The threat of technological unemployment
lemire.me
lemire.me
Today, people embark on careers in their 20s that disappear in their 40s and 50s. Such a pace of change is distressing. Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out. It'll be local short hauls only, places where there's a lot of human interaction and judgment calls. Long haul semis will be entirely automated. It'll save money and it will save lives, and it will be a huge boon to everyone in society - except professional long haul truckers, who will lose their livelihoods. They won't take it well.
Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can do that. But what if it takes a year or more to retrain? How will they pay the mortgage? How will they feed the kids? People who can't care for themselves and their families feel weak, vulnerable, and ashamed. They'll be angry and act out. They'll listen to political demagogues who tell them what they want to hear and give them scapegoats to blame. Such a sudden social change is politically dangerous.
You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline. I'm fairly sure there are exactly zero US states where bot trucking is presently common. Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor in whether or not this even could happen.
Bold predictions are, with hindsight, usually wrong.
A lot of these fearful arguments boil down to a simple syllogism; "if present trends continue, then (bad outcome here)". The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, and you'll see uniformly that the future predictors expected certain trends to continue which didn't, and missed the existence of other big trends that ended up as primary drivers.
People just don't know what's going to happen in the future. I suppose guessing is better than doing nothing, but we shouldn't think that the future guessing we do is actually good or accurate, past experience teaches it's actually really far off.
If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation.
But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough.
Protect against the unknown, and people will be less anxious about rapid change. Don't protect them, and risk social instability. This is what government, social programs, and taxes are for. Or we can wait for the 21st century equivalent of the guillotines to come out.
[1] http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleto...
You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough.
There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas.
Without jumping to either extreme, since such policy decisions are definitely not "all or nothing" -- I'd just suggest that it's a matter of where you focus your resources. Focusing on social safety net leaves other things unaddressed. Focusing on innovation and individualism clearly leaves some people's needs unaddressed too.
Ultimately, the best (for me) is to have a wide dispersion of countries who make different choices, with the freedom to move between them to find the fit that's right for you.
I have a few critiques of this hypothesis.
First, I do not think it's true. If by "innovation" you mean tech unicorns, then sure. But those same places tend to have world class universities churning out highly useful technological advances and scientific insights. Burning huge piles of VC cash to create a monopoly a dozen other companies are also competing for seems like a weird metric for measurng innovation... But I guess that word means different things to different people.
Second, these countries often but not always have strong economies. Necessity is the mother of innovation, and lack of necessity often coincides with wealth.
Third, Germany seems like an obvious counter example to this, as long as you're willing to consider innovation as something that encompasses a lot more sectors than young Internet services targeting highly aggressive growth curves... Their energy industry is highly innovative, for example.
I have never seen a libertarian argue for social safety nets. Instead they argue that private charity would somehow rise up out of nowhere and people would give more than they currently do in taxes, all to help the needy. Of course, this doesn't make sense to anyone that knows a) people and b) history.
Libertarianism is a way to say "fuck off, what's mine is mine and you can't take it", dressed up in flowery language. There is no provision in there to help our hypothetical unfortunate who is dying in the street. In fact, libertarianism argues that anything other than some random citizen helping in a purely voluntary manner would result in a trip to the courts.
In short, libertarianism is a caricature. It requires a lot of willful ignorance of how people behave, and a lot of magical thinking about what would result from a libertarian society and how humans behave. Something like Poe's law applies here.
If you get your libertarianism from cartoonists ( and they are extremely plentiful ) then you'd of course think it a caricature. Any libertarian that basically denies all public goods is simply not to be taken seriously. I think Rothbard is generally the source for most of that.
We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes. Some are government, some are not. The peak brightness for the sort-of New Deal approach was LBJ. You may or may not agree, but Charles Murray is at least thinking about this, takes social welfare seriously and has an idea or two.
My argument to other libertarians is that SSI and SNAP are simply in the noise of the general economy, have massive velocity and seem to work fairly well. They're "low load" - they will not prevent you building that new plant because of them ( indeed, it might be just the opposite ).
I'm skeptical of claims of mass technological unemployment. That's partly because machines made stoop labor uneconomic, and stoop labor sucks really hard.
We don't know what our problem is right now.
Now - where are they right? There is a lot of load. When people complain.... Trumpishly ... about regulation , they're not kidding. They're not wrong. Some of it is a rock in the shoe; some of it is better founded. That's not an argument against regulation. It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people. And it fits the anti-elite narrative that's popular these days.
After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value - they think that liberty has emergent properties that create additional value.
What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians. But the shouting continues...
I get my libertarianism from listening to people online who identify themselves as libertarians. They often use very flowery language, which many believe to be persuasive because of its floweriness rather than its content. It's from online self-identifying libertarians that I hear these stupid redefinitions of the word 'violence', for example - no cartoons required.
> We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes.
No, we absolutely have not. Historically, you got help if your benefactors find you personally appealing in some way, but otherwise you're short on luck. An industry might have had a 'widows and orphans' fund, but even these were supplements to other income. And if you had a mental illness like schizophrenia, you were really short on luck.
Even today, private charity really only works for one-off disasters (eg: katrina) or easily-marketable charities (eg: kids with cancer). Private charity does not work if it's not marketable (eg: pancreatic cancer) or if the person needs ongoing help throughout their life (eg: schizophrenia).
> It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people.
Yes, better regulation is good, but libertarianism is against proactive regulation - everything is okay unless someone can prove harm done by a specific party, who then has to be taken to court (because everyone has those kind of resources, right?). Libertarianism couldn't give you the Clean Air Act, for example.
Hell, plenty of libertarians even believe that private courts paid for by the applicants would be fair, and rely on the honor system to weed out the bad ones... of course, I've never heard what happens if the parties refuse to agree on a court. Curly realities like that just don't happen in the libertarian worldview - everyone is a fair, fully-informed actor with equal resources.
> After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value
No, that's an overbroad definition of the political movement, and pulls in a lot of people who do not fit the libertarian mold (myself, for example).
> What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians.
Believe it or not, but liberals are big on civil rights and personal freedoms. Equal wages, equal opportunities, and helping those who have been historically downtrodden to make the playing field a bit more level. They just don't believe in the cartoonish "courts will solve what the free market doesn't" ideology of libertarianism.
Have you never found it odd that the vast bulk of libertarians are white males with skills that are in demand? Libertarianism is just a nice-sounding way for these people to preserve their network effects; to preserve the historical leg-up they have over others.
"Private courts paid for by the applicants" - go read "Machineries of Freedom" by David D. Friedman. Catch the finer points. He writes well; it's just a foreign concept. His grounding is non-Anglo Saxon law, from the perspective of literally SCA stuff.
I think of the book as sort of a ... Talmudic dialogue on alternatives to what we're used to. Is it something that should or can be implemented? Can't say. Probably not if I had to guess - crosses too much path-dependence.
