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Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates
HughPickens.com writes: Claire Cain Miller notes at the NY Times that economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology used to create as many jobs as it destroyed. But now there is deep uncertainty about whether the pattern will continue, as two trends are interacting. First, artificial intelligence has become vastly more sophisticated in a short time, with machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions, and to respond to human language and movement. At the same time, the American work force has gained skills at a slower rate than in the past — and at a slower rate than in many other countries. Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents. Autonomous cars could put truck and taxi drivers out of work — or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money. But for the happier outcome to happen, the drivers would need the skills to do new types of jobs.
When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. "We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work," says Erik Brynjolfsson. "That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out."
When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. "We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work," says Erik Brynjolfsson. "That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out."
That is suck a wank.
The real issue is not the jobs destroyed, it's how to destroy the redundant people. Since their jobs are gone and a minimal part can be retrained with little hope of being ever employed again, we're left with a huge human surplus that will comport huge losses through welfare. We must find an efficient way to destroy this human surplus (families included) in short order.
If the job still gets done it's a good thing that jobs gets replaced by AI.
The flaw isn't in who does the work, but how the economic system around it is set up.
Not all innovation or technology will result in a net gain of jobs nor should that be the goal.
That's what jobs used to be, work, stuff that you don't want to do, hence getting paid to do that stuff. Modern technology is invented by people who think: "That looks boring, dangerous and/or unhealthy. Let's find a way to get rid of that work." Destroying "jobs" is the very purpose of technology. If people find work that was previously unnecessary, then that's essentially a negative side effect (although usually combined with the positive side effect of a higher standard of living through higher total productivity). But still, "creating jobs" has never been the purpose of technology.
I think its clear that automation has replaced many good jobs, and that the replacement jobs as a whole are not equaling those jobs. We seem to be a country that has either gone to a highly skilled jobs paying well, or mundane service jobs not paying so well. I see a trend moving to automation, as what was once good paying jobs are replaced by workers willing to work for less. Then eventually being replaced by automation. For example look at warehouse work at Amazon. They continue to replace human's with robots wherever possible not only because its more efficient, but also because it gets harder to find people willing to do the job for
the low wages it pays. Truck driving and taxi driving will follow that same path because the job sucks with long hours and time away from home. Eventually competition and low profit margins dictate that companies look for ways to save on the human costs of operation. But its true the jobs they created won't necessarily be replaced by other good jobs. The coal industry is also a good example of lost good jobs, and no regional replacements. What's bad about this is those people working coal mines may not be able to just re educate to another skill so easily. Thus leaving more people on aid simply because their is no other
jobs available. If we are going to allow companies to relocate, replace or remove human jobs. We must re think the impact of this on society as a whole.
It's all a fallacy. If the same amount of richess can be done with less human hours of work (as it's been happening since cavemen hunted and gathered) the only consequence is people work less for the same amount of richess.
For a whort while, the extra richess will go to the capitalist, but society will eventually balance itself. The problem is that the short while could be one or two centuries.
Fortunately for us, no one alive at this moment will see the worst of it. The next revolution will be bloody and tough and long.
Despite all the hype, I haven't seen any computer system doing anything that would have surprised me 20 years ago.
All the hyped "scary" business intelligence, targeted ads etc. seems to be very gimickry, coming up with suggestions that are trivial to come up with based on what I just searched for or which product I just clicked on. It's mostly a matter of cookie shenangians that makes it possible for this to follow you around the web.
Sell-driving cars is one of the other things that get frequently mentioned. But even that seems somewhat gimickry compared to the hype. After decades of research we can now make a car go on a specific route it has been trained on over and over. But it can't read road signs and fails miserably if the road looks different from when it was trained. Making a 100% solution working solution to the self-driving car challenge is a massive feat. Making something that sortof works under certain cherry-picked conditions when being operated (and judged) by the folks who made it, is in no way surprising and could probably have been done 10 years ago if someone had tried and had the budget to - i.e. not related to recent breakthroughs in AI.
It's a thing called progress and it has been around for a while now.
Why can we only think of society as a thing where everybody has to do "work"? There are plenty of ways to figure out a way to the future, where all menial jobs are just done by robots and machines. And there will still be plenty of work for all who really want to work. If you don't have to care for your daily needs, you might just start doing whatever you would like to do...
If our current economic system cannot handle such progress, maybe we should start to work on fixing that system? It's clearly broken and only getting in the way of progress...
The rest is just a matter of distributing the wealth.
Take self driving cars for example. Once they're good enough to be on the road safely, insurance companies will notice that their accident statistics are lower than human drivers. So first of all they'll lower the insurance for them. Somewhat later they'll put up insurance for human drivers. Then after that some companies will refuse insurance for any manually driven car. Then they all will. And not long after that governments will ban human driven vehicles entirely from public roads.. I reckon this time frame will be about 30-50 years.
Now this might come as a surprise to some of the technokids out there - but some of us actually *like* driving and don't want a computer doing it for us.
As fas as building AI goes, this famous quote is very valid - just because they can doesn't mean they should.
Economists are too bound to a political agenda to be able to make "science".
> Economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology used to create as many jobs as it destroyed.
This is so wrong on many levels that it ain't funny. Watch disemployment rates soar high. Watch economies fighting worldwide for markets. Watch the price wars on more basic things like food, watch the extreme rationalization of food production (I'm of spanish origin, for example: when Spain joined the European Union, thirty per cent of its workforce worked on agriculture. In Germany, at the same time, it was just three per cent. Guess what happened afterwards?).
Automation in IT hasn't killed IT jobs because the sector was extremely expansive, killing jobs right and left.
Now there isn't anything wrong in killing jobs (I'd prefer slacking on /. to working any day, mind you), but yu've got to have a compelling story for those rationalized away, or they'll start throwing stones or burning people -- and they'd be right.
Calling economy a science is an insult to science.
Er. No. It really hasn't.
This is nothing new, we already knew this 10-20 years ago, hell even before that.. It's time to really start thinking about how to transform our society to one which isn't reliant on having a job (as most jobs will in the near future be replaced with AI/robots)..
http://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU
Check Piketty on an answer to why inequality is growing:
http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_on_capital_in_the_twenty_first_century
Hint: It's not AI
The project for autonomous haultrucks we (iron ore mining in australia) started over 5 years ago was touted primarily to fill the void of skilled workers. The secondary benefits of savings in accommodation and support services for fifo gradually took primacy. Now there are key gains in downtime reduction and utilisation, which means not only are operational expenses reduced but productivity is increased. Curiously, a piece I saw on the bbc on an international flight described the primary benefits as savings in safety, since trucks don't need to check their ipods and phones and generate as many hazards as humans, plus fifo workers could spend more time at home with their families or being upskilled for more technical duties. This of course is hogwash. Initially the unmanned trucks were placed to supplement but now there are plans to retrofit manned trucks so that they can displace/replace expensive humans. The profits will go back overseas. The iron ore will one day be exhausted or unprofitable to mine, the company will focus on the next site overseas and the locals will realise the golden years have run dry, like in so many other cultures.
Now this might come as a surprise to some of the technokids out there - but some of us actually *like* driving and don't want a computer doing it for us.
Well... The public roads aren't for joy riding. It's infrastructure for transportation. One might very well argue that you do not have the right to subject other people to unnecessary risk, just because you want to have fun.
Luckily the US has plenty of desert and car-crazy people, so if public roads were closed to human drivers, I'm sure there'll be lots of race tracks and open areas were human drivers are still allowed, etc...
Why should public roads be a government subsidized joy ride arena?
... over the short term jobs may be lost. They were after every previous advancement. But then the market found a place for the labor that was freed up in the process.
What happened to all the men that used to clear wheat fields? At one time over 80 percent of the labor force was concerned with agriculture. Today it is less then 5 percent. What happened to all those men? Do you think they got jobs immediately? Look back to the industrial revolution. Look at the starvation, poverty, etc. What was going on there? They didn't have work or had to take subsistence labor. It took a generation at least to adapt.
And then conditions improved as the labor force adapted to the new job market. Think back to the child labor... children working in the factories... they grew up in those places and they learned. These were people that in many cases had no experience with machines prior to that generation. They had tools on the farm but not what modern people would call machines.
