What happened to robots taking all our jobs?

Touchscreens have replaced lots of human jobs. Self checkouts have replaced lots of human jobs. I worked in one of the very first grocery stores to have a self checkout added. They told us it wouldnt affect our jobs. If you go into any grocery store in the country you will see ~25% staffing compared to the late 90s/early 2000s. If you are askibg this question you are just too young to have noticed, or perhaps of a social standing that you just don't notice the people who are being swept aside by automation.

I think it's happening, just more slowly than predicted. Mostly jobs in manufacturing have been lost: about a quarter of a million since 2000. A couple orders of magnitude more jobs are expected to be lost, but the future is obviously uncertain.

When reading statistics like this, though, it's important to ask two things:

1. If the report lists how many jobs were lost due to automation, does it also talk about how many were created due to automation? If 20k are lost one year, and 19k are created, the article may not mention the latter, though it is relevant. In one sense, only the delta is important.

2. But, in another sense, the delta isn't what we care about. New jobs created by automation is misleading too. Because, are the jobs created by automation better than the ones that were lost? Is it the same people who lost their manufacturing jobs who got the new jobs? Are those people happy about the trade?

My point is that it's a complicated situation that has been (and likely will be) commonly oversimplified.

1. Most, and I am willing to even state 99% of tech ( where tech nowadays means Software ) people working in Silicon Valley doesn't have a clue how the outside world works. Along with Tech VCs which is why you get those fundings to Cloud Kitchens Robots taking over Restaurants. They clearly have never worked in a restaurants before.

2. The cost of developing Chips, Robotics is still ridiculously high. If Robotics ( which really is nothing more than Automation 2.0 ) did make cost savings, I can assure you, you will see it first being tested and deployed in the likes of McDonalds where they get an economy of scale. And it is happening, but no way near ready yet.

3. Tech people, or mostly Silicon Valley Tech people have vastly underestimated human being. How flexible we are and how quickly we could adopt to different task and needs, while giving comparatively little wages.

4. This is the same with Foxconn.

5. You should take a look at Car manufacturing and Amazon Warehouse on Automation or Robotics.

>>When can I expect robots to take our jobs?

Cost will still need to come down. And it is going to be a long and gradual path. Steve Jobs wanted a Giant Machine that makes the machines. That was in the 90s.

Automation has been eliminating jobs since the 1960s, which is why Richard Nixon was ready to propose a form of universal income in 1969. He backed out because of racism.

Look at real wages of the working class since then, vs productivity. Workers keep generating more profits, and don't get more pay.

I imagine it has something to do with the fact that it's a lot harder to build a robot that can respond to every possible thing that can go wrong in the same way that a human can. If a job is 100% predictable then it can probably be automated relatively easily.

Just my $0.02.

Silicon valley is full of crap is what happened. Some jobs have been reduced - bank teller, cashier etc. There are also lots of jobs that could be replaced but aren't beause of weird regulations and such - lawyer etc.

But most jobs - making hamburgers, cooking, laying brick, pouring cement, packing stuff in warehouses or assembly lines - stuff that matters, automation looks as far off as ever. Sure machines do a lot to help in these fields but it's going to be a very long time if ever when machines can replace people completely. Even self driving cars appear to be much further away than people think.

We cannot and should not plan the economy around Silicon valley hype

Robots have taken loads of accounting jobs. API integration, better software, et al have removed loads of mid-career/mid-level jobs.

I currently work at a small eocm business, the number of systems and integrations availble have gutted the typical career progression.

I am concerned at how to navigate from data entry clerk to CFO. This path was available historically, however, it is becomkng less-so.

Audit jobs are going too. Previously, a firm would need a big staff to check numbers. Now it's a lot easier to audit a process becuase the company uses SAP, Netsuite, or some other big name ERP.

Robots and automation take over one discrete task at a time, not whole jobs in one fell swoop.

It allows a smaller workforce to handle the same or greater volume. A port that had 1000 longshoremen can be staffed with 100 people. That’s as much due to workflows adapting to new technology, the use of standardized containers, and scale as it is a robot that slots in 1:1 for a crane operator. Bank of America opened a virtual branch in my town. There’s two ATMs that let you video chat with a teller if needed.

Or the end product itself has been obsoleted by something more mechanized, computerized, or standardized. Computer files means no more file clerks. Email reduces demand for First Class letters and mailroom staff. Dedicated staff passing around external mail and interdepartmental envelopes with the prior recipient and sender crossed out is an anachronism. Direct deposit/ACH and debit cards reduce demand for payroll staff, bookkeepers, tellers, armored car services, and checkbook manufacturing. Even low end legal labor like document review has been automated.

Demand is elastic. When goods are factory made they become cheaper and people individually buy more and more people can afford to buy one.

It turned out it was harder than everyone thought? I keep waiting for the house building robot https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/hadrian-the-constru... but still waiting. I think it was musk who said (or words to this effect), it turns out people are very good at handling the odd things that happen that robots can't. This was after he said he could automate all the Tesla build.

There is a Whole Foods store one block away from my house. Next to it I can see a number of bicycles with some type of trailers. They are used for deliveries. With such a bicycle a person can deliver easily 3 times more than a person who just pushes the groceries on a cart.

