Why the tech sector may not solve America’s looming automation crisis

https://pudding.cool/2018/08/retraining/

by tekacs • 8 years ago

112 105 8 years ago

TL;DR: it's hard to retrain people into jobs that require different skill sets (e.g. from trucker to s/w engineer), and there may be not as many jobs offering equivalent salaries.

Interesting supporting info graphics, as well.

nine_k• 8 years ago

The graphics are very nice. I wish it was possible to link to them directly (with an #-anchor in URL). The article is formatted more as a video clip, though.

mkirklions2• 8 years ago

Ive heard this about trucks being automated for 3 years now.

Truck drivers have probably heard this for a few years longer than that.

At what point do you blame the individual for not learning any skill in this time period?

jaxn2• 8 years ago

There is no where for CEOs to go.

brixon• 8 years ago

Maybe part of the reason for Golden parachutes.

jaxn2• 8 years ago

I think this is true for startup founders too. It's either win or reinvent.

usermac2• 8 years ago

Do yourself a favor and visit this link. The transitions are so good.

amelius• 8 years ago

If we keep pouring software development resources into such silly things, I can totally understand why we're in an automation crisis.

anoncoward111• 8 years ago

Marketing and style are the short term profit hack deployed when a company has decided that "money now" is supposedly better than "sustainable money later"

douglaswlance• 8 years ago

Did you do a split test on this design and find that the page without these transitions provides more value? No?

maxxxxx2• 8 years ago

On my Android phone with Brave browser it's pretty terrible. Does anyone who wants to read things actually enjoy sites that hijack scrolling? I can see nothing positive in it. Maybe it looks neat but in terms of usability it's just terrible.

Maybe we need less designers and more writers?

taneq• 8 years ago

I found the endless scrolling for dribs and drabs of content to be horribly annoying, and the graphs didn't seem especially meaningful to me.

ptero• 8 years ago

IMO do yourself a favor and visit the link for an example of how not to present information. On my screen (firefox, Linux, 30" monitor), scrolling and page up/down puts text boxes at random places. Most of the time the screen is 90% empty with a small text box that is not even displayed fully.

If possible, I am all for elegance in presenting information, but I almost always prefer to have less eye candy and more content. My 2c.

ryandrake• 8 years ago

The plots and data visualizations are good, but all the tiny flying text boxes and transitional animations are terrible. Would it kill them to include a version that had static text and graphics that you could print out? Bad, inaccessible format for simply reading.

wtracy2• 8 years ago

Transitions? All I saw was that scrolling would bring me back to graphs that I'd already seen, which, after a ten second wait, would be abruptly replaced by new graphs.

If these long pauses are "transitions", I see nothing to admire.

usermac2• 8 years ago

Tough crowd. I'm viewing it on a desktop. Looks great to me.

stephengillie2• 8 years ago

Interesting to see the automation of truck driving used again as an example in this discussion.

From what my dad tells me, the trucking industry is hurting for long-haul drivers. Few men want to spend days on the road, far from their families and homes. It's such an unsatisfying job that women largely refuse to consider it. Even fewer want the nomadic lifestyle idolized by many on HN.

How will the trucking industry deal with both this threat to their jobs, and also a lack of human interest in doing the job?

gaius• 8 years ago

I can see the use cases for a “road train” of a single human driver operating a convoy of semi-autonomous vehicles. Once co-existence with other road users can be addressed such as splitting and rejoining. I think this is far more likely to be the model than completely automated trucks

bilbo0s2• 8 years ago

This is not quite true. What's happened recently is a combination of more effective enforcement on the regulatory side, combined with a ruthless pursuit of efficiency on the industry side. This combination of factors has increased the number of trucking jobs beyond what was historically necessary. (That's right. Ironically, all of the automation being added in the trucking industry has actually increased the number of drivers necessary substantially.)

Think what would happen if tomorrow the government said from now on every doctor can see no more than 2 patients per day. (Oh, and by the way, we're installing cameras in every hospital, urgent care, clinic, and private practice office to verify that no one exceeds that limit.) Now imagine that at the same time hospitals said they would no longer work with off site providers of any sort because it increases efficiency to have all of their physicians on site full time. Well, all of a sudden you would need about 6 to 8 times the number of doctors you have today. (At a minimum.)

