"...It’s always hard to say whether economic changes are cyclical or structural, but I think it’s fair to say that there’s a slowly accumulating consensus that technology is now destroying jobs faster than it’s creating them..."
That's a strange thing to say, because I'm of the opinion that more people worldwide are employed in productive economic activity than at any time in the past. In fact, that we've lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in the last decade or so.
I was going to start this off with "here we go again" because observing this great change that's overtaking us and catastrophizing about it seems to be a cottage industry -- and has been for many decades. No doubt general purpose computers and robots are going to massively change the face of society and commerce. I'll even go so far and guess that parts of our coming evolution are going to be painful -- just like it always has been.
But our relationship to the worldwide economy is a funny thing. We can sit back, assume that we're appropriately educated, tooled, and have the right attitude for success, then complain when there aren't jobs. Or we can choose to monitor and adapt to where the economy actually is. When we read about great changes coming, we should be thinking about the great opportunities we're going to have and how to adapt to meet the future, not about "what to do when your job is gone" That's self-fulfilling horse hockey.
There's an infinite amount of economic activity left in the world. The question is whether we want to learn how to engage in it or sit on the sidelines worrying about terrible structural changes that will doom us all.
"When we read about great changes coming, we should be thinking about the great opportunities we're going to have and how to adapt to meet the future, not about "what to do when your job is gone" That's self-fulfilling horse hockey."
I think this overlooks a very real problem. There are a large number of real people out there who lose their jobs because of this. Essentially their skills are no longer valuable, so they need to learn new skills. How are they going to afford the insane cost of going back to school? It's a tough situation, and even tougher if they have a family. And if both spouses worked in the same labor market, they could easily fall into poverty trying to feed their children.
Of course structural changes won't "doom us all". It does doom many people who suddenly find themselves in expired labor markets with no way out. We need technological advances, but we also need to find ways to adapt to those changes better in order to minimize the collateral damage.
A TED talk with Andrew McAfee made an interesting observation: once long-haul trucks are fully automated (the tech exists, it's just a matter of time), there will be a massive number of truckers suddenly out of work. Yes, other types jobs will no doubt be created, but i'm not sure many of those truck drivers will be in a good position to make the transition.
But you can acknowledge that there may be a real scarcity of work for people who have low IQ? In the past, there was always manual labor, which could soak up all labor so long as aggregate demand in the economy was great enough -- and the best way to ensure sufficient aggregate demand, in the past, was typically a combination of productivity gains and sufficient monetary creation. But what happens when all the work that can be done by low IQ people is automated?
You might be willing to respond with "New forms of work will open up that will allow for the employ of those people with low IQs". However, I am asking you to consider the hypothetical where every such form of work is eventually automated by machines that have sufficiently advanced AI.
Between 1850 and 1973 there were immense improvements in labor productivity that completely transformed the world, and for a long time the rising productivity created more new jobs, rather than less. But going forward, we face a situation where increasing automation will still create new wealth, and it will still create huge improvements in labor productivity, but the improvements will only be available for those who have enough IQ to understand the technologies in use.
And much of this scenario might come to pass during the next 50 years. But imagine even further afield -- imagine 200 years now. Do you think the period 1850 to 1973 offers a reasonable model to think about, say for instance, economic growth between 2100 and 2200?
What happens if there comes a day when absolutely everything is automated and humans no longer need to work? We have reached utopia, yes? But you can probably see where I am going with this: eventually there needs to be some way to provide an income to people, when the day eventually comes when no one needs to work.
What happens if there comes a day when absolutely everything is automated and humans no longer need to work? We have reached utopia, yes? But you can probably see where I am going with this: eventually there needs to be some way to provide an income to people, when the day eventually comes when no one needs to work.
I never understand the logic of this argument. If everything is automated and everyone is provided for (this is a utopia, after all), why would people need an income? By definition, if people do not need to work, then they do not need an income. The need to work and the need for an income are the same thing, just worded differently.
The problem isn't with the state of this utopia; the true difficulties lie in transition process - when more and more things get automated, but the overall economy still forces you to have an income or starve. The real challenge of our times is how we get from here to there without a huge mess and a lot of suffering in the middle.
