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Digital Revolution Will Kill Jobs, Inflame Social Unrest, Says Gartner
dcblogs writes "Gartner says new technologies are decreasing jobs. In the industrial revolution — and revolutions since — there was an invigoration of jobs. For instance, assembly lines for cars led to a vast infrastructure that could support mass production giving rise to everything from car dealers to road building and utility expansion into new suburban areas. But the "digital industrial revolution" is not following the same path. "What we're seeing is a decline in the overall number of people required to do a job," said Daryl Plummer, a Gartner analyst at the research firm's Symposium ITxpo. Plummer points to a company like Kodak, which once employed 130,000, versus Instagram's 13. The analyst believes social unrest movements, similar to Occupy Wall Street, will emerge again by 2014 as the job creation problem deepens." Isn't "decline in the overall number of people required to do a job" precisely what assembly lines effect, even if some job categories as a result require fewer humans? We recently posted a contrary analysis arguing that the Luddites are wrong.
Jobs is already dead...
Yet stock market valuations increase, concentrating wealth in a lucky few.
Why can't companies pay better wages?
Wal-Mart increasing their wages to $12/hr. would increase their average item price by 1.1% --- perhaps then their workers could occasionally afford to shop somewhere else, or eat out at somewhere other than McDonald's.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I agree with the general thrust of the article, but comparing Kodak to Instagram is straight-up retarded. Instagram is not replacing Kodak. It does not do what Kodak used to do with only 13 people. It does almost nothing, and does nothing worthwhile.
The short science fiction one, in which increasing automation leads to an employment crisis so severe most of the population are forced to live in robotically-constructed slums.
I forget the title.
You know the one.
not more to say.
This is a really difficult thing to predict, and either prediction could be true. With the industrial revolution there was a net increase in demand for jobs since the increased efficiency resulted in higher demand in general thus increased infrastructure requirements. Part of what made this possible was, even if you decrease the cost, manufacturing still required time, energy, materials, etc.
Something that makes tech a little different, esp when it comes to software, is the near zero cost of reproduction. If industrial revolution Ford got double the orders for cars it would not only require more assembly lines but part suppliers would need to ramp up as would production of raw materials. If Microsoft's demand for MSOffice doubles, they might need a bit more bandwidth but there is no real spiderweb of increased jobs. They just allow more downloads or print more copies.
Same kind of people said the same exact things when the Industrial Revolution was underway. History and progress marches on.
is what we need when the machines rise, pardon, do our work.
I think the big difference now is that industry that spawn from these improved efficiencies are not local. So Kodak employed 130 000 people and instagram 13, what about the people employed by the hardware manufacturers that make Instagram possible? Companies that make phones, wireless equipment, processors, semiconductors....Imagine if all those jobs/business could be created in the economy that lost 130 000 jobs.
It's meaningless to predict the future based on historical observations.
THINK. WONDER. DREAM.
Captcha: cycled
"Plummer points to a company like Kodak, which once employed 130,000, versus Instagram's 13. "
Instagram relies on the fact that every person now has a telephony device on them that is capable of acting as a camera. There were no such devices in the heyday of Kodak. Some other company manufactured that phone, and it took more than 13 people to do so.
That is not to say that "more digital technology = less jobs" is invalid, though, just that the example in the excerpt is a poor one.
Seriously. Consider what we got the first that we as a species were able to allow some people to stop working for sustenance: civilization. Then, when conditions were right to allow some wealthy men and women to have so much money they didn't need to work and could devote themselves to the question of "how old is the Earth" we got science.
If we decouple work from basic sustenance, imagine what we'll come up with this time!
sorry, forgot: but i think it's like linus said: society is moving to a more relaxed way of living (as far as i remember). this should help is not because of some greedy, super rich people.
The problem is these silly people are trying to cling onto an economic system that is woefully out of date. Yes many things are automated now and require less human intervention and we're advanced enough that there's no way to keep everybody employed full-time doing something useful. So either half the population is unemployed or they waste resources producing trash just for the sake of "having a job."
So stop demanding that everybody work 160 hours a month. Split the work where possible so 2 people can share a task working 80 hours a month each and still get as much income as they do now.
Designing, producing and selling machines that do a job in the physical world take more people to do than a crude simulation of a tiny part of it in the virtual! Fetch your papers here!
Just because you're 7 years from retirement and nobody wants to take you on doesn't mean that you shouldn't spend what's left of your life savings after the 2008 crisis to go to college and start anew as a Silverlight monkey!
No?
I suppose Gartner would have a coronary if he was around when the forklift came into being. I wonder if he hires a personal truck to pickup his latest reading material from the publisher, rather than letting the paper see the inside of a jobs killing train car?
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
The same way we no longer need to hunt and gather in today's society, most of us will no longer need to work in the future in order to keep goods and services being produced. The question is, how easy or difficult can we make this transition? To me , the worst thing that can be done is simply ignoring the problem and erroneously pointing fingers to the Luddite movement as a perpetual example why this would never happen.
So Gartner keeps increasing the number of servers per admin that they say is "normal" and now they realize it is taking fewer people to do the job???
I can not count the number of companies where I have heard "Gartner says we should only have 1 admin for every XXX servers" Normally they are running old equipment with no underlying infrastructure and in a way where every system is a one off requiring all administration to be a manual process. The last company I worked at was touting 1 admin for every 160 servers with 90% outsourced to India.
Personally I think Gartner needs to hire more intelligent people if they are only now realizing this.
I've been experiencing considerable frustration in a job hunt. I have a couple of hurdles to overcome -- notably age discrimination (I'm 58). Talking with other folks about this, many of them quite a bit younger, has made me realize that there is a significant problem in the digitization of the employment application process. Every one I speak with expresses increasing frustration with not being able to speak to a live human to apply for a job. In the most absurd cases an applicant walks into an establishment with resume and portfolio in hand in response to a Now Hiring sign on the door -- only to be sat at a terminal to complete an application in the office then turned away with no other human contact. Lots of people including recent grads, furloughed workers, and older folks like me have talked about organized protests against companies who engage in online-only hiring practices.
I was concerned. Then, I saw this was some Gartner asshat prediction, and realized it would be wrong as usual. Really, who listens to these idiots?
The groaning of the economically illiterate, that is.
I hereby sentence everyone to "Economics in One Lesson", by Henry Hazlitt.
New technology and new production efficiencies certainly displace people who were tied to the old technologies and methods. Most people don't think too highly of the folks behind Standard Oil, but an honest assessment would suggest that they did more to save whales than anyone at Greenpeace -- by making whale oil a less cost effective heating mechanism.
This naturally caused a huge job loss for the whaling industry -- which at the time was of course a great social woe.
Whalers, buggy whip manufacturers, and people whos jobs can be trivially replaced by robots are all going to be displaced when technology improves.
What bad economics (and policy makers) repeatedly do, and what is covered in Hazlitt's book, is they focus on what is seen and ignore what is unseen.
What is easy to see when a buggy whip manufacturer loses their job is that Bob lost a job.
What is harder to see is that nearly everyone else in the society is some fractional percent wealthier. The automobile saved people time, which is why it replaced the horse. People who spend less time unproductively can create additional wealth for the rest of society to benefit from.
I think most people agree that a world where we all have handheld supercomputers that can take photos is a better world than one where the instant camera is the only cost-effective consumer device for seeing a photograph within 1 hour of having shot it.
What this analysis fails to "See" is beyond the 13 jobs at instagram. It's easy to see the loss of jobs at Kodak or polaroid. But add up all of the jobs that are tangentially related to digital photography. Flickr? People working on DSLRs? People working on Photoshop? People who write a 99 cent appstore app that is a filter for your iphone's camera?
Cast a wide net to "see" what bad economists aren't seeing.
The thing about these luddite arguments that really shows they don't hold water is that if the old way was really better, we'd go back.
We, in aggregate, like the new way better -- which is why we aren't giving up our smartphones and rushing out to buy film cameras.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Make less people. It's just what the Republicans have been saying, make do with less!
I also have a few predictions of stuff that will happen in 2014:
- Further improvements in production efficiency and robotics will increase unemployment to sky-high levels.
- The unemployed masses will be sitting on their asses with nothing to do, so they will start inventing new technologies, such as the Flying Car.
- Unemployed masses will be put to work to build factories that produce the Flying Car, and to manufacture the Flying Car.
- Robots will replace production line workers at the Flying Car factory.
- Mass unemployment will follow. The only ones who can afford a Flying Car are the assembly robots from the flying Car Factory.
- Humanity is screwed and robots are buzzing around in Flying Cars.
Anticipating this, I, for one, welcome our Robotic Flying Car Overlords.
Gartner, Forrester, etc. are the bane of my existence in IT, because they promote magical thinking among executives, but this time they're right about something.
No one is prepared to deal with the dirty little secret of the information age -- that there are going to be huge swaths of the population who will be out of work, with no prospects for future employment. The last time around, it was low-skilled factory workers. Now it's the middle class's turn! And when half the country has no money and no work, they're going to get angry.
