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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."
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?
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.
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It will destroy jobs like the farm destroyed the jobs of hunters and gatherers. It happens. If you can be replaced by a cheap machine, find another line of work where the quality that you can produce beats the machines.
So we can free up those people to do things we can't make robots do yet.
No.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Hourly updates on the implications of technology that does not exist. Yes it does man. Have't you seen a plane with like autopilot and stuff? Thats a self-driving plane man.
The things these articles miss is that in the future you won't ever need to leave your house. People won't own a car much less a self driving one. You won't need a hyper loop because there will be no traffic on the empty freeways. There will still exist a need to move food, water, and air around. But people can stay home. Not like they have jobs to go to. :)
I'm trying really hard to find a way to side with the humans on this one but I'm failing. I simply cannot figure out how to justify opposing this, particularly in reference to jobs like over-the-road trucking and basic shuttle-vehicle jobs such as buses and cabs. I can only imagine how much this would alleviate trafic in cities, cars with no ego behind the wheel, and how many meth-addled over-the-road truckers won't be behind the wheel (and honestly most should probably be replaced with improved freight rail anyway, regardless of robots, but there's no reason this system couldn't include the trucks jumping on rail cars since there's no need to take breaks or plan night stops at that point).
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I think it's very clear that most of the truck drivers will be replaced by autonomous trucks driven by software. Human drivers need to sleep, robots don't. As our storage warehouses are already mostly on the wheels and logistics is optimized that the required goods arrive just in time, all this makes sense. The change might even be very fast. 30% of truck cargo might be driven by robots in the end of the decade.
Before that steam drill shall beat me down, I'll die with my hammer in my hand. —John Henry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)
I think the introduction of "self-driving cars" would bring about a counter-balancing upsurge in jobs in the automotive/bodywork repair industry (at least for the first few generations of the technology).
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
omg here come the neo-Luddites (again)...
there is just absolutely no way anyone can predict what kind of spin-offs will be created given the rise of autonomous cars...perhaps entire new industries (cough like IT cough) will be created that require real humans to work on and fix our new 4-wheeled overlords. In fact, it's almost a given.
what IS guaranteed, however, is CHANGE...and man is that frightening for some people. i like to remember the old phrase "the only constant is change" at times like this.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
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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Lots less business when they're scraping texting drivers off of guard rails.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
too soon?
There are plenty of circumstances where we have machines that are extensively automated and we still have highly trained people operate them. Commercial aircraft have pilots there because there are too many circumstances where a person is going to be best able to make the right decision. Most of the time, these planes are running on autopilot and they do very well. But the circumstances where the autopilot fails (i.e. does the wrong thing) can have catastrophic consequences. So we have multiple pilots there for safety.
Freight trucks are the same way. These machines are require a fair amount of skill to handle troublesome situations. A loaded truck will weight in excess of 45000 lbs. That's more than 20 times the mass of most cars. I do not expect truck drivers to be overly affected by this for quite some time.
Every time I hear this argument, I think of the book player piano. Anyway, why do people want jobs that are replaceable by machines? It makes about as much sense as hiring someone to cut my grass with a pair of scissors, just so they have something to do. Or those useless construction workers holding a stop sign, that could literally be replaced with a piece of wood.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Lately I've been ever-decreasing in my sympathy for the concept of a "job" or even "full time employment". Both kind of seem like scams at this point. Surely there has to be a better way to make a living than to spend 40 hours a week "working" to get what some recent studies have indicated are more like 15 hours of actual work per week, averaging three hours per workday.
Of course, there are plenty of job-destroying policies out there. It's not just the technologies. I'm not convinced we're any better off than we were as a society before all these technologies.
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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.
New technologies always bring new jobs. Maybe self-driving cars will be the same. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ÃX-Driver
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
Like the people driving vehicles for Google Maps, which I always suspected was the reason for Google's interest in this technology.
A fleet of robots patrolling the world 24/7 collecting data.
One nice thing about being a programmer is that if computers ever take over your job then the Singularity has arrived.
It depends on how it is implemented. We have the Eastern model and the Western model. UK/USA are uber ruthless ONLY THE BOTTOM LINE MATTERS type economies. We see bits of this especially in the recent debate about giving two weeks notice. Where only the bottom line matters and corporates conveniently ignore the fact that employees also happen to be consumers. Probably why we are in death spiral mode right now. As companies make lower profits, they seek to cut costs, which puts people out of work.. which causes people to consume less, and so on... While Asian economies are funny things. Japan for instance, (lets ignore the fact that Japan is incredibly backwards outside Tokyo, they still use fax machines regularly! ATMs close at 5pm, you have to carry wads of cash with you everywhere). They could probably automate and stick robots everywhere. But they use people to over staff offices and make it super bureaucratic to keep people in jobs. Like making coffee in the western world we go to the machine ourselves. But a buddy working in Japan now has a refreshments lady who carts around a little trolley. Or the way that gas stations are often full service. Even in supposed hyperruthless capitalist Hong Kong. There are lots and lots of staff on the metro stations. When it gets busy in the morning and after work. They hire people to stand with signs on the platforms and at the entrances and exits, when a lump of concrete or a rope barrier would suffice.
Sympathy for the unemployed is nice, but it should never be an excuse to hold back progress that benefits the public as a whole.
Besides, even if you try to regulate it, unscrupulous cheaters will take advantage of it anyway and it will enter the market by force no matter how well regulated it is, which will leave law abiding businesses at a competitive disadvantage.
The proper way to deal with people losing their jobs over new technology is to help them adapt. Those jobs are doomed anyway because of the reasons cited in the previous paragraph.
Ok, maybe that was harsh.
Every wonder why there is more and more un/underemployment? It's because we can do more with less. By eliminating rote jobs we gain efficiency. The utopian ideal envisioned in the 60s is that we would all be working 10-15 hour work weeks by the 90s through automation and computer technology making things more efficient.
What they completely missed is that a human will trade roughly 2000 hours per year of their life to make enough money for food and shelter. Computers and robots don't really matter, it's just that each human can produce more stuff for those 2000 hours. There is no need to let them work less or pay them any more. You just need fewer of them.
The thing is, we're still making humans at an accelerating rate. That's great for everyone who sell things to those people, as it drives demand to make more stuff. It's bad for all the extra people who - quite frankly - are not in a position to excel at a job better than a computer, robot, or other machine. For a creature who evolves over a time span of tens of millennia, this kind of change in a couple of decades (two centuries if you want to count the industrial revolution), this poses quite a challenge.
