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Is Software Driving a Falling Demand For Brains?
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times that information technology seems to be reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers (reg. may be required), because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing. One good recent example is how software is replacing the teams of lawyers who used to do document research. 'From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,' says Bill Herr, a lawyer at a major chemical company who used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. 'People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don't.' If true this raises a number of interesting questions. 'One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war,' writes Krugman. 'Another is how we [can] have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can't command a middle-class income.' Remember the Luddites weren't the poorest of the poor, they were skilled artisans whose skills had suddenly been devalued by new technology."
We don’t need less skilled and educated people. What we need are more skilled jobs to put them in. Obviously way easier said then done. As technology advances, certain jobs, even entire trades, are going to become obsolete. I don’t think technology is even close to a point where we can’t come up with something for the more intelligent chunks of society to do.
The whole damn system is broken! Everything has to be immediately profitable or at least have demonstratable potential for future profitability. We are very good at improving on the stuff we already have because of this, but we seem to suck at coming up with completely new stuff. A lot of the cool stuff we have now came out of the cold war, because the powers were throwing money at scientists in the hopes of getting something cool before the “other guy” did. We need some more of that. We need ridiculous amounts of money thrown at scientists and engineers with no stipulations or requirements to show progress. You’ll have some serious waste.. but I think you’ll come up with some neat stuff as well.
I also think as a society it’s time to move away from the 5+ day work week. We have enough technology now that there is no reason for the majority of the population to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week working. How we get the ball rolling on this one I don’t know. The economy seems to be geared more towards people working more than less. Remember back when having a two income family really put you on top. Then everyone started to do it and the economy adjusted. Now you need that just to get by. We need to do that in reverse then keep going!
I haven't read the article yet (typical), but I've heard the argument before many times. I am of the opinion that computers are just tools that will allow users to use their brains on the more important (and less programmable) task of analysis. Jobs of the future will be about handling large amounts of information, not examining each thing in a serial manner.
I'm sorry, but if you're trying to garner sympathy for workers being displaced by technology, you're going to have to do better than lawyers.
Paraphrasing an old joke,
Q. What do you call an out of work lawyer?
A. A good start.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
If the article is explaining how lawyers are being replaced with programmers. Someone's got to create and maintain the software that replaces these "educated" people. Surely these are just a different set of educated people? That really does sound similar to the Luddites. It's not that there's no longer any demand for skills, it's that there's a demand for different skills.
And just to take an (only half joking ) swipe at lawyers, surely this means an increase in demand for brains?
See, those lawyers were replaced by technology. By being replaced with tech, those lawyers are free to move onto work that benefits society more: like porn.
BRAAAAIIIIIINNS!!
most tasks that are perfect for computers are repetitive work of finding the right data in a warehouse. just program it to find the right data and it will work until done. people hate repetitive work, people want something interesting that always changes.
the lawyers will just get put to work doing something else that needs to be done but wasn't affordable because companies that needed the document searches done would pay more
The printing press put millions of scribes out of work, because machines could do the same job. Of course we still needed scribes (later renamed secretaries) --- just not as many.
Same with lawyers - we still need them; just not as many as currently exist. These persons will just have to learn new skills. Like maybe programming the computers which do document review.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
The point is, you need skilled people to produce the clever algorithms, the software, the database, even the increased demand in hardware. The employment market is just shifting its requirement to different types of qualified jobs.
I would tend to agree that software is driving down demands for brains.
I went for my very first job interview for coding, and the "human resources" interviewing me said that my knowledge of and ability to write code in a text editor was irrelevant, because "We have templates for that". Maybe they liked their bloat code?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
...can just fall fast enough keep up with the falling supply perhaps there will be some hope of relieving the shortage.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Ultimately, not everyone can get a job, and it may not be their personal faults.
When technology advances, old jobs are eliminated and new jobs are created. But one day, there won't be enough new jobs to fill the hole. Machines and now, computers, replaced manual labours one by one. Capitalism will fail. And a significant amount of people will be born to live by social welfare, not because they are lazy, but because they have no choices.
Here one may take a leaf out of RIAA and the leading Music labels' book which has also seen the role of middle men being made largely obsolete by the advent of Internet.
The solution, hence, is simple: just sue the ... oh .. wait.
Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance -- Mr. Miyagi
...I'm always on the lookout for brains! Joking aside, the requirement for people with brains lives on. Right now, I'd give my eye teeth for people with the 'brains' required to develop my business. And brains doesn't necessarily mean PhD level deep thinkers, it means agility and flexibility as well as a basis in the required skillsets. Experience can be gained, skills can be taught, but the raw material... Give me strong AI, then we can ditch the talk about the requirement for intelligent people. Stokey
Natsu gusa-ya, Tsuwamono domo-ga, Yume no ato
There will be one day when there will be no jobs left for anyone, because everything will be done by computers/robots. We are not going towards lower unemployment rates, ever... We'd better prepare ourselves for a jobless society.
Employee's are always going to be an expense for a company. We've been building machines and equipment to replace the jobs of skilled laborers since the industrial revolution, the advent of computers hasn't changed this. Now, when that computer can do some serious thinking for itself then we really will have to evaluate to what level of dependence are we comfortable with, but we aren't there by a long shot.
Yes, computers can replace people for some jobs, they may do the task better in addition to being cheaper.
This is a great thing, as it frees these people to take on more complex tasks and advance the development of humanity.
However, these more complex tasks do demand brains - likely even more so.
not unexpected, still disheartening. we're ok, unlike our contemporaries, who are being mowed down dead due to our need to arm our 'business' partners (murderers, psychos, whatever?) whilst we ponder ???? almost nothing? please do not underestimate the abilities of the most powerful source of life in the universe. be there or be scared/angry etc...
The deep issue is the increase in productivity. Science fiction writers of the golden age did forecast a year 2000 where we'd all be working 2 hours a week and enjoying life the rest of the time. But what we got is a world where some people (CEOs, top-notch contractors...) work like crazy and get heaps of money while the rest get an unemployment check to keep them quiet. Can't we do better than that ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Mr. Bucket had a job at the toothpaste factory screwing lids onto tubes of toothpaste. A shitty job. One day, they bought a robot that did the same thing, only betterfastercheaper and so Mr. Bucket got the sack. So what did he do? He learned how to fix the machine, and thus got a job fixing the machine that paid better.
What is the moral of the story? If your job is in danger of becoming redundant because a robot (or piece of software) can do your job, you'd better start educating yourself so that you can get a job fixing the machine (or piece of software) that does your old job. Humans need to focus on work that humans are good at, and not try to compete at tedious repetitive things (screwing lids onto toothpaste, parsing long contracts with fixed logical rules) which machines (and software) are inherently better at.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
I'm sorry, but if you're trying to garner sympathy for workers being displaced by technology, you're going to have to do better than lawyers.
Lawyers are just overhead costs: they don't produce anything, but you need a few around to keep everything running... But if you can safely reduce the costs of overhead, that's supposed to be a good thing.
The day that engineers can be replaced by computers we shall talk again. Until then, I just advise law-students to choose a new study while they can.
Sure, Lexis-Nexus made document research much easier for the layman to do. However, they still need highly intelligent software engineers to design it and highly capable web designers/developers to keep the site going. Automation and workflow improvements have always been in-demand, even outside of IT (the industrial revolution being one prominent example); jobs being cut/simplified have always been a consequence. It's part of the workflow cycle.
Strange, I was just thinking about how we're apparently experiencing a falling SUPPLY of brains. Won't the two kinda cancel out?
Using computers to replace auditoriums full of lawyers? ... how can I help?
They tuk or jooobs!
for all the unemployed lawyers.
*giggle*
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Okay, no, actually I'm just scared that the unemployed lawyers will try to make their livings by engaging in even more ridiculous litigation.
As a species we are always pushing boundaries and technology is a manifestation of that urge. Certainly it means humdrum occupations requiring some skill and education become less relevant. But to suggest tech replaces people is fallacious. It is merely a platform upon which we can develop further.
Q. What do you call 100 lawyers buried up to their necks in sand?
A. Not enough sand.
Let's be open here -- these people were highly educated, yes, but where they using their education in this role?
I think not.
What they were doing was simply reading through mounds of material looking for something that could be interesting to the case. It requires some deduction, some common sense, a good grasp of the concepts of the problems they are trying to solve, etc. But, it does not require a law degree. This is grunt work. One could easily imagine a situation where several legal assistants do the same work, and report into a senior person who really does need that education.
