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The Luddites Are Almost Always Wrong: Why Tech Doesn't Kill Jobs
Mystakaphoros writes "Mike Masnick of Techdirt argues that we can all put down our wooden shoes and take a chill pill: technology 'rarely destroys jobs.' For example, telephone operators have largely gone by the wayside, but a (brave) new world of telemarketing and call center support jobs have opened up because of advances in technology, not to mention the Internet. Masnick points out writing from Professor James Bessen that makes the same point: 'In other cases, technology creates offsetting job growth in different occupations or industry segments. For example, word processors and voice mail systems reduced the numbers of typists and switchboard operators, but these technologies also increased the number of more highly skilled secretaries and receptionists, offsetting the job losses. Similarly, Amazon may have eliminated jobs at Borders and other national book chains that relied on bestsellers, but the number of independent booksellers has been growing and with it, more jobs for sales clerks who can provide selections and advice that Amazon cannot easily match.' That said, I think it's worth asking: if machines are going to replace all our fast food workers, are we going to start paying our gourmet chefs minimum wage just because we can?"
The article is absolutely correct. But it also fails to take into account that the new jobs are lower paying while inflation decreases the value of the new wages.
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No. People are paid what they are worth to the company and what their labor can be traded for on the marketplace. A gourmet chef isn't going to be paid minimum wage because the value of the labor is too high and there are no gourmet chefs that will accept minimum wage.
Obviously, this guy doesn't know anything about the restaurant industry, at least in the USA. Most "chefs" are already making minimum wage or very close to it. In the USA, only the servers and managers make money in a restaurant due to the messed up tip system. However, when it comes to "gourmet chefs" they make even less. At the highest levels, a.k.a. 3 star restaurants, most of the kitchen staff are unpaid interns. They all dream of opening up their own place some day.
Though technology may not "destroy" jobs, it certainly shifts them. For example, car factories are increasingly populated with robots. Although that creates economic prosperity that may show up somewhere else, it certainly displaces the unskilled, who previously could at least hold factory jobs.
In my area, we now have garbage trucks that pick up (standardized) trash cans. Presumably, this leads to fewer "garbage men" - who used to be the archetypal unskilled laborers. But the few garbage men that remain now must be skilled as truck drivers.
So, assuming that a certain portion of the population will always be unskilled, and assuming the portion of unskilled jobs is shrinking, the unemployable underclass will continue to grow.
That depends on one question: Can we replace them with illegal aliens?
Because the political establishment, along with business interests, have decided that a permanent underclass of illegal alien workers is just fine with them. This in turn has depressed the wages on labor-intensive jobs while making welfare a more attractive option than work for many.
The unwillingness to enforce border controls has probably cost more Americans jobs in the last 20 years than any technological advance.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Whether gourmet chef labor will be as devalued as say, that of Java programmers, is an interesting question. But I don't think it will be driven by the elimination of fast-food workers. All the elimination of fast food employment will do is provide fewer job opportunities for those with PhDs in physics and Masters' in biochemistry, making those degrees worth even less (at least here in the US) than they were when the rug was pulled out from under all basic research other than what Defense and Big Pharma commission. As for independent bookstores, I vividly recall the times when they were all but exterminated by competition by the titan of the moment, Barnes & Noble -- who somehow or other now winds up as one of the David's to Amazon's Goliath in our own day. I haven't really seen a growing number of independent booksellers, but then I live in the Southeast US where there never were many to begin with and finding a decent restaurant among all the chain stores can be quite a challenge.
IIRC, there was an article posted here in the last few months regarding the existence of mathematical proof that technology does, indeed, destroy jobs. I can't find it right now, but being mathematical proob and not something a blogger pulls out of his ass, the implications were huge.
Also, this:
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/
Hey, maybe I should be an editor too!
As a former bookstore owner, I can tell you that is crap.
Working in fine dining for the last 5 years I can tell you what we pay the line cooks at restaurants that average $80+ per person is usually not much more than minimum wage.
For example, word processors and voice mail systems reduced the numbers of typists and switchboard operators, but these technologies also increased the number of more highly skilled secretaries and receptionists, offsetting the job losses.
I haven't had a secretary since smart phones came on the market. The Administrative assistant was canned and we were handed these things.
Similarly, Amazon may have eliminated jobs at Borders and other national book chains that relied on bestsellers, but the number of independent booksellers has been growing and with it, more jobs for sales clerks who can provide selections and advice that Amazon cannot easily match.'
Borders went out of business, Barnes and Noble is hanging on a thread and the ONLY independent bookstore around me is a Christian bookstore. And they a lot MORE than books.
Look it, the data is showing that between automation and globalization, it is doing some real harm to our employment here in the US. And what this article misses is that job replacement isn't always one-to-one. Meaning for one worker who loses a job because of automation, there isn't always another job him to slip into: it usually hundreds get canned and a fraction of those move into the new area.
I am by NO means against automation - to head off the ad-hominems - but what I'm trying to point out is that there are some drastic changes happening NOW in our economy and things are going to get ugly.
Oh, to the weavers. Back in the 19th Century, automation increased worker productivity - it didn't replace them because you needed a human to be the brain of the machine.
Today, humans aren't necessary because the machines are "smart" enough to be autonomous.
When those new looms were put in place, you needed operators, and a few (children) to go inside a running machine to lubricate it - they lost life and limb and we got those "job killing" government regulations as a result.
So maybe a weaver lost their job as a weaver, but an entire crew was hired for the new machine.
Today, it's the opposite. Entire lines are replaced by robots and maintained and programmed by a hand full of people.
And that as a society is where we 're going to have to make some hard adjustments.
Anyway, BOOKS are going to be written on this and there's no way to do justice on the topic in a techdirt article let alone a Slashdot post.
Tech most certianly does kill jobs. It may make even more in the long term, but they are very different jobs. For the 50 year old newly laid off factory worker with kids he has to put through college now, the fact that there are suddenly lots of new jobs in robot design isn't a lot of comfort.
For example, telephone operators have largely gone by the wayside, but a (brave) new world of telemarketing and call center support jobs have opened up because of advances in technology
If I had my druthers -- and we don't, because time and tech marches on -- I'd rather be an AT&T operator in 1973 than a telemarketer in 2013.
That said, I think it's worth asking: if machines are going to replace all our fast food workers, are we going to start paying our gourmet chefs minimum wage just because we can?
Yes. If the "market" can set wages below minimum for gourmet chefs due to an infusion of newly retrained fast food employees so they bottom out at that limit, then it will. That's just what happens. Whether or not that entire scenario occurs -- laid off McDonald's cashiers going to culinary programs and flooding the upscale restaurant and hospitality business letting wages be depressed rather than trying to find other more immediately available jobs -- that's really the question to be asking. (I would answer "no" to that question.)
I am not a crackpot.
The basic parameters of the argument are clear, sure, and have been clear for a few hundred years: automation may replace large numbers of jobs with machines controlled by a smaller number of people, but may also create new jobs, either directly working on the technology involved, or indirectly in other areas. The more difficult questions are in the details. Do the numbers always match up, and what factors influence whether they match up? Does automation lead to more general shifts in the economy, e.g. either concentration of wealth or decentralization of wealth? If it could do either, what factors influence that?
My own view is to be rather skeptical that there is a universal answer. These kinds of articles give off a whiff of a kind of Panglossian view that the technology/economy ecosystem is in a Gaia-like eternal balance, and I don't see a strong reason to believe that's true. Instead I think we need to look at specifics to determine what effects a given technological advance, within a particular existing economic situation, will have.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That people will always be able to do things machine cannot. Sure, maybe machines will not be able to play rock-n-roll or write poetry, but it's not like these things actually pay very well. But what happens computers are as good as people in most of all the things that qualify as jobs nowadays? Are we to expect that suddenly 100 new paying professions will suddenly arise that we have no idea about today, that by some magic only humans (aka meat-sacs) will be able to perform? I doubt it.
Once fast food places are 100% automated and cars are self-driving, lots of jobs will go away permanently. Yes, there will be repair techs and such, but they will make up only 2-3% of the previous workforce.
"For example, word processors and voice mail systems reduced the numbers of typists and switchboard operators, but these technologies also increased the number of more highly skilled secretaries and receptionists"
Got to love it when someone gives an example that clearly contradicts his or her own "conclusion".
First, does anyone really think a secretarial job nowadays requires "more skill" than it did 30 years ago? Let's see... cutting & pasting + Googling something versus being able to type 200 words a minute and knowing which of 500 different contacts to call to solve a problem...
Second, are they really suggesting that the number of secretary jobs increased from 30 years ago?
Of course tech "kills" jobs. Mostly it kills jobs that people didn't really want to do. And that's a good thing.
And yes, ultimately (ideally) technology would kill all "jobs", allowing each individual to focus on whatever he or she had a vocation for. Of course, narrow-minded profit-obsessed capitalists would consider that a nightmare, but art and science would advance like never before. People don't have time to wonder about why apples fall from trees if they have to spend 16 hours a day doing some job they hate just to be able to survive, while their employer keeps 80% of the money they generate, and spends the other 20% on finding (both technological and legislative) ways to squeeze more out of a smaller workforce.
Very simply our standard of living = (production - consumption)/(numbers of citizens) Robots increase production, which is good.
Thank you science and technology for giving me the chance to pursue a career in telemarketing.
One day I will tell my wide-eyed grand children about about my dashing adventures as an itinerant telemarketer.
That "fact" about independent bookstores seems fairly easily manipulated and wrong just from a cursory look. For example, it's based on the fact that there are 200 additional booksellers in the National Association of booksellers. However, Borders had 700 locations between Borders and Waldenbooks (who they'd acquired).
So to catch up with the number of book stores before Borders closed, there would need to be more than triple the growth in that industry. Personally, I've never seen a new indy bookstore open as in this economic climate, the public library is an invaluable resource that's already competing with the bookstore.
And since we're talking about jobs: If there's a Barnes and Noble that closes near me and it employs 50 people and 3 new independent bookstores spring up nearby, each needs to employ 17 people to meet the same number of employees. Most independent bookstores seem to have far less than 17 employees.