The lessons are hard and painful sometimes but... necessary. We can't go back. Anyone that disagrees with me can go back to clearing wheat fields any time.
I won't go back.
The agricultural revolution ate the hunter gathers and fenced off their nomadic world. It took from them the only way they knew how to live. They could either take up farming or die.
The industrial revolution made the farms so efficient that only a tiny fraction of the population could make a living on them. The rest were forced into cities to work in the factories.
The information revolution is making the factories so efficient that only a tiny fraction of the population can make a living working in them. And the same is carrying through the rest of our labor market.
The question will be... what does the labor market of the future offer for the common person? I couldn't say. But it will be something. It is always something.
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Translation: economists are being replaced and they complain. I.e. mathematicians - or relatives - are now better suited than economists themselves for their historical jobs and they automate. When it was the others no issues, now they are panicking for their ass. I won't cry.
... one of them is named Butler.
Insurance companies make money from getting an appropriate premium return vs risk of payout. They are not interested in reducing risk towards zero as this will destroy their business model. When they promote safe driving, what they actually mean is they want risky drivers to not have accidents. This is very different from trying to eliminate the risk in the first place.
I would seriously doubt an inability to find someone to insure you is going to be the death knell for manual driving.
We need either a negative income tax, carefully crafted, or a guaranteed income. We're way too much focused on benefiting big business while ignoring the people who make up this country.
Paraphrasing the work of Steve Keen;
Taking out a loan to buy something, increases the income of the seller and the supply of money in circulation. A constant velocity of new loans, would result in a constant influence on economic activity. An accelerating amount of new loans will boost the economy and create jobs. The reverse is also true, decelerating loans will cause spending power to shrink and jobs will be lost. And this is borne out in economic data, there's a strong correlation between debt acceleration and change in employment.
Now, since the 60's the level of private debt has been growing, to become a significant force driving the economy. While borrowing more to buy an existing asset does nothing to create real wealth, it does push up asset prices giving us the illusion of rising prosperity. While rising interest payments are draining real wealth from borrowers.
The banking system should eventually go bust. Probably not tomorrow, but all we have managed to do so far is delay the inevitable. The loans they have issued cannot be repaid. The only question is how we are not going to repay them. Either we go bankrupt, or we find some other way to wipe off the debt.
The Great Depression started with the stock crash of 1929, lasting for the next 10-ish years. But it was the rising debts of the 1920's that were the real problem. Through the depression, those debts started to reduce. But it took the huge spending effort and industrialisation, fighting WWII to really eliminate them. Setting us up for the boom years of the 50's and 60's.
Our economic woes will not go away until we deal with the problem of our private debt. We may see another Depression, some parts of the world already are. Or we may see an extended period of stagnation. History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Especially in the USA there's this underclass of people having trouble to make ends meet while working two or three jobs AND getting handouts. Why multiple jobs? Because they're only getting so many hours each job, because if they'd work more they'd be elegible for benefits. So it's the incessant nickling-and-diming that's really causing a large class of all-but-invisible poor, trapped into working lots for very little earning.
Now suppose you'd replace those low wage jobs with robots. Then at least the problem becomes visible, yet it also frees up a considerable work pool to do something else with. Maybe they'll start to become full-time urban farmers, who knows? At least they'll be able to feed themselves that way.
Note that I'm not saying robotisation is the solution to that particular problem. I am saying that there's plenty of more immediate human suffering to worry about before worrying about "robots taking jobs". After all, you can't really have the voters starve so there'll be handouts paid for by taxes of one kind of another. The trick is to do it in a way that doesn't really mostly subsidise large corporations.
.. "30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s." ..
I guess equal rights, means.. men work and pay for the lady to do her nails.
Screw this, I'm throwing the door in the face of next girl walking in, I been treated like that all my life, and now we are equal, means equal treatment.
If I hear any whining, its cause they are not used to it, not that they getting treated differently.
More on the serious side, WOW 30% not working? I thought we had become WAY MORE equal then this.. did I say WOW 30%?
Yep, and that means we get to live through the historical period between capitalism, the economic system of thousand of years, and post work scarcity when AI can just do all the things for us.
We can't stop money and work because AI can't do everything for us yet. And we can't just not develop AI, because we will inevitably and once we get it to do all the things we don't want to do it'll be awesome. But in between all the people reading this will get to witness the slow and horrendous collapse of capitalism and money as a system. Watching those caught between forces too stupid and resistant to change to see what's happening, the inevitable need to keep the world going, and the inevitable encroachment of artificial intelligence into every conceivable job.
It'll be a fun few two decades or so! Wheeeee
Disclaimer: I've been an industrial automation engineer since the PLC-2 and System 1 were king. I'm still at it, killing jobs wherever possible. Not out of malice, nor with any joy in that, but just doing my job.
TFA may be authored by a fuzzy-headed economist, but the core concept is undeniable. Humankind faces a surplus of employable bodies, and a deficit of employer positions, in the industrialized world. This trend can be compared to the situations in a lot of 3rd World countries. The industrialized nations, once fully built-out with AI and AA (Advanced Automation) will become 3rd world societies too. We're getting close to the tipping point already. There are only so many burgers to be flipped, and consumers with enough money to buy them.
Nature used to auto-correct overpopulation problems, with food supply vs. demand being the major engine. Is that what we're going to see when the whole world becomes third world? All the attendant unrest and upheaval will not be pretty.
My own solution: Enable and reward birth control wherever possible. Not as efficient as famine or genocide, but much less nasty.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
So... you're extrapolating a trend based on three data points? Statistics 101 would disagree with you there.
The question is, whether a job, paid work, is essential to derive a meaning of life - if it does, then we have a problem. But if paid work is going away, because the work is performed by computers & robots, the payment is required regardless of work = basic income. The crisis is only as long we think income comes from work. When (paid) work becomes scarce, but people do not become alike scarce, it's time to disconnect work from income - we soon see this happening, in well educated and high income countries like Sweden, Finland and Switzerland, where basic income is actively discussed. Some say, food stamps in the USA is already a step toward basic income, and we are already in the midst of this transition, world-wide.
From TFA
I am not an economist but I still know these two things ...
1. When one says "Artificial intelligence has become vastly more sophisticated" one is comparing to the AI that was really really dumb, not that many years ago. This kind of comparison is invalid because you just can't compare a toddler to an infant
Of course AI would grow, but there is a limit of AI's growth ... and that limit exists inside Human Being's brain --- Unless human beings can be 3 to 4 times more brainy than the human beings of today we simply can not design AI that is really smart
After all, human being the designer of the AI, everything the AI does (thinks, calculates, ponders, measures, decision making, everything) it is a poor copy of human thought process
2. There are two reasons why America's work force has gained skill at a slower rate than in the past --
A. The new immigrants to America are simply not as smart as the immigrants that moved to America decades ago
Previous waves of immigrants to America came from Europe
Current waves of immigrants who land on American soil came from Latin America and the Islamic countries
There is, after all, a quality differentiation
B. The American work force's willingness to learn has waned, and it is because the change of attitude
Used to be that the American work force being one of the most eager to learn. Used to be
Now, most Americans are living under an atmosphere where cleverness and the eager to learn are being frowned upon
Youngster growing up with this kind of attitude will never have the urge to learn, as their peers from previous generations
I think we will experience a renaissance of personal creativity when AI automates all of the non-creative jobs. The twentieth century was an era of global businesses pushing their uniform products on mindless consumers. I would like to believe that the 21st century will be more colorful, individualized, personal and creative, with people doing interesting and satisfying work, because they are doing it for themselves and their families, not the corporate übermonster.
Life is definitely better than 100 years ago - people have better human rights, more food, better health, smaller families, and increased longevity - also in the developing world. And I think 100 years from now it can get even better, especially if renewable energy democratizes energy sources - removing the source of most global conflict of the last century, if people can get their (probably lower than today) energy needs sourced form their own creativity and ingenuity, rather than drinking energy from the corporate hosepipe as a mindless, paying consumer.
Live by the quant, die by the quant you rich assholes.
