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Technologies Like Google's Self-Driving Car: Destroying Jobs?
Nerval's Lobster writes "For quite some time, some economists and social scientists have argued that advances in robotics and computer technology are systematically wrecking the job prospects of human beings. Back in June, for example, an MIT Technology Review article detailed Erik Brynjolfsson (a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management) and a co-author suggesting that the evolution of computer technology was "largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years." Of course, technological change and its impact on the workforce is nothing new; just look at the Industrial Revolution, when labor-saving devices put many a hard-working homo sapien out of economic commission. But how far can things go? There are even arguments that the technology behind Google's Self-Driving Car, which allows machines to rapidly adapt to situations, could put whole new subsets of people out of jobs."
Nevermind the increases in safety. Nevermind the new jobs that this will enable. Nevermind the greater standard of living this will bring to all people. We've got to be concerned about potentially lost jobs above all else.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I don't employ any people in my car so you must mean the chauffeurs in the yellow cars who speak only Pashto or Urdu?
TFA seems to be arguing (not unreasonably) that if you've solved the machine vision and 'coping with surprisingly unpredictable environments' problems well enough to put a car on the road without being bankrupted by splattered pedestrians and next of kin, you've probably also solved the problems that were keeping our robot overlords out of a lot of 'semi-structured' environments that have not previously been economic to automate.
Conventional industrial automation is unstoppably, brutally, efficient; but you pretty much have to build the entire environment around the robots; because they are dumb as hell if anything doesn't go to plan (though, so long as it does, they can stuff boards or spot-weld chassis parts like nobody's business). If you solve the problems inherent in driving a car, you've made substantial progress in attacking environments that aren't built around robots and their limitations, which opens up many more just-sloppy-enough-to-confuse-robots and not-labor-intensive-enough-to-rebuild-for-robots workplaces.
Sure, a few Johnnycabs might be the most visible; but that'll be the tip of the iceberg.
when the last buggy whip manufacturer went out of business because of Ford? What about when computers killed Underwood and the typewriter manufacturers? What about when video killed the radio star?
Seriously, stop holding back progress in the name of the status quo, otherwise things can never improve.
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I have a lot of sympathy with this point of view, but there is a problem with it.
George Carlin said, to paraphrase, look at how stupid the average guy is and realize that half of the people are dumber than that.
My point is that we are not going to have a country with nothing but doctors, high-end engineers, programers, and tech people. Not everyone has the brainpower to do that. We have to have something to do or we with have the society in Vonnegut's Player Piano.
That could be the real challenge... what are we going to do when it's not economical for a human to do ANY busy work. Even the not-so-bright need something to do.
This is the old Luddite argument: without technology a lot more effort is required to get things done -- so more people get work. It follows that technology is bad.
In fact, the situation is exactly the opposite: if a machine can drive a car, then having a person drive the car is a waste of the person's time. They can instead do something else with their time, so society get both that and the driving done. In the 19th century, more than 80% of US population directly worked in agriculture. Today, the propotion is 2-3% -- yet we have a lot more food, and many other things to boot.
It's true that in the short term, there is a loss when the specialized skills (say driving) of the people displaced become less valuable, and those people lose their jobs. But this is a transient effect. Some skills were standard 30 years ago, yet rare today.
The more important issue is that technology more easily replaces low-skilled workers. Computers have reduced the demand for secretarial work; robots and other industrial automation reduce the demand for factory workers, and so on. This increases the returns to IQ and education, and reduces the number of well-paying jobs available to less-educated workers. But this seems inevitable, and needs to be solved by changing the attitudes of society toward education rather than by hamstringing technological progress.
he truth is that the amount of work will expand or contract depending on the resources and opportunities available.
"opportunities available"
That's the key right there. It's one thing to spout economic theory; it's another to apply it to reality - hence the complete failure of the economics profession.
As we shrink the need for labor one way or another; whether robots or importing cheaper labor from overseas or sending the work to cheaper countries (Programming and other high skill work included); there aren't enough opportunities being created for those displaced workers.
So, what are we seeing? Massive underemployment and massive increases into the disability programs. We the US are becoming a nation of retail, fast food, and medical workers - the rest are too old to do anything. We are becoming a nation where one part of the population is serving food and cleaning the bedpans of the other part.
The signs of an over supply of workers and decreasing opportunities are all over the place. Sure there are very few bright spots, but the thing is, there's are more than enough people going after those few positions.
Am I suggesting that we eliminate automation or purposefully make ourselves more unproductive?
Absolutely not - even if that were possible.
We have a systemic problem - too many people and not enough opportunities or resources for that matter. Commodities of all types of been increasing over the long term for over a decade and when more supplies are found, it does nothing but slow the increase - see oil.
I think you are making a joke but you right.
Once concern is that over the past 50 years the lowest rungs have been knocked out of the labor market. The gas attendant would graduate to the assistant mechanic, to a full mechanic. Now many low skilled entry level jobs lead nowhere.
Technology does destroy jobs (well sometimes creates jobs in other areas as well), but the same is produced for less, so in effect society is better off. The problem is not with technology but with the method of resource distribution. As you need less and less jobs the wealth gets distributed more unevenly.
The current system (capitalism) was ok, and maybe even necessary when we where not producing enough for people to survive, it encouraged people to produce more, but now we are producing enough to survive, to excess even. Society has a to find a better way of distributing wealth. If we don't the 99% will either die off because they are not needed, rebel because they don't accept dieing. If the 99% do die then the 1% will be split up again 99% of them will become redundant.
If the goal is to own as much as you can, and it is all based on greed and you can make a robots that can produce anything that you want, why would you want any other person around taking up your natural resources?
Oh, you mean in the future when we have a two tier system where the top 1% don't have to work, but the rest of us have menial jobs because technology has replaced all of the formerly middle class jobs that one could raise a family on.
Do you realize how silly that sounds? The rich just can't consume that much more than the rest of us.
No matter how rich you are, you can only drive 1 car at a time. You might buy "four Cadillacs, one for each direction", or forty it you're a collector and just like to look at them, but you have no use for 1000.
No matter how rich you are, you can only live in 1 house at a time. You might buy four houses, one for each season, but there's no point in buying forty.
No matter how rich you are, you can't drink more than 100 beers a week (someone used to have that as his sig). You can only eat so much. You can spend all you want on hookers and blow, but that just means you die and the money gets redistributed.
Money is just a placeholder. If robots are making enough cars, house, food, and drink for everyone, it just won't matter if the "1%" (really the 100 richest families) consumes 10x everyone else. The robots are still making enough for everyone.
People spouting this doom and gloom stuff are just projecting the latest economic downturn to infinity, when the economy is cyclic. It's like measuring the temperatures rising throughout summer, and predicting the oceans will boil in 5 years. Give it a rest.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you can only imagine the future in terms of the current economic system, you can't really imagine the future. We don't have the same economy we had 50 years ago, and that one was nothing like those before it. To presume the current model will persist indefinitely is pure ego.
Re:Out of jobs? (Score:?)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 29, 2013 @08:07PM
Minimum wage jobs are not just for teenagers. There just are not enough teenagers to man every grocery store, every restaurant, every retail outlet, etc. Millions of people are attempting to support families on minimum or barely above minimum wage jobs. These people need to be able to support their families just like anyone else.
The only other option to a reasonable minimum wage is a guaranteed minimum income. And we don't have nearly enough automation to deal with the people who would simply choose not to work given the the option.