Luddites also worry about the environmental consequences of high-tech pollution and yet other subtle problems technology introduced, like the danger of mass control, massive surveilance, a world economy slanted to favor a few and impoverish an increasing slice of the population.
While it's true that automation opens new opportunities while it shutters old ones, that's not the real problem with automation at the moment. The issue is that, as the owner of the automated technology, those at the top are reaping all the benefits of the increased efficiency. While it's technically right for them to do so as they are also bearing all the risks of the new implementation, it also has the side effect of concentrating the money upwards - the amount of money being made by the company increases due to efficiency, but the employees make the same because their labour hasn't changed. And that's assuming their jobs aren't wiped out and replaced with minimum wage positions. Net effect? The money goes straight to the top, further enriching those who are already wealthy.
We're already seeing a point in time at which the tremendous disparities in income are enabling the wealthy to wield an increasingly louder voice over the middle class (see: Citizens United, the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party). At the same time, the stratification of power at the top makes reform in favour of the middle class difficult at best. Historically, concentrating power at the top of society has usually ended very badly for everyone. With that in mind, how do we implement a system that reins in this power stratification, and more importantly, how do you get those at the top to accept such a system?
It also fails to take into account that the skills required for the jobs that disappear are entirely different than the skills required for the new jobs that replace them. This means you lose everything you've worked for, career-wise. I might have 30 years in as a buggy whip craftsman, but that doesn't mean I have the skill set required to assemble an automobile. It also means that the salary I've been building up disappears. Even if the jobs are equivalent pay ranges, a senior buggy whip architect probably makes a lot more than a junior steering column technician.
If I started at $40,000/yr 30 years ago and make $75,000/yr today and suddenly lose that because my entire industry has been obsoleted -- including my retirement possibly -- and can now only take a new job at $50,000/yr... I'm still screwed.
I'm not arguing we should stop inventing, but its hugely callous to ignore the difficulties inflicted on people when this kind of thing happens.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Sometimes, the technology just changes, and the jobs have to go with it. In the 80's, the UK had a huge coal miner strike. The strikers didn't want the economy to change, because they wanted to stay in their jobs. The strike failed, and some of the people and places involved never recovered. Switch to today, and who is looking to grow the use of coal? Their decedents may be working in the North Sea oil fields, or on wind and wave power. If they are in these fields, they are being paid much better than the coal miners who proceeded them.
But imagine if we developed AI as intelligent or more intelligent than humans; almost everyone would lose their jobs and they couldn't be replaced by pointless ones (actors, artists, entertainers) because not everyone could become such a thing or wants to, and having that many people trying to be those things would be unsustainable.
No one cares that by automating their job other completely different job opportunities open up.
They don't want to retrain, and even if they did, it would be cheaper to hire completely new people with no experience in some other system.
It's the same reason things like the RIAA don't want to go away.
Sure, distributing is now much easier and cheaper. But they already exist, and make money.
Why would you expect them to say "oh well, other people can get jobs now" and walk away?
If automating someone's job meant they kept being paid for doing nothing, everyone would think it's great.
But that's now how things work.
Why can't tech make having to go to work obsolete?
Why can't we make all the tech stuff, like robots, do all the dumb work for all of us so we can spend the rest of our lives playing, or do the kind of work we really enjoy? Isn't this the frigging thing we should strive to achieve in society? Not create more jobs, but less?
Something you'll never hear a politician say is that one of the goals of a real economy is to eliminate jobs. But over the long term that's exactly what makes our lives better. As technology replaces labor and makes products cheaper, we as a society spend less of a portion of our income on that, and can spend more on something else, possibly something entirely new, that we desire, thus improving our standard of living.
Very few people want to a job if they don't have to have one - they want the "stuff" and leisure time that the money they earn in that job can get them.
Think about it in terms of the broken window fallacy. Say there's a window guy, who has to repair our windows every time they break. So whenever that happens, people have to spend a portion of their income to have that fixed. So small disasters (and big, if you listen to the news) look like a boon to the economy because it gets people to get rid of their money in ways they wouldn't have otherwise - without broken windows, that guy would be out of a job!
But imagine if windows never broke. The repairman would be doing something else that's valued by society, perhaps making suits. With the money that everyone saves by never having to replace windows (and technically those jos lost), we could more easily afford to get those new suits. And society is wealthier and our standard of living improves, because we have suits that it wouldn't have had if the job-killing window tech hadn't come along.
I'm not saying it's great for the repair guy in the short term. He does have to find a new line of work, just like the telephone operators did. 90% of people used to have to be farmers and the vast majority of those jobs no longer exist. But now food is so much smaller of a portion of our incomes that we can have other great things in our lives. Computers, A/C, video games, music, and more leisure, that we all desire.
This article is flawed because it relies on historical patterns when we are entering entirely different age. Industrial Age is over and we are transitioning into Information Age. Comparing pre-industrial agricultural society to early industrial age is much better comparison, but then it doesn't support the premise. Few of us that are familiar with the history will tell you that this transition resulted in a lot of societal ills and displaced farmers and merchants did not all find jobs in the factories. Few that did find jobs were ruthlessly exploited and did not at all benefit from this transition.
Comparing telephone operator jobs to telemarketing jobs won't tell you what will happen when automation combined with a growing population will make any kind of job scarce. It is very possible that within generation only top 10% of intellectual ability will be needed, rest will be automated away. Even today we know that productivity already entered exponential growth period. We also know that benefits of this productivity are not reflected in growing wages - nearly all of the extra wealth created by this productivity increase is channeled into corporate dividends and not wages..Pattern is very clear - less workers doing more for about the same pay. This cannot support growing unemployed class by creating service job opportunities, unless you are talking McJobs.
Attempting to portray critics as Luddites is 'poisoning the well' further compounded by willful denial of empirical evidence of the societal trends to the contrary. Yes, author is correct - technology is morally neutral, it is nether good nor bad. What we do with it - and presently as a society we chose to enrich 1% of our population, is what we should focus on.
The Luddites were not anti-tech. They wanted the owners of the new weaving frames to share profits with the incumbent workers. Some did, and their technology wasn't sabotaged. Some regard them as the first socialists. IMHO, there is no communism without the first industrial revolution. Marx is a consequence of technology.
If you think about it, sharing the profit from new tech with the incumbents is a good way to reduce the negative social impact of the transitions brought on by new technology. Nobody is arguing that technology doesn't create new jobs. The arguments come from the negative social impacts caused by the transitions. The existence of new jobs is small comfort to those forced into early retirement and/or incapable of training for the new jobs.
The other dimension to this is that society needs to decide if the new jobs are socially beneficial or socially destructive. The switchboard lady was nice. The telemarketer is a douche. People who seek to address these issues are not "luddites". When I see a headline like this, I think the author is either benefiting from his elevated status, or sucking up to those who have such status.
How many people in Detroit were out of work once robots started spot welding all the car frames and moving parts into position for assembly? How about Robots in manufacturing in general? Lots of people used to do those jobs. Check out How It's Made sometime. You'll see huge assembly lines full of robots where people used to stand. Hardly anyone walking around.
I've personally seen the labor force in Manufacturing facilities decline due to automated machining processes; 1 or 2 guys running 6 CNC machines where it used to take 6 people to do it manually. Polishing metal to a lustrous finish used to be a skill reserved for the 1 or 2 old German guys in the place. Now, you have CNC polishers do it in 5 different axes nonetheless.
Next, lets talk about how global connectivity has put people out of work. CNC again. You only need one programmer to transfer the machining code to some place in china where a dude running the CNC machine uploads it, puts a chunk of steel on the table , and hits the Go button. For $1.75/hour wages.
TFA is complete BS.
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Technical progress has enormously boosted productivity worldwide and is still increasing it at a rate of about 2% per year. Theoretically, we needed to work four days less every year for producing the same goods and earning the same income. However it does not happen this way. Producers use productivity boosts for reducing costs - mostly wages and salaries. This is supposed to improve their profits, but it also has an adverse affect. Layoffs, unemployment, subsequent demand shortfall and economic crises eat a large part of the benefits from increased productivity. The remaining excess profits are invested - however not in production of goods, but in financial assets. Hedge funds, investment banks, and trading firms circulate an immense money volume (up to seven trillion US$ per day) through the financial markets, this way creating a shadow economy that largely surpasses the market of real products and services. It consumes most rewards of technical progress, and gives back occasional market crashes and financial crises.
But it also offers the opportunity to redistribute some of the excess profit back from the rich to the poor. Providing many people with a small but regular trading income will take liquidity out of the financial markets and inject it back into the production cycle. This will boost demand worldwide and soften the world's economical problems.
It's the regular trading income thing that has a lot of people stumped though.
READY.
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The question is, are they good jobs? We have done everything possible to destroy the middle class. You can argue 1% vs. 99% until we are blue in the face, but the fact is, what built America was a strong middle class. The logical conclusion is, if you want to unbuild America, you destroy the middle class. Mission accomplished, America.
I'm a libertarian-leaning independent, so I hate both parties. But, I find the Republicans piss me off the most, because they kept waving American flags as they shipped our good-paying jobs overseas.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Tech most certianly does kill jobs. It may make even more in the long term, but they are very different jobs. For the 50 year old newly laid off factory worker with kids he has to put through college now, the fact that there are suddenly lots of new jobs in robot design isn't a lot of comfort.
You got that right!
And that is assuming after College (with subsequent student debt that will follow him into retirement), someone actually hires him.
The job market is so tight, entry level is someone with 2 years of experience.
This bromide of "get retrained and move to another field" is much easier said than done.
First, exactly what field to get retrained in? It seems as though every job/career path is saturated with unemployed people.
And assuming you DO get retrained, getting employed becomes a whole new battle when, for starters, employers demand a few years of experience and for another thing, when you're middle aged and just starting over again, it's REAL hard. Let's face it, for ANY position, let alone entry level, the employer usually goes for the younger person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see all the stuff about employers "liking"older workers, but in reality, it's much different. Sure there are older folks being hired but the majority are younger folks so it's even harder for the older folks.
