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Is Technology Eroding Employment?
First time accepted submitter Idontpostmuch writes "The idea that technology cannot cause unemployment has long been taken as a simple fact of economics. Lately, some economists have been changing their tune. MIT research scientist Andrew Mcaffee writes, 'As computers and robots get more and more powerful while simultaneously getting cheaper and more widespread this phenomenon spreads, to the point where economically rational employers prefer buying more technology over hiring more workers. In other words, they prefer capital over labor. This preference affects both wages and job volumes. And the situation will only accelerate as robots and computers learn to do more and more, and to take over jobs that we currently think of not as "routine," but as requiring a lot of skill and/or education.'" Note: Certainly not all economists agree "that technology cannot cause unemployment," especially in the short term. From a certain perspective, displacing labor is a, if not the, central advantage of technology in general.
Can we displace THEM with technology too? If yes, maybe we're doing ok.
...pick a job in which you can't be replaced by a computer.
Pay those whom support the technology exorbitantly , and we'll buy big houses and hire gardeners, maids, butlers etc. Problem solved.
wha'? where am i?
This debate occurred in the 19th century. It's over. The answer is a resounding no. As in not at at all. Forget it. Give it up.
The only rational questions in the foreseeable future are whether or not we should reduce the work week's duration and increase paid vacation time.
. . .is what's eroding employment.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
"The idea that technology cannot cause unemployment has long been taken as a simple fact of economics.
This has never been taken as fact. Industrial technology has consistently been resisted by laborers for over 100 years for exactly this reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Slashdotters discussing economics. LOL
... sooner or later we're going to have to deal with the fact that humans are just machines made of meat that were designed for no specific purpose besides propagate genes/have kids. Whereas robots/AI can be specialized to a particular task and all the energy/resources dedicated to full specialization and be safely chucked/destroyed/replaced when new models come online. This will easily make huge swaths of humanity redundant/unemployable and everyone who believes that humans have an infinite employment landscape are idiots. We already have technological unemployment NOW we just haven't noticed it because we moved on to other "low hanging fruit" of work that only humans could perform, but that low hanging fruit is going to be gone sooner or later.
Instead of putting something in a bottle on an assembly line, a worker is now needed to set up the machine and probably another to maintain/fix it, engineers to design the machine, and a whole bunch of people to put that machine together, deliver, sell, and handle back-end stuff for that machine.
Just because a job doesn't exist anymore doesn't mean a job was lost, it just went elsewhere. Adjust with the times, or sit on the sidelines complaining that those machines derk er jrbs!!
No.
This reminds of 'player piano' by Kurt Vonnegut. It was his first book published and one of the best.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
So... who builds this "technology"?
But it seems pretty obvious to me that the drive towards robotic labour will displace millions, perhaps even billions of workers. Modern day capitalism will not survive a future with robotics. I only hope that whatever will replace modern day capitalism will be more humanistic than the current system is!
What utter moron thinks that technology can't cause unemployment. Throughout history, technology has repeatedly caused unemployment. Fortunately, in the past, other positions opened and there was some balance. However, as this article is showing, the imbalance is growing as it is tipping towards more rapid technology growth and other positions not opening fast enough to compensate for the losses.
What we are seeing today is technology creating permanent unemployment. Cue the experts stating how clueless I am.
You're assuming a whole bunch of things in that.
Primarily that the number of people needed to service the machine is equal to the number of staff replaced.
This seems at best extremely questionable.
Secondly - half of people are not as smart as the average. ...
They are unlikely to be able to get employment designing robots, or
The situation will resolve itself eventually and doesn't seem like anything to worry about. You have less people working? Well, people who aren't in that situation for other reasons aren't going to sit around on their asses collecting social security - they'll do *something*, probably something productive like re-educating themselves or start some crazy cultural movements or whatever. These will be reasonably culturally and socially connected people, lower-middle class and working class, not some fiendish dickensian underclass starting a bloody revolution or starving to death.
Instead of facilitating full employment with calls of "jobs, jobs, jobs!", the goal should be 100% total UNemployment using technology (specifically self-repairing robots or "cybermation"). A very low percentage of humans (say, 1% of the world population) can act as overseers on rotating teams of volunteers who do the remaining creative and design work that AI-guided machines cannot. The rest of the population can take the day off to pursue their own interests....
OF COURSE!!! The idea is so logical and natural I have no idea why any of these "experts" would think otherwise. Must be the reason everything is in the crapper, because we keep trying to prop up a system based of these idiot experts. For decades we have had the knowledge that technology makes work easier and quicker. Follow that to the logical conclusion that fewer people can do more with less. Meaning each individual becomes more effective with the proper use of technology, meaning fewer people needed for a specific task, meaning were people need to be employed for the same result. We keep getting into problems because we want to ignore this. The flip side is, what do you do with those who aren't needed. This paradigm has allready come to pass, we need to wake up and figure out what we are going to do about it. Canot keep people employed for the sake of saving employment We need to find better ways to be (and use) productivity.
Too true. It used to be that more people had to grow food. Now that one person with huge machinery can do the farming of 70 peasants, the other 69 people have found other useful things to do. Peasants didn't have smartphones, YouTube, or fine art. A lot of people are employed in creating different things that people value.
If you only have the skills to do what a robot can do, and the robot costs less than you, then you are obsolete. I don't have pity on you. Fortunately, there are very few people who fit that description.
I imagine that people will spend most of their time in the automated utopia trying to entertain each other. Whoever entertains the most effectively can buy the best entertainment for themselves. LOL
"There can be little doubt that union activities lead to continuous and progressive inflation." F. A. Hayek
Once, the automobile was new technology. In the decades since it was invented, it has seriously eroded employment in the buggy whip industry.
Of course, the automobile introduced many other supporting industries that employ many more workers.
Still no help for those who refuse to do anything but make buggy whips though.
"We don't know who struck first - us, or them. But. we know it was us that scorched the sky"
This has got to be one of the worst posts I've ever seen here. The submitter is citing someone who's not an economist on economics and then appends a note saying they're wrong? If you want to quote the relevant Acemoglu/Autor paper which Mcafee is somewhat-incorrectly paraphrasing, fine, but right now there's almost zero useful content here.
Many technologies are only economical because the cost of labour is driven up by regulation and in some cases, unions. As the price of labour increases, or rather, the marginal returns on labour decrease, firms substitute away from it to robots.
A good example is not necessarily in the manufacturing sector either. Look at the use of orchestras in popular music after the invention of synthesizers, sampling, and other music tech. Much of the music produced today is essentially "curated" from existing recordings, since nobody can afford the time or labour of real musicians.
All the employers I see still use IE 6 and XP and refuse to classify anything IT related as anything, but a cost center that adds no value?
10 years ago this was the thinking but not know. It is about cost accounting and getting ahead by staying behind and putting all your eggs in one basket like what we saw in Thailand.
Employers mostly are pennywise, but dollar dumb. Not all of them are like this, but the vast majority are today. Maybe I am wrong as the pendulum may swing in the other direction soon. However, right now I do not see that. What has happened is many public companies get a surge in the share price over 30 years and investors want to see this every quarter!
There is no room for investment nor expansion. Only cost cutting to keep the shareprice rising higher and higher. The problem is since 2008 it never has recovered share price wise. Investors know they have more cash on hand by firing people and keeping ancient systems running, but it is not enough. They want growth, but will fire the CEO for any investment do this. IN essence they are turning to us and asking for more results for less money and less people.
http://saveie6.com/
We have an article still on the front page in which Eric Schmidt of Google is saying we're going to have to compete with robots for our jobs.
Globalization is trying to move everything to the cheapest possible labor source, and robots and technology is next in line. Sure, your startup costs are high, but your robot won't need to take the day off because its kid is home sick.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No
And the situation will only accelerate as robots and computers learn to do more and more, and to take over jobs that we currently think of not as "routine," but as requiring a lot of skill and/or education.'"
Simply fear mongering, imo.
But HR will want a theory based engineer degree to do install / maintain/fix it part and pass over people who went to a very hands on tech school.
What economist says that "technology cannot cause unemployment", instead saying that on average technology transfers jobs from low to high skilled?
Any economist at all will at least give lip service to the fact that local changes can cause temporary disruptions in economies. It's the long term forecast that they argue over.
It's like the difference between weather and climate change.
The problem is that a local job change, like a tornado, can kill you before conditions normalize.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I can't help but notice that as of late, MIT has a *load* of content coming out of the place revolving around the general concept of automation displacing humans. I think they're, perhaps, a little too fixated on it to look at the big picture clearly? (Don't get me wrong. I think MIT is doing a lot of excellent research work - and they're on the cutting edge month after month with interesting tech. developments. I just see how they'd get sucked into the "robots will displace us" idea in the midst of all of that.)