H1B means nothing except a small eddy in the current of change which will see more and more humans become obsolete.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Just get your Adaptation Demotivator from Despair, Inc. (I don't work for them, but I love their posters.)
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Read the book sometime. By Daniel Bell, 1973.
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Yes. This 15 year trend is definitely caused by something that goes into effect next year.
Any new technology will destroy jobs. It will also create new jobs, and pave the way for entire new industries.
Technoli
One of the big ideas behind "modernization" was that, in general, people could work less and enjoy more benefits. Indeed, our per-person output has skyrocketed. The idea that we could get even more productive in the future is a conditionally great one. The big "if" is that right now, in the US, almost all of the benefit is being concentrated at the top-end of the economic spectrum. Indeed, our GDP has more than recovered from the recession even though most people are still suffering because of even more recent wealth concentration.
When normal people receive even half the benefits of modernization, its a good thing, and net job loss will be more than outpaced by work reduction.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Most people who think this is a great thing are in the top 10% (or 1%) and forget that most of humanity is really just a machine that gets things done. Class warfare is already brewing, with all of the economies of efficiency being funneled to those at the very top of the pile. With more and more people replaced by machines it will only get worse.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Back in 2007 the company I work for (manufacturing) was going to outsource my entire department to a company in Taiwan. The logic was that there was no way we overpaid ($100K+ per engineer), lazy (40-50 hrs/week) Americans could do what the industrious (60-70 hrs/week) and inexpensive ($24K/yr) Taiwanese could do. It was an obvious win-win for the company bean-counters.
However, when I was hired a few years before this, I began implementing a whole lot of automation into our stone-age processes. They were still keeping all production records in Excel spreadsheets and paper notebooks for fucks sake. Bar codes? RFID? What were those? I modernized the place, and after a few years of attrition we had fewer low-paid manufactuing drones working in the department, but we no longer needed them.
SO the bean counters did their cost audit and were shocked beyond belief that the American factory was producing goods WAY cheaper than they could get them produced in Taiwan. Taiwan came back with a cheaper offer, but it was STILL higher than our costs. The bean counters did another audit, because they knew there was NO WAY we could produce goods cheaper than Taiwan. Results: We sure can.
So, as a result of some (admittedly crude) automation, I and those who helped me with the automation, saved hundreds of jobs in the US from being offshored. And now my department is mosty highly trained (and well paid) engineers and technicians rather than mostly low paid people who move stuff from machine to machine. We still have the people who move stuff around, but they are fewer, more efficient and paid more than they were before. And the equipment is better maintained and more productive than ever.
So whenever some jackwit like this says automation is killing jobs, I get to trot out my personal example of automation SAVING jobs and creating new ones.
Self-driving cars will kill some jobs, but it will create plenty of new ones, many we haven't even thought of yet.
I'm a robotics engineer. For me, it's creating jobs.
I like the idea of robots just doing everything for us so we don't have to work. Maybe we can even do away with currency all together.
You need the human touch to grow pot or cook meth. No machine could... Oh dammit! Drug-bot 3000 done took our jerbs, and it don't blow up or burn down no trailers.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to pimp out your ride so you're down wid da' homies out front da sto' where you buy shit wid da' EBT card.
Oh no! Pimp-bot 3000 done took our jerbs. Damn, he fly.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to kill terminators. Oh no! Da terminators are killin' eachother. Look at that. HoneyBadger 4000 is killing that other robot. He don't care. HoneyBadger 4000 don't give a shit.
Don't worry. You need the human touch to choke on burning robot fumes...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Maybe even start to move the OT point to say 35-30 hours a week as well upping the ot exempt level to say 100K a year + COL.
Why should BOB be working 60-80 hours a week when jack does not have a job?
The internet put people out of jobs in the newspaper and magazine industry, it also opened up a world of new ways for people to make money.
Self-driving cars will have a lot less impact than the internet. A handful of cab drivers, whoopee do.
It's going to be awesome seeing self-driving cars assign red light camera companies to the scrap heap of history...parasitic bastards.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Unemployment is a benefit of a technologically advanced society (paraphrasing Robert Anton Wilson, I believe) -- the sooner we all get our heads around that, the better.
Humans have always made tools to make tasks easier (or automate them entirely).
Of course a new technology will destroy jobs.
It will also create new jobs, and alter the economics of how the workforce is distributed in existing jobs.
However, the fact that the Luddites have always been wrong does not guarantee that they will be wrong this time. With existing technology it does seem to be the case over the last few decades that society does not need 40 hours a week from every able-bodied worker, so some adjustment to the economic order may be necessary, like how the work week was reduced from six days to five days.
The college system is to long for some jobs.
Some schools tech out of date skills.
going for 4+ years can make you miss out on a fad skill as by the time you are done it's over.
also HR needs to lay off the need X degree or need 5 year with X skill or system even when it's easy to pick up or it's a lot like skill B that easy to move from one side to an other.
Escalators and automatic elevators are destroying elevator operator jobs
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Your Americentricism aside, H1-B visas cannot legally be used to hire drivers.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
If technology destroys jobs, they we would see a hugely increasing unemployment rate as more workers enter the workforce and are unable to find these destroyed. Yet the long term unemployment rate has only increased one or two percentage points over the past 60 years.
Could it be that technology creates more jobs than it destroys? Could it be for each typist job that is destroyed, two data entry jobs are created? This seems to be that case because we arguably have twice as many people working in the US right now. Could it be that really, now one wants to be the guy that pumps the human poop from the style latrines. Certainly those jobs are still available, but severely reduced.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Read Manna by Marshall Brain. It's an interesting view of two potential post-labor robot-driven economies. I hope we end up in the robot-driven paradise instead of the everyone-on-welfare dystopia, but I'm not convinced we will. I'm crossing my fingers for a Star Trek economy in my lifetime.
(Of course, given that we're looking perhaps a bit beyond 30 years in the future, it'll probably look very similar to today in a lot of ways with some changes that nobody predicted.)
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Self driving cars will cost jobs, as will eventual moves towards automation, telecommuting &c.
The increasing role of technology in every sphere of life will eventually rule out all but very skilled, specialised jobs in small numbers. This is a trend that started in the industrial age, and no amount of legislation will stop the fact that we simply don't need to employ as many people as we used to.
I've advocated on here before the role of a guaranteed minimum income, and this could be an opportunity to create the first real leisure society. Consumerism as we more or less know it would fund economic development still, as it does now, except the source of our income wouldn't be our increasingly obsolete labour but a guaranteed disposable income, rising gradually ahead of living costs over time.
