Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
... 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.
...pick a job in which you can't be replaced by a computer.
Sure. I mean, why wouldn't the country need 360,000,000 coders? I can see no possible negative outcome...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
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.
>pick a job in which you can't be replaced by a computer.
Like designing computers.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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
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....
pretty soon youll have a robot designing and building computers - but of course you will have to have programmers to write the code for those robots to do such a thing.
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
Well, then, flipping burgers is out:
http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
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.
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.
Factory worker... what could possibly go wrong there?
Uh....don't count on that. Maybe the archaeologist, but everything else can be made into robotics. The first three I think they're working on now using randomizers and grammar coding. The fourth Real Dolls. The circus performer, we have robots that dance and feed animals. Wouldn't be hard to make a toreador with the right parts.
I'm not trying to be extremist, but I think the robot overlords are coming and there's little we can do to stop them. Once someone makes a self-replicating robot, we're dead.
...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 ;-)
I see you aren't thinking about marginal costs. Sort of typical for those who decry capitalism.
When employment drops to zero while goods and services remain static or increase, the price of those goods and services also drop to zero. This is why almost everything on the Internet is free. If robotics do for physical reality what the internet has done for the mind, the future is bright indeed.
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
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%?
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.
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.
Factory worker... what could possibly go wrong there?
I guess we'll find out soon enough...
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."
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.
Meanwhile, at the Google Translate division...
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
"Machines of Easy Virtue"
...pick a job in which you can't be replaced by a computer.
Hmm. . .Well. . .how long do you figure before they let Watson loose on law libraries and medical databases?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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
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.
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!
Baxter
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
I know, I hate it when the citizenry discuss the issues of the day.
.: Semper Absurda
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?
If there really were such extreme deflation, the unemployed would still starve.
.: Semper Absurda
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
You can't see very far into the future then.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
What we're seeing today is a harvest. Your cash is the crop.
Savings are depleted. Practically everyone is deep in debt. A rapidly growing segment of the population is unable to secure basic amenities without public assistance and loans, which they will also pay interest on. The folks at Citigroup have been especially candid on this topic, and their remarks about the new 'plutonomy' ring true. The net worth of the lower classes is so incredibly small now that the diminishing returns on extracting value from them are finally winning out, and soon they will be irrelevant. There will be little to no profit to gain from them.
You don't harvest from fallow fields.
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.
Price cannot drop to zero because of capital cost. Luddites were wrong, because they have not seen coming the boom of new jobs to produce new things in new ways. Maybe we are the new Luddites, but maybe there is no such new job field ready to plow, because machines are just so good that they can do "everything".
If that is the case, the consumer driven capitalism will just implode.
"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 you got it. Machines will end up with all the dreary drudgery repetitive mindless work which supports our infrastructure. This was done by the "proletariat" of old days, leaving the enjoyment of the efforts of their labor to the bourgeoisie.
The machines become the proletariat, producing our food, making our things, cleaning up after us, getting rid of our trash. We just tell the men who design the machines anything we desire, and those of us proficient in machinery describe to CAD machines the instructions for making it.
This opens up a whole new realm of leisure for us. We get to spend our days socializing and doing pleasant things, hopefully enjoying what few days our biological systems are designed to last.
Being I just came off the flu ( a four-roll special, if measured in spools of toilet paper ), I for one was very thankful for the comforts of electric blankets, flush toilets, and machines which toiled through the night making cans of chicken soup and rolls of TP.
I can guiltlessly assign work to a machine I would have a hard time justifying I ask a living, breathing, feeling human being to do. I would not even ask an animal to do it. I see all sorts of stuff in history books ( and the Bible ) of people being required to perform all sorts of unthinkable labors, of which they reaped no benefit. Being I am in technology myself - and deal regularly with embedded processing - it is my goal to make some device with the sole purpose of making life easier for us. I think everyone who designs this stuff has the same intention.
But like anything else, technology, like fire, can be used to warm the house or destroy the building, but its not the fault of the fire.
I do not fear technology, but I do fear the misuse of technology.
We seem to be looking for something to blame the current economic malaise on. Its not technology causing this one folks... its Tax Law. In computer parlance, we have a bunch of legal short-circuits in the system. This system can work a helluva lot better than it is as soon as we patch the program to produce desired outputs rather than enriching a few by crony capitalism. Right now, the law incentivizes hoarding and greed. A few changes in tax law is all that is needed to fix this. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, but some of the software is poorly written, causing resource hogging..
