I think we are destined for a future of political and social instability in the world if we continue to define labor and its compensation as we do now.
We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required. The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval, to be harnessed by willing politicians of short-sighted vision.
What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines?
Are you familiar with potlatch society in the old Pacific Northwest? With wealth readily available, the "big men" of a tribe (roughly chiefs, but not hereditary) competed to see how much they could give away to their neighbors and rivals; all you had to do to eat well, or make it through a bad winter, was to admit that your neighbors were led by a great and glorious chief.
This system didn't work very well at the time (it bred slavery and warlordism, and produced a lot of waste, especially towards the end, when trade goods were abundant and population was running out); but it'll become increasingly more doable as capital becomes more productive. Magnanimity is a human instinct, and people already compete on status and prestige; just persuade holders of capital that supporting the unemployed/unemployable is a good thing, make sure they get personal feel-good-ness out of it, and persuade the unemployed/unemployable not to run up the red flag, and you've probably got a stable system.
Probably. I don't think we need to worry about slavery much, but warlordism could become a serious issue. Where potlatch-like culture exists, aggressive bids for the throne (or equivalent) tend to follow; the Earl of Warwick in the War of the Roses comes to mind. Still, even warlordism has potential to be less bad than Communism (more room for ambition, better management of capital) or Fascism (you can be a minority and not die) -- the Wars of the Roses had roughly zero impact on the common people of England. (See A Farewell to Alms for a detailed discussion of how England's wars, starting from a pretty early date, avoided messing up England's people.)
This is all hypothetical, though; I'm not saying that a potlatch orientation is the only possible solution, nor even that it's necessarily a working solution at all...
I like the comment, and you could add in the Roman "client" system which had real similarities. Rich citizens also acquired more status by donating public buildings or sponsoring games and festivals. More than one society has gone this route, with success.
But just a couple corrections re potlatch society: slavery happened in the Pacific Northwest with and without potlatch; potlatch didn't cause slavery. The fishing grounds in this region were the richest in the world at the time (they collapsed almost a century ago under white rule), if you conquered a neighbor (and that was frequent) you could afford to keep 'em and feed 'em, at least for a long time until your population expanded. So slavery was practical in a way it isn't for nomads, say. Excess production was the norm. Unemployment was dealt with largely by exalting art, and devoting an immense amount of the GNP to that, with spectacular results over time. So most excess labor and production was actually devoted to art, not giveaways.
I suspect that's the real lesson, although I'm a No Man's Sky devotee - it's a damn wonderful art generator, if you like landscapes, as I do. Maybe humans can't compete there, anymore, either!
Warlordism in an age of drones will do little for unemployment; but it's also easier, particularly for democracies, if only your machines get bent up in a successful war of aggression. So it may happen more, but will not be a safety valve for unemployment.
> Still, even warlordism has potential to be less bad than Communism (more room for ambition, better management of capital) or Fascism (you can be a minority and not die)
Warlordism sounds much worse than communism and fascism. Any culture that is sufficiently advanced to not be chaos and wars for the lords under walordism, would be much better without the warlords. Advanced societies with abundant resources and abundant capital do not need gatekeeping hoarders playing charity Olympics.
Interesting that your example of warlordism in a "potlach-like" culture is from a feudal society.
The rest you've said is a gross misrepresentation of the giveaway culture shared amongst many more tribes than just the Northwest ones. And of course, white academia will just refuse and say "our written documentation written by genocidal outsiders is way more accurate than what the cultures themselves say about themselves through their own oral traditions".
This must be an interesting book that somehow argues that wars that killed huge numbers of civilians somehow had zero impact. Looking at the criticism of the book it seems to also argue that there were no negative effects of colonialism.
Funny, I wonder if the millions of people killed in North America between 1500 and 1900 would agree with that.
> The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval,
That's why we need to place the means of production in the hands of the people, not just of capitalists.
> What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines?
Self-supporting human society, a mix of small companies, skilled people and experts, using automation as well, that works to solve the daily necessities for itself. So it would have its own farms, fabs, schools and such, totally self supporting and self bootstrapped. People wouldn't need UBI if they had the means to directly make what they need. We're going that way - everything becoming cheaper, until it lifts itself by self replication.
Exactly. The problem is that automation is the problem. Automation should be the solution. The goal of automation should not be to save labor costs for corporations and make people unemployed, it should be to increase productivity and make people have to work less, so they get more time to enjoy life.
Best way to accomplish this, I think, is to have a Basic Income. Give everybody enough to live, and increase that the more machines take over our work.
Is job displacement really different from large productivity gain? Both of them result in you needing fewer employees for the same amount of output, and in the end automated systems still need supervision, and someone has to make them.
We need to have an AI tax that redistributes wealth back to the "ordinaries" so they can have the resources to be creative. Even if machines can generate writing and music there's no real point of view to fully machine generated material. You can do the thing they said don't quit your day job to do.
I really hope we end up with something much closer to socialism than we do either the future from "The Time Machine" or perpetual cycles of Viva-La-Revolution.
Up until global trade took off, cities, villages and even individual farms were almost self sufficient. Why couldn't people be self sufficient with automation?
When you refer to capital owners, it has a historic context related to land and farms and large amounts of money. Robots, on the other hand, aren't necessarily going to cost lots of money. If everybody can own a robot, nobody has to worry about being employed.
The real issues won't change though. Those people who are considered rich will be rich because they own land in nice areas, or have a military-backed monopoly on natural resources.
The first issue is due to population size, and the second issue is an eternal issue of war that can't be avoided.
I have done a lot of thinking about this. There are 2 things that keep sticking out to me:
First, history. History does not make our future look good. Humanity has gone through a few disruptive changes in the way society viewed work and societal contribution. The most recent was with the spread of factories and assembly-line production. The result of the adoption of those structures/technologies was not good. Society saw factory workers as 'not deserving' reasonable wages because 'the machines are doing all the work.' Factory owners were more than willing to pay their workers as little as they could get away with. And it turned out, that was very little. Entire families (including children) working 16 hour days 6 days a week and barely being able to feed themselves was commonplace. Society had to adopt many radical (in comparison to previous history and other societies, they don't seem radical now because we've kept them around long past any practical utility) changes to function like this. Everything from anti-sex attitudes, the creation of 'adolescent' as a distinct category of person, even changes in the architecture of lower class homes to give separate sleeping quarters for children and adults.
And that didn't get adjusted for until the New Deal in the 1930s. Back when someone couldn't simply say 'socialism' and completely shut down all discussion, the New Deal was actually possible. People today don't realize how 'insane' the New Deal really was. Think of it from the perspective of the factory owner. Previously, you would get an entire family, say 4 workers, 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and you'd pay them just enough to eat and pay rent. After the New Deal, you were expected to pay 1 worker for 8 hours of work 5 days a week such a (comparatively) titanic amount of money that they could raise an entire family on it comfortably. Let that sink in. From 96 hours of work from each of 4 workers each week, 384 hours total, down to 40. That increases your labor cost by nearly an order of magnitude. Society re-configured their notion of what work was worth to address the idea that regardless of what tools are being used, the value the worker creates should play SOME role in compensation. And the world did not implode. But could anything proportionally similar ever be imagined to be acceptable to our modern society? I would argue absolutely not.
