Automation

[Goodspeed]

Every company I've ever worked at cuts corners about something because there is more work than qualified workers or because the cost of labor is too high. Why are we assuming automation is replacing a person's job and not doing what isn't being done? It's possible some jobs will become less important, like a cashier, but that's more about the death of retail as a job than anything.

Because the important point to distinguish is that once something is built & released to automate what isn't being done (because of not enough qualified staff, or too much work, or what have you), upper management will feel the pull to expand on the automation platform they've built and automate what is being done & replace their human staff for even greater efficiency & profits.  

If a company wants to build 20k widgets a week, but can only eke out 14k because of the issues you described, and they automate tasks to make up the extra 6k - what's stopping them from expanding an "automated" 6k to 12k, 15k, and ultimately 20k if feasible?

An early, mild example of this that may provide some correlation being the recent PepsiCo layoffs.  In their pursuit of "relentless automation" (their words), they reported a 158% increase in YOY profits and immediately announced layoffs.

I want to be as clear as day here: I'm not against automation/AI.  I see many, many benefits to it.  I'm not saying we need to grab our pitchforks and start smashing up AI labs as that's extremely shortsighted.  What I am - against isn't the word - curious about is

• How AI/automation is "sold" to disparate factions as both a panacea to the masses and a boon to corporate profits (and trying to pin-point where it really is on that spectrum - see my earlier Automation at Davos links above)
  
• What we believe the ultimate goal of automation is to those in economic & political power who will deploy it
  
• What happens in an increasingly automated world & how we plan for it
  

What do you think is going to happen? Assume AI takes x% of the jobs - then what? Poverty gap widens? Or do the billions who are already in poverty have access to opportunities they may not have otherwise had? We already have more people on this planet than we have jobs that pay a living wage, so how much worse does AI really make it? I'm not suggesting we go for it because the world is already fucked; I'm saying the privilege of growing up in U S of A has us worried about unskilled jobs that are a pretty small portion of the global workforce. Most jobs are physical labor and humans will be better at those for quite awhile. Once we have Rosie from the Jetsons, then people should be scared.

I shared my ideas on this in an earlier post, but my thoughts are that large swaths of the world population may get leap-frogged by automation.  By the time a lot of countries get into the realm of being first-world (if they get there at all - climate change & resource wars might get in the way), a lot of the traditional early-growth jobs may be automated.  It'll be an interesting exercise to ask a man who makes fishing nets with his bare hands to become a data scientist in a very, very fast timeline.  

But, perhaps the boon of automation is that most of the world population in 2nd & 3rd world countries wouldn't necessarily have to worry about anything - they might be served by the jobs we don't even know will exist yet, or will happily go on making nets and herding cattle while the rest of their ascendant economy just starts at whatever baseline automation provides. I once lived in a country that was dirt roads & goat herders as recently as the late 1950's, and its new cities glisten like quasi-Dubais today - and they did more than alright as a nation. I still think automation is much more different than it is equal to any previous leap in history, though.

Absolutely, I want to see what the future holds for AI & automation.  I just want it to be implemented in a fair, equitable way, and history gives me many reasons to be skeptical.