Automation is a meme

All those were making good progress well before they came fully to prominence. Automation is just a circlejerk by a bunch of desperate NEETs.

here's the deal with automation

>its fucking expensive
unless you are running 24/7 plant operations, automation will not beat out human labor in terms of ROI. thats how automation in manufacturing makes its money, by being able to run lights out. the initial capital investment cost is fucking huge. you need to be a GM or an Intel in order to afford it on any decent scale. even a single robot can put a medium sized manufacturer out of business if they can't fully employ it.

>it requires huge amounts of upper level technicians/engineers

the talent pool in the manufacturing industry is ankle deep right now. even the small job shops are willing to train just about any dickhead off the street who can do simple math. nobody actually wants to work in a factory.

I think the bigger question is why the fuck would employers automate everything to the point where no one would have jobs? If no one has jobs, no one can buy your shit pretty much fucking up the whole process.

>If no one has jobs, no one can buy your shit pretty much fucking up the whole process.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

That might as well be communism. Do you really think anyone would go along with UBI as there only monetary stream?

>Do you really think anyone would go along with UBI as there only monetary stream?
all NEETs would, probably all of /r9k/ too

Most people don't understand what automation means. This includes the people who made "humans need not reply" and OP.

I'm an engineer for an automation company. Automation is right in the name. Hippies give me a hard time for stealing jobs when they hear the A word, but here's a list of the projects my company has worked on:

Poison gas alarms.
Lightbulbs that dim automatically if there's window light.
Satellite linked glacier monitoring sensors.
Security tag systems for pet stores.

None of these steal jobs from humans. You would never pay someone to stand on a glacier all day and radio in his GPS coordinates or fiddle with a dimmer switch every time sunlight coming through a window changes. 99% of the money companies spend on automation is boring things like thermostats and smoke detectors that people have expected to be automated for decades; not replacing humans with robot workers.

Bump

Game theory.
Cant expect all employers to work cooperatively

>All those were making good progress well before they came fully to prominence
Do you even fucking fathom just how widespread automation already is?

I was blown away when I first realized serial production cars now look at the road and tell you when you cross the centerline, fucking break and steer for you in dangerous situations, switch the lights not to blind the oncoming drivers, read fucking traffic signs, actually understand GPS maps and more.

Yes, I'm a caveman, I drive a 22 year old Renault that barely moves its wipers, let alone do any of that other shit. Recently I sat inside a newest Subaru Outback and I felt like I was frozen since 50's or some shit.

Automation isn't actually about eliminating humans employees, it's about improving factory efficiency.
Also see

>isn't actually about eliminating human employees
>it's about improving factory efficiency

like one doesn't inevitably lead to the other
Sure, Industrial Revolution didn't create catastrophic mass unemployment, but that's because its aftermath created literally hundreds of completely new work fields, and menial physical labor is still a thing 200 years later.

What fucking new work fields are going to be created this time, when even management positions could very well be shafted by computers thirty years from now?

WHEW fuck to the you pal, Robots can sense when it is time to work with new algorithms and sensors being made erryday.

Liek if you cri erytiem

>requires huge amounts of
Yes
>upper level
No

The 'huge amounts' are the guys who repair basic mechanical issues like hydraulics leaking, high level in this case would be advanced programmers who would mostly be organising entire factories/companies from behind the scenes.
Just because a mechanic works on the same machines year after year to the point of doing things with no manual in half the time, it doesn't make him 'high level'.

by high level, i meant guys who aren't just the meat robots that pulled levers for 10 hours a day. when people think of factory jobs being lost, thats what they are talking about. being able to repair modern hydraulic systems puts you in to the top 10% of technical skill when compared to the every day american.

And vast numbers of people over the age of 35 can't operate a smartphone. It depends what sort of environment you grow up in, really.
That said, we don't have any areas with high-concentration automated production being everyday life for everyone yet, so we can't really test this.

Faggot.