The bottom line is, humans are social creatures. There's WAY too much that gets lost when you get close to full automation of any business. The workplace isn't only about the work that's done. You're still selling your services or products to other human beings on the opposite end of the chain, and they want to interact with other people. At best, artificial intelligence is still just that; "faking it". Maybe, *maybe* we'll eventually reach a point where a robot can think, reason and interact with humans to the point where it's effectively the same as another person. But it's far too early to suggest that will be the case in any of our lifetimes.
What you do (and will continue) to see is automation replacing any workplace roles where humans act like "artificial robots", performing repetitive manual tasks that don't require any real thought. That still amounts to only a certain percentage of the work at hand in any given factory, and if it helps make production more profitable, it leads to more factories being built, who employ humans in all of the roles that aren't just assembly-related on the production floor. (And yes, it also creates a few more jobs for people who do repair, sales of and setup of those robots and machines.)
Look no further than in agriculture. Just a century ago, what percentage of people used to work in the farms? What's that percentage now? People then moved into the manufacturing industries, but work there has also been replaced by machines to a great extent, and cheaper labor in other countries.
It doesn't take a lot of human labor to fulfill our basic needs anymore, and so people have been trying to create needs we didn't think we had. This is why so much rides on advertisement these days. Is there a point where the incremental improvement in our comfort is no longer worth the money we'd spend to get it? That's when we'll probably face major unemployment issues...
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
The problem is that those people are only employed for a short time in respect to each machine.
For example: 2 assembly line workera are employed for 40 hrs / 50 wks a year at $6/hr = $12,000 / yr * 2 = $24,000. A robot can be built for $48,000 with $6,000 / yr maintenance. Over 3 years the robot has paid for itself. It only employed a design engineer for 4 weeks to design it, a crew of 2 for 1 week to build it and on average one tech for at most 1 week to maintain it.
The robot company needs to sell 50 robots to keep everyone working all the time, so that's 100 line workers it can replace while only employing 4 people plus a few support staff.
I call that a net loss.
I've been in manufacturing for years and have seen it happen too many times. It's not new but a fact of life. As an IT guy I've personally created systems that have replaced 10 people without spending anything other then 3 months of my time, simply by automating data entry. Doing that saved a company from going under, but that's 10 people that will not be rehired.
Employment is down because of technology. Systems are getting better, more complex and more reliable, so the trend will only increase.
...this is either the start of the post-scarcity future so cleverly portrayed by Ian M Banks in his Culture novels. In this future we are freed from the need to work and instead choose to work, and play.
I'm hoping for the Banksian future ;-)
Economists will believe anything.
Historians will tell you that technology has often disrupted society. Having said that though, the net effect of advancing technology has been to put us in a golden age. Things have never been so good. We no longer have to huddle in our caves in fear that some sabre toothed tiger will devour us if we venture out.
What's coming up? Terminator? Road Warrior? Star Trek? It could be good ... or not. Getting better is one of the possible options.
the money that we have created cannot just be destroyed. you can put it in the bank,but the bank will find someone to lend it to who has a plan to make more money with it.
most likely it will be put to use on something to do with leisure. the trend of the last hundred some years is the cost of living dropping and more money being spent on leisure and entertainment. in the 1800's people used to give oranges as gifts. They were expensive, hard to find during the holiday season and good for you. hard to believe that not too long ago housing and food used up almost an entire paycheck
If technology improves, people are supposed to have free time to do *better* things. Instead of gluing together boxes, now they can be engineers. Instead of engineers they now can be scientists! That's what was meant!
But as it is now, the whole industry is hell-bent on dumbing down and simplifying things, destroying efficiency, destroying the power technology gives us, and thereby creating braindead drooling blobs of mere meat with eyes, instead of expecting people to *grow*!
So that's what you fuckin' get from it! I told you, and I told you for more than a decade! You wouldn't listen!
Now you've got the problem: There's nearly nobody left to even develop the next generation of technology, because everybody has gotten too fuckin' stupid!
It's your own damn fault! Because you were too greedy!
And I wish you a great going under, you greedy fuckers! Because of course you won't go "Oh, I didn't realize that. I'm sorry. I'll fix it!". Nooo. You're too fuckin' retarded *yourselves*. So, typical for a retard, you'll think you are "attacked" and would have to "defend" yourself. You can't think rationally anymore! So you will *completely* ignore this and live in denial to the *very end*! That's why you won't be able to prevent your own demise!
And that' why people like me, who still have working brains, will rule you farms of braindead will-less meat blobs!
Wasn't eroding employment supposed to be the *point* of technology? The biggest problem with this debate seems to be that everyone is assuming a lack of employment is a _bad_ thing.
If we can, at a relatively trivial cost, build machines to replace all menial drudgery, why is this a problem? Isn't it The Glorious Future?
We need to adjust our social, economic and political systems for the new reality, of course, but that's hardly impossible. It's not like we haven't changed them before. 150 years ago domestic service was one of the largest employment categories and only those who employed the domestics got the vote, after all. (Thinking of the U.K. here).
Hell, looked at from a certain perspective, we're already halfway *through* this change. 150 years ago a large majority of the population of any 'civilized' country had to work - whether actual paid employment, or some form of domestic labour - probably 72+ hours a week to give the country as a whole a standard of living quite a long way below what we enjoy today. I know there are still substantial numbers of people in some 'civilized' countries who have to work two jobs to keep the wolf from the door, but still, there's a hell of a lot more people who get by perfectly well on 40 hour working weeks and then don't have to hand wash their clothes or dishes when they get home.
Look at it that way and technology has _already_ reduced the amount of actual labour humans have to do by, say, 50%, and the world does not appear to have ended. What's terrible about getting rid of the other 50%?
It's been downhill ever since the invention of the shovel. We're doomed!
Yes because it's true that employers sometimes see increased technology spending as an alternative to hiring more staff. ("We'll just buy you a laptop and cell phone and you can work from home in the evenings, too! That way we won't need to hire someone else to help you get everything done during the 8-5 workday.")
No because there will come a point where businesses and their managers will realize that you can't just buy a magic box from Best Buy, plug it into the wall, and generate profit from your hindquarters. You'll need staff that know how to manipulate the Hot New Thing(TM) and make it do what you want. And so, wherever there is a new and complex technology that someone can use to make money but doesn't quite know how, there will always be an opportunity for someone who knows about this new and complex technology to make money managing it for other people.
And finally, I say "Maybe" because it's a given that some technology makes things easier on technical employees, so some burden is lifted, but at the same time that burden is replaced with additional responsibility, usually coming from a position that has just been "permanently vacated"... It's an endless cycle. "This technology makes managing our infrastructure easier, so we don't need as many people to manage our infrastructure. But now we need people to manage the technology that manages our infrastructure. And now we need middleware so it plays nicely with our accounting software..." and on, and on, and on.
From the perspective of someone who was laid off, I've come to regard labour as a liability. It is expensive to get rid of labour if you have to, so it is like an investment that I think can be treated like a debt. I think that the laws have been set up to protect employed people so much, that it discourages hiring, because to hire means you better be certain that you're going to need this person long term. Economic uncertainty makes hiring risky. I side with the 99%, but I must admit that simple solutions often have unintended consequences.
Conversely, technology is often accepted as a throwaway.
yep, not to long ago entertainment was reading the Bible for the 20th time and singing old songs with your family for the 30 minutes of the day you weren't working. not too long ago taking care of babies meant daily laundry and washing dishes by hand into the late hours of the night
Until today, corporations are ruled by managers who are good at manipulating people. The CEO is the guy who has the ability to get a lot of people working together to reach a goal.
In the future, when more and more things are done by machines, people skills will not matter.
The rulers of the future will be people who are good at manipulating machines, they will be programmers.
in hunter gatherer society, the invention of the bow and arrow dramatically reduced how much time had to be spent hunting. I.E. the invention of the bow and arrow created unemployment of club hunters. However, society as a whole got wealthier, because a small number of people could provide the protein needs of the tribe, and the unemployed club hunters retrained as sweater knitters, creating sweater wealth that did not exist before. If you look at a small version of an economy (i.e. a tribe) and consider all the people in the economy as members of the same family (i.e. a tribe) you will stop seeing unemployment, and start seeing technology increase productivity and wealth, and freeing up scarce labor resources to take on more productive tasks, for the family, i.e. for the general good. So, one more economic example, it was just one or two hundred years ago that most of America and Western Europe worked as farmers. Technology unemployed most of them. This was a good thing, because society still got enough food, but now we had a large number of people available to stop working at subsistence and start working for the betterment (and wealthierment) of mankind. Is anybody arguing against this view? Seriously? and short run long run... the benefits in the long run are quite simply worth the short run. Would my fellow slashdotters prefer to live 10% behind where we are now technologically? 10% starting 1000 years ago? 10,000 years ago?
