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Instead of Slowing Down Innovation To Protect Few People, Policymakers Should Focus On Helping Displaced Workers Transition Into New Jobs, ITIF Suggests (itif.org)
A recently published report by Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) argues that rather than slow
down change to protect a small number of workers at the expense of the vast majority, policymakers should focus on doing significantly more to help workers transition easily into new jobs and new occupations [PDF]. From a report: There has been growing speculation that a coming wave of innovation -- indeed, a tsunami -- powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, will disrupt labor markets, generate mass unemployment, and shift the few jobs that remain into the insecure "gig economy." Kneejerk "solutions" from such technology Cassandras include ideas like taxing "robots" and implementing universal basic income for everyone, employed or not. The first would slow needed productivity growth, employed or not; the second would reduce worker opportunity.
The truth is these technologies will provide a desperately needed boost to productivity and wages, but that does not mean no one will be hurt. There are always winners and losers in major economic transitions. But rather than slow down change to protect a modest number of workers at the expense of the vast majority, policymakers should focus on doing significantly more to help those who are dislocated transition easily into new jobs and new occupations. Improving policies to help workers navigate what is likely to be a more turbulent labor market is not something that should be done just out of fairness, although it is certainly fair to help workers who are either hurt by change or at risk of being hurt. But absent better labor market transition policies, there is a real risk that public and elite sentiment will turn staunchly against technological change, seeing it as fundamentally destructive and unfair.
The truth is these technologies will provide a desperately needed boost to productivity and wages, but that does not mean no one will be hurt. There are always winners and losers in major economic transitions. But rather than slow down change to protect a modest number of workers at the expense of the vast majority, policymakers should focus on doing significantly more to help those who are dislocated transition easily into new jobs and new occupations. Improving policies to help workers navigate what is likely to be a more turbulent labor market is not something that should be done just out of fairness, although it is certainly fair to help workers who are either hurt by change or at risk of being hurt. But absent better labor market transition policies, there is a real risk that public and elite sentiment will turn staunchly against technological change, seeing it as fundamentally destructive and unfair.
Not everyone will be able to do these new jobs. I would wager (ha!) most can't; otherwise, they would already be doing it.
Would these be the same policymakers that have been pushing students to go into STEM for the last several years? Or the same policymakers that were telling all the laid off machinists, welders & tool and dye makers to study computer science? I had several of those students in my classes, and they struggled because really had no interest in studying computer science. Most of them hadn't been in school for over a decade. They were there so they could get their "No worker left behind" money. I remember running into one of my former students a couple of weeks after he graduated & asked him how his job search was going. He told me he got hired at a new welding job for $13 an hour. He seemed pretty content.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Maybe we should just accept that not everyone is going to be suited to living in an advanced technological civilization, and figure out how to keep them from fucking it up for the people who are.
Human beings are evolved from animals. And most human beings still are animals. Inclusivity is going to be the death of us.
And who's gonna pay for those transitions/relocations/policies? I say the disruptors aka the robots.
So what does a policy perceived as 'slowing down innovation' have to do with helping workers find new jobs? Lets not conflate things unnecessarily. If we want policy that helps displaced workers, then propose how that looks and put if forth. If you tie it to changing unrelated policy, or play partisan politics with it, you'll doom it for certain.
It's the old retraining fairy tale. One, it assumes anyone can be retrained for anything. And for another, it assumes that there is a demand for workers - or enough of one for all the displaced workers from other fields.
And it also assumes that employers would even want those people.
Who do you think employers would prefer? The retrained old fart or the 20-something new grad?
and find AI bots crawling up my leg??? What's the *real* agenda behind telling everyone how the AI bots are going to kill all the jobs when I can't find an AI to do my effing household chores, or drive me somewhere, or cook a meal for me??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The major economic transition was moving jobs to China.
That change let US money move from normal nations to Communist China.
When workers in China get to expensive try Indonesia, Laos.
At some point robots in very low wage nations become the new way to ensure quality and a good return for the shareholders and owners.
The jobs went in the 1970's and 1980's. The robots and AI are just going to make lower cost production lines in a few very low cost nations.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Become a resource for silent green manufacturing. Or for fertilizer.
The sad truth is - we have way more people on this planet than the sociality owners (the 1%ers) need, and also way more than the planet can support sustainably the the rate of turnover of natural resources. An idealistic Starterk like society where everyone is equal and provided for does not need more than 250k people.
The root of our problems is that policy makers are not equipped to do their jobs effectively.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So, in this postulated future, we have general purpose AI and highly advanced robotics.
What, exactly, do all those humans transition to?
The agricultural revolution greatly reduced the number of people working in the fields. Those people could transition to jobs in manufacturing, and the industrial revolution happened.
Computers become cheap, widespread and widely-integrated into businesses. Many of the displaced workers are able to transition to jobs supporting information technologies in many ways.