And one last ting - there's an ugly little secret among some economists: we are not recovering; we are recovered.
If you pick choice points on the curve and then analyze a limited subset of the entire world market than you can certainly argue that, just as you can argue to the contrary.
Watch:
It used to be that there were buggy whip manufacturers and there was no minimum wage. Now people manufacture cars and get paid union wages. See, I just proved that people make boatloads more money because of technology!
Now lets go with a hypothetical. Soon there will be robots to build Big Macs so there will be no low pay staff to do that, but the robots have to be designed, programmed, manufactured and maintained! This is going to create much higher paying jobs! See, once again technology means boatloads more money!
The reality is that as technology progresses some people will lose low paying jobs and some high paying jobs. Others will gain low paying jobs and still others high paying jobs. Things are changing. Wealth is being redistributed. An emphasis on brains over brawn is causing more money to go to the intelligent folks and less to the shear brutes (unless of course you are a pro football player, or Tom Cruise, etc.).
Things are changing. This will benefit some and be a detriment to others. Trying to say if it is a good thing or a bad thing assumes that you can determine if it is a good thing or a bad thing, which is a mere delusion if only for the fact that it is based on the idea that good and bad have clear definitions.
The Zen master says: It is what it is., while the Xen master says: Fuck You, Pay Me!"
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I think at some point in the future many doctors may end up getting replaced by machines.
Imagine booths throughout a city that you walk into, punch in your symptoms, maybe it takes some readings of your vitals, and then the information is sent to some huge database that will look up the most probable ailment. If it has a high degree of certainty, then it can even prescribe a suitable drug. If it's not certain, it will instruct you to see a real doctor.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
If You Want Jobs Then Give These Workers Spoons Instead of Shovels (http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/)
I really hate the way the term Luddite is used -- people should read a bit of history (here for a start). The real Luddites were not anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers rebelling against the creation of textile sweatshops. It's a pity their rebellion was put down so violently -- we have a need for more Luddites in today's economy where our iPhones are produced by people who are effectively living in slavery.
Deconstruct the State
And I don't think the argument is that there is no disruption. What is being claimed is that there is no overall loss to the economy. A common flawed argument is: "If we let industry die, we're going to lose jobs and dollars from our economy." This argument is flawed for at least two reasons: 1) the money spent on doesn't disappear, it shifts to other sectors of the economy, and the thing that replaces or disrupts creates new and different jobs and opportunities.
It also fails to take into account that the skills required for the jobs that disappear are entirely different than the skills required for the new jobs that replace them. This means you lose everything you've worked for, career-wise. I might have 30 years in as a buggy whip craftsman, but that doesn't mean I have the skill set required to assemble an automobile. It also means that the salary I've been building up disappears. Even if the jobs are equivalent pay ranges, a senior buggy whip architect probably makes a lot more than a junior steering column technician.
If I started at $40,000/yr 30 years ago and make $75,000/yr today and suddenly lose that because my entire industry has been obsoleted -- including my retirement possibly -- and can now only take a new job at $50,000/yr... I'm still screwed.
I'm not arguing we should stop inventing, but its hugely callous to ignore the difficulties inflicted on people when this kind of thing happens.
"Callous" is really the only possible word I think we can use here. Look, I respect people's understanding of the benefits of capitalism. There are some brilliant capitalists around here. But when the problem is "solved" by market forces, there's another problem left over-- lots and lots of now-unqualified, unemployed people. Just using their children's hunger as a whip to scramble for a new job may again be a market force in action, but it's certainly not kind.
And then you run into the problem of... if we're all broke on our asses, who is going to buy your products?
Plus a lot of people actually wanted to talk to the operator, and didn't take the abuse that Telemarketers take.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You might want to avoid an example where someone went from a good paying decent status job to the lowest paying shittiest work our society has.
Essentially what my uncle did. Job security until the robot repairmen appear. But then it may be too late for us organics anyway...
it's that it kills YOUR job. Sure you can retrain and get another job, but in the meantime, tech killed your job!
The article is gaming the job argument.
Texas has added wages across all income levels.
But no, you just keep quoting that 90% figure from the Institute for Numbers I Pulled Out of My Ass...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I'm a Christian IP lawyer whose firm's servers run SCO and the employees run Microsoft Office on OSX, and we all make at least $385,000, you insensitive clod!
Nice to have such a happy spin on things, however:
1) I hate telemarketers, so thanks for that.
2) Tech has been killing jobs since the invention of tech. Imagine all the water bearers and candle makers that have lost their jobs thanks to pipes and commercial utility systems.
The issue is due to technology the job markets will stratify into very basic service industry and back breaking jobs where full automation doesn't work YET, or into highly skilled jobs that require a greater deal of intelligence than the average person is endowed with. It's an unfortunate reality, people are not created equal. Some are born with a lot more grey matter between their ears. (would we really want an entire world full of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates types?)
The tyranny of the IQ elite all live by the sword and die by the sword however. You get older and your agility and ability to continuously learn/adapt will slow down. The new smart kids will show up who will work for less and replace you. (hasn't happened to me yet, but I have seen it happen to many others that didn't realize they needed to stay current or were simply unable to). Never forget that companies are never about charity! You can work your ass off for 20 years and you will get your plaque and a nice $5 pen that thanks you for your service, right before they eliminate your job writing COBOL and JCL scripts, haha!
I am a firm believer that we are headed to an inevitable dystopic future (unless we run out of fuel/electricity first, in which case we would necessarily revert to an agrarian society which some might consider dystopic! Oh gawd, where is my facebook!). It might not be what some people envision it, but I bet it will suck for most of the people that will live in it. Have you seen many happy Amish folks? All the pictures I have ever seen were full of frown.
Manna is a pretty good quick read if you haven't seen it before (end is silly, but who knows???):
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
If we can't even agree that infants should be fed, I sadly don't see the guaranteed minimum income coming about any time soon.
Any article that heralds the creation of telemarketing jobs is so far out of touch with reality as be pure economics ivory tower hyperbole. This isn't a war, and quantity of jobs does not have a quality of it's own for defeating quality of jobs. When people have to hold multiple jobs to survive because the jobs we have are all part time and without benefits the public has lost. Simply saying we've created millions of new jobs is fraudulent misrepresentation when those jobs are all entry level jobs. People need middle class jobs and that point seems to have been lost.
"For example, word processors and voice mail systems reduced the numbers of typists and switchboard operators, but these technologies also increased the number of more highly skilled secretaries and receptionists, offsetting the job losses."
IOW the bosses and managers still can't type or figure out how the phone works.
A chef runs the kitchen (or a specific subgroup of the kitchen). The majority of the kitchen staff are not chefs, they are cooks.
Your error is forgiven since the article brazenly implies the same erroneous knowledge of the terminology.
Anyone who doesn't think that technology eliminates jobs needs to really think a bit. All technology is designed for the simple reason that it eliminates labor. Why else have technology? A can opener makes it easier and quicker to open a can. I no longer need 25 men with scythes to cut the lawn. One man with a power mower does the trick. We no longer have 90% of the public dedicated to raising food. Getting an ice cube in my soda no longer requires men to climb tall mountains to transport blocks of ice hundreds of miles. Technology simply eliminates human labor. The real threat is not the elimination of jobs as there are ways to handle that. The urgent issue is that we have become dependent upon too much technology and the slightest glitch can bring us into starvation and collapse. For example a passenger jet can bring people to us from far away very efficiently. And we can have an economy based upon fast travel. But one germ rapidly transported, far and wide, can spread a plague that we can not deal with at all. Technology also causes us to reproduce at absurd levels and one day we will reach the crash point at which we can no longer feed and shelter the majority and the pollution and violence will bring it all down to rubble.
I work in manufacturing. I have experienced robotic deployments - particularly in packaging - and I believe that those low-end jobs are strictly replacements without generating an equivalency of new jobs.
At the last company where I worked, word processors and voice mail systems allowed them to have zero secretaries and receptionists, as software developers had to answer the door phone and type their own everythings. Of course this did double the number of software developers they needed because they all got fuck all work done, so I guess the article's correct.
You know this is exactly what happened to the Luddites.
Luddites tended to be middle aged middle class families. Men would work in the fields, Woman would weave at home. It was great â" a decent wage and a decent life/work balance. In a stoke their physical capital (looms at home), human capital (knowing how to maintain and operate a hand powered loom) and a way of life (They would have to leave their husbands and farms and go to the city) were destroyed.
What is the lessoned learned?
Revolutions are good for people at the top. It is good for the next generation. It is not so good for the entrenched middle class which it tends to ravage.
So while I have empathy for the situation I donâ(TM)t think the answer is to slow down progress. Places that have done that tend to prolong the change and be in 2nd place when the revolution is over. I am looking at southern vs. northern Europe right now but there are a lot of other examples..
"Tech vs. Jobs" is the wrong frame, and the wrong debate. Jobs are lost, and (partially) replaced by lower-wage jobs, because of the enormous increases in productivity that increased technology (and improved management practices) brings. This should be making everybody better off--more product for less work should mean generally higher standards of living. The reason it doesn't is because our economic paradigm awards all of the benefits of increased productivity to capital, and none to labor. We need a system in which anyone who wishes can make a living working about 20 hours/week. But unless we rethink our economics we are teetering towards a crash, because the labor sector is collapsing, and capital must soon follow because it relies on a healthy consumer class--the very laborers whose livings have been pulled out from under them. If one looks at labor participation rates (instead of govt. unemployment numbers) the situation becomes quite clear.
What a discovery!
Mike Masnick of Techdirt argues
Masnick is the equivalent of a talk radio host for the software industry - loud and cocksure espousing nonsense day in and day out.
Oh, but do you realize he has a college degree in economics? That makes him an expert, right.
Mike Masnick's reasoning skills are very poor. If 10000 jobs are lost, then they are gone. It doesn't matter if different types of jobs come along, the 10000 jobs are still gone.
And then you run into the problem of... if we're all broke on our asses, who is going to buy your products?