I don't think the current generation of office workers is really thinking about how much less of them will be needed once companies get around to squeezing every single nickel out of every single business process. It's already happening on a huge scale, even in the IT sector. Anything rules-based is basically fair game for automation. Think back a couple of decades -- how many millions of bookkeepers, accountants, secretaries, low-level report-consolidation managers, etc. did large companies employ and pay a decent middle class salary to? Each one of those went out and bought those large companies' products, bought houses, cars and vacations. Now that strong base of consumers is disappearing, or they need to finance their purchases through debt because their wages don't keep up. Large numbers of corporate jobs can still be summed up as "I look at reports from this location, perform a few calculations and summarize the resulting numbers for my management by emailing them a spreadsheet." No one can tell me that the accountants haven't noticed this...
The vast majority of people in the middle class, in my opinion, are averse to social welfare policies simply because they don't think anything bad is ever going to happen to them. Worse, they think that if they support the richest people and just try really hard, they'll eventually be rich themselves. This thinking is going to backfire hard on them when their nice safe job is automated or no longer needed. For example, the most vocal opinions of the new healthcare law in the US are typically middle class families who get their insurance coverage through work and have never had to worry about not having it. Try explaining to them that there are a significant number of working individuals who can't afford insurance and you get, "But...but...socialism!!" All I can say is the next few years will be very interesting. If you believe the Star Trek TNG writers, it's going to take a massive upheaval to get to a post-scarcity utopia.
I remember a long time ago when I was young that some people were predicting a future where due to technology advances you only had to work a small number of hours to meet your basic needs. People were worried about what we would do with all that leisure time.
Of course, this was naive and while it is true that technology advances have made it possible to produce much more with less labor, all of the productivity gains have been captured by the corporations and the 1%.
We now have a situation where there is a surplus of capital controlled by the rich 1% and corporations and also a surplus of workers due to gains in productivity. Unfortunately, this leads to low wages and not enough jobs. Poverty and social unrest are the result.
One would think that different approach to society would correct these imbalances by first raising the pay for work which would allow people to work fewer hours and create more jobs. Also, the idle capital of the rich and corporations could be harnessed (taxed) to improve infrastructure and social services.
We could have a utopia if the capitalists weren't so firmly in control of our government. Instead we have a dystopia with poverty, disease and social unrest... perhaps that could lead to a better government but it will be messy and the outcome is far from certain.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Kodak kept far more than 130,000 in work. There were plenty of side businesses that fed off of kodak: photo labs, professional photographers (yes, they still exist, but now that people can take 300 pictures without spending a huge amount of time and money, they're less likely to hire a pro).
For once that will be very easy to check. We are not talking about prediction but daily reality: people are losing their job now, so it won't take long to see who is right and who is wrong.
That said both the examples in the article "Luddites are wrong" and the "industrial revolution" were successful technological revolution. However, there is a huge difference. In "Luddite are wrong", there is a smooth transition from old job to new job. Not such much with the industrial one. Although it will prove to be a long term good for humanity, it has been a (long) period of intense misery for the majority of the population.
Considering that is a scenario people look up too, I don't want to imagine the pain society will be in if the luddite are not wrong.
I'm sorry, I don't understand English unless it is in the form of magical squares or whatever other pseudo "research" products that gartner puts out.
That great "sucking sound" after NAFTA was passed was tens of thousands of jobs being sucked away heading to cheap over-seas labor. It continues even now, anytime new technologies create an environment for more jobs for the homeland corporate greed quickly sucks the jobs away to cheapest labor.
Pancreatic cancer, however...
So, the guy didn't learn from the Industrial Revolution (and revolutions since) that all the fear of 'no more jobs for anyone' ended up being unfounded?
New technologies don't decrease the number of available jobs; wealth sequestration among the super-rich does. With the Middle Class having less and less money to spend, the demand for products -- and the jobs required to create them -- goes down. We've been seeing this over the past thirty years, which just happens to coincide with the rise of the computing industry.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Gartner fails to include any sort of actionable response to this phenomena, or even any argument that anything can be done about it. Article seems half-baked.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
So, skilled jobs require fewer people, manufacturing and unskilled jobs get off-shored.
The end result is a big gaping hole in employment, and unless new industries come along, there's nothing else for these people to do.
We're already seeing this, and if there is no new employment sectors, all that's left in your economy is part time jobs and other shit jobs. Unemployment numbers go down more because people give up looking than because jobs are getting created to offset those who get 'right sized'.
Is this the direction you want your country to go in? Because this is where we're heading -- the shareholders are happy (for a while), but you no longer have anybody to buy your product (and then your sales slump and the shareholders are unhappy).
Welcome to the future, where short-term shareholder value will destroy your economy in the long run.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This is literally the definition of a Luddite. The original Luddites were skilled weavers who objected to the use of a new type of loom which allowed a few unskilled people to do the job of a larger number of skilled weavers. Sure, it put those people out of work, but it was still better for the economy as a whole.
Let me make something clear: jobs are a *result* of the economy, not a cause. Anything that ultimately benefits the economy will result in new jobs, just not always in any obvious direct path. Often, those new jobs are in the entertainment sector. Anything that requires less human labor to produce a greater result will ultimately benefit the economy, and thus result in new jobs. It's unfortunate for the buggy whip manufacturers, but good for everyone else.
What exactly has this guy ever gotten right?
Why does anyone report what he writes?
Forget about making busywork for people. Make robots. Let humans make art, learn, explore, teach, heal... those things humans are good at. Let robots do repetitive tasks. Focus on making people happy and healthy. Leave boredom to the robots. The creation of robots is undergoing a serious democratization, and these utopian ideals have a chance -- if only billionaires profit from the robot uprising, the world will be a terrible place. If we all profit, we can do what we love.
Give some money to every citizen (basic income) -- just enough to eat and live *outside* downtown areas. If you want to afford a gadget like an iPod, then you go flip some burgers for a while. If you want to live downtown or travel, then you work hard at school and learn a useful skill like digital technologies. Anyone protesting their living conditions will gather no sympathy.
Just as before, fewer people were required to do the work. Whether making autos, planes, trains, what ever and everything. There is no difference there. The difference that is real is that there today we lack innovation and the desire to create new items, new jobs. People are fixed in their mind sets that they are destined to go to college, get a degree in one field, do that job and that job only, and retire/die after that. The enterprising nature of Capitalism is dwindling, being replaced by the laziness and worthless attitude of Socialism. Why should any one work hard and take a chance at life when they might fail, when they can sit on their arses playing video games and drawing a government check? Generation X is really Generation zero.
Gartner says new technologies are decreasing jobs.
If this were actually true we would have seen a steady increase in the number of unemployed people over time during the past 20 years. Instead we had near record low unemployment until around 2008 when we had a banking (not technology) related financial crisis. Since then unemployment has been slowly but steadily falling back towards what passes for steady state norms. While it is true that people are not employed at the same companies they used to be, technology takes away some jobs and adds others. It also makes people more effective at the jobs they do.
But the "digital industrial revolution" is not following the same path. "What we're seeing is a decline in the overall number of people required to do a job,"
That's the entire point. It means you can get more done with the same number of people. It's called increasing productivity. Rather than having a room full of accountants entering journal entries by hand on a paper ledger we have one accountant keeping the books in some software and everyone else does something more productive. Instead of using switchboard operators we use computers to route calls. There is ZERO evidence that digital technology is eliminating jobs without replacing them with others. The number of jobs hasn't fallen due to technology but the skillsets required to fill them has changed.
Plummer points to a company like Kodak, which once employed 130,000, versus Instagram's 13.
I'm not sure they could come up with a more ridiculous example. Instagram is an add on feature to already existing social networks for sharing pictures. Kodak actually made critical parts of picture taking equipment. If you want to compare Kodak to something modern, compare them with CCD sensor manufacturers and camera makers which I assure you employ far more than 13 people.
On the Internet, people often moan about how Western countries "don't make anything any more." The idea being that our service economy is built on a house of cards and the only true economic generator is the making and selling of stuff.
My view is that manufacturing is a bad choice of focus for our economies. The direction of travel is clear: it is very clearly a race to an ever descending race to the bottom which will end with completely automated factories. This race started with the industrial revolution and it will accelerate during our life times. The jobs are slowly but surely being eliminated and it might even have happened sooner if China hadn't been able to provide so much cheap labour. Those jobs are simply not safe in the long term.
But even the Chinese are not safe. Eventually, they'll all be replaced by machines and when they are, it won't matter where those machines are located. The machines will re-locate closer to the consumers to shorten supply lines.
The message is stark: any job that is repetitive risks being replaced by a robot.
Perhaps the most interesting of these is automated driving. It promises to completely transform our world. It will transform logistics in much the same way as containerisation did to shipping. It will transform everything but just think of the number of jobs that will be eliminated!
Then there are threats like 3D printers which threaten to completely remake the world as we know it.
The only sensible way to weather the next 100 years is through developing products and service that can not be automated. These are things like law, software development, media etc. etc.
Producing stuff is quickly becoming unprofitable. Service economies are our only hope.
Machines can take over production and distribution so the only thing left for humans to do is, better ourselves. The rise of free online educational material is a sign that this is in fact happening.
I love how geeks get defensive when their own jobs are threatened but refer to the rest of the population as Luddites for worrying about theirs.
Even China will eventually replace a half billion workers with robots.
When the global population is 10 billion, 7 billion of those people will have no job and either have to rely on handouts or they still starve (or start to eat each other).
There will not be enough natural resources, and even if there were, all those resources would be retained by the upper echelons, essentially the top 5%.