This is somewhat of a simplification, and it doesn't get across the full depth and implications of the changes, but it gives you a good idea of what's happened to the trucking industry over the past few years.

pixl972• 8 years ago

Think what would happen if tomorrow the government said from now on every doctor can see no more than 2 patients per day.

Well, if doctors were killing patients at the rate truckers were killing other drivers then, yea, hopefully we would. (Honestly tired doctors kill a lot in the US as it is, medical mistakes are the 3rd leading cause of death).

stephengillie2• 8 years ago

Automation here prevents underreporting and other abuses - it's regulatory automation, so an alternative would be to hire more regulators to review documents. Automating this unsatisfying work increases the amount of law applied for the same cost.

smileysteve• 8 years ago

if tomorrow the government said from now on every doctor can see no more than 2 patients per day

I don't see much purpose in the exaggeration; change it to, Doctors must see each patient for no less than 15 minutes; and can only work 8 hour days.

Granted, internists with their own practices or in small towns do this already.

RobertoG• 8 years ago

"[..] the trucking industry is hurting for long-haul drivers"

Is not that a symptom of not paying enough?

bigpicture2• 8 years ago

I can corroborate, but the central issue once again is pay/working conditions. The pricing assumes that long-haul truckers don't get paid much and it assumes that they will drive up against the legal limits and it assumes that they will more or less live in their truck and never see their home.

Fixing the pricing to make the working conditions reasonable will simply make long-haul truck uncompetitive with freight railroads. And that is really the solution. If you want to send cargo across the country, put it on a train.

cyborgx7• 8 years ago

I'm ever more opening my eyes to how much crucial tasks for the functioning of the society are being done by low-paid workers under terrible conditions. We do have alternatives, but the profit motive comes before the quality of life of these people.

snarfy• 8 years ago

Not all shipping is equal. When I worked for a produce company we shipped via trucks and trains. By far there were many more incidence of produce going bad and having to be thrown out when shipped via train than by truck.

Put it on a train, unless it will spoil?

MikeKusold• 8 years ago

I used to work at a trucking software company, so I may have some insight.

Shipping cargo via trains is dramatically slower than via trucks. When you use a truck, your cargo goes from A->B.

When you use a train, you first need to get a truck to haul your content to the railyard. Then depending on the cargo, unload and reload onto the train. Then wait while the train makes stops for everyone else's cargo. Potentially your cargo will need to be unhooked from the train and wait until a different train headed to a different location arrives to take your cargo. Then once your train gets to the area of delivery, you still need a truck to show up and take your cargo to the final destination.

Even more so, for lots of loads trains cost similar to trucks. Trains have their purpose, but there is a reason why Coca-Cola, Walmart, UPS, etc... use trucks.

volkl48• 8 years ago

That'll actually be complimentary. Long-haul trucking is the part that's least desirable for humans AND the easiest to automate.

Highway driving is not hard in comparison with the actual local driving part, getting into tight loading docks, dealing with humans giving directions (at the terminals), handling driveways/paths not on maps, and so on.

And that's the sort of job that's a better quality of life for humans than long-haul is. Go to the terminal in the morning, make short trips all day, be off work at a normal hour, sleep in your own bed and be with your family at night, just like a normal job.

So given that, I actually see trucking as one of the areas where increasing automation may be a smooth transition, especially with the labor shortage in the industry.

------------

The hypothetical middle-term future then, looks like: Humans on either end making the last-mile trips, automation getting trucks between major terminals via highway.

JustSomeNobody• 8 years ago

Where will the hubs be located? Who will own and maintain them? This could end up costing more than just having the truckers drive the long haul.

drdeadringer• 8 years ago

About a decade ago I had cause to hire a long-haul truck [across the continental US]. At the time, I had come across information about how couples [married, whatever] were a segment of the trucker population; they would truck back and forth together.

Is this portion of the trucker population relatively small, and//or have little impact on issues being discussed here?

HeyLaughingBoy• 8 years ago

Probably both.

My wife has seen 48 states (except Hawaii & Alaska) through the windshield of an OTR truck, because when she was young her father would take her on some of his trips when school was out. He would also go with his wife sometimes. None of that changes anything: the vast majority of trips are still with a single driver alone in the cab.

