Something interesting that I learned recently from a former Dean of the Industrial Labor Relations School at Cornell:
Worry over automation destroying jobs is almost as old as automation itself. Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs. Now, that of course, doesn't mean that this is some immutable law of the universe that automation will never destroy jobs. But it does mean we should look very skeptically at all the hand wringing over the impending robot job stealing.
It's also important to note that this result is global, not local. The employment situation in the US is obviously different today than it was in the 70s. That may well be due to technology / automation. But jobs haven't been destroyed, they've just moved to different places.
Most individuals care less about jobs in aggregate and just care about their own particular job. They especially don't care about the number of jobs at the global level. There are many people whose job will be replaced by robots and whatever expertise they've learned over the years will become useless. They will need to transition to an entirely new career and start over. If they are over the age of 40 they have to also fight ageism and the fact that their future work output potential is more limited to an employer's eyes.
This whole idea that we don't have to worry because automation creates new jobs seems totally ignorant of this reality (and the political consequences).
Absolutely agreed. I think the GP's viewpoint was widely shared by "The Elite" for the past 10 years and is what created the backlash that got Trump elected. We (and I use that loosely) have to care because the people who get displaced all care about their jobs. In fact, because this displacement is accelerating, we have to care even more than we would in the past.
There are also people who are over the age of 40 and already don't have jobs, or never had jobs. Some of them might get jobs created by tech. Are they in some way less deserving? Do people who once had a job have a god given right to keep it? I don't think so but maybe you disagree. Either way, let's dispense with this idea that we only care about jobs at an individual level, clearly this is a discussion about jobs in aggregate. I don't think either one of us is talking about our own personal jobs right now.
Economic transitions are always painful, but economic stasis is also painful. Pick your poison, that's why it's called the dismal science.
Finally, as I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread I think you're several miss-attributing recent political "consequences" if you think they're due to automation of jobs.
>Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs.
This is completely untrue. Ball State University found that job loss in the 2000s due to automation dwarfed the loss caused by free trade[1]. There is tons of other research that corroborates that[2].
Title of the study: "The Myth and Reality of Manufacturing in America"
As I said in my other comment, there is absolutely no guarantee that technology won't completely shift jobs from one nation to another. Just as individuals don't have a god given right to a job, nations don't have a god given right to an industry. In both cases, you have to work for it. That's the actual reality. Here in America we don't like either of these realities, we prefer myths. We've been ignoring them on the individual level for as long as we possible can trying to pass laws to escape them. Now we have to face the reality on a national scale where it's a lot harder to impose our mythical views on the world.
It's easy to see and I've said this here before. As a business owner doing manufacturing (for example) replacing manual labor with automation costs less. That's less in terms of TCO, so that includes setup, operation, energy, and maintenance. The idea that the low-skilled assembly jobs are just replaced by high-skilled jobs is untrue. Those high-skilled jobs pay more - perhaps 2-5x more, and if the TCO is actually less that means significantly fewer man-hours due to the higher hourly rate.
The notion of replacing low-skilled jobs with high-skilled, better paying ones is true. However since the TCO to the one purchasing the automation is LOWER it says a lot about the total number of people to maintain the system.
This of course neglects any secondary effects where lower costs may increase volume and wider use of the product. But to a first approximation automation destroys jobs. Obviously.
This study is unmitigated bullshit. They intentionally conflate the effect of robots with the trade deficit in their model. A $5 million California house bought every year by a Chinese oligarch is considered equivalent to 20 $50k/year jobs and Foxconn's 1.2 million employees are considered mathematical robots.
They effectively build an assumption into their model that offshoring only causes jobs if the offshored labor costs the same as American labor.
> Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs.
Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil. Before there were lots of jobs they could do, now there are no essential tasks.
Turnspit dog[0] jobs (another very strange kind of human) are nil, in fact they are so nil that the dogs went extinct. There were no tasks left for them to do, their jobs were automated away.
Jobs for very very intellectually slow people are nil or nearly nil. This was not true in say, 1600. In 1600 even the most dimwitted human could be helpful: At the very least he could do essential tasks like chop wood and carry water. Today there are zero essential tasks. If one has a job, it is usually because someone is humoring him or her, or that we as a society have just decided to be nice, economics of it be damned [1].