The framework I use for "what is libertarianism" tends these days to be the three axis model from Arnold Kling. To wit: conservatives are concerned about barbarism, "liberals" are concerned about oppression; libertarians about coercion.
"... white males with skills..." - well, that's very path dependent. It's also the target audience for say, Heinlein novels. Y'know, nerds :) The internet of the '90s was a big vector for libertarian ideas. "Normal" people won't bother with it. So you have had 20+ years of libertarian bikeshedding online.
Finally, the Clean Air Act... it's easy to forget the junkyards full of cars where all the air control stuff just stopped working, to forget the rather steep learning curve, to forget it all really didn't work out until adaptive control in engine control modules became commonplace. To treat it as ... "holy writ" ( uggggh, horrible metaphor ) is leaving a lot of information on the floor.
There have been plenty of tech startups in Northern Europe, which is reputed to have the best social safety-nets on Earth right now. They also have some of the best academic institutions in scientific subjects.
It depends on their form. People aren't on drugs because they don't have enough money. People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply getting a government check won't change that. A man cannot provide for his family by simply being alive to cash a check.
There are things that look a lot like welfare to the government that don't look like it to the recipients, though. Wage subsidies could keep a lot of the people who are below the threshold of self-sustainment actually engaged with their communities.
And, for better or for worse, most people engage through their communities with employment. Unemployed people, especially unemployed men, do not suddenly become poets or volunteers for Meals on Wheels.
I know I don't want parents/grandparents ODing on heroin in a parking lot with a child in the back of the car. [1] So where does society start to fix this? How do you give people purpose and the means to embrace that purpose?
What good are self driving cars/trucks, machine learning/AI, and all that comes with it if you've hollowed out any substance your species had? EDIT: Maybe the Amish had it right the whole time. Social fabric above "progress".
[1] http://ktla.com/2016/09/09/ohio-police-post-photos-of-adults...
1. Wage subsidy. Tax people like me more to increase the EITC. At the extreme this is make-work jobs, but there is a lot of ground to cover between here and there.
2. Make employment cheaper. Cut down on employment taxes and other expenses associated with employing people.
3. Make employment easier. This won't happen overnight, but, after coming to wage and term agreement with someone, I should be able to hire someone by clicking a few links on a government webpage. And I say "I should" as a person, not as a corporation. Make everyone in the country able to hire another person quickly and easily. If I see too much trash on a street in my neighborhood, let me hire people to clean it up a few times a week. I shouldn't need any kind of HR department.
I have yet to see an employer who is friendly to labor, so that's where I'm coming from why I don't trust employers to be the solution (removing minimum wage, wage subsidies, etc). Labor regulation should walk softly but carry a big stick.
Example: We subsidize Walmart employees pretty heavily with government resources. We should not be doing that, and I highly doubt most people in those jobs feel as useful as they could be.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/walmart-government-subsidies-stud...
http://americansfortaxfairness.org/files/Walmart-on-Tax-Day-...
You are hitting on one of my concerns, though: make labor cheap, and people could be hired to basically annoy other people. I want to keep it simple, but there are certain categories of jobs that need to be ineligible for wage subsidy: anything that involves attempting to grab someone else's attention or time. So no sandwich board walkers, no demonstrators, no telemarketers, no door-to-door salesman, no picket walkers. Those can still be employed by businesses if they want, but without subsidy.
If you don't trust employers, you can bid up the wages of labor yourself by hiring people. Think what a non-profit interested in increasing recycling rates could do with access to cheap labor. In fact, all sorts of environmental issues are reduced by cheap labor. We can stop dumping old VCRs on China to disassemble. A local environmental group can collect them, and then use a disassembly line to teach workers the basics of technology repair while breaking out all the components for responsible disposal.
If you want to keep people employed but not willing to risk employers possibly benefiting in any way, well, it indicates that improving the standards of living of the workers wasn't your real concern. Keep in mind that "the government should take care of paying for health care" would fit in with my recommendations but run afoul of your objections.
I don't remember the exact numbers but it was some kind of custom combination like that designed specifically for the type of business.
Interesting idea, I think to some degree we already do this in an roundabout manner. We provide subsidizes (corporate tax exemptions for R&D) and billions of dollars of direct grants to scientific research for example, that can be thought as a wage subsidy for scientists. We definitely need to increase the EITC, and expand it to singles and couples without children. The EITC is probably one of the best ideas to counter an increasingly automated economy.
Cut down on employment taxes
The outlawing of slavery made cotton more expensive. We still have cheap t-shirts.
There is no excuse for rolling back labor protections when there is so much wealth available to society; its the distribution that's the problem.
1. Provide universal access to free abortions and contraception so that people who do not want to have children will not be forced into childbirth.
2. End the war on drugs so that people can have access to safe opiates and clean needless. When both are available at your liquor store for less than the cost of a six-pack of beer, you will find that suddenly addicts can both hold down a job because they do not have problems with withdrawal symptoms due to uncertain supply, and the violent and larceny crime rates plummet because affordability and price gouging by dealers is no longer an issue.
You separate purpose and a meaningful life from wage-labor.
That's a cultural issue. A man can very much provide for his family "by simply being alive to cash a check" and not think twice about it.
Unless the culture finds meaning only in the workplace -- and not in tons of other activities and pursuits.
I think a lot of this has to do with perception. As in, "how am I perceived if I take a check from the government."
We have cultural norms as to what is "valuable". Maybe someone focusing on their art will one day have more meaning, and you won't have to feel bad taking a check from Uncle Sam while you work on your painting, sculpting, or woodworking skills.
The need to replace truck fleets would be one reason why it won't happen overnight. It would take time to replace millions of expensive vehicles.
Passenger cars have a short enough lifespan that I doubt those sort of retrofits will be especially common.
Say it takes 10 years to replace most of the fleet. That still means someone driving a truck at age 25 will be facing an extremely different job situation at age 35.
We could use the tech to enhance the worker instead of replacing the worker, though. Right now, drivers are limited in the number of hours they can do in a day, for safety reasons. If drivers become mobile managers, there is still a need for them. Still less of them, obviously, but it does mean we don't suddenly get rid of 80% of their job openings in 10 or 20 years.
I think it comes down to what you mean by "soon". I would be surprised if in 10 years a huge number of trucking jobs hadn't already been replaced, and in 20 years they will almost gone outside of a few niches.
These sorts of things get waved off with tech enthusiasm as things that will just somehow get figured out; this leads to a straw man where the real costs of human drivers today are compared against the hypothetical, unknown, but believed to be effectively zero costs of the glittering future.
Not a very fair comparison I'd say, comparing fantasy to reality. We'll see how it shakes out in the years to come.
Much less than what they're paying now for insurance covering their human drivers.
> How much will the annual software updates cost?
Less than their human drivers cost, if anything at all.
Some trends will always hold true; cost of hardware goes down, capabilities of software goes up. I don't think anyone is saying it'll happen in 7.8 years, but as the HN group is aware, we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale. There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this?