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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.
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!
Economists discount it because in their view any laboror replaced by a robot can be retrained for another job. They fail to account, however, that many of those laborors may be sufficiently along in their careers that another career option may not be an option - e.g. someone about 50 who would need 10 years of retraining for an equivalent position. Pilots would be in that category if they could ever be replaced; especially since there is a mandatory retirement at 65 for commercial pilots (you can ignore it if you are running your own charter company to a degree, or doing bush-pilot) - needless to say, that's how most things are.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
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
That's the idea with more technology of course. But in reality, we seem to be experiencing the reverse. Collectively we spend more hours at work today than we did 50 years ago and many more than we did 200 years ago. It may be more cushier jobs sitting in front of a computer for 8-9 hours per day than digging ditches or cutting trees or whatever manual labour they did. Less risk of getting hurt in an accident, higher risk of getting fat and having a heart attack I guess.
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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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I always find it fascinating that people keep bring up buggy whips but don’t bring up any evidence of it.
Since the invention of the automobile sales of horse tack has steady increased. Unfortunately it not broken down into buggy whips, ridding crops, etc. The number of horses has increased in the U.S. and the number of farriers has increased.
Of course, the working plow horse is now the “pet” dressage horse.
I would even say the "archaeologist," too. Personally, I think the Mars Rovers are, in a way, archaeologists.
true that. Every time there is a new legislation protecting some group, workers in general, women, pregnant women, minorities, you name it, the employers preemptively discriminate against that group so they don't have to bother down the road. By hiring someone from any protected group, they give up flexibility and get liabilities/risk lawsuits instead. It's a barrier of non-zero cost and a very shitty deal in uncertain times. All these excessive protections mean that businesses can't really experiment with products/business plans without fully committing, they can't be up to date with fast changing market. They prefer to wait and see, especially in uncertain times.
Technology exploits the potential difference between workers but the process will stop. Investing in machines has to be profitable (people have to have money to spend on your wares) so you can't get rid of all labor as the returns will diminish fast.
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.
My position as smartass Slashdot poster is secure!
Is barely sufficient for casual recreational use. Legal docuemnts and negotiations are all handled by human translators, and likely will be until a computer understand the difference between quickly, promptly, and briskly as it pertains to a particular context. If MS is any gauge, the newest context-specific grammar hints are wrong more than right (subject-verb agreement and tenses being right more than wrong when listed as wrong, but perhaps they are set to give false negatives to call attention to questionable constructs, more than be useful for auto-correction as spelling is).
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You have computers designing CPUs, but then the computer designed CPUs are less efficient than ones optimized by humans, even if they are cheaper to design.
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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.
Huh, good read.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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
Yes, but when you go to a circus, you want to see humans, not robots. A human walking on a rope high up gets attraction, because everyone feels the danger of the situation (usually far more than there's real danger). A robot walking on a rope high up will interest no one (assuming the general development has gone so far that the ability alone isn't any more extraordinary). If the robot falls down, it will be harmed or maybe even destroyed, but so what? It's just a robot, it can be replaced, and the new one will be just as good as the old one. It's some financial loss, but that's it. Nobody cares about the individual robot.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
Organ donor. You cannot use a robot for that. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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."
You people keep saying that the unemployed are starving.
Care to enlighten us about which country you are talking about?
"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.
The problem is that our current economy is built on the assumption that people work to get the resources they need for living (well, unless you've got enough money that you can let others work for you). When robots make more and more of that work, this means less is available for humans, and thus the basic assumption the economy is built on breaks down. Which of course doesn't mean that the machines are bad, but it means that our economy is not adapted to their existence. Unfortunately for many people the economic system is a sort of religion, so they refuse to even think about how to change it to adapt to the new situation.
I've once read a very insightful sentence (unfortunately I don't remember who wrote it):
One thing all the world's stories of paradise have in common is that the humans are out of work.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This is the same labor saving that displaced cotton pickers and manual wheat threashing. Fast forward to today. Larger more effecient production means lower consumer prices.
How much time in wages does it take to bake a loaf of bread? Now the cheap bread in the US is still under $1 per loaf. Preminum multigrain or other specialty bread is about $2.50. Think about it. The cost of an average loaf of bread is under 10 minutes of labor. Care to eliminate the machines and go back to wood fired kitchen stoves and home made bread? Then a loaf of bread was ~4 hrs labor between raising wheat, cutting firewood, and making the bread.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanised_agriculture
The truth shall set you free!
