Automation and labour

Arguably for millennia, but certainly since the industrial revolution, technological development has been driving changes in labour practices. This has been accelerated by globalization and automation and is likely speeding up as sensors and artificial intelligence improve and costs fall:

Both for individuals and governments, it’s hard to discern what this means when planning for the labour force of 2050 and beyond, except, perhaps, don’t build careers on anything that is easily automated.

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Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

25 thoughts on “Automation and labour”

  3. Bill Gates and Elon Musk are sounding the alarm “too aggressively” over artificial intelligence’s potential negative consequences for society, says MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson. The co-author of The Second Machine Age argues it will take at least 30 to 50 years for robots and software to eliminate the need for human laborers. In the meantime, he says, we should be investing in education so that people are prepared for the jobs of the future, and are focused on where they still have an advantage over machines — creativity, empathy, leadership, and teamwork.

  6. The company has argued that an in-house autonomous driving capability is crucial to its long-term success as a company. “If we are not tied for first” to develop the technology, Uber’s chief executive Travis Kalanick said last year, “then the person who is in first, or the entity that’s in first, then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher-quality than Uber’s, then Uber is no longer a thing.”

    In Uber’s stated vision of the future, the only thing that’s important is surviving long enough to fire all its drivers and replace them with robots. And, to a certain extent, the company is right. If another company develops, or licenses, self-driving car technology before Uber’s own in-house product is ready, it will be very easy for them to undercut the company on price – a disaster for a market as sensitive to small differences in cost as cab hire.

  7. Yet as robots grow more nimble, humans look increasingly vulnerable. A new working paper concludes that, between 1990 and 2007, each industrial robot added per thousand workers reduced employment in America by nearly six workers. Humanity may not be sent out to pasture, but the parallel with horses is still uncomfortably close.

    …

    The paper’s authors, Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, are careful to exclude confounding causes as best they can. Their results are not driven by a few robot-intensive regions or industries, and are distinct from the effect of trade with China, or offshoring in general. Increased robot density does not seem to raise employment among any group of workers, even those with university education. Since relatively few industrial robots are in use in the American economy, the total job loss from robotisation has been modest: between 360,000 and 670,000. By comparison, analysis published in 2016 found that trade with China between 1999 and 2011 may have left America with 2m fewer jobs than it would otherwise have had. Yet, if the China trade shock has largely run its course, the robot era is dawning.

    …

    Similarly, the financial returns to automation flow to profitable firms and their shareholders, who not only usually live apart from the factories being automated but who save at high rates, contributing to weak demand across the economy as a whole. Indeed, roughly half of job losses from robotisation (as from exposure to Chinese imports) are attributable to the knock-on effect from reduced demand rather than direct displacement.

  8. This is exactly the problem. As robots and AI are able to outcompete people doing more and more jobs, it will add to the trends building up wealth inequality. As long as governments remain unwilling to even consider effective policies of redistribution the world will continue getting more and more politically and economically dominated by the 1%. Not because they are performing valuable services for others, but because their wealth builds itself regardless of what they contribute to society.

  9. Dongguan has an official policy of encouraging automation, and has set aside 200m yuan a year to help its factories eliminate jobs. This is part of a national strategy to upgrade manufacturing through automation. The governments of the PRD are leading the charge. Guangdong has pledged to spend 943bn yuan to boost the manufacture and adoption of robotics in the province. Guangzhou optimistically hopes to automate the jobs of four-fifths of the city’s industrial workforce by 2020.

  10. The Austrian village of Donawitz has been an iron-smelting center since the 1400s, when ore was dug from mines carved out of the snow-capped peaks nearby. Over the centuries, Donawitz developed into the Hapsburg Empire’s steel-production hub, and by the early 1900s it was home to Europe’s largest mill. With the opening of Voestalpine AG’s new rolling mill this year, the industry appears secure. What’s less certain are the jobs. The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500,000 tons of robust steel wire a year — vs. as many as 1,000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s. Inside the facility, red-hot metal snakes its way along a 700-meter (2,297-foot) production line. Yet the floors are spotless, the only noise is a gentle hum that wouldn’t overwhelm a quiet conversation, and most of the time the place is deserted except for three technicians who sit high above the line, monitoring output on a bank of flatscreens. “We have to forget steel as a core employer,” says Wolfgang Eder, Voestalpine’s chief executive officer for the past 13 years. “In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated.”

  11. At an exclusive gathering at a golf resort near Lisbon, the big minds of monetary policy were seriously discussing the risk that artificial intelligence could eliminate jobs on a scale that would dwarf previous waves of technological change. “There is no question we are in an era of people asking, ‘Is the Robocalpyse upon us?'” David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told an audience Tuesday that included Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and dozens of other top central bankers and economists… [A]long with the optimism is a fear that the economic expansion might bypass large swaths of the population, in part because a growing number of jobs could be replaced by computers capable of learning — artificial intelligence.

    Policymakers and economists conceded that they have not paid enough attention to how much technology has hurt the earning power of some segments of society, or planned to address the concerns of those who have lost out… In the past, technical advances caused temporary disruptions but ultimately improved living standards, creating new categories of employment along the way… But artificial intelligence threatens broad categories of jobs previously seen as safe from automation, such as legal assistants, corporate auditors and investment managers. Large groups of people could become obsolete, suffering the same fate as plow horses after the invention of the tractor. “More and more, we are seeing economists saying, ‘This time could be different,’âS” said Autor, who presented a paper on the subject that he wrote with Anna Salomons, an associate professor at the Utrecht University School of Economics in the Netherlands.

