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To answer the OP's question, you may be right but the biggest thing it does is expose the lie behind the argument that we need massive in-migration to fill jobs that are staying vacant because of our slow natural birth rates. If robots are taking our jobs we don't need a high birth rate or a high population replacement rate to fill all of our vacant jobs. The robots will do those jobs. Or they can fight in the arena with the new migrants to see who gets the jobs.
There's no point in adding what you did.
If a person thinks they deserve more money, they need to prove they can add enough value to justify it. Restricting progress and growth by preventing people from other countries from doing a job doesn't make sense. If someone can do your job at the same level of quality for cheaper, then you are overpaid. People need to be able to prove they deserve their paychecks in a global economy. The question isn't how to restrict the offshore person from getting the job. The question is how are you as the American worker going to improve your skills to the point where you can prove you deserve to make the salary you want in a global economy. (and yes, I know that's not an easy question by any means)
offshoring, H1B, "illegals", blah, blah, blah is the opiate for the masses to keep them from enacting change. Automation is the "REAL" threat of job loss and has been sine 1765 when Watt's engine started putting horsemen out of work
AI and automation. The march of progress. Coming to a neighborhood near you to take some jobs away from people. Slow, but relentless and inexorable. Making work better, neater, faster, and cheaper. How can anyone even think of retaining slow, expensive, and whiny people in jobs when you have an unbeatable combination of robots and computers?
AI and automation. The march of progress. Coming to a neighborhood near you to take some jobs away from people. Slow, but relentless and inexorable. Making work better, neater, faster, and cheaper. How can anyone even think of retaining slow, expensive, and whiny people in jobs when you have an unbeatable combination of robots and computers?
All true, but you might want to rethink "some" as your factor. Although technically, a quarter of the white-collar/pink-collar workforce is "some."
Yes, regular, as in regular working class American citizens. Not illegals and not kids.
The lawn mowing company can't double their salaries without increasing the cost of the service pushing them out of the market entirely. That's why those jobs pay so little that the only ones willing to do the work are illegals.
I pay $220.00 a month for a lawn service for our home. If they decided to double the salary of the employees so that it would now cost $440.00 a month for the same service, I would either find another service at a lower cost or use my leisure time to mow the lawn myself. Because $220.00 a month is the market value for that service. In other words, it is what I'm willing to pay. If they could double what they pay the employees and still get just as much business at $440.00 a month, that's what they would do. But at that price, it would push them out of the market for those services for most people.
You used the term "American citizens," none of whom are "illegals." Child labor laws preclude the use of "kids," why not say what you really mean?
The law of supply and demand establishes what the market rate is for performing any job function. If no one will do that job for less than twenty dollars an hour, or thirty, then all landscape companies will be forced to pay that going rate to maintain their businesses. The only way that could push them out of the market completely is if their customers decided to do the work themselves. Few would.
You must understand that even if salaries were doubled the cost of the service, while rising, would not double unless the business owner was looking to gouge the customers; the rest of his expenses would remain the same.
What we have here is business owners who refuse to pay what a legal worker will demand to do a job and instead will exploit those who are in no position to bargain, all the time complaining that no one will work for the substandard wages he is willing to pay. We also have customers who decry the use of "illegals" while knowingly contracting a service they believe uses them just to save a few bucks.
Illegals are here to mow lawns for sub-wages that Americans won't do. If you don't think so, talk to the owner of any lawn mowing company and they can't find regular US citizens to take those jobs.
They are willing to take the jobs, but those companies don't want to pay the wages the law requires - namely minimum wage. Plenty of teenagers and college students are looking for summer jobs and most can't find them.
About 119 years ago, a bit over 60% of the US population was directly involved with farming and ranching. Today, it is less than 4%.
Imagine that you could go back in time to 1900 & tell learned scholars, politicians, world leaders, journalists, futurists, business leaders, investors and farmers & ranchers that in far-off 2019 less than 4% of the nation's population would be directly involved in agriculture.
Then imagine you asked them, "what do you think all the other people will do for a living?"
Chances are none of those learned people would guess "network engineer," "web designer," "search engine optimization engineer," "industrial robot tech," "radiologist," "professional MMA fighter," "professional football player," "cinematographer," "sound engineer," "microprocessor architect," "telemarketer," "City-Data forum moderator", "cryptocurrency miner", "social media marketer", "physical therapist", "occupational therapist," and the like.
We don't know what the future holds -- it is exceedingly difficult to forecast the future, but I seriously doubt either AI or automation are a serious threat.
How hard is it to forecast the future? Take the Great Manure Crisis of 1894.
Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses...there were countless carts, drays, and wagons, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures exist for any great city of the time.
The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day... In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, all of which had to be swept up and disposed of.
The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Futurists estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles.
It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.
In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York; one of its goals was to figure out what to do about all the horse manure. The conference was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their waste output.
Obviously, the trend that couldn't go on forever -- well, it didn't go on forever.
So when we collectively think about AI and robotics, we do know that by automating more tasks, it frees up people to find better ways to add value to society. In the late 1890s, many people were employed in the collection and removal of horse manure from the streets of major cities. Just two decades later, the total number of people employed doing that had cratered to a tiny fraction of peak manure-removal employment. All those unemployed manure-removal laborers didn't sit around and whine; they all found other ways to add value to society and thereby earn compensation.
Back in the early 1900s, hunger was a major motivator: if you wanted to eat, you worked. Nowadays, hunger is not a major motivator: few in America actually go hungry.
Nevertheless, the future is brighter than it ever was.
About 119 years ago, a bit over 60% of the US population was directly involved with farming and ranching. Today, it is less than 4%.
[...]
Nevertheless, the future is brighter than it ever was.
Yes, yes, yes, the "there's always a new employment frontier just over the horizon and nobody never sees it coming" argument. Very original. The big-shock topic of many a humanities class.
In 1900, US population was 76 million and global population was 1.6 billion.
Today, US population is 330 million and we'll hit eight billion in all pretty soon.
Apply some relative factors, about population alone if you like, to the scope and needs of all these wonder jobs that didn't exist when the Eiffel Tower was new... and to whatever jobs you imagine are just over the next hill. And process this, with or without salt, ketchup or added fiber: We are no longer in an era where tomorrow looks like yesterday, only more so. Too many things are utterly, completely, irreversibly different than they were in 1900, 1955 or even 1980.
So, in conclusion, there's nothing to be worried about unless you have no ability to pick up new skills (which is not the case for most).
AI is just another technological improvement. It will increase productivity for workers. Eliminate some jobs and create others. We've seen it over and over.
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