General purpose AI and advanced robotics are able to replace everything a human can do. So what jobs do the humans transition to? Build robots? No, that can be done by robots and AI in this scenario, so it's not going to be able to support the displaced humans.
That's the glaring hole in this paper: the assumption that there will be some job for the human to transition to.
Unless they expect us to all be fashion models:
But they appear to significantly overstate this number by including occupations that have little
chance of automation, such as fashion modeling
Btw, this is insanely stupid of a claim. Fashion designers want a particular size and shape of model and for her to walk down a particular stretch of runway at a particular pace and be as non-human as possible - the point is to show off the clothes......golly, that sounds like a fantastic opportunity for robotics.
But that's OK, because rich people will still have money to spend!
The 4th industrialists’ third mistake is that this “nowhere left to run” argument is absurd
on its face because global productivity could increase by a factor of 50 without people
running out of things to buy. Just look at what people with higher incomes spend their
money on: nicer vacations, larger homes, luxury items, more restaurant meals, more
entertainment like concerts and plays, and more personal services
It doesn't seem to occur to them that the poor folks still gotta eat. And if they have no food to eat, they will eat the rich.
I think there are few opportunities for workers more valuable than the ability to freely tell employers to go fuck themselves, which a UBI would enable. Plus, if an employee can spend years looking for jobs, they can be much more selective.
The real downside to a UBI is that it reduces the power of employers, including the ones that fund the ITIF.
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Because humans are animals, and animals will instinctually defend themselves if they feel threatened. It's cheaper to give them income than to loose tons of angry, desperate people on the public.
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We are all the same person meeting up in the wrong order sorting each other out.
I'm tired of the hype. Sure, a Go-oriented AI was able to play itself and learn to play better. Most human interactions are asymmetric such that it seems unlikely an AI will be doing anything other than advising a human on responses for some time - and better quality response assistance seems like a fantastic efficiency enhancement that would only serve to improve productivity.
It's not like this new AI is going to be able to generate von neumann machines and grey goo us anytime soon... We can always pull the plug.
My response to this is more or less the same as my comment in another thread: https://slashdot.org/comments....
Productivity has grown substantially since the 1970s but wages have remained stagnant.
I just don't believe anyone who tells me that MORE productivity growth is somehow a predictor for wage growth. Perhaps there is some mythical level of productivity growth that overwhelm's capital's ability to capture it all, but I kind of doubt it.
Or in ekronomic terms, how can we justify paying people to drive the third part of the time-based economy? I suppose I need to review the three parts again, eh?
Part 1: Essential working time for such things as food, clothing, and shelter. Not much of such advanced economies as Germany, Japan, and the US. (Yeah, I think the FAKE conservatives are lying about wanting to protect the farmers and coal miners.)
Part 2: Investment working time for such things as education, research, and new infrastructure. These things work to further reduce the essential time of the first part. In less advanced economies, this time also determine the competitiveness going forward.
Part 3: Recreation time, which is weird in many ways. For example, most recreational products are not even consumed when we spend time on them. Books, songs, and movies are still there for the next people. Recreational time can also expand without limit, but it has a precious double of creativity that remains highly limited. I would go so far as to say that most people don't even want to create new art, and of the people who think they do, most of them can't, at least not anything that really competes with our existing stockpiles...
In conclusion, I would describe the economists as fools producing extremely low forms of recreation. A few of them seem valuable insofar as they support or try to "justify" the church of corporate cancerism. We need to get back to the important things and realize that the less time we have left, the more important it is to use it well.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I assume they got the required funding for this research.
The ITIF ("A Champion for Innovation") web site claims that their work been relied on by the White House on various matters---including broadband policy. Well... which White House are we talking about? Depending the administration they claim to have worked with, they've either:
I suspect most /. reader have strong opinions on which of these two options is the more innovative of the two. (Or maybe their input to the WH was merely that ``broadband==good''.)
Frankly, I suspect that the ITIF is all for AI everywhere and it's just tough cookies if you lose you job when that happens.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
"help those who are dislocated transition easily into new jobs and new occupations"
That's some mighty fine crack you're on. Sounds like Marketing speak glossing over something that someone wants hidden.
Workforce transitions are rarely, if ever, easy. Skillsets are often mismatched and can take a long time to change. There may well be geographic relocations (who pays?). And if the new jobs pay less, then we feed the cycle of pushing more domestic production overseas to lower the cost, so that workers who took a pay cut can afford those products.
I'm trying not to be a Luddite, and slowing growth artificially is a losing proposition, but let's at least be honest and realistic about what those changes mean to those whose lives are most intensely affected.
"report by Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF)"
Who are these people? What motivates them? Do they somehow represent the workers who will be displaced?
