375 million jobs may be automated by 2030

This according to a new report by CNN Tech:

The McKinsey Global Institute cautions that as many as 375 million workers will need to switch occupational categories by 2030 due to automation.

The work most at risk of automation includes physical jobs in predictable environments, such as operating machinery or preparing fast food. Data collection and processing is also in the crosshairs, with implications for mortgage origination, paralegals, accounts and back-office processing.

To remain viable, workers must embrace retraining in different fields. But governments and companies will need to help smooth what could be a rocky transition.

"The model where people go to school for the first 20 years of life and work for the next 40 or 50 years is broken," Susan Lund, a partner for the McKinsey Global Institute and co-author of the report, told CNN Tech. "We're going to have to think about learning and training throughout the course of your career."

The authors believe we may see a massive transition on a scale not seen since the early 1900s, when workers shifted from farms to factories. The report also cited the potential need for an effort on the same scale as the Marshall Plan, when the United States spent billions to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. 

This is noteworthy mainly because outfits like CNN had been, until now, entirely focused on giving airtime and mindshare to economists whose entire message was that new technologies would comfortably replace any and all jobs lost to other new technologies. This report is the first I've seen from the CNNs of the world that actually looked at the scale of the problem, and the cost of retraining the numbers of workers who will be displaced by existing automation technologies.

And that is the problem here: we're not talking about the impact of possible future technologies.We're talking about automation technologies that exist now, that are being deployed now, that are displacing workers already, and that are going to displace hundreds of millions of workers, worldwide, in the next decade. These people will not merely be unemployed; they'll be unemployable, through no fault of their own, trained and experienced in jobs that simply won't exist anymore. This is exactly the scenario that "alarmists" have been trying to warn policymakers about, and that has some lawmakers running Universal Basic Income pilot programs.

The good news? Universal Basic Income is looking like it has might be an effective way of tackling the issue. As reported by The Independent:

Support for a basic income has grown in recent years, fuelled in part by fears about the impact that new technology will have on jobs. As machines and robots are able to complete an increasing number of tasks, attention has turned to how people will live when there are not enough jobs to go round.

Ontario’s Premier, Kathleen Wynne, said this was a major factor in the decision to trial a basic income in the province.

She said: "I see it on a daily basis. I go into a factory and the floor plant manager can tell me where there were 20 people and there is one machine. We need to understand what it might look like if there is, in fact, the labour disruption that some economists are predicting."

Ontario officials have found that many people are reluctant to sign up to the scheme, fearing there is a catch or that they will be left without money once the pilot finishes.
Many of those who are receiving payments, however, say their lives have already been changed for the better.

[...]

Finland is also trialling a basic income, as is the state of Hawaii, Oakland in California and the Dutch city of Utrecht.

And for those skeptics in the United States, there's this report from Futurism:

In recent months, everyone from Elon Musk to Sir Richard Branson has come out in favor of universal basic income (UBI), a system in which every person receives a regular payment simply for being alive. Now, a study carried out by the Roosevelt Institute has concluded that implementing a UBI in the U.S. could have a positive effect on the nation’s economy.

The study looked at three separate proposals: a “basic income” of $1,000 per month given to every adult, a “base income” of $500 per month given to every adult, and a “child allowance” of $250 per month for every child. The researchers concluded that the larger the sum, the more significant the positive economic impact.

They projected that the $1,000 basic income would grow the economy by 12.56 percent over the course of eight years, after which point its effect would diminish. That would translate to an increase in the country’s gross domestic product of $2.48 trillion.

So the question becomes, as developing machine intelligence technology displaces hundreds of millions of human workers, will the world's governments have the political will to actually support them by implementing a "dole" system that looks like the best possible solution? In counties like the United States, where "socialism" is currently a worse political insult than "fascist," and where income disparity is about to get a lot worse as Republicans push through a huge tax break for their wealthy donors at the expense of lower-income Americans and more than a trillion dollars of additional debt, will Universal Basic Income have any chance of becoming a thing in time to matter? And what happens to the global economy if the can't?

And with that, I return you to the Singularity, already in progress.

Should robots pay income tax?

I have good news, and bad news. The bad news is that existing automation technologies are already good enough to steal 5% of all jobs in the U.S. by 2021; a Canadian study puts the figure at 42% within two decades. The good news is that people are actually thinking about this inevitable issue, and how to tackle it.

From CBC News:

Jane Kim, a municipal politician in San Francisco, launched a campaign this week called the Jobs of the Future Fund to study how a statewide income tax on job-stealing machines might work.

Assuming automation is inevitable, Kim proposes that proceeds from the tax bankroll new opportunities (for those of us who aren't made up of chips and data) through job retraining and investments in education.