I predict a global version of the French Revolution, and there will be a lot of head chopping after the authorities have run out of bullets to control the mobs.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Who also predicted (in 2011) that Windows Phones would capture 20% of the mobile market in 2015??? Yep. In fact, they are the same outfit that predicted (in 2010) that Symbian would have 30% in 2014. So, I make it a rule not to get worked up about their predictions...
... if you never studied history.
I'm pretty sure we heard the same tripe at every phase of every innovation since the dawn of technology.
Fortunately the revolution will not be televised.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
This didn't happen in the past with the industrial revolution - that means it can't possibly happen in future beacuse... well it does... ok
Well at least I have a job so I've got mine - who gives a fuck about you!
The key difference between this and previous technological revolutions is that many people will simply be replaced; whereas in previous revolutions the people's efforts were amplified. A great example would be farm technologies. A zillion years ago in the dawn of agriculture people used a stick to shove the earth around, which became an ox pulled plow, then a horse, then crappy tractors, and now huge combines. But at each point there was a person doing the plowing. But the final move will be a robot doing the plowing. In theory there will be someone to hit the plow with a hammer when it jambs but this will be a tiny number of people nationwide.
The other critical factor is that the guy who runs the combine isn't that much more skilled than the guy with the stick (In that it wasn't years of education) which will be typical of the job killed by various forms of automation. This means that it is not so much that fewer people can do more it is that a greater percentage of the population will be unable to work productively in that a robot will be the better option. If you talk to many people who earned a good living over the last 60 years with little education you will find that they worked in very few industries, mining, farming, fishing, and manufacturing. All these are becoming more and more automated. Personally I am surprised that mining isn't completely automated underground in that by eliminating the human factor a mine should become really cheap if you don't have to worry about keeping humans alive. Plus many mines are in bizarrely remote areas meaning that you not only have to keep the miners alive underground but you then have to build whole communities above ground including expensive things such as hospitals.
One thing that I worry about is not just this clear problem of the low skilled becoming generationally unemployed but that some cultures and governments are not biased toward solving this problem. Personally I think the solution will be a consumer focused socialism. My main worry is that some countries will punish the poor, reward the few extremely productive producers and end up in modern feudal system with freakish inequality becoming the norm.
Other countries I believe are well culturally disposed at aggressively making sure that the maximum number of humans benefit from the near utopian bounty that could be provided by this revolution.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
So you are assuming the only costs Walmart has are from store labour? You know there are other aspects of the business don't you? Like rent, utilities, management, and that is just at store level. Then there is how many thousands they have to pay at head office in Arkansas. Then there are things like warehouses and distribution costs, and the cost of the goods they buy from CHINA. And I am sure there is a lot of other stuff that I am missing. Use your freakin' head, labour doesn't come out of profit, profit comes after ALL those other things, including labour, are taken into account against income earned.
Look, I have nothing against the argument that if you have no skills and never tried to get any (including dropping out of school), you shouldn't complain too much about low wages. On the other hand, if you never were given or never had the opportunity because of circumstances, well then I have some sympathy... not everyone's life is easy. But please don't shoot shit like that out your ass and ask us to believe it reflects reality.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The digital revolution has created jobs, including mine. Most places I've worked 20% of the workforce had jobs directly due to digital revolution. crank up the digital revolution to 11, we need more jobs. information is just like any other resource, creating it can create wealth, processing it can add value to that wealth, and it can be traded and sold at a profit.
Reducing the amount of work it takes to keep the human race alive, fed, and housed should be unambiguously good. The reason it's not is because we've structured our society around the idea that all adults must be employed in full-time jobs (or be married to someone who is) to qualify for a decent life. We have this idea, particularly in America, that (employment) work is a virtue in and of itself. Unemployed people are shamed and villainized.
If we all lived on isolated family farms, it would be obvious that reducing the total workload is better for everyone -- less work = more free time. But instead, we live in a complex, interconnected industrial society. It's going to take a lot of large cultural changes before we can handle the idea that some people might not work at all, or only work a few hours a week. For perspective, we still don't have a consensus on whether something as difficult and time-consuming as being a stay-at-home mom counts as a job.
Visit the
When the Wal-Mart opened near my home, many of my friends who were working elsewhere jumped over to Wal-Mart. Obviously they thought Wal-Mart a better place to work.
...but it also spurs further consumerism which creates jobs that should (in theory) replace those that were lost.
However, there are still two losers when this happens:
1. unskilled or moderately-skilled workers
The new jobs created require more education and specialized skills than the ones that were eliminated. This is resulting in a wealth gap, which will further exacerbate things by reducing the size of the consumer class that creates those jobs in the first place.
2. the environment
Oftentimes, efficiency gains come at the cost of increased energy requirements. Consumerism brought on by technological advances is almost always centered on goods rather than services, which increases overall demand for natural resources. Say what you will about the out-of-control health care spending in the U.S., but it is an exception to this trend in that it is service-centered consumerism.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
"We recently posted a contrary analysis arguing that the Luddites are wrong."
No, you said "The Luddites Are Almost Always Wrong", and then in the blurb you said, "Mike Masnick of Techdirt argues that we can all put down our wooden shoes and take a chill pill: technology 'rarely destroys jobs.'"
"This has never happened in the past, therefore it won't happen in the future" is a poor argument to begin with. (After all, i've never died in the past, therefore i shall live forever!) However saying "this rarely happened in the past, therefore we don't need to worry about it in the future" is an even worse argument.
Just to throw in a random car analogy, there are certainly intersections on smaller roads where you could say "crossing the road without looking both ways first is almost always safe." The fact that 99 out of 100 times it's perfectly safe won't help you much the 100th time you cross the street without looking and get creamed by an oncoming car.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Why does anybody on slashdot care what Gartner says?
They are the National Enquirer of IT, mainly trying to sell useless advice to people who cannot think for themselves.
Newflash: Motor vehicles put buggy whip manufacturers out of business. And they also created a huge number of jobs in drilling for oil, refining gasoline, building roads and they even require mechanics.
Maybe we won't need store clerks any more but we will need somebody doing something new and unanticipated at this time. Gartner Group can never sell that to its customers (which is completely different from saying they don't understand the future). It's easier to sell fear than hope mostly because fearful people will buy anything that looks like a solution whereas hopeful people aren't in the market for solutions. (Be very clear about what sorts of folks Obama was selling his Hope message to in 2008).
IBM still makes mainframes. No matter how many tablets and smartphones are sold, Dell or Lenovo or somebody will still be able to make money selling laptops. Oh, and I can still buy both buggies and buggy whips at my local equestrian store, both of them made lovingly by hand.
So it's anyone's guess as to whether increasing efficiency will lead to lower jobs or else humanity as a whole will have some ambition to leverage the productive capacity of society enabled by increasing efficiency.
For the sake of argument, let's say our productivity at avg 40 hrs/wk has or will soon sate humanity's ambition and we start having more people than work to do. In a rational world, this should lead to good things. If he have twice as much productive capacity as we have use for at that rate, the average work week should shrink to 20 hrs/wk and relative buying power should remain constant. I think if you posited a world where everyone was employeed and retained the same buying power as they have today except half the work hours, no one would find that a bad deal.
There needs to be less fixation on finding *some* way to make everyone do about 40 hrs/wk of work and more thought around how to enable such a transition. Notably, a lot of magical things happen for a 'full time' employee from a legal perspective, and really the difference between full and part time should be equalized one way or another. One key element is that it should be forbidden for employers to provide insurance coverage. Ideally a socialized system where healthcare is between an individual and the government would be in place. I could also see regulating things such that the same benefits conferred to corporations are available to individuals so that private industry is workable without unfair tethering to a current employer.
That comparison isn't even tenuous. Instagram hasn't taken over for Kodak with 13 people. Kodak created products. Instagram simply leverages other companies products to provide a service. Instagram is more like one of those photo-mats that existed in parking lots in the 70's. The photo-mat employed a handful of minimum wage people to work with kodak's products. Those photo-mats also all went belly up long before even digital cameras started to come around.
Compared to the photo-mat, Instagram employs a handful of significantly better paid people to work with apple and googles products. The apples and the googles are a better comparison to Kodak. Last time i checked, apple and google employed a fair number of people.
AFAIK, in Kodak's heyday, there were 13 unemployed instagram people waiting for the digital revolution.
The analyst believes social unrest movements, similar to Occupy Wall Street, will emerge again by 2014 as the job creation problem deepens
The "Occupy" movement was about the fact that the country has been increasingly run for the benefit of the ultra-rich for the last few decades, and has reached the point of ridiculosity.
The primary problem with jobs in the USA is that manufacturing businesses have converted themselves into middle-men who vend stuff that is made overseas.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Guess the digital revolution have been here for a while already then.
The basic problem I see is that the fundamentals of business AND of societal expectations upon business are changing, and we must adapt to that change.
Thing #1 - Yes, we are now on the verge of comoditizing the tools for the production of goods and for the automation of that process as well. Think of 3-D printing, of web frameworks, of robotics, of the commoditization that open source brings us -- these are making and will make a small team capable of doing great things with little investment and quickly.
Thing #2 - Government intrusion into the healthcare system is pushing hard on companies to be ultralean and is also forcing the majority of the workforce that is not part of the core into a 29 hour work week -- both of these are caused by ultra-lean companies need to avoid having to "deal with" the government mandated healthcare system.
