Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Do you view the NSA's snooping technology as a benefit to society? More high tech, well paid jobs have been created there.
Likewise I feel that a great deal of the tech involved in finance is of questionable benefit to society as aw whole. Does High frequency trading actually benefit anyone other than the banks?
I'd go in debt to become a carpenter before I went in debt learning a JS Framework, as an example.
Isn't the purpose of work to end (or to diminish, at least) all work? (and leave us with more time to take care of ourselves, our minds, our bodies, our souls, our kids, our parents, our friends, our neighbours, our politics, our environment etc)
Technology has given me such an awesome way to make a living that makes me feel so lucky. Life for me now is far more enjoyable and easier than my time at school or college, purely because I get to work on the things I enjoy.
I'd also argue that an end to work is something that we, as a society, are simply not ready for. Firstly, because our current economic system isn't capable of handling such a change, but also societally, people aren't ready for it. If I recall, there have been studies that have linked earlier retirement to a reduced life expectancy.
If you count retirement as sitting around doing nothing then I agree. But retirement shouldnt mean retirement from doing things - just retirement from working for someone else to be able to support yourself.
When I 'retire' I'll get much more personally meaningful things done, which otherwise would not earn me enough money to support a family.
It shouldn't, but the studies suggest this is what happens in practice.
But what about the chance to retire at, say, 45? I imagine many folks at that age, having the 2nd half of their lives ahead of them, would go on to focus on a more personal passion that is also active.
If we 'developed' the world, why not develop other planets and so on and so forth.
Your utopia is close to North Korea's.
The rental versus buying dichotomy is orthogonal to the issue of limited supply. If everyone rents there is still the same overall demand for accommodation, hence rents would be high (due to limited supply) and that would propagate through to push up property prices. End result is the same.
With constrained supply the money flows to existing property owners which are generally older, more likely to be retired, etc. That older group probably spend a lot of that excess wealth on holidays and social care. If that excess wealth was reduced then the discretionary purchases would drop first (the holidays). Probably the economy would have a very different 'shape' if construction supply was increased to meet demand.
"If there's ever a sign that a society is organized really stupidly, it's that the prospect that actual manual labor being eliminated is a problem. If we don't know what to do with freedom and liberty... that’s pretty messed up." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ruS17ivinU&feature=youtu.be...)
What jobs do we squander our lives with? 37% of British workers think their jobs are meaningless. ("Bullshit jobs" is the technical term. The anthropologist who popularized it thought only 25% would've described their job as meaningless.) (https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningles...)
If we really end up with nothing to do but desperately need to be forced to work, maybe forced labor camps would solve the problem </s>
Now, people who are displaced by technology can move on to other things, but what happens if there really is nothing we're better at than a computer, in say 100 years?
what happens if there really is nothing
we're better at than a computer
The line between Humans and Computers will continue to blur. Right now, you carry a computer with you in your pocket. Tomorrow you will have it in your head. And it will aid your thinking without you having to type stuff into a keyboard and looking at a screen.
If there is nothing left "we" are better at then computers, the last remaining "old" parts inside of us will be discarded and we will just be a computer like everybody else :)
You're assuming people will want it in their heads. I'd rather be naked and without tools, than become part of The Borg. YMMV though.
They all have mobiles now.
Of course, it's pretty difficult to predict the future, and it's possible that human-computer hybrids will continue to outperform vanilla computers in the long term (as you point out).
But :
1. Will they grow under new conditions ?
These sectors historically didn't enjoy more productivity due to technology. Economists called this "baumol's disease". But this is changing. We're seeing higher education and maybe some lower education being automated. In japan we saw a robotic hotel, there's plenty of efforts to automate the food industry(both making and serving food), and in healthcare we're on the way to become much more effective at a fast rate with many(hundreds of genetic treatments in clinical trials,great improvements in targeted cancer therapies, artificial pancreases and continuous glucose monitoring are on the way to solve diabetes , etc ,etc) .
2. How much more can they grow ? Will said growth be enough to stop job decline in other sectors ?
All those sectors grew due to stuff like cheap credit, degree inflation, more expandable income, growing country budgets, etc.
But will those conditions continue to be true in a world with a lot of unemployment in other sectors - much more than we saw in the past ?
Also - all those three sectors are 23% of the economy. We're talking about 40% of jobs at risk due to automation in 20 years. So those sectors would have to double/triple themselves to compensate. Is this realistic ?
[1]http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/bus-register/business-register...
Some conditions don't change. An OAP with limited mobility will always require assistance day-to-day, and it's the sort of thing robots are really bad at. OAPs are also growing in number, as life expectation increases. Another one: you will always need someone to help give birth - in fact, as hospitals are deemed too expensive and scaled back, we will likely need more nurses, since home-births stop them from sharing their time between patients. Again, this will not be touched by automation. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
>2. How much more can they grow ?
I think that's more a function of our social organisation than technology. The real question is basically "how can we pay these people?" -- morality and common sense tell us that a lot of these activities should not be linked to profit, but that is economically challenging unless we rethink how money is created and distributed.