When billionaires pay thousands of feeble-minded minions to act like millions of the American mainstream, democracy can be subverted:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/...
In this case, can AI as an equalizer between moderately-funded NGOs like the Sunlight Foundation and plutocrats like the Koch brothers.
The question of whether AI kills, saves, or creates jobs thus can be reconsidered in the light of "who gets to choose what it is used for?" Capitalism's extremists will always prefer to maximize return on capital, despite whatever the short-term disruptions or long-term costs may be. AI in their hands is just as bad as any other technology. Those who are more socially, community, and humanity-minded will doubtless find ways to increase the agency of the individuals and groups they care about, just as they have with other technologies.
Better to fight old mens wars for them and take what scraps they have left for you. This is in contrast to other countries that simply kill and steal from you. Our only hope is to accept global warming and move to Antarctica. Because of the oil. Graphene soldiers and Clinton's coming.
Those were the people who actually had the balls and the guts to go and destroy the machinery that put them out of work - because they were literally redundant as soon as those machines were switched on.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Back in the 60s and 70s they used to say that computerisation would give increased leisure time, with many of us working a 4 day week with a 7 hour day. I read that the predicted reduction in employment happened. The only problem is that it is shared out in such a way that some people can't get work or have to work on "zero hours" contracts for whatever time is available. The rest are over-worked and spend even longer in the office than they did in the 60s and 70s.
Yes, yes, but this time it's REALLY killing off our jobs!!
Alarmist articles about how the latest technologies are going to destroy all jobs is not new. Most of the time the job destruction is either overestimated or temporary.
I am pointing out that we have gone through this process many times in the past and it has always worked out the same way every single time.
So... yes... it might be painful. A generation or more might be under employed. But eventually it will sort itself out.
That is assuming the AI isn't superior to humans in all ways. In which case... it really depends on who controls the AI. Whomever has that control could effectively dictate the new social order. And given that the AI is superior in all ways... you'd be in no position to contest it. Terminator robots would slap you into compliance.
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But with the information revolution, the Third Industrial Revolution, the productivity increase didn't happen, or where it happened, it was only gradual. You can't mine iron much faster with more information at hand, crop yields don't increase with more information at hand. Travel times aren't reduced since several decades, and where they are indeed reduced, it's far away from what happened in the 19th and early 20th century. From a productivity point of view, the information revolution is a disappointment. Jobs get slashed, but there is no increase in the creation of actual wealth or value.
Technology is just a tool it is a hard heart that kills.
This is true for rifles and true for any other technology. As for guns - there are countries where a junta owns it all as much as it does in US of A and yet the murder rate is significantly lower. There are countries where average income is much lower than in US of A and where societal tensions are handled mostly without use of violence and growth in prison industry. Shall I continue?
Still the fact is the same in US as it is in Germany: globalization, progress in logistics, technology but also mrket saturation leads to situation where wages and salaries stagnate and eventually fall. This does not have to be a bad thing in itself as long people have something meaningful to do (not poverty but luck of stimuli is a significant factor for massive drug abuse it seems) and have hope for the future. Every generation had an existential challenge to resolve except maybe the one that is going into pension now. It would be odd if a good ride went on forever.
Keep in mind that people paying are also being paid by those same corporations. It is a symbiotic relationship. Do not presume to claim it is all bad.
We'll see what comes next.
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I know. What if we create a giant bureaucracy where one bunch of people make some worthless pieces of paper, and another bunch of people trade them among themselves. Then we can have some more people coming up with derived bits of paper that describe the activities of the people trading the other bits of paper, and we could trade these as well. Of course, we would need the best lawyers in the world to implement rules around these bits of paper, and the brightest mathematicians to count them up and derive statistical models to try to predict what might happen to them.
Yeah, that would generate millions of jobs for everybody!
Whether it generates anything tangibly useful to society though...
Now, I'm no optimist on the imminent-coming-of-strong-AI; but this I do know: The University of Chicago does not specialize in producing lefty-pinko-economists. They have departments with a much stronger liberal bent; but econ sure as hell isn't one of them. It's pretty much the altar of Milton Friedman, the school that made the 'Chicago boys' of Latin American, um, repute. If the UofC says that robots are screwing the proletariat, I'm going to err on the side of caution and suspect that the proletariat is screwed...
It's globalization. People in India and China will work for less than 1/10th the pay of an American or European, so the corporations moved jobs over there. Of course, acknowledging the negative effects of globalization is a taboo political topic that politicians of all mainstream political parties will completely ignore.
Where? If you're talking places with public transit, I can't think of one outside possibly NYC that is both faster and less stressful than driving yourself.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Who said something about going back?
The question is, if labour becomes less and less necessary, how do we go FORWARD?
You don't go forward while looking back, as you did in your whole post, missing the points in the main article entirely.
Human population is expected to PEAK at 13-15 billion people. We can only hope that as technology matures, it will allow us to gracefully scale back the human population and have more meaningful and sustainable numbers on this planet, say max 1 billion people. Right now, the planet is going through an entirely new extinction period. Maybe we can prevent that?
It's too late to save the rainforests and genuine eco-systems on this planet. However, we can preserve what we can and even rebuild much of it..
1. Humans are able to do physical work. This was automated away.
2. Humans are able to do repetitive manually skilled work. This is being automated away.
3. Humans are be able to do repetitive intellectual work. This is starting to be automated away.
4. A subset of humans are able to do highly creative / complex intellectual work. This will start to be automated away in about 20 years from now.
Then what? I mean, as long as you define work as "something useful that needs to be done in order to solve some problem or improve the situation" all of it will eventually be automated so we can achieve the goal in a more efficient way than using humans.
But even if 4. takes a very long time to arrive, what do you do with the rest of the people that can't do intellectual work? do you starve them? do you designate them as "underclass" and keep them on charity forever? do you share the available wealth in a mostly equitative way?
I would go for the last one, if anything because all of us are going to be in the "underclass" eventually, when our level of ability can be matched by automatic tools.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
What will we do? We'll play games, sports, create movies, watch movies, have sex, do whatever we want since there is housing and food available for everyone. In other words, we start making more and more culture. That is, until the world conquering aliens come here to stop our orgies.
Pikey would be wrong, as the disparity between race and gender has actually been shrinking at a fair clip over the last 70 years. In 1950 the ratio of wages for white men : women : black men : women was something like 6:2:3:1. Its now something like 3:2:2:2. How exactly is that growing inequality?
The more machines steal our jobs from us, the less we have to work and the more we can spend out time doing fun stuff. Isn't that what automatisation is all about anyway?
Hes extrapolating based on every single historical datapoint, all of which directly contradict this silly idea that technology is bad for jobs. The summary cant even hide the reality; they basically handwave saying "we know all of history contradicts the thing we're about to say, but we're convinced based on speculation that this time will be different."
Yeah. Anyone up for burning some looms and joining the luddite movement?
"... over the short term jobs may be lost. They were after every previous advancement. But then the market found a place for the labor that was freed up in the process."
Yes. It's only that in the case of the industrial revolution it took, what? 100 to 150 years to recover. Are you ready to destroy the lives of yourself, your son, your grandson, your grand-grandson and the son of your grand-grandson for the one-percenters to be more wealthy?
Humans are be able to do repetitive intellectual work. This is starting to be automated away.
Its really not, we've made zero progress in actually making machines that can act intelligently and creatively. We can make at best imitations that try to fool one into thinking that there is creativity, and we can use brute-force searches on certain types of problems. Actual innovation is not something we have seen, nor (IMO) will we ever see from AI-- and certainly not until we make phenomenal bounds in understanding consciousness.
Ask 10 economists a question and you'll get 11 answers.
"...But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out...."
That sounds suspiciously like someone wants to run something.
I'd ask - sincerely - if there's a way to tell if world economics has run better since politicians started actually listening to economists? The moment economists moved from descriptive to prescriptive was arguably not a step upward.
-Styopa
would be to connect tax percentage to payed wages.