Just because you can have a passenger doesn't make the lifestyle more desirable for most. In fact, I think the drivers who do it the longest are personality types that prefer to be alone.

mikestew• 8 years ago

Few men want to spend days on the road, far from their families and homes

But back in the day, it paid well enough to make that sacrifice. I knew families growing up that did okay with Dad was a truck driver and sole bread-winner, probably as well as my UAW-working father.

But now, sound like it's crap pay and the job didn't get any easier. And, duh, they can't find anyone to do that job.

downrightmike• 8 years ago

Costs are the threat and the last mile problem. If rail could deliver close or at the last mile, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Rail is way more efficient, except for that last bit.

ams6110• 8 years ago

"the trucking industry is hurting for long-haul drivers"

I think that is the story they like to tell, because it gets on the news and leads some people to seek jobs as truck drivers. But I don't think it's really true.

I think they have all the drivers they are willing to pay for. If they really had a shortage of drivers, they would pay more to attract more drivers.

jedberg2• 8 years ago

There was an interesting comment on this in a recent government finance report. An owner of a company said, "I'm having trouble filling all my open roles". When asked, "Why not offer more money?", they said, "Because then I'd have to pay all my existing workers more too and I can't afford that. It's cheaper to just pay them all overtime".

So this could explain why they won't just pay more -- because some people are already willing to do the work at the current pay, and it's cheaper to have them work more.

TheBobinator• 8 years ago

If you look at IQ and the kinds of jobs people sub-100 IQ can retain, you begin to realize very quickly that about half of the population is going to need to be retrained in some kind of intellectual job going forward.

That forces public schooling to train children for intellectual persuits, and children who are gifted need to have programs tailored for them.

It also means you are going to have post-scarcity politics. The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property. Universal income is horrific in the fact it dissolves those relationships, and politicans can decide to revoke people's food or shelter on a whim and also the public can decide to support it. You also realize that things like firearms ownership become very important as that becomes one of the few things that forces people to have value for each other at a very basic level.

sewercake• 8 years ago

The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property.

Are you saying that the 'cognitive elite' will live unsatisfied, lonely existences, and that's the price they have to pay for material success?

It seems like you're equating material scarcity with a 'mythic' view of human struggle. I.e: we need to challenge ourselves to grow and become better people.

I'm not denying that struggle is 'good' for bettering yourself, but I think there are ways to provide this kind of challenge that doesn't involve encouraging or maintaining material scarcity for vast swaths of the human population.

pjc50• 8 years ago

firearms ownership become very important as that becomes one of the few things that forces people to have value for each other at a very basic level

... what? Fear at a basic level, perhaps, but making murder weapons widely available is the opposite of respect for human life.

enraged_camel• 8 years ago

Furthermore, just because someone is acting respectfully towards you doesn't mean they actually respect you.

salawat• 8 years ago

Incorrect. Making weapons widely available is indeed compatible with respect for human life. A human life is worth being defended. One may disagree, but the right to self-defense is a natural, inalienable right.

megaman22• 8 years ago

If you look at IQ and the kinds of jobs people sub-100 IQ can retain, you begin to realize very quickly that about half of the population is going to need to be retrained in some kind of intellectual job going forward.

This is a troubling thing to think about. What I can see happening is that increasingly, the utility of the labor of people in that subpar, but still adequate, IQ band is steadily decreasing as automation tears out the bottom of semi-skilled labor. You can take somebody with an 85 IQ and put them on an assembly line, and they'll make a good living in 1970, but you can't realistically send that person to a dev bootcamp and make them into a web developer in 2018. So what do they do? Low skilled service industry work sure isn't the answer. My suspicion would be that the trades are most likely to combine reasonable return and resistance to automation, along with a probable shortage once the boomers retire, but it's a thorny question.

I think it's become obvious that the "Everybody needs to go to college" narrative has been borderline disastrous, given the mountains of student loan debt and stunted development that my generation has experienced.

madenine• 8 years ago

Its not the bottom we should be worried about, its the middle.

AI is going to outright replace a whole bunch of what are currently decently paying, stable, office jobs: accountants, clerks, schedulers.... and AI-augmentation is going to allow 1 person to do the same work that currently requires 2+ in so many fields.