> We're talking about 40% of jobs at risk due to automation in 20 years.
I find that number too high to be true. 10 or 20%, maybe; 40%, it's really hard to believe - that's 15 million people in the UK without a job, where currently we have 2.3million unemployed. It would mean basically 1 million newly unemployed people each year; I would argue society would not survive 5 years in such conditions, let alone 20.
In any case, I have no doubt we can create more office-based bullshit roles to offset the bulk of those losses (dedicated entertainment people in every office; corporate psychologists; continuous-change oversight; dedicated corporate tailors; and so on and so forth...).
The 40% came from a study at oxford, which i think was a bit conservative , because it didn't take into account the possibility of creative jobs being automated.
>> I have no doubt we can create more office-based bullshit roles
Sure we can. But will we ? i'm not so sure.
>> but that is economically challenging unless we rethink how money is created and distributed.
If that happens , a lot of things would change, for both directions - more jobs and less jobs.
>> Again, this will not be touched by automation.
Automation is the less powerful technology working on healthcare. But if you can detect diseases very early , and have very effective , side-effect free and long-term treatments , healthcare will become more efficient.
Or let's talk about limited mobility(your example) - a leading cause is severe arthritis. But maybe we can cure that ?
>> home-births
Maybe we'll see growth there.But i would guess it's not that big of job provider. and even for home births, there's telemedicine and remote continuous monitoring , i think in use today - saving work.
In the U.S. we are creating software to get rid of those tasks. Yes, we'll hire a few programmers to make the software, and then cut 20 or 30 people out of an office. They don't get hired back. The company puts that money in the pocket of the owners. Every year the hardware and software gets cheaper to produce too.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out when robots get smart. My guess is people will still work on their novels, designing stuff, acting and the like.
You're putting the cart before the horse (or I misunderstood you).
People have less they are required to do and use time they would have spent tending to their farm to ensure their survival, to pursue novelty and comfort instead.
But people aren't great at entertaining themselves, so a lot of people are employed in the business of entertaining others.
Comfort is also something that doesn't come easily, so a lot of people are employed in the business of doing menial tasks (like cooking and cleaning) for others, or producing furniture or machines that enhance our comfort.
Are you sure? Maybe what they are actually pursuing is trying to convince other people that some new job is sorely needed in the "new economy"?
*People in what you quoted was intended to mean "anybody who would have been a farmer", so that's the 68% that have to find alternative employment.
I live in an apartment building, my rooms have air conditioning units, and I have a bed and a sofa and a refrigerator and lots of other things that improve my quality of life, and people had to build all of those things (including the building I live in and the rooms in the building and the power plant that runs all the stuff in my apartment and the buses and trains I use to get to places and the roads and track those drive on etc.), the labor and ingenuity required for all those things to exist comes from (I think) that 68%+ of people who were unemployed by technology, and those people also have their own things (homes and food and furniture and transportation), which they use to entertain themselves or make themselves more comfortable.
Seeking leisure is a human nature, true. But maybe also human nature is to compete for resources, get more for your family, and make yourself more attractive to the other sex, even if that means working harder. If the alternative is unemployment, this may drive people to work in (or even create) services that they know are not really that useful.
Now, population has grown three fold in the last hundred years: http://www.historyfuturenow.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/1...
There are more old people alive than ever before as a percentage of the overall population (I guess there's jobs in caring for them, unless robots do that, as well), and technology is at a point where it can replace humans completely, instead of working side by side.
I always say, the Industrial Revolution = humans aided by machines (say a ratio of 1-100), the Automation Revolution = machines aided by humans (take the same ratio in reverse).
You see the problem? Population is exploding, job automation is doing the same. In a society that needs to work in order to live, that is unsustainable.
I'm all for automation, but we need something for those who will simply have nothing to do in order to make money...
The people who own and maintain the machines will be fine, those who mediate relations between humans-humans-machines, as well. What about the rest?
But why do you latch to the specific job i picked? More ecologists, more physicians, more nurses, more psychologists, more people in the creative industries. More people in the "caring" industries as a whole. Workforce shifted from labor to knowledge. It will now shift to societal work.
For instance, I might never want to become a touchy-feely creative-industry person. What is there in this planned society for me?
The trouble with this discussion is, that it starts assuming everybody must have a job. I disagree; that's the old pre-abundance view of the world. We have to get past that.
There is still plenty of room to grow and improve. Africa and Asia have huge amounts of land that are nowhere as dense as the US, let alone Europe.
> we need something for those who will simply have nothing to do in order to make money...
We need to rethink how money is created and distributed. Once you do that, the need to "make money" might be lessened or replaced with different ones.
Rethinking income/money is definitely a must, but right now we're totally dependent on it...
You might want to re-think that. Places where people do not live are generally like that for a reason. How much fresh water is there? Do we really want to have more places on the planet under water stress? Do we want to ship water there? Is it hot as hell there? How much of a persons income is needed to survive with modern conveniences? What is the carbon cost of living there?