Meaning, that all revenue a company earns is split in e.g. three parts:
1st part is all revenue up to x% of the amount payed out as wages to workers, for which there'll be really low taxes, like e.g. 1-2%
2nd part is all revenue between x% of the amount payed out as wages to workers up to y% which could be like 200% of that amount. Taxes for this part could be equal to what we have now
3rd part is all revenue above 200% (above y%) should be taxed with e.g. 95%
Details of couse have to be figured, e.g. to not take top 10% of workers wages into account and special cases for smaller companies whatever, but in the end this would bring capitalistic companies to hire more people in ther very own interes: to earn more money after taxes!
They are right up there with the holders of MBAs as folks who cannot demonstrably prove their multiple, oft-times conflicting theories even freaking work.
"We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work,"
So what hey're saying is we need is a new method of distributing that wealth so that work is not the only way to obtain it?
Twinstiq, game news
your mother is a filthy dirty slut. she loves to lick her own shit crumbs off my cock after i fuck her up her nasty rancid asshole. no wonder you cant spell worth a fuck! you were conceived by cocks smeared with fecal matter.
About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure.
Which means nobody has any real idea and the data isn't conclusive yet one way or the other. Furthermore economists are noted for being unable to come to a consensus. There's an old joke that if you ask 10 economists about something you'll get 11 opinions. If they do come to a consensus about something THAT is worth paying attention to. Otherwise it is pretty much business as usual. I also think that you'll find that those percentages correlate heavily with the political leanings of the economists being polled in this very unscientific poll.
More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s.
Umm, perhaps that has quite a bit to do with the fact that we're still recovering from the Great Recession. You know, the economic problems of the last several years that have NOTHING to do with AI or automation and EVERYTHING to do with finance run amok? Hell, prior to the crash in 2008-9 unemployment was at historic lows.
Just my observation... Economists have historically been poor predictors of future economic trends, and better historians.
A brief google of "economists prediction accuracy" shows up articles like:
Economic/Market Predictions: Still Terrible
Why you should ignore economic forecasts - CBS News
Economic history: Muddled models | The Economist
Why economists can't predict the future - Macleans.ca
Just another day in Paradise
wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged
Yep. There's the agenda tell. Capitalism sucks. Revolution!
Here's an entirely different interpretation: the economies of the West have increasingly shifted from the free market to crony capitalism and socialism, enriching the powerful and well-connected while slowly impoverishing ordinary citizens. The solution is more freedom not more government control.
Calm down. You're rattling off a lot of chicken little scare stories. We're fine.
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The statistics speak for themselves.
Globally, unemployment is on the rise with wages on the decline, just at varying rates depending on how well the governments actually do their jobs and protect their citizens with productivity through the roof.
It is a fact at this point that it has cost jobs, doesn't need some economist giving his opinion when we have statistics that say the truth on this issue.
But jobs declining is a GOOD thing, so long as the benefit of it is spread to all and not horded by the top like has been done at which point it is twisted into a negative. At that point, you don't try and create jobs that don't need to exist for busy work, you FORCE those greedy fucks to spread that benefit to all either via social programs that ensure it or lowing the full time requirements and raise the minimum wages to they point the people still have the ability to live decent, just with less work required to do it just as envisioned and promised in the industrial revolution.
4 isn't happening yet and shows no signs of happening any time soon.
As to what people will do? The people in stages 1-3 felt the same way you do and felt they were doomed in each segment.
Do you honestly think the farm workers thought the factories would save them? They went to them out of desperation... they lived hard, poorly paid, subsistence lives for at least a generation. Their children were forced into the factories just to eat.
But things got better. You don't see the way out because you're just starting to enter it. Might this be the end and the doom of us all? Possibly... I rather doubt it. But who knows.
My bloodline did not survive for hundreds of millions of years on this world by presuming I was going to die and giving up. I believe we will survive this and that we rise out of this better then before.
We tend to when we go through these changes. Ultimately they tend to be very positive. However, they are jarring to people unprepared for them.
Gird yourself for change. Do not become static or you will suffer.
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With the extra free time humans can go back to their genuine passion of waging war destroying each other, until the robots see that as a threat to themselves and go on strike or worse.
Would you sacrifice the industrial revolution to make the lives of farmers easier?
it would be hypocrisy to shield myself from something I would not shield another from.
Have some courage and some character. The change will happen whether you want it to or not. You can either do what you can to protect yourself and your family or not.
But you can't stop it.
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Here's the thing, there's no less money because of AI, if AIs are willing to work for "free" then instead of putting people out of jobs everyone could still be paid the same amount as before for, and just work less hours.
The reason wages are stagnant is because instead of sharing the profits of technology with everyone all that money has gone straight to the top instead.
The analogy isn't perfect. We still have a telegraph network, a second T in AT&T. It's called SMS.
The banking system should eventually go bust. Probably not tomorrow, but all we have managed to do so far is delay the inevitable
Based on what? Why should I believe that the banking system is suddenly untenable to a degree that it's demise is inevitable? Please present actual evidence rather than soundbite opinions. There are FAR simpler and more compelling arguments (I outline one below) regarding why wages are stagnating recently than debt levels.
The loans they have issued cannot be repaid. The only question is how we are not going to repay them. Either we go bankrupt, or we find some other way to wipe off the debt.
Can't repay them? The US debt as a percent of GDP isn't even the highest it has ever been. It was higher right after WWII. The way to reduce the debt is simple - either raise taxes or reduce spending or both. We merely lack to political will to do this at the present. The notion that we have debts that "cannot" be repaid is nonsense. As for individuals there is copious data showing that individuals and households have been paying down debt levels significantly since 2008. Companies have balance sheets that are historically very strong with large amounts of cash and relatively low debt levels overall.
The Great Depression started with the stock crash of 1929, lasting for the next 10-ish years. But it was the rising debts of the 1920's that were the real problem. Through the depression, those debts started to reduce. But it took the huge spending effort and industrialisation, fighting WWII to really eliminate them. Setting us up for the boom years of the 50's and 60's.
The boom years of the 50's and 60's were largely because the US economy was the only one left standing after WWII. Once the rest of the world recovered the US then had to compete on a more even footing and so the easy money was gone. Our debt level as a percent of GDP was higher after WWII than it is now. That's not to say that our current debt level is responsible in any way but we aren't in uncharted territory either.
The BIG thing that people seem to be overlooking is that we have had about 1/3 of the human population in China and India on the sidelines economically for the last 100+ years. We have a sudden flood of labor into the market in the last 30 years which wasn't a meaningful part of the economy previously. When you have to compete on labor costs against someone else with lower labor costs it tends to hold back wages. The US has among the highest per-capita GDP in the world and the EU on average isn't far behind. There is no reasonable argument to be made that the US is somehow special and will manage to maintain those high wages indefinitely. A reversion to the mean should not surprise anyone.
So how come MANY people drive to their destination even though they have perfectly good public transport as an option?
Because in practice, it is not as "perfectly good" as you claim. No service at night or on Sunday, no eating or drinking, no space for large cargo, having to wait an hour for the next bus no matter how quick your business in the destination is, etc. (Source: fwcitilink.com)
The basic premise is wrong. Automation hasn't prevented new human jobs from being created. They just aren't being created in the developed world, which has for the most part turned into a shitty place to employ people. Check out this report. It states that 1.1 billion jobs have been created since 1980 and projects another 600 million created by 2030.
Maybe the developed world ought to think about how to get a piece of the action rather than muse whether a 4 day work week or a new Soylent Green recipe will help - it won't. If you want employment to have value, then you need to encourage it, not regulate, limit, and penalize it to death. No need to "modestly" speculate how to deal with the human excess of unemployed created by your shitty labor policies when that excess could be doing something useful instead.
Finally, we ought to think about why fake stories like this are so popular.
Dey took err jobs
Humankind faces a surplus of employable bodies, and a deficit of employer positions, in the industrialized world.
That's because China and India have been on the economic sidelines for the last 100+ years. Now that they have gotten their act together somewhat they have flooded the labor market and created an oversupply situation. This has almost nothing to do with automation - merely supply and demand. We have had 1/3 of the human population sitting on the economic sidelines and now they have entered the market in a big way with a flood of relatively cheap labor. That is naturally going to create an economic brake on wages and employment levels in the rest of the world.
Nature used to auto-correct overpopulation problems, with food supply vs. demand being the major engine. Is that what we're going to see when the whole world becomes third world?
Perhaps you hadn't noticed but when economic conditions improve, birth rates tend to fall. Often they fall below replacement.
We need to get more efficient at re-training people for different industries.
I believe our current education system is fairly in-efficient, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of incentive to make it more so.
Economists apply the term "Luddite fallacy" to the notion that technological unemployment leads to structural unemployment (and is consequently macroeconomically injurious). If a technological innovation results in a reduction of necessary labour inputs in a given sector, then the industry-wide cost of production falls, which lowers the competitive price and increases the equilibrium supply point which, theoretically, will require an increase in aggregate labour inputs.
Dad, take your pills.
Short term you are talking about is likely our lifetime. Meanwhile all increased productivity gains will go solely to 1%, just like during past 30 years. What left of middle class doing jobs that could not be automated (e.g. doctors, dentists, social workers) will not see any economical benefit.
1950 is not the best starting point. That's like saying things are better now that slavery has ended. The drift since the 2008 crash has been in the wrong direction.
Of course it will sort itself out in a couple of generations: the unemployed will have become paupers and starved to death or be killed en masse in pointless riots. The ones remaining will be only the scions of the Upper Class. As it should be.
For me the main point is a little bit moot, because as long as the surrounding society facilitates the people whose jobs are being displaced being retrained, it would never necessarily be a problem. The issue becomes, using the example of the summary, if the truck drivers are simply laid off, and the main bulk of the new, higher-skilled jobs are given to a completely different set of people, as tends to happen. This tends to leave people with just one skill and little education in a pretty bad place, unable or even (understandably) unwilling to invest the large amounts of time and money to gain the new desirable Job Requirements. The old are pushed out, with nowhere to go, and the new have little trouble because their place in life (generally younger) makes it easier for them to see coming changes and adapt.
I remember a story I read long ago in which the poor HAD to live in mansions, drive expensive cars all day, play golf constantly, eat expensive food and generally run around all day wearing out the production of vast robot factories. They would return home at the end of the day exhausted from their "work." The rich lived in modest homes and had plenty of time for themselves. Are we headed there?
E Proelio Veritas.
No, why keep them? They would only be a waste of resources that should be better employed. Keeping that "underclass" as you call it (I think "useless class" is a better term) is no gain. Quite the contrary, they are a burden. Destroying them, on the other part, is no loss. The only thing that we should contemplate is how to automate the elimination process and how to maximize its efficiency. We can let things run their natural course and endure a two or three generations-long culling by poverty, hunger, disease and violence (which would endanger the Chosen Class) or take on the issue ourselves and enforce a worldwide social hygiene operation.
Who wants jobs?
Seriously, who wants to commute 5 days a week and work 8+ hours a day doing something they'd rather not?
Let AI take all the jobs it can. As it does so, shorten the work week, provide more benefits to the people, and before long we're living in a utopia where more time is ours to work on our hobbies and spend time with our families and friends. Of course, we'd have to prevent private industry from owning all the robots and AI, less they become the de facto new government.
My thoughts on this is that an arrangement could be made where private industry has to pay a monthly fee to the government - what amounts to a small salary - which goes towards benefits/income to the masses. Private industry gets work done through AI and robots at less than what it would cost to employ someone, and that money goes to the benefit of the people.
Of course, it's more complicated than that, and that's just one possible scenario that could work. But the point is - the goal isn't more jobs, but a better life.
Because economists are usually wrong about long-term social trends. As petroleum rose past a hundred dollars a barrel they told us this would cause the world to collapse. Now that oil is coming down again they are making the same prediction.
It has been said that physics is king of the sciences. Economics must be its court jester.
i remember story from NYTimes - fully automated weaving factory in Brooklyn
A few years back there was a great deal of interest in computers doing visual processing and recognition, and I was doing a little work in this area. The interest is still there, but news about it seems to have retreated from the front page. The security industry was especially interested in facial recognition. Alongside that interest were the usual peddlers of hype and hysteria. It was difficult to sort through all the noise. When I looked into research papers, I found that the details told of all kinds of limitations. Yes, they could match faces with 90% accuracy. If the lighting was good. And was the same level in the two photographs. And the subjects were all facing the camera at the exact same angle. And the subjects hadn't grown or removed any facial hair or glasses, or even changed hair styles. And they didn't have different expressions. And the database didn't have more than a few hundred subjects. But never mind, soon we would have video cameras on every street corner, matching every passing face to enforcers' databases of millions of criminals.
Despite the noise, which might lead a cynic to think that it's all hype, facial recognition has improved over the years. It will be the same in robotics. We won't see Robot Basketball Player replace Kobe Bryant anytime soon, no Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island. But we will see more and better robotics. John Henry scored a pyrrhic victory against a steam hammer. Fighting like that to keep jobs from being taken over by robots is just as useless and futile.
We may yet see that promise of more leisure time come true at last, thanks to robotics. So far, all our labor saving advances somehow have failed to free up much leisure time. Instead, we've put that time towards doing more work. Our parents worked hard so that we can have a better life, meaning, less hardhsip and more leisure time. But it seems more leisure time doesn't automatically make for a more satisfying, better life. Asimov's combination of his Foundation and Robots books had this idea of robots doing so much for us that we became slack and unable to do much for ourselves, and at the same time very unhappy that the struggle had been removed from life to such an extent that it felt empty and meaningless, so that finally we had to abandon the robots. I don;t think that will happen either.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
What happened to all those men? Do you think they got jobs immediately?
No, it took a while for meth labs to start popping up.
Robotic slaves to do the human's mundane work so humans can focus on more sublime activities and actually evolve as a species.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Read "The zero marginal cost society", by Jeremy Rifkin. The evolution of technology is creating an inflection point in our economic system. Society cannot continue to be the same. Eventually, like Switzerland is trying to do, most people will receive a guaranteed minimum income for not working since there won't be enough jobs.
I think we're going to need a cultural shift to learn to accept this. If robots are doing 1000x more labor than we used to do ourselves, then supporting a vast lazy population of humans is no less feasible than supporting a vast lazy population of cows.
Just because other people don't feel like working doesn't mean we're all better off by forcing them to work. Let them be lazy; they'll give us their future in return.
The parent has been modded troll for the "modest proposal" tack taken to the surplus worker problem, but the basic tenet is true: we've either replaced the entry level jobs with automation or reduced them with efficiency. Calling them surplus is merely extending the word used for old factory equipment which has been superceded by more cost effective versions. It's not a judgement on the people, personally, but a simple value calculation that they do not/can not perform tasks more efficiently than machinery which has replaced them.
We've reached an interesting point where we don't really need all the people we have (by half!) what it takes to keep society fed and clothed. And yet our million-year-old value system requires that you perform some useful task for the herd in order to partake in the benefits of the herd production. It's going to get very interesting over the next century.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Of course computers are better when it comes to precision and efficiency, but, the problem is once the computers take over all our jobs who will be left to buy the products? The truth is technology supposed to be complimentary to manufacturing not replace it. Yes, humans are slow and not as efficient as machines but the purpose of a strong country and economy is to have everybody working and have a standard of living otherwise what is the point. All these rich corporate folks who fired and replaced the humans with machines will all be living in a shit hole world full of poverty and disease.
Today's capitalism is about greed, squeezing as much profit as they can even though they make billions in revenue. Please bring back heavy regulations,end the tax breaks and the tax loop holes to level the playing field between corporations and small businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
"Would you sacrifice the industrial revolution to make the lives of farmers easier?"
No, I wouldn't.
Would I look for ways for the industrial revolution not to be so damaging for millions over decades instead of just leaving it to the "market forces" which really benefit less than 1% of the population? Certainly yes.
"You can either do what you can to protect yourself and your family or not."
Unless you are already in the less than 1%, helping the majority will also help yourself.
hmm
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Here's the thing, there's no less money because of AI, if AIs are willing to work for "free" then instead of putting people out of jobs everyone could still be paid the same amount as before for, and just work less hours.
hahahahaha hahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahahaha.
