Slashdot Mirror
'Automating Jobs Is How Society Makes Progress' (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz, written by Per Bylund, assistant professor at Oklahoma State University: Analysts discuss the automation of jobs as if robots are rising from the sea like Godzilla, rampaging through the Tokyo of stable employment, and leaving only chaos in their wake. According to data from PWC, 38% of jobs in the U.S. could become automated by the early 2030s. Meanwhile, a report from Ball State University's Center for Business and Economic Research warned that half of all American jobs could be replaced by automation. These prophecies of doom fail to recognize that automation and increased productivity are nothing new. From the cotton gin to the computer, automation has been happening for centuries. Consider the way automation has improved the mining industry over the past 100 years. Without machines, humans were forced to crawl into unstable passageways and chip away at rocks with primitive tools while avoiding the ever-present dangers of gas poisoning and cave-ins. Not only was this approach terrible for health, but it was also a highly inefficient use of skilled human laborers. With machines doing the heavy lifting, society was able to dedicate resources to building, servicing, and running the machinery.
Fewer people now do the traditional physical labor, but this advancement is celebrated rather than mourned. By letting machines handle the more tedious -- and, in some cases, dangerous -- tasks, people were liberated to use their labor in more efficient, effective, and fulfilling ways. Critics of automation miss the point. Nobody works for the sake of work -- people strive to create value, which helps pay our salaries and feed our families. Automation effectively opens the door for more new endeavors that will elevate our species to greater heights. Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
Fewer people now do the traditional physical labor, but this advancement is celebrated rather than mourned. By letting machines handle the more tedious -- and, in some cases, dangerous -- tasks, people were liberated to use their labor in more efficient, effective, and fulfilling ways. Critics of automation miss the point. Nobody works for the sake of work -- people strive to create value, which helps pay our salaries and feed our families. Automation effectively opens the door for more new endeavors that will elevate our species to greater heights. Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
I'd love to work on my little projects all day long, but nobody's going to pay me for that - at least not enough and not long enough to earn a living from it.
#DeleteFacebook
Somebody should teach THEM a lesson.
.. we either we end up automate everything and become the ultimate slackers, or we fail to stay on top of the automation so that we eventually will be replaced by machines altogether. I wish I could say that I prefer the former scenario, but after seeing Wall-E I'm not so sure...
Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
Automation is NOT going to result in the Apocalypse. It is NOT going to take everyone's job away. It is NOT going to result in a global financial meltdown. There is NOT going to be a singularity.
Yes, some people will be displaced out of some jobs and have to find something else to do. No this will not be easy for some of them but it will be good for society overall. This is nothing new and has been happening continually for the entirety of the industrial revolution. The more things get automated the more we can accomplish. A lot of progress is held back simply because humans are stuck doing work that we don't yet have a machine for. A lot of dangerous, tedious, wasteful jobs will disappear. A lot of extra capability will be available for jobs that don't. New jobs will emerge that nobody even considered before. (How many web developers did you know circa 1985?) If automation progresses faster than we can handle it then we will pass laws to slow it down or in extreme circumstances revolt (possibly violently).
All this sturm und drang about robots taking all the jobs and killing us all is mostly about as realistic as the latest zombie movie. It makes for good entertainment but it doesn't have much to do with reality.
I'd love to work on my little projects all day long, but nobody's going to pay me for that - at least not enough and not long enough to earn a living from it.
Then perhaps you are doing it wrong. Lots of people figure out how to make a living from what they otherwise consider hobbies or projects. But it requires a lot of work and you have to figure out the business model to go with it. If you aren't willing to take the risk I understand but let's not pretend it is impossible. People do it all the time.
were it not for the blind greed of those in power. The way it is headed now, most people aren't able to survive without a job, and compete with cheaper and cheaper machines (meaning their wages go more and more down).
There are two possible outcomes:
(a) either the economy runs out of consumers (most will be less and less able to afford first-world gadgets, which will increase their price because they lose economy of scale, creating a negative feedback loop (careful: in their inception, those tend to be exponential -- ouch!))
(b) or misery will increase as much as to create social tensions worthy of a revolt. In times of post-Orwellian surveillance (look at China to see what's coming to the rest of us, because of... yah, tarrists & children) this one won't be pretty either.
Most probably we get (a) then (b). And stupid politicians run around like beheaded chicken and scream "Jobs! jobs! jobs!".
