Bill Gross: What to Do After the Robots Take Our Jobs
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
We have heard this luddite fear repeatedly since the start of the industrial revolution. There used to be 90% of people employed in agriculture but today we are down to something like 10% in the UK. Do we now have 80% unemployment?
A hundred years ago the UK had mass employment in heavy industries such as ship building. They have long gone and the UK is now a services based economy. Do we now have 80% unemployment?
There is no limit, so far, to human wants and needs and so releasing people from some industries will allow them to move to others or create entirely new ones.
Unless we can figure out how to retrain the redundant workers more quickly, we are going to inevitably have more and more unemployment.
We also have no way to accurately forecast future labor demand. So, people end up wasting lots of time and money to train for jobs that won't exist by the time that they're done training.
I already see this with programming. Tons of people are being displaced from other work, and they're trying to get into programming because they've been told it is the future. But, a good programmer takes many years to train. And, the skill requirements for programmers increases every year.
Programming will still be a good career for some time, but a 'basic' programmer job of today will probably only have another 5-6 years or so until it's mostly displaced. The next wave of programming jobs will require advanced math and scientific skills, at least.
Actual link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
ie. prior to the industrial revolution most human activities were related to satisfying our physiological needs. When that was largely automated we worked on increasingly abstract desires (eg. TV/entertainment industry, social media)
In a post-robotic world I think we'd focus on more human-centric activities. Eg. what if we had 10x or 100x the number of teachers, and the educational system was more like 1 on 1 tutoring rather than large classrooms. What if food became more like music in that its physical reproduction is automated, but humans are paid to design it.
ultimately the luddite argument belies a lack of imagination. Most jobs that humans do today didn't exist 100 years ago. If and when humans truly become redundant in the face of strong AI, there wouldn't be any point in worrying about whether all humans can remain employed.
1. There won't be room for people to operate freelance or outside of a structured business. Which given its commonality in the web design and marketing industries, seems unlikely.
2. That pretty much every business, without exception will decide to replace human staff with robots. I suspect this is more likely among large corporations than mom and pop groups that actually know their employees and don't see everything in pure statistics terms.
3. That some groups won't deliberately avoid replacing its staff for reputational reasons. There's a market for organic food, a market for free range food, a market for fair trade food and a market for no GM food, so there could just as easily be a market for products made by humans only.
4. That people will always pick the cheapest and technically 'best' option from the largest companies and hence the companies using them will somehow conquer the market. But McDonalds and fast food chains didn't kill the restaurant business.
And that's before you get into the issues with the version of basic income posited by this article. The 10,000 dollars example is completely inadequate to live on in a lot of the country (especially the large cities), so there's the question of what to do about the insane house prices and such.
Personally, I'm not terribly keen on living in a world where every single book I read (and how much time I spend on each page, where I stop reading etc.), every single song I listen to, every single movie I watch, every single computer game I play (and how long I play etc.) are stored forever in some central database.
However, with Universal Basic Income, people would be able to write books, create art etc. and simply release it for free.