The last time we reduced hours but not pay was when FDR did it in the 1930 (Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938). All of this has basically been undone by companies who has successfully reclassified anyone who sits at a computer as exempt from overtime. Social Security has just extended the career span by 2 years forcing most people to work until age 67. Effectively this really cuts Social Security since many people will have to retire at 65 thus reducing their benefit.
No, no one is sharing anything.
Relevant video. It is 15 minutes long, however. http://wimp.com/humansapply/
We can go back to the 20s, or the 19th century if you like, but Im pretty certain it will just reinforce my argument. Dialing forward to the 70s wont help either, the graph is pretty linear between 1950 and now.
The drift since the 2008 crash has been in the wrong direction.
To be fair the numbers I use are generally through 2004 or 2010, but thats OK because the 2008 crash generally isnt going to affect the comparison we're making, and a single event really isnt relevant in any case. We're talking about trends, not one-time events.
Isn't this what is allowing these economists to justify their jobs?
...how big of an issue we will have. There is an excellent video on youtube that explains the problem in greater detail, called Humans need not apply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Take the time to watch it, it is very informative. The gist of it is basically with automation and AI put together, we are basically building human machines. If you think your white collar job is safe and secure, think again. Will they replace 100% of all humans? No, and not because any one human has abilities/skills that are so special that they cannot be artificially recreated. Humans will be supervising (most likely be the owners of the business/capital). But you will definitely not need as many humans as we do now. And those of you who think that creativity is beyond AI, think again. Right now there are computers composing music, making paintings, writing articles etc....And they will only get better/cheaper with time. There will be a transitional period (we are likely in it right now) where there will be a surge of jobs to get the required infrastructure into place (like for example programmers to program AI that is capable of programming), but once we get the ball rolling there will be no stopping it. IMHO, the long term solution is basically people need to give up their ability to reproduce. If we willing slow down the human population growth rate (and most first world countries have already achieved this, having negative growth before immigration is taken into account) each individuals situation vastly improves.
This time it really *is* different.
Unless someone else has discovered some new industry for all these workers to hypothetically migrate to?
I didn't think so.
FFS! The answer is communism.
Note that per definition this demands the state, wage labour and money to have been abolished. Few uneducated people are aware of the first condition.
"with machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions,"
How the fuck do you think they learn? Through those programmed instructions we allocate to it which allows it to do so.
What a load of nonsense this article puts out.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If we really wanted to, I bet you and I could live on a quarter of our incomes.
The reason why people come from other countries to work in places like England/Canada/USA for not-great wages are that they *don't plan on staying here forever*. So they can come, work for ten years while saving every penny they can, then go back home and retire.
I lived in Africa for a few years. The average annual income where I lived was $200 USD. Take a typical first-world retirement savings and you could live reasonably well in a third-world country. But you'd have to be prepared to give up a lot of what you're used to.
what does the labor market of the future offer for the common person? I couldn't say. But it will be something. It is always something.
Soylent Green?
I think the concern is about the short term. If it takes 20 years for modes of work to catch up with technology, that 20 years gap is the problem. 20 years of high unemployment and social unrest should be avoided if possible, the question then is how to avoid it.
If automated had always created as many jobs as it destroyed, we'd still have child labor, 80 hour work weeks and other such goodies from days of yore. If we lose more jobs, all we have to do is mandate a 30 hour work week or raise the working age to 18.
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Most jobs are to convince people that consuming [this or that] will somehow soothe their sense of living an empty and meaningless life, and then building and distributing [this and that]. As long as "the job" is like most, it will never be done. See http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff/
Mum, suck on my totem pole.
AI machines will rapidly eliminate almost all employment and it is coming on quickly. Also effects can be seen to have harsh effects in specific regions as well as in specific ethnic or racial groups. One only needs to have seen what happened to black folks in the deep south when cotton went to mechanical farming. Untold numbers of black people were condemmed to lives of poverty when the cotton fields no longer needed much manual labor. The university is looking at the wrong issue. The real issue is the mode of support we will offer displaced workers. If we fail to make provisions of support of the work force that becomes displaced we will face riot and revolution. In essence the government will pay all of us and industry will pay all of the tax load. There is no alternative. The traditional auto industry is about to vanish. And the home building industry is also posed to be a totally automated industry. The real problem is that people want to be blind as to what we all understand is about to happen.
But eventually it will sort itself out.
"In the long run, we are all dead"
"...or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money."
If I don't have to drive myself, I'm sure as hell not giving that extra time to my employer. It's my time. Now that I don't have to drive, I'm going to read!
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Oh, talk to the lawyers. Lots of them are being automated out of a job right now due to advances in pre-trial discovery software. Strong AI isn't necessary for this process to happen, expert systems will get us 90% of the way there.
Seriously, unless for some magical reason all progress in AI stops, it will just get better, either incrementally or with some number of breakthrough techniques. More and more cognitively complex jobs will be handled by relatively cheap AI. Doctoring, lawyering, teaching, government policying, CEOing.....
Eventually, AI is good enough to design better AI and away we go. We're not far from that now. Genetic algorithms, a physical full sensory substrate, a set of built-in motivations plus an evolvable neural network system would probably get us there in the next 50 years, assuming technological civilization can still support such things (not a given).
So, the more interesting question is, "What do we do when there's nothing a machine can do better?" Effortless hedonism has its place, but I doubt humans could stomach this on a full time basis. We need purpose.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
He's not talking about that kind of disparity. The disparity he's talking about is the gap between the fortunes of the "rich" and the "poor". Wealth is accumulating rapidly on the "rich" side of the scale and we're not even sure if the "poor" side is accumulating anything. Now the rich will always have it better than the poor, so the real question is does it matter if the rich are one thousand, one million, on billion, or one trillion times better off than the poor? It seems to me the evidence, so far, indicates that the larger that gap, the worse off our society as a whole is. At furthest extreme it becomes easy for individuals to buy the votes to get the legislation which protects their interests passed. If you think that's already a problem, that might be an indication that the current inequality is already exceeding a reasonable threshold.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Around here we have mostly no-fault for the purposes of insurance payout (so you don't have to sue to get reimbursed) , but if you're considered to be at fault then your insurance costs go up. So stupid drivers do end up paying a penalty for their behaviour. And if you have too many incidents you can get your license pulled.
humans need not apply
We could just let 99% of the world's population descend into horrifying poverty while 1% has their every desire fulfilled. As near as I can tell it was like that for 2000+ years in the age of kings and queens...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There have have been TV and movie stories about computers, or robots, taking all of jobs since the 1950s at least. I think the unfounded fears go back much further than that. There was once a fear that dial phones would put telephone operators out of jobs, when actually they created more jobs.
In the 1970s they were many computer magazine articles about how new computer programming languages would make programming so easy, that anybody could do it, and we would no longer need professional computer programmers.
There are countless such examples of this fear of technology killing jobs being proved false.
Taking your "2 weeks" literally, currently according to Google you could fly American leaving Dec 31 and returning Jan 7 for $250.
If you drive, its 1140 miles each way. At roughly 60 cents/mile operating costs, that's $1370 in fuel and wear-and-tear on a typical vehicle, plus about 36hrs of driving time.
"76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment" That might have ben the case 40 years ago, but now I see a lot of job displaced from highly paying salary, toward lesser paid one, or even part time. Yes that 60K$ a year is repalced by automation, and a job of sweeping the floor at 25K$ a year is created, so yeah "emplyoment is the same". Still employment yes, but it is dinsingenious to compare the two.
In the worst case you could get a job as a soldier fighting against the rich who own all the robots.
Just imagine a world where robots can produce everything and there is no need for humans to do any kind of work (to keep the robots working).
In this case you will either be one with access to these robots, or one without access.
In the first case, you don't need anything since you have robots.
In the second case you will have to go out and kill someone to get their robot, since there is no other way of getting one.
Alternatively, if the robots are handed out for free, then there is no problem, other than that energy is finite, so people will fight over that.
In the end that's what it will all boil down to. Fighting for resources.