>What fucking new work fields are going to be created this time
Basically the same jobs that exist today, but employees' role would change a bit. Operators would supervise the automatic machines, check if they're working properly, operate shit in manual mode in case of failure, do calibration stuff, etc. There's also the shitton of maintenance required for those machines.
If you think automation means some machines doing all the work with no human intervention, you're quite misled. Shit doesn't work without human supervision and intervention.
>inb4 AI will do that
It won't. The current AI state is further away from be able to take those tasks.

>If no one has jobs, no one can buy your shit pretty much fucking up the whole process.
That's when the economy shifts away from consumerism and goes into hyperexpansion. Then we can finally expand out into the solar system.

Not true. Relative costs matter and relative costs cross borders for a multinational.

Why would a company pay more for automation when labor is cheaper? Becasue there is an efficiency gained somewhere. There is a point at which either labor becomes too expensive or automation becomes too cheap to ignore -but the two are absolutely related.

No reasonable person (or corporate entity) will increase a line item on their P&L unless they are gaining profit in some way.

Automation is a slow crawl problem, the issue lies with that more and more key human processes are becoming dependent on machine/ computer based activities.

Thus the level of productivity a society yields becomes intrinsically dependent on the how advance technology is. For example concerning cars you are looking at it the wrong way. The issue isn't self-driving vehicles but the fact driving/ transportation is needed more and more to function and be productive on a daily level.

In the current global economy where any subject has the potential to be monetized the danger lies not with automation on it's own but the people who use it to exploit any and every human action. This is because if the exploitation via automation proves successful it will cause an increase need of said automation by others to compete in a given subject. This will gradually reduce human capital until it is entirely dependent on machines/ computers to survive or rendered obsolete due to lack of efficiency and expenditure of time.

Ukfag here they are everywhere, I use them exclusively

noone uses those

Quit spouting your bullshit opinions that aren't backed by any evidence. Economists have done empirical studies and found no correlation between minimum wage increases and employment.

nelp.3cdn.net/98b449fce61fca7d43_j1m6iizwd.pdf

You've been trained to reflexively argue against your own interests by the media.

>I'm an engineer
I don't believe you
List of jobs you have stolen:
>Poison gas alarms.
Canaries and retards.
>Lightbulbs that dim automatically if there's window light.
Personal servants
>Satellite linked glacier monitoring sensors.
>Security tag systems for pet stores.
Security guards

Way to single handedly ruin the world economy you mongoloid faglord.

>Satellite linked glacier monitoring
I meant to say penguins and seals to this one.

Finance and Accounting double major here. How fucked am I?

>Lets just make minimum wage a million dollars! Then everyone will be rich right! xDDDDD

wew lad, unless you get a BCS to that, you are shafted, japan had automatic stock exchange 10 years ago

Nice straw man. I guess that's all that you have left to argue with, though.

The reason why it has no effect is that businesses already operate with the minimum number of employees possible and can't cut any more. It's in their interest to cut as many jobs as possible regardless of what the minimum wage actually is.

>already operate with the minimum number of employees possible and can't cut any more.
They can if the cost of automating one of those employees becomes less than the cost of their wage.
Unless you are saying they've already automated every job they possibly can.

Their all over the city where I live in and a third of my citie's population depends on mininium wage work.

Finance is fine but accounting is going to probably be axed soon

Not him but
Why would you say that?

Thats crap
You can walk into any business in existance and see people doing jobs that could be automated

I live in some bumfuck City of ≤100000 and these are at every McShit's in town.

You haven't heard about all the stores closing because of online shopping? That's automation. Or how Blockbuster died? We're are headed towards the day when the vast majority of humans will be obsolete. When that day happens we can only pray the elites take mercy on us and allow us our daily bread crumbs.

How much merit does that "humans need not apply" video actually have? Futurists are starting to seem more and more obnoxious these days

You're forgetting to account for the initial cost of that automation, the time it takes to implement, and the jobs required for upkeep

>le deep learning meme
Basically the whole research on this field is a giant load of crap, we are able of building let's say a machine which can learn bach's music and play something extremely similar but if we change the datasheet it will produce trash.

Machines work by breaking up complex processes into many many simple repetitive tasks, but for that they need a lot of data to finetune themselves, that's where informatization came in and now suddenly they have access to a shitton of data to do this.

