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> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine?

As software developers, it's literally our jobs to put people out of work. My software is specifically designed reduce the need for increased labor as the company crows. In my industry, legal, entire departments (like night word processing) no longer exist.

The fact is you cannot extrapolate from 100 years of human history and say everything will continue on. People just a few hundred years before that could not have predicted anything about modern employment.

> The fact is you cannot extrapolate from 100 years of human history and say everything will continue on

It's a lot more than 100 years. The invention of the scientific process, the printing press, the popularization of steel and before that, bronze, heck even the invention of agriculture radically changed human societies by increasing individual productivity and enabling specialization.

> People just a few hundred years before that could not have predicted anything about modern employment.

Right, which is why it's silly for us to look at the technology we have today and say "welp, that's the end of human employment."

>Right, which is why it's silly for us to look at the technology we have today and say "welp, that's the end of human employment."

And why it's also silly to look at the past and say "meh it worked out last time, everything will be fine".

It is your work to increase productivity. As tedious tasks are automated, you can deploy people doing new things. As you lower the cost of the product you manufacture or service you provide, you enable more people to afford it. That's how new industries are created. I am not to worried about the amount of work available as a whole. I am more worried about the nature of the work available, which will be increasingly skilled.

> As tedious tasks are automated, you can deploy people doing new things.

That has not been my experience at all. As tedious tasks are automated, the people who do those tedious tasks are no longer required.

Ultimately we are lowering the cost of our "product" but it's not to enable more people to afford it. We need to do that because less people can afford the service as is and we need to cut costs just to stay in business. It's a race to the bottom, not a race to the top.

Even better, as you have automated tools available, no one needs you any more. 'You' being the company, that is. As factories replaced craftsmen, and distribution chains replaced individual travelling merchants, I think there is a very good chance that the very structure of centralized companies with offices and on-staff employees will dissolve. You were replying to someone working in the legal field, for example. Why does the person putting together my will or litigating a suit for me need to be backed by an organization with an office building, expensive executives, etc? An individual with the right knowledge and tools, that's all that's actually NEEDED. Much of economics centers around assuming that the market will eventually pare away inefficiencies and competition will strip away all but what is actually needed.

There is a plan to start deploying Watson-like AIs in the legal field to automatically data mine for precedents and other legal resources.

> Why does the person putting together my will or litigating a suit for me need to be backed by an organization with an office building, expensive executives, etc?

These exists because they are currently necessary (they are the "tools" you speak of) but they're a pure business cost and constantly under pressure to not exist. Computers have already reduced this back-end cost immensely. For example, lawyers these days all use dictation software rather than having a secretary write out shorthand. If all the tools can be automated, they eventually will.

The legal field in particular is an interesting one as far as automation is concerned. Several states have passed laws which make illegal the creation of software systems that do simple easily-automatable tasks like generating boilerplate documents and filling in legal forms. They have variously considered either the creation or use of such software "practicing law without a license." Lawyers see the writing on the wall and are in the perfect position to do the most terrible thing possible - invent an artificial marketplace for services which should be being done by a machine.

This isn't a terribly novel idea. Companies which produce phonebooks have been suing the hell out of municipalities which wish to discontinue the practice of automatically giving a phonebook to their residents for years now. And, by the way, they win those cases. Even in municipalities where they simply want to change receiving a phonebook into an opt-in service, they're suing. That their product actually now goes beyond being worthless directly into the territory of actively destroying value, requiring the munis to put out special dumpsters so that the residents can immediately throw away the useless things, doesn't seem to bother them. They want their money and they don't care how or why they get it.

There was an article about the issue with writing software which does legal things in the Communications of the ACM a year or so ago. I haven't kept up with the topic, but at that time several states had adopted the laws and they were being considered in others. Having lawyers pushing new laws is a pretty easy sell, though, as most legislators come from law in the first place. Some of the states have a nice exemption that just really hammers the intent home - you can run a software service that lets people fill forms, get generated documents, etc... if you pay a lawyer for each thing it does. They don't have to be involved in any way. They don't have to review the documents and put their name on them or anything like that. They just have to get a check. Honestly though, I think that is better than only making it legal for lawyers to use the software. I fear a future where everyone is yolked and herded into a cubicle to sit there and push a single button mindlessly, prodding the automated system to do its thing simply because society and management want people to have to do a job.

"I am not to worried about the amount of work available as a whole. I am more worried about the nature of the work available, which will be increasingly skilled."

This is the same thing, FWIW. Opportunities to use skilled labour rely on the existence of skilled labour capable to fulfil it. The reason is that skilled labour shortages push up the price of labour, and that reduces the viability of businesses that use it as an input, and thus reduces the number of opportunities advertised.