Er, there's some guy called Ned Ludd on line one...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From an economic perspective, technology does not directly erode employment, it just changes the relative "value add" of capital (higher) vs. labor (lower). "Theoretically" long-term labor would become cheaper to compete and we would significantly reduce unemployment. Unfortunately, "cheaper" labor means lower standards of living, unthinkable working conditions, and a fundamental lack of human dignity. We have a choice as a society about what to do with the real, tangible value created by technological change (see GDP growth). That value is increasingly centralized (see income inequality and declining median real wages). Public policy is not keeping pace with technology change, at least in terms of effectively building skills that can't be automated away.
I think it is fairly obvious that eventually almost all manual labor will be done entirely by robotic (or similar) technology. The end result will be that all available jobs will be "thinking" types of jobs (writing, art based, theoretical math / physics, engineering, etc). For those that cannot participate in such a market, they won't work. Even manual carpentry or metalwork will be done solely for its artisan value.
Society will be post scarcity. How will our land resources and artisan resources be split up in such a society? Who knows. But all basic needs will be provided for free (shelter, food, healthcare). Go read "Piano Player" by Vonnegut for an interesting take on it.
Once upon a time, people generated most of their value with their muscles. When machines replaced muscles, people could still generate value with their brains because machines could not replace brains. So the original Luddite scenario never materialized.
Now that machines are starting to replace brains, a growing portion of the population has a rapidly dwindling ability to generate significant economic value relative to the machines. As time passes, machines can effectively replace both the muscles and brains of more of the population.
This is also why forcing people to work fewer hours will not help. The problem is not the number of jobs available; it is the number of people who can generate more positive value in that position relative to a machine. Eventually we will all be in the position of no longer being able to be a productive member of a modern economy; everyone believes their contribution to be indispensable until the technology catches up and it isn't.
If one person can feed ten, and one can house ten, and one can cloth ten, then we find something for the other seven to do.
Like making SUVs, reality TV, porn sites, weapons, CFCs, Pop music, CO2, High Fructose Corn Syrup, TPS reports, e-mail spam, brand name bottled water, high frequency trading...
Clearly we are much better off, and everyone is happier than when we all had to work just to sustain ourselves; and we need to raise the retirement age to 70 to ensure that all these vital things continue to be created.
Some tech actually erodes employment. There's no question about there. In fact, nearly any kind of system that decreases human input or actions has the specific INTENT of incurring savings through reduced human employment and increased process precision:
--Manufacturing automation
--Community Self-Assistance (Forums, FAQs, etc.)
--Self-driving taxi cabs
--Etc.
Some tech on the other hand creates employment need. This tech usually involved the addition of a product or service to a market.
--Cellular Telephones
--New websites that offer services in new niches
--Etc.
The problem comes when business, entrepreneurs, and economic theory suggests that the first grouping is more important than the second. With that scenario, tech has a net-negative effect on employment.
The question then arises, "What do we do when the machines are capable of doing our work?". The answer is simple, but not easy: move the general global philosophy from working for the ability to survive and progress financially to a socialistic and humanistic expectations on how one receives what s/he needs to live and how s/he spends her/his time. Yes, the "Start Trek" switch.
Unfortunately, tech advances by the day and hour while philosophy changes by the generation... and even then only slightly.
Quis manipulet ipsos manipulens?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's not a fantasy or even a theory, it's historical fact for the last four hundred years. A guy who can run a combine harvesting tons of cotton per day makes more, and works fewer hours, than someone picking by hand. An accountant running a computer is more productive and higher paid than one with a quill pen. Assume a company was NOT willing to pay you more for programming robots than it did for assembling toasters. (Or equalivently, give you more time off.) You'd simply get a job at another company which will pay programmers operators of robots more than the assembly low workers the robots replace. The fact is, 98% of Slashdot readers earn more and get more time off than our grandparents precisely because we use the technology that replaced pur grandparents' jobs.
The jobs that are lost to technology should be made up for by cheaper costs of items, as it is cheaper to produce. The human race should be using technology to upgrade its standard of living, giving us less menial labor to do to spend more time on arts and culture, and things that matter, creating new ideas.
Instead, all those manufacture cost savings are going to CEO pockets and ending up locked away in swiss bank accounts.
Read this :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_unemployment
And to the idiot who submitted this :
you are an uneducated fool if you imagine this has not happened
before.
Winners in this world know they will need to re-train themselves at few times
during their life span. This is reality. If you cannot handle it, kill yourself,
because we don't need your sorry stupid lazy ass on earth.
"Machines of Easy Virtue"
Unemployment is not necessary a bad thing. If everyone can live confomrtably with a low "employment" level is there a problem ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Imagine a robot that can be like a human. Robot ~= Human. We will have to coexist with them and work with them. Robots will build new robots, no human intervation will be required. Robots will work as psychologists. Sex with robots will be possible. They might be our bosses. They will gain rights. May be they will prevail and we will persish. However, biological still is more complex and advanced than electronical. Who knows what will become of us.
Written by an Human.
Biorobots only cost a few dollars per day to run. They require no capital to aquire as they naturally self replicating, thus there will always be a constant supply. Biorobots do not require a programmer or engineer to put on task. They are also cordless and self propelled allowing them to easily change tasks. Should a biorobot not do a task correctly a unit can be debugged by the use of a cellulose based rod, or by withholding the carbohydrate,protein, lipid, and water based energy supplies they require. Should production needs change, biorobots automatically remove themselves from the factory floor and return to the pool of available units. Biorobots are not chemically resistant. Should one malfunction due to overexposure to toxic chemicals, disposal is easily accomplished by placing the biorobot into a zippered polymer bag and disposing it as normal biohazardous waste, preferably by incineration. Grossly defective or worn out biorobots are easily dealt with by means of a lead projectile launched a high speed by expanding gasses in metal cylinder striking the biorobots central processing unit. Regular disposal procedures apply. Some biorobots may self propel themselves out of windows of the upper floors of the factory. This may be remedied by the strategic placement of nets if needed. Most factory owners have found that biorobots are color coded for their convenience. Biorobots are expected to remain a vital role in industrial production due to their cheapness, versatility and disposability.
Is Destruction of life, and dignity for others.
When the rich don't need you anymore, they won't feed you anymore.
Our society exists at the convenience of the elite. They created it. They can just as easily unmake it. Soon they will be able to do so comfortably.
"The idea that technology cannot cause unemployment has long been taken as a simple fact of economics." -- functionally illiterate poster
"The process of reemploying displaced labor is uneven and historically has not kept up with the labor supply, as evidenced by the decline of the work week since the mid 19th century." --wiki article linked by functionally illiterate poster
Seriously? What is wrong with you?
When robots make everything most people will be forced to simply consume as much as possible. The high priests of the world will be roboticists. They will get all the desirable sex partners (Meat or plastic. However they roll.). Everybody else will just have to consume Big Box store crap, eat, defecate, urinate and procreate. Then they will write bad poetry about it. Or make bad art. And they will plant it all on some social medium called FacePlant.
The Wall-E world is coming at us, bitches, and I can't wait. Let's start with self driving cars, because with 30,000 US dead even bad robots could not do worse. Then again who cares if people die if all they do is eat, crap, piss and bump uglies? Never mind. I'm getting confused. "
Hey, Baxter, bring me a beer."
On a slightly more serious note. There was a dystopian sci fi novel I read a disgustingly long time ago that had this situation as a premise? Not Player Piano. Was it a Philip K Dick? Anyone?
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Soon the machines will decide we're no longer relevant. TERMINATOR time!
Anyone who has sat in Econ 101 would say, "yes."
Baxter
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
We're seeing the return of the Iron Law of Wages: real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. That had been the case for most of history. For most of the 20th century, the Iron Law of Wages was viewed by economists as being obsolete. That may have just been a historical anomaly in capitalism. The period during which wages substantially exceeded survival level in the US was the period in which labor unions had enough power to push wages up. That's over.
"Machines should think, people should work". Humans just do the dumb manipulation jobs that still cost more to do with robots. Kiva Robotics video: "Training for a human picker on the system takes a minute or so." The end result is that most new jobs pay about $10.25 per hour. It's now cheaper to put the smarts in the software rather than train skilled workers. Computers are so cheap, and copying software is even cheaper.