From other job sectors, one could make this distinction between Nurses and Doctors. (Yes, i know Nurses are also skilled, but not as much so as a Doctor for most definitions of 'Nurse'). You don't need your MD to answer a slough of 'Does this rash look funny to you?' questions at a health clinic. Just a simple 'No, put this cream on it' or 'OMG, what did you do? You need to see a Doctor' will suffice. Four good nurses and one doctor is as effective as 5 doctors for most family style medicine, and a heck of a lot cheaper.
Or, closer to home, you don't need someone with a degree and 6 certifications to work Tier 1 tech support. Tier 2 or 3, perhaps. But not Tier 1.
We still need lawyers that will argue in court, and ones that give support in many other ways. We can't replace them with computers, yet. If anything it removes the tedious part of looking through volumes and volumes of past cases, and laws to find relevant information pertaining to the case. That is not the smartest part of a lawyers job. And we still need lawyers that know how to create the right "queries" on the machines. Falling Demand For Brains? No. Falling demand for repetitive, tedious jobs? Yes.
I thought anyone trained in economics would understand that technological innovation increases productivity and overall wealth through capital investment, whether that comes from machines which weave fabric, or engines that search for legal precedent, thus making the same goods available at lower cost.
There is an adjustment to the economy's structure as these are introduced, but without the benefits of specialization and diversification of the labor pool, married with capital equipment, we would never enjoy the lifestyle we do today in first (and second) world countries.
Perhaps Krugman would suggest we switch all gas engines back to coal-fired steam so we can re-employ the idle coal miners?
No serious thinking person listens to anything Paul Krugman says. He's an ideologue incapable of saying anything that isn't either America bashing or Keynesian.
Is it rally a falling demand for brains? Leaving aside the Lawyer Jokes surely all those lawyers in the auditorium can be put to more productive use. Or is it expected that all the expensive education gives them a right to do low end work for a high hourly rate. How come people were not complaining when blue collar workers were being laid off. That was OK because the companies had to increase 'productivity' and were answerable to Wall Street. Now that the white collar jobs are getting affected we bemoan the 'falling demand' for brains.
I've often wondered what will happen to the economy and employment levels as technology approaches the sophistication and intelligence of human beings. The singularity is supposed to occur in my lifetime. Does it even make sense for me to save for retirement if that's true? What meaning will money have when no human can earn any? Will we finally be well cared for at no cost, or will we simply become obsolete?
A reduction of lawyers in the workforce would probably be the best thing to happen in years! Now if only there was some software which could replace a hack NYT economist.
This author has a completely backward way at looking at things. Income is only half of the equation. What you can buy with that income is the other half. What things can you get with the work you do. Productivity increase is good because you can create more with less work. This means things get cheaper and you can earn less and live better. This is called deflation. The problem is the financial industry and politicians refuse to let deflation happen. They see it as an enemy that must be conquered. So they inflate the money supply and give that money to politicians to spend. So what ends up happening is productivity increases are given away and the citizens are never able to gain their benefit even though their income is lower.
I like to use StarTrek as an example. They have a replicator. Once you have a replicator you never HAVE to work again. Anything you want including another replicator can be made. Are the people all of a sudden poor? Technically yes since they no work for money. In fact they are flat broke. But are they living better? Of course.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
While it's true that a profession can be oversaturated due to swings in the market - Law and finance are suffering a glut right now, just as comp-sci grads started working at coffee shops to get by in 2001 - these ebbs and flows even out over the course of time.
Auditoriums full of attorneys are massively inefficient and error-prone. It's not a good use of a law degree - come to think of it, billable hours and the organization of the law firm are both obsolete. Prix-fixe legal billing is the new school, and lawyers using technology to make it possible are making a ton of money, and there's going to be more demand as the cost barrier is lowered: Lawyers get to make more money working less hours for more clients. I don't mean there will be more lawsuits, I mean there will be more wills, living trusts, estate planning, contracts entrepreneurs and investors, setting up LLCs and corporations, etc... stuff that increases wealth for the middle class, and was once reserved only for the wealthy. So it's a net positive.
Technology does close some doors and obsolete some careers. It creates far more than it destroys, tho... and there are still craftsmen who cobble shoes by hand, just like old Ned Ludd, and they make enough to support a middle class lifestyle.
The larger problem is that colleges funnel their best and brightest into law instead of other fields of study, and business looks at college as a 6-year trade school. An employee with an advanced history or english degree will be very damn valuable - they can organize research into any number of issues, think critically and analytically about what they've found and communicate what they've decided about it clearly. That's worth more than knowing how to get "hello world" to run in LISP. Yet it's a "useless degree" to many hiring managers...
Both business and higher education are not acting in their own long term best interests in search of short-term profit.
Software makes some tasks easier, but that does not mean the workers can now be stupid. ...
If you make it simple for people to search through a document (hint: type Ctrl-F), it does not mean I can have a dumb employee, it means I can let that employee do higher level stuff.
Until the eighties, you could give a 500 pages document to someone, and ask him for a one page summary management would then analyze the summary and take some decision. Today, you give an employee a project, he researches on-line, creates a report, presents it, and more importantly does recommendations.
Remove today's powerful tools, and people go back to low-level tasks.
Give an engineer a lab machine powerful enough to host 10 virtual machines. Guess what, he'll model a network of servers and make progress. Give the same engineer a pile of a hundred books on computers, and a crappy 500MB desktop, come back a year later and see if he's achieved anything, and progressed in his knowledge
"Is Software Driving a Falling Demand For Brains?" Yes, I have heard Zombies are starting to eat software instead.
What is currently being eliminated are jobs that do not require imagination or deeper insights. On the high end, people of all qualifications are even more in demand than ever, because the computers cannot do their job without them. Working AI is not even remotely on the horizon, it is still completely unknown how it could be done. And this also means it is completely unknown whether a working AI would have issues like motivation, etc.. What is also completely unknown is whether an AI would actually be as smart as a human being and how much computing power it would need to even get to human average level. There is some indication that when you look at interconnect, the human brain is within one order or magnitude of what is possible in this universe. Get larger, and you get slower because of longer ways. Get smaller, and you cannot fit in as many interconnects.
Coming back to the job market, the problem is with a lot of jobs that can be learned and do not require very smart or flexible or imaginative people. As these are where the middle-class mostly takes its income from, these jobs vanishing is a huge problem. As it seems there is really no way to prevent that, I think the solution must either go into the direction people starting to share jobs, while retaining their before income (otherwise spending power of the population goes down the drain), or something radical, like a base-income provided from tax money (corporate taxes, really) that you can live off reasonably well. Obviously, the time for the latter has not quite come yet, but it is one of the very few options how the economy is not going to implode in the longer run. The high-skill jobs would still be filled. Talented people want to exercise their talents. The question is what the medium skill range will do. However, the absolute worst approach would of course be to let them all slide into poverty. That could only lead to massive destabilization, finally ending in disintegration of society. It is absolutely imperative that most people have a good chance at a reasonable life.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...would definitely drive the demand for brains.
Though I'm not sure there really is a problem as long as IT replaces mind numbing and repetitive work. It's a waste of time to have humans do jobs machines can do faster and cheaper.
What I do all day long is write/maintain/modify software that does exactly what this article is talking about. The problem is in what the article is defining as "brains." In my experience the type of worker that I'm able to replace with software is the type of person that probably shouldn't have their degree anyway. You've got the kind of person that gets their degree and does great... really knows their stuff, wins a lot of cases. Then you've got the people that barely graduated, maybe paid someone to write their term papers for them, have a degree but are actually very poorly skilled. Those people end up in what I've always called "Professional secretary" positions. They do all the menial work that the real highly skilled employees can't be bothered with. You'll find a plethora of people like this in the IT industry.
We live in a society that begrudges good pay to workers who actually make things. Many people regard the medical profession as damn near crooks for, *gasp*, actually wanting to be paid very well because of the risks that come with their work and the amount of real education they need to get in the door.
So what in the hell would make lawyers think they'd be immune? Most of the "complexity" of their education is self-created by their profession. It used to be that anyone could read the laws of their state and become a lawyer; today you need a juris doctorate to get in the door. A degree that is closer to a PhD than a high school degree.
