The Next Industrial Revolution Could Put Millions Out of Work
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Also, a large part (40-50%?) of the population might not be needed, or even desired, e.g. poor and older people that put a strain in the economy, so, they might be delegated to "b class" citizen status, and might end up living in some developing world like wasteland/slums in the next 50 years or so, while another big percentage has service jobs, and a 10-20% of luckier people live in closed communities.
It's not some sci-fi fantasy, it's already in development, and even the norm in lots of parts of the world, nothing (and surely not naive techno-optimism) prevents it from coming to the West.
"The economy" did not "balance out". "The economy" is not an active agent. The economy was politically managed -- for instance, via the Fed's original mandate to encourage full employment. What prevents similar management taking place today is ideological opposition to it.
EDIT: Bah. Too late.
Used to be, worse came to worst, you'd just go be a hired hand for someone: a farmhand, a servant, a soldier, a sailor, etc. It also used to be that four walls and a roof was a home and bread and what-you-can-grow was food. Our standards of living are different now, at least in developed nations. We also had social structures that included multi-generational communities. So the grandparents, older relatives, etc. would watch the children, help around the house, etc.
Also, people ate worse, got sick more, and died younger.
If so, I missed that portion in my history classes.
Half the population is below average intelligence, and perhaps 25% (total guess) might be best suited to a manual or semi-skilled role. What are we going to do with them?
When similar things have happened previously, the once semi-skilled (eg) shipbuilder becomes a low wage driver or call centre worker. Many in an area didn't get those few roles, so became unemployed (and often depressed) for the rest of their careers. Some steel or shipbuilding towns haven't fully recovered even today.
Longer ago the farmhand could get any number of manual roles in the growing industries. Blacksmiths became car mechanics, fuel attendants and so on.
Also when it's only a number of regional cities affected, like with coal, steel or shipbuilding, it's much easier politically than when it's national.
If you were a 55 year old long haul trucker, you aren't going to be able to replace the income/benefits you had with a $7/hr (pre-tip) service sector job.
waitstaff isnt paid that much hourly. Its generally on the order of 2-3$ per hour.
edit: since im being downvoted i assume someone disagrees - here is a source:
from nolo.com:
>Employers must pay tipped employees at least $3.23 an hour in 2016, $3.38 an hour in 2017, and $3.52 an hour in 2018.
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/michigan-laws-tipped-...
Technically you can sue your employer if they wont pay you the difference if you dont end up making enough in tips to end up at or above minimum wage - in practice however, suing your employer is generally not a great way to stay employed
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/michigan-laws-tipped-...
Only way I know round UK min wage is to be self-employed, or one of the fake "self-employed" like some delivery drivers have had to become. Surprised the IR haven't slammed the door on that little scam yet.
That said, it's not uncommon to get at least minimum wage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_Stat...
Can they absorb another 10m (or however many there are) truck and van drivers who probably made quite a bit more? I know it won't be overnight, but it seems to be rapidly becoming a political rather than economic question.
Like must we learn to run at 20-25% unemployment instead of <10? We'd probably have to learn to stop viewing them as scroungers too and adjust welfare somewhat.
No, they aren't. Many "low-margin, framented service jobs" of the type you list are often effectively sub-minimum wage (possible because they are usually independent sole proprietorships renting facilities from the entity that looks like their "employer") highly-saturated already, increasing the proportion of the population trying to work them will further crash wages.
Who is eating at these restaurants that wasnt before? Why would they suddenly be hiring millions of people at restaurants?
Who is suddenly attending more fitness classes now that there is massive unemployment, to the extent that we need millions more fitness instructors?
Your suggestions dont make any sense whatsoever. If you had said Campbells soup company would be hiring you might be on to something, but in the face of millions losing jobs, luxuries like restaurants, fitness classes, etc certainly wont be seeing massive growth in demand....
Assuming intelligence is normally distributed, which I guess is a commonly accepted thing :-D
In the 20th century, the population of horses (in the US) started declining rapidly, from a high of over 20 million in 1920 to under 5 million in 1960. Industry decided the horse was unnecessary after thousands of years of history, thus they were slaughtered in short order.
The only difference between me and a horse from the market's view is that I do different jobs and consume human goods. To the extent that I am necessary it is because the market will need someone to move goods and services to, but left to its own devices it might well decide to sell weapons that I get killed with. Markets are honest, not smart.
