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Humans may not Apply: The future of Jobs

How bad is Automation?

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No, it's an employer's market. Us employees are fucked in basic terms.

I lost count at several dozen applications, and I've seen at least one in ten (some days it's like one in six) job openings having the words 'X years of experience required' or 'X years of experience recommended'... and this is consistent on multiple job websites. Hell, one of the jobs I've just field an application in is one that I didn't get a call back the last time I've been looking for a job (and it was a housecleaning gig at the local hospital!).
Even if they have the words of "X years required" fling your application at them anyway, if your qualifications are good they might just get you in for an interview.

Some areas that might get you a few interviews are farmwork and groundskeeping, its hard work and at times almost back breaking but it'll instill some good work ethics into you and open your eyes to work you might not know you're interested in.
 
Even if they have the words of "X years required" fling your application at them anyway, if your qualifications are good they might just get you in for an interview.
The majority of those 'X years of [insert job here] required' is usually something is way out of my league, as in '5 years oil refinery experience' out of my league. There is little that has 'prior experience required' tags that I can conceivably do.
Some areas that might get you a few interviews are farmwork and groundskeeping, its hard work and at times almost back breaking but it'll instill some good work ethics into you and open your eyes to work you might not know you're interested in.
I used to work at the Boys and Girls Club (my first genuine job), and I thought it was going to be a slog despite having only fond memories as a member... and you know what? I like working with kids, too bad that there aren't much in terms of jobs working with kids. :(

Yeah, I know what you mean when you say 'find something that you never thought you were interested in'.

Problem with groundskeeping is that my job lists don't have the various groundskeeping companies in-town and my family has members in the ag sector and they pretty much say that there isn't farmwork available (and they don't show up on the work sites either).
 
@Diablo21, I have been looking for work. Most of the jobs that I find out there is literally 'requires X years of prior experience', and I'm a user of the local transit over a car (I don't even have a driver's licence). Now you are starting to sound like my father. :mad:

Only advice I can suggest off hand, maybe try indeed.com. That or hit up temp agencies. As you say you live in Montana, that would be a problem outside of Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, or the two or three other major towns. If you're in a small town, driving to the next to find work could take hours.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/17/news/economy/us-worker-shortage/index.html

With all the talk of companies literally unable to find people, I'm guessing it's less a case of automation or anything on your end, and probably more a case of where you're located. I'd bet $10,000 cash you would probably be hired at my place pretty easy. I have two degrees, and I'm working hand in hand with people that only have a GED, or those that are in two cases convicted felons.
 
From The Verge:

The Verge: Walmart is hiring more robots to replace human tasks like cleaning floors and scanning inventory said:
Walmart is hiring robots to replace human tasks that humans didn't "enjoy doing." In a bid to save on labor costs, it's betting on robots to clean floors, sort inventory, and replenish out-of-stock items in its stores, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Walmart has several jobs in mind for the new robots. Robot floor cleaners are coming to 1,500 stores. (The company says that floor scrubbing was previously a task that could take a human worker two to three hours each day to complete.) Walmart is also adding 600 conveyor belts that can sort inventory automatically, and at least 300 bots that can check if shelves are running out of stock after Walmart initially began to test this technology in 2017.

All of this is coming at the cost of human labor. The more robots Walmart hires, the fewer people it needs for each task, and the more money it saves across its 4,600 stores in the US. Walmart says that although it's cutting down on labor for tasks like flooring cleaning, it ishiring employees to focus on growing its online grocery business. The move also comes after retail companies like Target and Walmart announced slight wage increases for store workers.

Walmart appears to be trying to make its online grocery service competitive to AmazonFresh and Amazon Prime Now's Whole Foods delivery, both of which are still expanding. It's part of a long feud between the two retail giants. While the brick-and-mortar Walmart has been pushed to acquire Jet.com and establish more of an online presence, Amazon has added physical stores to its e-commerce offerings and began to follow the playbooks of more traditional brands. Just last week, Amazon announced a new round of price cuts at Whole Foods stores around greens and tropical fruits. The company also reportedly has plans to expand grocery stores in major US cities later this year.