We're seeing the beginnings. Don't forget that the so-called "Arab spring" with its subsequent "migratory crisis" came after a hike in food prices due to global speculation.
"Automation effectively opens the door for more new endeavors that will elevate our species to greater heights."
Perhaps, but are those doors on the same floor, or will doors be opened on the same floor? When employers begin to look to automation instead of labor for new positions, where are the laborers going to find employment? When automation becomes so cheap it is a commodity, where businesses look to figure out how to automate a process before opening their business to the public, where are the laborers going to find work?
When it comes to automation, we may well be like the story of Icarus, and end up flying too close to the sun. Creating an overly automated society that collapses in on itself.
What folks are saying is that it will cause some serious social upheaval as people adjust and some folks won't be to adjust - they'll be permanently booted out of the workforce; like what happened with the weavers during the English Industrial Revolution*.
Nobody is "permanently booted out of the workforce". Some categories of jobs disappear but that's not a bad thing. Those displaced have to go find something else economically valuable to do. We know this happened. It wasn't comfortable in the short term for some but there was no class of people unable to find work for the rest of their lives.
*When the weavers were displaced, they did not become machine operators they were left out to starve or demoted to unskilled labor. One machine replaced about 27 weavers and one person operated at least 3 machines. Automation has always been a net job destroyer.
If automation was a net job destroyer then society would immediately collapse. Your argument makes no sense. Automation is a net job creator. Automation and it's positive benefits are all around you. The house you live in, the car you drive, the roads you travel on, the food you eat. All results of automation being a net job creator. The internet is a perfect example. The internet is a form of automation and it has created FAR more jobs than it has eliminated.
And folks make the mistake of looking at TOTAL employment and jump to the erroneous conclusion that the displaced workers got retrained and just moved to another job of equal pay.
What happened is that overall people got retrained and eventually ended up in BETTER paying jobs. Standards of living have increased more or less steadily (even with some down times) for centuries now globally. Your argument that we aren't better off than we were 50 years ago is belied by the flat screen tv on your wall and the car you drive and they computer you are staring at now. People are better fed, living longer, have more income, travel more, and are more comfortable than they have been in the entirety of human history. Your argument is quite simply not supported by actual fact.
AI researchers think creative problem solving will be one of the last capabilities to be developed. If you are afraid your job could be replaced because it is fairly monotonous, better start looking towards doing what computers won't be able to compete for a long time.
As with most things, it depends on context.
If more people are unemployed, then it is at least debatable if society as a whole has made progress.
The only significant advantage of automation (in theory) is improved reliability of the task = less chance for human error
Lower costs and higher volumes are more economic items. Higher volumes, for example, could also be the result of hiring more workers and building more factories.
It is economic progress to use automation to be more efficient. This certainly benefits shareholders and those who still have income to afford the products. For the increasing part of the low-income/no-income persons, not so much (directly).
For companies to compete, they have to keep their costs down. Iow, they need to keep total labor $ down. Things can be done with more hrs, but then u have to pay less per hr., OR, we can cut hr. While increasing pay rate.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
on sucking my DAMN balls
Move Fast and Break Things? Hey great. I love me cars in space.
Clean up your god damn mess. Lobby congress for policies that are actually as progressive as you pretend to be.
While the general trend of automation has been to make life easier for people, it hasn't always been easy. The reason luddites came about in the first place was that industrialization led to dangerous and degrading employment that benefitted those who owned the means of production at the expense of those who worked in the factories. For over a century industrialization benefitted the few at the expense of the many. While we may look back and think it's worth it because of how it all worked out for our benefit, if we become the ones stuck in such a rut then it won't seem so rosy.
Furthermore, there are other factors that need to be considered. Everyone loves to praise the inefficiency of the U.S. government as a feature to prevent rash changes, but automation presents unique problems that will require our government to change in ways that may be barred by the Constitution. For instance, education is left to the states and this cannot be changed without a Constitutional amendment. Without blue-collar jobs or a massive implementation of welfare, automation will most definitely leave many destitute. And AI will only complicate matters further. So many of these STEM jobs that are currently being touted will be compromised by AI. Computer programming is an area that will probably soon become too complex for humans to do (how many here honestly think they could tinker with Google's code?).