So... this will be the new structure... and we have to be ready for it. The requirements for working in an ultra-lean company in the US are going to be much different than working in a traditional company... It is going to require higher education, more technical higher education, and multi-disciplinary people. It is also going to require programmming skills for every single member of the core (non-temp) team.
But, if you think about it a moment... instead of dwelling on the chance of the unrest of an "unprepared" society -- if society prepares itself and embraces the change... this is such an exciting a time in history. Never in the history of the world has there been more opportunity to be successful and for so few to touch so many lives. People are empowered as never before to produce an individual contribution to society. There is more to the world than brick and morter, and more freedom accessible than ever before for those willing to sieze on the opportunities at hand.
Let's teach our generation to cast off the old unproductive model and embrace the new and more fullfilling model of the future.
Why can't companies pay better wages?
You need to differentiate between those who cannot pay more and those who will not pay more due to the greed of the owners. Many companies such as mine are in price sensitive industries and paying significantly higher wages results in the company's products becoming uncompetitive. My company manufactures wire harness products and our competition is often in places like China or Mexico with much lower wages or are much larger companies who are able to automate to save money. We simply cannot pay more than we do and remain in business.
Wal-Mart increasing their wages to $12/hr. would increase their average item price by 1.1%
Let's presume for a moment that your numbers are accurate. What you are forgetting is the the loss of sales from that 1.1% increase in item price. Walmart has built their entire business on being the low price leader but their lead is not very big. Walmart's net profit margin is about 3.5% so there isn't a huge amount of room to increase costs. They only keep their price leadership by a ruthless focus on keeping costs low. An increase in prices of 1.1% would result in a significant loss of sales. How big? A little hard to say without some pretty serious analysis but it could *easily* be more than 1.1%.
I don't actually have a disagreement that Walmart should pay their employees better if they are able to do so but it is not nearly as simple as you make it sound. There are more stakeholders in the company than just the employees and there are serious consequences to across the board pay increases.
The only sensible way to weather the next 100 years is through developing products and service that can not be automated. These are things like law, software development, media etc. etc.
...or...like...share the wealth and redistribute the goods? I'm not kidding, it's the only option to maintain some sort of equality between the haves and have-nots in a world where everything is automated. I don't believe you can sate the jobhunger of 7 billion people with innovation-gigs.
We're not talking about an evolutionary change in industrial production. Yes, buggy whip makers were going to go out of business. Fine, so those guys have to find different jobs. I hear the car factory's hiring. A little retraining, maybe a year of school / vo-tech, and he (no women in the workplace) would be back in a middle class job.
That's not the case here. The destruction part of your argument remains valid. Do we need lawyers to draft, say, formative corporate documents? Never did, frankly, but now that you can do it for $50 online, that's pulling $200 out of a lawyer's pocket. Better? More efficient? Sure. No chance we'll ever go back.
Now, take the case of a lawyer. If the online thing happens enough times, they're out of work. Now what? Law schools have produced more lawyers than available positions for years, so there's somebody younger and cheaper right behind them, even ignoring globalization. Retrain? For what? Most professional degrees and certifications are in the same boat. Unless they were just short of getting their Master's in (something where hiring is actually occurring), they're not much better off than a high school graduate.
If the lawyer is 50, they could easily have 15 working years left, and 15 more in semi- or full retirement. Never mind replacement income. It is entirely possible that they will never see a paycheck again. Economic multipliers, opportunity cost, and all that.
That's what we're up against.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
I posted about this before in another thread, but the scenario at some future time is something like this;
Robots, Automation, brute optimization from data analysis, etc will result in less jobs available for unskilled laborers and many skilled blue collar workers. At some unknown time, it's possible that even skilled white collar workers could be pushed out.
The interesting thing - and we may already be seeing it - is this; Unemployment goes up, but there's no scarcity of product or labor in response.
At this point, there's a subtle disassociation between work done and money. In fact, money as a whole will become less useful, especially as some segment of the population that steadily grows larger over time has no way to generate any. Long term, this could be a very good thing - think Star Trek and a moneyless society where people more or less live a vacation lifestyle.
Short term however, we're going to have a period of serious strife, with haves and have-nots extremely separated, where money is still needed to buy food, make rent, and obtain material goods. How are we going to reach that tipping point into utopia when we have to first get through 20%, 40% or more unemployment - but we still rely on money? I don't even know if it's possible to get through that phase without some sort of civil war or revolution first that sets up all back to zero.
Even if we do get through it, what happens when that discrepancy still exists elsewhere in the world? Some nation is going to get there first, even if it's only by hours, but the whole world won't suddenly switch on at once. If we achieve post-scarcity by forcing third world nations to bear the burden, how long will that really last?
Personally, I think that we'll come up with some other metric to judge individuals long before money and majority unemployment are real issues. We just can't stand to not place metrics of value on individuals. I also think that none of this will happen in my lifetime, so really, this is just a thought experiment.
In 300 years though, who's to say?
company want people who can hit the ground running but they want for areas that you need to learn on the job or maybe at the tech / trade school. But HR some times passes over the trades / learn on the job people.
I see a good analogy with of the "Broken Window" fallacy:
Breaking a window might, on the surface, appear to benefit the overall economy -- because of the increased spending that it generates. But, of course, there are more productive ways to spend that money, and those who fall for the fallacy forget to take that into account.
Refusing to adopt technological advances might, on the surface, appear to benefit the overall economy -- because it may help prevent unemployment in the short term. But, of course, there are more productive ways for those employees to contribute their labor, and those who fall for the fallacy forget to take that into account.
Meh. Just read the article....it sounds like the whole Gartner conference boiled down to: "The future is scary. All these new technologies are going to cause massive upheaval. Unless you know how to best implement them, your company is toast. Give us money and we will make the scary future go away".
Here are some other incredible "nuggets of wisdom" Gartner provided at the same conference:
- By 2018, 3D printing will result in the loss of at least $100 billion a year in intellectual property globally. This could be particularly hard on a small business. "It's now easy to steal an entire business.
Wow the tiny plastic widget market must be a lot bigger than I thought. Are they using the same statisticians as the MPAA / RIAA?
- By 2017, more than half of consumer goods manufacturers will get 75% of their consumer innovation and R&D capabilities from crowd-sourcing.
Yep, we're all gonna be buying stuff on Kickstarter.
- By 2020, enterprises and government will fail to protect 75% of sensitive data.
And where did they get the 75% number? How does one quantify "amount of sensitive data?" Is my fingerprint 1% of my sensitive data? 10%? Seriously, they're pulling numbers out of their asses here....
- By 2020, smart machines will disrupt knowledge workers in both positive and negative ways. Imagine training your replacement, a machine, to take over your job.
Companies have a hard time training actual people to take over the jobs of knowledge workers. I call complete BS on this one.
- By 2017, 10% of computers will be learning.
Yeah, I think I saw that in a Sci-Fi movie once. Didn't end well.
- By 2020, consumer data collected from wearable devices will drive 5% of sales from the global 1000 firms.
oooo, we're all going to be cyborgs too! Sounds keen!
Hopefully the "Digital Revolution" kills off companies like Gartner. Seriously, how hard would it be? Track the latest & greatest technologies getting a lot of buzz on the tech sites, make some random predictions about them, publish some insanely flawed "top quadrant" studies, and over-charge gullible companies for your wisdom.
Look the comment in your own site damnit. Frankly, the overall number of job for *one* specific branch lowered due to assembly line, but other discovery/new method at the same time allowed ton expand in new area, allowing the overall number of job increase. If tehre had been ONLY the assembly line enhancement, then the overall number of job in no training would have decreased making a lot of people precarious. But it did not happen then due to other domain popping up. NOW on the other hand NOTHING NEW is openning up. Thus the prediction of unrest.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
conversely, grammar NAZI is still a volunteer-only position, only pursued by those in it for the glory and fiiiiiinnne bitches
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The ACA seems to be a start to that but in some areas it needs to more but the GOP does not want that.
"If this were actually true we would have seen a steady increase in the number of unemployed people over time during the past 20 years. Instead we had near record low unemployment until around 2008 when we had a banking (not technology) related financial crisis. Since then unemployment has been slowly but steadily falling back towards what passes for steady state norms."
Only if you are considering sub par not paying job which are giving you less than the equivalent social help do if you are unemployed. The truth is that the number of "slave wage" job increased in the same time, part time , and so forth.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Make full time 30-32 hours with OT caps and some kind of high base level to be salary with no OT pay say 100K + COL.
Why should some people be worked 60-80+ hours a week when others are not working at all?
Yes we are! What's more fun than arguing about technology after all.
01/01/01
also need some kind of sick time system so you don't have sick people comeing to work or even working food service jobs as they get 0 sick days.
The older education system is to long and at some schools it's to much theory with skill gaps. The on line idea is nice but we need to move to some kind of badges system.
remember, this is Gartner we're talking about, the guys who predicted the growth of desktop computers when they didn't and who failed to understand that markets will shift in ways not yet realized.
That said, so long as the capital/labor split deviates from the historical mean of 50/50 to its current Rich/Poor divide of 90/10, you will always have social unrest, including large-scale looting of mansions.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
With the coming turmoil, "Shoes for the dead!" seems more likely.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I could. Assuming that the box of cereal was only one of many things that would go up... I know many people who couldn't (hell, I know some who are hard-pressed for that cereal box now).
Ah Whew!
