Automation Stepping Up Due To COVID
There is no doubt things were turned upside down last year. The lockdowns as a result of the pandemic certainly had an impact on the global economy. A lot of things suffered while some areas excelled.
Coming out of the situation, we are seeing similar results. Some things are doing very well while others are struggling.
One area that is excelling is anything that has to do with the manufacturing or development related to automation.
“automation takes place faster during recessions and sticks thereafter" -DARON ACEMOGLU, ECONOMIST, MIT
The collapse in the global economy, while not technical a recession, set things back. The second quarter of last year was absolutely horrific. That said, things have not rebounded in an even manner. Many industries are still trying to get their feet under then=m. This is causing a mixed employment situation.
Some industries are finding it difficult to find workers. Those at the lower end of the spectrum, unskilled labor, have plenty of options for jobs. There is a glut of opportunities, something that many are not willing to accept. States are now cutting back on unemployment benefits due to the fact that workers appear to have more money by staying home than going to work.
To fill the void, many companies are turning to automation. This is in the form of robots but also AI.
A fast food chain in Ohio is one example of an company innovating.
Unable to find enough workers, Chuck Cooper, CEO of Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, installed an automated voice system in many locations to take orders. The system, developed by Intel and Hi Auto, a voice recognition firm, never fails to upsell customers on fries or a drink, which Cooper says has boosted sales. At outlets with the voice system, there’s no longer a need for a person to take orders at the drive-thru window. “It also never calls in sick,” Cooper says.
This is no surprise. Over the last few years, we saw many chains adopt some kind of automation, even before the pandemic hit. McDonalds installed kiosks for customers to place their orders. Now we are seeing automated, voice recognition systems for taking orders. This is something that we can presume to happen across the board.
Supermarkets are also finding things a bit difficult. Their solution is to provide more self checkout lines. This seems like something that most will not adopt yet there was a time when people did not pump their own gas. Today, but for two states, most everyone in the US pumps their fuel.
Amazon is close to introducing their most advanced AI system which allows for shoppers to simply walk in, scan their cards, and everything the put in their carts will register. Hence, they eliminate the checkout process altogether.
What goes away is many jobs.
The future of unskilled workers is not looking very bright. As companies promote the idea of not being able to find workers (the conversation rarely touches up paying people more), they will seek to automate all they can.
Of course, this was the goal all along. Wages are one of the largest expenses for most companies. This means that if they can reduce that line item, profits should soar.
There is a point of view that tells us this is not a bad thing. Many jobs are absolute garbage. The only ones who feel people should do those jobs is people who do not have to do it. Anyone who worked in a fast food restaurant knows those jobs are pretty bad. Thus, society would be better off if they went away completely.
This does bring up a much larger discussion that society is avoiding. The best thing is for massive job loss in a quick period of time so everyone is forced to take a look at it.
Instead, we will like just piddle along with our head in the sand, avoiding the uncomfortable situation that is arising. What happens when large scale job loss as a result of automation takes place? How is society going to handle that? What solutions will be implemented, if any, so that people can have sustenance?
The answers are not going to be easy. There will be blowback no matter what is proposed. Nevertheless, if the pace of automation implemented keeps accelerating, we are going to find things very uncomfortable as corporate profits fatten along with the unemployment rolls.
Whatever direction this takes, we see that automation is already starting to penetrate many different industries. It is something that we can watch taking place.
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The lack of employment opportunities that will surely get worse as automation becomes the preferred option is without a doubt going to cause an issue for many people and not just here in the USA.
How will unskilled labor being displaced by automation be dealt with? Not sure. I really hope that those that can implement a solution are studying this problem which will hit sooner than later.
Not everyone can be taught to be a coder anymore than everyone can be taught to be a surgeon. Then again automation seems likely to displace surgeons as well!
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Well at this point i'm not sure they know what to do. Even in crypto we're focusing on making profits and getting rich and nobody is doing related projects to deal with this issue besides put your money in a vending machine. So i don't think that's going to do much to help the world in this situation. Other people are just assuming we get through it like the last several industrial revolutions.
Yet they forget their history of what exactly happen during those last industrial revolutions. They involved alot of pain suffering even death and people physically being killed which created labor day and the changes to the system.
The problem this time is we may not be able to recover like before. What crypto projects are working on this that you see? Not many, that's not good. So we're making the grave mistake of dealing with this problem after the nuclear blast instead of dealing with it at the nuclear proliferation level.