As retail goes online, whole sectors of the economy disappear, buildings go vacant, and jobs go away forever. One (1) new indoor mall has been built in the US in the last decade. (We don't count the New Jersey Meadowlands debacle; they're not open after a decade and the roof collapsed.) Many, many malls are dead. First, order processing and payment went online. Then warehouse operation and order fulfillment. Ordered from Staples, the Gap, Walgreens, Saks Fifth Avenue, Toys "R" Us, Follett, Timberland, Diapers.com, or Dillard's? Mobile robots did most of the work. Amazon just bought Kiva Robotics. Coming up next, Google same-day delivery service. (Not with automatic truck driving. Yet.)
We have an economic system which optimizes for lowest costs, including labor costs. It's working as designed. Do you want fries with that?
I'm afraid the day will one day come when machines WILL be able to have enough artificial intelligence to do ALL the jobs we now do. I shudder at the thought of...robot doctors(!)...robot lawyers(!)...robot real estate agents(!)...but then again, maybe the robots at McDonald's will actually get your order right(!!)...Eventually, all you developers/programmers will be out of a job, too, according to this premise, because the machines will program the machines, better than you, I'm sorry to say. But I wouldn't worry too much, folks. Computer voice recognition still isn't there, so computers aren't all that intelligent just yet.
The problem with tech replacing humans in the economy is that the proceeds of machines/AI all go to "owners" (the top 1 percent, in American parlance). If the "ownership" of civilization's assets (and the associated revenue) is distributed amongst all people as their inheritance (thank you, past generations who slaved in the Industrial Revolution) then we'll be fine. It will in fact be quite a nice world. The idea of an "unconditional citizen's income" is one that has been floated a bit among far-sighted thinkers in Germany.
If you chose a time period substantially greater than the time to raise a new generation of humans, then you can guarantee your models won't show humans being displaced by technology.
Persons desirous of having lots of automation, in hopes of having a better life for said humans, tend to chose such long time scales, while persons concerned with being displaced chose periods like "right now", to demonstrate the event actually happens.
Honest economists consider the period, say why, and discuss the trade-offs.
--dave (a philosopher, not an economist) c-b
davecb@spamcop.net
Woomba! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn5OzhsToBQ
He single handedly does the work of 50 or more laborers who now do?
An accountant running a computer is more productive and higher paid than one with a quill pen.
Single handedly making a dozen qualified accountants redundant. They now do?
The fact is, 98% of Slashdot readers earn more and get more time off than our grandparents precisely because we use the technology that replaced pur grandparents' jobs.
The fact is that 98% of Slashdotters are representative of the upper 10% of society's earners. However 98% of Slashdotters doesn't represent even 0.01% of workers overall.
A massive proportion of workers are displaced by technology. They have been for years and the chickens are coming home to roost. However, feel free to continue to put your fingers in your ears and sing La La La La La.
A quarterly global retirement fund tax levied on each unit will fix that problem. The theory is that for each individual rendered unemployable, the tax levied will guarantee a dignified life for said individual. In theory the "the use robots to replace people" becomes a franchise granted by the UN via national governments upon which it may lay and collect excises, fees and imposts.
Watch the Randroids blow their BUX32B's.
Waste your mod points, please.
This debate occurred in the 19th century. It's over. The answer is a resounding no. As in not at at all. Forget it. Give it up.
Did we know everything about economics back then? That comes a quite a surprise.
I was under the impression that we thought (at the time) that:
1) Population would grow exponentially (see Malthus).
2) Individual consumption would grow without bounds
It's clear that population tends to level off and then decline - it's doing that for all of the first-world countries right now. This wasn't obvious for a long time, and it wasn't expected back then. This is a pretty basic change in assumptions - shouldn't that lead to a rethinking of those 1800's theories?
It's also clear that consumption is not infinite either: once people reach a level of comfort that they enjoy, there is a decreasing level of need. Not true for all people of course, but there's a sizeable downshifter movement.
Economics is a series of stories dressed up with a little math. It's "schools of thought" and "expert opinions" - if you don't believe this, try to determine the value of inflation that is best. If the answer is "it depends", then try to determine the dependency formula.
If you study economics as history you'll be able to repeat statements like the one above. That's what economics majors are taught to do.
If you take the trouble to actually analyze economics, as a scientist would, you will realize that there is a tsunami of economic upheaval on the way: obvious and predictable by anyone.
Yes, technology is eroding jobs... but that's the wrong way to look at it.
Technology makes high levels of production, but doesn't increase human leisure.
http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
"That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen" by F. Bastiat
Chapter VIII, "Machinery" is what you need.
"The idea that technology cannot cause unemployment has long been taken as a simple fact of economics"
By who? it has clearly eroded employment. The only people saying that where corporate factory owners.
If technology produced more jobs then it replaced, then we really wouldn't need it.
Lets loko at some clasicc examples.
Garment industry. The first automated garment company produced for more product with fewer people need per hour, including the people keeping the automation system running. And this was pre-computer.
The number of people it took to build and maintain robotic auto systems has always been for lower then the people it replaces.
I right reports that can be generated in seconds that would have required 5 people 3 months to do.
I was on a team of 50 people that wrote some very sophisticated loan automation software that replaced over 1000 positions over a period of 2 years.
This is happening all over the world. What do you think will happen when robot appear to reliable do menial tasks? when fastfood places start replacing employees with 'robots'? Million will be out of work. Do you think it will take millions to build robots?
And when automated system write software? when robots repair other robots?
The real question is: How wisely are we willing to mvoe economically?
If you just replace people and leave then on there own in an environment where most jobs can be done better by machines, you will have riots, starvation, war. So what do you do? ONly let people own one robot and chose to work themselves, or hire out the robot? Do you have the government own the robots and pay people a monthly stipend*? Tax the work robots do, and divy that up among all the people?
Now, the price will come down,and efficiency will go up dramatically. And we will most likely have the technology to replace the people in these systems that would screw them up.
And eventually computers and robots will be able to make what you want on demand, including exotic features.
Could we become like the people in Wally?
The only thing of value will be land. So do we pay people with land?
*yes communism, but with out the pesky problem that a person will do less work for the same pay. I argue this is the only way communism can thrive without having to use force.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think technology is causing short/medium term unemployment. The problem is that the size of "displacements" is large and it's impacting skillsets people once thought were immune from automation. Manufacturing output in the U.S. is back to pre-recession levels, but manufacturing employment hasn't recovered at all. Companies are now second-level automating -- replacing the data entry jobs (and the "power-users") that once drove business processes with more yet more automation. But in the long run, people and economies will certainly adjust and new opportunities emerge. Not to mention that technology is also creating tons of new jobs, either directly in IT or by helping "old" industries find their way back to countries like the U.S.
Marx talks how capital's need to grow lead to technological innovation to make production more efficient. This in principle could allow for people to work much less and still maintain very high standards of living. However, our production is oriented toward maximizing profits, not human needs, therefore we work longer hours in spite of the mechanization of most of production.
OTOH, the labor theory of value also shows that this mechanization also causes a decrease in the RATE of profit, which has lead to a decline of labor intensive industry in the US and a financialization of capital.
So yea, mechanization not only displaces jobs, but I contend that it is more relevant than outsourcing to the loss of American manufacturing and tech jobs. In fact, there was a Slashdot post not too long ago talking about how rising wages in Asia is causing manufacturing to move back to the US but in the form of robot factories, so the jobs still don't come back.
These effects don't make themselves readily apparent because capitalism shifting these problems in space and time so they show up as problems elsewhere in the economy. Markets also further obscure these problems as consumers arrive at the market place theoretically as "equals" making mutual exchanges while hiding inequalities in labor and production.
If you flip the math you realize that now the company could employee those 100 workers to run 1,250 robots to do the work of 2,500 workers - increasing productivity by 2,500%. Assuming the capitalist take 90% of the increased productivity as profits (IIRC, the long term trend is 30%) workers would only see their pay increase by 250%.
I call that a gain. So did our forefathers who underwent the above.
Living during a renaissance is a scary thing full of uncertainties – and in the short term people are going to get whacked by the upheaval. The answer is not to slow down change but find ways to mitigate the short term pain (training, unemployment insurance, etc.).
the people builI know, but trust me it will be worth it.I like how you think the builder and maintainers won't be robots.
" people still have to build and service the robots"
then number of people that need to do that has always been lower then the people displaced, and that's not counting secondary markets.
and again, robots will do that eventually.