Yes, the transition will be an upset, like all transitions are. But what I quoted doesn't talk about the transition to the utopia, it talks about the utopia having been reached and people still needing an income. If people's needs are not being provided for they will need income, presumably by trading their time/effort for a means of exchange (money), but if that is the case, then the utopia has not been achieved.
Nothing happens overnight, and confusing the challenges of the transition with the endgame, or that the challenges that existed during the transition will still exist after the endgame is achieved, presents a position that the endgame isn't worth it because the transition disturbs the status quo.
Yeah, but the question is, where are these economic gains from automation and AI going? They don't just go into the ether - they'll accumulate to whoever financed the automated whatsit, and rightly or wrongly that person will not willingly share their vastly increased income with a superfluous zero-leverage former workforce. This is exactly what is happening now as massive productivity gains over thirty years have failed to translate into an increase in real wealth distributed across the population. The technological solution creates a social problem.
From the "What If Technology Is Destroying Jobs Faster Than It Creates Them?" one of the links of the article:
> It’s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, in which a small minority reaps most of the benefits of technology that destroys more jobs than it creates. As my friend Simon Law says, “First we automated menial jobs, now we’re automating middle-class jobs. Unfortunately, we still demand that people have a job soon after becoming adults. This trend is going to be a big problem…”
And this is of course true, the only thing that makes software cheaper is the one resource it can actually save on : people. I would even argue that, generally, when software replaces a person, it is actually less efficient in all but one metric : it generally uses more resources than a person would use for the same work.
So I'm arguing that mostly the efficiency gains from technology are negative, but you're trading expensive resources (people) for cheap ones (power, computers, robots ...).
A few more arguments for this :
1) machines are more precise, but require better inputs, which require more resources, and what they can't deal with is generally not recycled, as that would destroy the value of those machines.
2) the human body is surprisingly efficient (especially knowing how general it is in function. Usually the more generally useful something, the less efficient. Humans are among the most efficient animals and are vastly more general). Our body beats oil based energy, and beats coal based energy by a large margin (input in watts versus output in work).
3) saving the expense of keeping the human alive is useless ... unless, of course you intend to kill/starve/ignore till they're dead/... said human. You're just creating a negative externality.
4) as the past centuries have pointed out, saving human labor is completely useless if they're your market. The last French king had a much less comfortable life than a homeless man has today, with few exceptions : servants and available space. But seriously, even the food that was served to that king, I wouldn't touch it (I shudder to think what medieval kings ate). His toilet is only slightly better than a hole in the ground. Sheets, beds, ... all are cleaner, more functional and a LOT softer today. And about cleaning ... well people actually clean themselves today. I shudder to think of the smell of Versailles in the 19th century.
The argument "but life never gets worse in history" has plenty of counterexamples, the biggest one (imho) the end of the Roman Empire, which took half a millennium to recover from. But there were plenty, say, the muslim conquests of Northern Africa would be another example. Started out with >50% of the population pretty comfortable (e.g. running water, heating, public fountains, roads, working medical infrastructure, surgical procedures available to middle class and even a significant part of the slave class), working travel infrastructure, life expectancy at ~57 years and ended with tribes who effectively lived in the stone age (average life expectancy at one point under 20), and a few lords who lived at a comfort level that was at best what it was at the beginning of the iron age. They would remain locked in this situation for more than a millennium. Some pockets of technology remained, like Cairo, which retained it's Christian institutions up to this day. But technology can't compete with free labor, so it couldn't expand despite many, many tries.
The problem is about distribution, not production. Not everyone will own these magical means of automation, and owners will have no incentive to share with non-owners, because non-owners cannot offer anything that owners need.
The lack of low skilled jobs in the US is primarily a combination of zero import taxes with China etc and a minimum wage. We still want all those tshits and painted plastic toys that used to be low skilled laber in the US we just don't use people in the US to make them.
What does a "low IQ" have to do with manual labor? IQ or any other measure of so called intelligence, has never -- and will probably never -- have any correlation with a person's occupation. Ultimately, it is the parent's socio-economic status which usually dictates what jobs their children will have.
The fact that you believe it could be a person's "IQ" which dictates what job they may have really shows how little regard you have for people.