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Humanity seems to follow the same path as crypto... spikes and crashes but a steady climb upward. I'm not concerned about rebounding. We always do and we always will until nature/the universe/god/life, whatever no longer benefits from our presence more than not and then we'll be lost to history. None of which is really in our control.
Well that kinda thinking is not a solution at all lol. That's like me saying well i don't need to go to the doctor humans have survived on this planet prior to modern day medical science and we'll make it through? Well who wants to do that? Do you just want to survive cataclysm and apocalypse? and the best answer is we'll get through it don't worry about it? lol.
I got a better idea the energy and attention " you all" put into these pyramid schemes and ponzi schemes you all call defi and all these other trash models you guys made up. Why don't you take that energy instead and do things that matter? These crypto systems don't follow the same path as humanity they far worse than that. Which is why 87% of bitcoin is owned by 1% of the network lol. It's ridiculous and this time around we're going to get hurt really really bad.
To me this is probably one of the best videos targeting the big issues and i think everyone should watch it because it hits every point of what the problems are that we are oblivious to them.
So we don't know how well we will get through it and the attitude of do nothing is ridiculous. That's easy and lazy and any of us can take the time to say that and bury our heads in the sand. Why do anything at all? Sure the earth will burn out in like 5 billion years. 5 billion years a long time.. idk maybe we build a space ark.... maybe we send our dna around the universe and stay here and die but more humans live some place else. The point is you do something other than nothing and sitting here going well its outside our control.. well everything is don't worry about doing anything lol.
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I didn’t mean to imply we should do nothing. Just know when to act and know when it’s pointless or counterproductive.
Edit: I just got home from work and gave this a proper read it a lot of it looks like a rant I would've gone on a decade ago so don't think I don't appreciate your position.
However, I do want to clarify that I was speaking in very vague terms. If you look at humanity from virtually any angle it would graph out just like markets do. Highs and lows and periods of stagnation.
Regarding your position on defi, regardless of what you think of it it's cutting edge technology that will be a fundamental part of the world going forward. It may, likely will, morph into different things, some will work, some won't, but this tech brings too much possibility to the table to just die off anytime soon. Even if it doesn't pan out for finance in the long run other applications will arise.
About btc and 1%, I don't know enough about it to discuss it intelligently and don't really care to delve into it right now. I don't really care about btc anymore. It's just the gateway crypto.
Sure and listen no disrespect to you i'm sure you have thought about this however which way you have. I rather spend my rants with people who do care and think they can do something. so i do appreciate you clarifying for me so i can keep my time short as i'm trying to find active like minded people. Who may be inspired to plot a course. if people aren't going to do that well i firstly need to stop wasting my time reading their post and find the people who are going to write posts like this and actively pursue courses to do something about it.There are groups of people like that.. like these people.
They are out actively marching on their capitols..and it may do absolutely nothing but its better than being home. Now i think my position is about shaking a stick at the people who are like the people in that video or will be. I don't know who is on the other end of these computers. What often happens is i get responses like yours which thats no problem i once had different views maybe views similar to some of you all. I no longer have those views. I think you all for the most part create pyramid ponzi schemes do you agree with that? maybe you don't or never will it doesn't even matter because i'm sure at the end of the day where i'm coming from has as much value to you as where you are coming from has to me.
So i get it.. and absolutely no problem no issue, i'm speaking to the people who get what i'm saying.. i'm not trying to waste time with people who don't they may get it they may never get it. That is what it is. that's all i mean to say about it.
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The Luddites are the poster children for being against technology when things took off and began the greatest period of economic development.
Of course, what is overlooked is things did not end well for the Luddites. They were correct in their assessment. Sure things were much better 100 years later; that didnt really help them or their families.
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Coders will likely be affected to a large degree. By the end of the decade, we will have a lot more self coding programs out there. That doesnt mean coders will be eliminated, just a lot more will be produced without them.
As was stated just below, there are no answers at this time. Personally I feel there are not enough discussions taking place regarding it. Hence it will appear one day as a "surprise".
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BEER.I think this is a bit contradictory. Finding unskilled workers is hardly ever difficult. The pandemic caused a lot of job losses everywhere. It currently makes immigration difficult due to the unavailability of jobs.
Automation has always been the future. Before going into the University, I read about indispensable jobs and that's when I got comfortable with studying Communication. However, I didn't know the aspect of communication to delve into until recently.
A lot of skilled jobs will be rendered redundant shortly, alongside clerical jobs and I only hope people are ready for the change.
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It is if one does not want to pay wages to attract workers. Instead, they want to pay the same as before and claim that people are now paid more to sit home as compared to doing to work.