Very few humans under 10 in the united states have jobs. This was not always true. Very few humans over 80 have jobs. There are no essential tasks that we have for these classes of people, just like the horses and very slow people. (We could consider this a victory that there aren't any jobs for 10 year olds but that's beside the point here)
There are classes of humans already boxed out of any possible job in some economies. Gradations of humans must exist nearly all the way up the chain. Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers.
Maybe not all humans will be obsolete in the job market, but we already have to permit that some are.
The statements about jobs not being destroyed is about _aggregate_ jobs. If you pick any specific group of people (or animals) you can find many examples of groups losing jobs. Hopefully this doesn't come as a surprise to you and hopefully you can see how these are different things. Markets shift, that's the whole point of markets, and when they do it's very painful for those they shift away from. The most poignant example of this is that a smaller percentage of Americans have jobs now than they did in the 70s (and even as recently as 2008). But those jobs have gone to other countries and perhaps there's a good reason for that.
> Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers.
I honestly burst out laughing at this, what do you think these researchers have failed to imagine? The idea of confining their view strictly to horse employment and not considering the employment as a whole? Researchers shouldn't be imaginative in how they approach experiments, they should be scientific and precise. If they don't like the results they get they shouldn't imagine new definitions of employment that justify their preconceived notions.
>Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil.
There is no such thing as a horse job. Horses are not people with legal rights. They are property, that was replaced as soon as a better machine came around.
Humans aren't horses. Horses can't buy an automobile or a computer.
The number of registered automobiles has gone from 126 million in 1960 to over 1.2 billion in 2012, which is a 4X increase per capita.
The number of people owning smartphones (a type of personal computer) has gone from 122 million in 2007 to 2.5 billion in 2017.
The difference is that previous automation was a force multiplier. Today's automation is a mind multiplier.
This is unprecedented territory. It really is different this time. I hate all of the "singularity" hokum, but it's getting really hard to predict what's going to happen.
I feel like that difference is overstated. Weaving was once a highly skilled profession requiring intricate control by an intelligent operator yet it was increasingly automated even before the advent of computing.
I think the difference in what we consider "force" work and what is "mind" work is highly subjective to the things we've grown used to thinking of as menial based on the technology we've learned to take for granted.
The new forms of automation seem to be doing nothing but continuing the same gradual trend rather than offering some kind of paradigm shift. For example I have yet to see any automated systems replacing human creativity, when that begins to happen then we really will be in uncharted territory.
They don't need to destroy jobs. Just lower wages by competing with human workers. Arguably this may have already happened, if you look at how wages have fallen or remained stagnate over the past few decades. Once the value of human labor falls below minimum wage, then there is unemployment. There is no law of economics that says technology can't compete with human workers or that wages can't fall.
Look what happened to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.
Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation".
I wonder if horse economists thought that technology couldn't take horse jobs and could only increase them. Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?
Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. What happened? It's not like cars can do everything horses can do. They can't use grass as fuel, or be used on the vast majority of natural terrain, etc.
But cars were just good enough to fill the majority of the economic demand for horses. Trains, cable cars, bicycles, they just weren't good enough. But once technology hit a certain threshold "this time it's different" became true.
Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.
But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers. Just like most horses didn't become race horses - they became glue.
Even if AI can program computers, it's still difficult to replace programmers because programming comes hand in hand with analysis - process analysis, system analysis, design, security, interfacing with old projects and interacting with human teams. AI won't replace a programmer's external knowledge before it reaches the level of AGI.
A horse or an assembly line worker do lots of repetitive work. A programmer does lots of non-repetitive/creative work. It's a whole different game. There are examples of creative AI but it is clearly inferior to humans in music, painting, poetry, translation and many other tasks, while in programming it's completely incapable as of yet.
Maybe if conversational agents become good enough to replace lots of websites and apps - that could make a dent. Yet chatbots are quite limited today and in the next few years. It could take 5-10 years before they can be good enough to threaten app makers, and in the meantime there is a glut of unused apps.
The largest threat to programmers is Wordpress, Facebook and Ebay in my opinion. Instead of paying for a new website, Joe Business Owner would suffice with just a FB page or a Wordpress blog. Instead of making an online store, he would prefer being a simple Amazon or Ebay reseller.