The amount of creative works, open source projects, general hackery &c. that'll spring from having a majority of people free from having to be employed will be mind boggling.
The biggest stumbling block to this in my mind is the dismantling of "trickle up" neoliberalism and the replacement of a brain dead political class.
Yeah, I'd lean towards the side effect of our cultural "work ethic" that equates full-time to 40 hours, so laws addressing what working people get focus exclusively on those working full time. Culture has not kept up with reality. This isn't an artifact of one party or another, just the set of people who'd be outraged at rights for anyone "doing less than their fair share."
I'll just clarify that I am, myself, fulltime, in case anyone gets it in their head that I'm a lazy person defending lazy people.
You seem not to be paying attention, nor have any understanding of how businesses plan ahead: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/07/31/who-can-deny-it-obamacare-is-accelerating-u-s-towards-a-part-time-nation/
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In other news, automatic telephone switches might one day put telephone operators out of business. And the car itself is a serious threat to the buggy whip industry!
Technology advances. Deal with it.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Walter Ruether onde said this about robots to Henry Ford II...
"Henry, how are you going to get them (robots) to buy Ford cars?"
He probably is right, the economy is predicated upon wage earners having enough money to buy stuff. Robots will never be able to buy what they produce. That is until robots have the freedom to "live a life" of their own and buy stuff. The companies will never let their robots to be that independent. After all, they own the robots. Right now, companies are breaking the unspoken agreement that they have with thier workers and consumers, that they need to prosper.
I saw this on the Jetsons. George Jetson goes to work, pushes three buttons, and goes right back home.
What we've seen over the past 50 years is a growth in per capital GPD, much of it due to automation. This should have led to more pay for less work, or same pay for less work. However: the median income has held steady while the "top 0.1%" has taken off. Instead of everyone working 10 hour days and getting a livable wage as the efficiency would indicate, we have people working 40-50 hour weeks for less money, while a select few get a LOT more for it - effectively getting thousands of hours of income for each week of work. The tying of insurance and other benefits to a floor in minimum hours of work made this condition worse. I know of many people, parents and artists mostly, who would LOVE to have a professional job of 20-30 hours/week and are even willing to take proportionally lower pay to get it, but our current (US) system doesn't allow it.
Robots taking jobs isn't a bad thing - there's less work to do overall. If there are fewer hours of work to go around, then either everyone works fewer hours for the same pay, or... a few people work "full-time" and everyone else gets shafted.
Quite a few sci-fi books have looked at this. I think Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" visited a future where our protagonist worked at a junkyard where they took brand-new, off-the-lot cars and crushed them. The car builders had full-time work - the crushers had full-time work, too. That's messed up.
I believe the article overlooked one significant class of jobs that is extremely difficult to remove: those employed by the government (local, state, federal). An example for this story would be the Highway Patrol. It seems like their necessity will severely decrease, if not evaporate, if we're all in autonomous vehicles.
I for one want to see more forward-thinking politicians who are looking at the coming changes in technology and are interested in developing a road map towards peaceably reducing our government workforce, and that means figuring out an amicable solution for the newly laid-off workers!
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Only a business professor would suggest something like this rather than the very obvious real answer: job growth is slow because companies offshore everything.
The miss-issuance of H1B visas don't help either.
EMT do a lot more then just driving
Who are held just under full time so they don't get sick days or payed time off.
I for one welcome our automated driving overlords. I can sleep on my way to work. I can work on my way to work. I can eat on my way to work. I can text or call someone on my way to work. But by the time we get all the AI worked out I won't need to go anywhere to work. I can work from my home or anyplace in the world for that matter. Robotics can really help humans do a lot of crappy jobs and activities. But I often wonder why we insist that robots do our drudge work the way we do it. Why not just change the way things are done so drudge work is eliminated all together?
Eventually, almost everything will be done by technology. Even maintaining the technology will be done by technology. While it does mean more will be done, and more will be produced, this will collapse if there is not more of a market to consume it. Otherwise we will eventually get to a point that the 0.001 percenters will own all the production, and no one else will have anything to buy it with. So even the 0.001 percenters will end up losing. But how will that even be solved if there is nothing left for humans to do? Either we will have a world where no one has anything unless they have machines (and all they can produce for is themselves), or we will have socialism where the government provides everything ... so the 0.001 percenters will have a market to sell to.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
People will find things to do as long as government doesn't get in the way. Even good-intention regulation and licensing can provide a cumulative burden little different from a corrupt dictatorship where officials take bribes and kickbacks, which is what makes 3rd world places struggle, and why de Gaulle said Brazil was "the nation of the future -- and always will be".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Reporter: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of this new automated loom that will do the work of four hundred men?
Gandhi: Will it pay their salaries?
health benefits should not be tied to jobs and for the part time thing some jobs had people working just under full time so they did not get health benefits or they used temps as well.
but you can no longer afford beer! nooooooo! Welcome to the twilight zone.
Robotics is not destroying jobs, the over-concentration of wealth in the hands of hte uber-wealthy is destroying jobs.
You can't automate the production of everything otherwise you would have no customers.
I think Henry Ford put it better.
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.
Quite a few of you have been explaining that those put out of work by increased productivity can find other jobs; in the long run there's no net loss of jobs.
True, as far as it goes, for any given disruptive technology.
What that ignores is that disruption is becoming the norm. Things don't settle down. At any given moment there are many displaced workers from the last few disruptions. And new ones happening all the time. So instead of having a suite of new technologies throwing may out of work, who eventually find new stable jobs, there are no stable jobs, and the slow rate of social adaptation to change is simply not keeping up with innovation.
-- hendrik
Automation will continue to destroy jobs, it is inevitable. The main jobs that are being "created" are service based, and most of these amount to trading a bit of money back and forth so Bob will mow your lawn and Jane cuts Bob's hair. But we're just trading money at the low levels doing stuff most people used to do but (despite automation) are "too busy"...yet somehow still find time to follow every move Honey Boo Boo makes and never misses an episode of Teen Mom.
