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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.
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.
take the profit out of rent seeking behaviour.
> Not everyone will be able to do these new jobs. I would wager (ha!) most can't; otherwise, they would already be doing it.
So people are just too stupid to do the work, got it. :P
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"
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.
A lot of people really do lack the intelligence, memory, mental agility, and so forth that are needed to learn, compete for, and perform the new generation of jobs. As manual labor is phased out these people are being left to collect welfare and die of malnutrition-related diseases.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
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.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
We are all the same person meeting up in the wrong order sorting each other out.
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.
The retrained old person could be a plumber, electrician now working to sell products and services to a 20-something grad new to projects around the home.
That balance needs a lot of working 20-something new grads able to shop and the nice parts, crime free of a city able to support a quality shopping experience.
So the retrained old workers can drive out to their new jobs and sell to 20-something new grads who work on AI, robotics and have a wage to spend.
The part most city areas are missing is the low cost, low crime area with good city services to invest in.
Stop crime, attract investment and both retrained old people and 20-something new grad can have jobs and enjoy shopping.
How to clean up a city and stop crime? Use the 20-something grad skills to build an AI to find out who is doing all the crime and arrest the criminals.
Use a police AI to study the criminals and take a city back street by street.
Jobs for AI creating grads that then have the local wage to spend getting shopping advice from retrained old workers.
Jobs need crime free cities with good city services to attract investment. An AI can help with city design and finding all the criminals.
Use an AI to track citizenship, rent, bank accounts of anyone trying to move back into the city to ensure criminals do not gravitate back to a city thats is a great place again.
The AI to watch over a nice city with jobs for grads and the retrained old people selling products and services to the grads.
Retrained old workers and 20-something new grads are not the problem holding the USA back. City planning and a lack of policing is not allowing city areas to attract investment and jobs.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That's the hard unfortunate truth.
Your IQ places you in an activity/job bracket between too low and too high. That what you can psychologically tolerate and are able to do. The current social program says that everyone could be a chess master if they tried hard enough. Biologically that cannot happen. Despite whatever the "nuture" crowd would like to believe, peer reviewed research shows IQ is mainly inherited. Thus,you cannot become that much smarter. And you are limited to a subset of jobs that match.
Once the low to average IQ automatable jobs are gone we'll see hordes of forever unemployable people. Sure, it'll affect higher IQ people too, but first of all to a lesser degree and second there's less people at the right of the bell curve being affected for now.
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.
Please stop assuming electrician is some dustbin job to sweep excess labor into.
227-3517
Right, and that's why we need more immigration so we can have more unskilled workers. See how simple this is?
So people are just too stupid to do the work, got it. :P
This is the biggest problem facing modern society. Every job has an IQ below which you're not going to be able to do that job acceptably. Sure there's a fuzzy area where conscientiousness and drive can make up for low IQ, but there's also a point at which it's just not going to happen.
Automation is gradually raising that minimum IQ bar, because the jobs that are easiest to automate are exactly those which take the least thought in order to do. It's not uniform across all jobs, of course, but unskilled jobs outside of agriculture are very scarce these days. Unskilled manufacturing is mostly gone, and millions of skilled manufacturing jobs sit empty for lack of qualified people.
I don't know how we solve the larger problem here, but some combination of government and industry providing free training for skilled blue-collar jobs would be a huge help! Germany has a great system for this, where by high school you begin your vocational training - often for a specific employer on their specific processes. You have a job waiting for you if you're not a complete fuckup. In the US is seems we'd rather have millions on welfare and millions of jobs waiting for people to be trained.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
You win sir. The problem is that most people can't or won't do the studying necessary to become employable in the 21st century. STEM. Science. Techno-something-or-other. Engineering. Math.
But mostly the math. People who can't pass at least high school algebra, trig and geometry probably can't solve the big programming problems. Probably aren't even good coders. Or suitable for other technical fields. That is, almost anything ending in "***-ology" (except astrology).
The jobs that immigrants want will eventually be automated. Even many white collar jobs will be automated. Except for things truly creative that depend on human creativity. And those might not all be technical jobs. We're probably not going to have machines writing songs or poetry (unless we do it like George Orwell's 1984). Or movies, or videogames. So there is hope for non-tech people who are truly creative. But again, most people aren't either.
The jobs digging ditches, cleaning toilets, sweeping floors, driving, assembling, determine if someone is credit worthy, etc are all going to be automated.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
> So people are just too stupid to do the work
Probably. But not necessarily. Other causes exist. It could be due to being lazy. Or being a millennial.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
> these people are being left to collect welfare and die of malnutrition-related diseases.
If they are young and healthy, and I'm just sayin', but they could become sex workers. As a reference, see: all of human history.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
"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...
> Who do you think employers would prefer? The retrained old fart or the 20-something new grad?
Rephrased: the retrained person with a work ethic and diligence to study and retrain, or the lazy millennial?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Pushing many people into the job of electrician is a very good idea.
Either they succeed, great!
Or Darwin Award.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
Most young guys (what you're interested based on your handle) aren't interested in such work. Women too but that wouldn't be a concern for you, of course.
Only I can judge you.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Germany also protects its industrial base as they are not slavishly following the globalization agenda. Mainly because their corporations are not the psychopathic entities that US corporations are.