I'm not sure why you think China won't automate.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Of course that's a complete fallacy and further to tell people of you ignorance on the topic of social security.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Everyone here says computers one day will advance past machines, but what about the growth of hybrid human-computer systems? If we are also getting faster/stronger/smarter, then it doesn't matter. This is similar to how when the Industrial Revolution replaced manual labor, many more people turned to services+education. Now we'll turn to education+steroids+ embedded computers. There's still a lot the brain can do computer's can't, and supplementing it might keep us ahead for along time.
This is hilarious, like none of you have read Capital by Karl Marx. He goes further to explain the consequences of this trend which is pretty much what we're seing in the economy atm. Just read it ffs.
I think people are worrying about the wrong problem. It's not that technology erodes employment. And if it did, who cares? Technology has also made it a simple matter of filing LLC paperwork to get into business for yourself with no capital. So let me re-iterate. You can now go into business for yourself with technology, with no money above and beyond the ability to acquire the technology, and make a living through technology. And you could theoretically be unemployed the whole time you do it, too. We live in a day and age where any idea can become a viable business on the web. Computers may be replacing our brains, but their ideas suck. Ideas are one thing people are very good at it. Look there.
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100 years ago, people didn't need a cellphone, phone line, cable tv, computer, car, or air conditioning, etc... to live. Now its hard to think of life without them.
Robots are quite expensive compared to the human labor they replace. Worse, they require a high initial investment - a company hiring manual laborers can be started for much less than one which must purchase all of its robot capital up front (or lease them from a service, which creates even more jobs...). There's much less risk with hiring humans, because you can always lay off workers during an economic downturn; if you've bought robots, you still pay the mortgage on them regardless of whether or not they have work to do.
Yes, large, well-established companies with mature or slowly-changing processes can make good use of robot labor. And quite frankly, I'm glad they can, because I'd rather build and repair robots than do the mind-numbingly stupid work they do. A robot is content to take pallets off the line and load them in a boxcar 24/7/365. I sure wouldn't be.
And how much to design and build the robot? Well, it's quite a bit. A company won't reap ROI this quarter, or next. Or even next year. It would probably take several years before the cost of the robot breaks even, much more than that to start saving money. At $100k robot replacing a $10/hour worker will take 5 years to reach the break even point. Again, much to the loss of EE's and CE's everywhere, only the largest companies, with long term thinkers, will look at the robot angle.
And that pretty much excludes publicly traded companies, where the CEO is under pressure to produce "record profits" every quarter.
Until its the same as murder, robots will be at a disadvantage.
*yawn*
"The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era" is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work
You can not eat "a job", neither can you wear it. Work is a mean to create something of value. The less effort humans expend the richer we all are.
Those people who were replaced by machines are in fact liberated and have opportunity to create even more wealth.
You're assuming those 100 workers could do that work.
They might not (and probably aren't) able to do that work.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/
"I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn't seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism -- which shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.
But I think we'd better start paying attention to those implications."
I posted several comments there. Look at my site for ways to deal with the change after understanding it better. Essentially, we will likely hopefully see a healthy mix of local subsistence via gardening robots and 3D printers, an expanded gift economy like with GNU/Linux & Wikipedia & Thingiverse, An exchange economy softened by a "basic income", and better internet-enhanced democratic participatory planning at all levels.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Way to manufacture a .. whatever this is going to be. Take a bizarre idea, such as "the Earth is flat" as your premise, and ask a question that stems from it.
Then throw in an acknowledgement from the editor, that the flat earth hypothesis isn't quite unanimous, implying that if one were to turn over enough rocks, they might find a handful of godless irreverant curmudgeons, who cite obscure observations which cast an ambiguous shadow of minor doubt upon it. Then sit back and watch as people slowly get over how shocked they are, as they try to stammer out explanation of which earth-geometry hypothesis is really the prevailing one and which one is viewed as .. not even antique but naive to the point of dumb. I suppose the conversation will then transform into questions about whether or not anyone ever really held the fringe hypothesis in the first place.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
We measured. The last estimate was that my automation software did the work of over 200 people. If we didn't have the automation, we might be sending the work out to India and/or hiring more locals. Yeah, there are people not working because I did what I was paid to do and made the automation work very well. It's a dilemma, morally speaking.
The fact that machines are destroying jobs is a problem only because we refuse to reduce the work week, partly for a dogmatic reason, partly because company shareholders intend to make more money by replacing workers with machines.
But what if we taxed companies the same way, ie. they can either keep the workers, or automate their work but pay in taxes what they used to pay in wages?
Why is reducing the work week never on the agenda?
The original OP was using simplified logic – I just took it to the logical conclusion.
I will grant you that the real work is a bit more complex as I have posted elsewhere here. Some of the workers will find themselves flipping burgers and be worse off. Others with find themselves as independent artists creating custom works on 3D printers and be better off. In the long run things work themselves out.
Even if only 10% of the employees where kept, overall productivity and wealth would increase. In the long run these things tend to sort themselves out. In the short run this brings up questions like income disparity.
I am for technology – besides you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Manage the impact – don’t try to stop it.
Wanna tell that to the nice lady who used to buy your tickets 20 yrs ago.
You mean the same one that still works the Will Call box?
Yeah, technology can reduce some jobs but it hardly ever replaces all of them. There's just more to do all around.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Once again, those who own the means of production, the robots in this case, will control the fates of those who don't.
It is misleading to graph Real Productivity vs. Real Income.
The BLS uses different notions of inflation for Productivity vs. Household Income.
There is no absolute notion of inflation. Inflation depends on the basket of goods tracked. The basket of goods is very different for the sort of consumer items households purchase vs. the sort of items relevant to business costs.
The Consumer Price Index(CPI) has undergone significantly more inflation than the Implicit Price Deflator for the Nonfarm Business Sector(IPDNBS). A significant portion of the divergence in the graphs in the article is simply a reflection of this difference in inflation.
Here is a nice pdf from the BLS showcasing these issues: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/01/art3full.pdf
Of course, technology replaces labor; that is the purpose of using technology. But that doesn't "cause unemployment". The people that have been replaced by technology at those companies will go on doing something else at other jobs.
You're assuming a whole bunch of things in that.
So are you.
Primarily that the number of machines remains static, that if 100 workers were replaced by 10 machines that requires 1 operator, that this is the way things will stay. This seems at best extremely questionable.
Secondly - well over half the people already work in the service industry.
They are unlikely to be displaced by robots any time soon.
"His name was James Damore."
If you really wanted to, you could easily have a 19th century working class standard of living on very few hours of work per week. The reason you don't do that is because you want a higher standard of living, and also because labor is something people value increasingly doing in itself.
Marx made those predictions a century and a half ago, and mechanization has been happening ever since. Yet, far more people work today as a percentage of society and in absolute numbers than back in his time. That soundly disproves the idea that "mechanization displaces jobs" and shows that Marx and other "socialist/anarchist thinkers" were completely wrong.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you track inflation, and compare it to incomes, you will see that technology, and the obsolescence of human labor has actually been a loss for the individual. The generally accepted inflation gauge is the CPI:
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Consumer_Price_Index/HistoricalCPI.aspx?reloaded=true
I think it's pretty safe to say the income chart is close enough to illustrate my point:
http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2006/08/15/average-income-in-the-united-states
The cost of basic necessities has risen by over 2000%, but average income has risen by only about 400%. Mind you, that's just the average income, and I only personally know about a dozen people who earn more than $40k.
It doesn't matter how cheaply things can be made if the consumer cost keeps rising while incomes don't. There are many things at work, so I won't single anything out as the root cause, but the intermingling of government and private businesses is an important factor.
Certainly, this conversation can get very complicated, but I don't think it would behoove us to delve further into it at this time, so take this post with a grain of salt.
> He single handedly does the work of 50 or more laborers who now do? You get the cheap cotton goods with money you make from your web site or whatever. You're missing that fact that this has been going on for hundreds of years - you ARE the guy who is not picking. If you make more than $2 / day because you're not picking cotton, putting lids on jars, or weaving cloth, the automation of those repetitive jobs has been good to you. Imagone the power went out at your workplace. How much could you produce with no automation? Remember no automatic word processor - if you mess up you have to rewrite it. Your productovity minus overhead and marketing is your maximum salary. I thank God I'm not picking cotton or weaving cloth because machines have replaced me in those roles.
that's not how it works. You go to a good school (Harvard, Yale, etc), make connections, and use those connections to become a CEO and get on the Board of Directors at companies. Seriously. That's the way it works. You're middle manager boss does not, in fact, run the world. No matter how much you hate him. It's an elite group of old money asshats.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
First off, the calculation for interest includes costs of goods excluding food, energy, insurance, housing, and services (correct me if I am wrong on the services part as I heard mixed things).