> Ultimately, it is the parent's socio-economic status which usually dictates what jobs their children will have.
That's not an agreed upon fact.
For example, a cursory googling of "correlation between iq and job" brings up a lot of articles with language like "This is why hundreds of studies have found that IQ predicts job performance best (though not all that well) at the start of a person’s career, and progressively weakens over the course of that career."[1] or subtitles like "Intelligence wins out over socio-economic status when it comes to career advancement"[2]. (But maybe that search term is biased. I just entered the most obvious thing.)
As another example, wikipedia says "The validity of IQ as a predictor of job performance is above zero for all work studied to date, but varies with the type of job and across different studies, ranging from 0.2 to 0.6. The correlations were higher when the unreliability of measurement methods was controlled for."[3]
> really shows how little regard you have for people.
Look, that sounds nice and all, but it just isn't true. Some people are smarter than others. This should be an incredibly uncontroversial claim. Also, textbook ad hominem at the end there.
The fact that you believe a persons "height" dictates their chance of competing in the NBA really shows how little regard you have for people.
I once believed this was a danger, but have come to realize it doesn't need to be. As a thought experiment, all it takes is one infinitely scalable "job" to make the proposed jobless dystopia implausible. And it exists. Entrepreneurship. There is no limit to to the number of new companies that can be created. Some of them will even employ a few non-entrepreneurs.
As for societal tectonic shifts needed, we just need a safety net to make it safer to fail, and easier to try. Things like socialized healthcare, simplified accounting rules for small businesses, annual instead of quarterly filing requirments for small business, no corporate minimum tax (I'm looking at you massachusetts) can help make this work.
I agree with you that entrepreneurship is a good answer, but it's not going to be right for everyone. Some people are not that brave, or in a position to try that. And they tried to get an adequate socialized healthcare system in place, And then Congress stamp their feet and cried, and now we have the bill that's coming now. Not the same bill that was proposed at the beginning, that the insurance companies shit a brick over.
I agree with you re:health care and our inept congress. In terms of entrepreneurship not being right for everyone, I agree. However, the thought experiment was oversimplified a bit.
There are human-required jobs that won't be infinitely scalable. Artist, masseuse, daycare provider, teacher, author, sales, marketer, circus performer, mover, software engineer, owner, landlord, nurse, doctor. The dystopian argument is usually that technology will require less of these jobs. It usually doesn't go as far as saying "none" and that is where the people who aren't cut out for entrepreneurship will land.
What happens when there are no human workers to service the robots when they fail? There's no such thing as a machine with moving parts lasting forever and I seriously doubt robotics is at a point where a robot can replace its own failing moving part nor replace a bad power supply or fried circuit board.
Anything involving a repetitive task like assembling a phone, pouring a beer, flipping a burger or folding a box is of course naturally going to at some stage be almost completely automated. You can't win in a fight with a machine when it comes to efficiency. However, good luck seeing a robot replace an electrician, a plumber, a web developer, a dentist, police officer or paramedic any time soon.
I think the whole, "robots are going to take our jobs" argument is a little blown out of proportion. People have been saying since the 50's that they're worried machines are going to take their jobs and it hasn't really happened on the large scale people like to think it has nor will in the next 50 years.
>What happens when there are no human workers to service the robots when they fail?
We can automate the service of robots.
>I think the whole, "robots are going to take our jobs" argument is a little blown out of proportion. People have been saying since the 50's that they're worried machines are going to take their jobs and it hasn't really happened on the large scale people like to think it has nor will in the next 50 years.
It "has happened", but it's just called automation of the industry. Service jobs have replaced a lot of the jobs in the industry.
Or just destroy/recycle them when they wear out, because whatever's available as a replacement is probably better/cheaper in some way than the old unit. In fact if you design them with that explicitly in mind, it becomes very efficient.
We do the same with computers and phones, it's usually better in our personal big pictures to just get a new unit.
What happens when the automation of the robot servicing fails? Do you have servicing of the servicing of the robots? Seems like a massive clusterfudge if you ask me.
There is a difference between automation and people losing jobs on a large scale. I'm not talking about automation making the life of a manual worker easier like it was during the 50's, I'm talking about people being replaced completely by robots. Even a lot of car production lines which were the first to embrace machine automation still employ manual workers to operate some of the equipment and ensure any downtime is minimal.
