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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."
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.
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.
Its not about the Jobs, I would be glad without a Job - I just need the money. Why? Because I have to pay someone to do things I cant/wont.
But if its robots all the way down, who should I pay? The man who owns the robot? Well I would but I have no job. So we can all agree that we have all things for free since robots made them and the robots get all the stuff to make robots and so on (robots all the way down) or we have to create bullshit jobs no one needs to distribute the money, till someone finds out that we don't have to if we just give things away for free because there is no one who needs to work anyhow.
We must find an efficient way to destroy this human surplus (families included) in short order.
Be part of the solution then. Jump off of a bridge.
The only reason the robot exists, is because the man who owns it paid someone to build it for him, or if he built it himself, paid someone for the components. He would only do this if he expects a return on his investment. I assume, that for him, a robot would be cheaper than paying for a human to do the work. So, he would be able to make more profit. > So we can all agree that we have all things for free since robots made them No, the man who owns the bot wont let that happen. >or we have to create bullshit jobs no one needs to distribute the money No one is going to pay anyone for doing a bullshit jobs. The only way out of this problem, is if everyone gets paid a Basic Income by the government. Money for nothing. Its inevitable this will have to happen.
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)..
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?
And chicks for free?
I know you are being tongue and cheek, but very recent history is starting to show companies can make plenty of money just catering to the upper middle class. The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population (46.3% of households with iPads have income over $100k). While rapid economic growth does need a sizable consumer class, I don't believe it necessarily needs a robust middle class. A much smaller but still sizable upper middle class will probably do just as well.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
I agree, it only makes sense.
Somewhat later they'll put up insurance for human drivers.
This makes not sense at all. Why would they increase insurance for humans? Do you think humans will become more dangerous and reckless than they are now? Just because there are more self driving cars on the road? I completely disagree. I'd think that humans will be less prone to getting into accidents precisely because they'll be surrounded by more self driving cars, which are more predictable, better able to avoid accidents caused by another party, and won't give people road rage by acting like jerks.
Then after that some companies will refuse insurance for any manually driven car. Then they all will.
What's the logic behind that? Insurance companies refusing to insurance which is profitable for them?
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.
Here you're starting to make sense again. Conclusion seems straightforward - if the self driving cars are more efficient, less accident prone and faster than human driven cars, then as a society, we would prefer a fully automated transportation system. Remember that for the vast majority of us, going from point A to point B is a chore. We just want to get to point B as soon and as hassle-free as possible.
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.
Sure, no surprise, there are people who like sailing, walking, riding the high wheel, why wouldn't some people like driving? The question is would you still drive if you have a faster and less stressful, even maybe a more productive way of getting to point B? Moreover, you probably like driving because you've been doing it for a long time and you grew up in a culture that does it a lot. In a few decades, people will be growing up with self driving cars all around them. Actually driving will be an activity practiced by few. It might even become a hipster thing.
As fas as building AI goes, this famous quote is very valid - just because they can doesn't mean they should.
I find that quote meaningless. X doesn't imply Y is one of the weakest and least informative relationships.
Note. I do like to drive.
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.
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.
Why are you encouraging water pollution? That is part of the problem.
Economists are finally getting concerned because AI can replace them.
when robots came for maids,i didn't cry out as I wasn't a maid
when robots came for factory workers, i didn't cry out as I wasn't a factory worker.
When computers came for book keepers, i didn't cry out as I wasn't a book keeper
now the machines are replacing politicians and lawyers and I cry all the time but no one tries to help me.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
Maybe after the eugenic wars.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
It's not clear that Apple could survive in isolation. A lot of their components are only as cheap as they are because of other lower-margin companies paying a big chunk of the R&D costs. When Apple was using PowerPC processors and were the only customer for IBM or Motorola for a particular chip, they found it very difficult to compete. They're designing their own ARM cores now, but they're benefitting enormously from the thriving ARM software ecosystem.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
...very recent history is starting to show companies can make plenty of money just catering to the upper middle class...
It always was ever thus. Companies like Rolls Royce, Gucci and most of the retailers in the West End of London make money only from the affluent. The same could be said for owners of cruise liners, managers of hunting estates and wealth fund managers. In fact, most of the economy works by supplying goods and services to the rich.
On the other hand, many people make a living from the poor. Developers of social housing, discount retailers and energy companies are just a few examples of very large businesses that make a tidy living from selling stuff to people who are lower down the income scale.
In fact, we may be experiencing this trend right now. Economic growth is not needed anymore by the elites to increase their wellbeing, where it used to be neccesary.
The elites used to need an army of servants to clean their clothes, cooke their food, keep their houses, drive them around, manage their wealth and most of all, work on their factories... This is all being automated, and the new luxury is not based on people laboring for the elite, but on technology and resources available to the elite. The fact that labor was needed, and the unionization of workers, forced some redistribution of wealth during the past century. But it may be that in the history of humanity the past century is an exception and the "natural" state of society is to have a higher concentration of wealth than what we had in the sixties.
This would allow the elites to escape the general economy. They will build their luxury cars on automated factories, clean their houses with robots, be driven by robots (when they feel like not driving), manage their wealth with software and highly automated consultancy, shop on the internet... so what it matters that the economy is contracting as long as the luxury part of the economy grows? they don't need the goods made by the general economy as much as they used to. They will only need the highly skilled workers that produce new technologies, lay out new automated factories, build new medical procedures, manage their wealth, entertain them and teach their children.
They can be wealthy without having to spend a dime on other people, just on technology. This leaves the door open to a split in society where the wealthy people achieves "escape velocity" and they become a different class, or even a different species. The can manage the underclasses with the very powerful media and manipulation tools they have. They have all of the details about each one of us and the analytical tools to process them so they will be able to find the soft spots that can be used to convince a statistically sufficient part of the rest of us that "this is the only way it can be".
And we may be seing the beginning of this already...
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
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...
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..
My Uncle has a country place that no one knows about / he says it used to be a farm, before the motor law.......
Silence is a state of mime.
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."
"you don't want to destroy the redundant people, they're what really makes your economy."
Please, apply a bit more of imagination.
*Current* economy, not much more than a century old (since Henry Ford, to put an obvious time tag) is based on a middle class buying production.
But for basically all history, wealth distribution has managed to work on a basis of a very short affluent/powerful class with a majority of peasants/slaves/outclassed. Maybe the 20th century has just been an exception along history and we are just returning to the standard trend.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
I'm a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher, and I have zero confidence that AI is much more capable of replacing human labor this year than it was 5 years ago.
The economy is in the toilet, but it's not because computers are taking people's jobs. If AI were progressing to a point where it could replace human labor, the cost of production would plummet and those of us who are working would have very low-cost consumer goods. Trust me, we will be happy for every advancement that AI and robotics brings us.
Think again digital janitor scum.
Sincerely,
The 1%
And if they'd gotten their way, the "norm" for industrialized societies today would be 12 hour workdays, six days a week, and a standard of living comparable to the better sort of Third World country....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
If it was really destroying the most redundant and ineffective people, then why is it not destroying upper and middle management? They are the most worthless parts of any company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"... 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.
"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
I believe you would have extremely cheap goods except that various governments are taking and wasting unprecedented amounts of wealth. If I were wearing my foil hat I would say this is deliberate.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
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.
In the USA there are only 2 cities with "perfectly good" public transportation. NYC and Chicago. Everywhere else it's a steaming pile of poop. Why do we have people driving everywhere? Because we have to, there are no other options.
I will be driving from Chicago to Florida in 2 weeks. Why? because it's dramatically cheaper than Flying or taking the train. In fact taking the train from Chicago to Tampa is a 4 day ride that goes from chicago to WashingtonDC on down, and it's $450 per person plus $30 per bag. WTF is that?
Public transportation in the USA is a complete and utter joke.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of economists could be replaced by the dice in a standard d20 system, so the fear isn't without a basis.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Also the fault of scumbag business owners. Sorry but no you are not entitled to making obscene amounts of money, you are REQUIRED to pay an honest wage for an honest days work, and if benefits are part of HONEST pay then you are dishonest by avoiding it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Thanks for responding to his trollish comment on immigrants. I have a graduate degree and a six figure income, but most of my caucasian ancestors arrived on American shores illiterate and penniless and worked for coal barons.
The whole idea that there's mass laziness to blame is a convenient excuse for cutting social services. There are millions of people who would trade a limb for a $12 per hour job and medical benefits, and who are tireless and driven in their work habits. The jobs just aren't there. My dad just got back to work after six months unemployed. He kept a spreadsheet of all of the places he applied at and where he was in the interview process. He got into the low 400s before he got a job offer - which he took.
Welcome to Star Trek's Earth in the Federation of Planets? Free to instead pursue whatever hobby or interest we so choose?
Sure, you're free to do whatever you like for as long as you like! As long as it doesn't require any money, food, or shelter.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
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.
And they're outnumbered 99 to 1.
This is the kind of thing that causes revolution.
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"
Most iPhone users only have an income of >25k, Since the US median is 60k, that means that the iPhone is sold to basically everyone.
Most iPhone users having over 25k income does not specify how many are in the 25k-60k range. Your source was using those numbers to show that more iPods than iPhones are owned by families with under 25k income. It wasn't saying that a significant number of iPhone owners are poor.
Also, I would assume more iPhones are owned by lower class families than iPads, since the total cost is amortized within their phone bill.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
This is what a universal basic income or citizen's dividend is for. Consumers are the big movers in economy, and producers are the big makers; a portion of all income (individual and corporate) is taken and divided up among everyone (for some definition of "everyone"), stabilizing the bottom.
Imagine if all the homeless and unemployed had a fixed amount of income. Maybe $500-$600/mo. At $1.33/sqft (significantly more than I last rented), a livable microunit housing for a single individual would leave just barely enough for food, utilities, clothing, etc. Just barely. I think I have $50 of leeway in there at 17% of corporate and individual income (eliminating about half of taxes, including OASDI payroll tax, and applying a 17% flat to replace it). Right now, they have nothing, so can't buy anything; in this scenario, they have just enough to buy what they need to live.
This hypothetical creates an enormous market: if you fall to the bottom and lose everything, you still have the shirt on your back, enough money for a new shirt, and enough to rent a sardine can to live in (224sqft microunit; I may be able to get fancy without appreciably increasing costs, too...). Businesses can profit off this, while the mental and physical health problems of being homeless and hungry--starvation, unsanitary conditions, etc.--are lifted off the back of society.
On top of that, producers who fully automate are collecting profits. Automation reduces labor: it costs less to maintain a robot because it takes a collective 10,000 man-hours to produce a robot and 1,000 man-hours per year to fuel and maintain it (including mining fuel, refining fuel, shipping fuel, generating power, transmitting power, maintaining the power infrastructure, mining all the steel for the robot parts, refining steel, shaping steel, and sending maintenance people), but the robot does 50,000 man-hours of work in 10 years. 20,000 is less than 50,000, so that's 40% as many employment hours--40% as many jobs, if you will--for the same useful production.
This labor reduction by efficiency improvements includes far more than automation; for example, Toyota saved 45 seconds from a 65-second process building seats by using a shorter hose (raises the steam temperature) and installing the bolts in a different order (easier, faster access by the tech, who installs bolts and then steams the seats to drive out volatile manufacture chemicals). Many such optimizations allow the same humans to use the same tools to build the same things, but in 80% of the time overall, or 60%, or 40%; thus you only need half as many humans to build as many things in as much time.
The reduction of laborers and the increase in productive output means goods can come cheaper, but consumers are poorer. Fewer consumers exist. A citizen's dividend doesn't free us from work; it leaves us poor, but alive. It frees us from the terrible economic crash that comes when new management styles and processes. We will always find new use for laborers; but this comes after we put laborers out of jobs for a good while, and in the process destroy the labor force. Providing some return to the consumers for being consumes is, thus, advantageous to businesses: it provides them target markets to invest in, avoiding the economic problems of making higher-end goods for the working class which has just become the unemployed, and suddenly not having anyone to sell anything to.
A universal basic income, or a Citizen's Dividend in particular, is the solution to this conundrum. Universal vocational education--that is, college education--touted as a solution, is an exacerbating problem: laborers pay higher taxes or take on enormous debt to flood the market with cheap, skilled labor, giving employers the advantage of lower salaries as unemployment for a skilled labor class increases. Welfare, as a qualified service, takes on more operating cost as more people collect; while a universal income always pays at 100%, and is thus immune to the fluctuations of economy.
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So, it's cheaper than human labor.
Low-precision human labor means throwing out parts that don't pass QA. If they're from raw steel, you have to expend more energy (cost) to remelt them again and again. The same goes for higher quality and consistency--which is precision, anyway; quality is the degree to which a deliverable satisfies requirements, and high quality is satisfying those requirements in the cheapest and most effective way. This includes opportunity requirements--that a result 20% more expensive is of attributes which make another, expressly-desirable but not necessarily required venture 50% cheaper--so you may elect to make something of higher grade than necessary for Project A because it reduces the aggregate cost of Project A and Project B. If not, making the thing of higher grade is gold plating: it's a waste of money and does nothing useful.
Safety is a cost factor. People will sue you, or you will need to pay to retrain lost workers. Either way, this costs money; it may happen infrequently enough that solving the safety issue is more expensive.
A task not directly possible with human labor can be done in another way for high expense (lots of labor), or can take too long (missed opportunity), or is a missed opportunity by being not humanly possible (lost profit). All of these cost money.
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Actually, if you can get everyone a barely survivable standard of living by default, you can repeal minimum wage. Minimum wage gives a standard of fairness to cite in negotiation; when people can survive just fine without it--albeit, not comfortably--they will look at wages and only accept wages high enough to improve their quality of life, discounting the cost of having to work. That includes the time sink (40 hours/week is a lot of time compared to not working) and the personal irritation (cashier in an air-conditioned K-Mart is worth a lot less money than hauling bricks and shoveling shit in the hot sun).