But there is good news. Maybe. See, this isn't our future. It's our present. Between 1950 and 1980, the median wage rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, it rose by only 1%. Computers and automation technology caused average productivity to skyrocket since 1980. But wages were frozen. Not because of any economic reason, the median income of the top 10% rose by 475% during that 1980-2010 period. Profits grew and grew with greater acceleration, but all the benefit went to the owners, executives, etc. Society once again started feeling that workers did not deserve compensation where the value of the work being done played a role. The machine was doing the work. It just seemed too easy. You write some software and make the company $10 million, why should you get a "lottery winning payday"? Apple, Google, Microsoft, and similar employers that set the standards saw this coming and rigged wages in the computer market early on. This isn't a conspiracy theory, the FTC prosecuted them for it. They ended up settling for hundreds of millions of dollars in a huge class-action lawsuit a decade ago. But, really, you could argue it was inevitable. Society didn't see workers using computers as deserving of pay which increased alongside their productivity, so employers obliged society.
But something is different this time. Factories and assembly lines are expensive. And computers are cheap. And distribution, the whole reason we MADE factories and big companies in the first place, is effectively a solved problem. While companies have been getting rid of pensions, doing away with annual raises that exceed cost of living increases, cutting vacation time, expanding the work week, reflexively laying off workers to meet quarterly projections, etc... workers have become more than able to out-compete them. The drawbacks of centralization, which for a century were papered over with the invaluable ability to solve the problem of distribution, are now showing through more and more every day.
Employment is a two-way street. Employers pay workers because they create the value that is profit, and workers seek employment for things like a reliable income stream, the ability to settle down and make plans for the future, the ability to provide for their family. Except employers have welched on every single thing they ever offered to workers. They provide zero insulation from market fluctuations. They adopt practices that make it necessary for workers to jump jobs every 4-5 years just to keep up with the increases in cost of living. Etc. And it actually might have worked... if not for the fact that their ace in the hole, their one golden ticket, solving the problem of distribution (both of products and of work needing to be done, one to customers the other to workers) became worthless thanks to computers and the Internet.
Society changes slowly, and it certainly doesn't abandon century-long traditions overnight. But we're barrelling right for some proper Big changes. We're going to end up with the 'tools of production' (as Marx, who I've never read, would I think call it) in the hands of everyone, with a global market on our desk with commoditized distribution. Eventually enough people will be out of work as automation enables corporations to "reduce their primary cost center" and just trying offering their services online out of desperation that someone will build an excellent marketplace that actually works. And once it takes off, it will hopefully happen so fast that large companies don't even have a chance to react.
And I'm serious about that part. If they do have a chance to react... it could be uglier than you could possibly imagine. Wars have been fought over much, much less wealth. And things like the Internet are still primarily controlled at the last mile by large companies which will be directly and existentially threatened by this kind of thing. The government handed over a trillion dollars to make sure that the banking system didn't have to bear the consequences of their actions, what might they do if 50% of the Fortune 500 were facing insolvency?
Since 1980 this globalization happened, which literally added billions of low paid people to the work force. Many of them educated.
So of course there will be a global pressure on salaries. It is just market economics. (You can't coordinate a "New Deal" in countries all over the world at the same time.)
My point about that is -- it isn't all bad. Literally billions of people have left the utmost poverty. It just sucks for the ones of the old "middle privileged" level, like us.
If it was just that, I would cautiously be positive, but I agree -- this new level of automation implies "Big changes", which are scary. Most revolutions seems to end up with a large part of the population dead or in slavery.
"We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required"
Yes we do.
The industrial revolution had far greater impact on labour than any of this mysterious AI will ever have.
The first 'machines' powered by coal etc. instantly 'unemployed' hundreds of people per unit.
Go ahead and look at the productivity/capita charts for the early 19th century - UK citizens were multiple times more productive than citizens of any other nation. It was an astonishing explosion.
Imagine how many people a single train unemployed?
Or the weaving machines that did the work of hundreds.
The impact on labour was definite, direct and measurable - unlike a lot of the 'soft' impact that today's technology has (did MS Word really unemploy 'secretaries' - or was it a host of factors?)
But what happened during the industrial revolution?
Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically.
The surpluses from the machines went into the economy, basically providing the foundation for the modern consumer economy.
95% of folks back then worked on farms, mines - or did manual labour/service.
The industrial revolution created the middle class: lawyers, entertainers, restaurants, mass market clothing, design etc.. Electricity created massive new industries (think of what you could not do without electricity!).
The economy has been diversifying rapidly since the start of the 19th century in the UK, and everywhere else about 50 years later.
We will continue to do this.
In 1960 there were 3 channels. In the 1990's 50. Now it's 100's + online offerings.
There were no 'pro athletes' in 1930. Now we have massive industries around pro sports.
Working/middle class people did not travel much back in the day. Now they can travel around the world.
There were no consumer electronics past the radio in 1940. Now the are zillions of devices.
In the 1920's cars were made by people - now automated assembly lines.
And FYI - for the last 25 years and for at least the next little while - China (or rather, Mexico, China, India and other low-cost places) are by far and away bigger job killers than automation.
'Automation' as we understand it is not as fast a process as we think it is and the days of 'robot replaces x people' are long gone, it's a more complex and nuanced equation.
Try this one: tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine? Not so many. Customer service? Possibly. Some banker analysts? Possibly. But even in the later, there are other things for them to do, and the bulk of the staff on both sides have more to fear form India than Microsoft. In fact, this is happening right now all over North America: people training dudes in India to do their jobs, after they've been told they've been outsourced ... (train your replacement if you want your severance!) ...
Also - since 1900 - the size of government has expanded dramatically. I'm not 'against government' or anything, but many gov. agencies are abhorrently inefficient. I have a distant family member who's friend, a low-level thug dealer who was recently arrested. The RCMP (Can. police) spent zillions tracking, investigating this guy. Two years of surveillance, bureaucratic justice issues, lawyers - yada yada. So it's not so nice, but we find ways to 'distribute the surpluses' of the new economy in ways, even if they are not very efficient.
The trick is to 'find things for people to do' in a manner that is reasonably efficient and fair.
> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine?
As software developers, it's literally our jobs to put people out of work. My software is specifically designed reduce the need for increased labor as the company crows. In my industry, legal, entire departments (like night word processing) no longer exist.
The fact is you cannot extrapolate from 100 years of human history and say everything will continue on. People just a few hundred years before that could not have predicted anything about modern employment.
The period you describe was marked by revolutions, civil wars and world wars not stabilized until after WWII.
Things did indeed come out well eventually but that better world most definitely did not emerge serenely and rationally. It took the utter annihilation of the pre-WWI world order through decades of enormous violence. Indeed, the egalitarian socialist plan and the response of populist fascist to crush it emerged exactly because of industrialization.
There can be no doubt that displaced workers are not going to smoothly transfer to become professional athletes: a 50 year old unemployed coal miner with no social safety net is not going to peaceable become a wedding planer in a big city even if he could.
Until then, there will be increasing political disruption and radicalization as the advantaged group holds the disadvantaged down believing it's their own fault for not changing careers. And just like last time, the fighting will continue until adequate social safety nets are in place.
It would be better to honestly face the events of the past and not try to convince ourselves that an idealized smooth economic shift is how it's going to work out. But unfortunately we are just at the beginning of this and likely most people in the advantaged group will ideological despise the level of social security that will solve the problem. Indeed, in many quarters, there is a fetishization of and desire to return to that pre-WWI unconstrained economy that caused the nightmares in the 20th century. So, polarization, demagoguery, extremism and eventually violence loom for now I fear.