That's not at all true, or at the very least, it requires a raft of other assumptions which may not hold, to all stay true, in order for the consequence to stay true. Like for example the cost of rare earth metals, good trading relationships between nations, and so on.
> we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale
I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars.
> There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this?
There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time...
Sure, those lines aren't monotonically decreasing/increasing but the trend isn't likely to reverse direction any time soon.
>I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars.
There'll definitely be a costly hardware buy-in for a lot cases, but some applications of AI might only need a camera - say, a replacement for a cashier at a grocery store.
>There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time...
I think it's worth discussing because waiting for the bad outcome to happen before trying to handle it could be too little too late. Even if the percentage risk of an economic shock is low, the magnitude of the potential damage is high.
The average pre-tax income of the bottom 50% has stagnated since 1980 at about $16,000 per adult [1]
These people are more likely to live paycheck-to-paycheck and more likely to work jobs which might be targeted by automation. I think it's a recipe for disaster.
Exactly, look at mobile phones, that took years to scale up. /s
Why are you then confident that safety numbers will carry the day? When someone is killed by a driverless car, that's going to be an emotional issue, and the appetite for cold hard data may be limited.
If safety numbers were really what people were after, it's hard to see how the US would have the gun culture that it does.
Engineers put far too much faith in data, and it's why they're often so bad at politics. Look at the incoming president; what people want is frequently more important than what is.
The upshot of what I read was - these folks are, in effect, test pilots whether they know it or not, and even a good driver could have died.
As much as many might believe that moral outrage drives policy, the reality is that in the US, industry drives policy.
The transportation industry is powerful, and the transportation labor force is incredibly weak. I think we'll see the national government push for accelerating autonomous vehicles long before we see them push for banning them.
I think autonomous vehicles mean there won't be a transportation industry, per se. There would have to be some barrier to entry that's not readily apparent now. After all, "Uber for self-driving semis" under an Amazon style aggregator ...
My favorite is one of the first of such modern predictions:
"I have an asthma that the doctors have warned me should give me great consideration regarding my future health. My only consolation is that the total of medical knowledge has doubled during the last 7 years, and should our venerable surgeons continue to gain as they have up till now, those in the future will suffer less than I. Indeed, if my parents could only have so arranged their affairs such that I was born 25 years later than I actually was, then I believe I would live in an era where medical knowledge should have a cure for my ailment."
That was Laurence Stern, writing in 1759 (in Tristam Shandy). He was dying of tuberculosis, which he referred to as an "asthma". In fact, if he had been born 25 years later, he still could have easily died of tuberculosis. The first antibiotic (not counting some minor sulfa drugs) was Penicillin, discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928.
That was 169 years later than Stern was writing. Quite a bit more than the 25 years that he thought would be necessary.
Are 20 years a "near-term timeline"? Because all it takes is for self-driving cars to be approved for market, and today they are under heavy testing, and we even have some (Tesla etc) where while not "self-driving" they are very close.
It's not like some feature cpu/storage/battery/etc technology, where some lab breakthrough or another frequently gets reported in tech outlets, but it never arrives.
This is a mature field, with multiple multi-billion investments and heavy activity.
You know, it's funny when people talk about job disruption from tech, one of their key platforms is that things are changing so much faster now than they used to be. That's one of the things that's supposed to be really different about 2017.
If you accept that as valid, then 20 years is a preposterously long timeline, and nobody could take seriously a prediction that far out. As an example -- in 20 years time, Hyperloop could easily become the dominant form of transportation, leaving people to shrug off as irrelevant the self-driving car stuff. Not saying that's going to happen, just saying that 20 years is so long, that level of change could happen in the same timeframe.
Me personally - in terms of the economy, available goods & services and such, I think you can take a really good guess 1 year out. 2 years out it's a bit fuzzy but still OK. 5 years out you've only got the broad outlines. 10 years out, you're just straight-up guessing.
20 years out? Unrecognizably different.
I accept it ("things are changing so much faster now than they used to be") as valid AND I don't find 20 years a "preposterously long timeline".
"Much faster than they used to be" is not instantaneous, it just means that in the ancient world it took millennia, in the industrial world centuries, in the electronics world decades, and in the internet world years.
But self-driving cars are more in the electronic's world than the internet world. It's not like they are some new website or web business that takes over in a couple of years or so.
They need engineering work, safety tests, government compliance, infrastructure, etc, which take decades.
>in 20 years time, Hyperloop could easily become the dominant form of transportation
No, it wouldn't.
>20 years out? Unrecognizably different.
Hardly. 20 years is a perfectly good horizon to make realistic predictions. 1996 to 2016 for example: more mobile, more internet (which tons of people rightly predicted) would be totally correct. Policy decisions work in even larger timelines than that. Only superficial crap wouldn't a 1996 be able to recognize about 2016.
And why? Because driverless trucking solves tremendous problems. It's less expensive. It's safer. I'd feel much, much safer on a highway filled with robot trucks than I do on a highway filled with fallible humans with limited reflexes. So yes, yes. It will happen, despite resistance, because it will be so much better than what we have now.
And I'm not fearful about the future. But others are, and for good reason. In general, I think it'll be great. If I was a 35 year old trucker looking at seeing my industry evaporate when I'm 50, I wouldn't be so positive.
The key trend we're concerned about here is technology increasing productivity. That's a long-term trend (you can go back to the wheel, writing etc. if you want to stay in the domain of humans) that has accelerated over time, and hasn't shown any sign of letting up.
Output increases because people are freed up; when what they used to do is more efficiently done with technology, they can apply themselves to something else.
What's the end of that trend?
For my part, I can think of only three ends.
A) We stop creating new technology. The trend of development simply ends. We learn nothing more that can be used to increase efficiency. We know everything there is to know that can be applied to production. Seems unlikely and is contrary to the history of life on the planet.
B) We invent technology that replaces people with low ability - not low skills, but low ability, so that they can never be productive - completely. This is part of what we're concerned with in this article.
C) We start modifying people to increase their abilities to keep pace with what our technology is able to do. Seems dystopian.
Another way to put it is that technology can do an increasing proportion of what a person can do on their own. It's a trend line that has increased throughout history. There are only three extrapolations: the trend line stops short of 100% (case A), the trend line goes past 100% (case B), or our own capability starts growing at least as fast as technology (case C).
The only way I can imagine it would take this long is if governments just prohibit it. Even then, they'll get a big chunk of the market in 5 years.
1 - By real, read commercially available, that can run into any reasonable road without anybody inside.
It's not as bad as having your job automated out of existence, but it's still not good for people in that market. And I think there are likely to be a lot of jobs that are like that: not eliminated completely, but made in some way easier or less onerous, such that the labor pool is bigger.
But most people don't.
Offer retraining of entirely different work to 100 truck drivers whose jobs don't exist any more, and maybe 10 of them will go through on it.
We should do what we can to help those 10 do it, but most people will want to stick with something at least related to what they know. And they don't want to be on direct welfare, even though someone typing out code would think that would be nice.