Law and Medicine, two fields that have historically been good pathways to the middle class, are likely going to see AI hit them first in the middle, with the need for non-senior/non-specialized doctors/lawyers dramatically reduced as AI-assisted tools become standard.

As the middle gets cut out, more people are pushed towards lower-skill jobs that require physical interaction, likely pushing down wages in a buyer's market and decreasing the incentives for robotic automation.

That's going to be a massive blow to the US and global economy, all without having to build a single robot.

jeffreyrogers• 8 years ago

I think part of the reason the trades look attractive is because relatively few people do them. If we had labor-intensive manufacturing then we could add say 100,000 low-skill jobs, but you can't add 100,000 tradespeople as easily without crashing their wages since there's a relatively fixed quantity of trade work that needs to get done.

ckoglmeier• 8 years ago

Great visualization and topic.

If you are interested in helping to understand and be part of solving this issue, come join us at Guild Education in Denver. We're a venture backed B-corporation working to connect the future of work with (company funded) education opportunities - from the skilled trades + nursing to data scientists.

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6cd6beb• 8 years ago

Email me at ID @ DOMAIN.TLD for more info.

Generally, if you have to obfuscate the thing you want to post because you need to avoid a filter, it's unlikely that what you're posting is welcome in the place you're trying to post it.

ndiscussion• 8 years ago

What about avoiding email scrapers?

Chathamization4• 8 years ago

"Automation crisis" reminds me of "peak oil." Take a current problem (high unemployment, high oil prices), ignore the reasons for them (the global financial crisis, disruption oil supply along with increased oil demand), and instead construct a strange eschatological reason for the problem (machines are taking all of our jobs, we're almost out of oil).

Let's look at actual measures of automation - productivity growth. It's been very low over the past decade[1] when compared to decades past. Prime age employment has been returning to pre-crisis highs[2] - despite people claiming that the old jobs were gone and new jobs wouldn't replace them (the machines were supposedly going to take them all).

[1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm [2] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060

mdorazio3• 8 years ago

I think you're oversimplifying and ignoring a few key factors here.

1) As has been shown time and time again, the rewards of productivity gains accrue to the owners of capital far more than to the workers who are more productive. The result is widening inequality on many levels, which extrapolated a few decades into the future ends up looking... not great. I hope we can agree that de facto serfdom is a bad thing.

2) You can't just look at the number of new jobs when making employment generalizations - you have to look at the quality and type of jobs that were created to replace the ones lost. It's like if you took away someone's house and then gave them a tiny apartment a year later, then claimed "Look, they got housing back! Everything's great again!". In the case of employment, the vast majority of jobs created in the last decade have been contract positions and low-end temp work [1]. If you look at the sectors where employment has grown when new jobs data comes out, low-end service jobs continuously top the list (ex. [2]). We can debate whether or not people actually want these types of new jobs as opposed to traditional real estate/financial services/salaried construction/etc. jobs that were lost in 2009-2010.

3) We haven't hit the automation crisis yet in any meaningful way. When autonomous trucks and warehouse robots become prevalent, then we will be in an actual crisis.

The automation crisis right now is not that everyone is going to lose their jobs overnight, but that automation is exacerbating big problems in the jobs market that lead to massive inequality, the prevalence of underemployment, and the trend towards bad jobs with few or no benefits and workers needing to work gigs on the side to make ends meet or afford the things that their normal job would have provided in decades past. When large swathes of workers lose their jobs to automation in the future, these problems are going to continue to compound unless we start making big policy changes. Yes, people will likely find new jobs to replace the ones lost, but will they actually be better or worse off than before?

[1] https://krueger.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/akrueger/f...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/business/economy/services...

gervase• 8 years ago

I hope we can agree that de facto serfdom is a bad thing.

There is actually some evidence that what we currently have is already worse than serfdom [0] in many ways. I don't think this is a crisis which is about to occur, but one which has already started, is currently ongoing, and will probably get much worse.

[0] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...

rohit24123• 8 years ago

1) and 2) seem to be largely effects of a globalized eceonomy, with outsourcing and resulting inequality. Automation seems to be truly a boogie monster you can put blame on.

