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.

Comments

"It never happens".

[queazocotal]

'Playing Russian Roulette is perfectly safe, I've done five rounds so far'.

The jobs that went away in the past were the trivial ones, where you may literally have been able to replace a person with a transistor or automatic valve. (Elevator/lift operator).
There were plenty of newly available jobs for people of average skill to move into.

The game-changer today is not that any particular field is being automated, but that in many places, the robot is equal to 'the person of average skill'.
If all of the delivery, warehousing, farming, ... jobs go away, that is an enormous hollowing out, with masses out of work.
The new jobs may be around, but increasingly the new jobs leverage computers to solve with a team of 20 (that may get very rich) problems that used to take thousands of employees.

Re:"It never happens".

[rkordmaa]

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.

Re:"It never happens".

[jcr]

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

Re:"It never happens".

[MickyTheIdiot]

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.

Re:"It never happens".

[interkin3tic]

I suspect the finger pointing at "big government regulations" will dramatically increase as right-wing voters lose jobs. The writing on wall that the coal train isn't going to last forever has been there quite a while, and it's not rocket science that natural gas and automation are causing coal jobs to disappear, yet the useful idiot GOP voters of coal country are still convinced it was Obama deciding he didn't like white people.

Repealing protections will only make the situation worse, as will ripping up trade deals.

At some point, the right wing is going to decide that universal income totally fits into their ideology. To pay for it, we'll end social security, all federal funding will be distributed as block grants and left up to the states to allocate to universal incomes as needed, which will in most red states to be tax cuts to the wealthy. Kansas may be spared this as they seem to have already realized again reganomics don't work.

Re:"It never happens".

[queazocotal]

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.

Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[DumbSwede]

As they say in the stockmarket:

Past Performance Is Not An Indicator Of Future Results

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?

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[bluefoxlucid]

Past performance is an indicator of future results. The problem is people interpret results poorly.

I keep repeating this: technical progress increases wealth by reducing costs. Costs are ultimately wage-labor. There's one sustainable way to reduce cost: reduce the wage-hours invested in producing a thing.

Each technical improvement first eliminates some jobs. That gives you transitional unemployment. Lower costs mean lower viable prices, which draws luxury goods down into wider markets: it costs little enough for you to target 100,000,000 middle-class consumers instead of 1,000,000 upper-class consumers, you can price it low enough to target a bigger market. That means either current producers or new competitors will try to take the market and make a bigger profit by lowering prices.

Once prices are sufficiently-low, a good is just a consumer good. Everyone has smart phones now--even poor people--so we compete on price at the bottom and on the spread of prestige across income classes. We have economy cars and luxury cars. The lower-class goods have slimmer margins to try to capture the wider market; as costs come down, we start packing more features into these goods, reducing their price, or both.

So, what happens with those lost jobs?

More features means applying more labor. If you cut costs and then increase features rather than lowering price at a certain market level, then you've invested your displaced labor into producing more stuff--each of those new feature components requires labor, and you shift it from the now-cheaper components to the previously-not-incorporated components.

If you're not boosting features, then you're competing on price to capture those low-end markets. Prices come down in terms of labor-hours--that is to say, prices increase more-slowly than wages for non-changing goods as those goods become cheaper to make. The most extreme form of this is prices decreasing.

Examples?

Cars and phones pack more features into roughly the same price or the same proportion of spending (people tend to expend the same percentage of their income on cars; phones tend to keep at the $350, $500, or $900 price points and pack features, rather than inflating). Hard drives and SSDs tend to fall in price per gigabyte; we see hard drives in particular shipping ~$100 units that keep increasing in capacity (500GB a decade and some ago, several TB today).

Food and clothing increase in dollar-price, but more-slowly than inflation (median household expends 33% of its spending on food in 1950, 12.5% today; 12% on clothing in 1950, 3% today).

New technologies outright fall. Cell phones were available for $4,000 in 1983; small hard drives used to cost hundreds of dollars; and new types of display panels come out at multi-thousand-dollar price ranges for a given size and then fall to a few hundred. SSDs also generally sell by size, and so the 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB models keep falling in price, instead of simply changing the available capacities at a price point as with hard drives.

When the proportion of spending on the same goods falls, consumers have more money. They spend that money on new goods. That requires shipping, retail, and other logistics, all domestic; it also requires manufacture or service provision, which may be domestic or import. This is where new jobs are created.

Caveat: Transitional unemployment means exactly what it says. You eliminate jobs with technology, you need to wait a while for the markets to move around and create new jobs. There aren't new jobs waiting for these people; if there were, we wouldn't have 5% unemployment.

That means, yes, technology eliminates jobs; and, yes, technology creates new jobs. They're in proportion, and there's a lag between them. Both sides are arguing from one absolute, and so both sides are wrong; both sides also typically make ludicrous assertions, like the job-creation assertion that 1 human is replaced with 1 machine

Re:It's already happened

[liquid_schwartz]

Also, everything he described was infrastructure bought and paid for by tax dollars. Folks don't want to pay those taxes anymore and the infrastructure spending has more or less stopped. The build out of suburban America was financed by tax payers. They paid to pave the roads, run electricity, phone & internet, etc ,etc. They're done. They don't want to pay anymore.

As near as I can tell my taxes haven't fallen much. What has changed is that taxes on the 1% have fallen dramatically due to tax cutting, shifting things to capital gains, tax shelters, and keeping money overseas. What has also changed is that a dramatic drop in the middle class has meant that less taxes are paid by many people as they simply make less. If a greater share of the total income was taxed at middle class rates it would be a windfall for government coffers.

Marc Andreessen

[Pfhorrest]

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.

Re:It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it.

[boneglorious]

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.

Re:It's already happened

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re: It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it

[boneglorious]

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.