>>As tedious tasks are automated, you can deploy people doing new things.

That almost never happens in my experience. Deploying those people to do new things requires training them on those new things, and most companies aren't willing to make that investment, especially since said people are usually near the bottom of the totem pole and the fact that they just got made redundant by software is regarded by management as proof that they are just cogs.

> My software is specifically designed reduce the need for increased labor as the company crows.

That is either a very amusing typo or your employers are not nice people.

Same here. I work on conversational systems and our explicit goal is to enable our customers to replace humans with our systems.

The period you describe was marked by revolutions, civil wars and world wars not stabilized until after WWII.

Things did indeed come out well eventually but that better world most definitely did not emerge serenely and rationally. It took the utter annihilation of the pre-WWI world order through decades of enormous violence. Indeed, the egalitarian socialist plan and the response of populist fascist to crush it emerged exactly because of industrialization.

There can be no doubt that displaced workers are not going to smoothly transfer to become professional athletes: a 50 year old unemployed coal miner with no social safety net is not going to peaceable become a wedding planer in a big city even if he could.

Until then, there will be increasing political disruption and radicalization as the advantaged group holds the disadvantaged down believing it's their own fault for not changing careers. And just like last time, the fighting will continue until adequate social safety nets are in place.

It would be better to honestly face the events of the past and not try to convince ourselves that an idealized smooth economic shift is how it's going to work out. But unfortunately we are just at the beginning of this and likely most people in the advantaged group will ideological despise the level of social security that will solve the problem. Indeed, in many quarters, there is a fetishization of and desire to return to that pre-WWI unconstrained economy that caused the nightmares in the 20th century. So, polarization, demagoguery, extremism and eventually violence loom for now I fear.

"The period you describe was marked by revolutions, civil wars and world wars not stabilized until after WWII."

No - the late 19th century was relatively peaceful.

"But unfortunately we are just at the beginning"

Just at the beggining of the longest period of peace and economic prosperity in history.

Donald Trump, Brexit - this kind of 'nationalism' and 'demagoguery' is not even remotely in the league of anything in the past. Not even close.

In the 1800s after even after Napoleon there were sporadic uprisings scattered through Europe and around the world, especially in the 1830s and 40s. The Franco-Prussina war was a prelude to WWI. Brits fought Russians, Turks fought Russians, Spain had multiple civil wars, Germans fought each other constantly. Even the US had a civil war. And the seeds for 1914's WWI did not suddenly appear in the 14 years of the 20th century before it.

>...is not even remotely in the league of anything in the past. Not even close...

I wish this were the case. And while Brexit is only one referendum, possibly recoverable, the Front National, AfD, PVV and Trump use rhetoric that is completely indistinguishable for Eastern and Southern European fascism of the 1920s. Some of it is verbatim quotes translated. And the economic policies of these parties will only worsen the economic well being of the electorate angering them further.

We can keep making optimistic guesses about the next score years but there is also more realistic outcome:

We do not in fact live in a magic time at the end of history. The post WWII (relative) peace is not remotely an inevitable state of affairs. It is an incredibly delicate thing maintained by moderate democratic global nurturing. Inept leaders set on dissolving alliances and treaties combined with aggressive rhetoric and random hostilities executed solely to excite a demagogue's support base could break that peace in any of a dozen powder kegs world wide faster than the bullet that killed prince Ferdinand. Indeed, if NATO weakens enough, as many on the far-right wish, and Putin starts loosing popularity, god help the Baltic states.

In the late 19th, there was nearly the same conflicts areas as today, some european wars and massive colonization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1800%E2%80%9399

I don't think the issue is whether automation and globalization are able to create more wealth in absolute, but whether the resulting wealth is distributed fairly (or effciently).

If a company is able to automate its facilities to achieve 2X profits with half the workers, you'll have an higher overall GPD, but the created wealth will be shared by a reduced number of people.

People struggling to make a living won't give a damn whether TV has 3 channels or 300, they can travel cheaply around the world and there is a new smartphone model every year.

This has been sustainable up until technological advancement still allowed for enough decently paid unskilled jobs, but it's clear we are past this point.

We are running out of, as you say, "things for people to do".

I don't think these trends can or should be reversed (because they have undeniable benefits), but how to deal with the consequences is a real challenge.

Of course wealth will be distributed unevenly if it is created unevenly. Anything else is both unfair and unwise.

Poor people in the United States, today, have a significantly higher standard of living than my grandparents, who were neither uneducated or poor for the time.

Poverty has moved way up Maslow's hierarchy.

> But what happened during the industrial revolution? Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically.