Trains also took away long distance horse buggie jobs. They were largely automated too. And finally, if you think driverless cars are nearby, then so are completely humanoid robots who can do all the work a human can do.

Chathamization4• 8 years ago

You bring up important issues, but there doesn't seem to be an reason to think they are the result of automation. There have been periods in the past with higher levels of productivity growth that have corresponded with a decrease in inequality. Now we're in a period of low productivity growth corresponding with an increase in inequality.

As for self driving trucks, I remember people telling me a decade ago that they would have lead to mass unemployment by now. The predictions of an impending automation crisis haven't had a great track record.

wolfgke• 8 years ago

1) As has been shown time and time again, the rewards of productivity gains accrue to the owners of capital far more than to the workers who are more productive.

This looks much more like the real problem to me. The solution: Make it much easier and less bureaucratic for such people to invest their money.

maze-le• 8 years ago

"Peak Oil" is a theoretical model for analyzing oil supply and production cost. It was first conceptualized in the 1950ies, in a time where hardly anyone was claiming that we're almost out of oil. Indeed "Peak Oil" does not claim that the absolute oil reserves are nearly empty but that the reserves that can be exploited cheaply are at their maximum production capacity. What this model does not take into account are price fluctuations, based on a decrease in growth and economic activity (what we have seen in the past 10 years) and new technologies (Fracking, LNG). So this model is imprecise and incomplete, but useful when analyzing trends over a very long period of time.

You claim, that the "Automation crisis" isn't a real problem either, because apparently employment is almost back to pre-2007 levels. This may well be true, but a significant factor that has to be analyzed is: what jobs are being taken. I have no numbers only anecdotes [from UK/Europe, not US], and there is a pattern where low paying service jobs are replacing jobs in the manufacturing industry. This is a direct consequence of automation in the manufacturing industries, and these jobs are not very secure / automation-safe either. Also, this problem is way older than you or me, the first Luddites were smashing machines in the 1810s. The history of the 1800s show that automation (with lots of other factos in conjunction) can lead to societal upheaval and severe economic problems.

As for productivity growth, I concur that by the numbers in your first link show a stagnation in the past decade. That does not mean that this trend will continue in the future. When AI/ML Technologies become mainstream (this is already the case) and receive widespread adoption in several industries (this is not the case by now) productivity growth will increase once again.

std_throwaway• 8 years ago

We did indeed hit "Peak Oil" for conventional oil fields just as predicted. But we started to access new sources of oil to fill the gap. As long as we find new energy sources that are cheaper than oil we will never run out of oil because we can simply make more from other sources. Every form of good energy can be converted into every form of other energy (at some losses). Food can be turned into energy and energy can be turned into food. The big question is if we will develop cheap energy sources quickly enough.

If we don't we will have to reduce consumption considerably and there are several ways to achieve that.

Chathamization4• 8 years ago

I was referring to the quasi-apocalyptic belief that was popular after the Iraq War (oil was on the verge of running out, leading to resource wars and societal collapse). The Oil Drum was a good example of this[1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060110135409/http://www.theoil...

crdoconnor2• 8 years ago

there is a pattern where low paying service jobs are replacing jobs in the manufacturing industry. This is a direct consequence of automation in the manufacturing industries

It's kinda more related to that "Made in China" sticker that appears on most manufactured things you buy these days.

No shortage of manufacturing jobs in China. Or Germany (which has also enacted economic policy to keep manufacturing at home), for that matter.

harshreality• 8 years ago

I believe this is the second graph you should have used: The labor force participation rate.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

Unless you believe more people are wealthy enough to live fine without needing to work (the opposite seems to be true[1]), what matters is not the employment rate, but labor participation rate. That's not even considering whether average wages for those who are employed are are keeping pace with rising living costs. The good news is that, eventually, automation will reduce living costs. The bad news is that fewer people will have jobs enabling them to afford even those reduced living costs.

From the BLS website glossary: '"Productivity": A measure of economic efficiency that shows how effectively economic inputs are converted into goods and services.'

I don't see why productivity as an economic measure would increase in the early stages of a process where narrow AI and robotics start to take over human jobs. Until costs come down, when AI software and robotics becomes more generic, and standardized, and adopted outside of narrow industries, the economic effects won't be as dramatic.