We can make labor cheaper to ease the pain on people's lives. Raise my taxes to boost the EITC. Make employment cheaper by reducing payroll taxes and all other business expenses related to employment.
And these are tunable fixes. Once you put otherwise employed people through long periods of unemployment, they become very very hard to get back to work. If you keep them working, even part time, it's easier to restore them to full employment should the need arise.
Assuming that is so, to my mind the salient question is "why?" That is, why only 10? Is it that the other 90 just don't want to be retrained? Is it that the retraining wasn't accessible to them for some reason (child-care, transportation, etc.)? Or maybe some of them started it but dropped out for some reason? Is it that they "couldn't hack it" or is that we don't really know how to retrain people properly?
I would hope there has been research directed at this, as it seems to me that we'd want to find a way to maximize the number of people who do take advantage of retraining, and who ultimately benefit from it.
It was hard to get onto the course. I've taken a huge loan. I'm shitting my pants. I've got no idea if I'll like the job or be good at it. It's the biggest gamble I've ever taken. The stress is unreal. Most of my fucking hair has fallen out. My body is just falling to bits. It feels like my heart is either going 200% or 10%.
When I read posts saying "Why don't people re-train?" Its for the same reason you don't re-train as a doctor or a teacher or for the police. Because it's not what you do. It's not what you want to do. It's hard to change. It's a massive gamble.
I imagine if you have no qualifications it's even harder.
When those 100 truckers are put out of work, how is cheaper employment going to make them useful to another business owner?
We have a terrible history of giving the opportunity to switch careers. I suggest you look into the history of former mining or steel towns in the US and UK. The majority of "regeneration" has been from younger people coming into the market rather than former workers being given opportunity. A significant proportion spend their lives depressed, broken and unemployed for the rest of it. Some of those communities never recovered.
If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work.
It wasn't "a problem" in the past as the scale meant that it was possible to ignore - unless you happened to live near one of those former industrial towns. This time the scale is such that ignoring it will potentially take us near anarchy. It will have to get very close for governments to do something actually substantive.
It's a huge investment, and super scary when you are not guaranteed a job at the end of it.
I totally understand why people put it off and hope that a job comes up that they are currently qualified for.
Training to be an IT/CompSci teacher - 11 to 16 year olds.
For the last few years the coding has been eroded by automation.
Yep. Automation. Most of our clients want websites to sell some stuff. This no longer needs a team of 10, now you need an Amazon account, Facebook and Twitter, eBay, Etsy... or Drupal and other shopping templates make it too easy for designers to cobble something together that is 'good enough' that a team of coders can't compete on price. In the good old days we were bashing out 30K websites and running them for our clients. These days no one spends that much on a website.
We have a few companies left, SEO (lots of interesting coding there) Cloud computing (Perl and Python) Games (cut scenes, testing etc) not enough to support many coders. And again, you can get a job, but no pension, no perks, minimum holiday, no job stability (each time we lost a contract half the team would be laid off) and for me, no progression. I'd like to think in 10 years time I would be running a team of coders. No chance in my local area.
What would you train them in, anyway? There aren't many skilled industries that are looking for that many fresh folks. There's plenty of crappy labour jobs to be filled in places like agriculture, though even these are fading, and only certain places like fruit picking are hard to automate. What kind of jobs do you see this demographic doing?
Real retraining would be free, universal access to vocational schools and higher education. You are very correct in pointing out the shortfalls of current US retraining programs. Most of thoes came about during the Reagan administration and I think they are first of all a Republican trick to distract people from the need for free universally accessible vocational and higher education, and second of all a privatization scam to benefit people running the private retraining programs. Recommended reading on the topic: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010004030...
Your argument implies that everyone is too stupid to go to school for the "correct things." Do you realize that the truck drivers had to go to truck-driving school to get their truck-driving jobs? Implying that people are incapable of choosing a field of study that will lead to employment, to argue for denying people the right to education, is a vicious and idiotic lie of the "kill the poor" variety. You should be ashamed for even suggesting it.
You may also wish to consider dialing back the vehemence of your rhetoric. Accusing people of adopting "kill the poor" rhetoric in response to relatively polite disagreement may potentially be seen as a somewhat less that reasonable reaction.
The obvious response to this, of course, is that if people in dying rust belt towns have skills then jobs will come to them. This makes sense! Why put your factory or office in an expensive city when it can go in a cheap small town? Clearly a ridiculous notion, right?
The problem is that whole towns don't re-skill at once. Ten or twenty or fifty thousand people don't become educated, experienced professionals all at once. It happens in drips and drabs, a little bit at a time. If you're in a major metro area, this means the professionals come to you. If you're in a small town, you've probably either shut down or paid out the nose to import a handful of experienced and educated professionals to run the automation.
And all of this is making some pretty big assumptions, too. Not everyone wants to start over at the age of 40- or 50-something. Not everyone has the mental or physical acuity to do so or wants to go head-to-head with more energetic 20-somethings. It's humiliating, to a great many people, to have to accept that the trajectory of their lives has been a dead-end. It's a terrifying risk to leave behind everything you know and look for a new life and a new career. Even if all the education and training in the world was 100% free in every way, those would still be true.
Then we have to talk about the fact that under capitalism, these people are condemned to starve. Only something like a basic income can really help them.
Let's also talk about the fact that under a basic income, these people will be absolutely miserable.
They don't want money. They want work. Their identities revolve in no small part around dignity rooted in a fair day's work for a fair day's wage. Accepting charity is humiliating for them because it implies they cannot earn money. How do you think these people would feel about the prospect of being paid a basic income for life when they cannot work?
It's humiliating beyond words. It's patronizing as all hell. It strips them of all respect, all dignity. It leaves them unable to look at themselves in the mirror, because they are now worthless in their own eyes. What do you think that does to a person?
I'll tell you. Meth, heroin, obesity, heart disease... and burning hatred.
In one sense, you're absolutely right. Only something like a basic income can really save them. In another, also very important sense, a basic income will destroy them. Not by death, but by unmaking who they are.
Capitalism got us this far, but it's rapidly approaching the limits of its usefulness. Time to move beyond it, and not to some centralized government planning, either. Why do we need massive government power structures when all other jobs are being eliminated?
Except... it's still being paid without working for it. You wind up with all the same problems no matter what you call it.
If you frame it as a gift from your betters (which is how it is currently framed), yes, you have problems.
If you frame it as something you're owed as a human right, there are many fewer problems.
The framing does in fact matter. All the problems you mention are not inherent in the situation. They can be addressed.
We're discussing people who are inevitably going to view a basic income as charity. You can tell them it's their human right. You can tell them it's what society owes everyone. You can tell them they deserve it for existing.
I honestly believe that how you frame it isn't going to matter. Not with the populations and identities we have today. They're going to see those Other People over there paying them to shut up, sit down, and be useless.
If you want to discuss how people who identify differently would react differently, that's cool and fun. I don't believe we're in a scenario where that's a relevant discussion, though.
Right. And what I'm getting at is removing those Other People from the equation. I see that as a completely essential part of the process, and one not many people have come around to yet.
We can't have overlords of any sort for this to work out well. Not a government handing out checks. Not a few companies in Silicon Valley handing out checks. Ownership (if the concept even survives) of the sources of production and wealth generation must be shared equally by all.
For it to work out well, at least.
We can easily not go down that radical path, of course. Continue with small modifications to the systems we have. No doubt that's what we'll try at first. But as you're pointing out, that's not going to be a satisfactory solution. I agree with you on that point.
So I think it's worth looking at what the ideal would look like and then try to find the least painful path in that direction.
UBI as currently envisioned is a half-measure. A stopgap at best.
Their claim is that they "earned it" and "those people" didn't earn it. Ok, well if it's obvious that nobody earned something then you have the same problems.
The majority of american workers aren't going to see a paycheck in the mail and say "Wow, great this means I can spend more time whittling/hiking etc..."
I do not in any way, shape, or form believe that "work" is the only path to fulfillment for humanity. I do think that in much of the rust belt, a majority of the population has incorporated the dignity of work into their identities.
You are absolutely correct that a great many people love to do other things and find fulfillment in them. I simply do not believe that this number is large enough to significantly alter the analysis I have offered.
Yes, but the problem is to stop insulting people for taking that option by constantly making them "prove" to society that they "suffer enough" to be given automation-money.
Work gives people a purpose - even if it isn't the best purpose, it also gives people a community - even if it isn't the best community.
I think people in the tech world fail to actually understand the mindset of the majority of workers. They need to watch Dirty Jobs more.
What if we create factory amusement parks, where people go to build things for a wage that nobody will ever buy? Does that seem any less patronizing?
Everybody is going to have to shift their sense of identity, self-worth, ambition, etc. in the years to come. I don't see any way out of this.
If the problem is that there are no jobs, then "faking it" seems so much worse than simply providing a basic income, and encouraging education, non-profits, civil service, startups, etc.
Attitudes are going to need to shift, but that doesn't happen overnight. That happens over the course of multiple generations... which is the issue, because economic shifts are much faster now.
The populations we're discussing don't want either of those. They want to have back what their culture remembers as... not glory days, but days when hard work was valued and was enough.
Welcome to how many of us feel about wage-labor in the first place.
>In another, also very important sense, a basic income will destroy them. Not by death, but by unmaking who they are.
I need a good term for the extreme sense of entitlement inherent in yelling loudly, "Yes, definitely, give us a more brutal capitalism in which market forces override workers' preferences!" and then appending, "Except when doing so would violate my sense of identity".
Since when was imagined personal identity so sacred, let alone that the imagined personal identity of this particular demographic should be far more sacred than the imagined personal identities of everyone else put together?
What gives these people a right to live out their "identity" as blue-collar wage-workers, receiving high wages while rejecting unions at every opportunity, while people like me don't get to live out our "identities" as other things? Should we build custom-made bubble realities for everyone in which we can all pretend the world works exactly the way we want it to, and we never have to face hard truths about ourselves? Should society pay certain friends of mine to be artists, just because they self-identify as artists? Can I have a tenured academic job instead of a computer engineering job just because I "self-identify" with the values of academia more than with those of industry?
Jobs don't exist so anyone can actualize the little movie in their head about The Good Life. Jobs exist to make money for the employer, and arguably to exploit the worker. There are lots of useful things that need doing: infrastructure to repair, housing to build, communities to maintain. I support employing people to do those things: whoever wants to work should be handed the tools and told to show up on Monday because we're building a goddamn high-speed rail system like we should have done almost a decade ago.
I don't support building people's entire lives and livelihoods on lies.
You're free to believe that. You may very well be right. I don't know. For my own part, I think that they're unlikely to agree with you any time soon and likely to continue acting in what they see as their own interests.
You're completely right. There are lots of these people. I simply do not believe that this number is large enough to significantly alter the analysis I have offered.
Am I generalizing? Of course I'm generalizing. There's no other way to meaningfully talk about tens of millions of unique, special, individual human beings.
I'm saying that lots of people don't want change, and telling them they must change is unlikely to be persuasive. In a democracy, this has practical consequences.
No, I believe it's wrong that government policy and macroeconomics should be shifted away from the norm for the sake of one particular cultural identity. Instead, I want it shifted so that everyone can live how they think they ought to, without markets compelling anyone.
The unfairness is in Bob getting his unprofitable coal-mining job subsidized while Alice the starving artist can't even get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and of course Eve the Executive getting to exploit everyone else for her own profit.
Grew up in a rural area, of about 3K people. Lot of farmers, and this was the '90s so lot of broke farmers. (Family farming economically collapsed in the mid '90s and is hard to make work even today).
(Big alcohol problem. County next county over had a huge _huge_ meth problem. Got the impression they were a former logging/mining town, then things got Bad.)
Heard a lot of stories about folk whose pride wouldn't let them use welfare, and some "avoid charity of any kind" people. Kind of folk where it'll be a hard pill to swallow to use charity to feed your family. (They'd do it, but only when things got bad and then only once or twice)
I'm not sure what would happen to these people if you said, "Hey, here's $30,000/year for free (avg income, today, of that area), for nothing, when you broke your back for $15,000/year last year."
It's going to be an interesting day when these people want to work, NEED to work to earn money (because elsewise it's charity, and you've failed as a man (woman?)), but there are "no" jobs for humans. Unless suddenly magically employers start paying good money for 6 hour/week blue collar minimally training positions (so probably not robot repairfolk, although maybe). But this is a dream because (late stage) capitalism.
No they aren't. At the very least, capitalism in no way outlaws private charity. They are still free to move. Someone might still bring work to them under a scenario you haven't imagined. Etc.
What really happened is that the local economy remained "depressed" until some more of that "market clearing" occurred. Now, a generation later, we are a much smaller city. The mill workers are gone to pasture (with their benefits they voted for themselves) or passed. The new generation works in the financial, service, or "Eds and Meds" economy, and we're doing fine. There is in fact still a good amount of manufacturing in the region. Being "depressed" actually makes us attractive to young adults since they can afford to buy a house here.
Many of the people in those dead Appalachian coal mining communities distill untaxed alcohol, deal prescription painkillers, cook meth, or grow cannabis to pay their bills. If you don't retrain people into lawful careers, they might just retrain themselves into prohibited ones.
And that spills over onto everyone else around them.
Before we get there, there is a major problem in that we don't have enough young truckers. The average age of truckers is up around 50, and we need a lot of them. Automated trucking is still a long way away - the technology still has quite a long way to go, and after that, the infrastructure and tech has to percolate out (and trucks aren't cheap).
Semi trailers should be loaded onto flatcars, trained to the destination city, and picked up and dropped on a truck for the intra-city delivery.