  12. We have already eliminated all jobs several times in human history. How many jobs circa 1900 exist today? If I were a prescient futurist in 1900, I would say, “Okay, 38% of you work on farms; 25% of you work in factories. That’s two-thirds of the population. I predict that by the year 2015, that will be 2% on farms and 9% in factories.” And everybody would go, “Oh, my God, we’re going to be out of work.” I would say, “Well, don’t worry, for every job we eliminate, we’re going to create more jobs at the top of the skill ladder.” And people would say, “What new jobs?” And I’d say, “Well, I don’t know. We haven’t invented them yet.”

    That continues to be the case, and it creates a difficult political issue because you can look at people driving cars and trucks, and you can be pretty confident those jobs will go away. And you can’t describe the new jobs, because they’re in industries and concepts that don’t exist yet.

  15. Boston Dynamics

    Meet Stretch, a prototype of our new robot designed to automate box moving tasks in warehouses and distribution centers. Stretch’s mobile base allows it to go to where repetitive box lifting is required – unloading trucks, building pallets of boxes and order building. Stretch makes warehouse operations more efficient and safer for workers.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYUuWWnfRsk

  16. Unloading lorries is therefore one of the few parts of operating a warehouse that has resisted automation. But not for much longer. A new generation of cargo-handling robots is poised to take on the task.

    …

    An individual human worker can unload between 600 and 1,200 boxes an hour. Honeywell hopes that, once its robot is perfected, a single crew chief will be able to supervise the simultaneous unloading of three or four lorries, each at rates of up to 1,500 boxes an hour.

    https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/08/04/robots-are-poised-to-start-unloading-lorries/21803299

  19. Autonomous robotic laparoscopic surgery for intestinal anastomosis

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abj2908

    Autonomous robotic surgery has the potential to provide efficacy, safety, and consistency independent of individual surgeon’s skill and experience. Autonomous anastomosis is a challenging soft-tissue surgery task because it requires intricate imaging, tissue tracking, and surgical planning techniques, as well as a precise execution via highly adaptable control strategies often in unstructured and deformable environments. In the laparoscopic setting, such surgeries are even more challenging because of the need for high maneuverability and repeatability under motion and vision constraints. Here we describe an enhanced autonomous strategy for laparoscopic soft tissue surgery and demonstrate robotic laparoscopic small bowel anastomosis in phantom and in vivo intestinal tissues. This enhanced autonomous strategy allows the operator to select among autonomously generated surgical plans and the robot executes a wide range of tasks independently. We then use our enhanced autonomous strategy to perform in vivo autonomous robotic laparoscopic surgery for intestinal anastomosis on porcine models over a 1-week survival period. We compared the anastomosis quality criteria—including needle placement corrections, suture spacing, suture bite size, completion time, lumen patency, and leak pressure—of the developed autonomous system, manual laparoscopic surgery, and robot-assisted surgery (RAS). Data from a phantom model indicate that our system outperforms expert surgeons’ manual technique and RAS technique in terms of consistency and accuracy. This was also replicated in the in vivo model. These results demonstrate that surgical robots exhibiting high levels of autonomy have the potential to improve consistency, patient outcomes, and access to a standard surgical technique.

  24. Fears over the job-displacing effects of technology are, of course, nothing new. In early 19th-century Britain, the Luddites burned factory machines. The term “automation” first rose to prominence as the adoption of wartime innovations in mechanisation sparked a wave of panic over mass joblessness in the 1950s (see chart 1). In 1978 James Callaghan, Britain’s prime minister, greeted the breakthrough technology of his era—the microprocessor—with a government inquiry into its job-killing potential. Ten years ago Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University published a blockbuster paper, since cited over 5,000 times, claiming that 47% of the tasks American workers perform could be automated away “over the next decade or two”. Now even the techno-optimistic Mr Musk wonders what it would mean for robots to outnumber humans: “It’s not even clear what an economy is at that point.”

    Although Messrs Frey and Osborne still have a few years to be proved right, and Mr Musk can be safely ignored for the time being, the earlier fears about job-killing technology never materialised. On the contrary, labour markets across the rich world are historically tight—and getting structurally tighter as societies age. There are currently two vacancies for every unemployed American, the highest rate on record. America’s manufacturing and hospitality sectors report labour shortages of 500,000 and 800,000 respectively (as measured by the gap between job openings and unemployed workers whose last job was in the sector in question).

    https://www.economist.com/business/2023/03/06/dont-fear-an-ai-induced-jobs-apocalypse-just-yet

  25. Third, ai could change how many lawyers exist and where they work. Eventually, Mr Lessig argues, it is hard to see how ai “doesn’t dramatically reduce the number of lawyers the world needs”. If ai can do in 20 seconds a task that would have taken a dozen associates 50 hours each, then why would big firms continue hiring dozens of associates? A veteran partner at a prestigious corporate-law firm in New York expects the ratio of associates to partners to decline from today’s average of perhaps seven to one at the top firms closer to parity. If associates aren’t worried about their jobs, he says, “they should be”.

    https://www.economist.com/business/2023/06/06/generative-ai-could-radically-alter-the-practice-of-law

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