Robots Want Your Job

America has more than three million transportation workers, more than any other occupational group, and they are all about to lose their jobs to self-driving vehicles. They might fight it, says this video, but “the workers always lose; economics always wins.”

Fortunately, the creator of this video doesn’t understand economics (for example, it is not something that wins or loses). He equates humans with horses, saying that horses never expected that they would lose their jobs to motor vehicles, but as it turned out their population peaked in 1915 and has been declining ever since.

Of course, automation has been going on for a long time, but “this time is different,” says the video. While automation once threatened the jobs of low-skilled workers, the robots now being developed will take the jobs of white-collar workers such as writers and financial analysts and even professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Where the United States had 25 percent unemployment during the Depression, this video predicts that robots will put 45 percent of people out of work. “We need to start thinking now about what to do when large segments of the population are unemployable.”

No, in fact, we don’t. People are not horses, the Depression and automation are two different things, and they are not going to have the same effects on the economy.

The most important problem with the ideas in this video is that they have fallen for the lump of labor fallacy, the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to do and if someone or something takes your job, you will be permanently unemployed. This fallacy has been used to oppose women in the workplace, civil rights for minorities, and limits on immigration. It is just as wrong when applied to robots as when it is applied to women, minorities, or immigrants.

In fact, there is no limit to the amount of work that can be done, and if robots take over much of the work we do (effectively producing the economic value we would have produced for that work), we’ll be able to produce even more wealth doing the work robots aren’t doing. This was understood by a nineteenth-century French economist named Jean-Baptiste Say, whose Say’s Law has often been misinterpreted even by other economists.
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Basically, Say’s Law says that, if you make or do something that other people want, the money you earn will allow you to buy other things, which will earn other people money and eventually that money will come back to you. This doesn’t mean you can do things that are a complete waste (like build a light-rail line) and expect to get paid for them. It does mean that everyone can have the opportunity to produce things of value for others.

Put another way, if a workforce consisting solely of men is suddenly doubled because women want jobs, those women will be able to produce things of value that will make everyone wealthier and double the size of the economy. In the same way, if 3 million transportation workers who collectively earn $150 billion per year suddenly find themselves replaced by driverless vehicles, those driverless vehicles will still earn someone that $150 billion, and when that money gets spent, it will employ those 3 million people doing something else.

Women didn’t all enter the work force overnight and robots aren’t going to replace millions of jobs overnight. So the transition period will allow people to find new or more productive work that robots can’t do.

The Antiplanner often has to do things that could be taken over by a robot. If a robot were to do those things, I could be that much more productive doing the things a robot can’t do.

The fear that this video tries to spread is that there is nothing a robot can’t do, leaving humans as useless as horses. I don’t believe that, but let’s say robots were able to produce 90 percent of the $85 trillion worth of goods and services that made up the approximate gross world product in 2013. Then the value of the remaining 10 percent of work would go up ten times because one person was doing the previous work of ten. Rather than put 90 percent of people out of work, everyone would see their productivity rise and could earn that much more money, leading the gross world product to rise to close to $850 trillion.

Will there people whose skill sets are so limited that they will be totally unemployable after the robot revolution? Perhaps. But professionals and white-collar workers won’t fall into that category as their skills are, by definition, managing ideas, and there is no end to human ideas. Even most low-skilled workers should be able to find work, perhaps supervising the robots doing the work the people once did.

Automation has been taking place for more than 200 years, and it has not left a permanently unemployed class (though racism has). There is no reason to think that automation will do so in the future.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

16 Responses to Robots Want Your Job

  1. metrosucks says:

    If only robots would completely obsolete the planning profession. Then we might get infrastructure that actually works, instead of the frivolous fantasies that planners self-reinforce in auto-hating planning school.

  2. bennett says:

    I certainly welcome automation and driverless vehicles. Sure, I foresee some issues and roadblocks but I am not afraid of technology helping us with productivity. What I fear is technological determinism, often adopted by political leaders to further inaction on important issues. Technological determinism absolves us of any responsibility for the stewardship of our society and it is pervasive in political argumentation (particularly on this blog, IMHO). That scares the crap out of me.

  3. bennett says:

    “…the frivolous fantasies that planners self-reinforce in auto-hating planning school.”

    Despite the thousands of planners and engineers who attended planning school that work every day to improve the automobile infrastructure on this planet, and despite all of the transportation planning courses offered at Universities that cover, in depth, roadway planning and construction, this drivel is still spewed forth with venom and hatred.

    While Mr. O’Toole’s point that “People are not horses” rings true, one thing is clear; metrosucks is an ass.

  4. Frank says:

    “horses never expected that they would lose their jobs to motor vehicles, but as it turned out their population peaked in 1915 and has been declining ever since.”

    Incorrect. At least in the USA. Numbers tripled since the 1970s, and with nearly 10 million horses, we have the most of any country in the world. They also support 1.4 million full-time jobs.

