maintenance. The robots are going to spawn other more advanced robots. And the need goes on.

[80zephyr]

Peoples-eples. That robots are going to need programmers. The robots are going to need tester. The robots are going to need builders. They're going to need service and maintenance. The robots are going to spawn other more advanced robots. And the need goes on.

If what you say is true, then robots wouldn't exist. It is only the reduction in man power that makes them affordable. With every advance, the need for man power goes down.

And its only gonna get worse. In 10 years(or less) self driving cars will be viable. Maybe millions of driving jobs will disappear.

Mark

[Norm dePlume]

If greater productivity and less need for unpleasant, arduous labor is a bad thing, maybe we should rethink our system.

[80zephyr]

If greater productivity and less need for unpleasant, arduous labor is a bad thing, maybe we should rethink our system.

Its not a bad thing. And yes, our system will have to be rethought.

Mak

[Djharkavy]

Peoples-eples. That robots are going to need programmers. The robots are going to need tester. The robots are going to need builders. They're going to need service and maintenance. The robots are going to spawn other more advanced robots. And the need goes on.

To some extent.

But we are already at the point where we don't need full employment to run our economy.

The problem is what to do with those who either aren't qualified for available jobs, or who just don't have the ethic to keep a job.

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