Even those self service kiosks at supermarkets require staff standing around because they fail often and people struggle to use them and prefer going through an actual register and being served. Those self-serve registers drive me nuts when it incorrectly weighs your groceries and tells you to wait for assistance.
What happens when the automation of the robot servicing fails? Do you have servicing of the servicing of the robots? Seems like a massive clusterfudge if you ask me.
The same thing that happens if we were talking about humans instead of robots. They are replaced.
I think you might be looking at this a little too black and white. Perhaps a robot won't replace an electrician, but an electrician with advanced technology at his/her disposal can do the work that in the past required several electricians.
I think that going forward, we will see a smaller and smaller percentage of the population producing increasingly larger portions of the wealth. These producers will produce more than they can personally consume. The problem then becomes one of wealth distribution.
We need to find a new way to structure capitalistic society so that wealth producers can be rewarded for their efforts, but those not able to as effectively produce wealth are still able to live well. Ideally we should implement a system that can scale all the way from where we are now, to the point where very few people are required to produce wealth.
We are exiting a relatively short period in history with mass employment for cash wages. "People need a purpose and to work" is at best a bald assertion in light of a longer view of history, and, at worst, a pretty bad assumption about the kind of people who you want to make sure are tired at the end of the day and not out at night.
Why is work good? N.B. this is not the same question as "Why is income inequality bad?"
In addition to using some of the newly created wealth for paying fixed incomes, as the author mentions, we should be using that money to make higher education free.
The author says, "let them eat cake, smoke pot, and play video games." I say let them study art history (or CS). Who knows, maybe it will inspire them to do something useful in our brave new world.
Education is not the silver bullet to a good economy. At every point in which the economy bloomed, there were sufficient jobs for people who are not college-educated. Manufacturing used to fill that gap. Part of the problem is that companies are in a race to the bottom. TechCrunch Touched on that just briefly. The most vital economies always have a read distribution of wealth through services. At some point the rest of the country, the non-tech savvy, will have to redistribute farewell to the people in the tech sector and vice versa. Wealth creation free handful of people is not the answer by itself. Because we see that does nothing for the economy at large.
Before reasoning further you need to answer very simple question "From where wealth comes?". If your answer is "from employer", "from the bank" or "from the VC". Please, think again. I'll wait.
Money always come from customers. Who are the customers in this bipolar model of the world?
Jobless class cannot be sustainable customer. All the money they have comes from elite class. It is very strange from the side of elite to donating jobless. Jobless can pay for elite's product by elite's money. Oh, miracle, elite can has all their money back! It is stupid cycle. If there is no spoils in process, elite has no reason to start it.
> I think it’s fair to say that there’s a slowly accumulating consensus that technology is now destroying jobs faster than it’s creating them
Maybe, maybe not.
>> We juxtapose the effects of trade and technology on employment in U.S. local labor markets between 1990 and 2007. Labor markets whose initial industry composition exposes them to rising Chinese import competition experience significant falls in employment, particularly in manufacturing and among non-college workers. Labor markets susceptible to computerization due to specialization in routine task-intensive activities experience significant occupational polarization within manufacturing and nonmanufacturing but no net employment decline. Trade impacts rise in the 2000s as imports accelerate, while the effect of technology appears to shift from automation of production activities in manufacturing towards computerization of information-processing tasks in non manufacturing.
Well if we ruin this economy we can just create a new one. :-) And I think that's what people will do. If this society offers you nothing then just start your own (see the New Delhi slums as an example). That's what Mennonites, Quakers, Amish and other groups do. They are loosely connected to the economy and aren't as affected by this as people fully involved with the global economy.
In a way activities like urban farming and doomsday preppers share a value system we'll see on a rise. The value system shared between these two activities is being self sufficient and control of your own destiny. We'll see this value of self sufficiency rise as the economy provides less and less to the unemployed. No one wants a hand out.
Artificial intelligence wont take my programming job during my lifetime. Should it happen in the future, though, our descendants will have a completely different mindset from ours, being able to solve the problems at that time.