Since robots can't actually pay taxes on their own (for now), a company that employs robots might pay the government a tax in accordance with how much money each robot has generated, or based on the profits that come from the labour savings of an automated workforce.

The idea of a robot tax was first introduced earlier this year by Bill Gates, who said in an interview with Quartz: "Right now if a human worker does $50,000 worth of work in a factory that income is taxed. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think we'd tax the robot at a similar level."

[...]

But the concept has its detractors. Critics argue that taxing robots would disincentivize companies from adopting them and could impede innovation.

Taxing robots is a particularly a bad idea in an era of low productivity growth, according to Robert Seamans, an associate professor of management at New York University.
"The existing empirical evidence suggests that robots boost productivity growth, so a tax on robots would limit that productivity," he says.

Gates, who is a philanthropist these days, argues that slowing down the adoption of automation might not be such a bad idea. It would give us more time to be thoughtful in how we approach the shifting economy, and to avoid the social crisis that could arise if we're not prepared for widespread job displacement.

I think I'm with Gates on this one. Universal Basic Income is already being tested in Canada and Finland, but U.B.I. needs to be funded; if we can implement a funding model which simultaneously slows the pace at which workers get replaced, then we might have a model which can show how to manage the transition from our present, in which workers struggle to find jobs, to our future, in which the very term "worker" is obsolete. Make no mistake, though - that future is coming.

We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress.

We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress...

When it comes to truly autonomous self-driving vehicles, or capital-"a" Autos, it's helpful to remember that this cost- and life-saving technology doesn't need to be perfect in order to see widespread adoption; as CGP Grey put it, they just need to be better than us. And here's the thing; they already are better than us. Waymo's Auto has been in only 14 crashes during testing, of which 13 were caused by the human drivers that the AI had to share the road with; only one was caused by the Auto's software.

With a safety record like that, there was never any question that Autos would find their way onto our roads. The only question was, "When?" How long would it take the general public to accept the presence of self-driving vehicles on our roads? How long would public unease with these new AI drivers prompt risk-averse politicians to drag their feet on giving approval for automakers to bring these autonomous autos to market?

Well, we now know some of the answers to those questions. The general public may still be working their way around to a general acceptance of this new tech, but it seems that the politicians are all done with the foot-dragging, as of last Wednesday.

From Reuters:

A U.S. House panel on Wednesday approved a sweeping proposal by voice vote to allow automakers to deploy up to 100,000 self-driving vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards and bar states from imposing driverless car rules.

Representative Robert Latta, a Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee overseeing consumer protection, said he would continue to consider changes before the full committee votes on the measure, expected next week. The full U.S. House of Representatives will not take up the bill until it reconvenes in September after the summer recess.

[...]

Democrats praised the bipartisan proposal but said they want more changes before the full committee takes it up, including potentially adding other auto safety measures.

[...]

Separately, Republican Senator John Thune, who is working with Democrats, said Wednesday he hopes to release a draft self-driving car reform bill before the end of July. 

AI does not need to be super-intelligent to completely reshape the way we do everything; automation technologies are already good enough to replace forty to fifty percent of the work force, and the impact that will have on society is incalculable. Self-driving Autos alone can replace cab drivers (Uber and Lyft are both working on this) and truck drivers (long-haul transportation, in particular, would benefit) long before consumers get around to replacing all of their personal transports with a shiny, new, auto. The economic impact of that can't be understated; it's not just the drivers' jobs that would be replaced, but also the related businesses, like truck stops, that would suddenly find themselves obsolete, and their employees looking for increasingly rare employment.

If you were thinking that this change was decades away, then think again. The benefits of Autos, in increased safety and productivity, are simply too compelling to ignore, and the only voices that might be inclined to fight against it (i.e. labour unions) just aren't influential enough, anymore, to be able to turn the tide. This is happening. Self-driving cabs and long-haul trucks will be playing city streets and highways across the continental U.S. in a matter of just a few years, with other countries doubtless following close behind, and industrialized society will never be the same again.

This is the Singularity, happening in slow motion. AI may still be well short of the super-intelligent mark, or even human-equivalent general intelligence, but it turns out that those things are not necessary for the Singularity to occur. There's a reason why governments across the industrialized world are already looking into things like Universal Basic Income as a way of caring for the basic needs of a populace who will find themselves not merely unemployed, but unemployable, within our lifetimes, through absolutely no fault of their own.

What will society look like when 40% of the population having nothing but time on their hands? What happens when simply having a job becomes a weird sort of status symbol, instead of being simply the baseline assumption that drives our perceptions of ourselves, and of each other? I don't know; I don't think anybody knows. But the U.S. congress, in a rare display of bipartisan agreement, have just decided that everybody, both within the U.S. and without, are about to find out.

We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress.