What To Do After Robots Take Your Job

sarahnaomi writes In 2013, researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin School dropped the bombshell that 47 percent of US jobs were at risk of computerisation. Since then, they've made similar predictions for the UK, where they say 35 percent of jobs are at high risk. So what will our future economy look like? "My predictions have enormously high variance," Osborne told me when I asked if he was optimistic. "I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they're only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine."

In a new report produced as part of a programme supported by Citi, he and Frey outline how increased innovation—read: automation—could lead to stagnation.

Comments

Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[gurps_npc]

All it can do is change the work you do.

I am sick and tired of Luddites that claim robots will steal all the jobs.

Jobs are not a limited resource. Jobs are dependent on things we need to get done.

Once upon the time 100% of jobs were focused on getting food. Hunting and gathering became full time work when population was high. Once farming came around, it freed up some people to do other things. They did not suddenly become lazy do-nothing people. Instead they took up lower priority tasks, and turned them into full time jobs.

Things like clothing manufacturing, which used to be done in your spare time, turned into full industries. New products like shoes, alcohol, luxuries etc. were created.

The question is, are there still things we need to do, but have not been able to afford? The answer to that is YES. We have education, science, space exploration, green technologies, and a host of other things that we has decided would be nice, but we simply don't have the manpower to do.

We will not run out of jobs, instead we will do things that we can not even imagine today. Anymore than a hunter/gatherer could imagine someone would be paid to sell food at a basketball game.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Sir_Substance]

Jobs are not a limited resource. Jobs are dependent on things we need to get done.

Our capacity to get things done is increasing in leaps and bounds.

1 farmer today can do the work of a 20 farmers from 200 years ago. Yes, he does it using machines which took a thousand people to design and build, but those machines are made in one factory and used by 10 thousand farmers nationwide.

So 11,000 people today are doing the work of 200,000 from 200 years ago.

Our efficiency is going through the roof. We are already at the break even point in western nations. Unemployment rates are indicative of a society where there is less work than people. We could have everyone working two days a week. Yes that would introduce extra overheads, but we have the excess manpower to manage them, so why not?

This could be a cause for celebration, it's what mankind has always wanted, but here we are with people like you, who can't let go of the 40 hours work week, and you're pushing people into poverty because of it.

Madness.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MickyTheIdiot]

I agree with the basis of this argument in general, but as usual an entire group is forgotten.

We do have people who are not as smart as others. We have a very solid N% of people who will never be knowledge workers, who can't understand complex concepts, etc. In the US, with it's politics going out of control, we've also got a large group of smart people who won't make it because they won't have access to education they need (or the education becomes indoctrination and corporate training instead).

These people have to live somehow. Will we go the "Player Piano" route and guarantee a wage, or we will we go full GOP derp and just hope they die?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MickyTheIdiot]

Not to mention that the removal of the new deal and systematic attack on labor has made sure that the benefirts of that productivity has gone to mostly the top .01%.

George Jetson, on the famous cartoon show, used to complain how long the 3 day work weeks were! Everyone that put in work was supposed to benefit. It isn't working out that way.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

If we create true AI then most of the population will never be able to get a job of any number of hours because robots will be able to do any work they can do for a fraction of the price.

Robots don't need cars, houses, TVs, holidays etc.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

Will we go the "Player Piano" route and guarantee a wage, or we will we go full GOP derp and just hope they die?

We can learn something from both the liberal and conservative views. I'd like us to both guarantee a wage, and eliminate the minimum wage.

Let me explain. Minimum wage directly affects only those employers whose business model depends on low-wage, unskilled labor. But wages can be guaranteed directly by society (via government) instead. Take the following example:

You hire someone to take after-hours calls at home, jotting down any messages received. It's a part time job, about 10 hours per week, and typically about 2 or 3 calls an hour come in, and otherwise that employee can do whatever... watch TV, read a book, work on some other job, play games, whatever. You both agree $2/hour is an acceptable wage. But, with minimum wage laws, you're on the hook for $7.25/hour. You decide that is too expensive, and replace the employee with an answering machine. It's not your wish, after all the answering machine lacks true human feedback. And of course, the potential employee doesn't have any job or income. Sucks all around.