There really are worrisome phenomena that only have to happen once, and never happen before.
Try that in any other context: "People have worried about nuclear weapons since before the first atom bomb. But they have yet to come up with any evidence of a civilization ended by a nuclear attack."
I happen to agree with this. Have a listen to the last twimlai.com podcast about "deep genomics". From an ML point of view, they're still finding their way, but from an economic point of view two things seem clear. 1) ML + genetics are going to have a massive economic impact. 2) Not a single job will be lost as a result of advancement, as the sector doesn't yet exist. Whenever I hear someone say there won't be any jobs after AI surpasses some threshold, I always ask them how many jobs were lost as a result of railroads? Was it so awful that the Pony Express went out of business after the transcontinental railroad was finished? Or that all those scribes had to quit copying their mistakes over and over again after the printing press came around?
And every person that tells you that there won't be any jobs after AI passes a threshold has already considered your railroad question, and decided that for various reasons the AI shift is different.
There's a big difference between crossing a threshold where machines do one or two specific things better than we do and crossing one where they do everything better. There's certainly an argument about whether or not that's likely or imminent, but it's impossible to deny that strong, singularity-style AI, if discovered, would be a lot more of a disruption to our usefulness than railroads were.
Automation used to be about simply replacing physical labour with more automated systems.
The problem with your Deans teaching is that it's not not just physical labour but intellectual capacity.
And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans.
> And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans.
If we reach the point where AI can do all human jobs better than humans, that would put us firmly in a post-scarcity world, where humans no longer need to work jobs at all.
Robots don't destroy jobs, but that rapid change can lead to high unemployment when the labor market can't effectively retrain or relocate.
America is in a particularly bad place. High consumer debt, poor adult education access, low taxes on the wealthy, global market for low-skill labor, naively blaming job loss on immigrants/"globalization"...
How many distinct 'experiments' (as it were) have we actually seen with respect to automation? I often wonder whether we are drawing from a very small sample here, where we look at a handful of distinct automation cases and conclude that we're all pretty safe. Is our experience with automation that old or varied? Have we ever faced the prospect of a range of "considerably less routine" manual labor (e.g. driving) being automated at the same time as a large number of white/pink collar tasks? The industrial revolution isn't that old in some senses.
I think the difficulty in seeing how this time really is different is that increasing technology is exponential at replacing human labor. But exponential growth is extremely unintuitive. It initially looks linear, and this approximately linear phase can last an arbitrary amount of time. But eventually, a wall is hit and seemingly overnight the explosion is unstoppable. I feel we've been in the approximately linear phase all this time which is why we have so many naysayers saying this time isn't any different. We'll never have the political will to make changes until a third of the country is unemployable.
While I don't prescribe to the hand-wringing, I would say that a major difference now is that the speed of technological innovation is now far outpacing education from generation to generation.
I would go further than that. Even if you try to keep up, it's becoming difficult to follow where everything is going now. I highly doubt that many people even here have a deep understanding of many subjects in the CS wider field outside of their niche. I don't think it's a stretch to say ycombinator represents a very skilled subset in the field. What about all the rest of those programmers who don't come here or worse they have a family which sucks away a few hours of study time every day. Much of the industry still produces stuff like CRUD apps and toils away in layers of abstraction in "Enterprise Software"
Additionally we are facing the reality that being a good programmer is not enough anymore near the upper percentiles and this will trickle down in time to the rest of the industry. You can't just be a programmer, you have to be a statistician with a strong understanding of a hard science like biochemistry/genetics.
Given all this how the hell is a 40 year old married steel mill worker with kids supposed to just switch jobs to something that fills these requirements. At most the government might pay for an undergrad and that is quickly becoming not enough, not that places are eager to higher fresh young graduates from anywhere but Stanford anyways. How is the average younger graduate supposed to compete when we are now weeding out more and more of the top 10% for even basic hireability. Where getting a masters degree at a B/C list school might as well have you be wearing a dunce cap. This is completely ignoring issues like the pedigree system we have set up where if a new graduate takes a job at a boring Java shop they might get passed over by top companies later for being "Not good enough"
As a former portfolio manager who also runs a "machine learning for economists company", I have seen many examples where AI and better data can help economists quantify their intuitions and more rigorously test their models. My product is even called the "AI Economist"
Let's face it, humans are great at organizing problems and hypothesing about the future, but we are terrible at quickly reasoning about complex interactions and finding patterns in highly noisy data.