I was worried that the digital revolution would kill jobs and inflame social unrest
one day!
But now Gartner has said it, I know it'll never be true.
Now I can rest easy.
don't be a spelling loser
"Eventually, they'll all be replaced by machines and when they are, it won't matter where those machines are located."
Actually, it will. Location affects not only the primary industry but also a lot of offshoot industries from the middle-men who deal with language/trade barriers, to shipping, to salespersons.
A more local factory means less need for intermediaries. Heck, if we ever end up with home fabricators, then we can say goodbye to a lot of that chain, though again it would be replaced by things such as supply of raw materials, etc.
Yeah, because social media badges are so meaningful and indicative of 'success' in anything.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Oh yeah... nevermind the globe-spanning, decades old, usa-led neoliberalist poison which is fucking the whole world up.
'At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
yes - "innovation" will destroy jobs (file that observation under creative destruction) but that will also result in new (as yet unknown) opportunities...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
Whether or not this current revolution creates enough new jobs of new types to offset the loss of old jobs of the old types, the net trend and the entire point of developing technology is labor saving: we are, as a culture (the global human culture, not America specifically), actively trying to eliminate the need for people to do work. Either because we don't want to work ourselves, or we don't want to have to pay someone else to work; there is a constant universal and undying pressure to find ways to have people doing less work.
On the whole, this is a good thing. A world where nobody has to work would be great! The problem is that we have, and for most of human history always have had, a division in our society, between those who have more stuff than they need to get by, and those who don't have enough to get by, which allows the former group to not work, at the expense of making the latter group work more, in exchange for the former group providing the latter group with the material goods they need to get by.
It is only in the presence of that division between non-working owners and non-owning workers that the elimination of work is a problem, because it makes the working class entirely unnecessary to the owning class who hold all the power. If instead everyone was an owner and a worker, then the elimination of work would leave us with an eventual society where everyone is an owner and not a worker. Well, we will get that eventually one way or another, but the question is whether we get there by eliminating the workers and leaving only the owners (bad), or if we just eliminate working for everyone and leave everyone just owning (good).
So the way around the inevitable (if not looming) elimination of an entire class of people is to eliminate that class division. To make everyone a member of the owning class. Then we can all be happy to eliminate all the jobs we can. This of course is not a new idea, but I think the way it's been approached in the past has been entirely wrong. To bring people into the owning class does not require forcibly taking things from the existing owners and giving them to the workers for free. It should be happening naturally and voluntarily. Look at the arrangement between owners and workers again: the owners trade their capital for the labor of the workers. So labor flows from the workers to the owners, and capital flows from the owners to the workers. So obviously the workers gradually accrue capital and the owners gradually lose capital until the workers and owners are equally owners, and now the owners have to start working themselves since they've no capital trade advantage left. Right?
That clearly doesn't happen, which means that there must be some kind of mechanism which is operating counter to the flow of capital from the owners to the workers, keeping the workers from accruing capital and the owners from losing it. I propose that the underlying mechanism here is rent, including rent on money otherwise known as interest. In a rental arrangement, someone with capital lets someone else temporarily use that capital in exchange for a permanent payment, and then gets their capital back at the end. So the person with enough capital that they can lend it out gains more capital (the money paid to them) at the expense of someone who doesn't have enough capital and needs to borrow it (the thing they rented). The people who need to borrow capital are of course precisely the people who need to trade their labor for the money they need to pay that rent, and the people with enough capital to lend it out are of course precisely the people who have enough that they don't need to labor at all. So rent and interest creates exactly the kind of backward flow from those without enough (the workers) to those with more than enough (the owners) that counteracts what would otherwise be the natural flow of capital in the other direction.
All we need to do is eliminate rent (including interest) and the class divisions will naturally disappear. And when the class divisions disappear, the elimination of work ceases to be a problem and becomes a blessing instead.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
then why are so many people (some say record numbers of people) on unemployment, disability, and other forms of welfare?
company want people who can hit the ground running but they want for areas that you need to learn on the job or maybe at the tech / trade school. But HR some times passes over the trades / learn on the job people.
Either this happened to AC 10 years ago, or he's full of shit.
These days, they would have hired an H1B worker, rather than risk "wasting" money on training.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Look, this is how economy works.
People make things.
People sell things.
People buy things.
If you take people out of making things and they loose their jobs they can't afford to buy things.
If you can't sell things, then there is no point to make more things, then a company goes out of business.
You can't have an economy where nobody works and no company can stay in business because nobody can afford to buy what they sell, regardless of how automated the whole process is.
So everybody simmer the fuck down and welcome your robotic overlords already.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Inevitable change is the order of the century. The question may be whether we revert socially because a substantial portion of the US population doesn't care or want to learn more technical subjects that would allow them to stay well employed.
If we develop the 'taker' society, we in line for violent revolution when the goodies run out.
is that when you're looking for precedent there are always those two little words: "it depends". You can't count on history to repeat itself.
I don't think there's a fundamental economic principle that says, "productivity increases actually increases employment." Yes, it *tends* to do so. If the next dollar of labor produces fifty cents of income, a firm won't lay out that next dollar; but if it produces *two* dollars of income it will.
However that scenario assumes that demand for the product is "elastic"; that if you drop the price a little you'll sell more, and make more profit. Suppose demand for a product is *inelastic*, that dropping the price won't get you much more in units sold. If the market won't buy more widgets at a lower price, then it makes sense for a firm to lay off workers as productivity goes up.
In the past the fear that greater productivity would result in job loss tended not to come true. At the outset of the industrial revolution nearly everybody would be considered materially poor by modern standards. Even in my granfather's generation it was common to by new clothing just once a year, and nearly everybody mended their own clothing. When computers were introduced to do things like payroll, yes the people who manually processed paychecks lost their jobs, but businesses responded by demanding far more complex and timely financial information products.
Now we live in a different world now. Almost nobody darns socks or turns collars; they throw worn or even stained garments away. Clothes shopping has become a pastime, not an annual ritual; many people shop every week. Financial products turn on split-millisecond timing, and are so complex you need an advanced degree in math to understand them. It makes me wonder whether we might be approaching a kind of productivity/demand singularity.
The biggest problem with predicting the future isn't *what*, it's *when*. People were attempting computer tablets decades before the iPad, but until the processor, battery, software and user interface technology were all available it was an exercise in futility. Much of Steve Jobs' genius was a matter of timing, of sensing when there was an opportunity to be created. I think there may be a productivity singularity in our future, a point where our established wisdom based on past experience fails. But I can't say when that will occur. I'm certain the market has surprises in store for us, but in the short term at least they'll probably tend to confirm established wisdom.
disclaimer: I am not an economist. But I *do* write science fiction.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Many corporations over-RIFed and continue to do so. What they discovered is that many of 'those who chose to remain with the company' (as my former employer put it after a 27% RIF) work more hours for the same salary. Problem solved! Bonuses for all execs!
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
If you are unemployed or underemployed, try to keep busy growing your own food, fixing your house, fixing your car, or anything else which reduces your need for cash. These endeavors are not taxed, so they can really add to your bottom line.
Have gnu, will travel.
McDonald's is developing robot technology for making burgers, etc. Once you automate out of existence the lowest form of work, what are those people going to do? It is the natural order that wealth will concentrate in the hands of the very, very few. All through history there has been a vastly wealthy aristocracy and a vastly greater poor and peasant class. The only time there has been a sizable middle class is the last half of the 20th century, and that is mostly in the USA.
The problem with wealth being concentrated in the hands of the few is that their wealth doesn't circulate. It is the middle and lower classes who spend most of their wealth on goods and services. The wealthy spend a very small portion of their resources on goods and services, so their money stays tied up and out of the larger economy.
The economy is consumer driven and if the consumers do not have the money to spend, then there's little economy in which to employ workers, create goods, services and greater wealth.
If you automate away all of the jobs, who is going to buy your goods?
"Jobs isn't here, man!"
-
Last I checked, most people do *not* have enough money set aside for retirement, and most companies/governments are no longer offering "guaranteed benefits" plans.
People get funny when Faith is involved. Many people always have had faith in the status quo and it'll blind reason, generate rationalizations, high emotions, etc.
Calling people who know technology who do not fear technology and are experts in technology Luddites is ridiculous enough that one should immediately investigate those who are calling names. Are they the ones who are clinging to the past; perhaps, even clever enough to accuse the opposition of what they are doing?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
What is harder to see is that nearly everyone else in the society is some fractional percent wealthier. The automobile saved people time, which is why it replaced the horse. People who spend less time unproductively can create additional wealth for the rest of society to benefit from.
That assumes that the people that are out of a job can actually find something useful to do somewhere else. Not everyone can be a computer programmer or an engineer. Some fraction of the population has always been suited mainly for menial work--so what do those people do when all the menial work is being done by robots? And as robots become more and more capable, there are fewer and fewer jobs that can only be done by people. (And what about someone who is 60 and gets fired from their menial job. Many aren't going to be able to go back and retrain for a high-tech job.)
Sure, if we cut the population way back you could have everyone living ridiculously opulent lives....but I suspect it's more likely that the population will continue to increase and we'll have welfare slums for the people that can't (or won't) do the high-end jobs.
Read up on monopsony and how employers like them use it to make offers in bad faith.