Our legal system needs a reset on its entire code. There are over 4,000 federal crimes; to whit, there were only about 620 total laws (religious, civil and criminal) in the Old Testament. That means that there are likely more felonies in the federal criminal code than there were total regulations on every aspect of civilized life back then. Heck, the Roman law of the 12 tables, on which many of our ideas are based as well, is practically a foot note compared to just our personal income tax code.
For the last 100+ years people have been bitching that "machines" are taking jobs and displacing workers. Now it is machines and efficiency taking jobs. Guess what? People still find jobs and do just fine. People were worried the cotton gin would destroy jobs, that the automobile would destroy jobs, that the robot would destroy jobs. Same old boring song and dance. Yawn.
There are a lot of jobs (and I mean a _lot_) that do not require lots of brainpower, but, because of guilds/cartels/monopolies/licensing/etc, are priced as if they did. For example, researching a patent for novelty is a much more brain-intensive task than reading documents, looking for keywords. But lawyers gamed the system, and made it appear that both activities were equally time-consuming and difficult. (patent research must be difficult, because they get it so horribly wrong) Do not weep for the destruction of false barriers to entry.
The Earth is in the middle of an ecological meltdown, and on an unrelated note, apparently we're running out of jobs worth doing.
Could it be that, like all economists, Krugman could easily be replaced with a computer program?
I like to think of technology as giving us the opportunity to fulfill more desires more cheaply. So in a real sense, it's making all of us rich. Even the poor in the industrialized world have a higher quality of life, longer life expectancy, etc. than the very rich did 200 years ago. But the question of employment depends on whether we rich people are going to keep demanding more so that another person will find it worth their while to have a job satisfying our demand. I honestly don't know; this depends on human psychology. Once we become rich enough, maybe one of our demands will be to have leisure time instead of working, and working will not be judged to be worth doing. I guess that's called retirement. Technology might enable us to retire young without us being comparatively rich. I happen to think that's a good thing, because I think it's sad that so many people have to work who don't want to. But sometimes I think that there is something about human nature that will always keep us craving more stuff that money can buy - no matter how rich we get - and getting this extra stuff will require that we have jobs. But of course, this demand for extra stuff means that mean that there is also a demand for the people who produce that stuff, which means that on this scenario, there will be jobs for us.
Majority of people in the pre-industrial world were occupied gathering food/farming/hunting. Basically everything people did was about food.
Capitalism and industrial revolution put an end to that. Now 5% of population feeds the entire population. What were those poor 95% of people to do with themselves?
It's insane, how is society going to survive, when 95% of people do not need to grow their own food any longer. We need a super-one-new-brave-world-government-big-brother to solve it for us.
Fuck Krugman. Fuck the fact that he got a Nobel prize. There shouldn't be a fucking Nobel prize in Economics. (Not that the 'Peace' prize is any better.)
What Krugman wants is to put people digging ditches and government (taxes/borrowing/printing) to pay for it, and then other people to come right behind them and fill those ditches up with dirt, so they could be dug again by the third batch of people.
Note, that I am insulting the guy, but I am telling the actual facts. He did on a radio program said exactly that, that it would be better for people to be given government jobs digging ditches, even IF it creates traffic jams. I am insulting the guy, he doesn't understand economics. I am insulting him, he doesn't understand inflation. I am insulting him, as he is part of the machine that is destroying and distorting even the most basic understanding of real economic principles in people. I am insulting him, fuck him. But this is not a troll, I am very open about insulting the fucking guy, fucking piece of shit. And the Nobel prize is dead until he returns it (and possibly Obama as well.)
What is REALLY needed is removal of government stronghold on the economics and monetary supply and interest rates and to allow people to try and fail, to risk and fail, to try and risk and fail, so that SOME of them can try and succeed and create something new that sticks to the market, and none of it is going to come from government spending, because at this point governments have no money to spend.
Of-course this is not going to happen, the government is not going to just stop being, stop spending, stop wars, stop whatever it does, until the last dollar is worth 0. It's just too lucrative to be in government, to work with government, to be around even. You get special contracts, treatment, privileges, you get an easy pass. So instead of fixing the problem, the gov't is going to make it so terrible (and it did already) that there will be no return, and the economic collapse is now evidently unavoidable. Thanks to Keynesian shamans like Krugman, who provide the ideological arguments that are devoid of any actual economic truths but do serve to push forward the agenda of those, who are in power and who benefit from being in power.
You can't handle the truth.
Lawyers can't command a middle class income? I had a barrister meet me at the courts. $3000. The case was postponed because something else was more important. So we had to come back. Another $2500. And he did nothing but stand up and say "yes" to the judge and sit back down every now and then. But lawyers are one of those things you need, because the fight happens on their terms, ie. in court.
My solicitor also charged $1 for each photocopied sheet, and then sent us craploads of them in the mail. They should be fined, not rewarded, for not even trying to pretend to be the slightest bit paperless. Haven't they heard of email? I thought the standard anti-lawyer jokes were a bit much until I had to deal with them.
At least doctors actually feel obliged to provide a service when you pay them.
Politicians... Who decides their salary? Could it be the... politicians?
Computing is open to everyone (FOSS etc.) And which slashdot reader honestly hasn't given free IT support to friends and family? If you're not paying for their time, Doctors and Lawyers won't even say anything beyond "You should see a Lawyer/Doctor", because they don't want to risk being sued (ie. paying for a lawyer). Do IT Tech Support charge $3000 to turn up to a place, then come back for $2500 a week later?
Slashdot should start a new ministry in society. Half of us should arrest the spammers and virus-coders, and the other half should charge exorbitant fees to "represent them" in IT court. Those who have been around the longest should command salaries of $300k+ (to prevent possible corruption ;) and pass judgement on whomever they please. After all, it'll be their system.
Over my working life the trend has been to devalue a liberal arts education and replace it with very specific skills training (at great cost). But the student is making a bet that what they are learning will still be needed when they graduate and seek to pay off their education loans. Problem is that in the old days the employers expected to train new hires to their specific needs and industry -- but today that is all on the prospective employee. This is a sucker bet at best. The problem is that the jobs that supported the middle class are more or less gone and the employment needs of the moment are transitory.
I would suggest that one of the real disservices that HR departments have inflicted on employers is that they have no responsibility for their work force -- someone else should do all the training so the company gets the interchangeable skills they need at the moment, and discards them just as quickly. Problem is that to quickly re-train takes time and is best supported by a broad-based rather than narrow education. That ain't what we got.
The real question is more one of social engineering -- what kind of society do we want and how do we get there? For example, do we need or want a vast army of under-employed in a neo-feudal society? In reality, do people need to work at all to live a decent life? And if they don't, what do they do? Endless reality TV? Or a resurgence of dilettantism? Being retired, I would vote for the latter. But that requires intellectual skills of some sort -- in my view the product of a 'liberal arts' education. Not sure our profit-based fee for service model can get there.
One thing is clear -- more of the same just is not going to cut it. Particularly since the deck is stacked against the prospective job seeker.
All of us are glad to that we can reap the benefits of the industrial revolution. We all in the advanced countries live greatly better lives than those of 300 years ago. Even the poor of the world have benefited from public health advances.
Still we have to recognize the the industrial revolution was pure hell for the artisans and farmers who lost their livelihoods at the time.
We may be in the same situation with the information revolution, with a great long term outcome but a large amount of short term pain. I realize, as Keynes said, "In the long term we will all be dead".
So that when the Butlerian Jihad comes I will be ready.
college degrees are poor for most IT jobs they need training + maybe 2 years class room not 4 years or more class room.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/02/27/1530247/IT-Graduates-Not-Well-Trained-Ready-To-Go?from=rss
There has been a tendency to favour social skills more than craftmanship throughout the world for a while. Ofcourse you need to have social skills but they must never take precedence over your skill in your work.
While a salesman that scares any customer away is bad its obviously really bad having a manager without any skills other than social skills. I have had my share of sociopaths above me and while they can climb a career ladder like no one else they have had zero benefit in any position they have had.
In some enviroments having a brain is not an advantage despite excellent social skills because you know what you should be doing, but you understand that while being the best for the company, it would be detrimental to your career.
HTTP/1.1 400
The issue is with who is being replaced. If software can replace you then you never had any brains to begin with.
Krugman is usually right on the money, but he's out in left field on this one. The kind of routine task he says is being replaced by computers is not the kind of work real "brains" do. We are quite far from any sort of automation of any real knowledge work. There is no such thing as software that creates software, for example, only software that helps create software. There is certainly no software than can elicit requirements for software systems from business users; it's a pretty iffy proposition even when done by humans, let alone computers.