Given that folks are paying for LHT, it's important to figure out why. And the answer lies in just-in-time production and pull-based production systems. These systems put a large business value on the timeliness and flexibility of delivery. For many processes, saving $150/ton or so on transport doesn't matter if it means putting another day's worth of inventory into your production system, especially if if it risks producing the wrong stuff.
I am having a hard time coming up with areas where careers come and go in 20 years.
Truck driving isn't one, it's been around since the 1930s and only really aggressive predictions suggest its passing by 2030 - which is more than long enough.
It would be more convincing to name careers that had both come and gone, rather than which are scheduled to go soon. But everything I think of is more properly categorized as a sub-type of a larger career. Punch card operators and VB6 programmers aren't tied to those technologies, they are generic computing professionals who happened to use a technology stack which has gone away.
Can you think of any examples of complete career fields which have disappeared?
Plus, cities are filled with mostly knowledge and service specialists whom depend almost entirely on massive quantities of goods and food produced in factories and rural areas.
* Building a long-term career at a single company is safe.
* Traditional college degrees are worth the monetary cost.
* Society can only function if everyone works a job.
"Researchers’ estimates on the scale of threatened jobs over the next decade or two range from 9 to 47 percent. For context, every 3 months about 6 percent of jobs in the economy are destroyed by shrinking or closing businesses, while a slightly larger percentage of jobs are added— resulting in rising employment and a roughly constant unemployment rate. The economy has repeatedly proven itself capable of handling this scale of change, although it would depend on how rapidly the changes happen and how concentrated the losses are in specific occupations that are hard to shift from."
source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docume...
Now, let's say the VC money dried up somehow, or we invented an AI capable of programming anything based on a vague description. Lots of programmers would be out of a job.
I'm a bit skeptical that "we'll always find a way to
quickly replace jobs" will stand the test of time,
especially when the primary evidence given is, "Well
that's how it's worked out so far."
In many ways its like "running out of water" which on its face is preposterous. The planet is literally covered in the stuff. The mechanism (evaporation and condensation) which move it around the planet can put too much or too little somewhere but we'll never be permanently "out" of water. It will rain somewhere at some point (or snow) because water is evaporating from the oceans every day.
Economies are very much like that as well, they may have capital dry up in one area (like Appalachia) but it is probably raining somewhere else (like San Francisco). But the mechanism of buying and selling products or services is a constant force to move the money around.
So that money will always find a way to be spent. And that means jobs. They may be different than the ones before but they will get created.
Additionally, people are a resource, but a very finicky one. You would expect them to move to where there is a need for them, and to do what it takes to make themselves usable, but there are many external factors that make that far less likely than it could be, such as family, property, and various features of human nature. So, as money flows from labor-intensive industries to non-labor intensive industries, or transforms a previously high-labor industry into a low-labor one, what happens to labor as it increasingly loses value? What happens when the value of labor falls below the threshold required for human survival for increasingly more segments of the economy?
At a microeconomic scale, people are displaced. We saw last week an article on one of the few book binders left in Manhattan, there used to be hundreds of book binders. They stopped binding books. But the number of jobs in Manhattan didn't go down to n - (# of book binders) because in a macro sense what used to be spent on book binding is being spent on something else. Maybe it created a thousand jobs at print shops (for example).
We completely agree that people aren't fungible. Just like cattle die in a drought, people without marketable skills go hungry and homeless. I, and many folks I have talked to agree that one of the reasons you tax business is to fund transition plans for people being left behind by changes in the job market. Whether that is retraining programs, temporary shelters, or tuition assistance for additional education. In my mind I consider that social justice matter to be independent of the macroeconomic mechanism of job creation.
...because in a macro sense what used to be spent on book
binding is being spent on something else. Maybe it created
a thousand jobs at print shops (for example).
Looking at past examples, these new jobs seem to come from advancements in technology that both improved human lives (and thus were in high demand) and also required human labor to operate (and thus provided jobs). For example, we no longer need nearly as many farmers, but these people have all been freed up to pilot commercial airplanes, program computers, repair cars, operate print shops, etc.
But what if these trends don't hold up? What if the value-producing technological advancements of the future continue to eliminate jobs, but require radically less human labor to operate?
My best guess is that people will be pushed into less technology-driven and more service-driven pursuits. Instead of print technologies eliminating book binders but providing print shop jobs, we will be eliminating print shop jobs and getting — I don't know — more masseuses, therapists, cleaners, gardeners, personal chefs, etc? Basically the service economy we see emerging now — people performing what were previously considered "luxury tasks" for other people.
I suppose I've talked myself out of some of my former skepticism. We don't need new jobs, because we have plenty of "old" ways to provide value that become more broadly affordable as workers are freed up to do them. However, if this leads to a society in which the masses perform menial tasks for the rich who fill a limited number of high leverage technological positions, that could cause tremendous cultural problems.
You can flip that around, if there wasn't "something else" to spend money on there would be no reason to have it.
But the assumption here is that there are still lots of jobs that need people to shift people into. As a resource, we're consistently reducing the areas in which it's appropriate and cost effective to use people instead of some other resource.
This happens. Resources that were previously used for many things are displaced by other resources which are fundamentally better in those categories. Think stone age. Eventually stone as a resource was completely surpassed in almost every area it was previously useful in. It's value has been reduced to the point that if you have a large quantity of unsorted stone material, it probably costs more to sort the useful bits than you can make selling them, and without a local market that wants to use it, you're stuck trying to figure out the least costly way to either store or dispose of it.
I hope we aren't transforming ourselves into the equivalent of stone, where we end up that figuring out which select few of us is capable of contributing in some way is more costly than producing a product slightly worse quality but much cheaper using automation the majority of the time, for the majority of fields.
Hopefully I'm dead wrong and we transition to something far more uplifting, because it's depressing to think this way.
The vast majority of that water is not drinkable. THAT is the main issue. Obviously we won't ever run out of the H2O molecule, but there is a good chance that the availability of cheap, potable water will be a major issue in the coming decades.
... but there is a good chance that the availability of
cheap, potable water will be a major issue in the
coming decades.
[1] http://www.islandsky.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=a...
[2] http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/03/07/the-fog-collectors-h...
Yes, that's what I meant. And this can be a MAJOR issue. Not sure why you're trying to downplay its importance. I mean you can look at places like Haiti today to understand the true effects of regional clean water shortages. They are absolutely devastating.
The other thing you haven't mentioned is contamination, which is a lot more difficult for the natural water cycle to handle. For example, underground water reservoirs are an important source of clean water for many villages, towns and cities all over the world. If they get contaminated, you can't just wait for that water to evaporate and then condense back as relatively clean water.
https://www.dougsguides.com/content/whats
And with the rising income inequality , the same amount of money might highly reward specific professions, leaving others with no salary.
Simply letting people not work doesn't remove incentives to perform: the incentives that we have are already broken. We don't live in a meritocratic economy: the Monsantos and Blackwaters of the world are rewarded for destructive behaviors, while advertising allows inferior products to drive superior products out of business. If we have enough surplus to support these massive inefficiencies, surely we can spare enough to support the unemployed.
Further, transemployment actually costs us. It requires infrastructure to create fake jobs.
We will only hit real make-work jobs when we can no longer answer the question "how would I solve this problem, if only I had access to a lot more workers?"
There is work to be done in poor communities in the sense that there is need, but there isn't much work to be done in the sense that not many people are offering jobs (because not many can pay).
Anyone who has spent time in a rich community knows that there's plenty of surplus that could be shared. It's not a problem of lack of resources, it's a problem of distribution.
The problem with redistribution, we're told, is that the current distribution is based on merit: those who provide the most value are given the most value. Joe is a billionaire because he's provided billions of dollars of value to the world, while Bob is starving because he doesn't provide any value. If we take from Joe to feed Bob, then Joe won't have any incentive to provide value, so he'll stop, and society will collapse.
However, I don't think that's true. Joe doesn't provide more value than Bob necessarily--he just is better at manipulating the abstractions we've created around value. We don't live in a meritocracy.
But the lie of meritocracy isn't a complete lie. People do often provide more value if they receive more value. Honest actors do exist and provide value, and while most don't get to be Rich Joe, most don't become Homeless Bob either.
However, with technology, these honesty actors are no longer needed, and the lie of meritocracy becomes even more bald faced. In a future where robots do all the work, are we to believe that someone provides value simply because records show that they own the robots?
Transemployment is just an attempt to maintain the current distribution of resources: ostensibly the transemployed would work for someone, and that someone would determine how much they are paid. And of course that person would be paid more.
I think that a better solution is to drop the pretense that the distribution of resources is meritocratic, and as technology makes it even less meritocratic, we should look at ensuring that the benefits of technology are distributed more evenly. Creating fake jobs to maintain a tiered distribution of resources is only going to make things worse.
This is demonstrably not true. I mean, it's tautological. We have the economic surplus to support the unemployed, yet we do not. Therefore, the problem is not the lack of economic surplus.
People have noted this apparent perversity for well over a century, but it seems unlikely to change anytime soon. So the question isn't whether transemployment is preferable to some lower-friction redistribution scheme, but whether transemployment is better than letting those same people starve, or die from opiate addition, or alcoholism, or diabetes, or any of the other methods of benign neglect by which society has found to execute the economically redundant.
Also, I'm not sure that "the entire purpose of work is to create value" really encompasses the role of "work" in American society. The creation of value is, to the worker, often a side-effect, since that value in the capitalist model generally accrues to someone else besides the worker. The purpose of work for most workers is to bring in wages, which are necessary for personal comfort, but more importantly (above a certain level) as chips in a zero-sum game of social hierarchy. Extracting value from labor is the province of the employer; extracting wages from time spent, regardless of value created, is the province of the worker. The capitalist market's labor economy is the resulting intersection.
It's fantastic if your mechanism for surviving creates value for lots of other people. We should strive for that.
Might do something for a Mexican, won't do much for me.
But no, you'd rather people put in the effort they want, while arbitrarily rounding out the outcomes. You'd rather subsidize laziness.
Socialists don't make good entrepreneurs.
I'm thinking that one of the most disruptive things we could do is to invest our money in nonstandard channels. For example, promote systems that solve problems once and for all through research and then place the solutions into the public domain. A handful of engineers working over the span of months or a few short years could automate everything from wifi mesh networks to drone delivery to robotic home gardens. In a very short time we could remove basic need dependency from the system. Kind of like "a penny saved is a penny earned" on steroids.
Once people are not dependent on a system that tends towards wealth inequality, it would give them the leverage to demand a basic income because they could choose to no longer buy the goods and services from which the 1% derives its income. I'm not saying that members of the 1% are bad, just that whatever benefits they bring society will likely be commoditized like everything else when full automation provides cheaper (or free) alternatives.
Look at the stories of alternatives energies.
The trick is here, I think too, but really hard with no free time.
edit: Maybe the automatization of the expropriation of the 1% won't be captured..
There are more bank tellers in the US than ever before
But.. there are more people than ever before. And the number of bank tellers is leveling off even as the population grows.
Overall, there is scant evidence that we are undergoing a technological-unemployment crisis, if only because unemployment rates are low.
Are you kidding me? (First, you have to always be careful with any metric where the collecting agent has even the slightest bias to the outcome. Unemployment is not the obvious number you might think it is for a variety of reasons.) Jobless and underemployment are the numbers you want to be looking at -- and good luck getting good numbers on those but when you do, I think they'll tell a very different story.
A lot of employment is in the marketing overhead of capitalism. There are many products, from movies to Internet access, where the marketing cost exceeds the product cost. This is zero-sum; most marketing in the US just moves demand from one product to another. (Spending is income-limited in the US; the savings rate is very low.) It's also why people are still working so hard. Marketing is inherently competitive, which means it can chew up resources out of proportion to the value produced.
State and local governments have spent vast sums trying to attract "new economy" jobs to replace decimated primary industries, but I question how many of those jobs are marketing or "economic overhead" related. That's not to say that they're bad jobs at an individual level, or there's anything wrong with anyone working in them, but it doesn't seem like it's a sustainable basis for a national economy.
Starving is how revolutions happen, so probably not literally starving. But poor people in the US are already wholly politically disenfranchised, and children of poor parents likely to be poor.
The two questions which are important to consider in the light of extreme automation: "how large and diverse is our oligarchy?" and "how much social and economic mobility is there between generations?".
We are well on the way to having a small oligarchy like Russia and mostly inherited wealth, at which point our society will simply cease to exist.
A lot of baby-boomers aged out around during the recession, and will continue to do so (people born between 1943-1951 all turned 65 during the recession), and a lot of people went back into school to "hide" from it.
_Under_employment is still a serious issue, but that's only reflected in labor statistics by median wages. On the bright side those have been going up too, but aggregates only tell us so much.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060
edit:
...which is really terrible if you look at it in the longer term:
http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-population-r...
Process-heavy orgs will get out-competed by orgs managed almost any other way. If you're optimized to create useless work for people, you'll probably lose to an org that's optimized for something almost as silly like optimizing for high cost of labor. My consultancy is optimized for high cost of labor and I do okay.
Some people argue this is what's happening to France now. 40 years of shaping labor law to improve retirement & reduce unemployment has taken its toll. Paris is a smart tech-savvy and beautiful city that could have been Europe's silicon valley, but you're not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week and you can't fire people. Ah, 20-20 hindsight.
In other words, bullshit jobs: http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.o...
That's fine if employment becomes fully optional, but I fear we'll be forced into a life without the meaning of useful jobs, and without the freedom of technological unemployment.
"Bullshit jobs" depend on economic surplus to create work that is not immediately productive in terms of food, shelter, or safety. Most entertainers and craft artists fall under the definition of "bullshit jobs". Fine dining chefs are doing something entirely unnecessary. So are rock stars.