Even Walmart is going full steam ahead on automation to compete with Amazon... who is going full steam ahead on automation...

... Humans may not Apply indeed...
 
From The Verge:



Even Walmart is going full steam ahead on automation to compete with Amazon... who is going full steam ahead on automation...

... Humans may not Apply indeed...
I don't know about the loading stuff, but I'm pretty sure the floor cleaner and shelf scanner are going to be marginal improvements over humans at best.
 
I don't know about the loading stuff, but I'm pretty sure the floor cleaner and shelf scanner are going to be marginal improvements over humans at best.
Given how quickly things have been evolving on the automation front, I wouldn't be so quick to be so sure... remember, even marginal improvements mean oodles of saved expenses these days.
 
Given how quickly things have been evolving on the automation front, I wouldn't be so quick to be so sure... remember, even marginal improvements mean oodles of saved expenses these days.
The first one is going to be more or less the exact same floor cleaner, just self-driving now instead of having a human sitting on it/pushing it. It also mentions that it needs an employee to "set up" the area for it to clean first. So this is very much the kind of deal that can easily turn out to be, in practice, saving neither cost nor labor, depending on how much setup and monitoring it needs.

Wouldn't be the first time a company spent a bunch of money on new tech that achieves nothing.
 
They've literally been predicting this for the last 200 years, so far...not much has come about
the last 200 years... is not much? I feel we may lack the perspective to say that objectively, honestly I'd mark down complete replacement at this point to well meaning obstructionism thru out those 200 years
 
the last 200 years... is not much? I feel we may lack the perspective to say that objectively, honestly I'd mark down complete replacement at this point to well meaning obstructionism thru out those 200 years
That and the technological context not supporting such a thing.
 
That and the technological context not supporting such a thing.
there is the story of how "we didn't see adoption of the steam engine during roman times" because "Slaves" what do?" this mindset creates context of it's own people try to only create things that "fit" the current world.
 
there is the story of how "we didn't see adoption of the steam engine during roman times" because "Slaves" what do?" this mindset creates context of it's own people try to only create things that "fit" the current world.
The thing with the Romans not exploiting the steam engine is because -unsurprisingly- their technological context. Making a viable steam engine took centuries of metallurgical and technological developments (including the needed quality and quantity of steel to make a good steam engine, the various tools needed to make sure they worked right, so on and so forth), developments that the Romans were unable to accomplish. They knew of the principles but the principles don't become a technological development if you don't have the tools and materials to make it viable.

Basically, the Romans had the principle down but didn't have the tools (be production or otherwise) to make it viable.
 
the last 200 years... is not much? I feel we may lack the perspective to say that objectively, honestly I'd mark down complete replacement at this point to well meaning obstructionism thru out those 200 years
The last 200 years is basically all the time in which our productive capacity has increased at a high enough level per capita to be comparable. Let's not even mention that woman entering the labour force implies even more is being produced per person on average and that makes things even worse.

We quite literally don't have any other sample size. Realistically I think what we've seen is that productivity has increased, but then the growth of service type jobs has happened as a way of more efficiently allocating what we have.

Counter to what some people think, finance has allowed huge investment into start ups and people like lawyers have been a boom when it comes to things such as contracting.

So can these jobs continue? Perhaps, prehaps not, though I would strongly stress that even though markets in most cases are better suited towards allocation of resources then central planners there is still much theoretical room for improvement at place here.

I think we will default get diminishing returns on service sector jobs and that could possibly lead to more government type programs in the long run, but I suspect the concept of a robo take over is a little over blown.
 
One big thing to keep in mind also, a lot of industrial equipment such as stamping presses, robotic welding cells, CNC machines, and other things, are very capital intensive. One company I used to work for just purchased a brand new 1200 ton capacity FAGOR press, top of the line system across the board. just to buy it and get it set up, $20 million dollars. That's not factoring in the cost of steel to actually run parts, maintenance costs to keep it up and running, or the cost to build and maintain the dies that are going to be used in it, which can easily cost high six figures to upwards of $1 million by themselves.