This is the kind of fantasy the likes of Ray Kurzweil dreams about, but it has little to do with reality. My job is far more likely to be lost to other humans than to computers...
there were only about 620 total laws (religious, civil and criminal) in the Old Testament.
The jewish tribes could not empty a bottle in a river and kill off an entire ecosystem 100 km downstream. They couldn't mount a Ponzi scheme big enough to tear an entire nation down in its fall. Welcome to the 21th century...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Perhaps we need a Butlerian Jihad?
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion...
Somehow I feel like I have hit the nail on the head when I get a spurious troll mod.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Since this hasn't happened, there's obviously a flaw in the assumption. The demand for lawyers still seems to be as high (higher?) than ever so is there really any efficiency saving going on? Has the amount of lawyering we need risen by so much (taking the place of common sense) or is this all made up to give the impression that they're hard done by and offering excellent value for money?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
That wiki article doesn't help your arguments much. Apart from some oil-rich places there are no good examples of guaranteed basic income effectively working anywhere.
The BIG problem with all forms of socialism is that they reduce society to a zero-sum game. Socialism inevitably takes something away from someone to give it to someone else. Under capitalism there's always an incentive to produce more.
Imagine the consequences of that guaranteed basic income system. You tax the producers and give the results to people who are unemployed. They buy stuff with that money, driving up demand for things that they did not help to produce. The result is inflation, with the workers being forced to pay higher taxes at the same time prices rise.
The inevitable next step is price control. Then the producers have no capital left to invest in increasing production. They lay off people, so there's more people to receive that basic income, which means higher taxes, less production, etc.
were called computers. They were educated people who performed long, repetitive calculations such as artillery tables. Electronic computers were developed to do that work faster and more reliably.
There doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason that the power of machines to do both mechanical and information processing shouldn't be directed to providing leisure instead of increased production. In fact, the work week for some has come down from six or seven twelve hour days, which was quite common until about 100 years ago to five eight hour days now. Children from the age of five or six used to work those hours, often in dangerous jobs.
There have always been a few people who make a good deal of money from the output of both machines and other people. That money gives them a lot of influence, and they don't give up their profits willingly. Change requires society as a whole to focus on some paricular segment, to the point where it is impossible for even hired legislators to ignore it. That will be difficult, at least in the US, because FOX News does a brilliant job of persuading a sizable chunk of the population to blame and despise the victims.
Perhaps it would be easier to start by rallying sympathy for burger flippers and Walmart drudges, and maybe even teachers, than for lawyers, though.
The universe was intelligently designed. Unfortunately God was in a hurry so he coded it in Java.
I am an economist and you're spot on. Krugman has an econ education but his position now is just a well paid clown, rabble-rousing with a column that is consistently absurd. Most of the comments in this thread are just amazing, and dismaying to me because I presume the crowd here has at least average intelligence. Mencken's _Notes on Democracy_ thesis hits home - hard.
And to ensure that unwary citizens will be summarily prosecuted and convicted, Acme Corporation has developed the RoboProsecutor, which can present irrevocable arguments on all 4,000 possible counts to a Grand Jury and can handle the caseload of an entire major city.
Falling demand from brains comes from fewer zombies.
Hence I can say...we need to allow foreign zombies in greater numbers!
BRAINS!!!!!
...independent of technology. The system favours profitability from depressed wages, not productivity. With a population with no disposable income, there's no demand for production of consumer goods or services, and this results in a vicious cycle of poverty and desperation for the majority, with the very rich continuing to amass unproductive wealth in order to maintain the fear and insecurity the system is based on. Technology is not a factor.
The legal profession is probably the weakest example possible. Many lawyers (though not all) were not doing anything of value to society in the first place, and society benefits from lawyers becoming unemployed, where they can do less harm.
There used to be very few careers for sociopaths, but now they are in high demand as CEOs. That's not a result of technology, but of the conventional mind-set of contemporary society.
AI research continues, and makes small, incremental improvements in language processing, comprehension, etc. Fairly soon, Watson-style computers will do a bad job of service desk support for products, services, etc. Eventually, they will do a pretty good job.
Robotics research continues to make robots more adaptable, more sophisticated and more aware of their environment. We are already in the process of automating jobs that would otherwise go to China and Mexico. Over time, more of those factories will come back to the US, and be staffed with robots. This will have incredibly dire consequences for China. Eventually, there will be no humans on assembly lines.
As others in these comments have said, the last human job on earth will be programming the robots and computers that are automating all the other jobs. Because it takes a certain type of mind to understand the ramifications of decisions in software, a mind that very few people possess. These people won't be called programmers anymore, they'll be called CEOs of companies with no human workers, and lots of robots and computers.
In a world where we are steadily eroding away the need for no-skill labor and minimal-skill middle management, what happens? Several predictions:
1) Things made by software and robots (hereafter referred to simply as 'robots') will get cheaper. This is a long-term historical trend. It may not sit well with your ideology, but it's a fact.
2) The cost of starting a new business will drop (unless we have politically-motivated additional structural costs) - people will come up with exotic and bewildering ways to create things to make money. And they will depend on robots and software to help them scale.
3) People with little ambition, little creativity and little brainpower are well and truly fucked. I'm sorry, it's just a fact. The set of people included in this category will increase over time. These people will be the unfortunate equivalent of the deeply mentally challenged - unable to find meaningful work. They will be obliged to live off of the welfare of others. Luckily food is cheap, internet is cheap, computers are cheap - they will have lots of amusements.
4) Software and engineering jobs will rise in status over time - because thats where the money is. Alas, people who are not good programmers will flock to the discipline, but they will not succeed at it. It will be very messy.
5) Art will proliferate, because it's one area where people can beat robots for a long time. But, of course, there's only so much demand for art, so each artist will earn a pittance. Luckily, said pittance will be enough to live modestly
6) There will still be jobs in mining and other forms of resource extraction (including farming, mining resources from landfills, etc). This will be an interesting growth area for a while.
7) People at the top will get taxed more. There's simply no way around it. It will not be pretty, but it will happen.
8) You'll see some point of semi-equilibrium, where the companies that extract resources will sell things to companies that create robots to do things, which sell those robots to other companies that extract resources. One of those resources, BTW, is 'sunlight'. These companies will be heavily taxed, and that money will be given to the people who fit into item 3 above. The B2C economy will have two parts - the people who still work, and the people who don't. The people who work will get lots of custom service, lots of human service, while the people who don't work will get lots of generic, automated service.
9) As AI slowly but inexorably improves, it will be pushed higher and higher in the management and political decision-making process. Over time, politically, we'll have a human leader who is advised by
Since I’m a snowboarder, I will compare this to the evolution of the sport. It used to be that a solid, high, 900 would win a half pipe competition. Andy finch was a good example of that. Now you need double corked 1080’s at a bare minimum. Doing it as a hobby I am able to do a 9, which would have won me medals at some point. So there was a slack there, that isn’t now, which means that the gold medalist today needs to work harder, much, much harder.
:) I certainly agree w/ your first paragraph though.
When the bar is under what is possible, there is A LOT of slack, where something like a single income family can survive. Raise the bar (awesome health care, iPads, HD TV, the internet, cell phones, etc) and you need to work HARDER, not less, to create all these things. It’s like saying that “because we have farming machinery we should to work less to put a plasma TV in every house. “ That statement is broken, not the system.
Things need to be profitable, or at least have a hope of being useful. We spent all that money because the STAKE OF THE WORLD was at risk. You want governments to do something horribly inefficient “for the sake of it” Think of the sacrifice that was made in WWII to evolve so fast. I mean really, think of how many lives were lost & torn up. Think of how many hours where wasted, etc, etc. Think of how horrible you are suggesting you make life for people now to create a possible gain for the next generation. Not to mention that there are so many possible UFO/Alien ties to the quick WWII evolution that it may have not been us at all (not saying that was true, just expounding my argument.)
So I think you’re nuts. I mean that with love.
But with fast food and the collapsing retail sales.
I'm sure the Zombie cartels will help keep the market steady.
