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Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

I assume you've been downvoted because there's a somewhat reflexive faith here that new classes of jobs will always be created to fill those that have been taken over by increased automation/productivity. That may be true, but for anyone who believes that, I recommend at least taking a look at the arguments Marshall Brain presents in his"Robotic Nation." One of his conclusions is that -- unlike with previous revolutions where new classes of jobs appeared to replace the ones that were destroyed (industrial for agricultural, for example) -- no new class of jobs appears to be on the horizon that is also not automatable.

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I am down-voting him because, after two centuries of automation, the unemployment rate still hovers between 5 and 10 percent. In short, his ideas have no basis in reality and he makes no attempt to justify them. It is simple internet pop economics, and the world has too much of it. Not down-voting people like this is what leads to politicians getting away with ignorant demagoguery on economic subjects and a population too ill-informed to call them out on it.

Sure, when the singularity comes things may be different. But if that is his case, then he should make the argument. The parent comment is just noise.

I can't recommend the book "Economics in One Lesson" highly enough. It answers this question.

Full text here: http://jim.com/econ/

I think it should be required reading for everyone during high school. This chapter is relevant:

"The Curse of Machinery" - http://jim.com/econ/chap07p1.html

Long story very short? We'll be okay. It's been a worry for a long time, and it's always been false. But the chapter of the book says it much better than me, and it's a short read. Actually, I'm going to submit this now as a separate submission. Really, highly recommended, very insightful stuff.

Edit: Submitted here if you'd like to discuss: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1127345

It's been a worry for a long time, and it's always been false.

And therefore it will always be false?

The "TL;DR" doesn't cover it, but in the chapter the previous commenter references, he does explain why it's a logical fallacy. At the risk of putting something incomplete and/or incorrect, TL;DR summary of the explanation of the fallacy is that the productivity saved by automation is always available to fuel further production.

Higher average productivity is great, but the problem America has at the moment is an ever-widening gap in income, and very little political will to do anything about it. An important passage in the article:

William Felkin, in his History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery Manufactures (1867), tells us (though the statement seems implausible) that the larger part of the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years.

If this is true it is a big deal. Suppose you invent a device that will double economic output while putting half the population out of work. There's no question the device needs to be put to use, but something needs to be done about all these displaced people as well. Much of the surplus in productivity borne of your invention will need to be used to help those people switch to other work, allow them to retire early, etc. In other words you will be taxed heavily, something which is very hard to do these days in the States. So the American worker seems especially vulnerable to displacement by automation, and you get this scapegoating of machinery. If you don't like it, next time you hear some jerk on the radio bleating about high taxes and socialism, think about where that money might be going, and vote accordingly.

What about knowledge workers? They're a new class of workers. There is no AI good enough yet to replace a book author, a marketing manager, a lawyer etc. Will they ever be automatable? Probably. But who knows which new class will emerge after the knowledge workers..

Here's Marshall Brain's response:

The conventional wisdom says that the economy will create 50 million new jobs to absorb all the unemployed people, but that raises two important questions:

What will those new jobs be? They won't be in manufacturing -- robots will hold all the manufacturing jobs. They won't be in the service sector (where most new jobs are now) -- robots will work in all the restaurants and retail stores. They won't be in transportation -- robots will be driving everything. They won't be in security (robotic police, robotic firefighters), the military (robotic soldiers), entertainment (robotic actors), medicine (robotic doctors, nurses, pharmacists, counselors), construction (robotic construction workers), aviation (robotic pilots, robotic air traffic controllers), office work (robotic receptionists, call centers and managers), research (robotic scientists), education (robotic teachers and computer-based training), programming or engineering (outsourced to India at one-tenth the cost), farming (robotic agricultural machinery), etc. We are assuming that the economy is going to invent an entirely new category of employment that will absorb half of the working population.

Why isn't the economy creating those new jobs now? Today there are millions of unemployed people. There are also tens of millions of people who would gladly abandon their minimum wage jobs scrubbing toilets, flipping burgers, driving trucks and shelving inventory for something better. This imaginary new category of employment does not hinge on technology -- it is going to employ people, after all, in massive numbers -- it is going to employ half of today's working population. Why don't we see any evidence of this new category of jobs today?

I don't find some of his examples (robotic scientists?) particularly persuasive, but the idea that many low skilled jobs will be destroyed while few high skill jobs created... seems at least plausible to me. That this has never happened before isn't a particularly good argument why it couldn't happen in the future.

I do agree with your arguments, but regarding robotic scientists: automation is pretty strong also in science. combinatorial chemistry is used a lot in chemistry and chip fabrication r&d. And there's even a robot called ADAM that does biology research: he raises hypotheses , plans and executes experiments , analyzes results , and decides how to continue. the whole research loop.

I fear that this argument is too sci-fi to be taken seriously by the overly literal personalities that tend to dominate HN, so let's make it clear: he's not actually saying that "robot scientists" are going to take over. Brain is performing a reductio ad absurdum -- he's taking the other side's argument to the extreme to demonstrate the fundamental logical fallacies involved.

We don't need to wait for robot scientists to see the consequences of automation -- it's happening right now. Smaller numbers of skilled laborers are replacing larger numbers of unskilled laborers. To make the argumentative leap that this is a sustainable process, you have to prove that somehow, we will dramatically reduce the number of people who depend on unskilled labor to to make a living. I have yet to see a convincing proof that this is occurring. At best, we seem to keep shifting the kind of unskilled labor that we need, and paying less for it.

What I don't get is the difference of timelines in his argument. Considering all the fields where supposedly humans are to be replaced by robots we are talking about a point in time probably still a 100 years off. (And we just cannot say for sure that all those activities ever can be sufficiently performed by robots, probably until it happens.) So how are we supposed to know what kinds of jobs there will be in a 100 years time?

My (imaginary) farming and livestock-holding greatgrandfather probably didn't ever imagine someone could make a living out of Search Engine Optimization. Still, despite machines ploughing our fields, we still have jobs. So we probably will have jobs in 100 years time. We just have no idea which ones.

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