The problem isn't just that automation will take jobs away. The problem is that the challenges of automation will force us to rethink distributive justice in ways that most people are unprepared to do. Automation will be inherently incompatible with laissez-faire capitalism, which is a sacred cow to roughly 50% of the voters in the U.S. Bill Joy warned us almost twenty years ago.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
The problem is not that automation will kill jobs. The problem is with our current economic arrangement - capitalism.
In capitalism, the capitalist class (business owners) get to keep the benefits of increased productivity, while the working class (everyone else) gets to keep working a full working day, and paid their normal wages. With automation, the capitalists need less and less workers, which results in the kind of conflict we have here.
The obvious answer is to change the economic arrangement: make it so that *everyone* gets to keep the benefits of increased productivity, not just the capitalist class. In other words, give workers more leisure time while keeping their salary the same.
Soceity hasn't been making any progress. The same issues we face today are the same issues we have been facing for the past 100+ years. The only thing that has changed in business, material objects, technology and science.
While I was employed at a corporate research center, we scientists were told that we each had a new annual goal of getting a million dollars in government funding. I told my director that if I could do that, I might as well work for myself.
Charlie's dad may have gotten a job fixing the toothpaste-capping machine, but what about everyone else on his team?
Equally...
"Consider the way automation has improved the mining industry over the past 100 years. Without machines, humans were forced to crawl into unstable passageways [...] a highly inefficient use of skilled human laborers. With machines doing the heavy lifting, society was able to dedicate resources to building, servicing, and running the machinery."
I live in the North of the UK, and the old mining towns are not exactly hotbeds of thriving industrialisation and entrenepuralism. Instead, they're stuck in a rut of low employment and limited opportunities, and have been for decades.
https://www.ft.com/content/b74a638c-9fff-11e5-beba-5e33e2b79e46
Admittedly, there's a lot of other (arguably mostly political) factors involved, but fundamentally, when automation has such a drastic impact (from 1.2 million to under 7,000 in 70 years), it can take decades - and potentially several generations - to rebalance/rebuild the local economy.
Traditionally in the UK, issues like this have been partially addressed by people moving into service industries, but there's limits to how much this sector can absorb, especially in smaller towns - how many hairdressers/dog-walkers/cafes/etc do you need in a town with fewer than 10,000 people in it? And even then, those sectors are also under pressure from automation and process improvements.
Since "social media specialist" is an actual thing, I do have a lot of faith in our ability to invent new jobs, lol
Of course automation has increased productivity – but, in the US, ALL of those productivity benefits have ONLY benefited the top 1%. Workers wages have stagnated since the 1980’s, benefits have been slashed, infrastructure crumbles , pensions are the thing of the past, yet at a time of record corporate profits, CEO wages have shot up from 55x an average worker’s salary in the 1980’s to 350x an average worker’s salary. Multiply the inequitable distribution by orders of magnitude so yes, automation on and unprecedented scale will bring about massive societal change. There will be a few who live lives in wealth beyond imagination – and there will be starving masses barely scraping by. Unless you think that the oligarchy will be willing to share. Has that EVER happened without a bloody revolution?
cut full time to 32 hours now and add X2 OT at 80 and down the road slowly move the full time mark down. Maybe after some time full time 20 X2 OT at 40 X3 OT at 60 and X4 OT at 80
Automation and Minimum wages come together to take the least useful people, the used, OUT of the work force. That leaves them only useful to people who give them money for their votes. Call them the Users. The Users have no interest in making the Used more useful, they only want the votes.
As long as they have the votes, they can raise taxes on the useful people, to keep paying the Used.
The higher the min wage, the faster automation pays off. That is why the Users push for higher min wage.
The US workforce has been on a downward trajectory for the last four decades. Not just because of automation, but it sure hasn't helped. The auto worker that loses his job to a robot isn't moving to a higher plane of enlightenment designing self-driving cars for Uber, he's going to be an Uber driver for far less money than he was making before.
As productivity soared, production met all domestic demand very quickly. At that point it would have resulted in enormous unemployment and social unrest. The Luddites and the Saboteurs (sabots are wooden shoes, people who threw it into weaving mills were the original saboteurs) would have won and the industrial revolution would have been snuffed out in infancy. But...
When they ran out of colonies, they fought for 40 years, from 1900 to 1940 all the wars including the world wars were fight for exclusive rights to drain the last remaining wealth from the colonies.