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Yeah it has opened new path for automation because machine are not getting covid
Ironic that statement is being made.
A little more than a year ago, for the most part, when someone was talking about a "virus" they were referring to something on the computer.
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Lol well now they know
So in the future, how much of the population will be working? Will it be our data that ends up generating the living costs for people or will we end up with a UBI related system? Right now with the Defi related system, it still requires people to have money to get started. Otherwise they will still be at the bottom of society.
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That's not a solution. Defi works mostly for people with disposable income. Who has disposable income? Probably like 1% of the entire global population. So that's how defi is mostly going to work for. That's why right now 87% of bitcoin is owned by 1% of the network. Everyone else is on hopium as we march into the closest thing we've seen to armageddon.
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I foresee entities like Facebook offering incentives for people to give them more data, i.e free wearables, while some of us sell that data directly to the users before that and things like pay to play gaming become so luctrative people begin to switch over. But yeah, I think many of us will mine our own data by virtue of where we go and what we do, how our bodies act and react in various situations, all kinds ofstuff we don’t even think about will collect a fee cents or dollars here and there until we have ourselves a matrix prototype. 😁
Interesting point. Those companies are experienced in doing what they can to try to pull people deeper into their ecosystems. Facebook is subsidizing the cost of Oculus to ensure that it is a gatekeeper in the metaverse world.
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See. You touched on something last week or month that put all that in mind.
FB will likely offer that stuff as part of a subscription at first. Free oculus with x hours of Fitbit that they also provide. Once occult's is cheap enough for everyone they go back to "free" or more likely some kind of perks system to keep people in and paying small fees everywhere but getting them waived as part of their plan.
DeFi will be a funding mechanism once people are involved with the accumulation of tokens. Until that people, they are excluded for the most part.
The future of work will be in one of my upcoming posts. Essentially, it boils down to communities.
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It seems as though each century there are always jobs that are no longer needed and replaced either by automation or lack of demand.
It's not often you need to call your local blacksmith anymore or more recently go to your local video store (think blockbuster).
Our economy is a miraculous mechanism that always seems to balance these things out, either by good planning or by mistake. So I don't know how the unskilled labour are going to find work and what type of work they will do in the future but what I do know is we have a mechanism for adjusting..in that the economic system. And for those left behind some countries better than others have a social security system to provide a safety net.
So I'm not so negative about the future, more efficient production through automation will ultimately lead to more wealth. Lets just hope this wealth is fairly distributed.
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"Our economy is a miraculous mechanism that always seems to balance these things out, either by good planning or by mistake. So I don't know how the unskilled labour are going to find work and what type of work they will do in the future but what I do know is we have a mechanism for adjusting..in that the economic system. And for those left behind some countries better than others have a social security system to provide a safety net."
Our economy is a mess. It's a mess of debt piled on top of debt and history shows us that economies do collapse over the centuries when they have massive debt like we do.. I know in America.. its a rather young country still of only 300 years old so its looking like it won't even make it longer than Rome did.
As far as the economy always seems to balance things out. No it doesn't its been getting historically worse for many. Many people are a great deal poorer than they were decades ago. They go well you got tablets and microwaves. Sure we got tablets and microwaves for people who always screaming tech has made our lives better. The problem we don't got food to put in the microwave. We too hungry to extract knowledge from the tablet lol.
These social security systems you speak of. I assume you more than likely speaking of the ones in the west. Sure they haven't collapsed yet. They on the verge of it. They still function but i think its very dangerous to make the assumptions they can hold up under the pressure because there will end up being a large increase of people on them
They are very poorly designed generally the people on them they get trapped in cycles of these systems they don't allow for economic stimulus or growth unlike ubi which allows people to collect benefits and still create jobs and work with a safety net.
So sitting back and hoping or burying our heads in the sand. Is not a solution lol. I don't get why we haven't figured out that maybe we should be using blockchain technology to resolve this issue. No instead we create pyramid and ponzi schemes that are even worse than the mechanisms in our standard economy.
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Dont buy into the debt is catastrophic line of thinking. The challenge at the moment with debt is they havent really let a "cleaning out" process take place. Debt is easy to clear up, just have defaults. It will be painful but not catastrophic. We are at an unprecedented time in productivity that the debt load is minor as compared to the past. We can outproduce the debt if only they would allow the misallocation of resources (i.e. zombie companies) to be flushed out.