I don't think the issue is whether automation and globalization are able to create more wealth in absolute, but whether the resulting wealth is distributed fairly (or effciently).
If a company is able to automate its facilities to achieve 2X profits with half the workers, you'll have an higher overall GPD, but the created wealth will be shared by a reduced number of people.
People struggling to make a living won't give a damn whether TV has 3 channels or 300, they can travel cheaply around the world and there is a new smartphone model every year.
This has been sustainable up until technological advancement still allowed for enough decently paid unskilled jobs, but it's clear we are past this point.
We are running out of, as you say, "things for people to do".
I don't think these trends can or should be reversed (because they have undeniable benefits), but how to deal with the consequences is a real challenge.
> But what happened during the industrial revolution? Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically.
It should be added that wages going up and the emergence of a middle class was not a direct result of increased productivity. The labour movement had to fight hard to ensure that those productivity gains were shared with workers.
The problem we face with automation is that there is not much of a collective 'working class' to fight that fight.
The global market was still expanding so all efficiency gains from industrial revolution and the internet revolution were absorbed. Where as today the global economy is stagnating. The efficiency gains in the next decade are expected to be a few times the rate of market growth which would put many people out of work making the global market contract further. This cycle could accelerate very quickly.
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> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine?
I have literally seen a room full of people that lost their jobs because of software I wrote (admittedly, not alone, but still). The software was almost ready by that point and it was quite a disturbing experience that still bothers me up to this day to be honest.
It had nothing to do with AI and was quite a long time ago, but I still remember it very vividly.
I agree with your main point (that this is a small increment to the industrial revolution), but two objections:
> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine
Right now AI is still a future technology. The current AI algorithms are the equivalent of the early GSM phones, which looked like car batteries, very far from modern smartphones. But it is reasonable to expect that they will get better, and it is reasonable to expect that we will be able to emulate the brain with transistors and on a much bigger scale some days.
The second objection is that the demand for unskilled workers keeps shrinking. Our society has adapted to the industrial revolution by having a much larger skilled worker base, pretty much everyone can now read and write, college degrees have become the norm, etc. But there are brick walls to how skilled a society can be. A not insignificant share of the population just cannot become skilled. And even among skilled workers, only a fraction will always be capable to satisfy the demand for the "hotest" skills (engineering, software development, etc).
So I think that as that imbalance develops, we are bound to live with a structurally unequal society. And it doesn't have much to do with capitalism, it has more to do with the evolution of the technology outpacing the biological evolution of our species.
What's unique now isnt the "rate of change" but the absolute gap between skill sets.
Lets say youre a truck driver and suddenly you lose your job. You cant transfer your existing skill set to driving a cab for very long because guess what? Thats been automated too.
There arent any other jobs that involve sitting at a wheel avoiding bad drivers and rush hour traffic and pulling all nighters. Simultaneously the chance for that person to find work in new markets becomes low. They have to train themselves.
>But what happened during the industrial revolution?
Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically.
I'd be really interested to see sources for this since there is almost no accurate unemployment data pre-1840 and at least in the US it doesn't seem likely as what information we have tells us that during the period from 1800-1840 slaves made up over 26% of the workforce in the United States, peaking at almost 32% in 1810.
I'm assuming you're going by wage estimates from the UK over the period, but if you are those are really contested as a method for evaluating quality of life or actually real wages - many people at the time didn't earn inside the wage system.
I don't disagree that eventually cost of labor and general unemployment improved as a result of the industrial revolution - I just don't think it happened DURING the industrial revolution, at least not until its late stages.
Also, GDP per capita is a really bad way to estimate effects on the working class, particularly in a period famous for massive income inequality.
I need someone to burst my bubble from time to time.
Also, as a side note, I for one would be delighted if the future included people brewing delicious beer for one another as an important part of the economy.
Try this one: tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine? Not so many.
This is a nice tidy test that is not entirely useful. You can't know anyone that didn't get hired into a job that didn't get created. Say a plant doubles output while destaffing by way of retirement. No one loses a job, automation eats more than 1 plants worth of jobs.
One of the side effects of Industrial revolution was acceleration of colonialism. So job tremendous job loss may and subsequent suffering was not felt directly by western nations but instead outsourced to colonies. May be version 2.0 of colonialism might emerge to cushion Job loss from first mover nation.
little human labor is required,but much more human doctor are required.
How to make human labor to human doctor?
Education is just result,not methods.The key is that Capital is not the pursuit of money, but the pursuit of a higher level of human nature.
This is exactly wrong. Automation happened already, 200 years ago. It upended society. It was called the Industrial Revolution. Things changed dramatically, and nothing remotely of that scale is occurring now.
We are suffering today not because of technological progress, but rather the contrary: the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally come to a grinding halt. Let's stop denying this. The stream of lifechanging breakthrough inventions of the 20th century, from A (antibiotics) to Z (zippers), have ended. As a result, we now suffer from secular stagnation. [1]
This is why people can't get jobs. The answer is Keynesian spending, and the most fair kind of Keynesian spending is basic income. Call it a "Keynesian dividend".
I disagree that it's "exactly wrong", though I at the same time agree with the secular stagnation concept. It's important to remember that past revolutions in automation have destroyed one field of labor while creating another. For example, the industrial revolution destroyed hand and muscle-driven labor and replaced it with factory labor. In the US we then went from an industrial economy driven by factory jobs to a service economy driven by knowledge-based labor.
Automation today is now destroying service economy jobs, but it's not clear, at least to me, what new sector is ramping up to pick up the displacement slack. The tech sector isn't going to have enough jobs for everyone getting automated away, and this time around automation is unique in that it's attacking pretty much everything all at once. Human drivers are going to be displaced by autonomous vehicles at the same time as financial advisers are being displaced by wealth allocation algorithms at the same time as warehouse workers are being displaced by picker robots, etc.
> It's important to remember that past revolutions in automation have destroyed one field of labor while creating another.
That's exactly right. We've been creating work to keep people busy for 200 years in many more ways than you mention. Consumerism. Marketing. Bureaucracy. We have one industry that makes people sick (food) and another industry that makes people healthy (healthcare). The twin peaks of the sickness and health industries can grow indefinitely, especially in the USA. We have industries that make plastic casings to wrap goods, just so we can sell goods to consumers, who unwrap and immediately dispose the plastic, so that another industry (sanitation) can take them away.
We basically have a society which continuously breaks glass windows and then fixes them. It's all, in some sense, pure dead weight, just to keep people employed.
Even jobs in the tech sector are likely under threat. Remember that guy a few weeks ago showing an AI platform be built to design logos for customers? We're not far from having AI build our web pages, and then simple web apps, and then probably native apps, and before long, finding and patching bugs in software, and eventually writing the software itself
I agree that secular stagnation and the global savings glut are the real problems but Keynesian fiscal spending is supposed to be periodic to counter cycles. It cannot fix long term secular trends.
A worldwide monetary policy change that keeps real interest rates sufficiently negative to be in line with private market rates is the only real solution.
> The stream of lifechanging breakthrough inventions of the 20th century, from A (antibiotics) to Z (zippers), have ended
I agree, but this only leads to more questions: why? And is it permanent?