The destruction of ways of life, cultures, livelihoods, pre industrial technical knowledge were incalculable. And actual deaths, by millions and millions. So many died.
So yeah, Automating things is how societies make progress if you carefully exclude the devastated societies from your sample space.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... is that it isn't removing humans from the risk of injuries while performing dangerous jobs. Everyone is thrilled that we no longer have to have people--or as many people--risking their lives swinging a pick in a mine. Those people were now free to pursue jobs that weren't life threatening. You could work in a store or an office--where the risk of being killed was minimal--and come home at night.
The problem now is that automation is taking those retail and office jobs away--hell, soon you won't even have the fallback of driving a cab--with no real plan in place to deal with how those displaced workers are going to do to earn a living even close to the levels they were pulling in prior to losing their job to automation. The U.S. has already gone from a situation where a single breadwinner was able to comfortably support a family to one where both parents have to be in the work force in order to support a family. I can't see where a family will turn if one--or both--parents wind up losing their jobs in some mad dash to automate everything. The only real beneficiaries after the elimination of jobs to automation are the business owners.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
We cannot look to history and predict all will be well again. The advent of steam power replaced human muscle but led to many new jobs which required human skill. Automation replaced human skill but led to many jobs which required human intelligence. AI will replace human intelligence but now we have got very little left to offer.
This is an utterly ahistorical argument. Economists have long argued, on mere speculation, that pre-industrial revolution everyone worked like a dog. Anthropologists and historians have shown that this is not true--there are certainly times in the crop calendar (in temperate zones) when everyone has to work long days for weeks at a time. But these are the exception, and most of the year was spent with lots of free time (see Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life), much of it devoted (in Europe and elsewhere) to ritual and celebrations. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism fundamentally changed our conceptions of time and work (see, e.g., E.P.Thompson, "Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism"), effectively ending the autonomy of workers and tethering them to the boss's time-clock. This was and always has been a contested process.
The larger argument made in the original post is also utterly ahistorical: there is no essential "progress" that we are working towards, and the notion that some tasks are "higher" (or worse, marks of an evolution of the species) have been used for centuries to prop up illegitimate hierarchies of power and compensation. The notion that automation has made people "liberated to use their labor in more efficient, effective, and fulfilling ways" ignores all the many ways that our advanced capitalist society is DEEPLY UNFREE, and an increasing amount of our labor is deeply unfulfilling. Efficiency for me the worker is not fulfilling for my own purposes--it's only fulfilling to the capitalist who profits from my labor. I don't give a damn how many widgets I sell. Social psychology has time and again reaffirmed that a sense of fulfillment is gained by healthy personal interactions, not by mere productivity--as shown by studies that find people in jobs with more (conversational, not power-laden) human contact are generally happier than those with less.
Note that Per Bylund is a professor of entrepreneurship, not a discipline known for being aware of its place in history or society so much as its ability to extract value from others' labor.
Automate all the work you want... just socialize all the profits. The problem with increased economic efficiency is that it leads to exponentially greater concentration of wealth.
Where are the robotic farms which make free food for everybody? Where are the automated house building factories making free homes for us all?
Automating jobs is progress but putting price on everything stops the progress from reaching quality of life. We could have healthy food for us all right now. We could have free medication. We could have quality housing and mass transit. It could all be possible if we demanded that basic needs must be socialized.
Not socializing them means that we will continue to have parasitic "investors" and companies feeding off our basic needs.
As long as we figure out a way of moving huge numbers of displaced workers into other careers that can pay the bills and provide a sense of self-respect, everything will be fine!
The problem is not in automation itself, but in the new products which are not producible with manual labor anymore. Miniaturization combined with robotization kills manual labor. Manual work is dangerous, low quality, unreliable and requires to be paid.
Miniaturization, robotization and now AI will bring the end to manual work. AI is more reliable then manual operators. Self driving car is going to be way more safer than manually controled. Insurance for manual driving will skyrocket and remove manual drivers off the road. Police will stop and arrest people who try to control cars manually for dangerous "manual" driving.
Robotoized mining will eliminate all the jobs in coal mining sector, so what ever Trump promised to miners will only help to push robotization further ahead, it will not bring back manual work at mines. Mining operation centers will work 24 hours a day controlling remotely mining operations around the globe. That is why we need to kill Net neutrality for example. Net neutrality blocks development of such technologies and services.
Robotized army will not need meat shield on the ground anymore.