My long but related example is the what I call the Three Box Theory. Imagine if you will, a box, about the size of an Central Air conditioner that provides virtually pollution free energy for an entire household and needs little/no maintenance. It is affordable. It is Box One...the Power Box. Technology? Who knows but given the level of tech advances we'll say very small pebble bed reactor just to put a name on it. If it works, it's the best thing since sliced bread as we reduce pollution and increase reliability, plus no more electric lines killing birds/causing cancer/signaling alien invaders...no need for most of the coal fired power plants (less pollution again), no 8000' coal trains delivering coal and spewing diesel exhaust, no one having to work in a dangerous occupation like mining. In almost every metric, its a winning deal, EXCEPT you wipe out all those jobs (lineman, miners, railroaders) that pay pretty well. Sure a few high tech jobs get created but a magnitude more are destroyed permanently. So now, everyone has virtually unlimited electricity, pollution is decreased but you end up with a lot of high end jobs being wiped out. Box Two is the Food Box, who cares the specifics of how it works (probably an small algae farm) but in the end, a family gets their entire nutrition needs from this box. While some will still like an apple versus the apple tasting paste the machine extrudes, you'll dramatically reduce the amount of farmland needed and food delivery infrastructure. No more farm cruelty, erosion or beets, but again, a lot of good jobs down the drain. Box Three, the FixIt Box, probably powered by nanobots, can repair or even do small scale building. Again, great for the consumer and terrible for the worker. While far fetched, who really would have guessed how far 3D printing would be 15 years ago, or tell the 1800's farmer that in 200 years, one man will farm 40 times what he does and produce 300 times the food. He'd think you were nuts that what he and his 11 kids did was 1/300th of what one man could do in 8 generations.
In the end, the future is bleak for the worker but really, can you hold technology back?
Correct, but because of the favorable treatment of it in the tax code, this is what we have.
Alas instead of trying to make the system more competitive, cost effective & workable... it often seems that point for point Obamacare was crafted to do just the opposite.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
So the Luddite Fallacy is basically an economics maxim that says that while technological improvement destroys jobs, it actually creates more jobs than it destroys due to the fact that humans have infinite wants. There are several problems with this idea: 1) As it turns out most humans don't really have infinite wants, just really big ones. Consumption spending as a percentage of income declines as ones net worth increases. 2) The maxim is based on a measly two data points, the transition from Agriculture to Manufacturing and the transition from Manufacturing to service work. 3) There is a limit to the number of sectors of our society. If we accept the most generous definition there are five sectors: resources, goods, services, intellectual work and high level decision making. The resource sector is down to roughly 2.5% and manufacturing looks like it's headed the same direction. The service sector is at the beginning of the automation cycle but we're seeing exactly the same pattern that happened previously. There are three problems with this shift: 1) I don’t see how the intellectual and high decision making sectors can grow large enough to accommodate large sections of the work force 2) Many workers don’t have the innate talents necessary to compete in that market 3) Those sectors tend to be ones where the income distribution is heavily skewed to a small number of superstars. Suppose for a moment that the manufacturing and service sectors achieve levels of automation equivalent to the agricultural sector. If it only takes 7.5% of the population to provide all resources, goods and services is there really going to be enough demand for creative work to keep the rest of the population gainfully employed and earning a decent wage? To make things worse, before the automation of the service sector is even complete we're already starting to see early signs that we may be able to automate much of the intellectual and high decision sectors as well. I'm not saying that there will be NO jobs, just that large portions of the population will be unable to sell their labor for wages. In a society where you have to work in order to participate in the economy that's going to cause severe economic distortion and eventually social chaos. Traditionally one of the ways that labor market participants have compensated for this trend is to increase their inherent value through education. Two hundred years ago basic read, writing and math skills were valuable, one hundred years ago a high school education was great, fifty years ago a bachelors degree was a ticket to success, ten years ago a masters degree kept you ahead of the game. Today, even masters and phd holders are starting to have trouble staying relevant. The minimum required IQ & education to be a meaningful participant keeps increasing and there are hard limits on how much those items can currently be improved. What happens when the average person has no useful commercial value at any wage large enough to keep them fed?
Yes in the short term. Less truck drivers, less cab drivers...
No in the long term.
The real thing hurting the job pool is the dilution by H1-B.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The real thing hurting the job pool has nothing to do with H1-B. That might impact certain jobs, particularly the IT sector, but doesn't explain the high unemployment. The real thing hurting the job pool is that over the past 40 years we have pretty much decimated the middle class and it is the middle class that controls the economy. Without a strong middle class, to keep the economy going, we have relied on government spending.
What happened to the middle class? It's easy, since the 1970s there has been a massive shift of wealth concentrated at the top. What happened to the middle class? We decided unions were bad and have done whatever we can to get rid of them. What happened to the middle class? We outsourced all of their jobs so our corporations could pay their executives more and more and pay out more dividends, thus shifting wealth upward (see the first what happended).
It's not technology that has killed jobs, it's plain old greed.
BOB gets no OT and is very over worked.
Is it time to move to a 3-4 day work week at 8 hours a day? 5 day with 4 hour days?
I wonder if, under our current model of exchange based interaction, we can sustain ourselves?
In the natural world, we fight over resources for survival. We are limited by those resources. That's still essentially true however we've added more to the puzzle.
Now we use a medium of exchange. It is no longer just hard work in exchange for things. Someone invented money, which at first, seemed like a great idea. However, it also invented a means by which people could store value in a symbolic form. This enabled people who could negotiate the ability to use those skills instead of using physical labor. This is an interesting advancement. And as we see, those who accumulated great amounts of symbolic wealth also accumulated a great deal of power... power to enslave us all in fact. And not only do they own the symbolic wealth, they own the resources too. End game.
So every time I hear about new tech replacing jobs, the first thing I hear is "people should adapt and find new and better ways if earning symbolic wealth." This is somewhat true. Somewhat. But let's say a technology arrived which enabled completely self-sustaining and self-replicating robots all controlled by one person... me, for example. Well, these robots can do anything. They can be my army and take over all of the physical resources. They can be my workers and build all the things I need or could desire. And of course, I have a small collection of the best minds working for me who can out-invent anyone else.
So I have dominated the world with self-sustaining and self-replicating robots. I need no one to work and there is nothing left for anyone else to do. What now? I could send my robots out to kill everyone which would assure me of dominance...until I die or find a way to be immortal. Or I could send my robots out into the world and instruct them to serve all of mankind allowing them a life of leisure for all eternity.
In that situation, which way do you think a global elite will take things? Kill all humans? Or peace and prosperity for all of mankind? I think we all know enough about human nature to rule out the second option. And we all see that the more things are automated, the less we need people ... at all.
Now, we are obviously a long, long way from the ultimate end-game I described above. But you can see how bad things can get because man's current inability to see beyond his lust for power and [symbolic] wealth results in an on-going cycle of death, misery, tyranny, tragedy and destruction with sharp controls and limits on human advancement and especially in freedom.