>We need to rethink how money is created and distributed.
That has to happen, but will it happen? For example, after the horse was replaced by the car, did we keep millions of horses around? No, there numbers dropped significantly. If technology can truly replace huge numbers of people, the people left with the capital may think that getting rid of huge portions of the population is a valid outcome. The truly scary thing is it may actually be a valid answer.
The actual problem that worries people nowadays is if there is a limit to the number of avenues and if we are close to hitting it ? And even if new avenues open, how easy it is to switch to them physically ( they open in another country ) or practically ( they require high qualification level ) The article does not make a case for that at all. Increase in caring professions, for example, is government policy driven. Is the article claiming that technology what the key factor that drove those policies and that further automation will drive the state to push for even more caring professionals ?
Anyway, I guess the only goal of the article is to give hope to Joe Reader. That is not a bad thing, after all, at the very worst, we are still only at the peak of employment and wealth and (without the singularity) the world will not brutally crash, it will slowly degrade leaving plenty of opportunities for everyone to get a clue. For others though, they would have guessed that with a population doubling during the same period and low current unemployment rate, it is obvious that some jobs must have been created somewhere.
The problem with this line of thinking is that you assume there are some new job types that come into play and they replace old ones. While it is true that we have some entirely new job types (i.e. programmer) majority of the shift is to jobs which were already defined.
Did we have architects and physicians before the industrialization? Of course we did. We just have more of them now, because we don't need so many people to harvest crops.
Do we have kindergarten teachers, ecologists, social scientists now? Of course we do. We will just have more of them after the digitalization, because we won't need so many people to take your money at Wallmart or drive trucks or do legal discovery.
I think if you look at the stats it's been slowly upgrading rather than visa versa. I don't see much sign of the trend reversing globally. Pessimists tend to look at worker living standards in the US where they have been kind of static, ignoring the poorest 80% of the planet where they have been shooting up. China for example has been transformed over the last 30 years.
I personally can't stand tech anymore, it's what I'm forced to do to make a living. I'd rather stare at a tree than a mobile screen.
But a lot of that improvement has been off the back of Rest of World, where slave-like conditions still endure. It's fine to have hairdressers here, but it's useful to remember that hairdressing is only possible because there are textile makers, miners, and farmers working in extremely harsh conditions elsewhere in the world.
And there's also been incredible damage to the planetary carrying capacity, with effects that will become more and more obvious as the century progresses.
So it's just as possible to argue that technology is more like a drug that works on generational time scales: you get a hit, you feel awesome for a while, then you fall apart.
We're in a new and exponentially developing Renaissance, the likes of which we have no historical analogy for (not even the actual Renaissance or Industrial Revolution). It's incredibly exciting, but we're in for quite a ride over the next few decades, and our sociopolitical foundations are not prepared for it in the slightest. I think encouraging further procrastination of preparedness does a disservice to us all.
The biggest issue with our era of technological growth, is we really have no idea if it is sustainable socially or ecologically over periods of time.
If we take human social structures out of current growth and look at the 'people like to work and create to survive issue as an individual' we can easily destroy the world around us. This occurs all the time in biological systems. The great oxygen catastrophe is a prime example. Each individual bacteria produced oxygen in order to survive. This worked fine for around a billion years. The bacteria had no means to realized that free iron and other rocks in the crust would absorb their byproduct only for so long. Once the saturation point was reached free oxygen filled the atmosphere and essentially poisoned the Earth for a time.
The question is, 'is there a technological saturation point'? How quickly will technology continue to grow even if it is poisoning the social structures it was built on? Will people and society adapt quickly enough?
I also find it interesting they highlight the decrease in professional cloth washers something technology has allowed us to DIY. Next to an increase in professional hair cutters something we previously DIYed with little technology. If someone makes a good hair cutting robot what will we outsource next besides food cooking and drink serving?
AFAICT the article doesn't make this distinction, and it is difficult - we don't have a standard way to consider this problem.
The question is if it's worth it, and if it wouldn't be more useful to just let people work less and have more free time (for example through basic income).
Let's just hope that the way we distribute wealth changes simultaneously, otherwise a lot of people will suffer.
In a rational society, more jobs being destroyed would be something to be celebrated. It is a sign of a sick culture in which it would be seen as a bad thing.
Sure, having to work was (and still largely is) a necessity, but we should make it unneccessary as soon as technologically possible.
We act like being forced to do something is a right/privilige instead of a burden.
It's just an indicator.
We know this, I don't think anyone has ever said otherwise. We also have had positive growth and increased consumption over this time as well.
When it will stop is the only interesting point now since there seems to be many indicators we are hitting limits.
Secondly nobody can argue that there are less things in the world that we want to do than there were 100 years ago. They are not the same jobs but can anyone really argue that nope, there is nothing left to do. Of course not, that's absurd. Technology has simply changed and expanded the areas to work in.
Because India (customer service centers) and China (apple product assembly) would say otherwise.
Technology has simply allowed easier outsourcing while funneling the profits to fewer and fewer people.