The list is endless. The problem is in Regulations of Safety, Health, Environment and Quality. If you want to safe manual work you have to eliminate all the regulations and professional and business liability.
I don't think people 'strive to create value' at all - we just go to work to get paid, and while we're at work we basically do what we're told.
I wholeheartedly disagree. It's basically how Freud put it: We want to feel competent and loved. Which are two sides of the same coin. To feel competent means to do work you yourself deem useful and makes you feel that you deserve the love you get or at least expect from society and the people around you. And it means creating value or at least feeling that way.
This is the actual job crisis buy all-out automation.The thing bugging the now useless coalminer the most is his loss of sense of value and usefulness to society.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Real median wage for males peaked in 1974:
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/the-struggles-of-men/
there were decades of unemployment, social strife and wars following the industrial revolutions. They don't teach this in school unless you get to the 200+ level history courses in college. They kinda just gloss over it.
It takes a long time for other tech to catch up and replace the jobs automated by an industrial revolution. That shouldn't come as a surprise. It's much easier to automate an existing process than to create entirely new lines of work.
It's also _hard_ to retrain existing workers. Those workers are older, so they learn slower, they're typically working full time to support the families they had before their better paying jobs were automated and above all nobody wants to pay high taxes so somebody can get a free ride to college in their 30s or 40s
Automation fueled unemployment is a complex problem. To suggest otherwise is childishly naive. Let me put it this way: When in your life has the best (or even a good) solution to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it sorts itself out?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the 70s. Around that time the manufacturing base was shipped overseas and with it the power of Unions dwindled. Also political wedge issues (abortion, guns, identity politics) divided the working class into easily manageable voting blocks who could be made to vote against their immediate and long term economic interests.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
however, society needs to find a way to properly care for all those that are rendered redundant, by either managing to retrain into other occupations, or propose properly financed early retirement. none of that is currently properly implemented, as companies basically drop those people to the streets.
Also, business plans are designed to eliminate workers from the beginning.
Ha! Good luck running a business with no people. That is one of the most self defeating arguments I've read in a while. Every business plan requires people. There are precisely zero businesses that exist with no people.
In the last week or so I've noticed a surge in what could broadly be categorized as pro-inequality propaganda, not only on Slashdot but also on YouTube. Recently on Slashdot there have been a couple of articles suggesting that automation won't cause mass unemployment and will actually be beneficial to most of society. In the context of the current economic climate and known history, this is absurdly wrong.
First let's look at the industrial revolution, the supposed best-case scenario for automation which the people pooh-poohing these fears glowingly reminisce about. They're actually reminiscing about a fictionalized history of it. In reality, at least two generations died in grinding poverty caused by the industrial revolution. The generation that lost their jobs to automation mostly died believing they were right all along. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren got the new jobs automation produced. That's what we're being offered to look forward to.
Now let's look at what's different this time. Today's automation isn't yesterday's automation - it isn't just augmenting human labor with physical force and mechanically repeated actions like the automation of the past. AI is replacing knowledge work. The author of TFA is a horse looking at an early car and saying "this will be good for us, just like before."
Automation could be very good or very bad for society, depending on who benefits from the products of automated labor. In our new plutonomy, automation would be very bad for society in both the short and long term. We need to rework our economies so that autmation can benefit all of humanity as soon as possible, rather than letting whole generations starve as in the past, or creating an uberclass of hyper-rich space royalty among a world of slums as we're headed for now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The problem is two fold:
1) not all things that entertain you can be monetized.
2) often times the risk of failure is high enough that the individual is logically better served by the less fulfilling Job that is much more likely to pay more over the long term.
The math might looks something like this:
Choice 1: Follow your dreams invest 1 - 5 years of time with a 90% chance of meaning $12,000 a year then failing. A 9% chance of earning $20,000 a year that becomes $300,000 and is sustainable and a less then 1% chance of making $15,000 a year and after 10 years making millions.
Compare too:
Choice 2: Find a nice steady job where you earn $50,000 a year for the next 30 years with a 90% certainty.
The choice is often made by the fact that you need more or less then the expected $12,000 income to live. A single person, it works, so what if you fail or starve, a parent has a different obligation to their children.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
The problem isn't that automation makes life easier. People were pointing out as early as the 1800's that as work becomes easier, life stays the same or becomes more difficult for most people. And that has held true (outside of cases where the public hasn't remained docile and pressed their demands for things like 8 hour workdays and other benefits) and the result is that real wages have been stagnant for decades. The real problem is that only a few enjoy the benefits of this. It's a problem of ownership -- which happens to be growing worse as wealth concentration increases.
The world needs ditch diggers too. Uh, wait- maybe it won't need ditch diggers anymore?
I'm fine with biohacking onesself. One can hardly sue anyone for malpractice.
Sure people will get hurt. They also die from car accidents, and we let cars exist. People also die from diabetes melitis, HIV, bathtubs, and occasionally peanuts.
Freedom means many things; it can mean not being subject to fussbudgets who want to save people from themselves.
Human experimentation is broken, especially in the US where everyone is completely focused on reducing risk to the experimenter and subjects. We can't move. Even regrowing teeth with stem cells, a process ready to go, will take 12 more years because of the human testing regime the dental experimenter will have to undergo. Millions will die horribly for lack of treatments we cannot even begin to test. For things to move along at a sane rate, volunteers will have to die.
Sure, the insurance companies will have something to say about this. They own us, as they are free to cut one off for any reason. That's another problem.
I think this article neglects a very simple fact that as we've automated our production over history (through the use of machines) our resource demands have shot up through the roof. Cars for example use tremendously more resources (to the point that we've had to tap into oil reserves that nature has stored for millions of years) compared to horses. We've been able to keep economics in check because we're in an age of consumerism. As technology advances we're able to produce more stuff at higher efficiency so to keep everyone employed the overall result has been to get everyone to use more things but realistically this can't go on forever. We'll eventually end up with resource shortages which will kill the entire system. So really this is more an economics problem and unfortunately humanity in general hasn't been known to change anything until almost the last possible second or worse.
Blow it out your ass, Old Economy Steve. You think having a smartphone is a real trade for having five figures in student loan debt, having to pay four figures in health insurance costs before one cent of medical is covered, making both parents work instead of one, for less wages with no pension? GTFO
If you want income even though you canâ(TM)t add value, forcing companies to hire you and have you on their payroll thereby preventing them from automating is the worst way to get it.
Its better to get your income by taxing the company. Forcing them to hire you is the same as a tax, except its worse because it reduces their production output â" which in turn increases the price of their product. The cheaper a company can be productive, the more income they have that can be taxed. Also, more goods and products can be on the market cheaper. This increases the value of your basic tax-funded income because you can buy more things.
TL;DR: If you need money, get it via taxation not by degrading industrial output by forcing people to hire you.
Sometimes forces combine to create situations that are menacing. One such issue is a total lack of choice. Modern nations survive on trade. Those that offer the most for the least tend to prosper. That means that if China or Japan replace human workers with machines that they can compete in the modern world. In the past the argument was over the price of labor in foreign lands compared to workers in the US who earned far higher wages. But that is becoming an invalid point. Now the question is whether my automation is better than their automation. We have no choice at all. We must compete and if competition requires running totally automated businesses we have no choice other than going with the trend. Further the speed of change is increasing thanks to our new machines. Yet our politicians and even our business leaders are offering very little to buffer the effects of all most zero human employment in the very near future.
And what I mean by that is, I hope they kill us. Most humans donâ(TM)t contribute anything important anyway...
That is a nice estimate. A liberal estimate would broadly include underemployed putting the number over half the world.
We blame people for their poor situation as if it is their own fault and just as people are quick to cite somebody who deserves it, they fail to realize that it is more complex and their own position of blaming the poor is more flawed. (It's psychology, being argumentative can be a form of low-thought rationalization which is why a smart argument can be made while being blind to the hypocrisy.)
Technology has already eliminated MOST meaningful employment long ago. We have created many shallow jobs and a consumer culture (with addictions) to drive it. This has already reached it's limits in that we do not have the resources to sustain 7 billion people at 1st world living standards with our economic system. So we arrogantly make the arguments from our sheltered 1st world viewpoint that everybody just needs to do what we do and have done and they'd be ok too... blind to the fact much of our well being comes indirectly from the plight of those people and the luck of us being supported obvious to the fact we are not picking ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
THINK about it.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The OP got the causation reversed, for a great many people. Too many to simply ignore.
There are millions who work simply to pay the bills and keep the wolf from the door. Work is a chore for them but it is unavoidable. Telling them to "strive to create value" is like a preacher preaching to gangs of criminals and thieves: It might make the preacher feel good, but it's mostly lost on the audience.