Only initially. Later, they will be able to write their code themselves.
Of course you'll still have to have someone who checks this code, to make sure the robots don't get programmed to harm us. For obvious reasons, you wouldn't trust that job to a computer.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, the lawyers will make sure that there will be a law against having computers do the lawyer's job. Except if owned by a lawyer, of course.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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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.
Right, sort of like how the internet is starving of free content. I, personally, am paying ten dollars to post this comment.
Thats a pretty stupid statement, and I use stupid in the exact dictionary definition sense.
All of those things rely on someone else having EXTRA money to waste on them. None of those services are required and are generally some of the first to be ignored when times are tight.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
What is capital made from? Energy and labor. Energy is obtained through labor (mining for coal, uranium, etc). If labor is free, then capital is free. This is why there is no poverty in the world of Star Trek. With any good available at anyone's fingertips for free, how could anyone want for material things? A fully robotic workforce is just a larger version of a molecular replicator. There may be some goods that are so expensive that they still cost money, but basic things won't. You can see this on the internet, where some few sites cost money, but the vast majority are free.
Bullshit. Intel doesn't lay out CPUs by hand and hasnt' for years.
Ivy Bridge CPUs have roughly 1.4 billion transistors, the mere idea of doing that by hand is silly in and of itself.
Minor tweaks and learning new ways make the process work better? Sure for a bit longer, but CPUs are already highly built by themselves. The only thing that saves us is that the CPUs have no motivation to make CPUs for themselves.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Sure you can. Work is being done every day on growing organs in the lab.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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/
We "technology guys" ( and our patrons ) have been the enabler for our generation to escape the situations described in the Bible and other history texts. I do not mean to intone religious themes here, but look at this book as a history text of living conditions of generations past. Life has NOT been comfortable for most of us.
I look at even the kings of antiquity, and even they - as royalty - have nowhere near, and I mean nowhere near, the level of creature comforts I have, and I am not a rich guy. My dollar-store glass beer mug would have been considered a crystal chalice of great value. Even kings did not have as much as a proper toilet and paper. No electricity. No refrigeration. No motors. Even the lowest of us live better than royalty of antiquity as far as I can tell... ( except for social standing ). The only thing separating our conditions is the application of technology.
History books show us having to do all sorts of unthinkable things and live through much very unpleasant adversity and misery.
I believe I have lived through the pivotal generations which have transformed human existence from pure animalistic survivalism to the ability for each of us to enjoy and savor life. My fathers had the worst of it, laying the foundation ( industrial revolution ).
I hear what you are saying about longer days. But then, how long was my grandfather's "farm day" where all the work on the farm was manual, no electricity, no refrigeration, and all the work was done by man and mule?
Technology has freed us from a lot of the drudgery where we no longer need to grow our own food, rather we can play our guitar and fight over rights over who gets to hear it. We can now afford leagues of lawyers to hear our endless bickering over the most trivial of issues. We as a human race are finally getting to the point of each of us being able to do whatever it is we want to do... be creative in whatever way we create. Nothing says that creativity has to be technically inclined - it can be music, art, ( or my favorite art, cuisine ), architecture, landscaping. Each of us seems to have a burning desire to do something. The application of technology frees our time so we can do our dream.
This knowledge of technology and how to apply it is the crown jewel of human accomplishment.
Cherish it and teach it to your children, lest ye return to the days of history.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Read what I wrote again, take a deep breath and try again.
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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.
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
The Mars rovers are just fairly dumb tools for a large team of humans who can actually make sense of the data.
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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.
How will you know the code shown is the one that actually gets executed?
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
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Resources are finite. Oversimplifications of economic model work as long as the simplification is a good enough approximation of reality. The assumption that resources are infinite is good enough as long as work to extract the resource is the limiting factor. If it is not, then the assumption is wrong.
If labor is free, energy still is not (it cost energy to "mine" energy, there is a declining marginal return that's called thermodynamic law). Even if energy is free, other bare materials are in finite number, and they would be overexploited up to the point were they would become rare enough that they gain value from their scarcity, and would represent the most part of the price of anything. That, is capital cost.