It should be added that wages going up and the emergence of a middle class was not a direct result of increased productivity. The labour movement had to fight hard to ensure that those productivity gains were shared with workers.

The problem we face with automation is that there is not much of a collective 'working class' to fight that fight.

"It should be added that wages going up and the emergence of a middle class was not a direct result of increased productivity. "

I fully agree that the labour movement was essential.

BUT - wages did definitely rise far before labour got going - and wages could not rise as they did without underlying productivity gains.

But yes - the labour movement was essential.

> ...wages could not rise as they did without underlying productivity gains

Absolutely. The challenge with automation is ensuring that the increased productivity benefits all of society (not necessarily equally). As useful as capitalism is, it doesn't really have a mechanism for doing this properly. The solution will always have to be political.

It's not like this is something far off. Wages have been frozen since 1980. And productivity has increased at a breakneck pace. From 1950-1980, when productivity gains were slow and incremental, the median wage rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, it rose by 1% while companies posted record-breaking profits and the median income of the top 10% rose by 475%. The average wage increased alongside productivity gains, but due to the extremely skewed distribution, that hides the fact that the gains of computers and automation technology benefitted only the very top.

I think a large part of it has to do with how disruptive computers and software are. One person can walk in and write some software that makes an employee 50x as productive. How do you compensate that? They enabled your employee to create profoundly more value. If compensation is in any way tied to the value of the work being done, the compensation should obviously be similarly profound. You have to divorce value of work and compensation from one another completely to avoid ending up paying software creators very highly and practically creating a special class for them.

The global market was still expanding so all efficiency gains from industrial revolution and the internet revolution were absorbed. Where as today the global economy is stagnating. The efficiency gains in the next decade are expected to be a few times the rate of market growth which would put many people out of work making the global market contract further. This cycle could accelerate very quickly. reply

"Where as today the global economy is stagnating."

The global economy is in good shape.

Western economies are stagnating - but there are 5 billion people who were not even on the economic radar just 50 years ago. They were earning basically 'nothing'.

But now they are earning 'something' and it's growing fast.

There are more than 40 countries with growth over 5% GDP growth in 2015. [1]

There are 5 billion people who need: electricity, clothes, cars, tv, entertainment, sports, medicine etc. etc..

So, no. As prices fall, and globalization expands - all those products and services become accessible to these countries.

And what happens when they get reliable electricity? Governance? Consistent internet access? Their productivity goes up and they can afford to buy more.

Viewed from a 'modern world perspective' - I would be concerned, we are going to have to 'find new jobs' for a lot of people - but from a global perspective, the picture is mostly positive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...

The top 15 economies in the world are 75% of the world economy. Most are in the West. The growth of the other 25% is not going to help much if these 15 combined do not grow more than the efficiency gains from automation.

"The top 15 economies in the world are 75% of the world economy. Most are in the West. The growth of the other 25% is not going to help much if these 15 combined do not grow more than the efficiency gains from automation."

But they are not most of the population.

We're talking about employment here.

5 billion people 'lives improving dramatically' vs. 2 billion people 'lives improving slowly' is a good equation.

That those 2 billion are 'already wealthy' and a small uptick in their wealth increases the global GDP a little bit more is and odd way of looking at it.

By that measure, we should be focusing on Gates and Zuckerbergs wealth more than anything else!

The 'global GDP' is not the point here.

You are combining 2 seperate issues automation is going to help in many ways. But there are 2 main kinds of resoure that people use to earn income 1.money 2.labour(mental or physical) More than 99% of the people earn income with the latter so automation will take away the only source of income for most of the world's population. I am personally pro automation as it will solve many of the problems humanity faces today but at the same time see that the way the current capilistic economies work automation is also going to cause huge problems for many countries and the world should be preparing for it.

This is the real problem. While it may be good ecologically for population growth to slow and then reverse, it will lead to what I've long called "planet Japan."

Life in Japan is pretty nice though. You don't need economic growth if the population isn't growing.

What do you mean by "Planet Japan"?

Japan has second oldest population world-wide with 27.28% over 65, after Monaco, which doesn't really count (retirement home for rich people).

http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a01001/

... and economic stagnation. It's basically a permanent liquidity trap.

If you adjust GDP for population growth Japan is actually doing quite well. The fact that it has a growing economy and a shrinking population shows that productivity is going up. Countries like the US have historically had high population growth which is reflected in higher GDP growth.

No issue there. The problem is that this completely breaks all modern finance, which is built on the assumption of permanent macroeconomic growth to deliver returns and permanent inflation to continuously re-price debt.

> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine?