Now let's say we push the burden of guaranteed wage on society instead of the employer. Government writes that employee a check for $72.50 every week (10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage). The employee also gets $2/hour from the employer. Society gets what it wants by providing employment opportunities to everyone.

So if we are going to redistribute wealth, let's put that burden directly on society instead of placing it on markets and industries that thrive with unskilled labor.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Wycliffe]

Technology can NOT eliminate work. All it can do is change the work you do.

This only holds as long as someone is willing to give you food/money for your work.
The problem we're seeing today is that 90% of the stuff people want and need is produced by a handful of people.
Food is provided by just a few farmers. Software is written once by a handful of people and cloned millions of time.
Movies are created once and cloned millions of times. Millions of people all watch the same handful of ball players.
What happens when you have no useful skills to barter with because a robot can do the work cheaper?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[CaptainPinko]

Our society doesn't just need jobs, it needs predictable jobs. It needs jobs that a person of median intelligence and median means and median grades can work towards in highschool go to college for and the reasonably get hired at that gives them 40 hours a week of work for a decent wage to afford with a partner a house and two kids and then can expect to maintain that job/career roughly for their working life. That is the backbone of our society. Saying that there will be jobs is fine, but if those jobs boom and bust or require midlife retraining or insane amount of ours or risk, well that doesn't really help. The main point is what do we need to preserve our way of life, not just the jobs themselves. These are the kinds of jobs that made America the envy of those living under communism and brought it down. I would know since my parents under the cover of night smuggled themselves out from under the iron curtain. It was definitely not for the opportunity to participate in unbridled capitalism.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jythie]

Well, it is not that they lack the long term view, it is that their priorities put a heavier weight on the short term consequences since they are the ones being asked to bare it. Long term views are great when one is reaping the rewards or at least are not personally impacted all that much, but 'other people will be richer later' is not that big of a 'plus' for people who are becoming poorer in the now.

It is also worth noting that the 'new jobs opening up' tend to be in smaller numbers than the jobs closing down. So out of a displaced population, a few people will go on to do better, but the majority will have a lower quality of life even after things settle down. So they see the long term view, but it does not benefit them, and the people who it does benefit tend to have a bit of a blind spot in seeing outside their own class.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Maxo-Texas]

That's ignoring U6. A lot of people have dropped out of the workforce entirely because they couldn't find work at any wage.
If you use unemployment the way we used to use it before all the definitional changes, unemployment is holding steady at about 23%. By the same methodology, unemployment was 25% during the great depression.

Businesses are abusing labor. 200 people show up to apply for a job and the 1 who gets it has to work over 40 hours a week and on weekends.

The USA raised retirement age because it couldn't afford to continue to support age 65 without raising social security premiums (sad thing is that a mere 2% would have fixed it). The main result of that is a surge in disability claims as people hordes of people who are 60 and unable to work are going on disability instead. They are not really disabled so much as "too old to work long hours like a young person". That and massive age discrimination since the SCOTUS 2009 ruling that gutted protection from age discrimination.

If the government went back to enforcing a lower work week by removing exempt status for anyone who wasn't actually an owner or a supervisor who hires/fires/gives raises/can control working hours, unemployment would drop enormously and the abuse might stop.

Nothing to do

[Falos]

Look. Look there, at that guy. The young, healthy frycook.

Maybe he's heard that without exclusive skills, he'll end up in terrafoam someday, so he's decided to try and buy a ticket from the diploma printers, and trying to scrape together at least SOME of the gouging education costs (which have long since skyrocketed past "easily afforded with a 20h/wk part-time") rather than become another sucker hooked by the predatory student loan system.

Is there anything for this guy to do? We're already post-labor. We don't pay shit for "labor". There are no ditch diggers. Even those burgers he's flipping, he's only paid because he has the "skills" required for a warm body to deliver a result. The warm body itself is worthless.