I mean, one could probably say that the economy has balanced out after the great depression, after WW2, after the 2008 crisis, and so on. Many people did not.
There doesn't need to be anything "fundamentally different" except that we finally reached the exponential part of technological progress, which up until now seemed like a linear process. Just like population growth until 1800s, or economic growth until the 1820s. Those two were pretty much linear and not very different from zero until they weren't.
I don't actually subscribe to this rationale, though. I'm just putting it out like this because it's pretty much what everybody says and I recognize that it's quite plausible, given the two first hypotheses.
Most processes involving people (and lots of others, besides) that look exponential at some point are really logistic, so even in that case, there's probably some equilibrium point somewhere in the future, though its possible that its many generations down the line from the point where the appearance of exponential change first occurs.
On the other hand, I'd like to say that it's also possible that some particular processes can follow exponential laws without any restriction. It might be somewhat hazy, but what if outside of a few measures (infant mortality, life expectancy, etc) economic progress is nothing more than a subjective measurement of how present consumers value past output?
I'm not saying anything new here, both Easterlin's paradox and the idea of a "hedonic treadmill" support the idea that more income doesn't necessarily equate into increased happiness. And specially in the case of economic innovation, which might not actually be technically interesting or require any "new physics" at all - just mashing some current technologies into a marketable product - it might never ever stop, and will just degenerate into an endless chase of ever changing fads. Past economies wouldn't be particular poor, just particularly quaint, and a repository of dead fads.
http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0...
Here are a few prominent ones:
http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554 https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-tec... http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/08/28/1942571/david-autors-g... http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/autor-autor/?_r=... http://www.asymptosis.com/are-machines-replacing-humans-or-a...
[1] Autor, Ford, Cowen, Krugman, Acemoglu, Brynjolfsson, McAfee just to name a few
Wasteland/slum scenario seems unlikely; if 40-50% of all people did not live in a proper house[0], there would be a lot of empty houses.
(0) as opposed to a hut/shed
You seem to forget that "slums" were not always slums. They used to be reasonably nice places to live. (Some of them in the US used to be really nice, posh places to live.) All it takes to turn a nice neighborhood into a slum is a lack of income to keep the houses maintained properly. Human habitats fall apart pretty quickly when they're abandoned or neglected.
Coming 2046: P2P food sharing.
That's a wild assumption. I would predict that it's more likely all that additional value will be captured by already-rich business owners and shareholders, not consumers.
If you are concerned about that, lobby to create laws that make it easy for consumers to invest their money into this kind of undertaking.
I don't think food and manufactured 'stuff' has ever been cheaper relative to median wages than it is now.
At least, I hope.
It works well, but you'd have to commit to a less-expensive lifestyle because you're not working 40+ hours a week. It has benefits to the company as well, as they get two people for the cost of a little more than one (and don't have to pay expensive benefits to either of them).
I still think that Basic Income at a level that will allow you to live somewhere inexpensive will be a better solution.
I also don't see how such an arrangement will help, for example, taxi or truck drivers who will be completely replaced by autonomous cars in the near future.
Well, if you stop dividing people into "West" and not West, and consider the whole world without artificial borders as just humanity, it's already the case.
That said, the world is not without borders, artificial or not, so it's not wise to see it as such in determining the future. It might be wise to want to abolish those borders (and that remains to be proven -- empires are even less democratic than nation states, and civil wars are just as bloody, if not more, than wars between states), but not to live in la-la-land where they don't exist.
You have to (1) demonstrate that you understand how this very counterintuitive historical fact happened and (2) give a plausible theory for why it's different now, for me to even begin taking talk like this seriously.
Now and in the future, with software, robotic automation, and even more so AI, jobs are actually disappearing for the first time ("software is eating the world" so to speak).
Examples from the era of the steam engine and the advent of electricity when faced with what's possible with advanced technology like AI, modern automation and 21st century internet and software are not really applicable.
That said, it's not that mankind cannot manage this. But it cannot manage it in the ways it had in the past -- this will only lead to the marginalization of large parts of society. It can only manage it with political action: 4 and 3 day work weeks being mandatory, universal income schemes and other such measures.
Even right now, when software is eating the world, unemployment in the US is low and decreasing. The disaster is a bit like that my new diet, it always is happening soon :)
That's less like actual history, and more like a retelling of it as some inevitable repeated story.