The only escape from narrow AI and robots taking human jobs is the creation of more bullshit jobs (see: Graeber), or genuinely new job sectors, but I have yet to read any compelling predictions of new job sectors that will employ large numbers of people and can't be automated.

Creator jobs? How many people on youtube, or patreon, or self-publishing books, earn even minimum wage from the time they put in? If you dumped 1 million, or 10 million, additional people onto those platforms and told them their new job is to create full time, how many of those additional people could make a living wage, or even minimum wage, for the time they spend?

Service jobs? While the wealthy (let's say, upper middle class and above) might want human waiters, human voice support on the telephone, etc., I think that's vastly overplayed as an opportunity for human labor. I don't think that many wealthy people would prefer to deal with humans over good AI, and I don't think it would create that many service jobs even if wealthy people did mostly prefer to pay a premium for human service.

[1] With increasing numbers of people working beyond retirement age, more debt, and more couples both working (I have nothing against that, I'm just pointing out the labor statistical reality that families' standard of living requires that more, now).

knuththetruth• 8 years ago

The good news is that, eventually, automation will reduce living costs.

I’m not sure even this is true because of the degree of hyper-financialization and rent-seeking in areas like housing and healthcare. For example, with housing, even assuming we clear the zoning barrier, you still run into the problem of housing being an investment vehicle for global Capital. They’ll let it sit vacant or be consolidated into rental conglomerates in exchange for a relatively secure asset with marginal returns.

It’s possible that systems in Europe with a greater degree of decommodification will benefit from automation (e.g. easier to build public housing and easier to administer socialized medicine), but this seems unlikely to hold true in the American context, barring some massive political change.

Chathamization4• 8 years ago

I believe this is the second graph you should have used: The labor force participation rate.

Here's labor force participation for prime age workers[1] (which is similar to the prime age Employment-Population Ratio I posted above). The problem with your graph is that it's including everyone 16 and over - so baby boomer retirement makes an impact, as does the ACA (college students not working a job for benefits because they're covered by their parents, people who are retiring earlier because they don't have to wait for Medicare).

Though it's worth noting that even if, for some reason, you wanted to look at everyone over 16, the participation rate is still well above anywhere it was in the 50's, 60's, and most of the 70's. If you're looking at prime age, we're only a couple of percents below the highs in the 90's (and much higher than other periods).

but I have yet to read any compelling predictions of new job sectors that will employ large numbers of people and can't be automated.

I'm always confused by this argument. Practically every day on HN there are articles about problems that it would be great if more people were working on. Replication crisis? Aging infrastructure? Global warming? Cancer research? Environmental destruction? Food scarcity? Documentation and bug hunting in software? Taking care of frameworks? Early childhood education? Heck, even beyond all the problems on Earth, there are plenty of people who want to work on things like sending people to Mars.

I just can't fathom how people can look at the world and say, "Yep, we don't really need to do anything more than what we're already doing."

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

petra2• 8 years ago

Most of retail has little productivity growth. But what about Amazon(without shipping, an extra service)?

Same goes for most industries - there's a small group of companies who show good productivity growth, while the rest stay in place.

So it's just a matter of time.

intended2• 8 years ago

If prime age productivity were actually improving, then there would be more investments in it - instead firms are buying back shares, instead of re-investing.

So The marginal choice is known - perhaps the easy wins to be won from human productivity increases have been achieved?

adventured3• 8 years ago

instead firms are buying back shares, instead of re-investing.

That's false. Firms have been spending more on expanding capex investment than stock buybacks. There's a capex boom going on with the S&P 500 right now.

Year over year capex growth was up 15.6% in the first quarter, and 18% in the second quarter.

By contrast, capex growth for the S&P 500 was flat to negative for most of the prior five years, and was negative for nine straight quarters prior to 3Q17.

We haven't seen that kind of capex boom since the initial bounce out of the great recession in late 2010-2011. And that was massively juiced by the Fed, whereas we're in a very different Fed environment now.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-26/trump-tax...

adventured3• 8 years ago

To add to this point, over the last 12 months the US has created the most manufacturing jobs since 1995. Manufacturing jobs had essentially declined non-stop from 1998 to 2011 (there was no recovery during the real estate bubble years of '03-'08).