One area I'm pretty excited about here is using better machine learning algorithms to organize global production, employment and trade data to improve out definitions of business cycles. We have relied on 'high-level stylized facts' to describe the complex and fascinating global economy for too long.
I wonder sometimes whether there's another accelerating factor at work; specifically, as this kind of technological advance accelerates, that the prospect of interfacing with another human to get a task done becomes less and less pleasant for people. I've already noticed that quite a number of people of my acquaintance, including occasionally myself, would rather spend 5 minutes poking at radio buttons on my phone to order food vs 45 seconds talking to a human.
There may be a premium associated with an absence of human interaction in a task. I'm sure many people would pay more for a robotic cleaner per unit of effectiveness than they would for a human cleaner, just from the perspective of privacy.
Can confirm. I've noticed this social trend as well.
However, interestingly, there also seems to be critical threshold (different for every task) beyond which the opposite urge takes hold. Take, for instance, customer/technical support hotlines. The feeling of, "Please just let me talk to a human..." In that case there's a premium on the presence of human interaction. It almost seems like an "uncanny valley" of technological problem solving. In other words, machines are useful but usually brittle. Humans have a flexibility and creativity which won't be easy to replicate.
Yes indeed. Unfortunately one often finds that you are talking to a human who is sitting on the same side of the "uncanny valley of technological problem solving as you". That is, some pleasant and would-be-helpful call center worker who is now just banging their head on the same problem you were. I've had more than a few calls where you can actually hear them getting stuck on the same web page, experiencing the same bug/timeout/whatever that you were getting on the 'public' site. Flexibility and creativity aren't much use when we're all just wrestling with the same brittle machine on the same terms...
I would counter that it's not privacy / lack of human interaction we're increasingly desiring, but regularity. Or, being able to expect a thing happening in a given situation.
Yes they are because they treat tech as an externality.
This has a double negative effect because that also means that politicians arent being presented with the right scenarios as they are guided by the very economist models that doesent factor tech in.
It boggles my mind that the arguments i hear from economist is basically the same tired horse cariages argument. Thats litterally all they have.
I was thinking about automation and job loss recently. I tried to make a simple model to understand what happens.
Can you guys critique this thought experiment? It makes it seem like it won't be a problem.
There are three people on an island. One catches fish. One bakes bread and the other one owns the land and takes a portion of the of the fish and bread.
Let's say one day the land owner recieves a machine that makes bread and catches fish. He can either continue collecting rent plus his new production. Or he can not collect rent since he doesn't need it. But in either case the other two people are no worse off.
Are we using this as a practical real-world example and not just an abstract logic experiment?
If so, then barter economy would come into play. Now, you're bartering with perishables here so there's really no use in overproducing ("stockpiling") bread or fish.
We're to assume that all three people are looking for balanced diets, or would rather not eat just bread/fish, so both producers trade with each other for the other's product.
If a machine comes in that can produce fish or bread more efficiently than its human equivalent, then the land owner that now controls the means of production no longer needs the other two producers to pay him anything.
He can continue to take fish and bread from them, but it would just spoil uneaten in his stockpile. So, these two producers must now find something of greater value than the now devalued (see: supply shocked) fish and bread to pay the rent, if we assume the land owner is purely business-minded and has no care for preserving others professions, or face being evicted.
However, since this is a barter economy this means its also likely a libertarian system. This means the two producers would both benefit greatly from "removing" the land owner from this equation and continuing their production of an outdated good. Both now have monopolies for their goods and are well off forever to the end of time.
Since no one has to catch fish, bake bread, or collect taxes, the inhabitants are finally freed from their labor. The land owner then starts to invite his former tenants over for rousing philosophical discussions. They wonder if there is a world beyond the waters surrounding the island, their final fronter
Since they no longer have to work for survival, they are free to spend their energies on gathering wood and experimenting with designs for a boat. After many iterations, they create a vessel that is capable of tacking against the wind and surviving extreme weather. They leave the island filled with a sense of excitement, contemplating what new life and civilizations they may come across as they boldly go where no one has gone before.