Before a company automates, they're going to want to make sure that all the new equipment does indeed work as advertized first, so some companies are going to likely be guinea pigs in a way.

A lot of it will be the type of industry or location as well. A new build facility or s facility thats only a decade or so old could probably easily incorporate new toys fairly easily. A place that has been around 30 or 40 years, OTOH, could upgrade but it would probably take longer.

One thing I'm curious of though, what about products that may not be needed. There's an old paper mill near me, they have like 250 employees and on a given day there might be 100 or so contractors doing jobs that on site maintenance can't do for various reasons. Their big thing is newspaper print, the actual physical paper newspapers are made from. With everything being online, physical newspapers are on the way out. There really might not be a case to spend hundreds of millions automating a place that might not be in business a decade or so from now if their product is no longer needed.
 
I think we will default get diminishing returns on service sector jobs and that could possibly lead to more government type programs in the long run, but I suspect the concept of a robo take over is a little over blown.
That and there's no real solid evidence that being able to create a superhuman intelligent computer (when/if we ever get there) would create an exponentiation situation, or some form of "technological singularity," for all we know it could simply plateau after that. And "superhuman intelligence" probably/highly likely wouldn't be anything like a Marvel CU type situation or Terminator for that matter, it would probably be far LESS dangerous the more intelligent and civilized (because it is made by humans and would therefore learn FROM humans) it became, probably more likely to sue in court to adopt children than wage genocidal war on humanity or global takeover. These are all carnal/primitive inclinations.
 
Welp, this is troubling:
https://gizmodo.com/why-fast-food-is-the-ticking-time-bomb-of-job-automatio-1837898231 said:
On Tuesday, the automation-focused meme candidate Andrew Yang tweeted, "Fast food may be first." He was commenting on a new CNBC report that reported annual employee turnover rates of 100 percent at the Panera Bread chain—a figure that is low for the fast food industry, which can see annual turnover of up to 150 percent. Those figures may seem ridiculous, but they're a reality: The fast food restaurants regularly see more than their entire workforce turn over every year. And that is why industry experts—and Andrew Yang—warn that it's ripe for automation and may be the first field to become entirely automated.
...
(Somewhat hilariously, these sky-high turnover rates that have analysts predicting automation madness to solve the fast food industry's retention problem—it's expensive to constantly recruit and train workers—can alternatively be combatted with relatively simple means: offering your employees a modicum of dignity, a little time off, and some benefits. Starbucks, a mega-profitable franchise chain, has a retention rate of 65 percent precisely because it offers those things, and it is still mega-profitable.)
...
That will be the day that we'll know that automation really is capable of replacing low-paying human labor at scale. The day there are no humans working at McDonald's—that's the day the so-called robot jobs apocalypse will have truly begun.
Basically, Yang tweeted that the fast food industry would be the first of many industries that would go full steam ahead and damn the consequences on automation. Given that industry experts outright agree with Yang's statement...
 
Welp, this is troubling:

Basically, Yang tweeted that the fast food industry would be the first of many industries that would go full steam ahead and damn the consequences on automation. Given that industry experts outright agree with Yang's statement...
This was always going to happen, the vast majority of fast food can literally be produced on an assembly line and probably better by machines than by humans as machines don't forget orders. Delivery can also be done by automated delivery drivers (I.e drones) as has been proven by Dominos.

More industries that are very likely to be replaced by automation are things like Truck Drivers and Road Maintenance (I.e re-painting stripes on the roads and sweeping.)
 
This was always going to happen, the vast majority of fast food can literally be produced on an assembly line and probably better by machines than by humans as machines don't forget orders. Delivery can also be done by automated delivery drivers (I.e drones) as has been proven by Dominos.

More industries that are very likely to be replaced by automation are things like Truck Drivers and Road Maintenance (I.e re-painting stripes on the roads and sweeping.)
Yeah, and that'll cut something on the order of 30-50% of the workforce... if some charts from way back when were any indication...
 
 
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