I think we are in a temporary lull. Finance people, in the vain of JP Morgan, have gotten very good at controlling the social processes around both physical resources and human output. They keep most people tired and scared to change jobs, so they can be made to focus on production. The rest who are actively problem solving despite those pressures, the finance folks try to steer them towards a maze where big bets are made and equity changes hands often.
We were bison, and now we're cattle. There's more meat, but less frolicking, and no semblance of any kind of ecosystem that produced so many bison-y moments.
Is it forever? I don't think so. We're only fairly recently getting lots of brains trying to discover tools for doing things outside of finance. And still, it's a trickle. Look at all the beautiful brains on this message board, whose output is getting fed into the feedlots of VCs and Paul Graham.
> I agree, but this only leads to more questions: why? And is it permanent?
Our rapid technological progress in the last 2 centuries was an anomaly. We have 200,000 years of history as a species, most of which did not have nearly the same level of progress. The burden is on to you to explain what made those 2 centuries so great.
Employment is not low, so we don't need to explain it. Despite what you were told by some people at election time, the US jobless rate is 4.9% which is internationally low and has been roughly the same for 60 years. In the golden 1950s that rate was down to 4% and had a peak of 10% in the early 1980s. US employment is pretty darn stable.
I don't understand how HN so easily handwaves away these enormous problems with "basic income". What do you do when the currency becomes completely worthless?
You will have to explain why you think currency would become worthless. That would be a monetary problem, not a fiscal one. Basic income is financed with debt and taxes, and monetary policy remains a separate concern.
We have already done things like basic income in the USA:
- Economic Stimulus Act of 2008
- Earned Income Tax Credit
Please provide some sort of argumentation or data.
That's my point. I have a contrarian analysis. You have the conventional analysis. I think the conventional wisdom is wrong. It's frustrating that people just throw out economics and history and go for some sort of post-modern analysis of "things are so different now. No one could ever have imagined robots! We can't apply classical economics to the situation" Yes they could have, yes they did, and yes we can.
Automation is "changing the world" provided you're finding excuses for why there are fewer jobs with worse pay that exculpate the 1%.
Suddenly the American oligarchy loses its faith in automation once you discuss potentially inflationary increases to public spending.
If we really are in an automation renaissance public spending could be ramped up massively and the potentially inflationary impact would be offset by all of the cost savings from replacing people with robots.
One upside to automation is that comparative advantage with regard to labour costs becomes much less important. This means that manufacturers can more easily afford to keep production in high wage economies.
There are other considerations of course, such as proximity to resources, transport hubs, and markets.
Ultimately though, this doesn't change the fact that automation is mostly beneficial to capital owners and not the wider workforce, so capitalism's tendency toward inequality (as described by Piketty) still applies.
> Ultimately though, this doesn't change the fact that automation is mostly beneficial to capital owners
I think that inequality will increase but not because of owning capital. Rather because this automation will shift demand away from unskilled workers and into software developers, marketing experts, etc. And I do not think that the supply of skilled worker can adapt fast enough, if any.
The good news (for the US) is that China will be the main casualty. In a way the US has already largely paid this tax to automation by outsourcing factory jobs to China. It is chinese factory workers that are going to be automated the first. Some low skilled jobs that couldn't be outsourced offshore like construction, taxis, etc will suffer but I'd argue a large part of the impact is behind us.
Obviously the tax paid to outsourcing is also having Trump at the white house.
While we'll have to agree to disagree about ownership of capital leading to increased inequality, I definitely agree with you when you say that you "do not think that the supply of skilled worker can adapt fast enough" to the demand. I think that while education is fundamental, even if it were always of a high quality and free, not everyone has the temperament or innate ability necessary to make the commitment to getting sufficiently qualified.
It would probably require 15-20 years if automation does reach the scale to have macro-level effects on employment. By that time China's economy will be 2x-3x bigger than it is now with GDP per capita around 30k USD. China would essentially be a developed country at that point.
It's easy to assume and take for granted that the US will create all the automation technology. However, I think it's more probable that China will move up the value chain and be the ones to own and develop these technologies, especially in manufacturing as China already has a super strong manufacturing ecosystem and talent (think Silicon Valley and Software).
If China owns the technology, the wealth would be in China so less will be available to spread around for basic income in developed countries like the US.
> But this doesn't really bring jobs back, since they'll just be automated.
Yeah, that's right. There would certainly be other benefits (and a limited number of jobs created) that are more indirect.
The real issue around automation in my opinion is how we as a society manage it. If we stay the course, it is clear that capital owners stand to benefit most (almost entirely I would say). We are already seeing problems with rising inequality due to diverging returns from capital and labour. This is going to exacerbate that hugely.
I'm generally in favour of capitalism but I think we are going to need to revisit 'the social contract' that allows capitalism to exist in exchange for a share of the rewards being used to ensure that society's basic needs are met. Just as when it was first negotiated by Bismark, this is going to have to be an initiative of the capital owners if serious unrest is to be avoided.
I'm hopeful and think that it is possible. Rich people are not inherently sociopathic. A good example of this sort of compromise in more modern times was the reaction of Kennedy snr when the US faced economic and social unrest. Partly through correspondence with Keynes he was convinced that if himself and his peers didn't take a hit for the good of wider society then they stood a good chance of losing a great deal more.
Every so often the social contract needs a reset (e.g. Bismark, the labour movement, the new deal, etc). Automation is going to make this more urgent. The one thing I am sure of is that it will be a political solution and not simply an economic one (e.g. less regulation, more free markets, etc).
Someone has to service the machines. Also, big machines are expensive to transport, so it makes sense to make them closer to where they will be used, leading to more service jobs.
There are also a lot of engineering jobs designing the hardware and software of these automated factories.
This was one of the more frustrating parts of this past election cycle:
"No candidate talked much about automation on the campaign trail. Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico, there is no clear way to stop it, and many of the technology companies are in the United States and benefit the country in many ways."
A lot of US jobs have been lost to globalization, but in the long-term that won't compare to the jobs lost to automation. As a software developer this seems painfully obvious to me, and I would hope most politicians are intelligent enough to see it as well. Unfortunately none of them have even talked about it, much less proposed solutions to help displaced workers.
>Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico
Technology is a MUCH more convenient villain. You can roll back 1% friendly trade agreements with China and Mexico. You can point pitchforks at the 1%. You can't roll back technological advancement and it's pointless to try.
You achieve nothing by being against technology except looking like an idiot, which is precisely why articles like this are trying to convince everybody that technology is the "villain".
Because god forbid Lloyd Blankfein and his cronies start being seen as villains.
>A lot of US jobs have been lost to globalization, but in the long-term that won't compare to the jobs lost to automation. As a software developer this seems painfully obvious to me,
Funny. As a software developer it seems painfully obvious to me just how far off we are from this supposed goal. All around me I see developers who shirk at even automating their own tests while getting excited over vaporware.
Its not just automation. There have been many more applications of optimization to reducing operating margins. At my company, there was, for example, a project aimed at identifying the optimal service intervals for heavy mining equipment. As a result of this work, it was possible to substantially reduce the amount of preventative maintenance that was being done on the machinery. It was found that not all of the preventive maintenance was cost effective.