It's not a load of crap, it's incredibly powerful for tons of applications where there is a large amount of data to feed it.

However, the people treating it as the be-all and end-all of AI are retards.

Never forgetti, robots lack common sense and so would require constant supervision, and it is highly unlikely we could have robots repairing robots any time soon

>there will be a one-to-one ratio of humans and robots and everyone in the world would want to be a robot manager.

Have they become the new atheists?

I don't know. I just hope those arrogant assholes aren't actually right about their predictions. As a car enthusiast, I would be more comfortable with Tesla and other EVs if being interested in them didn't apparently mean that I have to discard all traditional notions of cars and car culture, all thanks to their fans.
They've also been saying that baseload power stations will be obsolete thanks to solar and batteries. As someone who would like the public to stop being scared of nuclear power, this is a little distressing.
I would like to ignore them, but then I could end up being that guy who thought that automobiles would,never catch on.

>3 years a long time
>bait

Here's your (You) faggot

oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/5jlz9h56dvq7-en.pdf?expires=1497242369&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=CF317CFF607FC246A42964B1CA558FE5

im beginning to think automation is a meme at the moment due to the increasing number of countries calling for a universal basic income.

central bankers - BOJ, ECB, BOE, and FED have been desperately trying(and failing) to achieve inflation with extremely loose mometary policy.

automation is currently the scapegoat to achieve this inflation imo

All you gotta do is listen to the economists. There's a reason they are not worried.

this literally would've happened regardless. stop acting like businesses don't evolve and upgrade technology because of possible customer outcry

well same channel just produced this video a few days ago

m.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKi8HfcxEk

toward the end of the video he says 'please put money into our patron acc, as this 10min video took 9 months to make'

>muh new age efficiency

interest rates are 0 or negative in most places. seems like the definition of worried to me

I'm too much of a brainlet to properly refute them, unfortunately. My dreams don't line up with their "utopia"

>Automation is a meme
>Local ford plant down from ~50000 to ~17000 jobs
>Car assemblying down to ~700 jobs
Automation is a process not something that happens over night.

Do you not yet realize what the endgame of capital and automation is?
>Imagine a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars. The inventor of the batteries might be a scientist who really believes in the power of technology to improve the human race. The workers who help build the batteries might just be trying to earn money to support their families. The CEO might be running the business because he wants to buy a really big yacht. The shareholders might be holding the stock to help save for a comfortable retirement. And the whole thing is there to eventually, somewhere down the line, let a suburban mom buy a car to take her kid to soccer practice. Like most companies the battery-making company is primarily a profit-making operation, but the profit-making-ness draws on a lot of not-purely-economic actors and their not-purely-economic subgoals.
>Now imagine the company fires the inventor and replaces him with a genetic algorithm that optimizes battery design. It fires all its employees and replaces them with robots. It fires the CEO and replaces him with a superintelligent business-running algorithm. All of these are good decisions, from a profitability perspective. We can absolutely imagine a profit-driven shareholder-value-maximizing company doing all these things. But it reduces the company’s non-masturbatory participation in an economy that points outside itself, limits it to just a tenuous connection with soccer moms and maybe some shareholders who want yachts of their own.
1/2

>Now take it further. Imagine that instead of being owned by humans directly, it’s owned by an algorithm-controlled venture capital fund. And imagine there are no soccer moms anymore; the company makes batteries for the trucks that ship raw materials from place to place. Every non-economic goal has been stripped away from the company; it’s just an appendage of Global Development.
>Now take it even further, and imagine this is what’s happened everywhere. Algorithm-run banks lend money to algorithm-run companies that produce goods for other algorithm-run companies and so on ad infinitum. Such a masturbatory economy would have all the signs of economic growth we have today. It could build itself new mines to create raw materials, construct new roads and railways to transport them, build huge factories to manufacture them into robots, then sell the robots to whatever companies need more robot workers. It might even eventually invent space travel to reach new worlds full of raw materials. Maybe it would develop powerful militaries to conquer alien worlds and steal their technological secrets that could increase efficiency. It would be vast, incredibly efficient, and utterly pointless. The real-life incarnation of those strategy games where you mine Resources to build new Weapons to conquer new Territories from which you mine more Resources and so on forever.
2/2
slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy/

It is simply already true that innovation doesn't create many jobs anymore, profit seems to come from cutting out the middle man, and innovation follows profit. No meme about it. For many people this has already happened.