If by people, you mean the ones whose jobs/skills became deprecated, then yes, they didn't know where new jobs will come from, and tons of them didn't get new jobs anyway.
But the industrialists in general knew they will have needs for tons of workers in the new factories -- and in fact the government then (in England, etc) passed laws that made sure they "encouraged" (forced) millions of farmers and such to urbanize and become factory workers.
The difference is that now we know of no such need.
>Even right now, when software is eating the world, unemployment in the US is low and decreasing.
Mostly by cheating: counting tons of low quality, low pay, part time (not as a choice) jobs, not counting people who have worked in the past X months, not counting tons of people outside certain narrow criteria that still don't translate to actual jobs, etc :)
E.g.:
The unemployment rate dropped because people unable to find jobs ceased looking and are no longer counted as being in the labor force. If you are unemployed but not considered part of the labor force, you are not included when unemployment is measured. The BLS says that in May there were 1.7 million Americans who “wanted and were available for work,” but “were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.” In other words, the unemployment rate is a useless measure of unemployment, just as the consumer price index no longer measures inflation. What were once useful statistical measures have been converted into good news propaganda.
I think this is very possible. And I suspect that the overwhelming majority of the b-citizens will be people not knowing how to write a software.
I say it continually to those I love (close friends, family etc...) : unless very specific career choices, starting in life today and deciding that "having no clue about coding is fine", is at best a dangerous gamble, at worth a suicide.
I think Darwin kind of applies in our modern society but people do not notice it. For example, what led me to doing engineering studies was pure survival instinct.
I have a business profile - and am a business owner today - still heavily writing code, and intending to keep doing it.
Since I'm about 12, I knew that my stuff was starting companies, business strategy, product design, corporate finance and this kind of stuff. That's what I was toying with in my spare time. But a pragmatic analysis of the world led me to quickly realize that I'd be better off being proficient in technology stuff, to avoid being at a big disadvantage since all the stuff I'd be selling and designing were going to be technology-based.
At the time, I said in the way children speak : "I want to be able to build what I will be selling so that I do not have to depend on the good will of anyone". And this was the smartest move I ever made in my life. And this kind of thinking is what continually puts me ahead.
I think it would be interesting to find a way to measure the "survival instinct" of people, and see if there's a correlation with those who do "well" and those who find themselves surprised at every recession and industrial revolution.
I think it's much more likely that many existing programming jobs will also be automated away.
And what I'm saying is that these businesses will likely be software-based, and that those being software-illiterate will have a life as comfortable as the one lived by illiterate people before them. Software is becoming the new paper, this is what I am saying.
Today, we on HN are like the Lords and the clergy who were the only ones able to read and write and hereby be involved in the important business of their times.
The history only repeat itself. And it will always.
It's just happened every other time something like this has happened. For tens of thousands of years.
> wasteland/slums in the next 50 years or so
Standards of living are rising globally. Even if comparative wealth drops vs other humans, most people will still see significant improvement in their lifetime.
Nothing like this has happened before.
For one, people in 17th century didn't live much differently than people in 500 A.D. or 500 B.C -- the huge majority lived in the country, milked their own milk, work with manual tools, etc.
The process we're discussing started mostly with the industrial revolution. With the advent of the steam engine and crude early factories, for the first 2 centuries of the Industrial revolution, as factories and factory assembly lines still needed tons of manual labor (see Taylorism).
Then, as automation advanced, around the mid-20th century, and there was not the same demand for factory workers anymore (a lot of production lines became more efficient and less manual), people were given office and service sector jobs -- because that was another underdeveloped sector.
Today, software and the internet makes lots of office jobs and procedures obsolete, advanced robotic automation makes tons of factory jobs deprecated, and with advances in smart software, business networks, etc, lots of service jobs are not needed anymore either. Advanced AI software and hardware will only make this worse.
And there's no next step to go besides either creating useless busywork or reducing work-hours/days (so work provided meets the actual work needs). And even that will still leave tons of people not needed to work anyways.
I'm not sure how anyone in a technology forum can believe technology can't get us to a point where a much smaller number or very few needs to work anymore, because "it never happened in the past".
That's exactly the idea behind innovation, to not get the same thing you had in the past...
>Standards of living are rising globally. Even if comparative wealth drops vs other humans, most people will still see significant improvement in their lifetime.
