Discussion
TiaMane: Robot war will be cinematic, will probably safe lives
paulryanrogers: That assumes those in power agree that only robots may be harmed.
iknowSFR: The robot vote is a critical and quickly growing minority group since Wall-E v Sanders determined that all sentient robots were to be treated as citizens. Immediately after, Citizens United was rendered useless and large corporations moved their investments from campaign finance to literal voting machines.
maerF0x0: "No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today.A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
Simulacra: The article seems to say that it's not jobs nobody wants, but rather a labor shortage from an aging population. Japan just seems to be running out of people for its labor market.
epolanski: 18% is one of the.lowest rates on the planet. 4th in fact.This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.
maerF0x0: It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw)
mamami: Meanwhile in the US they're replacing artists, writers, and teachers
wnevets: > but rather a labor shortage from an aging population.combined with ridiculous cost of living, work/life balance and incredibly xenophobic immigration policies.
alephnerd: No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan.
pj_mukh: I don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job.If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
eucryphia: The job no one wants?Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35.Who’s paying for your nursing home? Tax the robot’s income? Will your demographic replacements vote for that?
chaostheory: 1. There is only so much you can pay the people doing the kind of work like cleaning the Shinkansens or manning the 7-11's because it affects customer costs. i.e. There's a point where you increase the salary of 7-11 workers that it causes a $2 fried chicken snack to inflate to $10 that customers will refuse to buy2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of workers.
seanmcdirmid: Different from the USA, 7-11 in Japan and China are mainly self checkout at least, so they can technically run a store with less people since they don’t have to man cash registers to get people checked out.
epolanski: Japan has one of the lowest unemployments on the planet, 2.5%.Virtually all that don't work don't want to and don't need to or simply can't.As the article we're commenting points out Japan has a labor shortage.
msla: They're coming for the jobs immigrants would be taking if the Japanese government weren't so xenophobic.
jfengel: Jobs everyone thinks are easy and nobody likes the people who do it.
TurdF3rguson: But who's going to unlock the expensive items from the plexiglass case?
alephnerd: This. Also there is a social backlash against Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai service workers in Japan now.
wileydragonfly: You’re allowed to type shit. We’re all adults here.
slimebot80: Why don't they import millions of immigrants to do the low wage/skill jobs instead?
moostee: Sarcasm right? It's difficult to tell these days.I'll pretend it's not sarcasm despite assuming it is.Immigration changes the cultural profile of a region and increases cost of living, particular cost of housing.
TurdF3rguson: I agree with the teachers one. Having one lady in charge of educational instruction for that many kids will be looked back upon as barbarism.
canpan: I went to a chain Family Restaurant recently here in Japan. The food is brought by a robot for a while now. Recently you get your seat selected at a touchscreen. You can pay at your table's tablet using PayPay. There is still some waiter staff, but it being reduced to the past. The only part that did not change much yet is the kitchen.I said to myself to stop going, if there is no human staff left. On the other hand, small shops with good atmosphere are thriving.
jonah: I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film."Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself." -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/
mc3301: Ridiculous cost of living in Japan? What do you mean by that?
alephnerd: > Who’s paying for your nursing homeJapanese financial institutions massive capital positions across Asia, the US, and Europe which tend to be public-private ventures.> Tax the robot’s incomePretty much, in the sense that corporations and the Japanese government have spent decades working together to build a sovereign wealth model comparable to Singapore and the UAE's.
robotnikman: This is something that really needs to be done in the states imo.IIRC we don't have a sovereign wealth fund, but we should in order to provide a social safety net for our citizens, especially with all the uncertainties regarding the future right now.
wilg: In case you think 18% is Japan's unemployment rate: it's not. Japan's unemployment rate is 2.5%.https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location...This is basically the best in the world.https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/statistical-releases/2...Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
Buttons840: I clean shit for free often.I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.
slimebot80: Yeah. I'm more concerned about the welfare needed to support millions of low-skill people in high living cost areas, in the age of AI. Those people are being sold dead dreams for the benefit of a handful of billionaires.