This is a missing part of long stories about AI and automation. I too work in servicing of industrial equipment that is now being connected. The algorithms can be simple - after n running hours a component needs servicing. No fancy AI or automation, no over-hyped 'predictive maintenance' machine learning, just a 'connected machine'. As a result, the number of service engineers can be reduced significantly because they no longer over-service. This is not a robot taking someone's job, but a 10% efficiency gain in servicing equipment is a lot of people. It's across a skills range too - we have customers that range from minimum wage floor cleaners to PhD-level scientific equipment engineers.
It's interesting that many politicians, including Trump and Sanders, want policies to prevent jobs from leaving the US, but have no policy proposals around automation.
If you want manufacturing jobs to stay in the US, regulating automation would be far more effective than trying to prevent companies from outsourcing jobs. (Incidentally, a lot of jobs that have been outsourced probably would have been automated if outsourcing had not been possible, and that's what opponents of outsourcing are missing.)
I'm very much against a policy to restrict automation, but it's worth pointing out.
You know what else is interesting? The same part of the political spectrum that cites automation as the real cause of working class decline does not hesitate to rationalize mass immigration as necessary to fill the demand for labor. If automation is the problem then what are all the unskilled immigrants for?
Being against automation does not make for good sound bites. But if the business of America is business (I forgot who said that, maybe Hoover or Coolidge?) and automation makes more profit, then it will happen assuming society doesn't fall apart first.
It's about time for fruit picking to be automated. There are prototype systems, but they come from SRI International, not John Deere, and they're too fragile and too complicated mechanically. The vision system isn't the problem any more; that's simpler than a smartphone.
Once that works, California loses jobs about 2.1 million illegal immigrants.
I'm not sure what everyone is so afraid of? There will be tensions and a political problem about redistribution if "simple" jobs dry up, sure, but isn't automation a good thing regardless? It means we make more stuff withuot putting in more effort.
Automation and industrialization over the last 150 years already meant we went from 120h weeks on farms to 40h weeks in offices and factories, while living standards increased. Measured in 40h/week jobs per person that means we lost 2 of 3 jobs in the industrialization! The world didn't end.
And now everyone is worried that if we go from 40 to 30h or 20h weeks that will be a disaster?
We can't afford to have a large fraction of the people unemployed and the rest still working 40h weeks in ever fewer jobs of course, but that's a problem societies will hopefully solve.
Four years ago, I was working full time. That job was automated away, but I found another part-time job that paid minimum wage for fewer hours, so my income dropped dramatically. That job was automated away, and I was very lucky to find a job (that ended up being around double full-time hours, but only paid for half of them, so legally I was paid about half of minimum wage), which went away. Now, I'm working one third of a full time job, for minimum wage. That doesn't even cover living costs, and it's looking like it'll be automated away in the next few months.
As working hours drop and wages tend toward minimum, we do indeed end up in a bad situation.
Sorry to hear about your job troubles. Can you share what you do that has been automated away? Were all these jobs in the same industry? If so, what are your plans to shift to jobs that are less prone to automation (if you don't mind my asking)?
This is a very idealistic view that I don't believe is based in reality.
While we still measure a person's worth out of how much they make, this is going to pose an enormous problem for all of us. We can't just take away people's livelihoods for the benefit of a few (us, to be honest).
There will be a violent reaction, as there has been every time this situation has arisen throughout history.
> We can't just take away people's livelihoods for the benefit of a few
But how is shifting from e.g. production to services taking away peoples livielihood any more than shifting from farms to industry was?
> While we still measure a person's worth out of how much they make, this is going to pose an enormous problem for all of us.
Aren't most developed countries already either speculating in, or already effectively using shorter working hours now than say just one or two decades ago? Working less seems like the natural way to go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_...
Edit: I should add: I'm optimistic about this in societies with a high degree of labour organization, a flexible/agile political system, reasonably strong welfare states and a population that is positive towards working less in general.
Simply put: if you are in an OECD country and using kilograms you'll be fine.
Readit News
We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required. The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval, to be harnessed by willing politicians of short-sighted vision.
What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines?
This system didn't work very well at the time (it bred slavery and warlordism, and produced a lot of waste, especially towards the end, when trade goods were abundant and population was running out); but it'll become increasingly more doable as capital becomes more productive. Magnanimity is a human instinct, and people already compete on status and prestige; just persuade holders of capital that supporting the unemployed/unemployable is a good thing, make sure they get personal feel-good-ness out of it, and persuade the unemployed/unemployable not to run up the red flag, and you've probably got a stable system.
Probably. I don't think we need to worry about slavery much, but warlordism could become a serious issue. Where potlatch-like culture exists, aggressive bids for the throne (or equivalent) tend to follow; the Earl of Warwick in the War of the Roses comes to mind. Still, even warlordism has potential to be less bad than Communism (more room for ambition, better management of capital) or Fascism (you can be a minority and not die) -- the Wars of the Roses had roughly zero impact on the common people of England. (See A Farewell to Alms for a detailed discussion of how England's wars, starting from a pretty early date, avoided messing up England's people.)
This is all hypothetical, though; I'm not saying that a potlatch orientation is the only possible solution, nor even that it's necessarily a working solution at all...
But just a couple corrections re potlatch society: slavery happened in the Pacific Northwest with and without potlatch; potlatch didn't cause slavery. The fishing grounds in this region were the richest in the world at the time (they collapsed almost a century ago under white rule), if you conquered a neighbor (and that was frequent) you could afford to keep 'em and feed 'em, at least for a long time until your population expanded. So slavery was practical in a way it isn't for nomads, say. Excess production was the norm. Unemployment was dealt with largely by exalting art, and devoting an immense amount of the GNP to that, with spectacular results over time. So most excess labor and production was actually devoted to art, not giveaways. I suspect that's the real lesson, although I'm a No Man's Sky devotee - it's a damn wonderful art generator, if you like landscapes, as I do. Maybe humans can't compete there, anymore, either! Warlordism in an age of drones will do little for unemployment; but it's also easier, particularly for democracies, if only your machines get bent up in a successful war of aggression. So it may happen more, but will not be a safety valve for unemployment.
Warlordism sounds much worse than communism and fascism. Any culture that is sufficiently advanced to not be chaos and wars for the lords under walordism, would be much better without the warlords. Advanced societies with abundant resources and abundant capital do not need gatekeeping hoarders playing charity Olympics.
The rest you've said is a gross misrepresentation of the giveaway culture shared amongst many more tribes than just the Northwest ones. And of course, white academia will just refuse and say "our written documentation written by genocidal outsiders is way more accurate than what the cultures themselves say about themselves through their own oral traditions".
This must be an interesting book that somehow argues that wars that killed huge numbers of civilians somehow had zero impact. Looking at the criticism of the book it seems to also argue that there were no negative effects of colonialism.
Funny, I wonder if the millions of people killed in North America between 1500 and 1900 would agree with that.
That's why we need to place the means of production in the hands of the people, not just of capitalists.
> What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines?
Self-supporting human society, a mix of small companies, skilled people and experts, using automation as well, that works to solve the daily necessities for itself. So it would have its own farms, fabs, schools and such, totally self supporting and self bootstrapped. People wouldn't need UBI if they had the means to directly make what they need. We're going that way - everything becoming cheaper, until it lifts itself by self replication.
Best way to accomplish this, I think, is to have a Basic Income. Give everybody enough to live, and increase that the more machines take over our work.
The real issues won't change though. Those people who are considered rich will be rich because they own land in nice areas, or have a military-backed monopoly on natural resources.
