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If I Had a Hammer
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Tom Friedman begins his latest op-ed in the NYT with an anecdote about Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner who, when asked how he'd prepare for a chess match against a computer, replied: 'I would bring a hammer.' Donner isn't alone in fantasizing that he'd like to smash some recent advances in software and automation like self-driving cars, robotic factories, and artificially intelligent reservationists says Friedman because they are 'not only replacing blue-collar jobs at a faster rate, but now also white-collar skills, even grandmasters!' In the First Machine Age (The Industrial Revolution) each successive invention delivered more and more power but they all required humans to make decisions about them. ... Labor and machines were complementary. Friedman says that we are now entering the 'Second Machine Age' where we are beginning to automate cognitive tasks because in many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans. 'We're having the automation and the job destruction,' says MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson. 'We're not having the creation at the same pace. There's no guarantee that we'll be able to find these new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that.' Put all the recent advances together says Friedman, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. 'But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity and to societal stability.' 'We've got a lot of rethinking to do,' concludes Friedman, 'because we're not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We're in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
There are two basic approaches to handle this:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Computers replacing human's is fantastic, it frees us up to do what we want to do.
Well, it would if it wasn't for the fact that the monetary system is designed in such a way that unless we all work like dogs the economy goes to shit and we end up with a vast uneducated, depressed and criminal underclass.
There is a way out of this, but it involves stepping off the money-is-debt forced march that humanity is on at the moment [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Grip-Death-Destructive-Economics/dp/1897766408], otherwise the 1% we will end up having to exterminate the 99% [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm]
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
12 people built and ran instagram before it was bought out by facebook. They created $1.2 billion dollars of value. That's $100 million each. To generate $100 million in value in the manufacturing sector requires considerably more resources, long term investments and planning. And employees. And management.
The mail order company I worked for, their online division kept growing and growing the share of sales but they didn't lay off anyone in the mail order division due to loyalty to the employees. But they also didn't hire anyone new. Newcomers to their market don't even have a printed catalog anymore, and mail orders are processed by the IT staff on an ad hoc basis. Newcomer companies just have 2-3 employees where legacy companies have 20 or more along with 10 years of paper records to store and organize.
Yesterday I wrote a script that automates 80% of my coworker's job which was manual data entry for our system, which will allow our department to shed 1-2 jobs over the next 2-3 years.
Heck the financial industry used to be 100% manually processed and employed many many thousands of people across the country, now most trades are processed through four or five "large" firms who employ a couple hundred employees each in just a few cities.
Brick and mortar retail is seeing a decline matched almost dollar for dollar with gains in online retail, especially on holiday sales events.
If you don't see the data, it's because you're actively avoiding looking for it.
moox. for a new generation.
Add a basic income to this, and you get:
A few factory owners swimming in money, but having to give some of it in the form of taxes to the state.
The state then gives that money to the jobless people.
Those people do not swim in money, but have enough of it to buy the stuff produced in the factories, thus closing the circle.
Still not an ideal society, but a working one.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Feel a sense of accomplishment. To paraphrase Iain Banks: a robot composing a symphony is like flying a helicopter to the top of a mountain; it presents its own unique challenges, but is not nearly as impressive as climbing it with ropes and pegs.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Not necessarily. The Mondragon Corp. is a worker-directed co-op in the Basque region. Despite being "ethical" it is highly competitive, and with 80,000 employees it's the 7th largest company in Spain. The economist Richard Wolff talks about them a lot in his lectures. Worth a look...
People often say "communism doesn't work", and out of curiosity I looked into it. Dictatorships are bad news for sure, but democracy is a form of government and communism is an economic system - they are not incompatible. Several states in India have had governments with significant democratic communist components - Kerala and West Bengal being the most notable. West Bengal recently had their communist government voted out after 34 years, and that was apparently only because of a percieved betrayal of their socialist principles(!). South America has had several democratic socialist/communist governments... usually overthrown in short order by the USA, as is the case in the Middle East (eg. Iran)... so it's difficult to draw any conclusions there. I did find an interesting communist community in Spain with economic refugees coming into it from the rest of the country. Apparently the mayor changed the economic system to escape the crushing poverty commonly experienced in that part of the country.
I'm happy with my Australian free market with social/democratic trimmings, so I'm certainly no radical, but I was surprised and fascinated by my research.
Actually, if you look at youth employment it's pretty clear that 'we' don't have jobs. Even the people who do aren't benefiting from the increase in productivity which became detached from wage increases around 30 years ago.
I'm always cynical about any view of doom based on extrapolation. We've seen again and again that we adjust. If there was one slightly different aspect of the current issue it is that the rate of change is vastly increased and the level of expertise is much higher now. When cars led to stablehands losing jobs they probably didn't have to do any training to move into another role. When miners lost their jobs to automation a couple of weeks of training was probably about all they needed to get into another role (actually in the UK we are still feeling the impact of those job losses). When doctors, who spend 5+ years studying and training, get largely replaced by machines then how long will it take them to retrain into a role that a computer still can't do (biochemist perhaps)?
The average level of a job worth employing a human over a machine for is increasing rapidly. The level and quality of education of the population isn't. We aren't preparing the youth of today to all be particle physicists and genetic research post-doctorates so why expect that everyone is going to be able to do something that a machine can't do better and cheaper in just a few years time.
With services, it depends. I am quite sure that the average joe may get his hair cut and food waited by a robot at some point. But the people that own means of production (i.e. capital) will pride themselves that they are served by real humans. The millionaire may have a self flying jet but 12 gorgeous flight attendants. Unless we have a radical change in the society, I think we will have a situation pre industrial revolution: few with capital that employ hundreds of servants.
But the robots will be owned by someone who does want payments.
Years ago "they" talked about how in the future machines would do the work, and our problem would be figuring out how to handle our leisure time. What appears to have happened is that the machines do the work, the machine owners capture the revenue, and all of that "free time" essentially translates to lack of income.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.