In these conditions, a minimum wage is a figure to show a standard of fairness: these laborers want $10.15/hr, but the Government says these unskilled jobs are worth $7.25/hr; more laborers will accept $7.25/hr, and those who won't will accept considerably lower wages than they would usually demand, because they're aware they're making unusual demands above the established baseline of fairness. Without a published minimum wage, the baseline of fairness is whatever each party envisions when coming to the table; the employer and employee both think each are being unreasonable, and only begrudgingly compromise to the whims of the person across the table. You will compromise less toward the solution offered by some asshole who doesn't want to pay you than you will toward the solution published as known-fair.
The key to this is you don't need a job: welfare doesn't run out, and welfare is always there, and welfare is there to ensure your survival. Today, welfare doesn't do that; you need a job, you are desperate, and so you will take unreasonably low wages just to have something to stave off death. Minimum wage is needed when the employee is at such a disadvantage; but put the employee at advantage, and minimum wage supports the employer instead.
So if those who work get more than those who don't work, but those who don't work survive, you get a lot of power into the hands of the laborer. Currently, the laborer is threatened by death for unwork.
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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.
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.
Why should I? I'm not among the soon-to-be displaced. By birth and by personal merit I belong to the upper tier of society: the one that cannot be replaced and that stands to gain the most from complete automation. We can finally have a true leisure society, for those who have managed to place themselves in the right circles of course. Too bad for you wage slaves.
This is why we need a wealth tax.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I dont drive a super sized hummer, I drive a civic. Operating expenses for a civic are $0.12 (my real expenses as calculated over the past 4 years of ownership I average 44mpg on the highway at 75mph)
$273.60 there and back for 3 people plus all the luggage I can fit in the trunk. That is the real cost and is dead close as I have made this same run 4 times.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Posting anonymously removes your credibility as an expert in the field unless your post contains internal evidence justifying this. Yours didn't.
Most jobs don't require all that much intelligence. Many jobs have (and are being) intentionally redesigned to deskill them. This allows wages to be cut, as it's easier to replace the employees.
Much of this is political decision, but they are political decisions enabled by advancing technologies, including AI. A scanner that can recognize the price of an item whatever orientation it is presented with that item in is more intelligent than one that can't. This is true even if part of the intelligence resides in the design of the system (bar codes).
Automated warehouses wouldn't be being built if they weren't cheaper to operate than manned warehouses. They are being built. Therefore the jobs that they would have provided had they not been automated have been removed from the system. This requires approaches that in even the 1990's would have been called AI, but which aren't called that any more.
This is still the leading edge. Google's automated car isn't up to city streets, but it can remove a lot of jobs without having that kind of general capacity. And it will be (is being) improved. Still, even at its current state of development it is quite capable of being extremely useful in many situations. And in those situations it will be removing jobs because if it didn't, it wouldn't be used. It will only be used where it cuts costs, which means removing enough jobs that it pays for not hiring the drivers.
The question then becomes "What new jobs are created by the removal of the existing jobs?" And the answer appears to be "only a few, and those highly skilled". The last time this kind of thing happened nearly an entire generation of horses got turned into dog and cat food. This time it's not horses being put out of work.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But capitalism *is* the problem: current cronyism/corporatism/fascism seems to be an unavoidable outcome of capitalism
Why? Because you say so? Or because you've seen it *sometimes* happen? I can certainly see that it's happened, but claiming it's an "unavoidable outcome" is simply an assertion without support. In fact, it seems to be a false one, since capitalistic markets have existing in many places throughout history without those issues surfacing.
just as tiranny seems to be an unavoidable outcome of comunism.
Communism doesn't necessarily require an oppressive authority, that's just how it's usually implemented. In small groups, it works very well without a powerful leadership involved, but in large groups it becomes difficult to enforce the required contributions because of the complexity of the matrices of so many relationships. Communism should not require exchanging of tokens for resources, but "Communist" governments never seem to be able to eliminate it.
Maybe your "pure" capitalism is free of those problems, but then comunism is also problem-free... in theory.
Nothing is free of problems when it involves humans. Free market capitalism, however, has the best historical track record for improving living conditions. The biggest problem with it in the US today, IMHO, is the ability to buy and sell representatives and administrators. These people are not supposed be commodities, they are supposed to regulate the markets just enough to maintain a competitive environment in which consumers retain power over the producers. I don't think there is an easy answer to that problem, especially with such a large proportion of the population uninvolved and susceptible to marketing.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia