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Recession, Tech Kill Middle-Class Jobs
Un pobre guey writes
"'To understand the impact technology is having on middle-class jobs in developed countries, the AP analyzed employment data from 20 countries; tracked changes in hiring by industry, pay and task; compared job losses and gains during recessions and expansions over the past four decades; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, entrepreneurs and people in the labor force who ranged from CEOs to the unemployed.' Their findings: Technology has consistently reduced the number of manufacturing jobs for 30 years; people with repetitive jobs have been easy to replace in the past, and task jugglers like managers and supervisors will be likely targets in the future; companies in the S&P 500 have expanded their business and increased profits, but reduced staffing, thanks to tech; and startups are launching much more easily these days. The response to the article includes the dutifully repeated bad-government-is-at-fault and don't-worry-it's-like-the-Industrial-Revolution memes. But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
I'm currently reading Critique of Economic Reason by André Gorz. Despite being almost 30 years old, it describes this situation well. Rises in productivity due to automation are incompatible with a culture that values 'work' on a moral basis, and associates it with a persons identity.
Got enough karma so might as well post this AC: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
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What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
The final question in TFS is an example of a question that's bounced along the periphery of technology and now deserves centre stage. Nicely put!
Now, what are we going to do for a living after everything's been automated?
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It's not just schooling. The fact of the matter is that some people aren't too bright. Without repetitive, simple jobs, these people will literally have no place in the economy. There's no comfortable answer here. Do we prevent the births of stupid people? Gene engineer all potential parents so that their children are smarter? How smart? Where are the boundaries? And who pays? Or do we just hand them all a check each month and encourage them to stay out of the way, and reproduce as little as possible?
20th century morality isn't going to stand up long to this 21st century problem. Somewhere, something's got to give. Good luck if you think "the marketplace" is a good way to solve this. I think that was tried in France, and in Russia.
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Tech could just as easily extend middle class jobs, if we chose productivity over cost efficiency. The problem is the people making those decisions seem to lean heavily towards saving their wealth, rather than investing and creating more. We ought to look into why they are making that decision, and also, why they are the ones who get to make it.
did you know that 90% of americans were once farmers? and then they got pushed off the land by the emergence of technology and corporate farming (we're still in the 19th century here, folks). and THEN those people and their children took jobs in heavy industry (Carnegie, Mellon...) and extraction industries like logging and mining. And THEN the heavy industry jobs moved offshore and the extraction industries automated and wound down a bit. and THEN those people and their kids took jobs in engineering and technological industries. and THEN Japan took over the automotive and consumer markets. Remember the '70's "japan has won the war". And THEN... well OBVIOUSLY it's a HUGE CONSPIRACY perpetrated over several generations by... some... bunch of people who... well...
However reality is we live in a psychopathic insane society, where selfishness and greed have become dominant at the top. For them, if you have no useful function, you should starve and die. So the reality is automation presents a real problem for us as a transitional society.
With no attempts in place to reduce working hours, in fact the opposite occurring the reality is, society is far more likely disintegrate into violence as those at the top expect those at the bottom to simply die and those at the bottom refusing to do so.
The internet is helping to break down the control of the psychopathic minority but will it be quick enough to prevent societal collapse driven by insanity at the top? At the current rate no, with continuing pressure to reduce wages and increases hours rather than the required increase in wages with a reduction in working hours. Until that shift occurs to say a 6 hour 4 day week, things look pretty grim in the long term.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Where horses really better off when they were more useful to man? They were essentially kept as slaves. They were a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Maybe horses aren't smart enough to notice or care that they are slaves. Maybe some people aren't either.
Yes a difference between the common man and a horse is autonomy (one manifestation of which is the right to vote, along with other rights bestowed by various societies and constitutions and enforced by legal systems). When we say horses became useless, this is only in relation to people. What does it mean when people become useless? In relation to what? I'm sure some would argue that if the poor became useless to the rich, there would be a strong incentive to simply have the poor killed. This is probably true under some circumstances. But living in a society where the only thing keeping the poor alive is their usefulness (real or artificial through denial of technology) to the wealthy, seems to me to be barely an improvement. Maybe that was good enough for horses, but I wouldn't accept that for people.
I think people are intelligent and empathetic enough to come up with a system that respects human life while trying to maximize economic efficiency. I think sopping technology to keep the unskilled useful is one of the the dumbest things you can do if you care about overall human prosperity.
Even if you look at it from the point of view of the selfish uber-wealthy. If my options were to have 10% of my $billion income used to help poor people, or 90% of my $trillion income (facilitated by technology) used to sustain people who have no useful skills, it is simply irrational of me to choose the former. Obviously a selfish uber-wealthy person would rather just kill all the poor and keep 100%, but that's not one of the options allowed in this social contract. If people ever lose the right to vote or democracy fails, etc, all bets are off anyway.