That dream world of "Star Trek" where man kind outgrew the need of money? It's completely unimaginable and it would, of course, require massive revolutions of the French variety to rid ourselves of people who would seek to limit and control everyone.
"They took our jobs!!" It's a very valid concern. Some areas of growth and adaptation are not accessible to everyone. This means people can and will inevitably suffer and even die from the the decisions of others. And we simply lack what we need in order to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. Everything is measured in symbolic wealth and now it's a problem.
Think about it. Our symbolic wealth system is the measure of everything we use and do. We could be colonizing space right now and even teraforming Mars. Why aren't we? If you said "because it costs too much" you'd be right but then I ask "what is cost?" Yeah... it's that symbolic wealth we measure everything by. And no one will give up their anything without the exchange of symbolic wealth. Want my steel? It's cost ya. Want my rare earth minerals? More symbolic wealth please...
We're literally held back by our system of greed. Literally. And because we haven't found effective ways to defend ourselves against nature such as "angry sun gods" and falling rocks from space and because we haven't figured out how to escape this planet to live on other plan
Not that I'm a big fan but what about all those people that work for the automotive insurance industry (adjusters, investigators, phone operators, gecko's, etc)? When we are all "driving" cars that basically can not get into an accident, we won't really need all that pricey liability coverage and there goes a huge stream of revenue for those companies. And even if you do get into an accident with some gramps still driving his '72 Chevy, who is at fault? The insurance company can't go after me, I wasn't driving. Guess they'll have to sue Google since they programmed the car.
Now I'm not advocating against progress. In fact, I can't wait to one day buy a Tesla S with the full self driving package. My point is that self-driving cars are one of those disruptive technologies that fundamentally change an aspect of our culture. Its not just the professional drivers it will affect but body shops (less accidents to repair), shopping, (I can send my car to pick up the groceries I ordered online), law enforcement (no more police revenue from speeding tickets or DUI's), pizza delivery, train/air travel, sleep patterns, work habits, and laws will change.
Jobs are important but just like every other "revolution" humanity has been through, there are winners and losers but I think its hard to deny that we as a species are better off then we used to be. Get on board or get out of the way... at least until global warming or overpopulation wipes us out.
You are probably correct. Technology does create more jobs than it destroys. The problem is it destroys good paying middle class jobs and creates a lot of minimum wage jobs. That's not a very good tradeoff.
While this is certainly a flame bait, there is, sadly, some truth to that. I was quite surprised to find out that most guys in a construction crew that we hired were illiterate.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Well, they can, but it'd need to be a very specialized kind of a driver. Maybe an astronaut :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You know what else happened between 1970 and now? Increase of the labor force available to the developed world by around a factor of six to ten. When supply of something increases so dramatically, you should expect that the price paid for it does as well. This explains most of Krugman's observations. Robots aren't displacing human jobs - cheaper humans are displacing human jobs.
Now, I've read endless claims that due to technology, less people are working now than before. But when we look at what's going on, we see that such labor issues only exist in the developed world. And that a lot of that is because it's because it's so much harder to employ people and start new businesses than it used to be back in 1970. Rather than try to make their labor more competitive in the world, the developed world has turned around and made the problem worse while complaining about it and using that very problem as justification. For example, there are many direct effects that make hiring people more expensive, such as, minimum wage, shorter work week, and employer payments for various mandatory benefits.
And I see people continue to double down on this madness, for example, advocating shortening the work week even further. But that just means that people start to work more than one job to get by even to the point of getting paid "under the table" when the government regulation and taxation grows too much.
It's not just that these things aren't needed, but that their effect is opposite that which is intended.
A lot of the data entry jobs are bullshit anyway. Most of the time it's due to workflows that are 20 years behind the times. Nobody really needs to fill out paper forms anymore in this day and age.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
While I'm not sure if correlation implies causation, it's certainly true that executive salaries are absurd. There is no job out there that's worth millions of dollars a year.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The fact that a car is "self-driving" isn't going to be putting many people out of jobs, it'll just be changing the types of jobs.
It's how a car is made, not how it's driven, that determines how many jobs there are.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But a societal one. Just like the industrial revolution put a lot of manual labourers out of work, the digital revolution will do the same to the vast majority of low-and-no-skill labourers.
The moralistic notion that necessities, and even some small luxuries, need to be earned is starting to become antiquated. We need to begin seriously considering things like basic income if we are to transition without a whole lot of bloodshed. Good luck convincing the X%.
...they won't replace every job.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
All of us benefit from being the heirs of the industrial revolution. Even the poorest of us have better health and nutrition than before. We all have better healthcare than the mightiest king did 300 years ago. Yet for the average person who lived during the industrial revolution life was poor hell. Craftsmen and herders were sent into Dickensian factories and mines. I hope we can live long enough for the majority of citizens to see a benefit from our present computer revolution.
Since the Luddites were first in vogue the number of hours has gone down, the retirement age began to mean something, and we could afford social welfare programs. Employment back then was miserable.
If you lost your job and did not get work again decades ago it was because you were not willing to do some types of work.
Now we have all this Ayn Rand crap being spouted all over the place and anyone who wants to see continued progress is being labeled a communist.
Most of the jobs that practically anyone could do now do not provide a living wage. You are expected to work 2+ jobs if your skills are not unique.
People who are older than 50 are particularly being damaged by this. Extending Social Security to older and older ages can not continue. It is causing many more valid disability claims.
Listen to the Tea Party people carefully. They want to return to a feudal society.
The problem will eventually solve itself with protests, strikes and perhaps violence. I hope it does not go that far, but I don't see much hope in the short term.
I'm not sure that it's a hard and fast rule that more technology necessarily creates more jobs. We know that that has been true up to this point. However, a lot of those new jobs were for maintaining and supporting the new technologies. When your technology develops to the point where it supports and maintains itself, I'm not sure that will be true any longer.
For example, when I first started working in IT, at a medium sized mainframe installation you needed a staff of about a dozen operators per shift to perform manual tasks such as fetching tapes and running printers, and recovering and restarting failed jobs. Now that you have automated tape libraries, outputs are now directed to online archival systems, and you have software that can correct and restart failed jobs with little or no human intervention, most of those jobs are gone.
Also, robotics technologies are now becoming sophisticated enough to perform tasks such fruit picking and other manual labor which was previously impractical to automate.
