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The Real Job Threat
NicknamesAreStupid writes "The NYTimes reports on a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew P. McAfee (MIT director-level staffers), Race Against the Machine, which suggests that the true threat to jobs is not outsourcing — it's the machine! Imagine the Terminator flipping burgers, cleaning your house, approving your loan, handling your IT questions, and doing your job faster, better, and more cheaply. Now that's an apocalypse with a twist — The Job Terminator."
Reader wjousts points out another of the authors' arguments: that IT advances have cost more jobs than they've created.
Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!
... I thought in economics they called this restructuralization unemployment or some such term that wasn't necessarily bad unemployment. But they found work elsewhere -- all four of my grandparents were dirt farmers and I sure the hell am not. Sure, I grew up working on farms but picking rock and bailing hay are chump jobs. I herald the man that does away with that work. I think this statement is universally true: You could provide someone the means to complete all the work they want and -- given they are industrious enough -- you can come back the next day and they will be ready to pay you for more work done in new and different ways.
Well, the fact is that at first there were people that lost their jobs (the generation undergoing restructuring in their trade)
People have asked me if I'm afraid about open source ruining my software job. I couldn't be more diametrically opposed to that position. Open source basically makes me better at my job and ensures my future by empowering me to do my job better. I could give someone all the software they ask for one day and come back the next day only to have them asking me for more software.
There will always be more work to be done and I think there will always be more software to write for a very very very long time. I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards).
My work here is dung.
The problem with this absurd argument is that people want stuff, not jobs. The only reason you work a job is so you can buy the things you want/need. And if you don't have to work as much to get them, that's hardly a problem.
So, instead of working, you can now play while a machine does the work. Seems like an improvement to me.
No, it's been known since at least sometime in the 30s that there would be less and less need for labor in the future. What wasn't foreseen was the willingness of the working class to allow wealth to collect at the top and the increased consumption of things that people don't particularly want or need.
Back then it was expected that in the future the normal work day would shrink from 8 hours to something more like 3 hours as workers got more done in less time. Basically failing to account for robber barons that tend to screw up such things and assuming that people would continue to support their own best interests.
Obviously, they were quite wrong in that regard.
Your steam drill is calling on line one.
Seriously, this is the kind of discussion we get from the economically illiterate. There is a story, frequently attributed to Milton Friedman, regarding this sort of nonsense:
Dog is my co-pilot.
I've had similar thoughts myself. The problem isn't that machines are going to do jobs people now do, it's that people have been misled to believe their function is to do jobs. Your "job" is to live. Go outside. Have fun. Play with your kids. If we're lucky, someday all these mundane things we have to do now will not need to be done in the future. Your lawnba will cut your grass. Something will crawl up and down your house to paint it.
That said, there's really not a lack of useful work to be done. There's tons to be done in the sciences, for example. Medical research is wide open. There's so much we don't know yet.
There was a story about this involving some sort of super AI called Manna. It ended up essentially destroying the economy, I believe, and relegating everyone below the highest classes to concentration camps for poor people.
I don't know that their solution was ideal, but I do suspect that a post-scarce economy is what we need to investigate.
There used to be this sci-fi notion that one day, we'd have robots do all of our work, and it would free humanity to live fulfilling lives without toiling on stupid shit. Now we have robots doing all the work, but instead we've used this as an opportunity to impoverish the people who have been put out of work.
Can we change course? Where is our sci-fi paradise?
...is a new version of the Amish where they shun all technology developed after, say, 2010. That way I can keep my job as a software developer, but I don't have to learn any of these newfangled technologies.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It's really not even close to a new argument. The basic idea, put forward by the Luddites was that new technology makes workers more and more superfluous, ruining the lives of workers.
Karl Marx even took it a step further: He argued that while the new technology leads to lower prices of goods and services, which would appear to benefit workers, he pointed out that employers would then adjust to the lower cost of living by lowering real wages, which meant that the lowest-level workers don't benefit at all from the technology.
I am officially gone from
Congratulations to them, they've discovered something Karl Marx talked about when he published Capital in 1867.
What this means is a question of social relations. What it could mean is less working hours for everyone, more vacation time, more time for studying and learning, more time for out-there R&D projects, all the while with ever-increasing wealth. But that would be if social relations were in one parameter. Currently it means mass unemployment, chronic debt crises, and IP patent lawsuits. It means bust and boom cycles where in the late 1990s, Silicon Valley pulled in any kid with a high school diploma interested in IT and had them working 60-70-80 hours for years, before casting them off into long-term unemployment.