What has gone up 200% to 300% in 20 years? Insurance, gas, food, housing, etc.
They are simply not counted! Sure it looks like the US is doing fine but try living in San Fransisco today on $42,000 a year? Now adjust for inflation 15 years ago in San Fransisco at $35,000 a year?
Could you survive in SanFransisco in 1996 with $35,000 a year? Absolutely! You could rent a basement in a borderline part of the city. Your health insurance rates would be $40 a month. Gas would be $.79 a gallon. You could get a foot long sub at Subway for lunch for $3.99! You could even take the other half home for dinner for 2 meals.
Today in San Fransisco. You would have to live with someone else in your room 40 miles away! You would pay $4.000 a gallon. Your health insurance would cost $500 a month. That subway meal costs $7.99. Your rent would be 2x even if you do not have your own damn room as it would in the city itself.
Inflation is a huge problem and it is caused the federal reserve printing money left and right. It goes to the rich people who then lower interest rates due to the excess of cash. They then buy homes and raise rents and mortgages. The lower interest rates mean insurance companies have to raise rates to get profits. The extra cash is then used to speculate food prices such as the wheat in your subway sandwich. Products have not gone up as much due to China and a poor economy but it ignores speculatives like oil, food, insurance, and other activities.
http://saveie6.com/
Watch this: http://youtu.be/kYIfeZcXA9U
Then read this: http://robotswillstealyourjob.com/
If we end up with unlimited resources as a result of the automation of mining asteroids and farms on the moon, as well as having unlimited energy from fusion, then the employment problem will become irrelevant unless having those unlimited resources causes a massive population boom (this seems unlikely, people seem to have less children if they are educated and live in a stable society, both of which are a given if they aren't fighting over resources). If a handful of robots can feed and house an entire town, where's the need for money? The only "jobs" left would involve fashion, arts, science and entertainment, though even these could be replaced.
Secondly - well over half the people already work in the service industry. They are unlikely to be displaced by robots any time soon.
Service industry jobs as a whole certainly aren't going away, but technology lets you reduce those, too. There will always be people willing to pay for a human waiter at a restaurant... but why not just have a kiosk at a fast food place? A more visible example is the self-checkouts at grocery stores; they don't replace retail workers, but allows them to be more efficient. RFID to handle inventory (and possibly even faster automated checkouts) and robots to stock shelves aren't going to show up tomorrow, but I doubt they're more than a decade away.
Looking at other areas, the web has greatly reduced the need to have people talk to customers about the basics of your business and product line-up, instead customers can just read a website. Sales people aren't going anywhere any time soon, but the web helps companies work with a lot fewer. In the future, I expect more and more of what call center workers are doing to be replaced by web sites (I'm generally surprised by how much business is done by voice, but maybe it's just because I'm young enough to be used to always being able to do business over the internet in text).
Welcome to the future, meatbag.
It is possible that the effects of technology can increase unemployment, perhaps not directly but in various indirect ways. It does not necessarily need to, but it does cause at least employment but it does shift it from one place to another. Since the cost of technology goes into the pocket of a human, the money is still creating jobs. as well, If the cost of the production is reduced, this *can* reduce product cost that *may* reduce displacement in the economy of that product and free up space in the monetary cycle for other products, creating jobs elsewhere. A major problem here is that, a major cause of unemployment is employees not being trained for the latest changes in where the jobs are and that they need to be retrained to where job growth is occuring in the economy. Another issue is that the increased productivity can be manipulated by corporations to increase their profits, CEO pay etc, this results in much of the benefit being absorbed by the CEO class in expanded material wealth by them, absorbing more of the monetary job creation cycle for themselves and acquiring more physical wealth for themselves. That is a real issue. Another possibility is that low paying jobs which do create a larger number of jobs may be replaced with a smaller number of engineer type jobs.The engineer type jobs may absorb more of the available monetary supply in the monetary cycle and cause more displacement in that, this effect can result in job losses as a result of these technologies. Such as if we were to automate cashier jobs, we may replace a larger number of cashiers making, often a miserable $15,000 per year, perhaps 10 cashiers could be replaced with 1 engineer making $100,000 per year, resulting in the loss of 9 jobs as a result of the engineer consuming room in the monetary cycle that was formerely consumed by 9 people.
Thought everyone knew what was going on, I guess not!
There is a really good tech talk that touches on this. While McAfee seems to thinks this is a good thing, I believe it will most likely be a painful journey.
http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs.html
You're assuming there is market capacity for that product. It doesn't appear there is. Which is why companies are sitting on loads of cash right now and they aren't hiring. It's also why making excuses like "cutting taxes for business owners will help the economy grow" are a load of bunk. Businesses have tons of cash, they don't have meaningful areas to put that cash because they can't sell the product they are producing as it is.
This topic is covered in detail in excellent books such as Basic Economics, by Sowell and Economics in One Lesson, by Hazlitt.
The upshot is that automation (or any labor-saving technology) puts some people out of work, but increases overall labor. So, it sucks if you are a weaver when the automated loom is introduced; but the textile industry went from employing N people to employing 1000N people as a result of productivity increases and price reduction over time. If you outlaw the automated loom to keep those weavers in place, you keep many, many more jobs than that from being created.
This is easy to see. Imagine what jobs would be around without automated looms, computers, cars, trains, airplanes, ships, electric motors, gas motors, combines, factory equipment, telephones, etc. All of those put some people out of work, then created a vast number of other jobs. It is an enormous net gain, missed only by those who look only at the ones who lose their jobs while ignoring the vast number of other jobs created.
I think the only real answer may be to make business pay Social Security tax for EACH ROBOTIC WORKER! If the machines do the work of a 100 men, then the company should be paying Social Security payments equal to 100 workers. This is the ONLY WAY that humans will be able to remain competitive in the long run, and real competition is VITAL for any capitalistic system to remain functional.
Yeah, because the rest of Marx's economic theories were so successful.
I'm confused. When technology destroys the business model of the RIAA and MPAA we celebrate and point out that those that refuse to adapt should perish. Even though there are real people with real lives invested in the RIAA and MPAA.
When newspapers try to prop up their businesses by suing Google and putting up firewalls, we point to failed business models and the fact that they should adapt or die. Even though there are real people with real lives owning, operating, and working for the newspapers.
Now when it looks like technology is going to disrupt the business model of the UAW, the grocery clerks, the mail men, or countless others we start screaming that it's wrong? Really?
How about some consistency. Either support all buggy whip manufacturers or adapt to a new world where technology replaces more and more jobs -- freeing people up to pursue other interests.
Businesses have tons of cash, they don't have meaningful areas to put that cash because they can't sell the product they are producing as it is.
...which creates opportunity for new products to be introduced into the market. New inventions result in the startup of new companies, which need capital, and existing companies that have large cash reserves are one of the places they get it, though perhaps indirectly. Keep in mind that those large cash reserves aren't just sitting; Apple's $100B in "cash", for example, is all invested. Most likely it's primarily in safe, short-term investments, which lowers the price of the next-riskier class of investments and so on, all the way up to the VC. Those big piles of cash drive down borrowing costs across the board, making cash more accessible to startups.
(Note that this very simple analysis ignores the effects of low prime rates from the fed as well as the contrary effects of large amounts of public debt which soak up lots of available investment capital and thereby raise the cost of capital. It also ignores the effects of trade imbalances, currency fluctuations, inflation, both realized and anticipated and I'm sure a bunch of other things I don't even know I don't know. The point is that the cash held by big companies isn't sitting idle, and that it does have the effect of nurturing growth in the economy, by making cash available to new enterprises so they can get off the ground and start growing.)
One other point: Making existing industries more efficient not only frees up capital, it also frees up labor. What's really crucial but not often understood is that these are exactly the same thing. We measure capital in terms of dollars, but dollars are just fictitious placeholders for real wealth, which is actual stuff produced, which is created by the combined application of labor and capital in various permutations. So increased efficiency results in additional capacity in the market in terms of both labor and the placeholder for that labor, both of which can be applied to create new output elsewhere -- often output that was previously either a luxury item or simply non-existent.
The only real problem in all of this is the fact that while cash is liquid and can easily flow into whatever new industry can make effective use of it, labor is not very liquid. It takes time to retrain people to make them useful in new industries -- and sometimes it just can't be done.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
just sleep at quickie mart on the night shift apo will just yell at you.
we need to set full time as 30-40 hours a week or 32 (4 day base) with over time starting at 40 or a mini over time at 32-35-40.
You're missing completely the other side of your own story.
If you save a company from going under by losing ten people, then you saved the jobs of all the remaining people.
