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Is Technology Eroding Employment?
First time accepted submitter Idontpostmuch writes "The idea that technology cannot cause unemployment has long been taken as a simple fact of economics. Lately, some economists have been changing their tune. MIT research scientist Andrew Mcaffee writes, 'As computers and robots get more and more powerful while simultaneously getting cheaper and more widespread this phenomenon spreads, to the point where economically rational employers prefer buying more technology over hiring more workers. In other words, they prefer capital over labor. This preference affects both wages and job volumes. And the situation will only accelerate as robots and computers learn to do more and more, and to take over jobs that we currently think of not as "routine," but as requiring a lot of skill and/or education.'" Note: Certainly not all economists agree "that technology cannot cause unemployment," especially in the short term. From a certain perspective, displacing labor is a, if not the, central advantage of technology in general.
Sure, it didn't happen with the first significant efficiency gain, but what of future gains? Yes, if the labor of one man can support the lives of 10 men, we can find something for the 9 other men to do. What happens when that ratio changes to 1 in 100? 1,000? Do you really think we can extrapolate from the industrial revolution to future where the vast majority of economic activity is automated?
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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.
Consider the fact that your government confiscates ever greater amounts of your pay and savings via inflation. There is a reason that real income peaked while hours worked per family bottomed in 1971.
The sad truth is that you are competing for scarce goods with money that has been stolen from you and given to mostly non-productive workers (think bankers, politicians, and their cronies).
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."
Funny thing is, the industrial revolution created most of the jobs we're now trying to automate.
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.
The rulers of the future will be people who are good at manipulating machines, they will be programmers.
No. It will still be the managers who manipulate the people who manipulate the machines.
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.
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?
The last time this topic came up, someone posted a link to the short story Manna. I found it well worth the read.
The story explores two vastly different ways of greeting a near-total automation of labour.
Last post!
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]
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.