Apparently your friends were very desperate for cash to go with an employer that views its employees a problem to be managed - in the Taylor sense of scientific management.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
They'll train the H1B but not the US citizen for the same jnob.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Isn't "decline in the overall number of people required to do a job" precisely what assembly lines effect, even if some job categories as a result require fewer humans? We recently posted a contrary analysis arguing that the Luddites are wrong.
Assembly lines were introduced to mass produce (i.e. make more products in a shorter amount of time for a cheaper price)
The whole point of computers and digital technology is to empower each worker to do more. Let's express that as an equation:
1x = W, where x is the level of digital technology and W is work. If you increase the value of x (level of digital technology), W also increases. Let's set x=1:
1 * 1 = 1
One worker using level 1 digital tools performs 1 unit of Work. Now, let's increase x to 10:
1 * 10 = 10
Let's say the world's demand for work is 100 units. You need 10 people working with level 10 tech to get that work done. What happens if tech advances to level 20? You only need 5 people.
Recessions only exist on Westeros where you have 'seasons' that last for years. On Earth, we have 'market corrections'. What do I mean by that? So called 'recessions' force businesses to 'tighten their belts'. They learn to do more with less. Now, if your goal is to save money, why would you loosen your belt once you've trimmed down? You won't. As long as the amount of work you need to do is the same, you will not hire more people. Even if the amount of work you need to do is increasing, you won't hire more people unless it outpaces the rate of technological progress.
The answers to the worlds current problems involve population control and throwing the concepts of IP and patents down the toilet.
You're correct; that verb was used correctly, although the verb "effect" usually isn't. "I'm going to affect this car by hitting it with a hammer, and I'm going to effect a dent." Hitting it is affecting it, the dent is the effect.
If you said "I'm going to effect this car by hitting it with a hammer" you would be saying the car was the effect of the hammer's blow, which would be absurd.
Imagine how much the hammer would cost if it made cars... no wonder Govt issued toilet seats cost $50+ :)
"Plummer points to a company like Kodak, which once employed 130,000, versus Instagram's 13."
Talking about past revolutions increasing jobs but the digital shrinking... whoever wrote that is an IDIOT
You can't compare a company that makes PHYSICAL hardware AND the film to one that just writes SOFTWARE that works on a pre-built device! For fucks sake, if you're doing that you'd also have to include ALL THE JOBS required to design and build the actual HARDWARE the 11 person designed application is running on!
The only thing I find somewhat compelling about the anti technology stuff is that it moves people farther away from the "means of production"... which isn't a reference to marx etc. For example, if I know how to make my own tools out of raw materials and can make from those tools everything I need then it gives me economic and logistical options. I don't need to buy some things in the store. And if the quality/cost of things in the store rise above some threshold, I can decide to opt for my own production.
Look at food as a really good example of this... how many of you make you prepare your own food? Sure, you're just buying fruits, veggies, meat, etc and combining them to make a meal. But what if you couldn't? What if your only option was to buy prepared food at the store.
One thing which bothers me about the industrialized world is that the factories do things in a way that cannot be scaled down to the individual level. I can't have a personal assembly line etc.
We're starting to see something that might one day turn into that with 3d printers but its not ready at any price to do things like build cars or washing machines or even tooth brushes. They couldn't make a pencil if you wanted one... If you want a pencil, you have to buy one in the store.
So that is the only issue that I find somewhat compelling about the anti technology position. That every industrialization centralizes economic, logistical, and productive capacity puts all of that in the hands of someone that is never you. You are never in charge of it. It is always someone else.
As a counter point, look at the Amish. Okay, they're living like people did 200 years ago. But they're able to produce pretty much everything they need and use entirely on their own. They can sustain their society entirely on their own production and possibly some raw materials that if they had to... they could extract/mine on their own.
I find that independence valuable and I wish the average consumer had that ability all be it without sacrificing the last 200 years of technology to obtain it.
We need shake and back auto factories that can build just about anything. Possibly not personal machines but something every community could own a few of that just turn out high quality goods from raw materials. Then the big factories can compete with that... the big factories will be cheaper. But they'll know then that if quality slips or price goes up even on the local market much less the international one... they'll lose business and no because people will be deferring the purchase but because people will be buying elsewhere.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Before I'm called stupid, keep in mind that in Medieval times, and until quite recently, people had to work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. Now we are down to 5 days a week, 7 or 8 hours a day (in the west anyway). Who's to say it can't come down to 3 days a week, 5 hours a day, or two days a week, 8 hours a day?
Prior to the automobile the keeping of horses was an industry beyond imagination. It occupied untold masses of employees and also kept home owners busy caring for horses as well. Automobiles quickly devastated the huge horse industry and the total number of people required to produce and maintain automobiles was far less than what had been required for horses. Now we are seeing a situation where electric cars and automated assembly lines can replace almost 100% of all auto workers. Even repairs will fall to next to nothing with electric cars and gas stations will fall to unmanned charging stations.
This is a continuing process in technology elimination of human labor. It is only a problem if social and economic changes do not confront what is occurring. We simply will have to pay people not to work. It can be done and it makes economic sense. Taxation will supply the pay checks and the public will spend the money they receive supporting automated businesses.
The shock is that it will cause all of us to admit that no system of fair and just economy has ever existed. To put it all in context consider the Civil War in America. Men were free to pay a man to stand in for them to avoid combat. The equivalent is to send a robot to work for you as a surrogate. So the robot (technology) will earn while the human spends.
They'll train the H1B but not the US citizen for the same jnob.
Right, because if I'm not mistaken the terms of an H1B visa do not allow the holder to change employers, even if the offer is better.
So, of course they're going to choose the guy who can't be headhunted over one that can.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Considering I had posted this conclusion several times in comments here already, I think I qualify. The production times on these studies of theirs must take months.
A recent sample from 2012.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3317435&cid=42303767
We are the 198 proof..
I don't see much "insight" in the part of your comment where you say "there is no real reason things need to get more and more expensive".
Really? There are plenty of good reasons this happens. It's not just because businesses are greedy and decide they'd like to make ever-increasing profit margins on whatever they sell you!
Inflation, by and large, happens because as our government continues printing more money out of thin air, the value of any given dollar bill decreases. When the government is in a large amount of debt, as it is today, the value of the dollar is really only propped up by the faith the debt-holders have in the nation's ability to make good on the interest payments.
I know as a small business owner myself, I decided on an hourly fee for my service based on what I thought was the lowest acceptable/fair price I would be ok receiving for my labor. It factored in such things as my fuel and vehicle expenses to travel to my clients, and some margin to cover the inevitable return trips I'd make for free as "goodwill" to fix an issue that wasn't fixed 100% the first time around. After a couple years, I felt I had to increase my rate -- but even then, I kept the old pricing for certain long-time customers as long as I could. It was never about anything but trying to ensure I was compensated just enough to make the whole thing worthwhile.
Any employee is free to change jobs or careers, in an attempt to get better pay. But obviously there are many strings attached to that whole process. Increasingly, the quest for a better job requires traveling further and further from one's home. At given times, only certain parts of the country are really "hot spots" for different skillsets. The day when you could settle down in one city for life, and work for the same employer through retirement are nearly over. A few people still do so, but frankly, many of them do so at the expense of getting paid more money they could have earned if they were willing to move.
I've been very interested in this subject for quite some time and have done some number crunching on employment rates in different sectors (as determined by our national statistics agency). Practically of them are in decline except for these five:
- Catering
- IT
- Security
- Medical and other care
- Sport and recreation
(and to a certain extent waste management/recycling)
Jobs in these sectors have been growing steadily for the past 40 years. I think we can expect that trend to continue; these are exactly the jobs that are not easily automated. The others will slowly be taken over by the machines. This in itself is not a problem, though. The problem lies not in automation, humans will find new things to do. There is a problem though, and that's that as humans are replaced by machines, the money earned by these machines will be "trapped" within businesses. Without employees, there's no salary to pay and there will be no mechanism to keep the money going around. Economy will slow down, possibly come to a standstill. And this may very well be exactly what we've been experiencing the past few years (albeit partly caused by outsourcing to China instead of automation - for now).
There are several "solutions". The obvious one would be huge taxes and welfare. However, as stuff becomes automated really quickly, nearly everything businesses currently do will become commodity rather quickly. On the one hand this means everybody can do them, on the other hand it means nobody will be able to excel in them nor will any new business be able to enter such markets. Due to this, probably not too many businesses will remain. And when that happens, we will end up in some kind of planned economy. If we smart and/or lucky, that is; the alternative would probably be some kind of dystopian oligarchy of the owners of the machines.
Marshall Brain wrote quite a nice story about exactly this situation, its problems and the possible solutions. For a story it's rather bad, but it provides so many insights into the intricacies of this problem that it's definitely worth a read.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
0x or or snor perron?!
The beauty of technology and efficiency is that the money saved is simply spent and invested elsewhere. The market will always take advantage of labor as an available resource. A better question is whether we will see more lower wage jobs because of it since the market may not value labor as much as before.
http://news.msn.com/world/swiss-to-vote-on-dollar2800-monthly-income-for-all-adults
http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/08/12/cyprus-president-anastasiades-announces-guaranteed-minimum-income-for-all-citizens/
The days of a job for life, or even a LONG term (redacted term), have been over for a long time, No one should take a job with the hope of keeping it more than 4 years or so realistically.
