The Robots Are Coming
Over the last few weeks, a number of papers and studies starting to look into how the currency coronavirus crisis is going to affect employment.
The results appear to conclude that robots and machinery is going to take on a bigger slice of the "employment" pie.
Those jobs that are most at risk are the ones at the lower end that have a highly social aspect to them. This means cashiers, waiters/waitresses, and others who engage with the public.
In the past, the view was these individuals added more value, meaning that people would not be willing to forego them.
This is being challenged since we are now seeing people who are fearful to interact with others. Here is where technology can start to make an impact.
For example, coffee stands could affect employment at a chain such as Starbucks. Amazon is going to license out its Amazon Go technology, further cutting into the cashier jobs.
This is something that is happening across the board. There is roughly $1.5 trillion in wages at risk. Most of these are lower income people who can ill-afford to be eliminated.
It is a situation that is going to rapidly slap society in the face. Over the past few years, I wrote a great deal about this. Many counter by saying that technology always creates more jobs than it destorys.
Not this time.
I long maintained the pace of implementation will surpass anything we ever saw. This was before the crisis. Now, it is going to accelerate.
If people look to maintain distance from others, we are going to see everything in shopping malls end up going out of business. The retail sector was in bad shape to begin with. We are now going to see bankruptcies, eliminating the possibility of people being able to return to work.
Robots eliminate the social distancing problem. While they might not be as sociable as a person, people are going to be willing to forego it for the sake of safety.
People are social creatures. We can't have distancing for long, we need to socialize
The problem with tellers and checkers is... when i was young, these people seemed to be at least competent, today, they have problems operating a really simple user interface.
An interface that i could handle far easier, with less hassle, and i can get exactly what i want.
Today, it is like Wallymart has gone out of their way to higher the lowest IQ people they could get to run the registers. They aren't even good for chatting to.
Unfortunately, once these big stores replace all with robots, then all the people will disappear.
It will be like the stock market, when they went digital, everyone left the floor. It became a ghost town. The same will happen with stores and restaurants.
Without UBI there's going to be chaos. Trump may be controversial and rather colorful a figure but whoever may be next could be make Trump look boring in comparison.
Cryptocurrencies can help but they will not be able to plug the gap. It comes down to resources. What resources do the people who are made redundant, many permanently, have to bring to the table? Very few can become software developers or anything like it. (At some point, that may actually prove a bottleneck unless the productivity of the rank and file of developers can be improved significantly or if AI will become sufficiently advanced to do the programming by itself.)
One commentator against UBI on the grounds of not so much eschewing it because of the way it fosters dependency on a central entity but because of libertarian leaning moral reasons, suggested that that if made permanently redundant by AI and automation, she'd "live off the land". Good luck with that. First of all, most land is privately owned and landowners aren't going to tolerate people setting up camps without permission. Secondly and most importantly, very few people have the skills to survive out there. Certainly not tens of millions of people in the coming decade. This goes to demonstrate that our value systems and many of the moral truths we consider self-evident are bound to become completely unworkable in the face of accelerating technological change.
Very sad news but need to accept