I'm a motorcycle mechanic and while I don't believe there is going to be a robot mechanic any time soon. Automation is reducing the number needed and level of education needed. More things are desposible and quality of things are going up. So instead of needing something wrenched on twice a year you only need it once every two years and it ends up costing less to just replace whatever. Electric cars and bikes are only going to increase that. So while my job isn't going away tomorrow directly to robots I am never getting a pay raise and job is only going to get harder.

When cars are self-driving, it's predicted that insurance rates will prevent anyone who isn't wealthy from owning a manually-driven car.

What will that do to the motorcycle industry (and hobby), I wonder? Will this be the end of the Hell's Angels?

It will be the end of the poor Hell's Angels, anyway.

I imagine they'll be as legal as a car that requires leaded gasoline.

Bikers could become an opt-out group like the Amish, quaint reminders of times past. They're halfway there already.

Cheaper more disposable bikes. Like cell phones, when the battery dies it is cheaper to get a whole new bike. If anything goes bad in the first 2 years you more or less replace it under warranty. There would still be a few mechanics but not a local shop in every town.

Related, Japanese insurance company replacing 30% of workers:
Bots steal jobs: Japanese firm replaces workers with AI

I think this is the real issue. So many middle class jobs are pushing paper around. Anything that has a step system or is easily documented or has clear processes will be getting replaced.

Things like welding, yes, but the hard part is the mechanics of it. Even data analysis... from 2009 to 2016 SPSs has gotten SO much easier and really human involvement is less and less needed.

I told my family's financial planner that I wanted to invest some petty money and they told me to go with a "computer aided" fund.

Business has *no* incentive not to do this. Machines don't need insurance. They don't sue. They won't change jobs. They don't go on strike. They don't steal office supplies. They don't take bathroom breaks. They can be re-sold or scrapped for parts. Whatever. The change is that they can increasingly learn and can increasingly be reprogrammed to be instantly trained (think the matrix)

Humans are a business liability.

It's the government that should be doing something but american government doesn't move until there is a problem because legislation is reactive. Unemployed humans will be seen as a side effect of making American business leaders more money.

And increasingly we'll see automated security. Think factories being private property+camera/IR/guns. Think about gated security. I mean things really are in place for some classic dystopian futures. I don't think that can happen in a healthy democracy, but it could happen in an oligarchy and I think America is in a position largely less able to shrug those kinds of accusations off. I think America is capible of great things in the future because it's less restricted than Europe. But at the same time, Europe tends to fundamentally understand the value of those restrictions while America has never really had a "learning moment" (beyond maybe 1912)

Government needs a constituency to respond to. Organized labor is the closest, but they are more protected than most workers.

See? That's an issue I have with American politics.

It is not the government's job to look out for their "constituency". It's the government's job to look out for "Americans". All of them. Even the ones that don't vote.

And to think I wanted you to run for office.

The government isn't a single unit. The part of the government that does things by making laws is a bunch of individual elected reps. Their job is pretty much nothing but looking out for their constituencies. They have really no incentive to look out for those who don't vote, or provide campaign funds.

The responsibility of the government is to run America as a representative.

I'm not talking about incentive. I'm talking about responsibility.

A government that only looks out after the people that voted for it is a very American concept in a bad way.

Example: Last night, my friend from japan who works for Hitachi and has a wife undergoing chemo was incredulous about the opaqueness of the pricing, how nothing is done automatically and the pricing for insurance and medical procedures because all of those things are managed by the government in Japan to watch out for its citizenry.

Japan must not have a large voting population of religious fanatics.

Because they don't systematically under educate their population and their version of military employment is construction.

Thanks, MacArthur!
Thanks, MacArthur?

The "reverse occupation" is really interesting. He spent the first couple years decentralizing everything and making a model government (which meant jailing capitalist war criminals and releasing socialist/communist political prisoners) so Socialism really took off in japan... but then, when China went communist and Russia was rebuilding and becoming more powerful... they spent the next couple reversing everything and propping up the old people in power in order to block off China and Russia.

Even to this day japan is "command Capitalism"- which works for a country with language/cultural and physical barriers that is forced to interact with other countries to survive.

Such a short article. I swear there used to be an appropriate category for that. Must have dreamt it.

In my excitement to post I didn't check to make sure the actual academic paper was available.

Sounds like a job for a robot.

When a robot takes over a mundane task that no one did before, no jobs are lost.

I'll have you know I outsource my posts and comments to a call center in the Philippines.


Work conditions are poor. Please send help.

Seems like a corollary of the Peter Principle - automation of repetitive, low-complexity jobs gradually increasing in complexity means no low-complexity jobs for the humans to excel-until-failure at.

From the paper abstract:
Quantitatively, we find that advances in automation technology on their own account for a relatively small portion of the joint decline in routine employment and associated rise in non-routine manual employment and non-employment.
Now obviously we may be on the verge of an exponential increase in this area, but it's not exactly a crisis, yet anyway. But I also note that in Doctorow's very brief article he refers to "welders, bank tellers, etc" as examples of 'routine jobs' endangered by automation. Technically accurate perhaps, but these are very different kinds of jobs in terms of skill, demand, and pay. Right now for example welders are in great demand in the US, and while assembly line welders may soon be an endangered species, higher levels of skill and adaptability will remain in demand for some time.

It is going to get a little weird when no one has developed into a highly skilled welder because all of the entry level jobs are robots.

I'd consider it an opportunity and a challenge. A highly skilled welder would earn more after all, and bank tellers don't really have this option.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html?referer=

See. You're studying machine learning, you know how fast this all advancing. ;) The hard part isnt'the going to be building adaptable robots for much longer, it's creating the corpus they can learn and adapt from.

Since welding seems to be the topic of interest here, I'll add in that there will be a point where improvements to welding will be improvements to the robotic welding process --

(this order is not totally fixed -- better-than-human results in some facets can be achieved before parity)
get a robot to do a crap job at a human task
improve that crap job to a passable job
improvements to get to parity with human outcomes
improvements to the robotic process that push some areas beyond human ability
robot/computer-suggested-improvements to process

If there are very few entry level welding positions, not only will the skill become more rare, but the tools to do it will also become rarer. (ok, welding equipment is fairly simple compared to a lot of things, but for other things it'll be true.)

Exactly. Eventually what will happen is that highly skilled *insert occupation here* will become less competition for robots and more a kind of artisanal status symbol sought by the upper class and/or luddites.

This was foreseen in the book of the Prophet called The Diamond Age .

Indeed. Not only that, but we're almost at the tech where Ractors are going to be a thing. That's got Gig Economy written all over it, just long enough to get the data needed to simulate humans.

I don't want robots reanimating corpses, thank you very much.

Necromancy is being automated, too?

Hey, you could make someone half cyborg and charge them maintainace fees. Sorry you're subscription payment to "circulatory system" is overdue. Please pay the late fee penalties by Jan 2157 or service will be stopped.

How's that for a dystopian horror novel?

I mean, we've already got a for-profit based healthcare system. ;)

Reminds me of the Justin Timberlake movie In Time!

You say "demand for welders," but based on the late night commercials for the welding schools working to pump them out like there's no tomorrow, I read "demand for low wage welders with heavy amounts of student loan debt." If industries can't bump up their bottom line through scarcity of product or service they've found they can remove scarcity of their skilled labor. The robots will come soon enough, and once again the labor force will be stripped of all bargaining power ahead of time.

Not to disparage the welding occupation, but how much of that learning is for the piece of paper and liability coverage that gives a potential employer?

I know several people who have no formal welding training that do it for various tasks (car repair, construction, art, etc.), though non of them do it for a job working for someone else. They tell me it's "simple" to learn, point me at various online resources, and compare it to learning electrical work, plumbing, etc.

If it is, indeed, a relatively easily-learned trade, is it more like having taught oneself basic medicine and hanging out a shingle as a GP vs. having a diploma from a medical school, all things being equal?

It's easy to learn to do mediocre welding. If you're welding on something that flies, or goes boom, you better have the skills and experience, and the piece of paper. DOD and aerospace work will demand the human touch for some time.

There's an entire certification process that involves testing your welds and usually before they hire they want to see your skills. Also some skills like underwater welding are in demand but it's extremely dangerous. If you cut a hole in a pipe you can get stuck due to pressure or cause an explosion. Explosions in the water are deadly because it's much denser. There's a lot of fucked up stories about people who make a cut and get sucked into the pressure well and can't escape before their oxygen runs out.

That article was reckless to lump all welders into one group of workers as well as not including the full copy of the only journal it cites. It is locked behind a paywall. The journal in question states it is a quantitative study on routine jobs for individuals from a small set of demographic groups but not routine middle class jobs. This boingboing article doesn't rate attention at all for its anemic writing, it is just so much bait for those to argue about in the comments.

When they mean welder they probably mean the type of welder who does repetitive mindless welding like in a auto factory who was was taught to weld *by the company* with one device over different types of car runs. Most auto workers had a middle class wage to do so many repetitive very low skill work, but those days are decades gone. The robotic welders used in auto factories have been around for more than 50 years.

A master welder is a highly educated high tech worker that is needed to do jobs on site, on demand, and works in various conditions to include under water. The type of welding varies from massive steel jobs on ships and buildings to intricately fine welding on one-of jobs in aerospace. No robot exist in the world that can do all that. What passes for automated welding are robots anchored to the ground on assembly lines.

If you go to work thinking a robot can do your job then you should take precautions for the future, but don't feign indignation when it happens. The warnings for this is over a century old since automated factories in the 19th century had started displacing child labor and that there should have been the signal that as automation becomes more complex and cheaper your job is on the line to be cut.