The first issue is due to population size, and the second issue is an eternal issue of war that can't be avoided.
First, history. History does not make our future look good. Humanity has gone through a few disruptive changes in the way society viewed work and societal contribution. The most recent was with the spread of factories and assembly-line production. The result of the adoption of those structures/technologies was not good. Society saw factory workers as 'not deserving' reasonable wages because 'the machines are doing all the work.' Factory owners were more than willing to pay their workers as little as they could get away with. And it turned out, that was very little. Entire families (including children) working 16 hour days 6 days a week and barely being able to feed themselves was commonplace. Society had to adopt many radical (in comparison to previous history and other societies, they don't seem radical now because we've kept them around long past any practical utility) changes to function like this. Everything from anti-sex attitudes, the creation of 'adolescent' as a distinct category of person, even changes in the architecture of lower class homes to give separate sleeping quarters for children and adults.
And that didn't get adjusted for until the New Deal in the 1930s. Back when someone couldn't simply say 'socialism' and completely shut down all discussion, the New Deal was actually possible. People today don't realize how 'insane' the New Deal really was. Think of it from the perspective of the factory owner. Previously, you would get an entire family, say 4 workers, 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and you'd pay them just enough to eat and pay rent. After the New Deal, you were expected to pay 1 worker for 8 hours of work 5 days a week such a (comparatively) titanic amount of money that they could raise an entire family on it comfortably. Let that sink in. From 96 hours of work from each of 4 workers each week, 384 hours total, down to 40. That increases your labor cost by nearly an order of magnitude. Society re-configured their notion of what work was worth to address the idea that regardless of what tools are being used, the value the worker creates should play SOME role in compensation. And the world did not implode. But could anything proportionally similar ever be imagined to be acceptable to our modern society? I would argue absolutely not.
But there is good news. Maybe. See, this isn't our future. It's our present. Between 1950 and 1980, the median wage rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, it rose by only 1%. Computers and automation technology caused average productivity to skyrocket since 1980. But wages were frozen. Not because of any economic reason, the median income of the top 10% rose by 475% during that 1980-2010 period. Profits grew and grew with greater acceleration, but all the benefit went to the owners, executives, etc. Society once again started feeling that workers did not deserve compensation where the value of the work being done played a role. The machine was doing the work. It just seemed too easy. You write some software and make the company $10 million, why should you get a "lottery winning payday"? Apple, Google, Microsoft, and similar employers that set the standards saw this coming and rigged wages in the computer market early on. This isn't a conspiracy theory, the FTC prosecuted them for it. They ended up settling for hundreds of millions of dollars in a huge class-action lawsuit a decade ago. But, really, you could argue it was inevitable. Society didn't see workers using computers as deserving of pay which increased alongside their productivity, so employers obliged society.
But something is different this time. Factories and assembly lines are expensive. And computers are cheap. And distribution, the whole reason we MADE factories and big companies in the first place, is effectively a solved problem. While companies have been getting rid of pensions, doing away with annual raises that exceed cost of living increases, cutting vacation time, expanding the work week, reflexively laying off workers to meet quarterly projections, etc... workers have become more than able to out-compete them. The drawbacks of centralization, which for a century were papered over with the invaluable ability to solve the problem of distribution, are now showing through more and more every day.
Employment is a two-way street. Employers pay workers because they create the value that is profit, and workers seek employment for things like a reliable income stream, the ability to settle down and make plans for the future, the ability to provide for their family. Except employers have welched on every single thing they ever offered to workers. They provide zero insulation from market fluctuations. They adopt practices that make it necessary for workers to jump jobs every 4-5 years just to keep up with the increases in cost of living. Etc. And it actually might have worked... if not for the fact that their ace in the hole, their one golden ticket, solving the problem of distribution (both of products and of work needing to be done, one to customers the other to workers) became worthless thanks to computers and the Internet.
Society changes slowly, and it certainly doesn't abandon century-long traditions overnight. But we're barrelling right for some proper Big changes. We're going to end up with the 'tools of production' (as Marx, who I've never read, would I think call it) in the hands of everyone, with a global market on our desk with commoditized distribution. Eventually enough people will be out of work as automation enables corporations to "reduce their primary cost center" and just trying offering their services online out of desperation that someone will build an excellent marketplace that actually works. And once it takes off, it will hopefully happen so fast that large companies don't even have a chance to react.
And I'm serious about that part. If they do have a chance to react... it could be uglier than you could possibly imagine. Wars have been fought over much, much less wealth. And things like the Internet are still primarily controlled at the last mile by large companies which will be directly and existentially threatened by this kind of thing. The government handed over a trillion dollars to make sure that the banking system didn't have to bear the consequences of their actions, what might they do if 50% of the Fortune 500 were facing insolvency?
So of course there will be a global pressure on salaries. It is just market economics. (You can't coordinate a "New Deal" in countries all over the world at the same time.)
My point about that is -- it isn't all bad. Literally billions of people have left the utmost poverty. It just sucks for the ones of the old "middle privileged" level, like us.
If it was just that, I would cautiously be positive, but I agree -- this new level of automation implies "Big changes", which are scary. Most revolutions seems to end up with a large part of the population dead or in slavery.
https://myprivate42.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/lets-shift-to-2...
as well as the obligation to consume, otherwise savings will be invalidated. Dystopia ahead.
Yes we do.
The industrial revolution had far greater impact on labour than any of this mysterious AI will ever have.
The first 'machines' powered by coal etc. instantly 'unemployed' hundreds of people per unit.
Go ahead and look at the productivity/capita charts for the early 19th century - UK citizens were multiple times more productive than citizens of any other nation. It was an astonishing explosion.
Imagine how many people a single train unemployed?
Or the weaving machines that did the work of hundreds.
The impact on labour was definite, direct and measurable - unlike a lot of the 'soft' impact that today's technology has (did MS Word really unemploy 'secretaries' - or was it a host of factors?)
But what happened during the industrial revolution?
Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically.
The surpluses from the machines went into the economy, basically providing the foundation for the modern consumer economy.
95% of folks back then worked on farms, mines - or did manual labour/service.
The industrial revolution created the middle class: lawyers, entertainers, restaurants, mass market clothing, design etc.. Electricity created massive new industries (think of what you could not do without electricity!).
The economy has been diversifying rapidly since the start of the 19th century in the UK, and everywhere else about 50 years later.
We will continue to do this.
In 1960 there were 3 channels. In the 1990's 50. Now it's 100's + online offerings.
There were no 'pro athletes' in 1930. Now we have massive industries around pro sports.
Working/middle class people did not travel much back in the day. Now they can travel around the world.
There were no consumer electronics past the radio in 1940. Now the are zillions of devices.
In the 1920's cars were made by people - now automated assembly lines.
And FYI - for the last 25 years and for at least the next little while - China (or rather, Mexico, China, India and other low-cost places) are by far and away bigger job killers than automation.
'Automation' as we understand it is not as fast a process as we think it is and the days of 'robot replaces x people' are long gone, it's a more complex and nuanced equation.
Try this one: tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine? Not so many. Customer service? Possibly. Some banker analysts? Possibly. But even in the later, there are other things for them to do, and the bulk of the staff on both sides have more to fear form India than Microsoft. In fact, this is happening right now all over North America: people training dudes in India to do their jobs, after they've been told they've been outsourced ... (train your replacement if you want your severance!) ...