jjmarr: There's a subreddit for the NYC sanitation dept because it's so competitive to get into.https://www.reddit.com/r/DSNY/comments/1rwayil/what_was_the_...People will clean garbage and shit for a DB pension, stability, not sitting at a desk, and avoiding corporate politics.All of these things are easier to give to sanitation workers because human waste is a recession-proof good and it's less affected by boom-bust. Many people want these jobs.If you're a tech worker that likes a clean office and new technology this is boring.But I'm sure there's a sanitation worker saying the same thing as you. i.e. "Tech alternates between mass layoffs/hiring scramble every 5 years. There's a huge skills shortage so they should bring in Indians for a couple of dollars a day."
avadodin: What? When I went to Japan most service workers were Eastern South to South East Asian.I doubt many Chinese youths want to work for minimum wage in Japan.
Apreche: It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces?The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
genxy: I believe that is the plan.
Ancalagon: Viva La revolution
cco: Out of curiosity, what percentage of a fried chicken snack's final cost do you think is labor from that 7-11 worker?
Ancalagon: Why would people not like artists?
unscaled: Unlike many other developed countries, foreign employees working in cleaning and maintenance are still a minority. This is gradually changing, but I believe the main issue is that young people are completely uninterested in this kind of work. Most people working in these industries in Japan are old rather than foreign. The average is probably over 50+, and there are quite a few people working past retirement.
maerF0x0: Correct. I was using labor participation rates. As a society gets depressed and has a hard time people stop trying (ie they no longer count as unemployed, which doesnt count the people who are no longer trying to get a job).Similar to how as police systems fail, people stop reporting things assuming nothing meaningful will happen anyways. And then there's less reports of crime, so magically "crime is down" -- high fives to the police system... (/s)
wilg: I think that fudging the numbers to bolster your pet theory is not an acceptable way of looking at this data.
areoform: > Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35. * destroying your body, stripping your bones, getting diabetes and temporarily (or permanently) disabling yourself with issues no healthcare provider will take seriously for decades to come for 2.6 babies in your youth.
ceejayoz: Why would the retirees want to be put back to work?Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once?Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task?Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed?There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.
ryandrake: Money, money, money, and money. We need it to survive. Until people's basic needs are taken care of for them, they need to do what they can to live.
throwaway173738: Why not simply pay the homemakers? Why is it so important that everyone produce economic output at the widget factory?Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the valuable services they’re providing.
lmm: Probably quite a lot, 20% of the marginal cost or so? Maybe the truck driver has a bigger share, but they're a very similar case.
singpolyma3: Indeed. My first job was in a factory doing things that we had machines to do, but not enough of them or efficient enough. I spent the whole time dreaming of automating the factory properly.
kube-system: Rampant anti-intellectualism and machismo
ceejayoz: Again, we're talking about retirees, homemakers, college students, disabled, etc. here.
jmalicki: > You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.You're way better off YOLO'ing reading the documentation about how they are calculated than listening to the myriad pundits deliberately trying to mislead people and drive conspiracy theories.This is all documented on the websites of the various statistical agencies, and you can just read their docs.
vslira: He wasn't fudging anything, his phrasing was> ~18% of their working age people *do not have jobs*Which is a correct interpretation of participation rate. His theory on the causes may be off, but his numbers weren't
wilg: His theory on the cause is wrong, and using the wrong number is dishonest here. I agree he more or less correctly cited labor force participation rate (still basically the best in the world) but badly misrepresented what that number is that he should be apologizing.
youre-wrong3: Even tho you added an edit. You’re still wrong. Garbage collection is typically a high paying job because no one wants to do it. But people still consider it “below” them and don’t want to do it even when there’s a high unemployment rate.
weslleyskah: I wonder how the hikikomori problem in Japan will be aggravated by this. The situation was already dire in the 2000s. [0] The parents of the early generations of neets are aging and dying, not to mention that they must be growing quite old. Now robots will come. Perhaps this will serve as a warning for a new welfare system in Japan.[0] Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation (2007)
fercircularbuf: Japan has a very low cost of living. Work/life balance, however, is not good. And neither is the increasingly hostile immigration policies.
wilg: Yes, I agree. The person I'm replying to knows only enough about employment rates to have bad conspiracy takes.
fhn: just like nobody in the US is qualified to work in tech so companies have to outsource jobs?