I hear that IBM is working on a program to write New York Times editorials :)
Any new technology results in more work, actually, but in industries that didn't even exist before the new technology. For example: the invention of television has created an entire industry of cameramen, script writers, actors, network programming executives, etc. It didn't just put theatre and cinema people out of work. Yes, new technologies kills jobs in old industries. While creating tenfold more jobs in new, previously nonexistent industries. Most of those jobs requiring more skilled, less repetitive, more brain-heavy work than before.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When those brains MAKE the software, it becomes more of a catch 22.
This needs more cowbell!!!
That doesn't ring true to me. I can't thing of one person I know who things physicians are overpaid. If anything, my impression is that people feel bad for doctors who face huge student loans and malpractice insurance rates, in addition to several years of sleep-depriving residencies.
However, a lot of jobs are indeed in jeopardy.
There's no stopping the use of machines, and whining
about it won't help.
The solution lies in re-training in order to circumvent
one's temporary loss of a job. This ought to mean that
the economy in which this scenario is played out will become
*more* competitive with respect to other economies. Time will
tell.
I also think as a society it’s time to move away from the 5+ day work week. We have enough technology now that there is no reason for the majority of the population to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week working. How we get the ball rolling on this one I don’t know. The economy seems to be geared more towards people working more than less. Remember back when having a two income family really put you on top. Then everyone started to do it and the economy adjusted. Now you need that just to get by. We need to do that in reverse then keep going!
This will never happen as long as marginal costs of employing people are prohibitively high. Specifically, health care. Divorce health care costs from employment (in a practicable way) and you might have a shot, but we've seen how that has gone (at least in the US). I certainly hope that someone (China?, India?) pulls it off on a scale that can't be ignored by the commie-phobes in the US.
In general, I agree that employment could be optimized. Not only could people get more time to spend in leisure, caring for families, or volunteering their time, I believe that most jobs could benefit by having a wider variety of fresher hands/minds applied to them on a regular basis.
If you want to get an idea of the type of job that is being replaced, look at this blog, and the many others like it: http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/
Temp attorney document review work is awful. It is the kind of work that should be done by machines.
I do not think that means what you think it means. Punitive is for the purpose of punishment. How is making someone who benefits tremendously from society pay for that society a punishment? What exactly are we punishing them for? All the clean air & water, roads, schools that make useful workers for them, and the military and police that protect them?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Upon succefsfully returning with the time traveler to his home era, I difcovered that farming, which ufed to employ the vast majority of my countrymen, is now accomplifhed by mechanical clockworks under the supervifion of only a few percent of the populace! Surely the vaft majority of people in the colonies are now out of work!
We are all to be replaced with small shell scripts. Or maybe if we're really special it will take a page of Perl.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Forget 100 years ago. Go back 1000 or 10,000 years. Everyone worked like crazy during planting and harvest seasons or if there was a war. Otherwise, life tended to be pretty low-key, with lots of time for drinking and fucking and story-telling.
What we need to do is find a way to give ourselves the benefits of the industrial revolution without its downsides. Given the length of time it took us to go from feudalism to post-industrialism, you will want to be patient. The machines and toys may change with fearful rapidity, but human beliefs change slowly. Please note the fact that the most popular religions today are more than 1000 years old.
(or perhaps better said, the innovative, forward looking economists)
I'll concede that Krugman may indeed be a popular bloviator who uses his economics credentials for credibility rather than knowledge, but to be honest, I don't really hear anything on the traditional information channels from anyone labeled an economist that is any more informative or useful. Mostly I hear from experts in the details of current economic systems that can (in sportscaster-like fashion) describe clearly why some particular thing is happening to the economy, or tea-leaf readers that make predictions (like meteorologists) about what our current economic system is going to do next. I guess that's better that total b.s., but not by much.
I'd like very much to hear from people who are equipped to inform us about how to productively and positively adapt economic systems to changing conditions (such as the rise of technology) rather than just being buffeted about by economic storms, or who can propose new and better economic models which might suit us better than the currently established ones as the world changes. I get the impression than economics as a discipline isn't operating at that level, based on what bubbles up to the popular consciousness, at least.
Someday, everything will be done by robots and computers.
We need to start thinking about a "robot" tax/welfare society, where we all get to sit on our butts, watching TV and playing video games.
I guess we could all become "artists"...
I'm with you 100% that the current system is broken. (I think much of that stems from our collective arrogance 20+ years ago, when the intellectuals declared the United States "too intelligent and sophisticated" to waste time with physical labor, manufacturing things, and proclaimed that we'd get ahead if we let other nations do all of that stuff for us.) In reality, manufacturing involves all levels of skill, from highly technical folks who design and maintain the complex conveyor systems and automated assembly machines to the mentally handicapped guy who functions at just a high enough level so he can screw the caps on the containers as they come by, or box up products for shipment. When we decided we didn't need that stuff so much any more, we let go of a LOT more employment opportunities than we were able to fill with replacement employment peddling "intellectual property".
But the idea that just because "not enough work is available", we should institute some sort of basic income for all? Doesn't that basically define Communism the way the old Soviet Union handled things? Didn't pan out so well.... (Sure, they claimed their government would find employment for everyone and in name, they generally did. But it was clear they didn't REALLY have enough work to keep all those people employed full-time. So you had people collecting some meager paycheck for a job they only sort-of did, when they felt like coming in. Not much different than just giving them a handout and dropping the pretense that they "worked for it".)
If you want a prosperous nation, you need to CREATE more jobs. The work is ALWAYS there. It's just a matter of getting enough businesses (or even non-profits that hire people) off to a good start. Unless you really believe that humans have achieved perfection in most areas and there's NOTHING more under the sun we can do to improve on any of the things we use or do in a day -- opportunities exist to create more jobs doing real, useful work!
i already said "new technologies kills jobs in old industries."
now, think about the tenfold more jobs and economic opportunities that have been created by the Internet (which is what killed your printing plant, rightfully so)
for example, automobiles most certainly put thousands of blacksmiths making iron horseshoes out of work. and, how many new jobs, more highly skilled, were created in the automobile industry? do you see?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A university education should not be primarily vocational. Almost every university has become impossibly double-minded about this. They do a dreadful job at preparing people for the workplace, while on the other hand they no longer give them decent liberal arts education where they learn what it means to be a citizen of a civilized society. This is not to mention that they have just about priced themselves completely out of the market. I heard a lecture somewhere where the guy compared the British Empire to current American empire building. The Brits educated leaders who knew the history, language, and culture of various regions in the world, and were trained to be diplomats and effective political leaders. Now all we have are soldiers to lead these regions, because everyone either gets an MBA or is a film major; we actually don't have people capable of understanding what we should do. Furthermore, for the vast majority, their education ends after their 4 years of quasi-vocational 'higher' learning, and they just get dumber from there. If anything is a crisis in American society, this would be it. Software has nothing to do with the fact that we have forgotten how to lead substantive lives. The work market is always going to shift, and someone will always be sitting in the seat of the Luddites, that much is inevitable.
The purpose of 'brains' is not just to have a hard and lucrative job.
We live in a society that begrudges good pay to workers who actually make things
Not really, it's just that China undercuts them so they look greedy when they ask for twice as much.
Many people regard the medical profession as damn near crooks for, *gasp*, actually wanting to be paid very well because of the risks that come with their work and the amount of real education they need to get in the door.
Well for most general practitioners and diagnoses, they can be replaced by WebMD, just like the article points out. And a lot of the time they're just guessing. But I think the main thing that makes people begrudge the medical system, here at least, is that every test, procedure, and sterilized two by four costs a ludicrous amount of money. And most people really don't need someone with 12 years of experience to tell them "yep, that's a bad cough you got there, here's a script for that". Plus there's the horrible run-around you have to do to get any help, when you least feel like even moving.
It used to be that anyone could read the laws of their state and become a lawyer; today you need a juris doctorate to get in the door.
And you can go get one by... wait for it... reading the state laws.
Our legal system needs a reset on its entire code.
Ah, I see you're one of the "burn it all down and start from scratch" type. Listen, that never ends well. Working inside the system and smoothly making things better is a lot better then the chaos that a complete revolution causes.
There are over 4,000 federal crimes; to whit, there were only about 620 total laws (religious, civil and criminal) in the Old Testament.
Yeah... cause THAT was such a great system.
And taxes are complicated, but only for rich people. The 1040ez is indeed pretty easy. But rich people pay financial people to get innovative with their money and evade taxes. The only way you could make it simpler is to abolish all the non-profits, deductions, and credits. Which would screw over a lot of people.
I get it, you're ranting against the system. It's good to blow off steam. But relax, it's really not all that bad.