Well that escalated quickly

The automation/AI/robotics news lately is not a meme. It's purposeful propaganda to trick people into accepting universal income by making them think most jobs will be gone in the near future.

That would be retarded because ubi could only happen IF automation is true. Otherwise it's impossible.

I don't think people are wrong to be concerned about automation eroding the number of jobs available and the massive spike in unemployment however I think there has generally been a lot of fear-mongering and people have made it sound like 50% of all jobs would be automated within the next decade or something ridiculous like that.

I have no doubt that automation will replace most human jobs at some point but I don't believe that point is in the immediate future. I think we have at least several decades before we even hit the 50% point. Maybe even a century or so. Beyond that even just a little bit of public backlash against automation can probably retard progress on it even longer.

I think the automation issue has been significantly overblown and while we should be starting to consider how to adapt our economy for when most jobs are automated it is a fairly low priority and changes don't need to be made right this second.

UBI is the the deathbed of humanity.
Once you're completely dependent you lose all power. The governing masters can just cut off everyone's income and we'll have no way to resist.

Not to mention alrenous.blogspot.sg/2016/05/basic-income-impossibility-theorem.html

>vast numbers of people over the age of 35 can't operate a smartphone
You're kidding me right now

>all NEETs would [go along with UBI only] probably all of /r9k/ too
Probably nearly all of /r9k/ would accept it, but even there I doubt the majority would actually prefer it.

The right to a government job (with flexible hours) would be preferable for most NEETs, and would be better value for the government.

Unless you live innawoods and only eat what you kill you're already pretty much 100% reliant on the machinations of government to survive.

>muh automatic cars
Driving your car to work is not a job, that's why no one is rushing to automate it. Your job will be automated first, which renders having a car pointless as you'll have nowhere to go.

Yes but currently the government is still somewhat dependent on me and everyone else for tax revenue.

If I pay no taxes, have no job, and produce no labor, then I have exactly zero leverage over the person paying my basic income.

I've always said that capitalist in its purest and most perfect form is machines creating better machines, forever.

>finance algorithms investing in other algorithms to just benefit share holders who are algorithms themselves
I don't think that's the way it's gonna work.

So what you're saying is we should just cut to the chase and not implement UBI, cutting off everyone's income in the first place?

Look at machine style transfer and NLP. Those are the areas that are already beginning to reach superhuman capability and will be the first major source of disruption.

I'm saying we should look to keep everyone employed and working productively as long as possible.
We should probably also be looking at population control measures.

This is under the false assumption that technologies will just keep developing. However, most technologies hit a plateau once they reach a certain complexity. For example, we figured out going to space 60 years ago, but not much progress has been made since. Yes, SpaceX has figured out how to land the first stage, but that's not really such a siginficant breakthrough. Another example is us trying to figur our nuclear fusion since 60 years but we are barely making any progress.

It's the same with automisaton. Everybody just assumes that if we can build chess and go playing robots now, then surely it is just a matter of decades until we figure out a general superintelligence. In reality it is rather probable that we will absoluetely never figur it out, because it's just too complex to build for us.

I work in a manufacturing environment that runs 24/7. I only started working there recently, but I can tell there have been changes. I'm sure a long time ago there were a lot more people involved, but now machines do most of the hard work. But people still have to operate the equipment.

It's a gradual thing, it won't kill jobs overnight but it's something you don't notice. People aren't always laid off, more like young people just never get the opportunity to enter the work force and have to find other means, such as government assistance.