Is there anything for this guy to do? He has a few options today, but the moment a robo-cook's cost ticks under his $8/hr or whatever? The existence of that job will evaporate. Globally. "Overnight", if you will.

Is there anything for this guy to do? There's a lot of naive posts saying "There will be jobs" with examples like fucking scientist. We have an ideal, motivated homo sapien right here, eager to work and rearing to go, and no robo-owner will look twice because nothing he does is worth money.

We're in tech, we've got some of the best tickets for The Ark, but we're not going to need ten billion robot repairmen.

I already solved this

[bluefoxlucid]

Amazon's automated warehouses become K-Mart's automated stock rooms. Check-out lines are replaced by assisted self-checkout, allowing one cashier to run 4-6 checkouts. Hamburger makers are replaced by hamburger making machines. Auto manufacturers use a fully machine-tooled line with only a few workers for final assembly. It's coming.

Our welfare system, in 2013, cost $1.62 trillion, of which $1.28 trillion was Federal spending. This is made up of Social Security Old-Age Pensions, Supplemental Disability Insurance, Food stamps, WIC, income security programs, unemployment, and the HUD direct housing voucher program. Just the Federal spending accounts for 37% of Federal spending, 46% of Federal taxes taken, and 55% of all Corporate and Individual income taxes taken at the Federal level.

If we drop the payroll OASDI tax and roll OASDI into general income, all income taxes increase by 9.34%. If we then slice those incomes by 55% and apply a 17.0% separate Dividend Tax on all currently-taxed Income, our tax brackets move from 16.2% on the lowest income earners and 39.6% on the highest income earners to 25.69% and 38.99%. Low-income earners around $9,000 income will take home $5000 more per year; middle-income earners at the $120,000 level will about break even; above that, it increases as high as a 3.17% take-home decrease around $400,000, again breaking even around exactly $2,000,000.

The base income tax system is progressive, and can be adjusted to smooth this out as appropriate; reducing the income taxes at the lowest level to around 0% would return the system to something resembling our current tax structure, with a 3% increase at the highest end. Considering this along with the above, the total taxes taken can raise from 16.2% to 17% on the most poor, and 39.6% to around 43% on the most rich. This compares favorably against current proposals to tax Millionaires and Billionaires at 45%, 50%, 60%, and 80%. Minimizing the taxes in the poor and middle-class ranges is a practical matter: it reduces their wage demand, reducing the cost of labor and slowing down all future transitions to new management strategies designed to reduce labor expenses; such management strategies have higher base cost, but lower labor utilization, and thus are cheaper only when labor is expensive or when the base costs factors of the new strategy have been refined into a significantly inexpensive form.

The 17% Dividend tax would be distributed among every natural-born, resident, American citizen over the age of 18. This specifically excludes the abuses of immigrants flooding to America to live on free Government money, and immigrants crossing the border illegally to birth an American citizen who then goes to live in Cuba or Mexico or wherever with a pension coming at age 18. It also excludes the abuse of welfare families popping out more babies to get at an additional per-child stipend by simply not providing one. The Dividend amounts to $6,558 in 2013; with the typical 3.4% total income growth per year, this amounts to $7,010 in 2015.

In 2013, a 750sqft apartment in a lower-class neighborhood rented for $725/mo, or $0.96 cents per square foot. Assuming an inflated $1.34/sqft, a 224sqft apartment could rent for $300. The model apartment houses a single adult individual and consists of a 6'x9' bedroom suitable to contain a twin bed and a small end-table dresser; a 10'x9' sitting room; a bathroom including a 3'x3' shower stall with corner sink basin and spigot mounted inside, totaling 20 sqft; and an 80sqft kitchen, one counter surface separating it from the sitting room to function as a prep surface and a dining table. These living arrangements provide an improvement over the standard soggy cardboard box inhabited by 600,000 of the United States's poor.

Assuming $300 for rent, out of the 2013 $546/mo, $246 remain. The cost of food is