I have literally seen a room full of people that lost their jobs because of software I wrote (admittedly, not alone, but still). The software was almost ready by that point and it was quite a disturbing experience that still bothers me up to this day to be honest.

It had nothing to do with AI and was quite a long time ago, but I still remember it very vividly.

Losing their job is a violent and unpleasant process but a sort of necessary one as a society. I have seen that first hand many times. It forces people to reconsider their career, move to another more promising industry, move to another city or another country. That's how the economy adapts to change and resources are allocated efficiently.

What I have seen often too is bankers wealthy enough to be able to live on their savings for a long time, and therefore not willing to reconsider their career. And as a result staying unemployed for a long time before coming to the conclusion that they need to do something else.

I'm not saying this is fun and that I wouldn't mind going through it myself but this is capitalist's creative destruction at work. Not something you should feel particularly bad about.

We have to feel bad because they lost their main (and I think only) source of income, not because they lost their jobs.

Nobody has to be forced to reconsider his career (so his entire life..) when we just have to cut the link between work and salary that we learn at school.

Sorry, but have you ever really witnessed firsthand the difficulty of being forced "to reconsider one's career, move to another more promising industry, or move to another city or another country"?

The economy might adapt to change, but people aren't able to nearly as well.

You say "capitalist's creative destruction", but it's really "greed-driven devastation".

But are you suggesting we should keep people employed doing manual tasks to spare them the unpleasant experience of reconsidering their career? Are you suggesting that industrialisation or automation is greed? You can reverse a lot of technological advance that way. And we see that in many socialist economies, where zombie-like industries have been subsided well after they should have disappeared (like mining in the North of France).

I'm not really suggesting anything. I literally have no answers.

But I do think we (humanity) do ourselves a massive disservice when we push for automation for the sole purpose of reducing costs/boosting profits.

I also think that we need to remember it's real people being affected here. You say "spare them the unpleasant experience" - that's an almost comically insulting way to phrase it - it's really more like "spare them the emotionally traumatic and devastating experience of watching their future evaporate". You say "creative destruction", but you're really talking about lives being literally destroyed. And the key difference here is that (unlike previous time periods), there is no obvious future for these people who are losing their jobs to automation.

You rail against bankers not being willing to reconsider their careers, but what about cashiers at fast food restaurants? What about truck drivers? Train engineers? Miners? etc...

You say it's not something we should feel particularly bad about, but it absolutely is. I can't tell you how hard my eyes roll when I hear people talking in the almost kumbaya-esque way that I'm talking now, but we are all really in this together, and if we can't figure out a way to help people through the transition that is coming, well, what good are we as people?

Speaking so clinically about people's lives being destroyed does no one any favors. That's really all my point is.

I agree with your main point (that this is a small increment to the industrial revolution), but two objections:

> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine

Right now AI is still a future technology. The current AI algorithms are the equivalent of the early GSM phones, which looked like car batteries, very far from modern smartphones. But it is reasonable to expect that they will get better, and it is reasonable to expect that we will be able to emulate the brain with transistors and on a much bigger scale some days.

The second objection is that the demand for unskilled workers keeps shrinking. Our society has adapted to the industrial revolution by having a much larger skilled worker base, pretty much everyone can now read and write, college degrees have become the norm, etc. But there are brick walls to how skilled a society can be. A not insignificant share of the population just cannot become skilled. And even among skilled workers, only a fraction will always be capable to satisfy the demand for the "hotest" skills (engineering, software development, etc).

So I think that as that imbalance develops, we are bound to live with a structurally unequal society. And it doesn't have much to do with capitalism, it has more to do with the evolution of the technology outpacing the biological evolution of our species.

" But it is reasonable to expect that they will get better, and it is reasonable to expect that we will be able to emulate the brain with transistors and on a much bigger scale some days."

No, it's not reasonable to assume they will emulate brains.

Not even the experts are saying that.

They're not trying to emulate brains at all.

Uhm... yes, they most definitely are. There are many efforts underway right now building 'neuromorphic' architectures with memristors (which function very similarly to neurons). I don't think there is any promise in the approach personally (our 'mind' is a property of the feedback loop between our body and the world, and can not exist without the body, dualism is just wrong) but there are many who disagree.

Also, even going back to von Neumann it has always been expected that the brain will be able to be built in hardware, simply because neurons exhibit binary behavior. They fire or not, and all the rest is massive interconnectedness and adaptive changes to their activation potential. There's lots of argument about whether reproducing the behavior of neurons will result in a 'mind' or be useful, but no one would argue that we simply won't be able to build a brain workalike.

I was under the impression that neural networks are inspired by the brain. And as we understand how the brain works better, it is obvious that we will be replicating it mechanically.