Only I can judge you.
You can add engineering, doctoring, housebuilding, programming, and general design and marketing to your list. All of the jobs will be done better by AI in the near and not-too-distant future.
Only I can judge you.
Unfortunately one of those unsuited ones is currently occupying the WH with his illegal immigrant of a wife.
Only I can judge you.
The problem is not that automation is gradually raising the IQ requirement for jobs. The real problem is there are no jobs. Because large parts of the United States economy have been in a depression for decades.
That our corporate masters, their puppets in the regime, and their shills in the news media refuse even to acknowledge this truth is a big part of why state legitimacy is at a long time low.
Humming "la, la, la, everything is rosy!" may fool a few comfortable dimwits. But it won't fool the millions crushed under the grinding poverty that resulted from deindustrialization.
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.
250K isn't even enough to populate earth in a reasonable way while ensuring well-varied procreation, let alone exploring the galaxy. In a non-resource-constrained society, why should population growth be limited? The more people we have, the more likely one or more of them will make important advancements.
Only I can judge you.
Given your nick, you should be able to see the pitfalls from a mile away.
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.
This idea that artificial *intelligence* isn't a threat to people who's market offering is based on their *intelligence* just isn't true. My bet is some of the lowest paid more miserable jobs like nursing home caregiver will be some of the hardest to replace with bots, while information processing jobs will be much easier.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
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.
The retrained old person could be a plumber, electrician now working to sell products and services to a 20-something grad new to projects around the home.
That "retrained" unit will be a robot, or a service kiosk. No people required.
That balance needs a lot of working 20-something new grads able to shop and the nice parts, crime free of a city able to support a quality shopping experience.
Why? Drones will drop off their purchases where ever they desire. No people needed.
So the retrained old workers can drive out to their new jobs and sell to 20-something new grads who work on AI, robotics and have a wage to spend.....[Utopia! description]
Hilarious! You should quite your day job!
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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."
Germany also protects its industrial base as they are not slavishly following the globalization agenda.
What did you just type? What did you just smoke before you typed it? Good stuff man, good stuff. Heard of the EU maybe?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The problem is not that automation is gradually raising the IQ requirement for jobs. The real problem is there are no jobs.
I have a job. Therefore your statement that there are no jobs is false. Maybe you meant open jobs? Over a million skilled manufacturing jobs are seeking workers, and around here construction is going crazy and there's a serious shortage in the skilled trades.
The problem is there are very few unskilled jobs, and not everyone is able to retrain - it takes a certain minimum IQ.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not so much. As per standard market operations, as technological advances free workers from old jobs, there is supposed to be a, for lack of a better word, budget to retrain those emancipated workers for new jobs in areas where the company is growing. Of course, this assumes that your company is pro-growth (apparently, a number of them aren't), and that your company wants to be at the top of its respective market(s) (some seem content to be the thousandth also-ran).
For some odd reason, companies aren't doing this...a number of them are just poaching from others, while others seem to be demanding unrealistic job qualifications. Or they are dropping current employees, and picking up new ones straight from college, shuffling the training costs onto the applicant (also making things kind of one-shot).
You don't really believe that obvious lie about there being a million open skilled manufacturing jobs, do you?
Germany also has long term goals for its industry whereas a lot of the US/UK companies seem to operate on very short term targets to suit the current directors bonuses so do not really plan for the future as they won;t be there to see the fallout
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Quite right. That's plumbers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
Hmm. Do you have anything meaningful to respond with?
Only I can judge you.
UBI is cheaper then lockup
Salespeople...
How hard is it for a bot to call me and annoy the piss out of me.
Plus, no commission...
Cheap storage VM.
It's possible to flood the sex worker industry so that very few people can make much money. It's happened before. Prices can get into a race to the bottom when workers are desperate.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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
During the famines provoked by the failure of Stalin's ambitious agriculture reforms, the Soviet statistical agencies reported record harvests and abundant food for everyone.
The EU is the champion of globalism - the epitome of globalism - the essence of the ideal globalism as realized in the practical world. And German leadership has been the strongest force pushing for the creation and growth of the EU. You don't get more "pro-globalism" than Germany. An example of rejecting globalism is Brexit.
Also, 2+4=4, and water is wet.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
German corporations keep their industrial base intact in the face of globalism. This is why the German economy hums along, still making great products from cars to pencil sharpeners. Their robust industrial base is due to the fact that it enshrined in their constitution (which our socialist generals at the end of WW2 dictated to them), that rank-and-file employees make up 50% of an advisory board for each corporation. This is why their corporations are not soulless psychopaths that American corporations are.
Don't you have some other pro-dRumpft forums to visit? Or places to troll with your russian-bot friends?
I'm a bit concerned about your math skills, or you were up too late past your bedtime, or mom was yelling at you to unlock the door this instant.... You were correct about water though, it is indeed wet, great job you!
Only I can judge you.
The US also kept it's industrial base intact - we just went with robot workers. Total US manufacturing has risen every decade. We do suck (really, embarrassingly suck) at training skilled manufacturing workers, and Germany is probably the best at that, but that has nothing to do with globalism - plenty of German cars made outside of Germany, Germany is as "pro open borders" as anyone, etc, etc.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.