What will happen when all the low skill jobs are gone?

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

Building and maintaining railways worldwide since the invention of steam was labour intensive giving millions of jobs for a over a century

But not nearly as labour intensive as the tasks that the trains made redundant. The same applies to robotics and computers. Designing, building and maintaining automated systems is labour intensive, but less so than the tasks it replaces.

Otherwise you wouldn't bother building trains or robots.

Paramite Pie wrote: »

Of course there will be new jobs created but a lot more lost. I know a guy who works for a multinational and he alone is the entire European Office. He's only paid so he'll be there if something goes wrong. If everything runs smooth (and it often doesn't because of human error - not the computer/servers!) he has nothing to do. If he wasnt there company could loose millions for every minute there's a problem. The current model wont work - we need more start-ups and less monopolies.

But I wonder how many jobs this guy has created by making whatever service he's maintaining cheap enough that more people/companies can afford a service that may have been out of their reach when it took hundreds of people to do the same job?

It's all swings and roundabouts. A company makes a more efficient process that requires less human labour so reduces their cost, which means their product is more accessible to more people/companies, creating new jobs/industries that end up employing more people than were lost in the original company. It could even be that it created more satisfying jobs than the ones lost too.

The obstacle to all this will be large Corporations and their patents; smaller companies or individuals may struggle to challenge legal claims against them - even if they're in the right.

I think patents and copyrights are becoming utterly pointless as time goes on. Even look at music, there's a huge restriction on what a person can do thanks to copyrights saying this particular sentence or harmony is owned by a corporation. It's the same for all industries. There is a right way to do something but you can't do it that way because the people who discovered that method first own the right to use it. It's going to have to be something the human race abandons in time.

Like the microchip - the future is of businesses is smaller.

I think so too, the problem is we're eating up resources faster and faster. Localised production and design may become the norm for a while but we'll probably start eating through resources rapidly because there won't be the same level of efficiency when your average Joe makes something compared to a corporation trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency and money out of everything.

Most HR departments in large companies have always been automated.

It,s about time for a robot tax so people can get a basic income and start ending the dole

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

..................

Amazon uses Humans in it's warehouse because for now they are cheaper but they will be replaced.
......

Seems they've quite a few already, 15,000 in this :

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

First have import tariffs on places that don't follow EU health and safety legislation. So if the only way you can make it cheaper is by putting workers at risk then we don't want it.

This a thousand times. It makes no sense to bring in worker protection here and then for us to end up buying from abroad because we're not willing to pay for the measures we insisted be brought in to protect us in the work place.


Living in space solves all our problems. Resources are never ending, there are no land issues, just build as much as you need.

When all the low-skilled jobs are gone, they won't really be gone; they'll be reassigned to specialists and professionals, and the low-skilled way of doing the low-skilled jobs will become the substandard, possibly legally impermissible, way of doing them. Think of it as similar to letting the government come into your kitchen at home and marking all of the possible health and nutrition violations that it would mark if you were running a restaurant out of that kitchen. Hell, the way my mother raised her three children 40 years ago would be considered child neglect, if not abuse, these days (and based on what we know about children these days, it might in truth have been neglectful and abusive). I know someone who sold his office-cleaning services based on being an informed professional armed with the latest health and safety data. If that model takes hold, you won't even be able to be a low-skilled toilet wiper.

eeguy wrote: »

What about low wage workers around the world who can't find work because a machine can now make clothing and shoes faster than a human possibly could?

Clothing in particular may be one thing that can create a much more diverse market for itself. When clothing machines become cheap enough every town could have it's own locally produced clothes. Cities could have loads of shops popping up, trending for a while until the next in fashion designer comes along. Maybe someone in a small town with a clothes producing machine can sell licensed copies of the designs from cities. Improved clothing producing machines could bring high end Haute couture to more people as you don't have to pay for the one off made by one highly skilled designer. Instead you're buying the design and a machine puts it together in the same way it would have been done by hand.

What about retailers who move entirely online and operate out of automated warehouses?

Everyone moves into sales and customer support. It would be great if instead of just pocketing the difference companies would reinvest some of the cash saved into proper after sales support.

Or b&m retailers, who have automating checkouts and help screens instead of staff?

Still need people to oversee the whole process. The automated checkout isn't going to do anything to make sure anyone pays. Even packing shelfs is something that's probably beyond AI for a while due to the shelfs changing so often. I could actually see shelf stacking becoming a more professional job in the future.

It worries me that all the sh*te jobs that put me and millions like me through college will be gone and the only jobs left are those which require creative thinking, artistic flair, complex movements and co-ordination and the jobs that people won't accept being automated (hospitality work etc).

Artistic jobs are already over supplied.

The way businesses work are changing too, they're trying to work around having to have geniuses/experts, departments are getting larger with people specialised more into smaller parts of the process. So rather than have one guy that's absolutely fantastic they have a team of people that only need to be decent at their part. In the scenario of depending on the fantastic guy, if something happens to him everything grinds to a halt. In the second scenario if something happens to one or more people just replace them, the training won't even be too elaborate.

So we are generating more jobs through the process of building intelligence redundancy into our endeavours.