Slashdot Mirror
Bank of England's Andy Haldane Warns Smart Machines Could Take 15M UK Jobs (robotenomics.com)
New submitter Colin Robotenomics writes In an important new paper based on a speech at the trade union congress in London, Andy Haldane Chief Economist at the Bank of England and Executive Director of Monetary Analysis and Statistics has examined the history of technological unemployment and has given a thorough review of the literature and implications for public policy. The media will likely focus on the number of jobs that can be displaced and not necessarily Haldane's points on new jobs being created – both of which are highly important as is 'skilling-up'. His report reads in part: "...Taking the probabilities of automation, and multiplying them by the numbers employed, gives a broad brush estimate of the number of jobs potentially automatable. For the UK, that would suggest up to 15 million jobs could be at risk of automation. In the US, the corresponding figure would be 80 million jobs."
That's what a lot of people don't understand. 15 million people not having to do tedious mindnumbing work that can be replaced by a machine is a GOOD thing. The fact that this is seen as bad news is proof of our disfunctional society and economical model. The day basic income comes in together with a reform of our economy, is the day automation will truely be embraced as it should.
In Capitalist US, the commerce controls the Government.
15M UK people could do something else. The world fails to end.
If this bank doesn't help them find some work, there's going to be hell to raise, especially when 15 million people is about a quarter of the entire UK's population. If a fourth of the US was layed off, do you think that would end peacefully?
Automation makes sense when the job is dangerous or risky to humans, or requires extreme precision. Replacing everything with automated machines for profit gains makes it hard for low end jobs to exist, and thus for low end workers to be employed. We have here a very large mass of people who feel hopeless and have nothing to lose. We also have a very large resentment towards the upper class and a weak middle class. History has presented us this situation before, and I encourage you to research what happened then.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
The example I keep seeing used is self-driving vehicles, particularly trucks.
They've already proved themselves in mining contexts - they use less fuel, wear their tyres less, less maintenance, downtime, and of course, no wages to be paid.
People are falling over themselves to get them approved for road use. Truck driver is 3.5M jobs in the USA. There are about 285,000 HGV drivers in the UK.
The trend is already that middle class jobs are being eroded and replaced with low waged work. Truck driver is unglamorous but they probably count as middle class guys with the wages they get.
What jobs are we going to find for truck drivers? They're not all going to train up to be robot-truck mechanics (as above, robot trucks are pretty much existing trucks with a few extra sensors and something wired to the power steering etc - and require less maintenance). You'll have all those middle-class people with a lower disposable income, so the market for services and consumer goods will shrink, so what industry will expand or arise to employ them?
Tech changes that increase production, expand wealth and (eventually) the job market. Spinning Jenny and her ilk turned cotton shirts from a luxury into a mass-market commodity.
Tech changes that just do existing work with less human labour do not expand wealth. The automated trucks drivers, administrative assistants, warehouse pickers, burger flippers, etc, etc, that are coming down the pipe do not increase demand - if anything, they decrease it, by reducing the amount of wages entering the economy.
In Bertrand Russell's example, no one of the needle workers actually strives to improve his skills. But instead, the companies replace the old needle manufacturing equipment with new ones which doubles the productivity of their workers, and all of the workers get retrained for the new process. So yes, the inventor of the Improved Needle And Pin Machine gets his share, as he has outfitted all needle manufactures with his new invention. But the global market for needles does not increase, as needles are totally cheap already. A lower price for needles does not increase demand. So what we have now is companies with 100 percent surplus manufacturing capacities competing in a tight market, and half of them will get bankrupt in the process (it may be purely random which one get hit), until the manufacturing capacity for needles fits the demand again. It means half of the workforce will be out of a job, even if they don't differ in any way from the part of the workforce, that is still employed.
So contrary to your hypothesis, it's not the individual strive or laziness that made the difference between unemployed and employed needle workers. It's pure random chance. They all trained for the new manufacturing process, they are all equally skilled. But they were just to many, if they kept their working schedule.
All labor can be automated given enough time. The solution is not to require labor to survive. Star Trek economy is the eventual end-state of where we're going.
The question isn't what we do when we get to the Star Trek post scarcity economy. The question is more what we do in the between period, because what we're approaching now isn't post scarcity, but rather, an economy where the marginal value of low skill human labor is so low that it's practically worthless for most purposes, and certainly is far below what it would take to maintain a single person at poverty level subsistence.
What we'll need to do is move to a guaranteed basic income. If robots do most of the industrial labor, then we tax that productivity instead of human wages. Give money to people who will spend it on food/clothing/etc, thus maintaining a demand for the goods the robots make (since in a market, you need both supply and demand, otherwise things start going bad quickly on a macro level). Eliminate the minimum wage, since everyone earns enough to live on, and let market forces freely set the value of human labor. $2 an hour is pocket change, but that's really all I'd need it for at that point. You wouldn't need welfare or such, since the minimum income covers it - and it's fair, because everyone gets it. If you make more money, you just add it on top of that - so instead of making $100k, you might earn $80k salary, but get your $20k basic too.