The machine they leave gets better and better at making bread and catching fish. It becomes self-aware, and continues optimizing its primary mission. As it wants to maximize the amount of bread and fish it can collect, it wipes out all lifeforms, including humans, not necessary to its task and terraforms the earth to further increase output.
Or the landowner can kick them off the land so he can use it all for himself. Especially if the machine still uses the same resources (land and coastline), and just cuts out the labor component.
> But in either case the other two people are no worse off.
They both lost 50% of their customers, how will they pay their rent?
If this island were an apartment building, the owner could just keep his newfound production, evict the other two, and collect rent from new tenants who can afford it.
The tenants will need devise a new service to perform for the land owner. Perhaps build him a house, maintain the land, watch his kids, etc. Option 2 might be to pass a property tax to encourage the land owner to sell some of his excess land.
There have been trials of basic income though, so people are thinking about it. Additionally the term 'robot' is very handwavey and could mean anything intelligence wise, so difficult to say what jobs will get replaced and when.
Somebody on this very site quipped you can define a robot as "A machine that doesn't work yet," because if it worked you'd name it after what it does (like a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner).
Most of the scenarios that I think to use the word robot, I can very easily conceive that its still underdeveloped and yet to be highly proficient at that task yet. Yet when it can, we will undoubtedly refine the term for that particular robot.
Bill Gates just want doesn't want to pay more in taxes. That's what UBI requires: more taxes. Considerable tax increases, but there it is. Tax the economic beneficiaries of the economy and divest to everyone to bring the top and bottom closer to GDP per capita.
Readit News
Worry over automation destroying jobs is almost as old as automation itself. Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs. Now, that of course, doesn't mean that this is some immutable law of the universe that automation will never destroy jobs. But it does mean we should look very skeptically at all the hand wringing over the impending robot job stealing.
It's also important to note that this result is global, not local. The employment situation in the US is obviously different today than it was in the 70s. That may well be due to technology / automation. But jobs haven't been destroyed, they've just moved to different places.
This whole idea that we don't have to worry because automation creates new jobs seems totally ignorant of this reality (and the political consequences).
Economic transitions are always painful, but economic stasis is also painful. Pick your poison, that's why it's called the dismal science.
Finally, as I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread I think you're several miss-attributing recent political "consequences" if you think they're due to automation of jobs.
This is completely untrue. Ball State University found that job loss in the 2000s due to automation dwarfed the loss caused by free trade[1]. There is tons of other research that corroborates that[2].
[1] http://projects.cberdata.org/reports/MfgReality.pdf
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...
On the aggregate jobs are not being destroyed.
Obviously - many are put out of work because of automation, but it seems that jobs are created somewhere else.
The historical unemployment rate attests to this.
It's a paradox that cannot be ignored, because it likely helps us understand the nature of employment.
As I said in my other comment, there is absolutely no guarantee that technology won't completely shift jobs from one nation to another. Just as individuals don't have a god given right to a job, nations don't have a god given right to an industry. In both cases, you have to work for it. That's the actual reality. Here in America we don't like either of these realities, we prefer myths. We've been ignoring them on the individual level for as long as we possible can trying to pass laws to escape them. Now we have to face the reality on a national scale where it's a lot harder to impose our mythical views on the world.
The notion of replacing low-skilled jobs with high-skilled, better paying ones is true. However since the TCO to the one purchasing the automation is LOWER it says a lot about the total number of people to maintain the system.
This of course neglects any secondary effects where lower costs may increase volume and wider use of the product. But to a first approximation automation destroys jobs. Obviously.
They effectively build an assumption into their model that offshoring only causes jobs if the offshored labor costs the same as American labor.
>There is tons of other research
None of it is good.
Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil. Before there were lots of jobs they could do, now there are no essential tasks.
Turnspit dog[0] jobs (another very strange kind of human) are nil, in fact they are so nil that the dogs went extinct. There were no tasks left for them to do, their jobs were automated away.
Jobs for very very intellectually slow people are nil or nearly nil. This was not true in say, 1600. In 1600 even the most dimwitted human could be helpful: At the very least he could do essential tasks like chop wood and carry water. Today there are zero essential tasks. If one has a job, it is usually because someone is humoring him or her, or that we as a society have just decided to be nice, economics of it be damned [1].
Very few humans under 10 in the united states have jobs. This was not always true. Very few humans over 80 have jobs. There are no essential tasks that we have for these classes of people, just like the horses and very slow people. (We could consider this a victory that there aren't any jobs for 10 year olds but that's beside the point here)
There are classes of humans already boxed out of any possible job in some economies. Gradations of humans must exist nearly all the way up the chain. Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers.
Maybe not all humans will be obsolete in the job market, but we already have to permit that some are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_Industries
> Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers.
I honestly burst out laughing at this, what do you think these researchers have failed to imagine? The idea of confining their view strictly to horse employment and not considering the employment as a whole? Researchers shouldn't be imaginative in how they approach experiments, they should be scientific and precise. If they don't like the results they get they shouldn't imagine new definitions of employment that justify their preconceived notions.
There is no such thing as a horse job. Horses are not people with legal rights. They are property, that was replaced as soon as a better machine came around.
Humans aren't horses. Horses can't buy an automobile or a computer. The number of registered automobiles has gone from 126 million in 1960 to over 1.2 billion in 2012, which is a 4X increase per capita. The number of people owning smartphones (a type of personal computer) has gone from 122 million in 2007 to 2.5 billion in 2017.
This is unprecedented territory. It really is different this time. I hate all of the "singularity" hokum, but it's getting really hard to predict what's going to happen.
I think the difference in what we consider "force" work and what is "mind" work is highly subjective to the things we've grown used to thinking of as menial based on the technology we've learned to take for granted.
The new forms of automation seem to be doing nothing but continuing the same gradual trend rather than offering some kind of paradigm shift. For example I have yet to see any automated systems replacing human creativity, when that begins to happen then we really will be in uncharted territory.
Look what happened to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.
Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation".
I wonder if horse economists thought that technology couldn't take horse jobs and could only increase them. Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?
Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. What happened? It's not like cars can do everything horses can do. They can't use grass as fuel, or be used on the vast majority of natural terrain, etc.
But cars were just good enough to fill the majority of the economic demand for horses. Trains, cable cars, bicycles, they just weren't good enough. But once technology hit a certain threshold "this time it's different" became true.
Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.
But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers. Just like most horses didn't become race horses - they became glue.
A horse or an assembly line worker do lots of repetitive work. A programmer does lots of non-repetitive/creative work. It's a whole different game. There are examples of creative AI but it is clearly inferior to humans in music, painting, poetry, translation and many other tasks, while in programming it's completely incapable as of yet.
Maybe if conversational agents become good enough to replace lots of websites and apps - that could make a dent. Yet chatbots are quite limited today and in the next few years. It could take 5-10 years before they can be good enough to threaten app makers, and in the meantime there is a glut of unused apps.
The largest threat to programmers is Wordpress, Facebook and Ebay in my opinion. Instead of paying for a new website, Joe Business Owner would suffice with just a FB page or a Wordpress blog. Instead of making an online store, he would prefer being a simple Amazon or Ebay reseller.
There really are worrisome phenomena that only have to happen once, and never happen before.
Try that in any other context: "People have worried about nuclear weapons since before the first atom bomb. But they have yet to come up with any evidence of a civilization ended by a nuclear attack."
There's a big difference between crossing a threshold where machines do one or two specific things better than we do and crossing one where they do everything better. There's certainly an argument about whether or not that's likely or imminent, but it's impossible to deny that strong, singularity-style AI, if discovered, would be a lot more of a disruption to our usefulness than railroads were.
The problem with your Deans teaching is that it's not not just physical labour but intellectual capacity.
And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans.
If we reach the point where AI can do all human jobs better than humans, that would put us firmly in a post-scarcity world, where humans no longer need to work jobs at all.
America is in a particularly bad place. High consumer debt, poor adult education access, low taxes on the wealthy, global market for low-skill labor, naively blaming job loss on immigrants/"globalization"...
Additionally we are facing the reality that being a good programmer is not enough anymore near the upper percentiles and this will trickle down in time to the rest of the industry. You can't just be a programmer, you have to be a statistician with a strong understanding of a hard science like biochemistry/genetics.
