Digital Revolution Will Kill Jobs, Inflame Social Unrest, Says Gartner 754
dcblogs writes "Gartner says new technologies are decreasing jobs. In the industrial revolution — and revolutions since — there was an invigoration of jobs. For instance, assembly lines for cars led to a vast infrastructure that could support mass production giving rise to everything from car dealers to road building and utility expansion into new suburban areas. But the "digital industrial revolution" is not following the same path. "What we're seeing is a decline in the overall number of people required to do a job," said Daryl Plummer, a Gartner analyst at the research firm's Symposium ITxpo. Plummer points to a company like Kodak, which once employed 130,000, versus Instagram's 13. The analyst believes social unrest movements, similar to Occupy Wall Street, will emerge again by 2014 as the job creation problem deepens." Isn't "decline in the overall number of people required to do a job" precisely what assembly lines effect, even if some job categories as a result require fewer humans? We recently posted a contrary analysis arguing that the Luddites are wrong.
Re:Wages as share of GDP dropping since 1972 (Score:5, Interesting)
Wal-Mart increasing their wages to $12/hr. would increase their average item price by 1.1%
Walmart's profit margin is 3.61% [yahoo.com]. So 1.1% would be about 30% of their earnings. If they could increase earnings by "just raising prices", they would have already done so.
If Walmart increased their wages to $12/hour, that would not help their current workers, because for $12/hour they would hire different people. My local Walmart has two employees in wheelchairs, and another employee that obviously has Down's Syndrome. You won't likely see either in shops that pay higher wages. Walmart hires people on the bottom rung, that would likely otherwise be unemployed.
Yeah, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
So, skilled jobs require fewer people, manufacturing and unskilled jobs get off-shored.
The end result is a big gaping hole in employment, and unless new industries come along, there's nothing else for these people to do.
We're already seeing this, and if there is no new employment sectors, all that's left in your economy is part time jobs and other shit jobs. Unemployment numbers go down more because people give up looking than because jobs are getting created to offset those who get 'right sized'.
Is this the direction you want your country to go in? Because this is where we're heading -- the shareholders are happy (for a while), but you no longer have anybody to buy your product (and then your sales slump and the shareholders are unhappy).
Welcome to the future, where short-term shareholder value will destroy your economy in the long run.
Re:Kodak vs Instagram? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
I highly doubt displaced, former foundry workers, who spent the last 30 years mastering the art of steel production, would give a flying fuck that Samsung opened a new facility where they used to work and is now hiring software engineers.
Amusingly, I used to work in a foundry and I'm currently a software developer. (Employer keeps trying to call me an engineer, but I call it alchemy.)
I think you over estimate the time or skill required to master steel production. You could have a high-schooler trained to do it inside a year.
Such a shame that the American people allow the university (and medical) systems to hold them hostage instead of allowing the whole country to move into the 20th century.
Re:Kodak vs Instagram? Really? (Score:1, Interesting)
- New cell phones to make uploading to instagram easier and faster
- New cameras to support communication with cell phones
- New cell phone towers so that photos can be uploaded anywhere
It may take fewer people to do a single job, but that makes the product cheaper and more available. Greater availability increases the need for all related services and products so the jobs just move to new areas. The key lesson is that job mobility is the most important skill to have for the future. All jobs will require computer skills.
Re:Not this shit again (Score:5, Interesting)
Service Economies are the future (Score:5, Interesting)
On the Internet, people often moan about how Western countries "don't make anything any more." The idea being that our service economy is built on a house of cards and the only true economic generator is the making and selling of stuff.
My view is that manufacturing is a bad choice of focus for our economies. The direction of travel is clear: it is very clearly a race to an ever descending race to the bottom which will end with completely automated factories. This race started with the industrial revolution and it will accelerate during our life times. The jobs are slowly but surely being eliminated and it might even have happened sooner if China hadn't been able to provide so much cheap labour. Those jobs are simply not safe in the long term.
But even the Chinese are not safe. Eventually, they'll all be replaced by machines and when they are, it won't matter where those machines are located. The machines will re-locate closer to the consumers to shorten supply lines.
The message is stark: any job that is repetitive risks being replaced by a robot.
Perhaps the most interesting of these is automated driving. It promises to completely transform our world. It will transform logistics in much the same way as containerisation did to shipping. It will transform everything but just think of the number of jobs that will be eliminated!
Then there are threats like 3D printers which threaten to completely remake the world as we know it.
The only sensible way to weather the next 100 years is through developing products and service that can not be automated. These are things like law, software development, media etc. etc.
Producing stuff is quickly becoming unprofitable. Service economies are our only hope.