If technological improvements can help a failing company survive (in other words, losing fewer jobs than it otherwise would have), then they could help a thriving company grow, and employ more people as a result.
People in these comments keep acting as if a company that produces x units / year, will only ever produce x units/year, and therefore if they can produce more units per worker, they'll always end up with fewer workers, rather than higher productivity.
What kind of a company sets itself a production limit and sticks to it every year regardless of costs or people required per unit?
If you can widgets more cheaply and people buy more of them as a result, then industry as a whole will probably grow and employ more people.
Look at electronics. Used to be people had to solder transistors onto circuit boards, in some case they still do, but has fabrication technology led to fewer people being employed in the computer and electronics industry than, say 50 years ago?
What about molded plastics. How many people do you think are employed in this industry compared to fifty years ago?
Cheaper = more demand = more production.
Using a resource (e.g. labour) more efficiently, often leads to more of it being used, not less.
See jevon's paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
But what creates employment to begin with? People with technology to produce something valuable to other people. This was true four hundred years ago with the printing press, and it's true today with robots doing manual labor.
This is effectively a conservative view of technology, that something new necessarily represents a risk to modern society.
Marx was writing in an era when about 90% of the workforce was engaged in farming or manufacture. It was an era when just producing enough stuff was a big problem. For the developed world, making enough stuff became a solved problem in the 1950s and 1960s. Making enough good stuff was solved in the 1980s.
Today, about 3% of the US labor force is involved in farming, and 9% in manufacturing, and 4% in construction. So about 16% of the work force produces all the stuff. Marx's writing assumes that goods production dominates the economy, and it just doesn't any more. We need different analysis now.
Henry Ford figured out why this was wrong nearly 100 years ago. He didn't pay his workers minimum wage. He paid his workers substantially more than workers at other factories. So much that they could afford to buy the cars they were assembling. As a result, demand skyrocketed and Ford made gobs more money than he ever could have saved by paying them less.
If you aren't creative or lack the desire to work, then that is your own fault. With the internet you can sell products to anyone in the world, and anyone can potentially use their skillset to come up with things that other people can use. If your skillset isn't good enough, there are plenty of ways to pick skills up, the potential to learn and develop with other people are limitless with the internet. So figure it out and make yourself useful in todays economy.
technology cannot cause unemployment
Yeah? Tell that to the fine people working in the grocery stores I visit, slowly being replaced by machines. Tell that to all the people who would have worked in banks and offices before the days of punch cards. Tell that to the guys who gandy-danced rails into place, and the diggers, and the guys who carried bricks on their backs all day long, and the guys who built cars and machined millions of parts all day long for decades.
Of course economists would say that, they've never left the Ivory Tower to labor in the mills and fields and tunnels and streets. That's the kind of disconnect that got Murka where it's got today, that got our space program where it's got, that creates the 'nutrition' that got us where we are.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
What it really boils down to is the following, one observation and one question:
1) Observation: The end goal of adopting technology in business (currently) is raising value created per dollar expended, or equivalently, decreasing cost per unit value created. They're both the same thing looked at from opposite ends. If the ratio of value created to costs expended can be increased by replacing people by technology then that will happen, right up to the point of no humans being used in production. There are a few cooperatives around the world whose stated goal is to maximize quality of life for their members, but their numbers are vanishingly small. For the vast majority of companies, employees are an unfortunate cost of doing business and to be reduced as much as possible.
2) Question: How are people going to make money to pay for essentials like food and housing, let alone to pay for the amenities created by much of business? The answer to this question lies at the root of the business dilemma, because if business were 100% successful in eliminating human costs then it would die, because no workers in the economy means that nobody has any money to pay for the goods that are being manufactured. There is a strong negative feedback loop here.
Putting 1) and 2) together, it's pretty clear that society doesn't have its thinking hat on, because the goals of 1) are in conflict with the needs of 2). Business looking out for itself alone is on a path towards failure both for itself and for the rest of society.
Nothing in past economic / political history has really addressed this modern dilemma properly. Older political theories don't really cover it too well, because although they addressed the problems of manufacturing being in the hands of a select few, advances in technology such as we are experiencing today weren't becoming a reality at that time.
We're arriving in unexplored territory, and sadly the business view of all this is typically "Not our problem". But it is.
So soon technology will release us all from the slavery of work? I hope so, they have been promising it for decades already! 99% unemployment here we come! Woo hoo!
farming machines killed off farming jobs.
in reality people are freed from mundane laborious jobs to do more creative and and advanced one, such as creating computers, curing disease.
....and really this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. There have been any number of science fiction novels with this premise (that machines replaced human beings for virtually all work), usually at the detriment of the humans.
We're already at the point where some people think it's better to just collect stipends from the government and sit on their butts doing whatever. I believe right now we're in a "transition period" of sorts, where human-only work and best-done-by-machines work will fluctuate back and forth depending on social development, new areas of technology, etc. If we can get ourselves into space then the opportunities for human-required stuff will boom since there's so much we hairless monkeys are better are doing than machine are--at least for now.
Down the road (a hundred years if we don't get off planet, perhaps a thousand if we do) we'll have to fundamentally transform society to allow machines to do most of the work and yet somehow find a way to provide necessities and luxuries to people. That's gonna be a bit of a wrenching transition and will likely happen gradually if we're dispersed around the solar systems and/or stars.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
and won't have to pay nuthin' to nobody. Big factories making goods to sell to a large number of people will become unnecessary too. The only function of the army of robots will be exactly that -- be an army. Protect the 7,000 from the 7,000,000,000. They will fail.
I make the following unfounded assertions:
1. Technology tends to displace workers who are doing the least skilled work.
2. Continually increasing the skill level of the population to enable people to remain in work is not sustainable. Each individual has an upper limit to how much they can learn in order to function in a skilled workforce. Some people struggle with the skills required to gain employment today in 2012, but as the minimum skill threshold rises, this will affect more and more people.
3. Creative work is some of the hardest work to automate. Increasingly, people will be pushed into such work when other work is automated away.
4. The more people we have creating, designing and engineering, the faster the development of automation technology can proceeed.
5. Consequentially, the rate with which work opportunities will be lost to automation will increase roughly in proportion to the amount of work that has already been automated.
6. Eventually, the creation of new ways of automating things will be automated, obsoleting the creative work also. Of course, when nobody is working, there are no customers, but the handful of people remaining in charge of vast automated business empires will by then have assumed great power over the rest of the population in a more political manner.
7. People might struggle to revolt against such a regime, lacking the resources and technology to do so.
8. ???
And just how do these other economists define that phrase? Is it thirty years... in which case that's when you kids are my age.
In the late seventies, before many of you were born, and into the early eighties, there was a *lot* of talk in the media and by talking heads, about how, in the US, well, yes, manufacturing was going away, but it was going to be replaced by better, less soul-deadening, and better-paying jobs in the "Information Economy".
Yup. And for the majority of the US (that's > 50%, for those playing with statistics), their paychecks have been stagnant or gone down; the majority of newly created jobs involve burgers, pizza, and low-level healthcare.
This time around, they claim that the economy will Really Move, and more new jobs will be created... not one is saying *where* those jobs will come from.
And do you *really* think many people are capable of doing college, and adding to the economy, rather than them preferring lower education jobs, and more time at life, not at work?
There were a number of stories a couple of months ago, about new manufacturing jobs here.. all of which require extensive training, and there aren't a lot of them.
The conversation I've been trying to get started for about 15 years is what happens when 90% of manufacturing is automated, and construction is heavily prefab? Where will the jobs be? What will happen to three-quarters of the population - will it be like what used to be called the Third World, with 50%-80% unemployment?
Just to offer a suggestion, how about government ownership of major industries, and a reverse income tax... the way they have in Alaska?
What you do with your life after that is, of course, a separate conversation.
mark
Economics used to study a broad spectrum of questions revolving around wealth and value -- up until the early 1980s. Then it took a turn toward the Conservative. Economics departments threw away three quarters of their field of study, to focus on what their resident Money and Banking Professor told them was worthwhile. Economics devolved to become a version of Bookkeeping, taught over in the Business School.
Business MBAs became loaded toward what had been its Finance specialty. The study of Capital became all-important. Resources still played a role -- but the study of Labor in this new Economic world, became worthless. Many new neoclassical Economists said openly, that Labor creates no wealth whatsoever, and therefore was not a valid subject of economic study.
Mitt Romney is the perfect example of its new Academic end product -- a fine man with definite business skills who means well and is successful on his own terms, but is utterly clueless when it comes to labor's contribution to the firm. Economically speaking, he's living in the 19th century. ... so the old fights become new again. Most of you have taken University Economics sometime in the last thirty years, and you didn't learn who Malthus really was, or why he is important to this thread.