We're not talking about whether millions rural chinese person improved their "standards of living" in the 20th and early 21st century by getting work in a factory, but whether they'd still be needed in 2025 or 2030.
> office and service sector jobs -- because that was another underdeveloped sector.
Or perhaps automation allowed more people to pursue that type of work? Was working in an air conditioned office an option for your average person in 500bc? Doubt it. Instead it sounds like we created a whole new type of work in response to a society wide change in technology.
> software and the internet makes lots of office jobs and procedures obsolete
Some, but fewer than you would think, and it makes many other jobs accessible. Often technology advances are unskilled people + tech/process improvements displacing skilled artisans. The factory worker jobs were an example of technology displacing skilled workers. Computers and the internet allow for unskilled/untrained people to enter fields that they would be unsuited for alternatively. How many retail bankers could do an amortization table without the computer's assistance?
> I'm not sure how anyone in a technology forum can believe...
Precisely the opposite. Technology eliminating work has happened several times in the past. Just never with disaster. We always seem to find new things to work on. The greater efficiency we have the more our horizon expands about what we can pursue as 'work'. If you were a good actor in 500BC, what would that buy you? Some local notoriety? Would it be 'work' that you get paid for in your local town? Probably not. Now it means you get a private jet. New areas will expand to fill the gaps.
Even among the industries being automated, the results are often not that dire. There is a milder version of Jevon's paradox at work here. Once you can produce something with great efficiency and low cost, people will demand more of it. Sometimes demand will even increase faster than efficiency and you'll have net employment growth.
Not many worked in grain mills in the first place for that to be much of an issue. Something like the fishing sector becoming deprecated in the 16th century B.C. would more faithfully describe the kind of impact modern automation technologies can have.
Besides there were still tons of work opportunities in ALL kinds of manual and menial labor fields as the standards of living were very low and urbanization was just starting.
>* We always seem to find new things to work on.*
From a list of limited options -- not from some magic infinite bag of sectors.
>Precisely the opposite. Technology eliminating work has happened several times in the past. Just never with disaster.
You conflate technology eliminating SOME work, with technology that can replace all kinds of jobs -- including lots of mental labor with AI.
You also conflate technologies that were small multipliers of productivity, with technologies that allow 1 person to do the work of hundreds of thousands, or even millions.
Given how our civilisations ultimately compete through force, this raises interesting questions around optimal design. Namely, every civilisation will have to choose between subsidising their poor or quarantining them. (If we are honest, we already do this to some extent with borders and welfare and immigration controls.)
If their parents are not people of high intelligence, these people should rather complain to their parents that they gave them birth: Knowing that in the future a lot less people of bottom but much more of high intelligence are necessary, the parents willingly produced children of genetic material that is probably badly suited for the future.
Thus the "bad guy" is not the political system, but people of low intelligence producing children of low intelligence (in statistical average).
Nevertheless I see the much larger problem in the fact that many pairs choose to bring children to the world because this is the action that is encouraged in society (most people are simply conformists). If we could make it the default that it is frowned upon if a couple, for which it will be rather likely "from available data" that the children will be in a bad position in future society, nevertheless decides to have some, I think a large part of the problem would be solved.
I also would encourage children from the bottom quantiles of intelligence or earnings to say clear words to their parents that they are part of their problem.
But it's comforting to know that you wouldn't force sterilization upon them, but instead merely encourage their children to reproach them for having brought them into the world.
Maybe these children could also volunteer for euthanization to reduce the burden on society imposed by such worthless individuals? This would also have the benefit of making the idiotic, conformist parents remorseful for having indulged in their mindless rutting.
Let me narrate to you an alternate view from a formerly a socialist country, India. Prior to the mid 90's there was immense resentment towards computers, there were heavy import duties on computer products and anything related to them in general. It was so expensive to work with automation that it almost throttled the economic growth for a good two decades.
I hear a lot anecdotes from my dad from around 80's. Unions in India called for a national strike, like a total shutdown when the prime minister wanted to introduce computers to the country. It was believed job losses would be so immense it will impossible for the ordinary person on the streets to meet the basic needs. Also around about that time, most factory assembly workers used to protest against PCB assembly machines all the time, government offices hated digital record keeping etc.