    Love the anthropomorphism of horses regarding them “not expecting” to “lose their jobs.”

    Anyway, maybe we will lose our jobs and then we can stop breeding. Because there are too many of us in the world. /sarc

  5. transitboy says:

    In any case, the number of transportation employees affected may be overstated. Transit agencies right now are finding it difficult to attract bus drivers, see the recent decision by Golden Gate Transit to cut bus service because of a driver shortage. This shortage will be even greater in the future as the liberalization of marijuana laws will make it more difficult to hire drivers absent a relaxation of the FTA’s stringent drug policy .

  6. Sandy Teal says:

    The transportation industry went through a radical transformation a few decades ago with the introduction of the shipping container, which drastically reduced transportation costs and jobs. Ships used to sit idle for weeks being loaded and unloaded Ports used to be huge job centers and lots of opportunity for theft and corruption. Now ports are big cranes and few jobs, and ships are extremely large and hardly ever idle.

    Its a fascinating story of how low tech can revolutionize the world commerce — try “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” by Marc Levinson.

  7. msetty says:

    While Mr. O’Toole’s point that “People are not horses” rings true, one thing is clear; metrosucks is an ass.

    Speaking of Dicks and such, there is something in the background of the picture at http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2014/08/11/gary-kiehne-gets-biggest-endorsement-of-them-all Metrosucks will probably want to get to working on quick. :-0

  8. metrosucks says:

    Unfortunately for your argument Michael Setty, you are the one going around looking at pictures of horse penis. Hmmmm.

  9. metrosucks says:

    As for bennett, decry your “profession’s” public image all you want, but this is what most of them think:

    http://domdangerous.wordpress.com/

    where this thug is advocating for a “benign dictatorship” to implement his particular views on land use and transportation. That’s nice; it’s so important to him that people do things HIS WAY that we need a dictatorship to forcibly smart growth up the USA.

  10. MJ says:

    This shortage will be even greater in the future as the liberalization of marijuana laws will make it more difficult to hire drivers absent a relaxation of the FTA’s stringent drug policy.

    It seems to me that this policy will have to be modified in light of the various developments in marijuana liberalization at the state level. After all, they don’t test drivers for alcohol when hiring them, but expect that drivers understand that they can’t be drunk when behind the wheel.

  11. Frank says:

    “they don’t test drivers for alcohol when hiring them”

    The making up of stuff continues unabated.

    ELECTRONIC CODE OF FEDERAL REGULATIONS
    Title 49: Transportation
    PART 655—PREVENTION OF ALCOHOL MISUSE AND PROHIBITED DRUG USE IN TRANSIT OPERATIONS
    §655.31 Alcohol testing.
    (a) An employer shall establish a program that provides for testing for alcohol in the following circumstances: post-accident, reasonable suspicion, random, and return to duty/follow-up. An employer may also conduct pre-employment alcohol testing.

    Just one example: “applicants for CMV driver positions must pass a DOT pre-employment drug and alcohol test, which will be conducted after an offer is made but prior to being hired for, or transferred to, the position.

  12. bennett says:

    Frank is correct re: drug and alcohol testing. I review transit drug and alcohol programs all over the country. Not only are you tested before employment, if you as much bump a side mirror pulling out of the transit facility you will most likely be drug and alcohol tested right away.

  13. bennett says:

    “… but this is what most of them think…”

    Your aptitude for clairvoyance is amazing. Why are you trolling the blogs? You should be running a hot-line or something.

  14. MJ says:

    The making up of stuff continues unabated.

    I didn’t make it up. Congratulations on finding an exception to the rule. Enjoy your ‘gotcha’ moment. Note also the use of the word ‘may’ in that passage you quoted. Sounds like it leaves a lot of discretion to the locals.

    It also doesn’t change my point. I agreed with transitboy that the legalization of pot in several states may create points of conflict in driver hiring. My point was that drivers are as unlikely to drive a bus while high as they are to drive drunk. However, the testing procedures for drugs and alcohol may yield very different results, since alcohol works its way out of your system relatively quickly, while traces of THC may remain for weeks and even months, and could conceivably show up during a screening well after the last time someone had gotten high.

  15. Frank says:

    “Congratulations on finding an exception to the rule. ”

    The “rule” is that pre-employment drug AND alcohol screens are permitted by federal law. You claimed that “they don’t test drivers for alcohol when hiring them,” so the burden of proof is on you. I found several examples but posted just one. Bennett spoke to his experience where he “review[s] transit drug and alcohol programs all over the country” sharing his knowledge of pre-employment tests. If you have some evidence to your assertion that drivers aren’t tested before employment, I’d enjoy reading it.

  16. the highwayman says:

    Given the nature of O’Toole, humans are obsolete and expect a robo-apocalypse. 🙁

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