Certainly what Mr Krugman does for a living could be replaced by computer software. It's not like his columns in the New York Times are the result of skilled labor.
The crux of Krugman's argument seems to be the extraordinarily misleading statement that "A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value." Krugman has obviously never studied information theory. Yes, our world is 'awash' with information, but that's not because machines are especially good at producing it. Machines are only good at copying it.
Krugman's error stems from his conflation of the two definitions of information. By one definition, the physical number of bits that the human race has managed to store on hard drives, the amount of information the human race has produced has been increasing exponentially. However, this is not useful information, and not the kind of information that requires any serious education to produce. The other definition is from information theory, where information is defined in terms of randomness: here, information is the total number of bits that you need in order to convey a signal in its most compressed form (i.e. the 'random' component of the signal that can't be derived from other parts of the signal). By this definition, the fact that I copy the 100mb file 'a.mp4' from my desktop to my home folder does not mean that I have produced 100mb of information; I have produced at most 64 bytes of information, since that's the number of bytes it took for me to describe the new state of the world.
As for the rest of the article, Krugman argues (correctly, I believe) that any job which requires the production of information will remain strictly in the domain of human beings. However, he seems to forget that most physical goods are just copies of other physical goods, and therefore contain very little information. The production of those goods can generally be replaced by machines.
However, there is still some insight in what Krugman says, though you have to think a bit to realize it. Krugman is actually arguing that educations are only valuable if they teach you how to produce information, and that an education which only teaches you to parrot facts makes you very much like a computer, and very much replaceable by computers. Hence why he needed to use lawyers in his example. I don't think us computer scientists have much to worry about from this argument.
Interesting short story by Marshall Brain on this:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Wishful thinking, but society, as a whole does need to face the fact that there will be less work needed to support people in the future.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The US is also no better able to deal with it in its current laws. The Mosaic Law at least regarded willful negligence that lead to deaths as a form of capital murder, plus its laws covering willfully harming property are cut and dry. It would be almost impossible to escape execution under the Mosaic Law for killing someone as a result of toxic dumping. The only scenario would be is if no one actually knew that the chemicals were toxic.
Meanwhile, the worst that came of the Deepwater Horizon fiasco was a lawsuit and possibly a little jail time for some people. This is despite the fact that the executives who cut the corners that caused the incident should have faced felony murder (Google it) charges.
True, but you're obviously ignorant of the fact that Madoff was actually caught well before the stock market crash. Private analysts caught him almost a decade ago and alerted his customers who were primarily Jewish and shrieked "you eeeevil anti-Semites, how dare you attack Bernie?!" Our system didn't stop him. The FBI or state police in New York didn't get involved. Heck, the FBI gave testimony about the mortgage fraud in 2004 that caused the crash in 2008 and still didn't bust any skulls despite what they were seeing.
In other words, all of your complicated, high falutin' laws ain't done a damn thing to stop these serious things from happening.
Meanwhile, your "response" does nothing to address the fact that the federal government has over 7 million lines of income tax code.
7 million lines of income tax regulations. Think about that. What on Earth justifies a tax code that complicated?
For several years sociologists have anticipated that almost all human labor would soon be obsolete. They have already issued a plan that has merit. The idea is to issue a full pay check, not a low level check, but a robust check, to each adult. Then require some form of gambling of a portion of that pay check so that some people would tend to have more money than others. By having people who gamble more skillfully win more often the social pecking order is preserved.
The real bust out will occur when we incorporate a machine in such a way that all money earned by the machine less the usual taxes will be self invested back into building a stronger and more able machine. That could be something no more dramatic than a powerful computer system that invests in the stock market and upon gaining funds keeps extending its data base and electronic abilities but never pays out to humans. Or it could be as basic as a robotic farm tractor that upgrades the model of the tractor constantly and then sells it and keeps the returns to fund building an ever better farm tractor.
The point being that not only is human labor challenged but human ownership and investment will also be severely challenged. Remember the Supreme Court declaring that corporations have basic rights. That corporation could be nothing more than a couple of machines combining resources with the humans spawning the self feeding corporation. Frankly I like the idea.
If there is a category of "smart" people who should be put out of work by technology, then in my opinion lawyers are it... :rolleyes:
Horses may make a good comparison, since we have primarily used them for work and not food. Horses have some advantages, but are inferior to tractors and automobiles for most things. And so today, the population of horses is much lower. We've cut them.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Lawyer replaced by shell script
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Too many breeders for inputs
I cannot in good conscience accept as an example that software is replacing manpower and lengthy, expensive, difficult training, and that this is _bad_, if that example is the legal field. Having people manually review tens of thousands of documents to try and understand and find a few conversations is one of the best examples of inefficiency. Tax law and real estate law are so complicated people don't even make jokes about it anymore because considering this fact and its collateral damage (it takes 15% of the cost of a home, at least three trained professional in different fields, and a dead tree to transfer ownership of a home). So, yeah, software might be replacing people who borrow a hundred thousand dollars to go to school to get into one of these jobs so they can work themselves to death paying off their loans, but that's actually good for everyone.
viz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMvARy0lBLE
A JD is closer to a professional masters degree than a doctorate. Lawyers just hate being second best... Look up grade inflation at law schools for a good example.
And I don't begrudge doctors their money. I think a good doctor should be paid like, say, a good CEO. The problem is, all payscales have become so ridiculously shifted. No one should be paid that much. And don't argue "better pay gets better people" cause the people who trashed our economy 2 (and 10, and 90) years ago were all very well paid. Veeeeerrrrry well paid. There's an interesting paper about how, at about 75k a year, paying people more doesn't really do much as far as making them better at their jobs. At that point, assuming they've relatively little debt, they're extremely comfortable.
Maybe that's what we should do for doctors. Less debt when they graduate, more med schools and more doctors so they don't have risks like doing surgery on 2 hours sleep and a double espresso... Oh wait, the AMA thinks that that would devalue doctors and wont let it happen...
True, the scale of destruction was less attainable; but the basis for environmental and banking laws are there. If that system of law was all we had, wise judges could easily fill in the gaps.
The Old Testament has laws on where to put your sewage. Charging interest is illegal except to foreigners--an idea I find fascinating since it's in some sense pro-tarrif/anti-Free Trade. You're not allowed to take a tool vital to the conduct of trade as collatoral (IIRC, they cite the example of not taking a miller's millstone as collatoral). Weights and measures must be just (ie, no lying about how much precious metal is in a coin, or how much grain is in the bag).
It's all very understandable, and a fair judge could easily find cause to punish violators of these 21st century crimes. In the first case he could decide that what came out of the bottle was tantamount to "sewage", and in the case of a Ponzi he doesn't even need to pull in the laws governing trade--he can just fall back on "Thou shalt not lie".
Or is being boring, giving headaches and so on somewhere in your list of must- or nice-to-haves when looking for a job?
each link in your chain of logic is flawed.
Rising demand does not lead to inflation as long as production can keep up. This whole conversation is about how mechanical workers are leaving people unemployed.
Inflation does not necessarily lead to higher taxes.
Rising taxes don't necessarily lead to price controls. Where did you even get these ideas? Am I being trolled?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Great, we got the guy up top talking about Star Trek and their replicators, now we got this guy at the bottom talking about Worfe.
Now all we need to Troy, Data, Picard and maybe Riker and we are set.
The point is that educated "smart" jobs are increasingly becoming at risk of downsizing due to smart automation. It may seem like a dull assembly line type job but it is not, he cited lawyers because of the high degree of education and difficulty those "dull" jobs required; he wasn't thinking about how popular lawyers are or how inept the reader would be in understanding the difference between a pre-industrial textile worker and a law researcher.
This isn't low-level manual labor, this is educated career people who are being cut out and it will continue - you never know who will be next...as a college student you can't predict your niche will be around; so... we blab about continual education - at what point do we start to question the "system"?? How bad does it have to get for the stupid majority to catch on and then get upset enough to act?
Will we all be working 40+ hrs a week WHILE going to school part time for our whole lives? (that is, unless you are in management...)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
...or has someone beat your teeth out?
I'm old enough to remember the sci-fi promise that more and more automation would allow humans more leisure time without sacrificing the necessities and comforts they were accustomed to. But that hasn't really come to pass, even with machines taking over human jobs.
The technology has changed, but the economic model has not. You're still selling your time, not your output. Your rate per period (hourly or yearly) is dictated by the labor market (supply and demand for people who do what you do).