I remember even in the 90's telephone connections used to take years to get, and things like TV's/Refigerators used to be considered very expensive to own. When Washing Machines came around most people used to identify the lazy with those buying these machines.
Yet today all of this is common. Every house hold has these devices. And the introduction of computers and automation only increased jobs and overall quality of living has only improved.
If computer systems do most of the thinking, and users don't understand how they work, I'm concerned that people will lose those cognitive skills. We're already seeing this happen with calculators (mental arithmetic) and satellite navigation systems (orienteering/navigation). Driving a car and learning a foreign language might be next.
Some, probably most, people will give up, while the rest will pursue the gradually dwindling number of things computers can't do.
So it could well be that most people, rather than the new Luddites who will try to keep the old skills alive, might never learn, because they don't need to.
Now we'll see what happens when the consumer base is decimated too. Capitalist might have all of the infrastructure but no one can buy.
First: Drivers obviously: 10 million people. Fast food: 3 million. Walmart: 1.4 million. Etc.
Secondly: offshoring (NAFTA and TPP) was never happening at the scale those treaties are indented to impart.
These two things could decimate the US workforce if they're not contained.
In the past, a displaced worker could transfer their skills or pick up a new skill relatively quickly (6mo-1yr).
Today though, it's much harder for a high-school educated person to completely change their skill set to building ML systems.
I think this is solvable through education programs and shifts in how humans can train machines, but so far those systems aren't being built or deployed.
We can average it all out, and everyone can work 3-4 days a week and have way more time to explore our passions and side projects. Imagine how much better the world will be when people have time to spend with their kids, to learn other languages, to write that book they dreamed of, etc.
Bring it on, I say!
I agree with you, but we need to make a plan for all those that will put out of their existing jobs and make it possible for them to transition to jobs that can't be replaced by technology.
Technology is what drives us forward. It's necessary and is the only way we can legitimately effect our advance as a species - aside from other more controversial topics. But we cannot be blind to those it will leave behind if we allow it. They cannot be lost in the shuffle or we all lose.
Oh, that's why we are still dealing with the crappy automated support from Google or Steam that does not seem to be working much if at all ?
But I think you're right - as a general trend, any job that can be automated, will be automated, as long as consumers find the product acceptable. Of course, you can't automate everything because someone, somewhere, needs money to spend on the goods and services, but with a global consumer base and efficient automation, companies can probably still make a profit in the midst of mass unemployment.
If things like Robots take over blue collar jobs, I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Computers, anyone ? And yes, may be AI will change things a bit more but I am sure we will come up with a way to manage that as well.
I cringe when ever I hear Programmers left of out of the, "Where will these people go." Guys like Willie Brown are alwready wondering what San Francisco is going to do with the new homeless that will be hitting the streets--when this current bubble ends.
Yes, the Rock Star Programmers will always have a job, but that's a minority of you.
I'm not saying that the job won't be automated eventually, but the actual driving is only a part of the job. And even when the automation begins to happen, I think there will be time for them to transition into new roles.
Long haul trucks are loading dock to loading dock, so you don't need the driver to do loading.
Uber is another fleet: they just want to do transport-as-a-service so they HATE drivers as overhead. They have signed up to buy 100,000 Mercedes (future autonomous upgrade). They've indicated interest in 500,000 Teslas.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-ord...
http://www.autoblog.com/2015/07/08/uber-tesla-self-driving-c...
Exactly. It seems like most people on HN reason with the "work revolutions" being zero-sum games or something. It's been proven over and over again it never ends up being like that, despite the numerous revolutions the Human Race has seen. It's getting a little old.
You are uninformed if you believe these jobs are staying. There is no way, mark my words, that our economy doesn't experience a net negative in jobs during this next revolution.
It's not all bad though, it could push us towards UBI, maybe a supply based economy. Otherwise we're basically saying jesus take the wheel.
A guy can dream.
The world is changing, faster than it has in the past. No one know exactly what will happen, but there's a whole new generation of people who have no idea what it used to be like, and they will do their best to survive.
The economy, and life, will find a way.
At some point you have to admit that there is a limit to the potential jobs that a society can support. You can hope these hypothetical new jobs get created, but I don't know how you can prepare for them.
I sincerely believe there is no way to invent enough jobs, by convenience or necessity, to replace the amount of jobs that will be destroyed by automation.
How about the people Google and Facebook and Twitter employ ? That's a huge workforce and these jobs were not predicted by anyone 15 years back.