When they develop robotic consumers, we are screwed.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
That said, I think it's worth asking: if machines are going to replace all our fast food workers, are we going to start paying our gourmet chefs minimum wage just because we can?"
Of course we are. In fact, we're already doing it. 20 years ago any restaurant or hotel of note had a pastry chef on staff, now they mostly serve premade desserts that come frozen from factories where machines and fewer low-wage workers do the former jobs of many well-paid chefs.
0 1 - just my two bits
Jobs are not a benefit, they're a cost.
You only hire people when you have no other way to get something done.
Loosing jobs liberates capital for other tasks - some of which will also require jobs.
In general, the economy makes such a vast amount of wealth each year that the fundamental resource limit is not the amount of wealth available for jobs, but the number of people; so even when robotic efficiency is introduced, there's so much wealth around that new jobs end up being created, in tasks which only humans can perform. Wealth is always trying to inflate the balloon of employment
However, the State acts against this, by taxing and printing money, leading to unemployment, due to lack of wealth.
They are basically competing for a shrinking pool of low-skilled jobs that are already possible to automate, ...
It's not just low skilled.
Medium skilled: I can't tell you how many book keepers who were put out of work because of QuickBooks and it's clones. You used to have an accounts payable, accounts receivables, payrolls, etc .. clerks. QuickBooks made it so that you just needed one person.
3 or 4 jobs became one.
Did some of those folks become CPAs or some other type of accountant - going up the food chain? Yep. Which put more pressure on the existing accounts - more competition for jobs and lower salaries. SOX helped stabilize wages - for now.
As it is, folks realize that they need to have a 4 year degree because low wage jobs are going away - increasing the labor pool there.
And then we have off-shoring. IBM just canned another 800 programmers and other college educated people and sent THOSE jobs over seas.
But aside from off-shoring, let's look at programmer tools. Today's IDEs and modern abstract languages (C#/Java, Python) make a programmer so much more productive: a couple of guys can do what a team of four or five of us did in the early 90s. I'm still amazed at what Visual Studio can do! What would take me a couple of days to write in win32, I can do in an hour or so.
If anyone thinks being "high skilled" protects them, they're are mistaken.
This fails to take into account that some of the professions though they disappear as a mass employer remain on indefinitely as artisan crafts, and those craftsman make more due to less supply of people skilled in their trade. Look at coopers, their are maybe 5 large cooper shops in the USA. They can charge more for their products / skills due to reduced competition. After how many years of being irrelevant as a mass employer, coopers are still relevant to the wine and whiskey industries. So not all trades truely go away, there are still coopers, wheelsmiths and yes even buggy whip craftsman.
Except the money created for the state (ie. welfare) is with interest. Interest of money that previously didn't exist, and that doesn't exist before borrowing MORE MONEY in order to pay that interest.
Learn about the money system and modern banking, who they are, and why they do not want to create that world you know would work perfectly.
Captcha: coercion
One thing that is often overlooked in the technology v. jobs argument is how technology enables us to do "less with more", not only with workers but natural resources as well. A lot of the original applications of IT were improving accuracy in factories, and this has enabled a tremendous savings in resources, which in turn helps create/preserve jobs. I used to do IT in a steel mill, and technology has allowed us to produce steel that can be rolled within an incredibly small tolerance, which is crucial to building lighter, more fuel efficient appliances/vehicles. This simply would not be possible without the tech. But not only that, the factory automation means we waste a hell of a lot less steel than we did back in the 1950s. That reduction in waste makes the product more affordable and thus means that companies can produce more.
As another example look at airplane manufacturers. Boeing and Airbus produce some amazingly fuel efficient planes, but the design and production of those planes relies on highly precise machinery. If we had to use the same machining tech that was around in the 1950s there is no way there could be as many planes in the sky today as there are now. There simply isn't enough fuel. Without tech unemployment would be even higher today, there simiply aren't enough resources.
Monstar L
A serf in the Middle Ages was usually reasonably well cared for by his lord. For instance, many, if not most, had access to free medical care, such as it was, as the lord didn't want to lose his property. With the dawn of the Industrial Age, that all went away as the factory owner had no investment in his workers and they were easily replaceable. The life of those workers was, generally, much worse than their predecessor serfs.
Today, H1-B visas are about the same phenomenon. Make workers a disposable commodity and the riches you accrue will be without limit. But all of this overlooks the ascent of robotics, which truly will replace human workers. It will be less effective to throw you shoe in the works when the works just throw it back at you.
Those who cannot adapt to tech and/or the world changed by tech will find themselves uncompetitive, and their earning and thus purchasing power will dwindle (as pointed out by others that many new jobs are lower paying, and the people who lost their old jobs may not have the skills to get the new good paying jobs in time). If they lack the savings, they will eventually starve and die.
This doesn't usually happen quickly, and some people may lift themselves back up, but it would be naive to think that the number of people who don't is zero.
But as I said in the title, we as a society is ok with this. The capitalist and libertarian side will tell you it's their own fault for failing to adapt. The socialist and communist side will tell you that the needs of the many (of us who adapted) outweigh the needs of the few (who didn't).
And you know what? They/we are right. For better or worse, humanity isn't an endangered species. Could there be some unexpected unintended (and possibly preventable) catastrophe in the future that might change that? Sure, but then you could also get hit by a bus tomorrow, or get cancer. For all the things technology has allowed us to do, it has yet to allow to have complete control over our lives. Welcome to life.
if we're all broke on our asses, who is going to buy your products?
As automation and outsourcing drive down the cost of our products the cost of buying such products declines. The poor in America generally own cars, air conditioners, DVD players, TVs, etc. Wages aren't all that matters if consumers can stretch their money further.
The Gospel according to lolcat
he pattern is that if you aren't very bright and your skill set is basically manual labor you are hosed. If things do go as most predict there will be an entire class of people where any job they are able to do a robot will do it better in every way possible. But unlike previous mechanical revolutions they won't be running the machines. The machines will mostly run themselves. Historically it wasn't so much replacing people as it was increasing the efficiency of a single worker. Horse drawn plows to tractors, horse and buggy to car, wagon train to railroad, shovel to steamshovel, pick-axe to dynamite. But there were exceptions such as elevator operators.
Where the real problem is going to come is not so much the robots themselves but how our economy and government's interactions with the economy are structured. Presently production and productivity is king. A simple example is that governments love to measure GDP (Gross Domestic Product) the number governments hate is unemployment. Governments have bought into the MBA culture of the "Bottom Line" all kinds of excuses for their bad behavior come up like "The market dictates wages/prices/contracts/working conditions." But they forget the human element in the economic equation and that it is not production but consumption that drives society and the economy. If more and more people go into survival mode the economy will tank. With minimum wage in the US often below $10 there is no way for those people to consume much beyond the basics that marginally keep them alive. But even those crappy jobs are drying up do to automation. A very simple example of how misguided present policy is would be to look at the government's quantitative easing. The government is basically printing money and then buying stuff with it. Most people think that they have to buy certain things but the reality is that they can buy anything, jellybeans if they want. So who do they give this money to? The big banks; billions upon billions to the big banks. But they could just as easily give this money to anybody on the street. So instead of seeing that this money ends up in the pockets of consumers who would say, spend it. They give it to the banks to shore up their stock prices. Then the banks use it to buy up homes which they rent to people making as much money as possible for a very small group of people.
So with the above in mind what will happen when some companies are able to reap huge productivity gains without hardly hiring anyone and in all likelihood eliminating existing jobs? Without a cultural readjustment all I can see is a situation where more and more people are going to become generationally excluded from the economy and this won't end well. But those closer to the reigns of power will be raking in more and more money with fewer and fewer costs wondering why the government less and less functional.
But not all cultures see things this way. There will be some countries and cultures that will be stupid and just try and ban robots. But the simple solution is to make sure that the rewards of the robot revolution are more evenly spread; focusing on making sure that their populations have generally equal access to things like money, education, and other public resources. I am not saying out and out communism in the soviet style as that really doesn't work but a system that continually makes sure that inequality does not become a virtue. If I had to identify a single solution it will be the minimum basic income. Not minimum wage but something quite different and quite radical.
The problem with the "job" count is that everything seems to be based off the assumption that even with new technologies, we have to fill everyone's time with something "productive" (and yes, given a lot of jobs, the quotes are absolutely necessary).
I've heard that on average, an 8-hour workday results in maybe 3 hours of actual work for most jobs. It seems to me that rather than focusing on how busy a person is in this new world of technology, perhaps we would be better off figuring out a way to allow people more flexibility and free time to pursue their passions than simply filling their time with desk-sitting and staring down the clock until 5pm.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Yep, the article is correct in what's stated, but entirely misleading. It also does not take into account related changes in the US during the same years (1999-2009):
the population grew from 279M to 307M (+11%)
the GNP grew from $10T to $14T (+40%)
the employed population decreased from 64% to 58% (-9.5%)
The end result is more business but a much lower ratio of workers to product overall, which the author completely ignored.
For last 17 years, I have enabled my employers to either not hire technical workers, or to reduce the skill level required to perform a job, or eliminated the position.
In 1996, was hired by a major test instrument maker to 'get rid of at least 10 techs'. A year later, we had reduced the 'Test Tech A' headcount by (7), and started up two new product lines using only 'Test Operator' A and B job titles, which paid about 45% less than than 'Test Tech' A,B, or C.
My next job was at an agriculture equipment mfr. Two years later, the electronic controls line had (4) less techs and almost %15 production rate increase, and much less RMAs.
At start of my current job, there were (2) Jr engrs and (5) techs in the engineering lab. There is now (1) Jr Engr, and (0) techs. The eng dept continues to release the same number of new products per annum, where some of the products are much more complex in both code and hardware. Have done similar process automation for the factory, but since it is in TJ, the cost savings make it less of an imperative.
Process automation does not just affect blue-collar workers. A school bud that does similar stuff has indicated his employer is slowly reducing the number of machinists and metal workers required.
I do not know how much of this is sustainable, but to date the work has kept the crunchy peanut butter on the table. And I have always been able to afford much better than just wonder bread.