The thing is that labor "cost" is the other end of the funnel called "consumer market". If economy has only capital cost, and no labor cost, it can produce cheaper in great quantity, but it has no absorption capacity for produced goods, because everybody is broke. Hence, overproduction crisis, deflation and economic collapse ensues.
And therein lies the rub: if no one can convince the robot owners to give up goods (or robots) for these services, then there will be a lot of useless people sitting around taking up resources (from the POV of the overlords). The serfs were kept because they could work the fields. If robots are working the fields, the serfs are intelligent vermin.
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.
Hey, good point! Same if the Virgin Mary comes down on a cloud and shows us her infinite mercy. Or if Jesus comes in after the Four Horsemen and we end up in heaven on earth. Or if Santa Claus clones himself into 10 million copies, and distributes free food, shelter, clothing, and of course toys. Come to think of it, there are lots and lots of ways the employment problem can become irrelevant!
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.
Of course, the last refuge of the cornered socialist is peak oil. Why did I ever expect you to listen to or understand reason?
I forsee the rise of the welfare state - without any welfare. Except of course, someone has to *buy* the stuff our robot overlords are producing on behalf of the rich elite who own us. So we have to be given enough money to be consumers, but the rest can continue to go to the 1%
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I didn't talk about peak oil.
I'm not a "socialist".
I'd certainly like to hear your articulate objections to what I said, if you have any.
So far you just sound like LALALALALA I DON'T HEAR YOU. Whose "cornered" here?
>Bullshit. Intel doesn't lay out CPUs by hand and hasnt' for years.
Bullshit. Parts are drawn by hand, other parts are not as engineering need dictates. This I know.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
Until they get good enough to start writing their own descendant's code and doing their own upgrades......
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
Sure, if the prices really drop to zero. But otherwise we would probably institute a basic income.
.: Semper Absurda
Here in the US and most other advanced economies, we have partially detached income from labor via social policies (so that the unemployed are often not literally starving). We may have to totally detach them when faced with the combination of extreme deflation and extreme unemployment.
.: Semper Absurda
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!
The robot will look (and emote too) just like a human. So the perception of the viewer is unchanged. Nobody need even tell the viewers whether it is a "real" human or not. So why not?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
so that the unemployed are often not literally starving
So instead of saying something accurate, you said something else instead.
What objective did you hope to accomplish by being dishonest?
"His name was James Damore."
....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 hear what you are saying about longer days. But then, how long was my grandfather's "farm day" where all the work on the farm was manual, no electricity, no refrigeration, and all the work was done by man and mule?
Much shorter than yours. Keep in mind that without electricity, it's pointless to work after dark and you can't till fields in freezing weather. Your grandfather would also work with his friends and family, not strangers at the office you happen to share a skillset with. He would also stop working when there was no more chores to do, while when you are done with your work, your boss will just pile on more keeping you busy until your hours is up. He also exercised some control over when to do what work, in what order and how to do it. Stuff that your boss nowadays have control over. Technology has given us a lot, but to wage slavery there is no end in sight.
Football Odds
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?
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?
That's an accurate assessment; the question is, how do we transition to that point.
To be more precise, capital is generated from energy and labor employing existing capital (it's in its very definition - capital is the type of property that generates wealth for its owner). In our existing economic system, all capital is owned by someone, and its owner also owns all its output (including any additional capital that is created). Now, obviously, you're not going to get to the point where robots just do things for free overnight. It's just going to be getting cheaper and cheaper.
However, the benefit of those things being cheaper is enjoyed primarily by the owner of the robots - he does not has an obligation to lower prices on his goods; indeed, it is in his own interest to keep them as high as possible to maximize his profits. Of course, there's competition driving prices down, but there's also collusion (monopolies etc) fighting against that. In practice, you just have to look at the distribution of income today to see just how much in the price of consumer goods that you buy goes directly into the pockets of those who own the "robots" (i.e. the capital). The trend, so far, has been for the steady increase of that share - IIRC, today, about 40% of all wealth generated goes to the owners of capital. So robots making things cheaply does not necessarily translate to cheap goods for everyone. It will, eventually, when cheap transforms into free, and there's simply no point in amassing capital, but we need to get there first.
And in the meantime? Say, a robot displaces 100 workers, producing the same output for the same price. Note, it's still not free, so you still need money to survive in such an economy. But where do those 100 workers get that money from, now?
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.
Tax Law is hardly the big cause.