So I think the question is still on the table. Is there an inflection point where technology will begin destroying jobs on net? I don't think we really know that yet.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Probably just going to be like how the waterless urinals couldn't get sold for 10 years due to opposition from the plumber's unions.
Citation require. If I cannot find an employee locally I will either ship the job offshore, or I'll import an employee. If an employee was available locally why would I go through the expense and hassle related to an H1-B?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
If all menial jobs are done by robots/computers/machines, then the only jobs remaining for people are ones required mental flexibility, artistic vision, or some kind of "human touch".
Given that for most of human history most people performed menial jobs, there are going to be a lot of people struggling to adapt...
What do we do with the people who used to drive trucks, or dig ditches, or fill holes? What do we do with people that are not *able* to be artists, or engineers, or software designers, or doctors, or car mechanics?
It's easy to say that they should do things that contribute, but if someone has worked for decades at something and then that something gets automated, it's *really hard* for them to switch over to doing something else for another decade until they retire--and when they do that switch they're likely going to take a huge hit in salary, so what do we do to support their families?
If you look at it from a global perspective, by automating the factory you allowed X people in the USA to produce a certain amount of goods. To produce that amount of goods in Taiwan would take X*Y people. Therefore globally you actually destroyed jobs via that automation.
OK. Now explain the 10 years before Obama was elected.
" I wouldn't be surprised if EMTs are told to let a patient without an insurance card code as opposed to give CPR if they want raises."
Your "making shit up" argument style is not as effective as you might think.
I'm curious - what new careers do you foresee, that current professional drivers would qualify for?
That's kind of irrelevant, since it's a transition phase only.
But basically, it's whatever they wanted to do before they became a driver. Or, it could be filling the remaining driving roles that cannot be automated for whatever reason (security or second role as personal assistant).
And after the number of professional drivers has diminished, it simply means that people will be doing other work. It doesn't matter if you remove jobs, we've been doing that the entire history of mankind and there are still a vast number of jobs remaining, including those people make up for themselves...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While I'm not sure if correlation implies causation, it's certainly true that executive salaries are absurd. There is no job out there that's worth millions of dollars a year.
There is a good book, well, some say so, others not, called Aftershock by Robert Reich that discusses among other things exactly how far out of whack executive pay has become and the problems it causes. More importantly it discusses the plight of the middle class and the ramifications on the economy.
Obamacare is based on GOP ideas from the 90's and the tax thing is a old WW2 hold over.
Good bye truck drivers, and taxicabs.
With a little robotics added in, good bye delivery drivers, postal drivers who drop off at boxes instead of houses, and maybe even pizza delivery people.
Face it: Mankind's efforts at automation mean everybody will be automated out of a job in due time, save possibly the programmers and the decision makers. And I foresee a day when AIs do a better job at day-to-day decision making than their human counterparts, too.
That will leave doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, and politicians employed.
Mankind will eventually have no choice but to move to a socialist society, where you work for perks and extras, not for survival. Sure those days are still a long way off, but eventually "Star Trek" and "Communism" will rule the day because there isn't enough *real* work for people to do.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
If my eyes were rolling any harder I'd be looking at my brain. Those same labor saving devices unleashed the greatest economic prosperity the world has ever seen. Yeah, some people had their jobs replace. Then they found other things to do which on the whole were usually more productive than whatever they were doing before. Do we *really* want to go back to the days of using ox to plow fields or harvesting corn by hand? Do you really think we would be better off using hand tools for construction instead of power tools because the hand tools require more people to do the same work?
When is this stupid argument that we should halt technological progress because some people might need to learn something new going to die?
Welfare - where no one is hungry, but the poor are over-weight because they cannot afford health club memberships
It doesn't take a health club membership to do sets of push-ups and body weight squats in front of your TV. Even chin-ups are without charge at a nearby city park.
If the distribution isn't skewed enough to push the mean a measurable distance away from the median, then yes, that is how averages work. Show me that the mean and median of a large human population's intelligence differ to a noticeable extent, and I'll agree with you.
You could not live alone. Live with family.
I thought there was a "mom's basement" stereotype against adults who live with family other than spouse and children. In addition, some careers tend to be concentrated in cities where one might not happen to have family. For example, good luck working for a U.S. video game developer and living with family if you happen not to have family who live in Austin, Boston, or Seattle.
trying to achieve full employment when no one really wants to work. We should be trying to achieve universal unemployment where no one has to work to earn a living. That means all jobs functions, especially the dangerous, dirty, unappealing jobs that employ so many at or below minimum wage. Work would not be eliminated entirely, but should be left to those who really want to do it.
If you start on this path, go all the way. In the Soviet Union there was no unemployment at all. Everybody had a job. In fact, being unemployed was a crime (no, not a serious crime). All you had to do was go to the local employment office and you'd be assigned somewhere. If you had no place to live, you'd get a place in a dorm and meals at the cafeteria.
Naturally, there are drawbacks. The cushy jobs were assigned strictly by pull. If you didn't have friends in high places, you'd get work in a quarry or something. If you did have friends in high places, you'd never get fired, so incompetence was the rule in managerial positions. Productivity sucked, but nobody really cared. Everybody had jobs, so who cares if there is no meat at the market this week?
Could it be that technology creates more jobs than it destroys? Could it be for each typist job that is destroyed, two data entry jobs are created? This seems to be that case because we arguably have twice as many people working in the US right now.
Almost no one is arguing that technology destroys all jobs. But some people do believe that a certain level of technology will put most humans out of work.
For thousands of years we had technological advancements, but we still had work for horses to do. No matter what new tools were created we still needed horses to pull farm equipment and transport people. The emergence of trains didn't reduce the number of horses; in fact horse populations exploded because people got used to being more mobile. But in the early 1900s technology finally got good enough to do almost everything horses can do, but better. Now horses are barely used for labor outside of entertainment.
So history has shown that technology can coexist with a population of workers for thousands of years yet eventually make them obsolete. Humans are far more capable that horses, but we can't escape the uncaring advance of technology forever. Even if sentient AI never happens, technology will get good enough to do away with almost all manual labor and other non-creative jobs. And yes, this includes highly skilled but mostly uncreative jobs like doctors and lawyers.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
There will eventually be no job that a machine can't do better than human beings. That's the unarguable extrapolation of an asymptotic acceleration of technology. By itself, this isn't a problem. It only becomes a problem inside a Puritan ethic, that people are only worth what they produce, combined with an economic system that concentrates wealth at the top.