I'm lucky since my work is quite fulfilling. However even then, I do what my employer tells me; hopefully I'm creating value but it is something of an act of faith. Who knows how much actual value I'm creating?
The 'striving' is important, but it's more like an aspiration than a universal characteristic.
"These prophecies of doom fail to recognize that automation and increased productivity are nothing new."
This is like saying, "You have survived a common cold, therefore, you are immortal and nothing can kill you."
Too much of ANYTHING is a bad idea.
TAX the robots or you will loose your tax base entirely all the while disenfranchising workers from wages - this will destroy any economy.
People work to be relevant, to add value to themselves, their families and everything else.
I know I know, the green energy revolution will save us, BUT green energy will never be as plentiful or cheap as fossil energy. As the total energy available to society is reduced, regardless of the fossil renewable mix, we will have to continuously re-prioritize its uses. At some point the energy needed to automate a process will be greater than that required to do it by hand, given that we have to feed all those hands anyway. For example, think of the energy required to build and then run electric hair dryers versus just using the towel you use to dry yourself with anyway. The electric dryer is definitely more convenient and faster, but think of the energy cost.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
Add to that the abolishment of the concept of "exempt" vs. "non-exempt". An hour worked must be an hour compensated. NO EXCEPTIONS.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
first, what the *bleep* is wrong with you. Second, I don't think it'll happen this time. A while ago Pakistan ignored an impending terrorist attack on India and pretty much let it go forward. The attack was against a major building in their capital city. The attack went off as planned. Normally this kind of stuff starts wars, but unlike an America/Iraq war this one (India/Pakistan) would be bad for business. The mega corps said no, and so there was no war.
You'll see brush fires here and there to keep the Military Industrial Complex going and to make sure folks like Saddam & Ghadaffi know their place and don't try to cut the mega corps out of the picture, but you'll never see another major world war again. The people who make those decisions are not tied to any one country anymore. They're global. They own property through the world. A world war would just be blowing up their own stuff. Wars are organized theft. They're one country trying to take what another country has by force. If you already own everything there's no reason to fire off a war. Not a real one.
Wars to control population are over. Come up with a better solution or let the world descend into dystopia. That's your choice.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Fixed
Automation effectively opens the door for more new endeavors that will elevate the financially privileged to greater heights.
The guy from OSU claims the authors "failed to recognize" that improved efficiency is nothing new. What??! Unemployment and starvation are also "nothing" new, and HIV is just another virus; nothing new. So this imbecile argues 1. There's nothing new under the Sun and 2. There will be something new that happens to fix things (although we don't know what), just you wait. If (a big IF) 50% of current jobs disappear in the next 15 years, the impact will be equivalent to what happened to "the natives" when the Europeans landed (in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas) but on a super-compressed timeline. It will be a profound disruption of our society. I doubt if it will happen so quickly, but it is possible. Will such disruption be a net benefit? There's no way to tell. At least, for those of us who know predicting the future based on the past is delusional. I'll put it this way: there is one obvious part of the economy which will expand. I'll call it "personal services". When the only way for someone with a H.S. education to survive is to sell their "personal services", then that is what the survivors will do. This, it could be argued, will be a more satisfying job than punching a keyboard 8 hrs a day. It also could be argued that it will be dehumanizing and degrading. Feel free to chose the narrative which is most consistent with your prior beliefs. When A.I. is as intelligent as a person with an IQ of 100, it WILL be able to replace those people - most people. When A.I. can be built with an IQ of 200, there will be no job that can't be automated - but that doesn't mean all jobs will be economical to automate. Nor does it mean that all movies will be CGI. I doubt if, for instance, live theater will be automated in my lifetime - just like automating poetry or painting - not that it can't be done, but that it won't be - I mean why bother? So, some jobs will remain even in the worst case scenarios. I see a likely scenario in which we have a 3 tier society: the ultra-rich who hold all the voting shares, the bourgeois who have found some niche in which they can eke out a living, and the untermenchen - on the dole. No reason to educate them. And the drones will keep them in line.We're already most of the way there.
resources based on exchanging labor for tokens and tokens for resources. We're starting, but we've got a ways to go.
Yes automating jobs does create progress but automation also enables tasks to be done that never could have been done by a human in the first place also.