The big cause is simply that people are used to living an advantageous life over other people.
You see this all the time with people complaining about being paid the minimum wage.
Well what is wrong with the minimum wage? Someone has to be paid the minimum wage. Those paid higher than the minimum wage simply take advantage of the labor of those paid less and get more 'stuff' in life.
The public school teacher only has a 'good job' because some waiter is being paid minimum wage so they can go out to eat on a weekend. Because some textile worker is earning minimum wage assembling clothes and the teacher can get a new pair of jeans every few months...
In as much as you throw the words like crony capitalism/hoarding/greed around, the problem is ultimately 'us'... the people.
Ultimately, technology is going to make us more egalitarian. There might be a few rich people in charge of the robots that provide us with cheap goods, but you know what will get to the average Joe... that they cannot complete with the average Joe's anymore.
In a more egalitarian society... who gets to live in Downtown Manhatten in the 'nice' neighborhood close to transit? Answer that question without saying one person earns more than another.
I too don't fear technology. But I do fear humanity.
Humans love to take advantage of each other.
The 'evil' banker, the teacher, the police officer, the businessman, the engineer... we all in general want to live a better life than someone else.
To truly take advantage of this technological progress, we must rid ourselves of this. That will be the hardest challenge.
We all *know* the solution to this.
Things like work sharing, decreased dependency on economy growth...
The question is how will societies transition their people to this model.
How will they convince public sector unions, doctors, lawyers... that their standard of living will be that of the average citizen?
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.
So... who builds this "technology"?
The technology.
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?
I am missing a line of argument here – but how would that lead to deflation?
To put this in context, if we have a stable GNP, a stable monetary policy, what would force the price index to go down? Now mind you, the conditions would be bleak and dickensesque – I just don’t see how that inherently leads to deflation.
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.
Even with extreme deflation, the unemployed will be severely undernourished (feeding into the destructive cycle of hunger and poverty), unless a basic income were instituted. Happy now?
.: Semper Absurda
Deflation is the collapse of prices. If in future cheap energy and high degrees of automation led to most goods and services being "priced near zero" as OP said, that would be extreme deflation. Reducing the money supply can create deflation, but deflation can also occur even if the money supply is constant or growing (for example because of technological progress).
My point is just that in that circumstance - prices extraordinarily low, unemployment extraordinarily high - we would probably institute a basic income to avoid mass suffering (and attendant costs).
.: Semper Absurda
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?
That's well and good IF you can afford to buy technology. If technology takes your job and there is no social welfare structure in place you will sicken and die exposure and starvation in a hobo camp. The machines will not care. Capitalist only want you for your money. If you can't add to the bottom line you are a liability to be eliminated.
I kind of disagree with you.
What you are saying is that deflation occurs when aggregated supply outstrips aggregated demand (with a constant money supply), which is what would happen if capital and energy approached zero. If this did happen then, yes, for a short time period we would have deflation.
However, one of the assumptions of economics is that people have an insatiable demand. I have confidence that the status seeking humans will figure something to spend their money on even if energy and capital were free. There are many things that we pay for that have intangible values. Things that are limited (collectable beanie babies. A Harvard education. A day on a deserted beach), require labor (a MLB game, live music), or require choices (do we preserve the equatorial rain forest – or build some big massive space elevators).
There you go with the hunger stuff again...
Do you know how many people are on food stamps in the U.S. right now?
"His name was James Damore."
Is technology enabling us to achieve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
Casteism
But there's no reason that demand for these other, non-essential items would then increase the price of energy or food.
I'm not saying that non-essentials or intangibles would necessarily become free as well, but generally those sectors can't provide the sheer number of jobs offered by agriculture and manufacturing before automation. As a result, all the unemployed people might be given food and energy (now nearly free) to prevent them from starving and rioting, etc.
I do agree with you that over time the hypothetical society-of-plenty might develop enough demand for education, research and entertainment that those sectors could employ everyone, but I doubt that the basic income would be then rescinded.
.: Semper Absurda
About 50 million. They each receive about $130 per month.
Despite this small allowance, hunger and other symptoms of poverty are severe problems in the United States. Worldwide, hunger is far and away the largest single source of suffering (~220 million disability-adjusted life years lost per year, about 12% of the total), and mass unemployment contributes significantly to the unavailability of food.
For you to claim otherwise is simple ignorance.
.: Semper Absurda