We have some robotic arms, and machines that do a lot of the assembly, but humans are still needed. They have to have a lot more mechanics around to fix them when they break, which they do often. The storage warehouse is entirely automated by rolling drones, it's pretty neat to observe but it's definitely eliminated the need for human employees. Honestly a manufacturing company such as the one I work is pretty rare in America. In my city most jobs are part of the knowledge economy, I'm like the only person I know who doesn't work in some kind of office or exclusively on a computer. Excluding service industry and healthcare jobs.

Even though it's gradual it will cause a major disruption, maybe not in months or years but in decades there will be a noticeable change. I believe there already is. Large numbers of manufacturing jobs are not coming back to the US, the economy is changing and it's cheaper to build things in China or Malaysia or India than it is in the US. People living in the rust belt who voted for Trump thinking he'll magically make jobs return are dreaming.

We need to face the reality that eventually, maybe decades, the economy won't be able to support a comfortable way of life for all people. Many would say it already fails at this. Call me a socialist but I believe a government as powerful and rich as ours can afford to create some social programs for the most extreme victims of circumstance which are our citizens, brothers, fathers, maybe ourselves. Universal healthcare and universal basic income don't seem as crazy as they once were.

>machine style transfer
But all machine style transfer demo's so far have been horrible. It's on the level of a shitty photoshop plugin at best.

youtube.com/watch?v=0ueRYinz8Tk

So you're suggesting abolition of technological advances? Or are you suggesting even more bullshit jobs that serve absolutely no purpose other than keeping people busy? Why not just allow people the chance to live without worrying if they'll get another meal or not?

>Why not just allow people the chance to live without worrying if they'll get another meal or not?
Why not read the thread before replying?

I read the thread but didn't see anything countering UBI. The best I saw is someone claiming no leverage over someone supplying the UBI. But I have no idea what leverage someone already working a bullshit job has over their employer. Instead of letting them do something they'd like to do to improve themselves or society they're forced to waste it doing a job nobody really cares about.

>But I have no idea what leverage someone already working a bullshit job has over their employer.
what?

Let's say your job is to insert part A into Part B over and over again. This is all your job teaches you and is the only thing you're allowed to do with your time. Suddenly for whatever reason the job dies and you know nothing else. What leverage do you have over your income? Now if you were on UBI you'd have all this free time to better yourself, to develop as a well rounded human being. The time that would be wasted putting part A into part B can now be spent however you like. For whatever reason UBI is cut, compare the leverage of this person with the person doing a bullshit job and tell me which has greater odds of survival.

In an employee-employer scenario the leverage you have is whatever the value is of your labour. Sure they could fire you, but it wouldn't benefit them to do so.

When you are being given money by the government you are not giving anything back to them.
If it's only a small amount of people receiving money, then it's fine because the people who aren't dependent still have leverage and are probably willing to exert that leverage to help you. A normal welfare system.
But if significant portions of the population become entirely dependent, they wont have any leverage, and the people with leverage wont want to and wont be able to exert it on the behalf of the dependants.

>Sure they could fire you, but it wouldn't benefit them to do so.
Never encountered anyone afraid of being laid off? The scenario I described is extremely common. Every single person I know has been laid off or have had people in their company/lives laid off. It ruins lives because that's all they knew and now it's worthless.

>When you are being given money by the government you are not giving anything back to them.
Consider it a peace offering to avoid constant revolutions and coup d'états. Keep them pacified with sufficient means to live so they let the bourgeoisie live their lives in prosperity.

this
Most of what you hear about anything comes from people who don't know fuck all about it. My Dad still thinks H fuel cell tech is the future because he did some work for a company that was researching it 10 years ago.

>Never encountered anyone afraid of being laid off? The scenario I described is extremely common.
I'm talking about the general case

>Consider it a peace offering to avoid constant revolutions and coup d'états.
How does a revolutionary army of the jobless dependants arm, feed, and supply themselves?

Communist uprising were successful in the past because the workers' labour was actually critical to the economy.
It doesn't work the same way when your labour no longer has value.

Revolutions only happen when the people have nothing. You think it will be harder now with the technology we have than in the past? Technology can be taken you know, starving people don't really give a shit about that piece of paper that says you own things.