Such as jet engines. At no point could a human do the job of a jet engine. For example....
is that most of those unemployable with little or no education still has the right to vote and are ripe propaganda fodder for populist politicians looking to keep their jobs. Perhaps automation is sort of self regulatory that when enough are unemployed, further automation will be outlawed?
Folks want meaningful work to feel they're contributing and adding value.
What a crock of shit.
Otherwise why does the Lottery exist? Only a small sliver of 0.1% of folks would volunteer to work if they didn't have to. Otherwise most folks would sit around scratching their sacks and smoking weed.
All of us are for automation -- as long as we own the tools in question.
We've been sold on automation ever since the first farmer poked holes in the ground and threw in tiny self-replicating nanobots (seeds). It worked better than foraging the same food in the jungle.
But in today's age ownership of tools is a problem. The first farmer 'owned' his inputs, or got them for free: seeds, sticks, land, labour; air, water, sunshine. The smith owned his bellows, the weaver owned his loom.
But workers in modern societies are raw materials in someone else's factory. Our labour is our principal asset. When it becomes unviable (age, sickness, robotization), no one continues renting this asset. Sure, we now own mobile phones and robot vacs, but can we service, customise, or clone our tools? The farmers, smiths and weavers of yore could.
Capitalism got us here. Communism simply transfers ownership of tools to someone else (the state). Perhaps we need an old doctrine with a new name -- disseminationism -- spread technological ownership to deliver the maximum benefit to the most people in the minimum amount of time. I'm sure this was widely practised in more altruistic societies in the past. Maybe open source is one embodiment.
It's a bit of a meme among progressives and the harder left in the US that bullshit jobs were an invention by the capital owning class to tamp down what might otherwise develop into a tipping point of popular pressure to take ownership of the means of production away from them.
But, this gives the Captains of Industry more credit than they're due, because creating jobs is a PITA, and with actual revolutions too far in the past for them to have even heard stories of over cocktails, never mind experienced, I doubt they think there's any practical limit to how much they can screw the rabble (ie. you).
In fact, increased productivity of existing work merely makes nice-to-have stuff enterprises and people couldn't economically justify before affordable. Stuff you didn't even give a second thought about become a handy way to put some surplus coin to use, finally spiraling down to the point where mobile dog groomers, large HR departments, and conservative think tanks are a thing. That's where the bullshit work comes in.
We've been through rapid economic changes before, and the past may well provide a guide to the future. But, which past? The one where farmers became steel and automobile workers? Or the one where steel and automobile workers became Walmart greeters? And not so fast you programmers, escrow agents, insurance brokers, and day traders. When you get automated out of your current job within a matter of a couple of years, or months, then what? Exactly what sort of bullshit work are you , you Ayn Rand-worshipping, it-won't-happen-to-me, automation fodder, going to do, eh? Learn to use a dog brush?
Luke, help me take this mask off
How much does it cost for a tutorial on the difference between then and than?
If you thought you could make your own clothes, build your own home, and grow your own food for less than you could pay others to do it, you'd do it yourself and create value that way. On the other hand, you probably can't as all of those are specialized skills that themselves require several specialized skills to contribute to the process of producing the end product so it's much easier to create value in other ways. You could probably pay someone else to mow your lawn as well, but you don't think what you'd have to pay is worth the value created.
And that is exactly what automation can and probably will change. Automation (and industrialisation in general) is "commoditiation" of specialized skills, either through ready made mass products, or, in case of automation specifically, through pre-packaged skills to be used by end user.
So, one last job will be finding new skills for new needs and packaging them for automatons to perform. Prophesiers of Singularity claim that it can be automated too, but we'll see about that. IMHO it is a moving, no, it is an actively evading target just like evolution of art.
or panic. But we're faced with a serious problem. 4 million people are going to become redundant in the next 20 years from retail & driving industries alone. A healthy amount of fear is called for. A lot of folks (especially the conservatives in America) won't react unless there's fear.
Moreover most folks are calling for the invisible hand to take care of this, making the argument that since it corrected itself during the last 3 industrial revs. Those people ignored enormous amount of unnecessary suffering.
Put another way, if a hungry bear is bearing (pun) down on you it's OK to be afraid. Maybe even panic a little. But if you've got a high powered rifle in hand you should shoot the damn thing instead of saying "Well, this mauling will work itself out".
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/