Re:Wages as share of GDP dropping since 1972 (Score:3, Interesting)
Global Population goes up, jobs go down... (Score:2, Interesting)
Even China will eventually replace a half billion workers with robots.
When the global population is 10 billion, 7 billion of those people will have no job and either have to rely on handouts or they still starve (or start to eat each other).
There will not be enough natural resources, and even if there were, all those resources would be retained by the upper echelons, essentially the top 5%.
I predict a global version of the French Revolution, and there will be a lot of head chopping after the authorities have run out of bullets to control the mobs.
Re:Wages as share of GDP dropping since 1972 (Score:5, Interesting)
Replace not amplify (Score:5, Interesting)
The other critical factor is that the guy who runs the combine isn't that much more skilled than the guy with the stick (In that it wasn't years of education) which will be typical of the job killed by various forms of automation. This means that it is not so much that fewer people can do more it is that a greater percentage of the population will be unable to work productively in that a robot will be the better option. If you talk to many people who earned a good living over the last 60 years with little education you will find that they worked in very few industries, mining, farming, fishing, and manufacturing. All these are becoming more and more automated. Personally I am surprised that mining isn't completely automated underground in that by eliminating the human factor a mine should become really cheap if you don't have to worry about keeping humans alive. Plus many mines are in bizarrely remote areas meaning that you not only have to keep the miners alive underground but you then have to build whole communities above ground including expensive things such as hospitals.
One thing that I worry about is not just this clear problem of the low skilled becoming generationally unemployed but that some cultures and governments are not biased toward solving this problem. Personally I think the solution will be a consumer focused socialism. My main worry is that some countries will punish the poor, reward the few extremely productive producers and end up in modern feudal system with freakish inequality becoming the norm.
Other countries I believe are well culturally disposed at aggressively making sure that the maximum number of humans benefit from the near utopian bounty that could be provided by this revolution.
Re:Wages as share of GDP dropping since 1972 (Score:2, Interesting)
>
> in most cases *you can't start a business*
>
Where do you live? In the US you certainly CAN start a business.
My dad and several of his siblings, my mom's dad, and a host of other people
I personally know started with NOTHING and are now successful business owners.
Yes, it takes time and sometimes the ability to save but starting a business is not
hard. I get annoyed when the media talks about companies or the government
needing to create jobs. If you go out and create a job for yourself not only will your
livelyhood not be dependent on the whims on your employer but you'll probably
be happier too. I have dozens of friends and relatives that work for themself and
would never go back to working for someone else.
Dangers of a post-scarcity world (Score:5, Interesting)
I posted about this before in another thread, but the scenario at some future time is something like this;
Robots, Automation, brute optimization from data analysis, etc will result in less jobs available for unskilled laborers and many skilled blue collar workers. At some unknown time, it's possible that even skilled white collar workers could be pushed out.
The interesting thing - and we may already be seeing it - is this; Unemployment goes up, but there's no scarcity of product or labor in response.
At this point, there's a subtle disassociation between work done and money. In fact, money as a whole will become less useful, especially as some segment of the population that steadily grows larger over time has no way to generate any. Long term, this could be a very good thing - think Star Trek and a moneyless society where people more or less live a vacation lifestyle.
Short term however, we're going to have a period of serious strife, with haves and have-nots extremely separated, where money is still needed to buy food, make rent, and obtain material goods. How are we going to reach that tipping point into utopia when we have to first get through 20%, 40% or more unemployment - but we still rely on money? I don't even know if it's possible to get through that phase without some sort of civil war or revolution first that sets up all back to zero.
Even if we do get through it, what happens when that discrepancy still exists elsewhere in the world? Some nation is going to get there first, even if it's only by hours, but the whole world won't suddenly switch on at once. If we achieve post-scarcity by forcing third world nations to bear the burden, how long will that really last?
Personally, I think that we'll come up with some other metric to judge individuals long before money and majority unemployment are real issues. We just can't stand to not place metrics of value on individuals. I also think that none of this will happen in my lifetime, so really, this is just a thought experiment.
In 300 years though, who's to say?
Re:Wages as share of GDP dropping since 1972 (Score:4, Interesting)
But Capitalism has been proven to lift millions of people out of poverty. I question what school you went to that didn't teach this plain fact.
Communism fell because it took people who were poor and made them even poorer. Quite an accomplishment, if you look at the historical circumstances. Go ahead, try to figure out a way to take a peasant whose entire worldly assets are a goat, a cow, and a couple of chickens even worse off. No, seriously. Communism figured out that problem and applied it to hundreds of millions of humans just like you.