You're talking about something a bit more abstract and puritan. I was a 3602 Clerk, once, which was an essentially bullshit job created to navigate the hurdles presented by a post office clerk assigned to my company, whose skills primarily consisted of sleeping while sitting up, and storing the 12 lbs. of paperwork I generated per mailing in a closet and taking my word for its veracity. That's a bullshit job. I once worked for an agency whose primary job was procuring people willing to, for money, give permission to other people to declare evidence for a quality assigned by governing officials that obligated higher governing officials to give money to the customers of the clients for whom we procured, and whom we sought out to make a living. We were honestly just a conduit for government money that grabbed 3% of the cash that flowed through it. That's an entire bullshit agency.
A comedian creates laughs. That's not a bullshit job, that's a good job.
edit: I understand, you're just giving the source of the phrase rather than a definition of bullshit jobs. I don't think bullshit jobs and "transployment" are similar.
Edit: that is to say, I agree with you, and my original post was explaining why
The possible result is an attack on all branches of the executive except the military. Replacement of Social Security and Medicare by virtually worthless vouchers, elimination of the departments of Education, Housing, and Energy. emasculation of the EPA. And on and on.
This could be as self-destructive as an armed uprising with fewer deaths (maybe).
Many of the issues are easy to fix. Remove the wage cap on Social Security taxes. Convert to health insurance to Medicare. Some of the unemployment issues can be mitigated by making the workweek 30 or 32 hours. Turning truck drivers into nurses or medical technicians takes a few years of training. Many of them are smart enough to do it. The current stumbling block is that they must have income support during the education period. Giving someone $100K to manage the transition doesnt seem like much to me.
Fundamentally increased productivity and wealth should lead to more leisure and a better standard of living for everyone. Eventually everyone should get a minimum guaranteed income so they have time to pursue their education, raise families, be artists or novelists.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome for an experiment on a guaranteed income.
I think unemployed people will start teaming up to solve their needs directly - farms, small fab shops, schools, construction - we can make all these with local workforce, "self employed for self reliance". We'd only need access to raw materials and some land.
But the problem to solve isn't how to blunt the impact of AI, rather how to handle the newly freed labor force. I don't think this should be seen as a bad thing. Tasks a machine can take care of should be left to a machine, and other work should be handled by a human. We'll have a lot of open human capacity to accomplish something, but if the transition isn't handled well it could be really painful.
The interesting question is why people think this time around is different. Answers seem to vary from just "computers" to, "the same change is happening but now it's happening faster". The compensatory mechanisms still work though, yet it seems no one things they will.
No human or combination of humans can turn iron ore into stainless steel tubing. Yet a whole lot of people, acting in concert, can build and operate a bunch of terrifically complex machines which will do just that. The end result is an entity that you can draw a box around, which takes in that human labor plus iron ore and coal and minerals and produces steel tubing (and slag and acid rain). And it'll continue to do that, optimizing itself, as long as the market price of the outputs exceeds the market price of the inputs.
Google is similar (without the air pollution, though it has its own externalities). It's a bunch of people building and operating a bunch of terrifically complex machines which organize information, in such a way that the outputs have more value than the inputs inclusive of labor. It's a pretty nice business model, particularly when the inputs are basically free (because of the Internet).
But I don't see any reason to be especially threatened by Google, or at least there's no reason to be more threatened by Google, than the steel plant. Google can and probably will optimize itself to reduce labor costs, just as steel mills have optimized themselves; a modern steel mill can produce a hell of a lot of steel without very many employees, which isn't good if you're a steel mill worker. Google in 20 years may not employ very many people to maintain its search products, either. It's something to be aware of if you work in that industry, but it's not especially unique.
Seems the point you're making is that it takes 57,000+ people to make google run. You'd think they'd want to automate those sales reps, except that's human work and they can't. Which is the point the previous poster was trying to make.
I'm unwilling to speculate a couple of decades out when I don't think anybody has any clue what's going to happen in the next 5 years, forget decades.
But what I will say is this - there is no plausible way to automate human sales relationships in the foreseeable future. I don't even know of companies who are even seriously trying right now.
If you take the unbridled enthusiastic position that everything can be automated in 20 years, sure, all those sales guys are toast. I just don't see a pragmatic basis for taking that perspective. Tech gets better and that's great, but what you're talking about would be some Manhattan Project stuff. People have been talking about the potential of those advances since the 1960s. Wake me up when someone announces a date when they'll ship a product.
My life has become so much better with the advent of Amazon Prime and related services. I go to a website, find what I want, click a button, and whatever I want shows up on my doorstep two days later. It's fantastic, and nobody is trying to mislead me, or upsell me, or convince me to add on some shit that I really don't want. More things should be this easy.
It's not "the new machine can gin cotton" or "the new machine can weave cloth", it's "the new machine can handle an extremely wide range of problems, and we're moving from having to teach it each problem individually to having it teach itself."
This time really is different and it's crucial everyone realize why as soon as possible.
It's funny you mention this because in the past few days on HN there have been a number of articles whose general point was that the machine learning stuff presently in use is well tailored to very narrow, specific problems, and that the AI tech that would tackle a broad range of problems is still very elusive.
This new machine that tackles a very wide range of problems without massive programming investment is something I've been wanting for 20 years, and I still don't see anyone with plans to bring it to market.
It's more accurate to say the machine learning in use now works on narrow classes of problems. But even that is a giant leap forward from teaching the machine to solve each problem individually.
Teaching a car to drive very specific routes is one thing (and has been effectively done for decades now). Teaching a car to drive entire classes of routes is something else, and where we are now. In a decade or so cars will drive all classes of routes better than humans, and that will be something else again.
If it happens to you and enough of your peers in one area, it can devastate the local economy. None of the solutions for this are easy, and history is full of examples of it.
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> None of the solutions for this are easy, and history is full of examples of it.
This is demonstrably true in the past, but it doesn't have to be that way in the future. But if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.
Solutions are all about the next generation. If a human did adapt to a change, it was because of training, mindset, and education they received before the change. Humanity has to get ahead of these things, and be prepared for changes, rather than trying to figure out what to do when they happen, when options are already drastically limited.
Probably the cheapest, best, most flexible way to do this is to educate them better in the first place. It's probably also the most efficient, since even if the world doesn't change, the education demonstrably improves their outcomes and has positive return.
I'm not sure how this is calculated. Do people employed part-time count as employed? How has that changed over time? The problems of the precariat include under-employment and being forced to hold undesirable jobs.
Partial employment (such as part-time) due to economic circumstances, as well as those who are within the employable age range (18-60something) but are not employed nor seeking a new job due to economic circumstances (i.e. gave up) are covered by the U-6 measurement, which is substantially higher at 9.8%. See here: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
That page also has links to historical measurements back to 2003, and you can probably find further back (though I'm not sure if there are older resources that also include the state-by-state breakdown).