When people say 'technology destroys jobs', what they really mean is that 'technology destroys MY job, and now I have to actually learn something new and more complicated if I want to earn a living'.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Actually, the movement toward computing has tremendously reduced the average medical knowledge in the country. Good secretaries in doctor's offices used to know a huge amount about the doctor's field of medicine because they had to transcribe dictation all the time. Today, they know how to book appointments, but tend to know much less about medicine. (And be less helpful to patients who spend hours in the waiting room).
Is that tech and automation is just useless?
If you built a robot to replace 50 people. it will always take 50 people to build, maintain, and misc that robot (probably while producing a worse product)?
So basically, the moral of this article is that tech is mostly useless, and does not solve any problems?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
also some schools are loaded with theory and are lacking real skills needed to do the job.
Some of the real skill can only really be picked working hands on. At least at the tech schools there are a lot of hands on classes but over all to many of them are forced into the old college system that is not really setup to teach like that.
If I started at $40,000/yr 30 years ago and make $75,000/yr today and suddenly lose that because my entire industry has been obsoleted....
How often are these things "sudden"? The process of automation is not developed and deployed overnight. It is up to you, as a worker in an industry, to stay informed of the threats to your job security by new technological advancements. As the possibility of automation gets closer to reality, you should be preparing for your next job while you still have a stable income, as opposed to sticking your head in the sand and hoping the world doesn't change around you.
I'm not shitting on you in any way, but the thing most people don't consider is inflation. If you made $40,000 30 years ago, you would need to make almost $94,000 today to break even.
Most people don't realize they aren't even making as much money as they did 10 years ago.
That's simply and quite clearly false. For example, automation of the phone system replaced operators moving plugs with voip techs. The new technology always makes the people more productive, and therefore more valuable. Any technology that doesn't increase productivity get implemented. That's one of several simple logical proofs.
It's also clear that machines are suited for extremely low skill, repetitive tasks - the very lowest paying jobs. That leaves the humans to do less mundane and therefore higher paying jobs.
Lastly, we've actually done it, so we know what happens. In 1870, real per capita income in the US was around $4000. In 1900, $6k. In 1940, $8k, 1970 $20k, 2000 $40k. (All figures adjusted for inflation to 1995 dollars).
As society has become more automated, incomes have gone from $4,000 to $40,000. That's historical fact.
The current technology and job markets are extremely distorted. If you can get credit (like most businesses), it only makes sense to invest in machinery that will lower the headcount. Interest rates are being kept at all time lows in the hope that somehow it will trigger a 3-5% recovery in the economy (and subsiquent hiring but that's not going to happen this time). No one really knows what's going to happen to health care costs in the US with our "grand experiment" that is Obamacare, and no one wants to find out either.
If I were running a business in this enviroment I'd be automating (borrowing capital) as much as possible. And putting my factories closer to the customers just in case oil jumps up again.
What has happened as real incomes have become ten times as large over the last 140 years is that we've become more educated. When Americans spent their days farming with a horse, they were doing a job that required a fourth grade education and earned $4K/year.
Later, they earned $20K running a partially automated tractor and used their high school education to plot out crop patterns. Today, Americans average $40K and farmers have a bachelor's degree from Texas A&M. They operate $2 million combines with GPS and laser range finders to be more productive and earn more.
Arguments of this sort should help us understand that talking about this problem as a matter of jobs numbers is a flawed strategy. We should be talking in terms of how economic production is distributed and how much of the risk workers should be expected to assume to provide the workforce flexibility required to accommodate these productivity enhancements. There is only a dilemma between protectionism and innovation if we are unwilling to take responsibility for the economic outcomes which give the vast proportion of productivity gains to the investor class.
I'm a poor in America. I bought a used 25$ tv about two years. I saved for years to buy a 300$ laptop. I'll have to save for 5 years to finish my BA in math. I haven't spent a single dollar that wasn't for food, housing, or electricity in over a year. I don't have a phone or car or an air conditioner.
The dollars are stretched, and the situation is getting worse.
After all, I am strangely colored.
First get rid of the salary pay system where you can end working 60-80 hours a week with no OT pay or say have a min pay level of like 75K-100K + COL to be able have some on salary. COL is needed for high cost living areas as well as inflation.
Maybe have some ways around that with forced comp time With an pay out for any lost time that also is added to vacation / PTO days. (no more use it or lose it as some times you can't use it)
But over all an 32 Hour week may a good thing to shoot for soon.
I thought it was us techies, who keep promising that tech advances will kill jobs.
(Keeping in mind that killing jobs is a desirable; achieving a near-100% unemployment rate is part of how resources (labor, in this case) could cease to be scarce, thereby overturning all previous economic theory (e.g. Adam Smith and Karl Marx become irrelevant), and allowing people to live like the characters on ST:TNG. Sure, it's a fantasy ideal, but fantasy ideals are what you always aim at, right? It's not like Adam Smith and Karl Marx don't also target fantasy ideals.)
It sounds like it's the luddites who have (metaphorically) thrown a wrench into the plan, showing that no matter how well we automate, some asshole somewhere will find a way to keep people wasting their brief limited lifetimes on toil rather than hedonism.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Wait, so if tech doesn't eliminate the need for work -- making the total burden of sustaining humanity lighter -- what are we doing it for? Is it all just a big game then?
All my paychecks go straight in through digits from my company to my banks.
Some of my employers have been unable to offer payroll direct deposit. Their payroll processors could issue only paper checks. And that still doesn't help with depositing cash or checks received from other individuals, such as birthday money and repayment of short-term loans to family members.
There are many banks now that don't even have physical customer facing locations.
A number of banks have services that scan checks either in the ATM machine
I thought automated teller machines and the change counter in your primary bank were still "physical customer facing locations".
or even with photographic text messaging.
Oh great. Now I have to pay hundreds of dollars per year for smartphone service just to deposit checks.
What I hear economists say about technology relative to income is that it concentrates and magnifies existing economic power.
If you're a good stock trader, with advancements in technology, you become a better stock trader because you can manage more trades. And it's even simple technology changes that enable this -- running a GUI display instead of a character mode display, running 2+ monitors, even relatively simple software improvements.
And part of the reason why it concentrates power is technology is a capital intensive asset that requires capital to exploit. The more you invest, the better off you are -- if you are Goldman Sachs and have a lot of capital, you can do large-scale data mining, HFT.
And yet they freely migrated from the land to the factories. Might have been hard but they made a choice.
[FUCK BETA]
but a (brave) new world of telemarketing and call center support jobs have opened up
In other words: Tech kills people!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Once computers can do everything that a human can, except perhaps for a few geniuses, then there will be no more jobs for regular folks. That's the endgame. It's like Moore's law - we can talk about how long it will last, but the one thing that's abundantly clear is that it can't last forever.
That sounds like they were opposed to their guild or equivalent being undermined. They wanted the industry to be dominated by skilled workers such as themselves, when skilled workers were no longer needed.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Not exactly. Their jobs on the land evaporated, leaving them the choice of starving or trying to find work in town. Unless you want to argue death by starvation is a viable choice.
But those people that had the old jobs don't get the new jobs, that is for the next generations. The industrial revolution displayed a large number of people and made their lives worse, Over time new types of jobs were created which employed people and gave those people a much better standard of living. I believe the same thing is happening again.
.... yes, technology does not kill jobs, and it creates new, better ones. But, those new, better jobs usually require more skill.
The telephone operator had to plug jumper wires into a board. But, a telemarketer needs to know how to use a computer, customer relationship software, a credit card interface, and other tools and utilities. A call center support technician needs to know even more.
So, unless and until people learn to increase their skills, they will be relegated to sitting on the couch bitching about technology eliminating their jobs.
This has always been about tech , automation, destroying the hand-work medium paid job where you do not need a PhD to do. Once you remove a lot of those job, a whole slate of the population is unable to find a new one. What do you do with them ? tell them in a swiftian way to eat their chidlren ? Once you automate a lot of things, those medium paid job, are gone, then the lower paid job are left, and once you automate more with more tech, those are gone and only the lowest crummy job are left. Which means that there is a huge step up to make for those people to find a new job. Tech kills those job and they never reappear. Sure in some case you find out some lower/median job position not needing experience or study open up, but that's rare , and that's the point.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Look at the standard of living and unemployment rate 100 years ago. Even 50 years ago. Now compare it to now, after huge revolutions in technology. You'll always see that technology ends up doing one long term change, and that is increasing the standard of living (more economic output for the same input).
Gaging on various companies and government contractors I have worked for, large scale tech projects create more jobs. Lots of project managers and middle managers sitting in meetings with engineers trying to discuss a design plan then meeting again and again over endless months or years never deciding on much of anything. Then things go forward with the most ill concieved plans, countless millions are spend on miracle third party products that never really do what they were sold to and were evulated to engineers without the skill nescessary to make the evulation and managers just looking to get ahead. Then someone in house gets fed up and creates a little in home app that solves most of the problems in the first place.
Have gnu, will travel.
But you're making a mistake, too. You are assuming that because new tech always worked out to create new jobs to replace the jobs it destroyed, that it will always be that way. But things rarely continue on as they always have.
There are some major differences between now and the past. The world's population is larger than it ever has been before, and there's more automation than ever before. There are a lot of people who, like it or not, are never going to be capable of much more than flipping burgers. There are very few tasks at that level that won't be able to be replaced by machines in the near future. Even the call center jobs mentioned are gradually being replaced by machines.
So maybe new kinds of jobs for the lower echelon of capabilities will appear. Maybe they won't. But it's every bit as stupid to say that there will always be new jobs created as it is to say that new tech will kills jobs and leave people unable to ever find work. The truth will probably end up in the middle. But getting into space and opening new realms of expansion for humanity will help give a large portion of humanity something to do in the long term.
Bear in mind, they were characteristically also evicted from their homes by the lord, who still owned their homes.
The problem of more tech is that the new "jobs" are further and further from the source of value/product creation. Each of these new jobs give diminishing returns on useful output and therefore pay less. It's like a private sector "jobs" program, but one that requires more and more irrelivant $100k degrees.