This process could create a society of human abundance, a golden age of human advance and evolution. However we're currently nailed to rails that will elevate a fleeting small handful of people to godlike wealth and power, and a devastated, oppressed slave class comprising the rest of humanity.
The future is coming, the only question is whether or not it'll be friendly to being human, and whether the feared terminators that might oppress us will be autonomous intellects, or the strike forces of human despots. We've made a very poor showing to date. The time to grow out of our primate baggage is short.
Any other conversation about this process is short sighted and misses the titanic transformative forces in process.
Robots will replace every human working in fast food eventually so what do you do to employ tens of millions of people put out of work? Look at the millions without jobs now. Even in IT a lot of automation has reduced the need for more IT engineers and to save money they are making us do more with less which forces is to rely more on automation. Robots will also evemtually replace surgeons and could replace lawyers too and so you and up with a broad swath of skill levels without jobs or money. Some sections of our society will just decide to kill the constitution and lock people up in dorms to keep these jobless out of the eye of those or we can free people to turn their attention to things that interest them. Things that they could not focus on before. Think scientist who did not have to worry about money or resources. Google manna chapter 1 and read it.
Ok, maybe that was harsh.
Every wonder why there is more and more un/underemployment? It's because we can do more with less. By eliminating rote jobs we gain efficiency. The utopian ideal envisioned in the 60s is that we would all be working 10-15 hour work weeks by the 90s through automation and computer technology making things more efficient.
What they completely missed is that a human will trade roughly 2000 hours per year of their life to make enough money for food and shelter. Computers and robots don't really matter, it's just that each human can produce more stuff for those 2000 hours. There is no need to let them work less or pay them any more. You just need fewer of them.
Which is an obstacle trivially removed by a bit of well understood government regulation. And if the 60's economy had kept going through today, we would probably have that already.
But a funny thing happened on the way to a worker utopia: Foreign competition became a real threat, for the first time since WWII. Instead of a clamoring to reduce working hours, there was a clamoring to free businesses from regulation so they could compete more effectively with whatever nation seemed ready to eat or lunch.
Without government controls businesses do whatever they think is more profitable and it just cheaper to pay fewer people to work 40 hour weeks than it is to pay more people to work less. Benefits and infrastructure costs scale with employees, not the number of hours they work. It's even better if you can scare them into working more than 40 hour weeks while still only paying them for 40 hour weeks.
The exception is low paid hourly workers, where it is cheapest to limit hours to part time so you can dispense with paying any benefits at all. Now since these positions are almost always service roles with no foreign competition, you might think that something could be done with such travesties. But no such luck. Government controls would ruin us all. After all, if we paid pizza delivery guys more then the Chinese would take over the pizza business. Or maybe it is because other businesses would become uncompetitive if the cost of pizza went up.
The only way our economy works is by companies hiring people. People are the engine of the economy; They made stuff, they get paid, they buy stuff so other people can make stuff. If you take people out the whole thing falls apart like it's doing now.
My question is how many jobs get automated out of existence before the economy either collapses or has to be completely reworked from the ground up? Eventually it's going to either be a few rich people living in protected enclaves with everyone else poor living a subsistence existence in a trashed world or a Star Trek style socialist society where the basics are so cheap they are basically free.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Yes !!!
Of course, that's why unemployment is such a non-issue.
There are tons of jobs to be done.
But when government scares businesses with looming tax hikes because of rampant spending, businesses cannot spend money on employees even when they need them.
Also raising the minimum wage to the level someone can live on it means lots fewer jobs as well, and teenagers competing in a wider range of jobs instead of taking up the lowest tier as was traditional.
The jobs are there, just waiting for a government to understand how to simply not freak out business owners.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Imagine a future in which fleets of self-driving cars navigate city streets, picking up anyone who requests a ride via their smartphone or tablet" link
..
Weren't self drive cars already depicted in Total Recall, see Johnny Cab
AccountKiller
Kinda funny that everyone seems to miss one point - it is money. Self driving car is not going to be like a cheap Android tablet made in China for $40. It is not a simple thing "just add another CPU", it is a car wide system of sensors, computers and other devices to control the car. What this means is that it is never going to be as cheap as a car without AI. I haven't seen a car where the options would reduce the price, why would this be different? My prediction is that we will see AI cars coming to market very soon. They will cost +10k, maybe even more when compared to human driven models. Prices will come down when those are sold in millions. However there will be lots of people who can not afford a self driving car. What we will have is a mixture of AI premium cars navigating around poor people in human driven cars. Since AI cars cannot avoid human errors the biggest benefits will go to insurance companies. "That redneck wrecked my self driving Mercedes-Benz with his shitbox!" Guess who is paying all that? You.
"Yet a new piece in The New York Times .. hypothesizes that replacing human laborers with machines has proven economically devastating to a broad swath of society."
What the difference between replacing jobs with machines or some Chinese wage slave?
AccountKiller
How would your life change and the life of millions if you didn't need to spend and hour or two every day commuting where you could do little else but drive or sit uncomfortably (more likely stand) in a bus? That is an hour or two liberated for other purposes multiplied by millions of people. That is a huge boon likely to lead to more jobs and greater wealth and more life satisfaction. So worrying about this destroying jobs is simply perverse. It might if you are a truck driver or a cabbie. Otherwise it is a huge boon.
And why would you even need to own a car if you can just whistle (tap an app on your smart phone) and one will pick you up and take you where you need to go when you need it for little more than vehicle maintenance charges? Want to own your own? Fine. Tell it go park itself and come back when you want. Or go rent itself out while you work and make its payment. :)
Actually an excessive use of robot technology could be dangerous. This can move people to become lazy or to don't cooperate anymore in the improvement of society. It is quite obvious that many entrepeneurs will move into automatic cars if that will help them to increase their incomes. I think this book explains pretty well the dangers of excessive automatization: http://www.amazon.com/Age-Spiritual-Machines-Computers-Intelligence/dp/0140282025
I got an offtopic for a clearly on-topic post, which highlights failure of america's economy. The shilling is strong with this one
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even as more and more living-wage jobs disappear, we (well, the corprate-polical class) refuse to acknowledge it, clinging to an 18th-century patriarcal bootstrap model that binds unemployment to a moral failing while richly lauding and rewarding the (ironically un-Christian) immoral behavior of A-Type A-holes.
Where has that huge chunk of factory wage payroll money gone? Not back to society to help transition to a more elightened model than simply Birth/School/Work/Death, but straight into the bulging pockets of the 1%.