Ever-increasing productivity could be something people looked forward to, instead of being something that was a real threat to putting food on their table, as the Luddites who smashed mechanized looms realized. That better productivity winds up harming the majority of people is a contradiction within the current system of production we live under. At some point, these contradictions become too great and the system breaks down, then it needs some major reconfiguring. We already see one thought of how this will be done in the US, with all this talk about privatizing Social Security and privatizing education into charter schools. Of course, there's little discussion of why the US spends so much on military bases in Cuba, or Italy, or Kyrgyzstan. Or why it needs 11 aircraft carriers, when there are only 20 aircraft carriers in the world, and only two countries with more than 1 (Spain and Italy). Aside from minor cuts that's not even a question, it's easier politically to cut money to the majority of old Americans or young Americans than the military empire.
All of these ways in which people are losing work wouldn't be a problem if we let go of one fundamental idiocy in American job policy: the idea that more time worked is better.
Americans, in general, seem to think you're only worthy of a respectable income and worthy of overall economic security if you work at least 32 - 40 hours a week, and we're perfectly happy to see doctors, lawyers, programmers, and entrepreneurs pump out 80+ hours per week.
We're just about the only country dumb enough to do this. As automation and industrialization took a firm hold through Europe in the 20th century most of them allowed people more leisure time, effectively spreading the shrinking pool of necessary work across the population.
America, on the other hand, converted all or nearly all of the gains into standard of living increases, most of them not even measured in infrastructure or public works (much of which is in disasterously bad shape at the moment), but in personal possessions like luxury goods and larger homes.
So we watch the pool of strictly necessary jobs, that is to say those that deal directly with food, sanitation, manufacturing, etc. and haven't yet been replaced by robots, shrink by the day, but we still absolutely demand that people work 40 hours a week and take less vacation time than any of their European counterparts.
Less work, more people, absolutely no reduction in hours worked. Where did we think that was going to get us? The invention of entirely new fields and the expansion of academia, research, new bullshit financial positions, etc. isn't enough to replace all of the lost work that simply isn't needed anymore.
So we let people go without. And then we send even more jobs overseas.
Seriously, we had it coming.
That's true. The problem was everybody thought we'd have the Jetson's future. The (clearly, horribly, mistaken with hindsight) assumption has that if two workers worked an 8 hour day, then along came some new piece of technology that meant they could do the same amount of work in 4 hours, the two workers would work 4 hour days and have 4 extra hours of leisure time to enjoy the fruits of man-kinds ingenuity. What they didn't realize, but should have been blindingly obvious, is that the company that hires those two people would, instead, just fire one of them and make the other guy do BOTH jobs in an 8 hour day. So instead of the 1950's era vision of a future utopia with people doing less work and enjoying their life more, we have half the people unemployed (and miserable with no money) and the other half over worked (and miserable with no time).
Isn't the future grand?
If machines are used to the point that productivity becomes so high that many items become extremely inexpensive, then fewer people will need full time jobs in the first place, more people will work less and enjoy the benefits of a modern robotic world. The fact is before machines life was hard. Yes, no machines to take your place, but you worked virtually all day scraping out a meager existence which offered inadequate nutrition and limited options for shelter.
Remember that machines have made many things extremely cheap. Imagine a house being built with future concrete printing machines. A quality, strong home could cost a fraction of what a typical house is today. You could pay it off in 5 years, free and clear.
Just another perspective that shows there can be a bright side to automation. Maybe the ideal use of people is engineering and maintaining of machines and personal interaction with other people. Maybe working 70hrs a week and getting carpal tunnel is not an optimized use of a human being.
The goal is always increased productivity. If it results in fewer jobs, that doesn't mean the increase in productivity is bad, it means your jobs retraining programs are inadequate. The point of the anecdote is that increasing jobs at the cost of productivity is counter-productive. You are better off building the canal with machines at lower cost, and using the money saved to create other jobs.
Who knows, that AC might be an early prototype.
It dates back a lot further than that. The Luddites were destroying machines back in the 1810s on the basis that the machines would put them out of a job.
The framing of the question is wrong. People don't necessarily need jobs. Certainly not repetitive ones, boring or drudge ones such as a machine might replace. What they need is the means to put a roof over their heads, care for their families and to have an equitable standard of living.