One way to look at this is to say the bicycle increased someone's productivity by a factor of 3.

But another way to look at it is to say that one man and one bicycle can do the work of 3 men now. So 2 men will lose their jobs. A bicycle just replaced 2 men.

The bicycle does not look like a robot at all, but is just as good, if not better, at replacing human workers.

The same with other jobs. You don't need to replace 100% of the workers. You just need to bring machines that increase someone's productivity by a factor of 5, and boom, you are able do let go of 80% of your human workforce.

At the same Whole Foods store there are lots of self service lines now. My guess is the number of cashiers went down by at least of factor of 3.

Amazon has shops where you don't even need a self-service line. You just go in, pick whatever you want from the shelves, and leave. The cameras keep track of what you pick and charge you appropriately. They started using this technology in Whole Foods stores (one in Washington DC is already functioning, one in LA is coming this Fall).

I went on a road trip last week. I noticed there are no more manned tollbooths. Everything is fully automated. That's probably some thousands of human jobs lost. Big win in my opinion, the passage through the tollbooths is much, much faster now.

3 things to note

1) I think it really depends on how you define "robots". If you defined robots to include servers, many jobs have already been taken.

2) Transitions are slow. Jobs our parents knew don't exist any longer. But it won't happen faster than that.

3) People move on and learn new things. It's great to get rid of receptive tasks that a computer/robots can do. It is liberating. No one wants to wash their dishes or clothes by hand these days.

It's not at all clear that automation destroys jobs overall at the economy level. It seems like there are two main effects behind this. One is that it increases the productivity of the economy and drives down the cost of goods, which increases overall wealth in society, which drives consumption and growth. The other effect is that somebody needs to build, install, maintain and operate the automated systems. It's fewer people in that particular sector, but it's higher value technical jobs. There's also a possible effect where automation reduces the costs in a sector which increases demand for those goods and services. There's good evidence that companies that automate more employ more people in the long run than their less automated competitors, but across the sector it's not as clear. Between these effects, the result seems to be either a wash or possibly a net positive. The problem is it's hard to tease out all these effects in an economy, and different forms of automation have different effects.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2021/09/02/does-auto...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2021/09/02/does-auto...

At the global level we've been automating away jobs for 200 years now, and while predictions of the end of employment have been a constant, if you look around now it really doesn't seem to have worked out that way. I grew up on 200AD comics in which the Judge Dredd and Halo Jones strips depicted a world of 95%+ unemployment because the robots had taken all the jobs, but back then in the 80s we did have mass unemployments in the UK as the economy went through a painful transition, so such a future seemed more credible.

Having said all that, any shift in industrial and employment patterns creates winners and losers. I'm all for social support to ease and manage such transitions, but trying to slow down and block change of this kind as a strategy has a really poor track record. It's incredibly expensive and inevitably fails anyway.

As long as people are cheaper than robots, not much will happen anyway. I think a lot of jobs can be replaced by robots with enough money, but for that money (and the maintenance costs etc), you can get so many cheap (and more flexible) human employees that it is not worth it. If that goes up a lot, maybe it will be tempting; think the pressure is not high enough (yet)?

We have automated an insane amount of jobs with software already. Data collection and processing is largely done by software now. Customer service is shrinking in size. Automation is slowly reducing the workload of many other departments.

You might only see self-service in stores, but there's so much more going on in the back office.

Hardware automation takes time, but software automation is eating the world.

It’s happening, just too slow for the short attention spans..

It's a gradual process which started at least 50 years ago. It was only recently hyped by various media and academia pundits, because it (hyping things) is how they make a living. See also: self-driving cars.

It's still coming, the biggest impact will be in self driving trucks and commercial vehicles, next to that it will be in heavy equipment operation, farming, etc. And then in healthcare, etc.

It turned out Luddites are still wrong after 200 years.

Automation destroy jobs, but others are created.

The belief in job stealing robots is mostly tech bro lore and not based in science nor empirical observation.

It’s the same reason that Uber’s autonomous driving robotaxi projects are so misguided. Exploiting people is a heck of a lot cheaper than inventing robots.

Robots taking our jobs = a headline. Automation leading to deskilling and removal of certain job functions = reality. Many jobs that are amenable to complete automation are not being backfilled.

Robotics is only one way to achieve automation -- I wouldn't be obsessed with "robots" per se and insist it's not taking over.

We are converging.

We have people working on ML for understanding multilevel tasks, recognizing the souroundings, understanding items, generic ai etc.

Digital twins become normal.

The race for the robot has already started and with companies like Tesla now talking about it much more than before, we might see it happening in the next 10 years.

Buy a robot,.show it what it should do, replace low skill workers.

They took the jobs people would have had, they didn't take the jobs people currently have.

Amazons factories would have employed every human on Earth if they had to use humans. That's what happened to the robots taking our jobs. They took them from the future, decades ago, and you didn't even notice.

The robots are too busy working in the Cloud, using ML and AI to analyse Big Data, to flip burgers.

Have you been to McDonald's lately?

According to hackernews terminology the government "printed" more jobs.

Ask your ATM. It replaced a real bank employee.

The same that happened to self driving car. Fogezy Fogazy. The robot have not been deployed because they are not ready and do not exist.

Articles over sensationalize for clicks not truth, you passed their test congrats.