That was supposed to be impossible. It was seemingly universally claimed by economists, industry pundits, stray talking heads on TV and armchair experts that manufacturing jobs were in permanent decline.

Instead, the US is in the middle of a manufacturing boom. That looks set to continue with at least three factors in the US favor: cheap, abundant energy; the cost of manufacturing in China continues to climb and has made the US a lot more cost competitive in contrast; a slowdown in the DC regulation monster; corporate tax cuts are a big deal for domestic manufacturing - as profit margins in manufacturing are typically modest - and the US is now tax competitive with the OECD median.

To paraphrase Buffett, you get rich making things, and you get poor buying things. The US used to be a potent example of that; China is the latest stellar example of it. The US desperately needs to reduce consumption and boost production + savings, in regards to the ratio in the economy.

cryptonector• 8 years ago

It also ignores human creativity. "Machines are better, so no more jobs", when the reality is "people like to pay a premium for hand-made things / services that cannot be provided by machines". Sure, there's no guarantee that we'll create new jobs, but it sure seems very likely to me that the market will find a way to employ people if the market is allowed to.

gumby2• 8 years ago

That looked like it might be an interesting article but implementing it as tiny fragments of boxed text that fly by as you scroll (and obscure the graphs) pretty much destroys the point of publishing an article.

Can anyone point at the original data of which this is presumably a summary?

grump.

KineticLensman2• 8 years ago

This is the pudding [0] house style. Luckily for us, if its not our Jam, we can preach. I kid you not.

[0] https://pudding.cool/

gumby2• 8 years ago

Wow, that's insane.

rayiner• 8 years ago

Does anyone really think this site design is a good idea? The images are all dynamic anyway. It adds literally nothing to a traditional static page with captions below diagrams and images.

cowpig• 8 years ago

I'd say it very much detracts from the experience... to the point where I can't be bothered to mess with any of the what look like beautiful presentations of data

zwieback• 8 years ago

Worst website design I've seen this year, maybe I'm just too old for this type of thing.

wtracy2• 8 years ago

Some of the diagrams don't fit on the screen on my phone. Since the diagrams are fixed in place and don't scroll, there are parts that I literally can't read.

HillaryBriss• 8 years ago

...truckers and developers have relatively few similarities in terms of the competencies necessary for their respective jobs.

also, given the age, culture, geographical location of applicants and their families, what percentage of former truck drivers turned software developers will be hired by a tech startup or a FANG company?

jackcosgrove• 8 years ago

Tech sector as the solution to the looming automation crisis? It's the cause of the looming automation crisis.

mkirklions2• 8 years ago

Seeing how much free content exists on youtube, I imagine the future is going to be creative/hobby based.

It wont pay as much as programmers who eliminate jobs, but given how starvation is over, people live alone, and I watch my friends with tons of college debt spend money on bars and activities, the future will be entertainment/human based.

oliv__• 8 years ago

Kind of meta but this website looks like an unreadable version of a nice NYTimes article.

imron• 8 years ago

The funky scrolling makes this site is unreadable to me.

JDiculous• 8 years ago

The underlying assumption of course is that everybody needs to be working in some kind of drudgery to justify their own existence.

We really need a mental paradigm shift here. If a robot can now do a job that used to require 2 million workers, why should that not result in 2 million people being freed to enjoy this increased leisure rather than having to desperately find new "jobs" or otherwise face destitution. What are we working towards again, GDP growth?

Regarding the article, to be completely blunt: no sh*t. Software engineering in the U.S. is already very saturated, just less so than every other field (eg. marketing, finance, law) so nobody frames it as such. One of my ex-coworkers just went through 6 technical interviews and a coding project only to have his offer rescinded by an HR lady at the parent company due to a minor mistake on his original resume (against the will of everyone who actually interviewed him). Coding bootcamp placement rates right now are awful.

Do people really think the 2 million truck drivers can just become software engineers (without some kind of massive government-sponsored jobs program akin to a "New Deal")? Taking a step back, why is that even something we should socially desire? Do society really need more Javascript monkeys?

Why the tech sector may not solve America’s looming automation crisis

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