But that 1% will learn the same harsh forestry lesson of putting off controlled burns: they will be utterly consumed, leaving nothing but ash and palatial chimneys. And that right soon.
"some economists..."? Yeah, like 1% in the quack fringe. Increasing productivity is a good thing. I don't expect Mr. Union car maker guy who thinks he deserves $50 an hour for a semi-skilled welding job to understand that, but the audience of Slashdot should. Increasing the efficiency with which we can work means we can do more, and society progresses. Do you want to spend your like digging ditches? Doing The laundry by hand? Doing accounting without computers? Come on. Automation is sometimes bad in the sorry ten for those automated out of a job, but it's good for everyone else. And people don't necessarily lose their jobs, often they get to do something more interesting. For example, I knew one guy who used to work at a plant that made cardboard boxes. Now he writes assembly code for DSP chips. I also met someone recently at my current job who was transferred into the IT division at his company after they automated the hard disk drive factory he worked at. And for that matter, I'm supposed to be giving business process advice to people, but Half the time I get sidetracked into helping people load files into a finicky database or something like that. If that work that should be easily automated disappeared tomorrow, we would all be happy. There will always be plenty of work to do, it just won't always be the exact same work. But hey, what do I know, I only have a degree in finance. New kinds of jobs open up all the time.
Technology has a habit of doing that...
You seem to think that because there is an upside, we don't need to be aware of all the consequences of greater automation. This is a broad article that engages in a nuanced discussion of the effects of automation. It seems clear that one of the effects is the elimination of certain types of jobs and that this will be painful for many. Few say we should eliminate technology for the sake of jobs, but anyone with any sense realizes there are effects that must be reckoned with.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." R. Buckminster Fuller
Say we replace bus drivers who are obnoxious and think they own the road and can cut you off at a whim without any consideration, we could use such technology to introduce better driven cars/buses which would not cost a salary, therefor would not be under any pressure to actually keep a schedule other then just drive to the next stop. This lack of pressure does not allow tempers to enter the factors that might affect road conditions for a bus operator.
We see also that taxis that keep crying they need to make more money and keep inflating pricing, would then be able to lower the costs way down, and bring about less pollution as less people would use their cars if they knnew the alternative to downtown travel could be a cheap cab ride (think about it, if cab fares were 1/5 the cost, would you worry about finding parking, or wasting time and gas, when you could for the same cost just grab a cab?)
This is turn would have an effect of lowering the amount of cars in the downtown area, and also lower pollution from carbon exhaust and traffic. All in all, I think all taxi drivers and bus drivers should be replaced with a safer or cheaper alternative. This is public transport though, so when we think about what that person now would need to learn to have a job, they could be a car washer or gas pump jockey, etc... I know other jobs can be had to replace the ones they would lose.
I am not worried, only excited.
surprised no one's talked about this (yes I know TFA was about job displacement) - 'script kiddies' driving trucks off bridges to see what happens - mobs 'rerouting' that shipment of cool new tech - nation states crashing thousands 18 wheelers (or however many they'll now have) simultaneously and grinding traffic to a halt nationwide yea, yea, it's FUD. But independent of the FUD, there's a lot of work to do before the security aspects are solid.
Such a system will collapse because the top 1% needs the rest of the population to buy the products they make
But why do they need this? Who will control manufacturing?
Imagine a future like this: quality food is grown, maintained and harvested in optimal conditions by robots. Most common items are created by robots, similar to 3d printing but on a high-quality industrial scale (perhaps assembly by nano-bot). If a rich person wants something, he/she grabs a catalog item and simply has it assembled by nanobots. There's not even a need to buy materials as the bots can simply disassemble+reconstitute almost anything as raw materials. Bots are also optimal for defence, as any intruders can be taken apart in a manner similar to the building materials with no evidence that they even existed.
Of course the "normal" people can't afford nanobots. They're reduced to a near survival. Perhaps they have to purchase products from the wealthy (who again, control everything). Perhaps the rich don't even need them, as - again - they can have whatever they want built for them.
The only thing normals would be useful for (to the rich) would be entertainment, or to think up ideas for new "toys" for the rich. Some form of movies or music might exist, but likely those high up would probably not even have even see a normal person much less interact with one.
That's depressing. The Eloi of this world are likely to be pretty fat and unhealthy. They wouldn't taste very good...
The government should offer basic insurance coverage to every American. Private insurance companies would still have the option to compete for premium services.
Anybody read Anthem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella) The society in that book felt light bulbs would take the jobs from the candle workers.
... they run you down after experiencing a 'malfunction'!
"Kill all humans!" - Bender
THINK! It's patriotic
But what is being discussed here in the example of mainframe staffing is not the number of jobs, or even the type of jobs, but the number of person-hours necessary to complete a job. This question is not on the table either. Technology will always increase the efficiency of the worker and always reduce the number of people needed for a job until it is effectively zero and those people have to find other ways to work. For instance making clothes and food preparation has become so cheap that it has become more economically advantageous to outsource those jobs from the individual family to the corporate suppliers. How many people make a cake from scratch? Even the simplest food to make, rice crispy squares, are store bought. Cookies are made from dough, not from flour and eggs.
What is arguable is where the increased in efficiencies For the most part these efficiencies seem to be reflected in corporate profits, rather than worker benefits. As time goes on, if we are going to have a consumer culture where people are working, these efficiencies are going to have to be reflected in worker compensation. I would suggest that the total compensation is not going to increase, but the amount expected work hours will have to decrease so we can employ more people. For a average worker the pay will have to rise from $20 to $30 an hour as the work day moves from 8 hours to 6 hours. I know that for some people thinks this would make us very lazy, but i assume we already look lazy from those who worked in the early 20th century.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_URL destroy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url
Casteism
So machines might replace drudge work that employs people in
mindless jobs? What do you think allowed civilization to ban slavery on a wide scale.
Think of all the slaves "out of work", or after them, remember all the serfs, servants and share-croppers that are now largely out of work.
Technology creates more opportunities to profit from less exploitation of inferior resources.
Transitions are a bitch (ex: USA Civil War et al).
This isn't simply a threat to some labor group or collection of individuals, it is a complete reorganization of society that is underway, without any real awareness. Owners of companies continue to make money, while employees are gradually replaced. Even technology workers will be increasingly replaced as code production is automated. Office workers are replaced by programs resembling IBM's Watson. The only jobs that cannot be replaced are those that involve selling actual human interaction. This indicates an economy with owners at the top and a giant hole in the middle which no one can cross.