Also - since 1900 - the size of government has expanded dramatically. I'm not 'against government' or anything, but many gov. agencies are abhorrently inefficient. I have a distant family member who's friend, a low-level thug dealer who was recently arrested. The RCMP (Can. police) spent zillions tracking, investigating this guy. Two years of surveillance, bureaucratic justice issues, lawyers - yada yada. So it's not so nice, but we find ways to 'distribute the surpluses' of the new economy in ways, even if they are not very efficient.
The trick is to 'find things for people to do' in a manner that is reasonably efficient and fair.
Check out GDP/capita during 19th century:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#/media/File:B...
Were there was more automation, wealth exploded. (This chart does not address wages, but there are others that do :) )
As software developers, it's literally our jobs to put people out of work. My software is specifically designed reduce the need for increased labor as the company crows. In my industry, legal, entire departments (like night word processing) no longer exist.
The fact is you cannot extrapolate from 100 years of human history and say everything will continue on. People just a few hundred years before that could not have predicted anything about modern employment.
Things did indeed come out well eventually but that better world most definitely did not emerge serenely and rationally. It took the utter annihilation of the pre-WWI world order through decades of enormous violence. Indeed, the egalitarian socialist plan and the response of populist fascist to crush it emerged exactly because of industrialization.
There can be no doubt that displaced workers are not going to smoothly transfer to become professional athletes: a 50 year old unemployed coal miner with no social safety net is not going to peaceable become a wedding planer in a big city even if he could.
Until then, there will be increasing political disruption and radicalization as the advantaged group holds the disadvantaged down believing it's their own fault for not changing careers. And just like last time, the fighting will continue until adequate social safety nets are in place.
It would be better to honestly face the events of the past and not try to convince ourselves that an idealized smooth economic shift is how it's going to work out. But unfortunately we are just at the beginning of this and likely most people in the advantaged group will ideological despise the level of social security that will solve the problem. Indeed, in many quarters, there is a fetishization of and desire to return to that pre-WWI unconstrained economy that caused the nightmares in the 20th century. So, polarization, demagoguery, extremism and eventually violence loom for now I fear.
If a company is able to automate its facilities to achieve 2X profits with half the workers, you'll have an higher overall GPD, but the created wealth will be shared by a reduced number of people.
People struggling to make a living won't give a damn whether TV has 3 channels or 300, they can travel cheaply around the world and there is a new smartphone model every year.
This has been sustainable up until technological advancement still allowed for enough decently paid unskilled jobs, but it's clear we are past this point.
We are running out of, as you say, "things for people to do".
I don't think these trends can or should be reversed (because they have undeniable benefits), but how to deal with the consequences is a real challenge.
It should be added that wages going up and the emergence of a middle class was not a direct result of increased productivity. The labour movement had to fight hard to ensure that those productivity gains were shared with workers.
The problem we face with automation is that there is not much of a collective 'working class' to fight that fight.
I have literally seen a room full of people that lost their jobs because of software I wrote (admittedly, not alone, but still). The software was almost ready by that point and it was quite a disturbing experience that still bothers me up to this day to be honest.
It had nothing to do with AI and was quite a long time ago, but I still remember it very vividly.
> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine
Right now AI is still a future technology. The current AI algorithms are the equivalent of the early GSM phones, which looked like car batteries, very far from modern smartphones. But it is reasonable to expect that they will get better, and it is reasonable to expect that we will be able to emulate the brain with transistors and on a much bigger scale some days.
The second objection is that the demand for unskilled workers keeps shrinking. Our society has adapted to the industrial revolution by having a much larger skilled worker base, pretty much everyone can now read and write, college degrees have become the norm, etc. But there are brick walls to how skilled a society can be. A not insignificant share of the population just cannot become skilled. And even among skilled workers, only a fraction will always be capable to satisfy the demand for the "hotest" skills (engineering, software development, etc).
So I think that as that imbalance develops, we are bound to live with a structurally unequal society. And it doesn't have much to do with capitalism, it has more to do with the evolution of the technology outpacing the biological evolution of our species.
Lets say youre a truck driver and suddenly you lose your job. You cant transfer your existing skill set to driving a cab for very long because guess what? Thats been automated too.
There arent any other jobs that involve sitting at a wheel avoiding bad drivers and rush hour traffic and pulling all nighters. Simultaneously the chance for that person to find work in new markets becomes low. They have to train themselves.
>In 1960 there were 3 channels. In the 1990's 50. Now it's 100's + online offerings.
Exactly, we're already beyond the limits of what we can consume. There won't be jobs producing more stuff when there is no one to consume it.
I'd be really interested to see sources for this since there is almost no accurate unemployment data pre-1840 and at least in the US it doesn't seem likely as what information we have tells us that during the period from 1800-1840 slaves made up over 26% of the workforce in the United States, peaking at almost 32% in 1810.
I'm assuming you're going by wage estimates from the UK over the period, but if you are those are really contested as a method for evaluating quality of life or actually real wages - many people at the time didn't earn inside the wage system.
I don't disagree that eventually cost of labor and general unemployment improved as a result of the industrial revolution - I just don't think it happened DURING the industrial revolution, at least not until its late stages.
Also, GDP per capita is a really bad way to estimate effects on the working class, particularly in a period famous for massive income inequality.
I need someone to burst my bubble from time to time.
Also, as a side note, I for one would be delighted if the future included people brewing delicious beer for one another as an important part of the economy.
This is a nice tidy test that is not entirely useful. You can't know anyone that didn't get hired into a job that didn't get created. Say a plant doubles output while destaffing by way of retirement. No one loses a job, automation eats more than 1 plants worth of jobs.
Babe Ruth, arguably one of the most famous athletes ever, played from 1914-1935.
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We are suffering today not because of technological progress, but rather the contrary: the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally come to a grinding halt. Let's stop denying this. The stream of lifechanging breakthrough inventions of the 20th century, from A (antibiotics) to Z (zippers), have ended. As a result, we now suffer from secular stagnation. [1]
This is why people can't get jobs. The answer is Keynesian spending, and the most fair kind of Keynesian spending is basic income. Call it a "Keynesian dividend".
[1] http://larrysummers.com/2016/02/17/the-age-of-secular-stagna...
Automation today is now destroying service economy jobs, but it's not clear, at least to me, what new sector is ramping up to pick up the displacement slack. The tech sector isn't going to have enough jobs for everyone getting automated away, and this time around automation is unique in that it's attacking pretty much everything all at once. Human drivers are going to be displaced by autonomous vehicles at the same time as financial advisers are being displaced by wealth allocation algorithms at the same time as warehouse workers are being displaced by picker robots, etc.
That's exactly right. We've been creating work to keep people busy for 200 years in many more ways than you mention. Consumerism. Marketing. Bureaucracy. We have one industry that makes people sick (food) and another industry that makes people healthy (healthcare). The twin peaks of the sickness and health industries can grow indefinitely, especially in the USA. We have industries that make plastic casings to wrap goods, just so we can sell goods to consumers, who unwrap and immediately dispose the plastic, so that another industry (sanitation) can take them away.
We basically have a society which continuously breaks glass windows and then fixes them. It's all, in some sense, pure dead weight, just to keep people employed.
So why should this stop now?
A worldwide monetary policy change that keeps real interest rates sufficiently negative to be in line with private market rates is the only real solution.