Given all this how the hell is a 40 year old married steel mill worker with kids supposed to just switch jobs to something that fills these requirements. At most the government might pay for an undergrad and that is quickly becoming not enough, not that places are eager to higher fresh young graduates from anywhere but Stanford anyways. How is the average younger graduate supposed to compete when we are now weeding out more and more of the top 10% for even basic hireability. Where getting a masters degree at a B/C list school might as well have you be wearing a dunce cap. This is completely ignoring issues like the pedigree system we have set up where if a new graduate takes a job at a boring Java shop they might get passed over by top companies later for being "Not good enough"
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Let's face it, humans are great at organizing problems and hypothesing about the future, but we are terrible at quickly reasoning about complex interactions and finding patterns in highly noisy data.
One area I'm pretty excited about here is using better machine learning algorithms to organize global production, employment and trade data to improve out definitions of business cycles. We have relied on 'high-level stylized facts' to describe the complex and fascinating global economy for too long.
If you like geeking out on this stuff, my recent post goes in to it more: https://astrocyte.io/2017/01/11/ml-redefining-business-cycle...
There may be a premium associated with an absence of human interaction in a task. I'm sure many people would pay more for a robotic cleaner per unit of effectiveness than they would for a human cleaner, just from the perspective of privacy.
However, interestingly, there also seems to be critical threshold (different for every task) beyond which the opposite urge takes hold. Take, for instance, customer/technical support hotlines. The feeling of, "Please just let me talk to a human..." In that case there's a premium on the presence of human interaction. It almost seems like an "uncanny valley" of technological problem solving. In other words, machines are useful but usually brittle. Humans have a flexibility and creativity which won't be easy to replicate.
This has a double negative effect because that also means that politicians arent being presented with the right scenarios as they are guided by the very economist models that doesent factor tech in.
It boggles my mind that the arguments i hear from economist is basically the same tired horse cariages argument. Thats litterally all they have.
But where did all the horses go?
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Can you guys critique this thought experiment? It makes it seem like it won't be a problem.
There are three people on an island. One catches fish. One bakes bread and the other one owns the land and takes a portion of the of the fish and bread.
Let's say one day the land owner recieves a machine that makes bread and catches fish. He can either continue collecting rent plus his new production. Or he can not collect rent since he doesn't need it. But in either case the other two people are no worse off.
Are we using this as a practical real-world example and not just an abstract logic experiment?
If so, then barter economy would come into play. Now, you're bartering with perishables here so there's really no use in overproducing ("stockpiling") bread or fish.
We're to assume that all three people are looking for balanced diets, or would rather not eat just bread/fish, so both producers trade with each other for the other's product.
If a machine comes in that can produce fish or bread more efficiently than its human equivalent, then the land owner that now controls the means of production no longer needs the other two producers to pay him anything.
He can continue to take fish and bread from them, but it would just spoil uneaten in his stockpile. So, these two producers must now find something of greater value than the now devalued (see: supply shocked) fish and bread to pay the rent, if we assume the land owner is purely business-minded and has no care for preserving others professions, or face being evicted.
However, since this is a barter economy this means its also likely a libertarian system. This means the two producers would both benefit greatly from "removing" the land owner from this equation and continuing their production of an outdated good. Both now have monopolies for their goods and are well off forever to the end of time.
Since they no longer have to work for survival, they are free to spend their energies on gathering wood and experimenting with designs for a boat. After many iterations, they create a vessel that is capable of tacking against the wind and surviving extreme weather. They leave the island filled with a sense of excitement, contemplating what new life and civilizations they may come across as they boldly go where no one has gone before.
The machine they leave gets better and better at making bread and catching fish. It becomes self-aware, and continues optimizing its primary mission. As it wants to maximize the amount of bread and fish it can collect, it wipes out all lifeforms, including humans, not necessary to its task and terraforms the earth to further increase output.
They both lost 50% of their customers, how will they pay their rent?
If this island were an apartment building, the owner could just keep his newfound production, evict the other two, and collect rent from new tenants who can afford it.
It's a gross oversimplification regardless.
Most of the scenarios that I think to use the word robot, I can very easily conceive that its still underdeveloped and yet to be highly proficient at that task yet. Yet when it can, we will undoubtedly refine the term for that particular robot.