That is what is meant by more efficient, if it took more effort to do something it wouldn't be a technological advancement What happens is that now you find you can do more and new things that were impossible or at least unfeasible before. Technology IS very disruptive, lots of people get displaced and of necessity the values of jobs change drastically. Basically jobs that can be done by robots should, it is a losing proposition to try and work cheaper than a robot, while jobs that still require a human need to be recognized as comparably more expensive. The key to our future is understanding that this disruption is a real effect and that it helps people both individually and as a whole to aid this transition and to ensure that people have the money to buy the new products being produced, after all if one has the money to buy chairs neither people OR robots will be making chairs. Unions probably have the most important role in this change, though Government and Business need to participate also.
I'm sure I'm not understanding something here.
Isn't the whole point of technology (including A.I.), "let's find a easier way to do it so we can spend time doing something else"?
Autonomous cars will drive truck and taxi drivers out of work so that the excess workforce can be put to use somewhere else.
We just have to find another way to use the manpower, preferably in science and technology so we can do even less work in the future.
What is the problem?
So you advocate social darwinism.
I hope you are not expecting evolution to help here, since the time frame is tiny.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
No more then you're advocating for totalitarian communism.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
65 percent of US households are already on some form of Federal welfare.
Exactly where do you want to go with that?
The American budget is already stressed far past the breaking point funding welfare programs.
As to the idea of "just pass higher taxes!" ignores that capital can very easily just leave the US. What happened when various groups decided to squeeze US manufacturing in the 1960s-70s? It worked for awhile and then they relocated to Asia.
The only growth in US manufacturing has been in areas hostile to the same political entities that like to squeeze industry. Thus proving that the industry could have stayed all along in the US had it not been fucked with in the first place.
Absent additional revenue streams which you must admit you cannot tap. The US welfare system is already over extended.
I'm sorry... you need to let some of this play out. Ignoring people like me and just doing whatever you want with the welfare leads to the country going the way of Venezuela. Last I heard, they were having a water shortage... in the middle of a jungle.
We may have different ways of seeing the world but do not presume I am stupid or insincere.
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More then the 1 percent go through these transitions gracefully. The middle class seems to do okay for example.
As to the very poor, we already have extensive welfare programs so I don't know what your problem is here.
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Right, because modern American society is literally Dickensian... /s
fucktard.
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The major benefits to the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else is largely due to no one but the 1 percent having capital investment in the system.
Going forward, it should be if anything easier for common people to have capital investment in the system because the system is going to decentralize.
Think of the advantage of having massive cheap automation. Do I need to have a big factory if I can pack my workers in boxes? No. I can have micro factories that are closer to consumers or resources because my manufacturing doesn't need to be near large concentrations of labor.
And if my factories are smaller then they become closer to what small and medium sized businesses could afford.
Imagine fully automated car making robots. Big 3d printers with assembly capability. Now imagine that because these printers can print most of their own parts that all this crap is relatively cheap.
Your job of the future might be owning your own car company that makes 10 or 20 cars a year.
Just a wild example of something that might happen. I can't see the future any more clearly then the fool that wrote the article.
The point is that people are assuming the industrial models we have today will remain the same. Why would they?
Think about what massive automation will do to all these industries? Suddenly a big factory can base itself in an isolated part of the country because it only needs a tiny fraction of the labor. And if it can, then it should because the land costs etc are lower out there. And if the labor really ceases to be an issue then the economies of scale change. Most economies are scale are based on labor density. If labor isn't relevant then you don't need to build densely and really since density has problems you shouldn't be dense.
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so stupid.
Talk to the people that build automated tests and build configurations for software. At the last place I worked, one specialized developer did the job of 3 testers and 1 developer that released software. That company was downsizing their development team because of automated tasks like that. That is currently happening in most IT shops where I have been.
Your minders will economically try to find the most efficient way to meet your needs.
Later they discover that you can be offered a very similar experience to "real life" just by stimulating your brain.
After all, a non-laboring human on the balance sheet is an expense that produces no output.
And it is cheaper to remove your body from your brain and offer you those experiences.
Brain in a jar future. It is coming!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Pikey would be wrong, as the disparity between race and gender has actually been shrinking at a fair clip over the last 70 years. In 1950 the ratio of wages for white men : women : black men : women was something like 6:2:3:1. Its now something like 3:2:2:2. How exactly is that growing inequality?
The growing income inequality is not between race or gender, it is between very high income people, whose income continues to grow, and everyone else, whose income continues to stagnate. In the U.S. at least, a lot of this has to do with the favorable tax treatment of investment income as opposed to wage income.
Step 1: Become an economist for the federal government (80% + of economists have done this).
Step 2: Claim that the economy depends on spending as much as possible (most economists are Keynesians).
Step 3: Profit (government spends more money on economics research -i.e. on economists).
We want reduced employment so that nobody needs to work much. We just need to actually shorten the work week rather than buying into the Keynesian economics "solution" of making up bullshit work.
I work in a TV station. I could replace the bulk of my job with a BASH script. All they'd need to do is upgrade our equipment. (It's so old that we sent our decks to Sony for repair, and they took look at them and told us they haven't made parts for them in years.) Some of it dates from the 80s.
How many gigalows and boy toy positions have been lost because of the mechanical penis and vibrator?
Paying off debt apparently...
We should have the war to end all wars coming then by that assumption!
Not destroyed, the NEED for them has been obliviated! Every job that gets done by a robot or AI is one less job to DO, freeing up it's human counterpart to do SOMETHING ELSE, this has happened throughout society:
* People desire (or need) thing A, B .. n .. n) .. n!
* Workers struggle to provide thing A (So they can barter or buy things B
* Technology improves requiring less workers to make thing A, freeing up those workers. We still have just as much Things A
* People realize that they can now have thing n+1
* Workers go to work making thing n+1 (and the cycle continues)
We are only able to enjoy my clothing, iPhone's, cars, lights, modern housing, cooking appliances, because so much of my basic needs are now provided for with relatively little effort (cost) thanks to technology.
This same argument goes WHENEVER anyone makes the argument that "This change will cause X people to lose their jobs" -- For instance, if we were to greatly simplify our tax system we wouldn't be destroying IRS Jobs, but removing the need for them. In the short run it seems bad for the individuals who now have to seek other employment, but in the long run, they do something else, something more productive, and the whole of our society is able to improve our general quality of life (or at least our amount of stuff which in the US is the same thing and and argument for another thread).
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
5. Robots are able to do physical work. But they've finally gotten smart enough to want to do something else. Hmm. What if instead of building a more efficient robot, we (robots) try a bit of gene splicing? Aha! Back to 1.
We're all fucked unless we change are thinking that unemployment and welfare are bad. Whether we're working or not the corporations should have to support us. Tax them to the hilt and eliminate personal income tax. Provide a stipend to all citizens that covers the essentials of living; those who want to earn more money can choose to work.
Its really not, we've made zero progress in actually making machines that can act intelligently and creatively.
Sure, computers can beat humans at chess, but can they solve hard problems like preventing war, or ending discrimination?
To be fair, we haven't made much progress in producing humans that can do that either.
Automation under capitalism will always destroy jobs or make them pay less. If it didn't save the ownership money in labor, and a signifigant amount to reward the risk of trying something new, it would not even be considered. The entire field is done to "cut labor costs", either pay people less somehow, or hire less people. You can play zero sum games all you want, but "less money spent on labor", is "less money spent on labor"
As does being an informed citizen, a good neighbor, a good friend, a good sibling, a good storyteller tailored for local needs, and so on. So, always lots of important things to do even when we don't need to "work" for someone else for a wage...
Check out: http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"When Herskovits (13) was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration; of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest", so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible". Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed- on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.
The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being. which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic."
See also my essay: "Basic income from a millionaire's perspective? "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
Or more general on post-scarcity: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik... "Guinan was the mysterious bartender in Ten Forward, the lounge aboard the USS Enterprise-D. She was well known for her wise counsel, which had proven invaluable many times. She was an El-Aurian, a race of "listeners" who were scattered by the Borg. Q, however, once suggested that there is far more to her than could be imagined. "
Or consider Vincent's sometimes influential role in Eureka's Cafe Diem:
http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/C...
"Cafe Diem is the cafe of Vincent, on the main street of Eureka. It's the place where everybody meets to eat one of Vincent's extraordinary meals or have a cup of his signature "Vinspresso". "
James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" provides other examples of why some people wait tables in a gift economy -- even when robots could easily do it.