Right now some of you are furious with the tone of my response and are about to post your reply telling me that you have a recent MBA and are richer and smarter than I am. That's fine. I am (surprise) happy for you -- but you still don't actually know how labor creates wealth, how technology leverages labor and creates opportunity for employees, competitors and consumers, and why all this matters a whole lot today. You have your surfing cut out for you this morning.
sc
Muscles...
Intelligence...
Perhaps the next great human contribution will be... imagination.
I doubt it's going to be something machines can emulate for a long time, and if they ever do then what will be the difference between machines and people?
I've thought long and hard about this issue. In math we take the limit as some variable goes to infinity to get a perspective on how some system is behaving. With this topic I started off along these lines thinking about robots displacing people at jobs. You follow that line of thinking out before the economic system changes and things are bad. Then I asked myself why do people actually need to work. They need food, shelter etc. What does it take to provide those things? Energy. So I decided to take this general concept of technology advancing until some singularity that changes everything. I took the limit as technology reaches infinity. What is infinity? Assume we find an almost limitless supply of energy. Couple that with replicator technology where you can convert energy to mass. Now you can manufacture anything you want personally and have a stable food supply. Scarcity disappears. Would we stop working? I decide that most of us wouldn't stop working. Working gives us purpose. What would we work on? Better tech of course. Star ships etc. In this world you can think of either 100% unemployment or 0% unemployment depending on your point of view. No one has to work for money. Money is now obsolete since it would no longer fulfill it's main purpose of being necessary to obtain the things you need/want. The whole concept of employment has been radically altered and possibly made obsolete in this world. There are variants of this scenario of course...what if there is a limtless supply of energy but the powers that be decide to artificially restrict access...etc.
Getting back to the problem at hand. Robots are coming. Until we have a nearly infinite energy supply we will need food and shelter. Those things are scarce items. Scarcity drives the need for money and therefore requires people to work. The answer therefore to this whole problem is that that people will have two choices of fields. Become involved with making the robots that do the things we need or become involved with exploring the cost effective energy sources for the future. The key will be who controls the access to tomorrows energy. If we have empathetic and generous people in control of tomorrows energy our march towards automation doesn't need to be so horrible.
also because labor is something people value increasingly doing in itself.
The vast majority of people don't value their labor so much that they'd work 40 hours per week just for the fun of it. In fact, if you ask around - especially among people whose wages are closer to median (and not, say, software developers), most of them don't really enjoy their jobs. At best, they find them tolerable.
Yet, far more people work today as a percentage of society and in absolute numbers than back in his time.
So, pray tell, all those people who were not working in Marx's time as a percentage of society - where did they get their food from?
If you flip the math you realize that now the company could employee those 100 workers to run 1,250 robots to do the work of 2,500 workers - increasing productivity by 2,500%. Assuming the capitalist take 90% of the increased productivity as profits (IIRC, the long term trend is 30%) workers would only see their pay increase by 250%.
If productivity gain is 2500% (i.e. we produce 25 times more goods by price), but workers' pay is only 2.5 times bigger (and the amount of workers is the same), then who's going to buy all those extra goods?
From their husbands, mostly. The point is that mechanization did not cause a collapse in the job market; instead, there was a modest increase. Hence, Marx was wrong.
So, as I was saying: people choose to work longer hours, some because they want the extra money, others because they like their job. So, people aren't forced into working 40h+ weeks by some evil capitalist plot.
In the design of operating systems, there is a notion of policy vs. mechanism. A good mechanism in an operating system is one that enables a number of different policies to be implemented. One such mechanism, found in most modern operating system, is the scheduling of threads by priority. At first glance, this might seem to be a policy rather than a mechanism. But we haven't specified how priorities are assigned to threads. In fact, by assigning priorities in various ways, a number of different policies can be implemented, such as increasing the priority of interactive threads, or ensuring the priority of threads that have real-time requirements.
This mechanism is very flexible and powerful, but it is not without some problems. For example, if locking is supported between threads to control access to shared data, there is a potential for a higher priority thread to be stalled while a thread of intermediate priority continues to run. This can happen if a lower priority thread holds a lock that the higher priority thread needs to acquire in order to continue. As long as the intermediate priority thread continues to run, the lower priority thread will not run, and the lock will not be released.
There are ways to fix that particular problem, such as by dynamic adjustments to thread priorities when an attempt is made to acquire a lock. But the points I really want to make are that priority scheduling, however much it may appear to be a policy, is actually a mechanism, and that it has dysfunctional edge cases that may not be obvious. I claim that capitalism is actually a mechanism, not a policy, and also has dysfunctional edge cases.
I make this claim because arguments about capitalism often seem to assume that it is a policy. In my mind, a policy is a statement of what you want to achieve, and not of the mechanism by which you plan to do it. In fact, when we have arguments about capitalism vs. socialism, for example, those are really arguing about the merits of different mechanisms, and often never touch on what we consider to be good policy. There seems to be an implicit assumption that we all agree on the policies, so the discussion is just about how to implement them. I don't believe there is general agreement on the policies, because any attempt to discuss them is usually sidetracked by discussions of mechanisms.
Even if you're sure in your gut that capitalism is the right mechanism, there is much left unspecified, and edge cases to handle. So there still needs to be a discussion about the desired policies. The basis of those discussions are our values, which in the US are largely shaped by mass media, with many people just accepting certain sets of values uncritically. As it seems that capitalism has reached (or soon will) one of its dysfunctional edge cases, it might be a good time to start discussing values, then move from there to policies, and finally decide what mechanisms to use to implement the policies.
From their husbands, mostly
Are you seriously claiming that most peasant women didn't work?
I see, so given that Marx's hare-brained economic predictions clearly have turned out to be false, you're now trying roundabout ad hominems.
No, I'm still trying to figure out how your claim that, supposedly, in Marx's time fewer people were working, makes any sense. Because it sure doesn't to me, when we're looking at the age where there was no such thing as unemployment insurance or welfare.
(As a side note, you should be paying more attention to names of people you're replying to, because I think you're confusing me with the guy who started the thread)
Well, one could pull out Marx, but his theories have a couple of holes. I will give you 2 flip reasons and hopefully something to chew over.
First, who cares? In the very long run (25+ years) workers would go back to it’s normal 70% to 50% . In the short run – well technology distribution is distribution. Old capitalist out, new capitalist in. Turnover over the soil. All is good.
Second, who cares? If you are a worker and you had a choice of either between enjoy a $1 pop or waiting a year to get a $2,500 (which is the value of the robot) – which would you chose? If you look at developing economies (those which have finial gotten the technology, education system, regulations, capital, etc.) their economy is heavily weighted towards capital development and consumption. Take a look a China today. (Which might lead to questions about income distribution, but there are better solutions then stepping on the breaks for progress.)
What you are asking is why society would want to invest in something that would make it radically richer? Don’t worry about that – it will happen. I think the question you want to ask is how do we limit the plutocracies to promote a meritocracy?
Feanorian claimed that "mechanization displaces jobs" like Marx predicted. Feanorian and Marx are obviously both wrong, as a simple look at labor participation rates shows you. We have more jobs today, not fewer, and more people filling those jobs, both in absolute and in relative terms.
Neither of them made an argument about unpaid peasant home makers. Unpaid peasant home makers clearly have less unpaid work to do today due to mechanization, and it's hard to see how that could possibly be considered a bad thing.
I'm not confusing you. But you should pay more attention to the context of an argument instead of interpreting words out of context.
First, who cares? In the very long run (25+ years) workers would go back to it’s normal 70% to 50%
What, exactly, would be the mechanism for that?
Second, who cares? If you are a worker and you had a choice of either between enjoy a $1 pop or waiting a year to get a $2,500 (which is the value of the robot) – which would you chose? If you look at developing economies (those which have finial gotten the technology, education system, regulations, capital, etc.) their economy is heavily weighted towards capital development and consumption. Take a look a China today. (Which might lead to questions about income distribution, but there are better solutions then stepping on the breaks for progress.)
Income distribution is precisely the issue here. I don't think anyone (on Slashdot, at least) is seriously arguing for Luddism. It's more a question of, once capital becomes essentially self-sustaining with minimal or no involvement of human labor, how exactly is our present system (where ownership of capital is highly concentrated) going to work, especially when it comes to distributing the goods produced by means of that capital?
perhaps we didn't actually elect the lesser of two evils, and the pres is merely Cthulhu's puppet
Is technology enabling us to achieve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
Casteism