If a machine replaces a boring or drudge job, that's unquestionably a good thing. If people are struggling to have a decent life because they don't have means, then society needs to change and deal with that.
Not quite. Everything will still need raw resources. That will limit supplies, thusa need for money to determine who gets what.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
make full time 30-35 hours a week
The "threat of automation" is finally getting attention because it's hitting the middle class. It hit machine tool operators decades ago. There was an assumption that if you went to college, there's always be some kind of office job for your. That's ending. The world of paper pushing is coming to an end. The paper industry itself is hurting and mills are closing. At first, computers increased paper consumption, but that peaked years back.
I expected it sooner. I was surprised to see new office buildings going up after 2000 or so.
What does the future look like? The favelas of Rio and Mexico City, surrounding the cities of the rich. That's where productivity and capitalism takes us.
Here's a novel idea. How about issuing everyone in the country with an equal share of the country's resources. And not a tradable share, as they'll just end up back in the hands of 1%. A share issued upon birth, thus diluting the value of everyones share, but destroyed upon death thus restoring value to everyone else's share.
That seems fair.
And by lately, I mean ever?
Dude, I hate to break this to you, but combines and tractors DID ruin agriculture jobs in the United States. Time was that a majority of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. Now we're down to about 1% of the workforce.
And sure, in the past, all those displaced ag workers found other work, including doing things like building the tractors and combines. But if we get to the point (as suggested by TFA) where suddenly, large swathes of the workforce are being replaced all at once by robots... what then? The robots build themselves (not entirely, obviously, but without a lot of human labor required), so there's no help there.
I'm no longer so sure. In the not-too-distant future, a huge proportion of the workforce may be "made redundant", as the Brits say, by machines. What the hell are we going to do then?
You mean, nowadays you can't get documented workers to break their back on farms, under deplorable working conditions, for a tiny paycheck and no benefits. FTFY.
I guarantee you that you could find people to do the work if you were willing to pay a decent wage, didn't expose them to pesticides, provided retirement and medical, etc.
At that point "unemployment" becomes "I decided to become an artist because I know I'll never starve to death."
Absolutely. But there are a lot of other changes needed to make that happen. Currently, a lot of people, when they have no work to do, and have resources supplied (welfare) don't choose to do anything as noble as being an artist. They sit at home watching daytime TV, getting bored and fat and letting their kids create trouble in the neighbourhood. That isn't inevitable. But it's a problem that needs to be fixed. And it's bigger than just education.
This has been the topic of a great deal of discussion. The problem is that in the current economy we live in, the benefit of greater and greater efficiency through human replacement by robots goes to a small handful of people. The rest simply find themselves scrambling harder and harder for the fewer and fewer remaining jobs. Ultimately, everyone becomes unemployed. We are quickly heading towards a two class society, with all but perhaps a few hundred haves (and their families), and 7 billion have nots.
If you think of "Fair Trade" as a game (see game theory), this game is so designed such that the nature of human competition demands there must eventually be a winner, and the effect of technology is to ever accelerate the rate of play. A winner in this case resolves to one person, or a tiny group or family. This is why we have barriers to monopoly (the place where capitalism fundamentally fails to serve the greater population.) Sadly, over the last 30 years, the control rods have been removed from the reactor, the planets wealth and control has been placed in the hands of tiny few financial houses. A team in Zurich using a database of 37 million companies looked at the 43,000 critical transactional corporations on the planet and found that only 147 controlled the entire structure, and that these were primarily banks.
Add to that the accelerating trend to criminalize poverty, and the advent of "for profit" privatized prisons. We have a strategy to turn the vast majority of humanity into a captive resource. Add to that the separation of sexes in prison (controlling population growth), and one might conclude a program designed to sequester and control humanity is now fully under way. Ever since the French Revolution, the rich and powerful have exquisitely been clear where the threat to their control lies. They now have the resource and the means to manipulate large populations. We are left misinformed, confused, angry, and impotent.
I'm not saying this is happening, and these observations may represent naturally emergent phenomenon, that is a global system like ours may naturally tend to resolve into a small controlling class. It demands that we begin to look at what kind of world we actually hope to live in, and press for that. One possible outcome is that people are issued stock at birth (retroactively) on global corporations so as they lose their jobs, the growing robotic economies provide them with a life long pension and high quality of life. That way all people can participate in technological advance fairly and equally. This is only one possible ideam there are many. We simply need to ensure that human life remains a precious and the quality of that life remains sacred.