Would you really want a world where increased productivity meant decreased working for the same output? Do you think you'd still have your smartphone, your big TV and game console, your sophisticated automobile, the Internet, all that stuff that you take for granted, if we had simply chosen to increase leisure time instead of increasing productivity? Think of how cheap they are, too. Things like the iPad were sci-fi not long ago, but now you can waltz into your local apple store and buy one for a few hundred bucks. If waltzing isn't your thing, you can order one online for the same price, and it will be in your hands in a few days. You sound like you're old enough to step back and realize just how amazing that is.
Also, we're whining right now about unemployment that is 8.something%, but that's actually not too bad in historical terms. We're actually not doing too badly keeping folks employed, if you think about it.
And so now Paul Krugman is telling us that we're doomed because an army of attorneys don't need to read documents anymore. This comes across to me the same way Tom Friedman's World is Flat did a few years back. High speed communications and combined with cheap overseas labor was going to make American workers obsolete. Anyone who has ever worked on a "flat world" project knew Friedman was full of shit, and Krugman is also full of shit, at least for the foreseeable future.
Oh sure, computers are great at finding a needle in a haystack. Hell, Google can find a needle in all of the world's hay, and in just a few hundred milliseconds. But you still have to know what the needle is.
Present day, computers suck at figuring out what the needle is. A human, you can instruct to, "Find me something useful for [whatever]. Use your experience to know what would be useful." Computer stink at that. A computer can search all correspondence between the CEO and the CFO about shell companies, even if the keywords "shell company" aren't used, the computer can infer from the context. But you can't just tell a computer, "Look at all of the email and find what's relevant to the case."
I've always been a fan of letting computers do what they're good at, and letting humans do what we're good at. Let's not get confused that a machine is always better than a human or vice versa. We each have our own comparative advantage.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
A nutless monkey could do your job.
Except capital is not being invested now is it, at least not domestically ... but I forget, we should "all" get poorer so we can get richer, austerity ahoy.
Foregoing cable TV, broadband and buying used cars instead of new will not save enough money for the average family to get by without two incomes and live in a safe area that is accessible to jobs and services, pay for health care and educate their children, etc.
Just do the freakin' math and stop trotting out this lame talking point. This is just a new take on the "welfare queen" myth.
never find another job that pays as well, slipping down the social food chain. (Citation: Detroit).
The jewish tribes could not empty a bottle in a river and kill off an entire ecosystem 100 km downstream.
Nah. That only took one guy...
You're using words again, and I don't think any of them mean what you think they mean.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Yes, Krugman is an idiot who believes that job creation is the primary function of an economy. In fact a large portion (majority?) of economists have been trained in this view, known as Keynesianism.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The solution to this problem is the basic income. Essentially, those who engage in profitable production through the ownership of these systems pay taxes that are distributed to everyone as a basic, minimum income in exchange for those systems creating vast unemployment.
It's a single possibility that creates the sci-fi ideal of lowering the number of work hours and/or the number of people who have to work, while providing for their well being and the availability of recreation time for innovation, as well as the old capitalist incentive for ownership and entrepreneurship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
How strange -- in your sarcasm something really interested came out. The primary function of an economy is not to create jobs. It is to satisfy demand. Some people demand labor, others will sacrifice their time and skill for money. Some people demand music, others will sacrifice money for the music.
An economy is the collected exchange of goods and services, based on one party's desire to make that exchange with another party. This satisfies demand.
Were job creation the only thing required, it would be quite simple to order people to dig ditches and give them fiat currency to do so. You are quite right that many mainstream economists would think that is a good idea.
Marshall Brain once wrote quite an entertaining story about this phenomenon. I think it might be spot on (until it goes crackpot, that is:P).
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
0x or or snor perron?!
The other 500 then could: make a second car company
And buy the land how? And buy the necessary government regulatory licenses how? And license the essential patents how? (Unpatented cars are not street legal due to increases in government standards for safety, fuel efficiency, and emissions control, all of which require patented processes.) And fight covenants not to compete how? There are entry barriers against laid-off workers starting their own business to compete with their former employers.
The rate (change) in productivity increases is far out-stripping the rate of deflation (actually by many orders of magnitude now as you point out that deflation is being actively discouraged).
The problem is, even under ideal conditions, the rate of productivity increases far outpaces the rate of deflation even if deflation were allowed to occur. While perhaps in a macro-sense (centuries) this would be OK, in the short term this is NOT a good thing.
Even if the rates were equal, this is still a problem as productivity increases means employment elimination. Even a 20% decrease in a product price is out of the reach of someone with $0 income.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Our legal system needs a reset on its entire code. There are over 4,000 federal crimes; to whit, there were only about 620 total laws (religious, civil and criminal) in the Old Testament. That means that there are likely more felonies in the federal criminal code than there were total regulations on every aspect of civilized life back then. Heck, the Roman law of the 12 tables, on which many of our ideas are based as well, is practically a foot note compared to just our personal income tax code.
Wait, are you advocating a return to justice driven by such concepts as "an eye for an eye?"
Regardless, you appear to be overlooking the fact that civilization has also evolved for more than 2000 years since the Old Testament was written. New laws exist to address situations that did not even exist back then.
The problems arise if the boring job isn't replaced by an interesting job. Because then you not getting the boring job means you not getting a job at all.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The primary function of an economy is not to create jobs. It is to satisfy demand. Some people demand labor, others will sacrifice their time and skill for money.
That's just the same thing. I demand labor to help build my robot army. What happens to that labor once the robots are built? It's a humongous negative externality built right into the flawed assumptions of almost every idiot economist on the planet.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It's about highly educated people, not about uneducated manual workers, so that shouldn't be the problem.
OK, I follow the math now... what can I say but "it's Monday". :)
But my basic point still remains sound regardless of the precise value of 'n'. To give substandard wages to a fairly small percentage of people you have to reduce the wages of a much larger percentage to substandard - hilarity will not ensue. If you could enforce employment (a cure worse than the disease IMO), it would all sort itself out in a decade or two... but it wouldn't be pretty.
Machines and now, computers, replaced manual labours one by one. Capitalism will fail.
That is the success of capitalism. A surplus of labor means cheaper labor. And as we are currently seeing in the US, the capitalists don't believe in the social welfare either. It's just an unnecessary expense for the corporations.
When the corporations advocate for government spending on social welfare...it's because they already have a plan for providing the services, usually in the form of a no-bid contract.
Yeah, call me disillusioned.
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
Many places in the US are beginning to prefer the nurse practitioners (advanced nursing degree allowed to prescribe), since they can perform most of the examination/diagnosis duties of the MD's, and cost less in terms of salary to insurance reimbursement ratios.
Of course, at the same time places are cutting registered nurses and using cheaper LPNs and nurses aides more also. But then this has more to do with corporate profitability, and pushing productivity to the extreme limits rather than best practices.
In the US, we still have perverse incentives to have people seen multiple times, when best practices would suggest a single visit.
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
I'll concede that Krugman may indeed be a popular bloviator who uses his economics credentials for credibility rather than knowledge
Bash Krugman all you want, but the guy has better statistics-based macroeconomic models than all of the philosophy-based fresh-water economists put together. And, he's still doing relevant, published research in the field. There are many economists out there far more worthy of the phrase "using his credentials for credibility" than Krugman.
That is all.
Destruction of property and fraud.
Next?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I think that work benefits might have something to do with it. Maybe there needs to be legislation that prevents any distinction between part-time and full-time workers. We all get to earn benefits based on the hours that we worked.
Also, the current overtime benefits are not disincentives to overtime work. I think that overtime should start at 6 hours. Every hour should result in double the day's pay. The idea is that overtime is really meant for absolute emergencies. By that, I don't mean late deadlines. I mean, actual safety emergencies.
Current models are built around how much time we can spend at work. They should be built around how much we can do with a fixed amount of time.
There are lots of things that we can do.
Severance packages should include free education, and the money for former employees to support themselves, during that education. I'm not a socialist, or a liberal, but the idea is that company decisions have far reaching implications, and the lower level workers just can't fluidly change careers.
testing out my trending skills
Remember the Supreme Court declaring that corporations have basic rights. That corporation could be nothing more than a couple of machines combining resources with the humans spawning the self feeding corporation. Frankly I like the idea.