I'm one of those right wing nuts that yell, "Get a job, slacker." but there's less to be had and we will need some kind of mandatory, permanent payments for those who do not work.
Personally, I've always thought that a good fallback job for IT workers would be fixing cars. My new Jeep has more electronics in it than ever. In fact, there have been some growing pains with programming the new ZF transmission and all the dealer does is upload new firmware to fix the behavior. Cars are becoming more and more like computers than mechanical devices, especially the electric ones.
This all leads to a place where humans are essentially pets of machines/robots. A place where nothing most humans can do is useful to the economy except acting as consumers (like dogs eating dog food).
There may be some special functions we serve for robots, like seeing eye-dogs do for humans today, but that will be limited, and done on a leash.
So, start working on your neck muscles if you want to be useful to society in the years ahead.
No. The factory revolution preceded the revolution in agriculture, which didn't really get going until the 1830s. People were still harvesting crops with sickles until the mid-Victorian era. Up until the 1930s, anyone with two strong arms could easily get a job working the land in any temperate climate.
[FUCK BETA]
No, really: people once claimed & hoped that industrialization would raise productivity so much that we'd all have 20-hour work weeks or some such. Yet here we are, with massively greater productivity than 100 years ago (or even 20), and the so-called "work ethic" handed down from the top-level management sociopaths to everyone else has led to an increase in the average work week among full-time workers.
I'm not claiming that we'd solve unemployment by chopping every job in half & increasing our employee count by 100%, but it sure would be nice if a little of those productivity gains came back to us all in the form of something other than, well, the nothing we're getting now.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I'd like to point out that very few people here really understand minimum wage laws. Minimum wage law is not an 'employment' law... it is an unemployment law. All it says is IF I employ someone, I MUST pay them X dollars. It dose not say I MUST employ anyone. What people usually think is that minimum wage is a floor that everyone stands on. If you lift up that floor, you lift up everyone standing on it.
However, minimum wage more represents a high-jump bar. You MUST jump over that bar (in terms of productivity as an employee) or I wont hire you. To do so means I loose money at with every hour. If your productivity is only $5 / hr, there is no way I'll pay you minimum wage... ergo I won't hire you! An absurd example (but this can be extrapolated to all technology / labor savings). I need a place to hang my coat in the morning. I can pay someone 10c / hour to stand in the corner and hold it (which is the value of that service) - or I can buy a coat tree for $10 and make up the savings over time. Since minimum wage is $7.XX, the first option is out of the question - the laborer worth 10c / hour is out of a job (sorry). I'll pay someone $3.00 / hr to pump gas at a gas station. Minimum wage is $7.XX. the gas station attendant is out of a job (sorry). I'll pay someone $7.XX to take orders at fast food joint - oh minimum wage is raised to $9.XX / hr. Those people are out of a job (sorry).
We see exactly the same thing happening with the new obamacare mandates. The law says that IF I employee someone more than 28 hours then I MUST provide healthcare. This is effectively a minimum wage raise on people who work over 28 hours - it is just disguised as 'health care'. Instead of being able to pay you $7 /hr for 28 hours, it is now $10 + cost of health care (an increase in minimum wage). The employer has 2 choices - either lower your wage so that new wage + health care = old wage.... or cut hours so that they are exempt from the laws requirements. Given that most employees don't like seeing wages cut - or are already at minimum wage (so that isn't an option), you see the expected decrease in hours.
So what can you do about it? Raise your own productivity so as to be more beneficial to an employer. If an employer is not valuing (in your opinion) your productivity correctly, find a new employer. Learn a new skill, start your own business. Stop viewing it as 'a job' and start seeing how you can improve humanity by your own effort. The money will come. Pro-tip: humanity is beginning to see ordering fast food as a job it no longer wants - just as elevator operators and gas station attendants are jobs it no longer wants. They are too expensive and too easily automated (thank you minimum wage laws). Find another way to be productive!
What doesn't work? Asking for a raise in minimum wage. All it does is push that high-jump bar even higher so more people can't jump over. Same thing goes with mandating health insurance. Until we FORCE employers to hire people (which is disastrous by the way, and totally against any natural state of humanity), only a proper understanding of the economics of the situation will improve your lot. You cannot make employers pay more by fiat - it DOESN'T WORK!
I'm a poor in America. I bought a used 25$ tv about two years. I saved for years to buy a 300$ laptop. I'll have to save for 5 years to finish my BA in math. I haven't spent a single dollar that wasn't for food, housing, or electricity in over a year. I don't have a phone or car or an air conditioner.
Why are you still working on your BA? It sounds like you are already a grad student.
Quite truthy, but that overlooks an increasing population that exceeded agricultural demand and the fact that the peasants doing the work were now in the same boat as the factory workers; they were disposable labor. Of course, you can lay some of the blame for that on social change, but much of the social change on the farm was driven by the changes in town and the financial impacts that had for the feudal model.
The future is like the past except when it isn't, so arguments about the historical effect of automation are not terribly persuasive.
Over 200 year ago, Adam Smith analyzed Capitalism far more accurately and intelligently than the the nonsense here.
Imagine instead of people we're talking about horses. Horses have had a variety of jobs throughout history. They bounced around between farm, military, and transportation jobs as different trends and technologies came and went. Horses didn't have to worry, there was always something they'd be useful for.
And then, within a 50 year span, they lost almost all those jobs, because machines surpassed them in their core competency (pulling and carrying stuff).
Similarly, humans will get bumped and jostled around and generally will have something to contribute... until we quite suddenly (from a history perspective) don't. A few more advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, and the majority of humans will have nothing to contribute to the economy. The kinds of jobs that humans will still excel at (eg. creative stuff like writing) are also things that just don't require that many people to do, and which many people will continue having no aptitude for.
This is good news. It'll be awesome to see what humans can do post-scarcity. But the transition will be awkward.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Jobs are disappearing. Real jobs, I mean - the ones that provide actual value. The ones that, at the end of the day, a person goes home and feels a sense of pride and accomplishment.
They've been disappearing for a long time. We've just been replacing them with bullshit jobs - like telemarketers, advertisers, personal shoppers, sales clerks, etc. Look around carefully and observe how many of the jobs that people do every day are completely unnecessary and pointless. The only reason they exist is because of consumerism. Selling crap people don't need, and the vast quantities of money spent convincing them to buy it anyway.
If you look at the items that are truly valuable and actually improve our standard of living, it's a pretty small part of the economy. If we kept that part, and got rid of the bullshit part of the economy (including the part where companies design things to break so the products need to be bought again), we'd have an employment rate of probably 30-40%.
Unfortunately, the way things are designed now it would collapse because there wouldn't be enough money in the hands of the masses to buy from the producers - because they wouldn't have jobs.
For example, a huge part of what drives people to need work is the absurd cost of housing - driven because of supply and demand constraints created because of the need for people to go to cities for work. Think about that for a second - we spend a huge chunk of our working lives paying for the cost (including interest) of housing; the price of housing is determined largely by the location relative to where people need to be to earn money; they need to earn money to pay for housing. So assume a $300k average home price, with mortgage interest making it cost $650k over the 25 year term. If we assume an average $35k after tax wage, that means a person is working over 18 years of their lives just to pay for their house. The important part is that they could probably buy the materials and build a similiar one themselves (assuming access to the heavy equipment required for parts of it) in the country (i.e. away from the jobs) for $75k and 1 year of their life. Repeat similarly with cars (which are designed to break down), and fast food (which mostly exists because people are too busy from working at their pointless jobs to cook real food).
Extrapolate from where we are for a minute - imagine 20-50 years when 3D printing and other technologies make the basics of a comfortable lifestyle cost almost nothing, and the drive of consumerism has died as people have realized that buying stuff makes you less happy than being fulfilled. There won't be much demand for people to work at pointless jobs anymore. Our economy can look like one of two things: 1) a few people hoard the important raw resources and control everything, or 2) wealth is distributed fairly evenly and almost everyone can choose to live a comfortable, happy life and pursue arts, culture, science, health care, teaching, as driven by their own interests.
And I don't think the argument is that there is no disruption. What is being claimed is that there is no overall loss to the economy. A common flawed argument is: "If we let industry die, we're going to lose jobs and dollars from our economy." This argument is flawed for at least two reasons: 1) the money spent on doesn't disappear, it shifts to other sectors of the economy, and the thing that replaces or disrupts creates new and different jobs and opportunities.
If 40,000 senior buggy-whip manufacturers lose their jobs and 15,000 of them get new jobs as junior steering-column assemblers, 25,000 new jobs with compensatory salaries don't just magically spring into existence to keep everything in balance.
Economies are not based on invariant intrinsic values. They are based on the confidence of the participants. That's why there are booms and recessions as people's expectations change. It's not that suddenly 30,000 LCD TVs vanished overnight, just that 25,000 prospective TV buyers without paychecks decided that eating was more important and 15,000 junior steering-column assemblers found amusements that were more in line with smaller incomes.
So yes, money does "disappear". Even in economies without fiat currencies. You might have as much gold coins or dollar bills, but you can do less with them. And, worse, you may see fewer of them coming your way in the future.
the last time I needed to pay some money to my Dad, I did it at home without writing a cheque and the money went into his account instantly.
For one thing, good luck explaining electronic person-to-person payments to a pensioner who prefers the familiar ritual of writing a cheque. For another, good luck satisfying someone who wants to be paid now, before services are rendered, not when you get home.
My PC has a flatbed scanner. I called Chase, asking if there were some desktop application for depositing checks using a flatbed scanner, but they said it's available only for iPhone on the App Store and for Android phones on Google Play Store. And yes, it has to be a phone. I own a Nexus 7 tablet with a front-facing camera, but when I tried the Chase Mobile app, the deposit option didn't appear. Should a smartphone plan be considered part of the cost of doing business with a bank in 2013?
Besides, even if you do have a smartphone, a scanner doesn't help you deposit cash.
Computers replace journalists? What'd they do then?
You do realize that automation drives the prices down don't you? Now if you have inflation stop blaming the machines for it and look at the real culprits.