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As a point of reference, the Depression of 1921, and it lasted roughly between 1 and 2 years. The FED was only a few years old, so it wasn't a player back then. As a result, "nothing" was done to the economy-- there were no interventions of any kind. As a result, debts were defaulted, resources were reallocated to those better able to use them, and the economy recovered in a short time. Those 2 years absolutely sucked, but the economy did what it was supposed to do.
Nearly everyone knows about the Great Depression which came in 1929. Economic interventionists were at the levers of power, and they intervened with a vengeance. Each time the economy didn't respond as expected, another intervention followed, and another one followed, and another one....
Instead of leaving the economy alone to heal itself over 2 years, the economic interventionists caused the economy to take between 11 and 16 years to recover. World War II was in that timeframe, so the end date for the Great Depression is a subject of debate.
Bottom line: something which should have lasted 2 or 3 years was prolonged to 11 to 16 years.
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What you state is true. However, we never has seen technology advancing at this pace.
Yes things did adjust a century ago when things were moving at a slower pace. It took 20 plus years for things to go into total decline in an industry. Now, it can happen within 5.
Plus we are dealing at a technological level that is far superior to what we had in the past. It isnt so much robotics but rather software. This is growing at an astounding rate in terms of what it can do.
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Robots get all the work, humans get UBI, except programmers; they have to program robots.
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Not exactly its more likely robots in the near future will be self programming as well as self replicating. So they'll be smarter and more equipped to program themselves than human coders i believe.
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I bet it would be some programming job left to humans. Assembly maybe; have to have some kind of opcode to generate interrupt.
Human will not lose all control over all process. Just in case, you know sky net type of catastrophic situation.
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As was stated below, it is likely the need for wide spread coders will be reduced by the end of this decade. We already see self coding AI which will only become more prevalent in the future.
There was a thought that being in the "creative" field was a safe bet; a common thought 5 years ago. Now we see this is no longer the case as AI is showing it can be creative too.
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I agree the amount of coders needed would be reduced. But I also believe there will be more for any core designs, or a hybrid approach in the future.
AI is perfect for repetitive work; making variant changes from original of something.
AI does not make sure 100% correct, their way of solving problems is to use millions of historical records. It's like Asian/Chinese medical practice. There is no scientific approve for many treatments, it just has done the same way for thousands of years, and it works.
That being said, it can produce inaccuracy. If we write a machine learning logarithm, we aim at a really high number of probability that the result is correct. Let's say if we got something lower than 10% correct, we just invert the logarithm to make that high (over simplification here).
But never 100%, because that's not how we train ML.
There is always something the machine needs human, and/or vise versa.
I'm not saying AI cannot do what human wants them to do. They can beat human in chess, go, any other high logical, creativity required games. They can do it.
But, again, there are some uniqueness that human brain has, that machine just cannot do yet (keyword yet). It might take very long time.
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I still believe that new technologies will create jobs that never existed before. Like a few years ago, I didn't know that you could earn by running social media ads for clients.
But the obstacle is that technology has a barrier of entry for many people. I guess entrepreneurship and education are going to be the two best tools to solve this problem.
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There will be some jobs created but the challenge I have with that viewpoint is the pace of things. We are seeing technology moving ahead at a pace, and a level, never seen before.
So if there are new jobs created but you need to be an astrophysist to do it, then that doesnt amount to much from a societal standpoint.
Of course, it is in the best interest of the politicians to generate as many bullshit jobs as possible.
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I agree technology creates a barrier against people who do not have access to it. And with the pace it's growing, some people will be left behind. Not sure how we are going to deal with so many unemployed people over the course of years.
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Simple solution is to place hefty tax on the companies, and then use that money to pay unemployment benefit rather than to fund wars and other dumb shit that the world doesn't need.
There's enough resources for everyone but the 1% always want to board shit so that the hierarchy remains.
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Perhaps the best solution is to decentralize to the N-th degree. Instead of letting a few people in certain buildings in certain cities determine what everyone should do, maybe we should decide how we relate to the people near us.
If Decentralized Finance resulting from smart contracts is wiping out several layers of intermediaries (who also join the unskilled laborers in unemployment), we may as well decentralize everything and solve our problems at the lowest levels possible. Even if misakes are made, they can be corrected relatively quickly.
Instead of many people working for a few business owners, why can't everyone or every household be a business owner? Then we relate to each other as business owners, and along the way we get the benefits of being business owners. After all,
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Of course, this also feeds into the deflationary pressure in an economy. It seems like every lever leaders pull to make things better in the short run end up making things worse in the long run.
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