I agree, but this only leads to more questions: why? And is it permanent?
I think we are in a temporary lull. Finance people, in the vain of JP Morgan, have gotten very good at controlling the social processes around both physical resources and human output. They keep most people tired and scared to change jobs, so they can be made to focus on production. The rest who are actively problem solving despite those pressures, the finance folks try to steer them towards a maze where big bets are made and equity changes hands often.
We were bison, and now we're cattle. There's more meat, but less frolicking, and no semblance of any kind of ecosystem that produced so many bison-y moments.
Is it forever? I don't think so. We're only fairly recently getting lots of brains trying to discover tools for doing things outside of finance. And still, it's a trickle. Look at all the beautiful brains on this message board, whose output is getting fed into the feedlots of VCs and Paul Graham.
Our rapid technological progress in the last 2 centuries was an anomaly. We have 200,000 years of history as a species, most of which did not have nearly the same level of progress. The burden is on to you to explain what made those 2 centuries so great.
Fine, I can buy that. But stagnant productivity alone doesn't generate low employment. How do you explain low employment then?
Nah. The mother of all tech progressions, AI, is just kicking in.
We have already done things like basic income in the USA:
- Economic Stimulus Act of 2008
- Earned Income Tax Credit
Please provide some sort of argumentation or data.
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IMHO these articles are fake news, journalists love beating the Automation is killing jobs drum.
IT certainly is changing and outsourcing is swings and roundabouts. But there's more work than ever.
Suddenly the American oligarchy loses its faith in automation once you discuss potentially inflationary increases to public spending.
If we really are in an automation renaissance public spending could be ramped up massively and the potentially inflationary impact would be offset by all of the cost savings from replacing people with robots.
If.
Oh god, stop with this in every article.
This isn't "fake"; it isn't even "news".
News is either fake or not. A researched opinion piece isn't "fake" because you disagree with the conclusions. It might be wrong, but it isn't "fake".
There are other considerations of course, such as proximity to resources, transport hubs, and markets.
Ultimately though, this doesn't change the fact that automation is mostly beneficial to capital owners and not the wider workforce, so capitalism's tendency toward inequality (as described by Piketty) still applies.
I think that inequality will increase but not because of owning capital. Rather because this automation will shift demand away from unskilled workers and into software developers, marketing experts, etc. And I do not think that the supply of skilled worker can adapt fast enough, if any.
The good news (for the US) is that China will be the main casualty. In a way the US has already largely paid this tax to automation by outsourcing factory jobs to China. It is chinese factory workers that are going to be automated the first. Some low skilled jobs that couldn't be outsourced offshore like construction, taxis, etc will suffer but I'd argue a large part of the impact is behind us.
Obviously the tax paid to outsourcing is also having Trump at the white house.
It's easy to assume and take for granted that the US will create all the automation technology. However, I think it's more probable that China will move up the value chain and be the ones to own and develop these technologies, especially in manufacturing as China already has a super strong manufacturing ecosystem and talent (think Silicon Valley and Software).
If China owns the technology, the wealth would be in China so less will be available to spread around for basic income in developed countries like the US.
But this doesn't really bring jobs back, since they'll just be automated.
That's not to say there aren't other benefits aside from job creation, though.
Yeah, that's right. There would certainly be other benefits (and a limited number of jobs created) that are more indirect.
The real issue around automation in my opinion is how we as a society manage it. If we stay the course, it is clear that capital owners stand to benefit most (almost entirely I would say). We are already seeing problems with rising inequality due to diverging returns from capital and labour. This is going to exacerbate that hugely.
I'm generally in favour of capitalism but I think we are going to need to revisit 'the social contract' that allows capitalism to exist in exchange for a share of the rewards being used to ensure that society's basic needs are met. Just as when it was first negotiated by Bismark, this is going to have to be an initiative of the capital owners if serious unrest is to be avoided.
I'm hopeful and think that it is possible. Rich people are not inherently sociopathic. A good example of this sort of compromise in more modern times was the reaction of Kennedy snr when the US faced economic and social unrest. Partly through correspondence with Keynes he was convinced that if himself and his peers didn't take a hit for the good of wider society then they stood a good chance of losing a great deal more.
Every so often the social contract needs a reset (e.g. Bismark, the labour movement, the new deal, etc). Automation is going to make this more urgent. The one thing I am sure of is that it will be a political solution and not simply an economic one (e.g. less regulation, more free markets, etc).
There are also a lot of engineering jobs designing the hardware and software of these automated factories.
"No candidate talked much about automation on the campaign trail. Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico, there is no clear way to stop it, and many of the technology companies are in the United States and benefit the country in many ways."
A lot of US jobs have been lost to globalization, but in the long-term that won't compare to the jobs lost to automation. As a software developer this seems painfully obvious to me, and I would hope most politicians are intelligent enough to see it as well. Unfortunately none of them have even talked about it, much less proposed solutions to help displaced workers.
Technology is a MUCH more convenient villain. You can roll back 1% friendly trade agreements with China and Mexico. You can point pitchforks at the 1%. You can't roll back technological advancement and it's pointless to try.
You achieve nothing by being against technology except looking like an idiot, which is precisely why articles like this are trying to convince everybody that technology is the "villain".
Because god forbid Lloyd Blankfein and his cronies start being seen as villains.
>A lot of US jobs have been lost to globalization, but in the long-term that won't compare to the jobs lost to automation. As a software developer this seems painfully obvious to me,
Funny. As a software developer it seems painfully obvious to me just how far off we are from this supposed goal. All around me I see developers who shirk at even automating their own tests while getting excited over vaporware.
https://twitter.com/SenSasse/status/806889568276336641
If you want manufacturing jobs to stay in the US, regulating automation would be far more effective than trying to prevent companies from outsourcing jobs. (Incidentally, a lot of jobs that have been outsourced probably would have been automated if outsourcing had not been possible, and that's what opponents of outsourcing are missing.)
I'm very much against a policy to restrict automation, but it's worth pointing out.
Dead Comment
Once that works, California loses jobs about 2.1 million illegal immigrants.
Automation and industrialization over the last 150 years already meant we went from 120h weeks on farms to 40h weeks in offices and factories, while living standards increased. Measured in 40h/week jobs per person that means we lost 2 of 3 jobs in the industrialization! The world didn't end. And now everyone is worried that if we go from 40 to 30h or 20h weeks that will be a disaster?
We can't afford to have a large fraction of the people unemployed and the rest still working 40h weeks in ever fewer jobs of course, but that's a problem societies will hopefully solve.
As working hours drop and wages tend toward minimum, we do indeed end up in a bad situation.
While we still measure a person's worth out of how much they make, this is going to pose an enormous problem for all of us. We can't just take away people's livelihoods for the benefit of a few (us, to be honest).
There will be a violent reaction, as there has been every time this situation has arisen throughout history.
But how is shifting from e.g. production to services taking away peoples livielihood any more than shifting from farms to industry was?
> While we still measure a person's worth out of how much they make, this is going to pose an enormous problem for all of us.
Aren't most developed countries already either speculating in, or already effectively using shorter working hours now than say just one or two decades ago? Working less seems like the natural way to go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_...
Edit: I should add: I'm optimistic about this in societies with a high degree of labour organization, a flexible/agile political system, reasonably strong welfare states and a population that is positive towards working less in general.
Simply put: if you are in an OECD country and using kilograms you'll be fine.