Unfortunately, that push towards instability is what makes things worse off. Long term plans generally can't be made if you're having to worry about switching employers. In addition, such frequent switching lowers the quality of benefits overall. Never mind that it kills morale across the board given that you're not much more than a mercenary versus a valued partner in the workforce.
if you're younger, you should be job hopping every 3 years or so, if working W2 jobs...to get promotions and raises.
Which reflects a problem in the company and people like yourself more than ever. As evidenced in at least the defense contractor and public sector work, stability trumps precarity.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Nope. Not true at all. If another company wants to take over their sponsorship, they can do that.
Source: I tried to hire my H1B friend from my old job at my new job. The only problem was that the new company was unwilling to keep his cousin as his "contract company", so his overall family compensation would have been worse (but he would have received more).
There was absolutely no problem transferring the H1B. The only issue is the number of companies that want to get involved in H1B hiring is smaller, since it's a bit of a pain.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
and not as human beings. As a laborer he might be worth only $25k/year. As a member of the Human Race, I think he's worth much more. That's why you and I will never agree. You think people only have intrinsic value. You're not considering the very real human misery your beliefs create (or if you are you dismiss them off hand with a wave of Ayn Rand's magic wand).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I fully believe that much of both law and software development could be done by sufficiently smart AI. As for media, we've already got software composing music and visual art "in the style of" human masters.
We're really losing the argument here. The trouble is we came to a gun fight without so much as a knife, just a pen and paper.
Let me break it down for you: The reason you can't win arguments with Libertarian/Conservative types is you're arguing with the assumption that both you and they share a fundamental belief: That human beings have more than Intrinsic Value. e.g. that people are worth more than the raw output of their labor, simply by virtue of being living, breathing people.
The parent/grandparents here don't think that way. If you're labor is worth $25k/yr, then you get $25k/yr. The consequences of human misery are irrelevant, because at the end of the day just as Liberals find it morally reprehensible to let someone starve to death when there's plenty of food, Conservatives believe it's equally reprehensible to give them that food if they aren't able to generate enough labor value (for lack of a better term) for it.
Now, the smart Conservative will chime in that a rising boat lifts all tides (actually, it swamps all but the biggest boats, but I digress). And they'll have all manor of reasons why it doesn't matter that they don't believe a person's worth can be more than what they make per hour, but it won't change the cold hard facts.
Liberals, Don't bother arguing with them until you change their mind on this. If you can't get them to agree that people are worth more than how much they can beg, borrow or steal from their fellow man then you're wasting your time, and you'll lose any debate you start because you're not talking about the same things...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Thing #2 - Government intrusion into the healthcare system is pushing hard on companies to be ultralean and is also forcing the majority of the workforce that is not part of the core into a 29 hour work week -- both of these are caused by ultra-lean companies need to avoid having to "deal with" the government mandated healthcare system.
Then intervene further so that business cant create the two-class workforce - where:
Full-time & benefit status is instantaneously conferred - eliminating the possibility of a no-benefit tier for any given skill level.
Temporary/Staffing agency/Consulting/1099/etc work cannot be made a condition of accepting/continuing work - eliminating a means to control the workforce.
Unemployed of all types are considered a protected class wrt EEOC in exchange for removing nearly every other category.
If businesses dont have those ways to subjugate workers, they might just have to hire in good faith - in one tier.
So... this will be the new structure... and we have to be ready for it. The requirements for working in an ultra-lean company in the US are going to be much different than working in a traditional company... It is going to require higher education, more technical higher education, and multi-disciplinary people. It is also going to require programmming skills for every single member of the core (non-temp) team.
Or just kill the two tier idea with fire and from orbit. Make everyone in the core group by default and make temporary work a relic of the past.
Core + Temporary workers is an idea that needs to die for its second-class treatment of the masses put in the lower tier.
But, if you think about it a moment... instead of dwelling on the chance of the unrest of an "unprepared" society -- if society prepares itself and embraces the change... this is such an exciting a time in history. Never in the history of the world has there been more opportunity to be successful and for so few to touch so many lives. People are empowered as never before to produce an individual contribution to society. There is more to the world than brick and morter, and more freedom accessible than ever before for those willing to sieze on the opportunities at hand.
Unfortunately you cannot ignore the displaced in that manner. The best idea is to include them even if it means that businesses take on an unavoidable burden.
Let's teach our generation to cast off the old unproductive model and embrace the new and more fullfilling model of the future.
Good. Let's start by bringing the two-tier work model (core+temp) to the guillotine along with those who push for it. If you want workers in unstable arrangements, you'll have to make it more attractive than well-paid secure work(for all skill levels) instead of using it to deal with 'uppity workers'.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Forget the IT folks, I'd think that the people that send jobs offshore would be targeted - especially given that it targets those programmers and sysadmins.
This already has some truth given that no company wants to disclose offshoring efforts, and that employers make sure that there is a penalty for doing so. However, if it gets to the point where loss of life is encountered by those who send jobs offshore(or to guest workers), those severance-linked NDA's wont be a barrier to disclosure.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Or just kill the idea of any tier lower than full-time given that the lower tiers have less freedom overall. Triggering anything with a numeric minimum invites circumvention - as evidenced by the 29er/49er response to PPACA.
If there was a way to trigger OT w/o circumvention or exemption, it would be a good idea.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Capitalism rewards most those who succeed most at pleasing their fellow man. That makes an economy a very efficient meritocracy, to everyone's benefit.
Eventually, the most successful wind up controlling too much of an economy's assets, however. The resultant imbalance causes all kinds of harm, including poverty and hopelessness.
This consequence does not make capitalism evil in-and-of-itself, but it does demonstrate the lack of long-term scalability.
I hate the reality of poverty, and conscientiously donate to causes that help poor communities build themselves into thriving economies. I am told that this solution, too, is not scalable in the long term. However, I can't fathom what other solution would be scalable. I just have to hope that continued investment in the bottom will result in a natural leveling of the playing field over time.
Perhaps this digital revolution will force the invisible hand on some important issues. The reality of abundance of digital data, and the enormous economic disparity caused by data monopolization, might eventually push to a breaking point the strange control-of-knowledge agendas that continue to be foisted upon us. Though the intermediary period will probably be unpleasant.
The only reason I ever read past "Gartner says" is to stay abreast of the speculation behind stupid decisions made by the tassle-shoed crowd. Looking toward the "digital revolution" to explain the effects of a mass exodus of manufacturing and outsourcing of everything is definitely Gartneresque.
There isn't anything to replace these jobs with. before cars were built in assembly factories, not many people had cars, and after that we had huge amounts of infrastructure to build. What extra infrastructure are we going to need in a digital revolution? just more computers which can be built by robots (and maybe a bit of fiber). We are talking about taking the current job and work of 10 tech people and doing it by 1 and a computer, not a new industry the current ones, if you can think of a new industry for the other 9 out of 10, I'm all ears, but i haven't heard one yet. Then throw in robots replacing menial labor (not replacing a work process or an animal, replacing the actual human) and it looks really bleak.
Rocket Surgeon.
So if automation is eliminating all the unskilled jobs, will somebody tell me WTF 12 million undocumented immigrants are doing in the US? Not to mention the last wave that got amnesty in the 80's? From what I can tell looking around my neighborhood, it looks like they're working pretty hard at landscaping, construction, janitorial, and farm work. Or am I just seeing a small slice of this workforce, and most of them have STEM PhD's?
It feels like every day I see people arguing about the idea of minimum wage on /. Here in Europe it is standard and serves to protect a basic human right, which is to be paid fairly for unskilled work. Otherwise we are literally all slaves.
I'm a programmer, I can't even count the number of times I have written a program (or even a script) which has reduced a departments workload to the point where one or two (or more) staff members are no longer required. Usually they are not retrenched but moved sideways out of the department, natural attrition does the rest.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Nope. Not true at all. If another company wants to take over their sponsorship, they can do that.
But the worker themselves cannot make that decision, which seems a bit fucked if you ask me.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If you're learning, you're no better than a schoolkid, so your salary will drop from experienced member to noob.
Except you have a house and family to feed and killing your family, though reducing your monthly outgoings, is not going to be accepted by the public as a solution.
So while you **learn**, you're earning 1/3 or less of what you had.
This is why I count your entire screed about your work history complete and utter bunkum.
I've said it over and over, everyone needs to learn programming, the lingua franca of automation.
In that way they cannot be replaced by a robot (until the next unknown paradigm shift comes along, such as hard AI)
Programming is not a job description, these days it's just a necessary tool to get any kind of real work done. And will become increasingly relevant for all future business.
The "contrary analysis" could have been a Tea Party press release. Don't make me laugh. And if I can ever find my password again, I won't post as AC anymore!!!
An economy based on people having jobs is doomed to collapse for two reason: 1- People keep replacing themselves with more children than their parents had. 2- Only a finite number of workers are needed to produce enough to match demand, and that number is shrinking. This jobs-based first world economy must be replaced by something that isn't dependent on everyone working for someone else to prove that they deserve more than basic human needs. "on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need"—and we're just distributing it wrong, and "we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff." http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/douglas-rushkoff-why-do-we-want-jobs-anyway
Where's Gartner been? Slow news day? The question is, what jobs are going to be safe in the digital age?
People must stop arguing the wrong point. This is very important and people must get this right. The problem with technology is not that it kills jobs. It doesn't kill jobs. In a free market there is always work to be done, and there's always a price the market will pay to have that work done.