Employ a dozen men to dig a ditch - how much tax do you pay for the ditch being dug?
vs
Use a JCB digger to dig a ditch - how much tax do youpay for the ditch being dug?
(clue: The answer is not 'none, because the ditch is already there, the men finished it earlier')
Peoples labour is hugely taxed, labour done by machines is not.
Is it luddite to simply ask for a level playing field?
Twitter: @pperrin
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During the period from 1920 to 1970 U.S. wages on on age average went from about $10K to $40K (inflation adjusted). Since 1970 the rate of increase has dropped considerably. So much so, that it would be very prudent to consider it a structural change.
Some of the likely candidates
1) Increasing automation due to the relative affordability of computer and electronic technology
2) Demographic changes due lowered birth rate
3) Demographic changes due to aging population
4) Demographics changes to die increasing saturation of high-tech jobs relative to the percentage of the population able to succeed in high-tech jobs
5) Absolute and/or relative decline of US Education
6) Relative decline of US economy compared to world-wide population
7) Shifting emphasis in population priorities -- more "me time" less emphasis on working
8) Breaking of the social presumption of job for life relation between employers and employees
9) Increasing cost of energy beginning around 1970 (Arab oil embargo)
10) Increasing net tax burden (not just fed. income tax)
11) Increasing regulatory burden
12) Reduced influence of unions
Of course, I'm sure you could think of more, and a combination of factors is more likely than any single factor.
However, if automation was primary reason that wages went from $4K to $40K, it most certainly is not the driving factor today. Automation has continued unabated since 1970, if rate of increase since 1970 matched the rate from 1920 to 1970, we would be making around $100 today, and McDonald's and WalMart would be paying $15 per hour to their employees.
And then remained essentially flat for the past thirty years.
Religion doesn't require a god. Just a belief in supernatural powers impacting reality and this idea that unbridled capitalism and automation are going to give us the best utopia possible is a religion. There is no proof; only faith and a short history of failures to compare against.
A BS job of no substance with high education requirements is not equivalent of a laborer who actually contributes to society by doing something that is needed. Unhappy people who work long hours and live under a lifespan of debt with nothing meaningful to show for it but the dumpsters of junk.
Economists mostly just spout BS and pick poor representative numbers attempting to quantify the quality of life. They see a booming economy while the middle class gets weaker and weaker and their quality of life diminishes. The amount of money changing hands is a poor metric for progress. The Amish are happier people but to economists they are primitive failures. Economics is no more life than creationism is real.
2/3 of the world is poor. It is already increasing.
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The past is not always a good guide to the future. It's almost like proclaiming in 1890 that "all past attempts at powered human flight have failed, therefore all future attempts will likely fail".
Technology and offshoring are quickly advancing. There just may be a tipping point where past job replacement patterns shrink or disappear.
Table-ized A.I.
It doesn't matter how much "evidence" one can bring to bear in sociological journals, let alone pundit pieces in the fashion press of the intelligentsia, in support of this or that social theory; imposing them on unwilling human subjects violates humanity.
Quite aside from the fact that "correlation doesn't imply causation", thereby rendering any mountain of data-collection incapable of scientific proof of causality in the social sciences, it is more compassionate to let people learn live out their strongly held beliefs and thereby learn from their mistakes then it is to engender their unquenchable hatred.
Seastead this.
I'm a poor in America. I bought a used 25$ tv about two years. I saved for years to buy a 300$ laptop. I'll have to save for 5 years to finish my BA in math. I haven't spent a single dollar that wasn't for food, housing, or electricity in over a year. I don't have a phone or car or an air conditioner.
The dollars are stretched, and the situation is getting worse.
Sorry to hear about your situation. This hits home for me personally, because I also studied Math. I was fortunate to have parents who could help me out a little financially (at least until I finished my BS degree) but had I not had that, I could have been in your situation (actually, even with their help, you pretty much described what my life was like in college!)
Do something else. Math will always be there. Get a job where you'll be around a lot of people (phone support or call center for a business that does something else as its main mission, for example). Be a nice guy there, help others, and eventually you'll find out you're front in line for promotion further up the chain (or if not, you'll meet a customer/exiting coworker/etc who knows another job you'd be good at). Move to a different part of the country where the cost of living is lower. A good way to get some feeling is to glance at the COLA location charts for federal/military employes. Maybe you can even finish your BS part time. If Math is really still a passion, you can then start to look at grad school (which is a lot easier to swing, since math grad students can usually get paid GTA/GRA jobs).
Best of luck, wish I could help more...
Technology allows jobs to be done with less manual effort. By its very nature, it leads to less jobs; if it didn't, it wouldn't be adopted. Replacing 50 auto workers with 1 robot may create 1 robot repair tech job, but it's not going to produce 50. Otherwise you'd keep the auto workers on the job.
Tu quoque.
These dialogs are held by people looking at numbers and pretending that laborers are as interchangable as any other resource in the production/consumption cycle.
Simply put, they aren't.
Pretending that job loss and it's very real human consequences are meaningless makes as much sense as assuming a marketplace with rational actors is the norm.
Society continues to grapple with assigning responsibility for the consequences of technology and has yet to demonstrate any real innovation in addressing the issue.
Since our technologies are multiplying both in number and in power, it might make sense to consider this topic with care rather playing musical chairs with it.
Seems to me a dangerous tactic to base this kind of prediction purely on historical data. There is no way to prove that something that was the case will always be the case in the future. The problem in essentially, I think, the gap between what humans can do and what machines can do. What humans can do and machines not defines the "skillspace" left for humans. Now that space is contracting very fast, for the first time in history. That may well break the "law of always more new jobs". Another related issue is the character of the revolution. It is general purpose machines that replacing humans. Not something like hammers and printing presses. It seems to me that not only will the gap between humans and machines get smaller, it will shrink at an increasing speed. Think about it. A printing press replaces printers, but a general purpose cognitive machine added to a human like body replaces maybe 95% of everything that a human can do. Big difference, IMHO. So every imrovement of the general purpose cognitive machine will replace jobs over a broad spectrum of industries and skillsets.
You don't have to work like a machine just because you don't have much money. Someone reading Slashdot should know how important access to the internet is these days, especially if you are pursuing a STEM field. Besides that you need to keep your mind stimulated and let it relax every once and a while in order to keep it sharp.
Only the very shortsighted would want more jobs. Lets just solve the distribution of wealth instead right...
Know also that the Luddites weren't anti tech but anti deskilling and against the destruction of their relatively free and unsurveilled way of life.
And I don't think the argument is that there is no disruption. What is being claimed is that there is no overall loss to the economy. A common flawed argument is: "If we let industry die, we're going to lose jobs and dollars from our economy." This argument is flawed for at least two reasons: 1) the money spent on doesn't disappear, it shifts to other sectors of the economy, and the thing that replaces or disrupts creates new and different jobs and opportunities.
The difficulty is that often when a disruption of this nature occurs, the shift tends to favour a select few (the owners of the automated factory for example) rather than a more broad swath of society: everyone gets (slightly) cheaper goods/services, a bunch of people lose their livelihoods, a few people gain new careers, and a very few people get very wealthy. The total economy might be larger, but the wealth has been concentrated.
Lastly, we've actually done it, so we know what happens. In 1870, real per capita income in the US was around $4000. In 1900, $6k. In 1940, $8k, 1970 $20k, 2000 $40k. (All figures adjusted for inflation to 1995 dollars).
As society has become more automated, incomes have gone from $4,000 to $40,000. That's historical fact.
Looks good, but you could have that type of shift if everyone's income stayed the same and one person at the top made an obscene amount of money. How has the income distribution shifted? How has the fraction of the population changed below the poverty line? Has the "rising tide" lifted all ships, or just the mega-yatchs?
As automation improves, the number of jobs needed to produce things goes down. However, the demand for jobs is very strong so the cost of labor decreases until affluent people are more willing to hire people for generally unnecessary service jobs. However, these service jobs pay very little.
The problem is that as the automation improves, society can increase the cost of labor because less labor is necessary. In this ideal situation, we can all work less but have the same amount of things, But free market seems to result in the cost of labor decreasing.
Why does the price of goods not decrease more than the price of labor? Why doesn't everyone just work less? The reason is that the costs of certain goods do not decrease with automation, such as land and natural resources. Education costs could decrease with automation (the internet), but we haven't quite hit that point yet and education prices are set by powerful guilds. If everything cost 1/2 as much labor to make, people can't just work 1/2 as much because they still have to pay rent.
It's called the internet. Learn to use it.
Start with the Department of Labor.
You must be a Yankee city slicker. Maybe one of those who drives through our little town in his $50,000 car turning up his nose at us country bumpkins in overalls.
We laugh at you and that $50,000 car you think is such hot shit because we do indeed have $2 million machines, and we drive them.
Posted from College Station, home of Texas A&M and the Fightin Texas Aggies.
In case you're wondering WHY "with the money to buy a $2M harvester" will "lower himself to driving it", ask yourself this:
If YOU spent $2 million, putting $200,000 down and you are responsible for a $1,800,000 loan, would YOU let some idiot drive it? No, you drive it yourself or hire someone good, someone who knows his shit and is proven responsible and trustworthy.
For him to be correct, he would have to assume that transitioning from one job to another is effortless and that the relevant skills are picked up by the displaced.
On the other hand, when more displaced are being created and remain so for longer periods of time, the only way that he can be correct is if one ignores the displaced. Given that the displaced do exist (especially in higher skill ranges) and cannot be ignored, he is incorrect.
That, and it is far better to have the employers adjust to the displaced (and train for the skills). The job gets done and requirement-related abuse/inflation goes out the window.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It's happened many times before in many industries and it's still happening. Local butchers, greengrocers and ironmongers were replaced by supermarkets. Switchboard operators were replaced by electro-mechanical telephone systems, digital telephone networks, voice-over-data systems like ATM. Coal miners, steel workers, car making and shipbuilding and other manufacturing jobs have been offshored along with back-office jobs like medical transcription and paperwork processing. Elevator operators and telegram messengers were replaced by automated control and mail systems. Just about every manager used to have their own secretary. Then when E-mail came along, the managers discovered that they had to learn typing skills (to them, they felt they had just become "glorified secretaries").