And I'm not even talking about the network effect, i.e. businesses and freelancers and individuals who were able to build their businesses on top of the services offered by such companies.
And that's just a single industry. Look at how the solar panel industry is growing, or the smartphone industry (it did not exist 10 years ago), and look at all these companies living off it making apps and services around those.
Seriously, opportunities arise by themselves.
Ford alone employs 200,000 people, with a market cap of... 48 billion. And a profit of ~7 billion. GM also employs ~200,000 people. With a market cap of... 50 billion. And a profit of ~7 billion.
Tech employs very few people, compared to the amount of money it brings in.
People were saying the exact same thing when sophisticated machines were introduced in automotive industry manufacturing. Sure, some people could not convert and lost jobs, but everyone else moved on to be productive in other areas.
This prophecy of Doom is happening every 10 years or so.
Tell this to the midwest, where the lie of our government's unemployment reporting is most obvious. It's honestly kind of offensive that you said that as I am from Michigan.
And as I have said in other comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12605690), there are factors like the stagnant minimum wage and self-interest at play that have kept jobs in these companies that could be replaced currently let alone in 10 years.
I am not here to convince you to change your mind about potential job loss. Understanding the technology, our current economy, and the political atmosphere around jobs should be enough to convince you of this truth.
As others have said, maybe there are imaginary jobs that will be invented to make up for these losses. I'm sure the banks will do their best to make sure that happens.
Is there some demand for the general skills of former lathe operators, that we've all missed?
Should millions of people start building websites that make money by advertising other websites that make money by advertising other websites?
If you're answer is "fix robots", that's fantasy. If these people had the capacity for highly technical jobs, they wouldn't be working as burger-flippers. And for the few exceptions who might have the capacity for it, they're not doing it because they don't have money to go to school instead of work, and that's not going to change either if society has the mindset of refusing to adopt UBI.
Almost every major manufacturing industry is now automated, we don't have to go to the future to see the effects of automation.
These assembly line workers had to have gone somewhere, because if they haven't, we'd be experiencing extreme unemployment now-let alone the future.
Born and raised and still live around Detroit. There is staggering unemployment.
I'm amazed that anyone believes otherwise...
Not sure how you can explain this. You're saying that we would need 1 person per robot?
That's not even true currently, let alone in 10 years.
No they're not. The entire point of automation to be able to extract the benefits of labor without paying for the burden of human employees. Unemployment isn't a bug, it's a feature.
More likely - all five employees are fired, and whatever skills those employees had becomes useless to them, as regards future employment elsewhere.
Operation, maintenance, cleanup, admin, etc. gets farmed out to contractors for a fraction of those former employees' salaries, or else shared by the remaining employees. A few people wind up reaping the benefits, everyone else becomes surplus to requirements.
Automating jobs requires a large up-front cost for a long-term payout. Industries have been cautious to move to full automation because for the last 20 years wages have, for the most part, favored the employer. Not to mention they can just move operations to Mexico to stave that off even further.
Governments also get upset when you destroy jobs, so it is beneficial for companies to say "boy I'd like this tax break or I might have to automate" as a way to blackmail governments for more tax breaks, less oversight, etc.
I'd love to bring up a bunch of statistics to refute what you're saying, and I may be wrong, but I don't believe many industries have actually moved over to full automation. Most of these automation processes are to improve productivity but keep jobs.
Globalists also don't want to deal with automation because that requires a fundamental change in economic systems, which significantly degrades their power. Globalist corporations and banks are probably in charge of most employment worldwide. Their reluctance to automate is basically in self-interest. Their ability to maintain jobs while improving productivity is in self-interest.
Once nimble companies thrive on automation and resist hostile takeovers, improve productivity, and drive prices down to the point where globalist bank-owned businesses have no choice but to follow suit, we will see this loss in jobs we are all talking about.
We will also see a change in the way economies work, most likely in some half-assed capitalist system that still manages to support the hyper wealthy.
I dont know, but every plant I have ever visited in the past 10 years has about no folks in the production area - most of the lines are completely automated. Yet they require lots of people for designing new lines and new products, planning for newer productions, managing inventories, shipments, etc... and all these folks are already aided in the work by software so make them more productive.
I don't see industries cutting even more jobs any time soon. Or maybe in places where labor is getting really expensive only.
Following your reasoning, the difference with those buggy drivers is the level of education you need to cover the new jobs. The education funnel left a lot of people behind.
Yes, but we'll need a lot less of them...otherwise, what's the point in having automation?
When cars were invented, a lot of horses lost their jobs. Now, there aren't as many horses as there were before.
Heck, I'd be interested in seeing the ratio between total employment numbers before the advent of the car in the late 1800s and automobile-related jobs at their peak (US only).
The only reason to automate, is because buying robots is cheaper then paying employees, for the same amount of output produced. Since those robots were built by people, who had to get paid... Clearly, at the end of the day, you are employing fewer people.
New jobs get created when the amount of produced goods grows, as happened in the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, we are currently in a supply glut - we are demand-limited.
I think it's fair to say that there are instances of technology causing variable effects on the labor market over time (particularly variable effects on different parts). That's not a particularly interesting result though :)
More broadly, economists overwhelmingly think that increases in productivity lead to improvements in quality of life of people over time. Either by improving their labor situation (better, safer jobs) or their consumer situation (cheaper goods, more choice etc).
The logical counterexample would be technology we wish we would not have created, of which I can come up with a few examples, but far fewer than the reverse.
All of which employ far fewer people (And collectively pay them far less in wages) then the assembly lines did. If they didn't, the robots would be more expensive then assembly line workers.
> Also, the jobs associated with more cars being on the road and being more reliable.
More reliable cars arguably produce fewer jobs. More importantly, per-capita car ownership hasn't changed in the US in the past 35 years.
> More broadly, economists overwhelmingly think that increases in productivity lead to improvements in quality of life of people over time. Either by improving their labor situation (better, safer jobs) or their consumer situation (cheaper goods, more choice etc).
Have these economists ever considered that automation scales non-linearly? In the industrial revolution, if you wanted to double the amount of widgets you made, you needed to double your workforce. If you want to double the number of widgets you make today, you buy more robots - this does not double your costs.
If we take automation to its logical conclusion (Wherein robots can build other robots), then its clear that that claim is nonesense. Yes, the labor situation is improved (All jobs are safe, because no jobs are left), and yes, the consumer situation is improved (All goods are now made by robots, all robots are now made by robots). Yet, it's a complete disaster - as with no employees, nobody has the money to buy all these cheap goods.
For a capitalist, the best state of affairs is when he doesn't have to employ anyone to produce products. If automation is adopted, it's because it gets a factory closer to that point.
(And let's not forget that exponential growth in the production of goods will bring about an unmitigated ecological disaster... We need to produce fewer things - not more.)
"Reliable cars" have built in positives for the consumers productivity (they're reliable).
Yes, the majority of economists have considered that and it's why they love automation so much! As costs to produce goods come down, competition (in a competitive market) forces the end price down. Then the end consumer saves money! In your example if the costs hit zero while the consumers still have money then it's a complete miracle!
For a capitalist, the best state of affairs is when everyone can consume her products with enough margin to beat other possible places to invest capital! If automation is adopted, it's because it gets a factory closer to that point.
Whatever money consumers have will be quickly siphoned up by both the non-productive rentier class, and profit margins - just because the production costs zero human labour, doesn't mean that the cost of a product will be zero. (Who would want to build a factory, when you can't make any margin?)
And cars were preferable precisely because they took less effort/expense. It was actually cheaper to build a car than raise equivalent horse(s).
Some of this is just blatant credentialism and signalling - what insignificant fraction of office jobs really require a college degree? But on the other hand, you're never going to turn somebody like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, who could get by working as a farm-hand in a pre-mechanized agricultural economy, into a software engineer.
Maybe we can simplify the process and tools enough that more people are capable of working with very complex things and being productive, but it's hard making abstractions that don't leak.
A handful of reactors here and there while an awesome achievement in itself doesn't really meet the expectations people of the sixties had for the year 2000.
Other analogies I considered using but was too lazy to mention in my comment were jet packs, space tourism, cure for cancer and HIV. (and you could say all of these have also been delivered... to some extent)
nuclear energy appears to be the safest energy option, and has been for many years now
It seems she gives examples of AI-powered voice chat-bots instead of call center workers, the robotic burger flippers instead of humans. The cause: because "minimal wages will raise."
Have I missed something?
Mars, the land of opportunities for the next industrial revolution?