Only superficially. Deep learning has little to do with biology, and even if a future AGI was running on a NN, it's structure would be very different from our brains.

A not insignificant share of the population just cannot become skilled.

Can you justify that statement?

The IQ distribution is what it is. For instance you won't teach to code or to do something abstract to everyone in a generation.

Having everyone in a country be able to read - and write! - would have sounded absolutely insane to anyone a thousand years ago.

What's unique now isnt the "rate of change" but the absolute gap between skill sets.

Lets say youre a truck driver and suddenly you lose your job. You cant transfer your existing skill set to driving a cab for very long because guess what? Thats been automated too.

There arent any other jobs that involve sitting at a wheel avoiding bad drivers and rush hour traffic and pulling all nighters. Simultaneously the chance for that person to find work in new markets becomes low. They have to train themselves.

Machines took a long time to build and replace people. Software can be instantly copied.

>In 1960 there were 3 channels. In the 1990's 50. Now it's 100's + online offerings.

Exactly, we're already beyond the limits of what we can consume. There won't be jobs producing more stuff when there is no one to consume it.

"Exactly, we're already beyond the limits of what we can consume. "

No, because in 1960 everyone had the same thing.

Now - you get programming for your niche, which is different than that of the dude next door.

Take clothing: even in the year 2000 people did not really wear fashion. We had 'the Gap' and not much more. Everything else was expensive.

'Fast fashion' has changed the world. Young people can now afford an absurd variety in fashion. Nobody 50+ ever thought you needed a 'new pair of pants' every season. Now it's normal. Clothes are almost disposable. That's a consequence of increased productivity and adapting demand.

But a lot of that is subsidized through globalization, which nearly every colonizing country is eschewing. Without it, 80℅ of your users and customers can't afford clothes or phones or apps. It's all subsidized through foreigners plights and profited upon wildly. Watch what happens if that goes away. The neoliberal idea of the world was born to stop a revolution in the western world - instead of paying people fairly, they just exploited other countries through capitalist guises instead of barbaric colonisation. If the new answer is that everything has to be made in the nation, no one can afford anything without some sort of basic income/welfare, which the masses will vote against because they've been trained to hate recipients of such social programs for the last half century

"But a lot of that is subsidized through globalization, which nearly every colonizing country is eschewing."

"It's all subsidized through foreigners plights and profited upon wildly"

This is highly speculative, and I don't think in any way substantiated.

"they just exploited other countries through capitalist guises instead of barbaric colonisation."

Borderline racist.

American consumers are fuelling a massive wealth creation boom in places like China and India, where 100's of millions are coming out of poverty.

Trade is generally good for both sides, and it has benefited China/India etc. massively.

It's funny what you call 'exploitation' is 100's of millions of people with massively increasing wealth.

If you want to see China and India desperately poor again, we can 'turn off globalization'. A few more Americans will have jobs, but it will be back to the dark ages for many economies.

>But what happened during the industrial revolution? Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically.

I'd be really interested to see sources for this since there is almost no accurate unemployment data pre-1840 and at least in the US it doesn't seem likely as what information we have tells us that during the period from 1800-1840 slaves made up over 26% of the workforce in the United States, peaking at almost 32% in 1810.

I'm assuming you're going by wage estimates from the UK over the period, but if you are those are really contested as a method for evaluating quality of life or actually real wages - many people at the time didn't earn inside the wage system.

I don't disagree that eventually cost of labor and general unemployment improved as a result of the industrial revolution - I just don't think it happened DURING the industrial revolution, at least not until its late stages.

Also, GDP per capita is a really bad way to estimate effects on the working class, particularly in a period famous for massive income inequality.

All good examples!

I need someone to burst my bubble from time to time.

Also, as a side note, I for one would be delighted if the future included people brewing delicious beer for one another as an important part of the economy.

Try this one: tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine? Not so many.

This is a nice tidy test that is not entirely useful. You can't know anyone that didn't get hired into a job that didn't get created. Say a plant doubles output while destaffing by way of retirement. No one loses a job, automation eats more than 1 plants worth of jobs.

> There were no 'pro athletes' in 1930.

Babe Ruth, arguably one of the most famous athletes ever, played from 1914-1935.

"Babe Ruth, arguably one of the most famous athletes ever, played from 1914-1935."

Correction: there were 'few' pro athletes. Today, it's almost a career path. Back in the day, it was mostly amateurs.

One of the side effects of Industrial revolution was acceleration of colonialism. So job tremendous job loss may and subsequent suffering was not felt directly by western nations but instead outsourced to colonies. May be version 2.0 of colonialism might emerge to cushion Job loss from first mover nation.