Manual looms operated by four artisans in order to make one garment have been replaced by digital print looms that are large enough to weave carpets using patterns generated by Photoshop and require only one technician to supervise 15 machines. Print workers in newsagents (the guys who put boilerplate letters on drum printers and removed it again) were replaced by WYSIWYG systems overnight. Instead of the journalists writing shorthand articles and having them converted into boilerplate by the technicians, the journalists simply typed the text in. The print workers wanted that job as it seemed to closely match what they had been doing.
Ironically, a decade after the print-workers strike happened the Internet and the world-wide-web took off. If that had happened first, the print-workers could have migrated their skills painlessly to new industries. It would seem better to introduce technology to home users first, giving everyone time to make the jump.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The better question is: How can we remove illegals and make sure that the border is the most inhospitable thing for those attempting an illegal crossing?
Given the deleterious influence on illegals making such crossings, the Border Patrol should just consider illegals as open targets (regardless of who they are) and make a SB1070-like bill(it works, much to the chagrin of employer-backed AZEIR) the law of the land.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If you think about it more in detail, in a lot of sci-fi books where there is vast automation, (such as Rainbows End), there is a virtual economy. This virtual economy is very similar to WoW gold farming in that actual dollars end up being worth something in these virtual worlds. This re-builds the low class jobs, so people end up grinding virtual asset production instead of flipping burgers. I never thought of it before, but the financial market system is sort of a virtual economy. Sure people claim it has functions in the actual economy, but it in a sense is a virtual economy.
I guess we should figure out how to skin the financial system so it looks like WoW so we can hand over the keys to everyday folks.
The greatest hazard is finding an employer that deliberately tries to hold you back. Sometimes it can be because "they've never had a bright graduate" or want to keep you for as long as possible, then don't realize that the industry has suddenly leaped forward. Other times, they think project A is the way forward, decide to bring on more staff to explore project B, and suddenly realize that project B is the most efficient route and no longer require staff for project A. In a large city where there are plenty of opportunities, that isn't a problem, but if you are in a one-company town that's the end.
The real lesson is that the middle class is unstable. The world, without significant interference, will tend towards a gap in the middle.
Learn to love Alaska
And they go on social assistance because they can't get a job anymore, and the people that do have jobs have to support them.
I think that is why some countries that are driven by capitalism also happen to have larger (relative to the USA) social programs, like job re-training as part of your unemployment benefits.
That would effectively be the same as saying: "Capitalism, without significant interference, will tend towards a class society."
So if that's true, then it seems we have the choice between:
(A) significant regulatory interference
(B) a class society
(C) something else than pure capitalism
A corporate megafarm doesn't even need the loan. The lease system might put some semblance of "ownership" in the hands of the lessee, but it's not the same thing....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Or today, we have all three, implemented poorly.
Learn to love Alaska
Luddites (contrary to more recent neo-luddites) was not an anti-technology group. They were depicted this way by their political enemies but actually they only protested to the way many workers were fired and obsoleted without any kind of safety net. There has been some machines destruction, but their revendications were social, not technological.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I want to call b.s. on the 'in America' part because:
A) in 28 years, I've never seen an American write 25$ (it's $25 even if it makes less sense)
B) it would take far more than 5 years for even a middle-class individual to pay for a BA in anything
The Luddites are NOT wrong within the context of Globalization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slave
Casteism
So you are comparing an operator position with a sweat-room telemarketing operation. You know the operation that no one wants to hear from? Tech does open new jobs, but not for artisan workers. It opens jobs that frankly are cheaper to be had over seas. I never had a problem with it because it also opened high tech jobs, but there is a large segment of the populous that are not capable of those positions. I am so I should be happy, but then I see the masses grow in their discontent. This is not in just one industry as it was in Banking during the 70's. The math is done, cheaper to buy and repair machine or to hire workers....machine wins almost every time. In the industrial age it was the machine, today it is the computer/robot. It is fairly simple if you look at it all without emotion for or against.
Look at the trend: the share of earnings going to capital vs. the share going to labor has been steadily increasing for a long time. Funny: nobody worried too much when technology only replaced menial jobs. But now that it's starting to take on the functions of middle-class information workers and the professional/technical set (radiologists, lawyers, software engineers), the screaming will begin in earnest. When a few rich people own the machines that do all our jobs, what do the rest of us do? Is massive redistribution the answer? This is a looming problem to which we have no good answers.
Theoretically I can see people becoming more intelligent and continually performing the tasks that technology cannot do. However in the real world, anyone with an IQ under 100-120 or so are essentially displaced by technology. Unless you mean paying them half a cent per captcha they solve.
the day is here when an individual may never have a "real" (you define) job. can society accommodate?
Well played, sir!
Minimum wage, the least someone can if they consistently show up late or stoned, is now three times higher than the average used to be. (Inflation adjusted of course .)
So yes, a rising tide lifts all ships. Please go talk to an old person, complain to them about not being able to fly first class to the Bahamas during your two weeks of paid vacation and see what they can tell you about life just sixty years ago.
Usually a company has competition. Any increase in production is used to under sell the competition, who quickly increase their productivity. This is where consumers should get lower prices. Monopolies and price fixing usually preclude that though.
Billions of people are increasing their numbers with sustenance farming and fishing. Africa is now the land of low cost labor. In in the 1930s half the population worked on farms. Even with no job you would't starve, and some relative would let you sleep in their barn. Without welfare almost 20% of the population would be fighting for something to eat. Interesting times ahead.
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The premise of TFA is that tech displaces jobs from the focus of new efficiencies to other jobs not eliminated by or created by the new technology. History has proved this out so far. But history has also shown that technology's advances are coming at a faster and faster pace. It take TIME to transition from one job to another. The types of advances we're now seeing in technology aren't industry specific they are generalized advances in computer intelligence, cost efficiency and universality. The advance in vision and motion that displaces the worker from factory X can displace them tomorrow from factory Y and from orchard Z. The white collar world has seen the disappearance of middle management but will see decisioning frameworks outperforming boardrooms full of meat shells sooner than anyone cares to believe.
Workers at all levels will find themselves running away from a wave that is moving faster than their capacity to adapt. IF the advance of technology slows as a consequence of less people capable of buying new tech that could reach some kind of equilibrium but I wouldn't count on that, would you?
Every rule has more than one consequence.
The ag STUDENTS I've met wouldn't starve, I don't believe.
If you throw random LAWYERS out there some might starve, but that was true of barristers 200 years ago too, that hasn't changed as much as your post implies.
Of course, far fewer people need to know agriculture these days because agriculture is more efficient than before. One farmer can feed 100 people who choose to be poets, graphic designers, database architects or occasionally hemp-bracelet-makers. Today's graphic designers are better educated in absolute terms than 140-years ago farmers because anyone with a degree of any kind is supposed to understand things like chemistry 101, basic economics, and climate - aka how fertilizer works, why crops sell for what they do, etc. In some ways, a graphic designer today is more educated about AGRICULTURE than farmers of 140 years ago were. At least, the degree plan says they are. Tomorrow, I may ask a couple of graphic designers about how economic factors affect crop prices and see if they actually absorbed that education.
I don't agree with the contention in this article. And it is foolish to think that we can do away with technology, with digital technology and its far reaching impact. But I would argue that the lopsided income distribution and flat income of about 60% of Americans is a direct result of technology. While productivity in the economy has been increasing, it is due to the effort of a smaller and smaller segment of the population. The reason why the rest have lower-paying less secure jobs is because compared to the top 10% they are marginalized. One can argue that the original Luddites were just not used to retraining or to having multiple roles in a life time, but the current situation is far worse than that. The rate of innovation is marginalizing some very skilled and valuable people subject to short-term investment thinking. This is not something that can be effectively predicted or planned for. And even the most highly skilled of today could be marginalized by advances in AI, so that if you are a software developer today, you might have vastly diminished opportunities within a decade if all the mundane jobs are taken over by AI programs, and only the most arcane problems are left for people.
Suppose the future is that most of the productive work is done by smaller and smaller minorities of people. Aside from the very real issue of where the eralth in the economy resides, what role will all the vast majority of people, who are just not necessary for the infrastructure and production to happen, not everybody is creative or motivated. What happens them. Past history says that they become cannon fodder of some sort.
This present change in technology represents a fundamental shift, something at least comparable to the change at the beginning of the industrial revolution, possibly even larger. Technology of the sort represented by Watson can replace all the employees of a call center. It isn't a question of minimum wage or jobs being created elsewhere. If there is a question which can be answered by searching through somewhat structure information in reply to a spoken question, then it can almost be answered by a computer at this present moment. If software is modularized and all interfaces are carefully controlled, then it can almost be written by a computer at this present moment. There seem to be only two human functions which definitely cannot be replaced: jobs in which human interaction is what is being sold, and consumerism.
While it is callous, but some people refuse to learn. Americans, for example, have this debilitating allergy to saving money for a rainy day. It makes the situation more tragic than it needs to be.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Previous efficiencies created more jobs. The new efficiencies eliminate them. It's really that simple.
In many fine dining kitchens the usage of the term recently has moved back towards older titles like "Chef De Partie" for line cooks, even if they don't have anybody directly under them in the brigade, and are collectively referred to as 'chefs' even though "The Chef" that is in charge of the brigade of any particular is still called "Chef." I guess if you can't get paid more than $8/hr then at least you can sound cool to people at the bar after work.
Just who would compare a "sales clerk" to someone erudite enough to make literary recommendations? And, just who would suggest that anyone out here would have any ability to regulate the pay of a gourmet chef? Chefs are just like any other performer. They take what they can get. No one sets their pay scale, just like writers and editors. So, tell me, is this a reflection of the type of talent that has been spawned by the 'burgeoning Greek economy' ?!? Is Mystakaphoros a wannabe sales clerk or what? Being a 'luddite' is a life style choice. It had a place during the industrial revolution but has little relevance, today.