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Self-Driving Cars Will Boost the Job Market, Says Marc Andreessen (recode.net)
A future with self-driving cars has induced a lot of anxiety about a resulting loss of jobs, but in fact, they'll create tons more jobs, Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen (Wikipedia) said at Recode's annual conference on Tuesday evening. "The jobs crisis we have in the U.S. is that we don't have enough workers," he said. From a report: "It's a fallacy," Andreessen said (specifically citing the lump of labor fallacy and the luddite fallacy). "It's a recurring panic. This happens every 25 or 50 years, people get all amped up about 'machines are going to take all the jobs' and it never happens." Andreessen used the example of the rise of the automobile industry a century ago, which many thought would cost the livelihood of everyone whose jobs were to take care of horses. But "the car then created not only a lot of jobs creating cars" but everything else that happened because of the car: Paved streets, restaurants, motels, movie theaters, apartment complexes, office complexes, the entire buildout of suburban America, etc. "The jobs that were created by the automobile on the second, third, and fourth order effects were 100X, 1000X the number of jobs that blacksmiths had," he said.
As they say in the stockmarket:
Educating our general populace to a higher degree will help, but at some point the knowledge curve will be too steep for most people to get educated enough to get a job that really adds to production. There will be jobs gains for sure from new and novel activities, but I'm willing to bet starting in 5-10 years job destruction will far outpace job creation. You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?
Letter To Iran
So what if it does happen, what are we supposed to do, tremble in fear and stop advancing as a human race? Halt the march of progress in technology, stay stuck exactly where we are? Sod that! If it happens, it happens, humankind will adapt and continue on harder, better, faster, stronger.
No, but we need to do better than the Right's drumbeat of "only the lazy don't have jobs". If we continue to worship corporatism and capitalism we could end up with large numbers people starving because they aren't capable of getting the education and skills they need to get a job. That's a significant number of people.
The jobs that went away in the past were the trivial ones
At the turn of the century in 1900, 80% of Americans worked on farms. Today, it's around 4%. This did not result in 76% unemployment, you dolt.
What it did was drastically cut the cost of food, and make labor available for new jobs, which nobody could have predicted at the time. Robotic cars and trucks are going to drastically reduce the cost of transportation, and once again people will take up new employment in new fields, and our overall standard of living will increase.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Point missed. What jobs will it make the labor available for? High-end jobs only this time. One of the saving graces of the industrial revolution is that it required more warm bodies than it required skilled labor.
And even if everyone can be an engineer or a programmer - that doesn't help.
Look at for example amazon warehouses.
The algorithms that drive the robots in the warehouse are not going to be done on a local warehouse level, but programmed globally, running on one of a few different platforms.
You can have a smart algorithm that drives robots around, and another smart algorithm that knows how to pack boxes, and suddenly a team of a few dozen has removed the need for many thousands.
Similar or worse gearings happen - facebook, for example has likely killed way more media jobs indirectly simply by taking screen-time away from the media sources, with very few employees.
Apps aren't much help - everyone has 24h a day, and their screen time is monopolised by a handful of apps. The remainder of the market is not significant.
Even if everyone was to become skilled enough for the 'new' jobs that are displacing the old, it doesn't help much, as there are so many fewer of them.
We need to somehow fundamentally re-engineer what 'work' is and how it's paid - the alternatives are very, very bad.
I find it weird that Marc is described simply as a "Silicon Valley investor", like he's just one of innumerable rich people interested in tech, instead of describing him as the founder of Netscape, who first brought web browsers to the masses, which seems like the much bigger deal if you're going to say who he is and why anyone should care about his opinions.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What UBI assumes is that:
1) All members of society should share in productivity gains.
2) Working for someone else isn't the only way of being productive.
3) Money isn't the only --- or the best --- way of attaining status or self-worth.
4) Most humans have a desire to be productive in some way, and that desire can best be fulfilled in a self-directed manner.
5) There's plenty of fulfilling work available, even if that's just participating in vibrant relationships and communities and taking care of our homes and our hobbies; we don't have to make work as if we were in 2nd grade and the teacher needed a break so he or she gives us those busy-work assignments most of us hated.
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
Yet they *still* pay approx half the taxes in the US....so, you're saying they should pay 3/4 of all taxes...or maybe all of them?
If they are receiving 95% of the benefit, they should pay 95% of the taxes. We can argue about what percentage of the benefit they are deriving now, but if you measure it in dollars, it's way over 3/4 of the total. Also, if you accept the argument that forcing people to pay taxes on necessities is slavery, then it's obvious that a whole lot of people should pay no taxes at all. If the super-wealthy want the rest of us to shoulder more of the tax burden, then they can share more of the profits. If they don't want to share with us at all, then they're going to have to exterminate us, but a) that may turn out to be harder than they expect and b) if you eliminate all the weirdos then you eliminate all the culture and then you will have to create more weirdos, it's much more efficient to learn to live with them instead.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The few who control the wealth right now already DO see low-wage workers as resource leeches, and they've pulled the wool over the eyes of most other people. That's an attitude that has to change. The attitude is the bug of the current economy.
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?