This is actually something I've been thinking about recently. Once we've automated all of the "manual labour" jobs away in the name of efficiency or human safety, what do we do with the people who are only fit for manual labour?
Ethically, we're compelled to support these people. But does it make sense to maintain a population that contributes absolutely nothing? I imagine they'd start to get restless as well... I suppose we could always put them into giant hamster wheels to generate power.
Society eventually will work it out. If you get too many idle and angry people you get a revolution, everything is broken in the process, and lots of work to get back to the beginning of the problem again. Or maybe technology allows us to move to other planets and have to start again. Or maybe a disease kills 50% of the population. Lots of possibilities. People always assume the future won't be much different than the present.
Why not? Isn't it possible that we are affecting our own evolution? Those with rational and logic-oriented minds will thrive, and the numbers of those who aren't able to develop that capacity will begin to dwindle. Given the inclination towards pacifism, scientific reason, and tollerance that most rational people exhibit, seems like a net win for the future of humanity.
Unskilled labour will go (first), but there will be higher demands for developers, innovators, researchers, and a push to make the tools they use more efficient.
I only hope the government create a free and continuous education system for those who are out of work, so that they may develop their minds. I hope education in this new world becomes cultural.
The horse population was huge in the 19th century, and then drastically fell when they were replaced with cars, trucks and trains for transportation and machines for labor. We didn't need biological horse labor anymore, and they became luxury items.
The same thing could happen to humans. I'm sure the 1% or the 53% wouldn't miss the irritating 99% or the 47% once we're no longer needed to maintain their lifestyles.
"Look Daddy, that family has a human gardener! Can we get one? Please?"
Well, you're right about human labor being a luxury in a world of increasing automation. It seems like people are willing to pay for that, though. Until something really crazy happens, like mind uploading becoming a reality, automation will result in more people being employed for luxury purposes. Many of these will be low-wage jobs, but that won't be so bad if technological progress continues to make things more affordable. But human labor as a luxury does not necessarily mean low-wage work. For example, mechanical watches have essentially been toys for rich people for the past few decades, yet they continue to be produced in significant numbers, and the higher-end watches generally have a significant amount of human labor involved.
I agree, but I do think it's important to point out that a lot of human labor (like programming, for example) seems to be AI-complete. Once we have full-on AI, we'll have bigger problems than unemployment. As Bostrom points out, intelligence and morals are orthogonal. That is, while intelligent agents may converge on a provably optimal method of cognition, their goals will not converge. One can't construe conscience and capability. This is a bigger problem. There doesn't seem to be much point in worrying about unemployment when strong AI is on the table.
I dont think TechCrunch is right on this one. Automation is not putting people out of work. The failure of future reward for a lifetime of effort is turning careerism on its head regardless of your career field.
Ive been a software engineer for 15 years, I have chosen to not work for almost 2 years.
I could get a job tomorrow, but I would quit in a couple months because the working conditions in software shops is pretty bad and the economic reward that looks good on paper doesn't really translate into anything I need or want.
And its not that I cant get a GOOD job. The working conditions at big company X, Y, Z are frankly terrible.
Ive been there.
I may not represent the average unemployed person (and no I dont collect unemployment) but I can see where people are coming from, and I empathize.
That's a strange thing to say, because I'm of the opinion that more people worldwide are employed in productive economic activity than at any time in the past. In fact, that we've lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in the last decade or so.
I was going to start this off with "here we go again" because observing this great change that's overtaking us and catastrophizing about it seems to be a cottage industry -- and has been for many decades. No doubt general purpose computers and robots are going to massively change the face of society and commerce. I'll even go so far and guess that parts of our coming evolution are going to be painful -- just like it always has been.
But our relationship to the worldwide economy is a funny thing. We can sit back, assume that we're appropriately educated, tooled, and have the right attitude for success, then complain when there aren't jobs. Or we can choose to monitor and adapt to where the economy actually is. When we read about great changes coming, we should be thinking about the great opportunities we're going to have and how to adapt to meet the future, not about "what to do when your job is gone" That's self-fulfilling horse hockey.
There's an infinite amount of economic activity left in the world. The question is whether we want to learn how to engage in it or sit on the sidelines worrying about terrible structural changes that will doom us all.