The true problem with technology is inequality.
Technology drives inequality, and it is inequality, which is the foundation of all our current social problems. So where some people are having their wages driven down by technology, other people are having their income and wealth driven higher. But this does not balance out over time giving everyone an equal chance to get wealthy from technology The wealth concentrates into the hands of a few and the more technology we create, the more concentrated the wealth becomes. This is nothing new that just now showed up with the digital revolution. It's a trend that has been growing worse for 100's of years now.
Technology, is primarily a tool for creating MORE wealth in society, which is the good side of technology that we all love. It is why GDP keeps growing exponentially higher year after year. But technology has an evil side as well. The evil side of technology is that it is also used as a tool by whoever owns the technology, to take wealth away from others. It's this power of technology to steal wealth from people, that is what we must address.
When the textile workers of the early 19th century lost their jobs to the new machines, what happened? Lots of skilled workers were all making about the same amount of money weaving cloth by hand before the new technology showed up. But then automated looms were invented, and all these textile workers LOST their income. 1000 skilled textile workers, might have been replaced by a 500 people who manufactured the new automated equipment, OWNED the textile mills, and staffed the low skill, low paid jobs for the people who tended the new machines (operators). So we see a situation where there was a lot of equality of pay, across a large population of workers, shift to a small population, with high inequality of income, depending on what role they played. But the most wealth, shifted to whoever OWNS these new machines. Wealth shifted from the people who used to do the work, to the machines that took over the work.
This is very important concept to understand. Humans are just meat robots, that have for thousands of years, done most the work with their hands. We humans were the "machine of choice" for getting work done - for the protection of goods and services of value. But as our technology advances, other machines have slowly replaced our job functions, and those other machines become the "machine of choice" for that jobs. When a weaver is replaced by an automated loom, the money in society that once went into the pocket of the weaver, now goes into the pocket of the person who OWNS the new machines. The machines become tools, that allow the people who own the technology, to take money o9ut of the pockets of the weaver, and put it into their own pockets.
Every technology ever created follows this same pattern. It boosts total wealth in society, but at the same time, it shifts some wealth, from one group of people, to another.
What is happening over time, is the the creation of wealth is shifting from the old machines (meat robots), to the new machines, automated looms and all the other technology that is producing wealth today, like computers and robots. The wealth of society (the wealth produced by the machines), is assigned to whoever owns the machines. We humans own our own bodies, so any wealth we produce with our own hands, goes to us. But when we create machines that produce wealth, the wealth doesn't go to whoever made the machine, the wealth goes to whoever OWNS the machine. Sometimes the person that makes the machine is the one that ends up owning it, but more often than not, it's not true. Wealth production, and wealth itself, has for a long time now, been
These arguments that turn on the ideal market and the ideal technology that will save all our problems, either the so-called freedom of choice in markets, and the co-called freedom of a CEO to spend as he or she sees fit, is bunk.
People don't have freedom of choice about what they do to survive when circumstance forces them to choose from what is available to them.The smug message we get is from people who already had resources to sit out a bad opportunity. They are elitists.
What limits the freedom of choice is investment, the people who have the money and decide where to put it. The rest of us are either charged to execute or are payed by someone in the line of command to do assigned tasks, and we are relatively unfree. So the smug assurance that markets give us freedom of choice is made by liars who know how the market is rigged, by analysts, by financial insiders, by politicians, and the choices are limited by investors, whose overall intelligence and sense of general welfare is doubtful.
So, the people who insist on the wisdom of markets, in the fairness of overall self-interest may have their convictions tested and soon. They may have to pay with their comfort and safety for their conviction that unguided self-interest and possibly greed is the best way to set the priorities in a nation and in the world. They may have to fight, literally, to support the right of labor markets to behave as they do.
This may come to a head sooner than conventional thinking expects, and the people who cause the crisis may not have any idea that they are lighting a fuse. People's perception change suddenly, which is why economics is not a science, and why smug assurances have a way of vanishing instantly.
It can easily be said that the lopsided income distribution and the corruption it is causing in the government are both caused by the digital revolution. Programmed trading has so distorted equity markets that they really aren't the domain of mere human investors, and the application of the high technology of digital mathematics has fed the most craven urges of mankind, leaving the majority of people at a disadvantage. I wouldn't go so far as to advocate Luddism, but human institutions need to catch up with digital institutions, particularly in finance. Whether or not digital technology creates more jobs or not, I think that more jobs have been marginalized and lost than have been created, and even the new jobs aren't safe from elimination, there is the overarching question of how societies create roles for people not needed in economic activity other than turning them into cannon fodder.
The warning is clear, and it may already be sounding in other parts of the world, that the great Unwashed, the non-elites, will get their say about the smug images some people here have been putting out, and that otherwise very intelligent people become victims of history because smart or no, mankind is very poor at predicting the future, which is again why economics is a dubious line of reasoning to argue from.
"Humanocracy" is a word imagined to suggest sponsored time limited investments in the following areas: family, economic, participation, creativity. It is based on the observation of humanity's progress through the ages, split into four distinct periods of time: 1 conscience, 2 conquer, 3 command, 4 create. It sounds like the concept could be slowly making its way out http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4214205&cid=44849821 no matter the desperate efforts the Western World could be putting in, trying to avoid the implementation of this part of a unique world wide Universal Democracy model. If it was effective it would, probably, be a solution to the debt ceiling and the federal shutdown issues. But it would also progressively bring the obviousness of carrier politicians or bankers to a lower state along with, depending on the receiving or funding side of the line you're on, their incomes to acceptable or non-acceptable amounts. The funding side hasn't really had it's word to say yet but this situation shouldn't last forever.
A parable by me about robotics and a basic income: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
Key line from there to echo your point: "The politicians and their supporters said the solution was to lower taxes and cut social benefits to promote business investment. They tried that, but the robots still got all the jobs."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
More idea by me: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Its lucky that the job market is infinitely flexible and everyone can pick and choose exactly what job they do, when they do it and how much they get paid for it.
Your sarcasm would be funny if it weren't so one-sided. Here are both sides of the matter:
People can't choose exactly what job they do and how much they get paid for it. (If they could, they would choose infinite compensation for doing nothing.)
Conversely, employers can't choose exactly who they want to hire and how much they want to pay in wages. (If they could, the would hire only the most qualified people in the world, and pay them nothing.)
The free market is the mechanism that finds the best compromise between these two extremes; it forges labor-for-money transactions that both parties perceive as being in their own best interests. If either employees or employers are coerced to alter their behavior, it's no longer a free market, and the transaction may no longer be in the best interest of one or both of the parties.
For example: Mary, a 67-yr-old woman on a fixed income, is willing to pay the neighbor kid $5 per hour to mow her lawn, and the neighbor kid is eager to put down his X-box controller and do it. But then Mary becomes aware that this would violate minimum wage laws, and decides not to proceed. Both parties have been precluded from a transaction that would have been in their own best interests.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Meanwhile the total personal income for 2012 in the US was $13.4 Trillion. Total number of workers is about 154 million. If we had a purely distributed wealth economy where everyone got a cut of the pot we would each make: 13.4T/154M = ~$86,500 per year.
Just one problem with your argument: total income has risen to $13.4 trillion only because the U.S. has adhered, somewhat, to free market principles. If you want to see what happens when you don't adhere to free market principles, look to the economy of the Soviet Union. In the USSR's final year of existence, after its policies had been in effect for about two generations, its GDP had shriveled and at last become smaller than that of tiny Denmark. You'll be pleased to know that the misery was spread quite equally. (Except for elites who still had gosdachas and consumed Stoli and caviar.)
I'd say "or, don't look to their example and take your fellow citizens down the same dismal path" -- except I'm one of your fellow citizens.
I'll take my "unfairly-small" share of a huge and growing pie over a "social-justice-approved" share of a shrinking pie any day, thank you very much.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Rewrite your Constitution within the context of digital revolution and globalization.
Casteism
Next thing you're gonna tell me that Employees are also Consumers and that outsourcing jobs overseas is a short term gain for a long term loss in the gyst of the "Tragedy of the Commons"
The digital revolution is largely irrelevant--it is dwindling wealth which will kill jobs and inflame social unrest. As long as the pie is shrinking, and the fools making policy treat our economy as a zero sum game, there will be no end of problems. Certainly the distribution of wealth must be addressed, but it is also absolutely essential that we grow the pie.
Jobs and natural resources are necessary inputs to wealth creation, though by no means sufficient. Limiting the scope of the discussion to jobs is a futile exercise and misses the key point: our collective prosperity rests entirely on energy. Both jobs and natural resources are directly dependent on access to affordable and abundant energy. While automation will continue to reduce the need for human input, energy is not optional. It is critical that we secure a reliable and economical source of energy now, or the suffering will be inevitable as fossil fuels become ever scarcer.
Without access to energy, we won't even be able to feed ourselves, much less maintain our existing infrastructure, and civilization will decay and crumble. There is no shortage of work to be done, but we are increasingly constrained by our resource inputs. If only people could develop an appreciation for just how instrumental cheap fossil fuels have been in supporting our present quality of life, the sooner we could seriously work toward replacing them. Unfortunately, that requires embracing nuclear energy, as it is the only viable replacement we have for fossil fuels. Needless to say, I'm not very hopeful about our future.