Trying to pass the Turing test, eh? Caught ya! :-)
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
I think one of the many problems with this approach that isn't mentioned is it has the greatest negative effect on young adults 18-27. Right at the age their brains are best set to learn lots of new info, they are also most likely to be lazy, and sub come to a free apartment and parties and whatnot. Yes, a lot of them do this now. but without real motivation to work, you will remove the work ethic from them. Suddenly new tech isn't made fast enough, but you don't realize it till 15 years later. Of course I suppose you could just make EVERYone join the army for 7 years, and ahve them build roads and such.
But about all the economists can say is "I'm alright Jack. Fuck you."
There *IS* no valid way to adjust to technological unemployment in this society. There is effectively no constraint on the ability of the wealthy, whether individuals or corporations, to abuse their employees, including absconding with funds entrusted to their care for retirement, firing without just cause, abuse on the job, or many other things. The wealthy can afford to hire a lawyer to find the place where the laws can be understood to allow them to do whatever they did, and you can't afford any such expense. Even if you win, you lose. And if you lose (usually) you *really* lose.
Earlier in the thread I heard a lot of programmers "whistling in the dark". Technological unemployment is coming to programmers faster and faster with every decade. And it's a highly exportable job. Even in 1970 it was often the case that for a programmer the only promotion possible was into management...which most programmers, especially the best ones, are highly unskilled at.
Other people remind me of my younger brother, proclaiming "If they can't make it on their own, they don't deserve help". He never remembers the times when he has been desperate for help himself, or that the family did help him. He feels no reciprocal responsibility. People who make that claim appear to me as the same people who feel free to demand your help when they "need" it. By *their* perception of need.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Ah, ignorance of basic economic science on Slashdot once again. Ok, this is why, even though the avg. worker is 20x as productive as we were 200 years ago (a guess, I'm too lazy to look up the actual figures, but suffice to say our productivity has gone up a LOT thanks to automation) , we are not working 20x less hours: we have lots of extra stuff. Keep in mind that unemployment has remained fluctuating but within the same range for the past 200 years despite massive productivity gains. Obviously this extra productivity hasn't stolen jobs yet. No, the extra productivity didn't disappear, it went into more stuff ("higher standard of living", for economists)
I'm not joking. On the macro level, all of that excess productivity gets channeled into making extra "stuff" that people want to buy. If everyone were happy with a 1810 standard of living, there would be no one to buy this extra stuff, and there would be much less work (because that excess productivity is wasted). But since we like having a standard of living higher than that of the average 1810 worker, there is demand for extra stuff. That's where the extra productivity goes. So while it takes fewer people to harvest food/make industrial widgets than it did in 1810 thanks to machines, the people who would have been working on the farm in 1810 are instead hard at work making cars, computers, telephones, and providing services that weren't cheap/widely available in 1810 like modern medicine, travel, or yoga training.
But ok, you want to take this extra productivity gain and translate it into more free time, not more stuff. It is still possible to do this, depending on what kind of jobs you can find. Let's say you work for $10/hr for 80 hours a week, that's a half work-week.. That's $800/month. If you're willing to downsize to a 1810's lifestyle, it's very possible to live on $800/month. (For the purposes of this discussion we're ignoring gov't assistance). No telephone, no electricity, smaller house (a shack in the woods is nice), cheaper food (McD's probably more cost-efficient calorie- and protein-wise than an 1810 meal - meat was EXPENSIVE back then because they were more valuable as farm animals). Of course if you have medical bills you are sunk, but they didn't have modern medicine in the 1810's either. You can do this because you live in a high-productivity economy.
On a national level, we can see a similar pattern in other countries. Underdeveloped countries still have low productivity and low levels of automation. People in this countries work full hours and have a low standard of living - they're basically 100 yrs behind us. There are some socialist developed countries that have, on a national level, decided to trade productivity for more free time, not more stuff. So the French worker gets 3 months of vacation a year, but has less stuff than the average American worker - smaller car, smaller house, smaller TV, less stuff (this is reflected in consumption statistics), less food (probably a good thing all in all). America didn't go that route, because we're not lazy like the French. Also, we kind of like being the biggest kid on the block, and that means work. But if YOU want that kind of lifestyle, if you make the right kind of decisions/are smart with career planning it is possible to downsize your life and trade excess productivity for time. Instead of devoting your education/work life to climbing the career ladder, devote it to engineering an exit into a decently compensated part-time, contract, or freelance position. Then reap the benefits of extra time. No robot butler yet, though, sorry.
TL;DR - extra productivity from machines/automation doesn't disappear. It goes into higher standard of living. If you are willing to accept a lower standard of living, you can convert that extra productivity into free time.
Ah, ignorance of basic economic science on Slashdot once again. If productivity (automation, 1 man can do the work of 4, etc.) created unemployment, we would be at 99% unemployment or so by now. Instead, unemployment has been mostly stable, on a historical scale. 10% is actually about the unemployment pre Civil War, IIRC. So why, even though the avg. worker is 20x as productive as we were 200 years ago (a guess, I'm too lazy to look up the actual figures, but suffice to say our productivity has gone up a LOT thanks to automation) are we are not working 20x less hours? we have lots of extra stuff and services. Obviously this extra productivity hasn't stolen jobs yet. No, the extra productivity didn't disappear, it went into more stuff ("higher standard of living", for economists)
I'm not joking. On the macro level, all of that excess productivity gets channeled into making extra "stuff" that people want to buy. If everyone were happy with a 1810 standard of living, there would be no one to buy this extra stuff, and there would be much less work (because that excess productivity is wasted). But since we like having a standard of living higher than that of the average 1810 worker, there is demand for extra stuff. That's where the extra productivity goes. So while it takes fewer people to harvest food/make industrial widgets than it did in 1810 thanks to machines, the people who would have been working on the farm in 1810 are instead hard at work making cars, computers, telephones, and providing services that weren't cheap/widely available in 1810 like modern medicine, tour guides, or yoga training.
But ok, you want to take this extra productivity gain and translate it into more free time, not more stuff. It is still possible to do this, if you can find the right part-time job. Let's say you work for $10/hr for 20 hours a week, that's a half work-week.. That's $800/month. If you're willing to downsize to a 1810's lifestyle, it's very possible to live on $800/month. (For the purposes of this discussion we're ignoring gov't assistance). No telephone, no electricity, smaller house (a shack in the woods is nice), cheaper food (McD's probably more cost-efficient calorie- and protein-wise than an 1810 meal - meat was EXPENSIVE back then because they were more valuable as farm animals). Of course if you have medical bills you are sunk, but they didn't have modern medicine in the 1810's either. You can do this because you live in a high-productivity economy, and you have chosen to trade that extra productivity for free time, not for higher standard of living. As it happens, most people like a modern standard of living, and enjoying the benefits of modern science, so they work a full work-week instead.
On a national level, we can see a similar pattern in other countries. Underdeveloped countries still have low productivity and low levels of automation. People in these countries work full hours and have a low standard of living - they're basically 100 yrs behind us. There are some socialist developed countries that have, on a national level, decided to trade productivity for more free time, not more stuff. So the French worker gets 3 months of vacation a year, but has less stuff than the average American worker - smaller car, smaller house, smaller TV, less stuff (this is reflected in consumption statistics), less food (probably a good thing all in all). America didn't go that route, because we're not lazy like the French. Also, we kind of like being the biggest kid on the block, and that means work. But if YOU want that kind of lifestyle, if you make the right kind of decisions/are smart with career planning it is possible to downsize your life and trade excess productivity for time. Instead of devoting your education/work life to climbing the career ladder, devote it to engineering an exit into a decently compensated part-time, contract, or freelance position. Then reap the benefits of extra time. No robot butler yet, though, sorry. Of course if you WANTED a robot butler, you'd have to work full-time to af
So then they'll simply generate more laws to keep themselves in power! After all, most politicians are former lawyers, at least where I am from (Germany).
I mean, this is the time where there is a new law being thought out to push/mandate a new (but essentially useless) product. I have seen that pattern several times now...
Because your name here fits you so well (wandering idiot), we thought we'd all let you know that you can stop trying to play "smart" now already, as we know you're an idiot. You even said it yourself, wandering idiot, lmao!
See the URL below:
"...You're the host file guy, aren't you? Yay, I have a /. enemy!" - by Wandering Idiot (563842) on Thursday March 10, @06:35PM (#35448650)
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2025178&cid=35442196
Your own trolling words got yourself bitch slapped.