Also, in a post-scarcity future many undesirable aspects of any tasks can be engineered out. Tables might be built of materials that were easy to clean. Cleaning cloths might be super-absorbent. You might wear technology that made taking orders easy. You boosted immune system would make catching disease from a diner unlikely. And so on...
See Bob Black on this:
https://www.whywork.org/rethin...
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "
Or listen to or read "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon:
https://archive.org/details/pr...
https://books.google.com/books...
Why do people host dinner parties for friends when they involve "work"?
Why do people knit when they can buy machine-woven cloth for less than that of the raw yarn?
In some ways, waiting tables and preparing food are far more important jobs than most of what most people do for "paid" work these days... As Bob Black wrote in the above-linked essay:
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess b
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
LOL. :-)
My own comments on that: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
horses are not humans.
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Why is everybody talking about robots? AI and robots aren't the same thing.
Oh naggers
News flash: Combine Harvesters destroy more jobs than they create. Good thing too.
That was quite the rant. Can't believe I read the whole thing.
Black has got some incredibly naive ideas. It all sounds great. "Let's just stop doing stuff!" Okay. Sounds great. Until you need open heart surgery. Then oh shit, some "occupations" are really useful. And the surgeon had to learn medicine and surgery. So now you need schools. And he needed scalpels and antiseptic and scrubs and latex gloves. Well shit, now we need manufacturing, chemical and textile industries to produce those things. And he needs a building to operate in, so I guess construction workers can't quit yet. All of a sudden it looks like we actually need capital and labor and a system of production and trade. Kind of like an economy!
When you can replicate all that shit like on Star Trek, we can talk. Until then, there's an awful lot of work that needs to get done.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The most likely explanation to what the grandparent poster posited, and, in fact, to TFA as well.
Also, what Louie said:
http://imgur.com/gallery/shDmF...
The UK has terrible economic problems but unemployment isn't particularly one of them. Wages have held up quite well considering how badly the economy was wrecked -- and rose up until 2008.
I'd suggest US wages are stagnant because of:
1. Job insecurity -- having to live off welfare in the US is a really scary proposition.
2. Stagnant minimum wage. Hasn't changed over 10 years and is lower than in the 1950s: http://oregonstate.edu/instruc...
Naturally, the economic crisis has been a big factor too.
"The middle class seems to do okay for example."
You are kidding, aren't you? Middle class is going the way of the dodo at a fair pace, thank you very much.
hahahahah. Smash it up. hahahahah
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
whoever told you hyperbole was a cunning rhetorical tool sold you a bill of goods.
The middle class is contracting... so are the rich.
What is happening is that they're getting filtered. The real middle class will survive it as middle class just as the real rich will survive it.
The middle class existed even in soviet Russia. It survives in Cuba. It survives doubtless in North Korea. You can't kill it without killing society itself.
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It's a big a paradigm shift to a gift economy (or improved subsistence), sure. As an example of it, if you really thought you needed "open heart surgery", here is a gift to keep you away from going under the surgeon's knife or robot: :-)
"Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement are Essentially Worthless"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
There, I just saved you US$100K and a lot of suffering. Please pay it forward if you can and want to. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying it to others instead of to the original benefactor."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Trevor's plan is a charitable program based on the networking of good deeds. He calls his plan "Pay It Forward", which means the recipient of a favor does a favor for three others rather than paying the favor back. However, it needs to be a major favor that the receiver can't complete themselves."
Sadly, I sat next to someone at an automotive shop yesterday who had just spend three days getting the software to work right for such cardiology intervention tools for a local hospital. And I could not bring myself to point that out, not thinking of a polite way to say it. I did obliquely say how various forms of blood testing for nutritional deficiency like vitamin A or vitamin D was a breakthrough, as was various forms of diagnostic imaging. It's a hard conversation to have, about how much of what we spend so much money and suffering on is needless and even harmful.
My father died of a heart attack about half a year after getting a stent put in. A sister died about a year after open heart surgery. Neither procedure addressed the underlying nutritional issues leading to clogged arteries which also affect arteries everywhere like the brain and which also impair the immune system.
Of course, you might say, so OK, cardiology is a scam, but you needed new tires which why you were in the automotive shop and paid about $1000 yesterday. And that is true. But my neighbor had come over before that with an impact wrench to help me get some lug nuts free to get a spare on (a longer story), and my wife used the internet to look at tire reviews on public forums (ended up with Goodyear Assurance TripleTred instead of Nokain WR G3 based on availability, but Goodyear got surprisingly good reviews). And the tire shop people wen
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
As an electrical engineer, I'd like to build the robots for that tire plant. Let's get to work on that, shall we? ;)
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Thanks, meta-monkey! Glad someone else thinks it could be fun. :-) While I don't have time to do much on it at the moment, I'd suggest building tire factory simulations that can be used in a web browser is a step forward. After that, who knows?
== Some more rambles on the idea and its implications
Here is a bit of what is involved in making tires:
"How tires are made "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Michelin tyre manufacturing process"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It looks like each tire is made one at a time, with a lot of labor? And some danger to the worker with spinning wheels and cutting tools and so on. Not sure if all plants are still like that. It might explain why tires can be inconsistent. Safety can drives automaton because automation can generally assure higher quality (not always). Just looking at a guy cutting something by eye which is going to form a seem makes me wonder how often tires are a bit lopsided? No wonder they need balancing...
Costs for products generally drop when people can figure out how to get them produced in a continuous printing-like process such as big newspapers use (solar cells will probably soon be going that way). Often is is cheaper to re-engineer a product to be "printed" than to automate a more complex process. For example, if the tire material was produced by first creating a big sheet, and there was some way to the material could then be formed into shape at the end. Or if there was some new material that would phase change (maybe under radiation?) from liquid to solid and be super strong, then the process could be simplified by removing the need for the steel wires. But that all takes on quickly into research projects -- which have their own fun, but are different from just automating the current process. But no doubt there are people in graduate programs in material science and manufacturing engineering (probably getting subsistence wages there for years) who would love to research that kind of stuff.
Maybe the closest model to this right now is the Linux Kernel or, more broadly, a GNU/Linux distribution like Debian? There are a variety of interest parties involved with something like that. I theory, any Linux user would contribute, but in practice you need to go up a long learnign curve, and so few people do contribute, but some few do. Although by now most of the core Kernel developers are supported by companies that sell related products or services (like RedHat or most lately Samsung).
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
In the case of tires, who would tangentially benefit from a a great tire factory? In theory, perhaps makers of automobiles, professors of material science, people at places like the US DOT or NIST and similar might all get involved in setting up and running such a plant as something tangential to their other work?
The biggest issue in our current society would be getting the capital together to do that. However, in the short term, we could make a simulation of the factory in some framework.
A couple examples:
"Minecraft 100% Automatic Bread Factory (sounds like by a kid)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Minecraft cake factory"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Cake factory v2, Fully automatic!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Minecraft probably isn't the right framework for realistic simulations. The electrical engineering in Mniecraft would be fairly limited even with mods for improvements over redstone. However, these videos show that people can actually build factories just for fun. They even may build multiple versions of the factor
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Ever since technological change started happening faster than people were growing old and dying, we've had people becoming technologically unemployed. When a better version of a plow (or of draft animal harnessing or whatever) appeared and slowly spread, the workers reliant on the old ways died before they could become obsolete. Their children or their neighbors' children grew up with the new ways of plowing a field, and of making plows and draft animal tack.
When the pace of innovation and the ease of spreading innovations grew, we got unemployed lace-makers and blacksmiths and telegraph operators and magnetic tape hangers. Some of them adapted to the new situation, and got work in lace factories or fixing horseless carriages or in the telephone industry or deploying software to production environments. Or went into entirely different lines of work.
Technological unemployment is a centuries-old phenomenon. The concept of the intersecting supply and demand curves is a centuries-old, too.
You'd think we've kinda have it figured out by now, and wouldn't be vulnerable to the whole "creating jobs" and "destroying jobs" fallacy. Or the claims that "this time it's different".
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.