TL;DR. So let me guess that they are a think tank full of 'smart' people who report to industry leaders. What motivates industry leaders? The first thing is profits, which means lowering costs, which means in this case, reducing payroll expenses.
So, yes, they want to continue with innovation, replace workers with bots, and let government retrain those workers at taxpayer expense.
...omphaloskepsis often...
It's cheaper to give them income than to loose tons of angry, desperate people on the public.
Cheaper for who? Definitely not the tax payer.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
they're working on automated weapons platforms for just such a scenario. Also they're building up our caste systems so the working class will continue to fight among themselves.
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There won't be a whole lot of taxpayers left once automation has run its course. Most likely the few jobs left will be electrician, plumber, and appliance repair man; of course, no one will have the money to hire them.
Only I can judge you.
Well paying jobs that teach you a skill over time while you work... those're what we need.
One thing I notice is that it isn't that people are too dumb or stupid to pick up a new skill... it's that they're so god damned bogged down by the day-to-day drudgery of just trying to get by that after a full work day, groceries, dealing with kids (if you've any) and everything else that comes with life... it's REALLY hard to find the motivation (let alone, energy/time) to sit down and make yourself study and learn a new skill.
It's something I currently struggle with. I got my job with an associates and a few certs. Now that I'm salaried, all I hear from my co-workers is "when are you gonna go back to school for your four year degree?!?!" and I'm over like "man I barely have time to study for the certification I just finished going to class for.... and now you're telling me I should willingly put myself in debt AGAIN?" /end rant
Because without money to survive in the mean time and money for that training (since employers don't offer it anymore), they will have no choice but crime. Do you want that?
And if you don't think people are hindered or obstructed from finding other means of support, try plowing your front yard to plant wheat or corn and getting some chickens for the back yard. Then mark on your calendar how long it takes for someone from zoning enforcement to write you a summons.
You ever wonder why you get paid less than Instrument Technicians (I&C Tech), Engineering Techs, and Electronics Repairmen?
A) You rarely need a college degree. We do.
B) You're the dumbasses who will climb 300ft to dangle from a 16kV line in 30mph wind and risk getting cooked. We are entirely too smart for that and talk you into it.
I have had to fix numerous fuck ups that idiot electricians decided would be a good idea. I have never had to fix a job performed by an Inst Tech. You fuckers can't even get your wiring color codes right....black is ground dumbass!
The jobs are going away. "Slowing down innovation" will just move the industry offshore, accelerating the effect. At the same time, retraining is not going to do it, because a) there are not a lot new jobs and b) they have far too high requirements with regards to talents and skills. Most people cannot do the job of an engineer, for example. No amount of training will change that.
This story just shows that the ones trying to deal with the coming crisis do not have the skills to even understand it. Not a good sign.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Buying compound walls and tazer drones won't be cheap.
Technically you used the word "cheaper" and I've been disabled from breaking out further ridicule.
Have you ever heard of the "Information Technology & Innovation Foundation" before? Yeah, neither have I. Some random group we've never heard of puts out a "report" giving their opinions, and this is news?
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
including rent and food etc. should cover it.
The idea that you 50-year-old coal miners can be or WANT TO BE retrained to do anything else is either naive, dismissive, or both. It's policy-maker hand-waving that makes everyone feel nice inside because "Who wouldn't want to be trained to be a computer programmer after working 30 year in the mines?" Except for the extreme exceptions, though, it's just not happening. People don't work like that.
If you want to minimize tears and do your best to ensure that families don't fall into poverty, you literally need to pay attention to the human life cycle. "Dying" industries (coal, etc.) need to be helped along as their older generations enter retirement and the children of the workers are educated and prepared to join a non-dying industry.
colleges also need to be more open on going certs / people who want to learn new skills but don't want to takes 1-2 years of filler and fluff classes + don't want to retake classes as there credits don't fully transfer
UBI is cheaper then lockup
Declining Birth Rates.
Technological innovation displaces low-skill workers from their jobs. You can either try to retrain these workers to fill higher-skill jobs (which depresses those job markets) or just stop having babies to compensate for the displaced job positions.
Supply-demand economics leads to higher wages (less job competition) while lowering consumer costs (less demand). Of course, whenever you displace jobs with new technologies, there is a transition period before the market reaches equilibrium (lesser demand -> fewer products -> fewer employees) but lower birth rates will eventually bring the population down to a steady-state level.
rod blagojevich for president!
Absolutely it's cheaper for the tax payer. It's far cheaper to cut a check to help with food and rent than it is to employ an extra 20,000 policemen, prison guards, court clerks, and judges -- and build another 100 prisons to hold all the food rioters.
On a personal level, I'd rather pay the taxes to cover the unemployment payments than experience a food riot in my neighborhood. Riots get ... messy.
Many colleges want you to get a college education, which has value in itself. If you want vocational training instead, there are institutions that will provide that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes