Robots Aren’t Killing the American Dream

That's a pretty logical answer, and they support it with good examples of past policies to ease the social pain of economic changes.

Most kids coming out of college will go into careers their grandparents have never even heard of or don't understand.

That's the way it's always been, while old jobs get replaced by technology, new jobs get created.

It's not unique to this generation.

Perhaps the unspoken honest answer is that people without other assets are going to live in 'poverty' (compared to the rich); their brains will operate at better watts-per-compute than the computers for a long time and still be worth something. They will earn a living on this. The people that do have assets (e.g. own the robots), are going to be extravagantly wealthy. It will be a feudalism but without violence, seniorage, or other expectation that the poor work for the good to the rich. Just that there's going to be really poor and really rich.

I and my kids will almost certainly be left behind in this. I am not an asset owner. But I will not attack my neighbor for their wealth. I will not turn over my ability to live to some bureaucrat who steals it from the rich and will eventually make me dance and beg for it. Let the rich asset owners go to the stars even if I will not be joining them. Better to have some of us get ahead than hold all back trying to leave no one behind.

Nitpick. UBI is not socialism. It's still capitalism.

The US and various countries around the world have this.

That is, let's socialize part of every company's profits but not management.

In other words, taxes? Your "government pays for shares to get money" scheme will be gamed as much as the current tax code is.

Well, we've had the automated IT-based office for decades and the cries of everyone losing their jobs didn't really happen, not the paperless office.

I certainly see AI changing things, but these hysterical futurist articles tend to lean more pie-in-the-sky techies than managerial types. Managers and executives know that employment, today, is a mostly a fiction. A lot of what drives employment could be automated right now, but isn't for political reasons. Not the least of which is internal company politics on having as many direct reports under you as the threat of becoming a 'small' department means becoming eliminated by outsourcing or in-sourced/absorbed by another department or simply a loss of prestige. The idea that employment numbers are purely meritoriousness is fairly questionable. Its bureaucratic and political primarily.

The larger issue is, how much will this change things from the norm from a reasonable perspective. We can't automate most things and that probably means a certain class of jobs will be threatened but most will be fine. So even if that doubles or triples unemployment, that means we have unemployment rates closer to European economies or perhaps higher, but still doable without a radical restructuring of our economy. The futurist dream of 100% unemployment in ten years and everyone on UBI simply isn't happening.

My worry is that we'd probably need a very liberal government to handle this as it will put it quite the load on welfare, but currently the US has a radical conservative administration as well as a conservative congress, which means the political fight to raise taxes and expand welfare for displaced workers is going to be tough or impossible. The problem is that angry voters put in isolationists and those who they perceive have and can build wealth, but those types of people are often very anti-social services and very anti-welfare. So the voters took a big gamble. They think the Trump admin will 'fix' jobs. Jobs that are destined to go away. But if he fails, and he probably will, then they will lack the social safety net to fall back on. Those in vulnerable industries, often in rural and less urbanized communities, simply voted the wrong way and most likely will be punished economically for it.

Capitalism will not destroy itself. Capitalism will reach its conclusion. We should let it. Herald the dawn of the new age.

(we're currently looking for an internship by the way, so if you're in this area, please feel free to reach out!)

Some of the estimates of job-losses approach >50% which, for context, the great depression was 15% to 25%

So we're looking at the rough equivalent of 2 to 3 great depressions in terms of unemployment, but productivity should be equal or higher.

A lot of the solutions being looked at center around basic income, but there are some really interesting questions around BI like "how do we help people deal with the emotional impact of 'freeloading'?" or "how do we deal with 'life without purpose'?"

She's thrown out some interesting solutions (I think). There is expected to be a lot of focus on subsidized training.

One sort-of "out there" idea which I don't think I've heard anywhere was 'framing' the BI payments as a 'royalty' on the data they provide merely by existing. Since marketing, science and government with the help of big-data tracks everyone so deeply then turns around and re-sells that data, the people being reported on 'deserve a royalty' on the data they provide. (I'm paraphrasing and she is way smarter than me, so the way she put it was a lot more convincing).

If you're looking for more information on the coming tsunami of technological unemployment there were some incredibly interesting whitepapers published by the white-house on the policy impact of this stuff.

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - oct 2016 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/whi...

Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy - dec 2016 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...

Monica's papers really echoed those whitehouse ones, though she hasn't published any of them yet, but the professors seem interested in publishing with her on a few things.

Anyways, this stuff really is a pretty big deal. You'll see Elon Musk talking about the 50% unemployment figure and the need for BI.

Who knows where today's whitehouse is going to go on this stuff, but we're really going to have to be prepared. Ontario Canada is kicking off a project in this now and a few other countries around the world have pilots brewing.

What both systems have in common is that they are built around scarcity. For capitalism, it is a method of price discovery. For communism, it is rationing by the state ("From each according to his ability...").

When there is no more scarcity, then there is no more need for either price discovery or for rationing.* Therefore, will need to create a new economic model that is not built on scarcity.

*Footnote - there are some things that will always be scare, such as location. Having a view of a calm beach, or of boundless nature, or a city skyline will always have a scarcity issue. It will be interesting to see how that scarcity is dealt with in this future.

What's funny about this idea is that it's not mine. I remember a long time ago that I use to go on a web forum on the New Speak Dictionary site. The site owner styled himself a Libertarian Syndicalist and he espoused very similar views here. I think it's inevitable that this might become the normal state of things if people become aware of this possible alternative to centralized state vs centralized business.

UBC without any social contract in place may further allow immigrants to be alienated into language communities. Alienation breeds ill sentiment.

I really wonder what the solution should be.

(NOTE: than I'm only talking about automation, not the creation of hard AI, which you allude to. That's a whole other kettle of fish)

The impact of automation is a profound topic. But it doesn't preclude us from making the policy change that would have altered income distribution in the last ten years, and the next ten years as well.

Broadly, people right now are sustaining themselves via their own efforts - if your boss quits paying you, you can take your work elsewhere. It's a mutually beneficial exchange, so there's no reason to think anyone is going to cancel it unless they get a better alternative. (The situation for capital is a bit more complex, but the argument carries.)

The utopian logic of automation suggests that people will be provided benefits without mutually-beneficial exchange - which threatens the outcome where someone else can say "you know, I'd be wealthier if I quit supplying you with food".

For someone currently limited to working 28 hours per week so that their employer can avoid giving them health care, this is a terrifying proposition. They're painfully aware that the people most likely to own the robots have a track record of choosing personal wealth over the well-being of employees (or even the companies they own - Sears is not explainable by pointing to ruthlessly efficient capitalism). That person might not be comfortable right now, but they're not living on charity either, and precedent suggests that living on charity is a terrible place to be.

Obviously none of this is inevitable; even the existing logic requires support and agreements. Labor and capital can't be exercised freely without someone around preventing slavery, robbery, and appropriation - reliable systems can be built. But right now I think its unfair to suggest that people are valuing themselves by their careers as an emotional matter. The reality is that the emotional reaction to unemployment is largely driven by the practical fear of being rendered optional.

Unfortunately, capitalism disagrees. As long as we have capitalism + greed, the owners of the automation will reap the benefits while everyone else struggles to make a living.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-...

But from what I hear about "real America". There is a huge value placed on "working with your hands". It's a pride thing. That's at least my stereotypical understanding anyways. I don't really know.

I love the ideal that, if labor is automated, that we would be able to spend that time and energy on things that would better society. Making art, scientific research, all that good stuff. But, before anyone can do any of that, they need their basic needs to be met. They need food, shelter, and clothing. Currently, the only way to get that is to work. If we take away the basic jobs that millions, if not billions of people are doing, and our leaders don't want to invest in the basic income idea, they're not going to be able to meet those basic needs or go on to those higher pursuits.

In a world full of robots doing my job, how can I ever be sponsored for a VISA? I can't self sponsor as I don't really meet any of the criteria for self sponsorship.

Perhaps I could marry but I wouldn't do that just for a green card, that's dishonest and I won't do that.

Maybe in the UBI utopia, people will be able to move to other countries just by asking. I'm not holding my breath though.

Because every living organism is designed to work itself to death and we're no exception.

In the case of labor productivity (by my understanding), if someone were to lose a job to automation and then begin working a less productive / lower paying job (because it's all they could get) then GDP would stay the same, hours worked would stay the same, and only the individual would be screwed, no?

In the case of capital investment, hard robotics is a photo op. The real job destruction is coming from soft robotics + initial deployments of AI. I can't imagine the procurement costs of those are falling under the capital ex budget. The departments we typically deal with are almost exclusively business-operations units (typically ones ill-served by the company's current IT).

Anyone who performs a process that follows a definable set of business rules is going to be automated away in the next 10 years. Some will last longer (OCR), some will go sooner (Excel), but it's an inexorable tide.

If your job doesn't require using your brain to make a complex, fuzzy-logic judgement call... I'd start seriously looking for one that does.

But of course, the New York Times can't actually call out who the real enemy is.

I own two shares of GM stock, so I am one of the enemy?

And that's a key element that these kind of analyses almost always ignore: there is no bright line distinction between "the capitalists" and "the non capitalists." Everybody is eligible to own a share of any publicly traded company, and a large segment of the population do choose to participate as part owners of various enterprises.

We're all capitalists.

One big thing we're missing though, is education and awareness for large chunks of the population. With things like fractional shares (ala Sharebuilder), almost everybody who has any income at all, can start building an ownership stake in the various capitalist enterprises out there, and reap the dividends (in either the literal sense of a dividend paid our, or capital gains, whatever). But how many people don't understand how this works, or aren't aware of what their options are? Or how many are but just choose to spend their entire paycheck every week instead of investing in anything?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chinas-economic-problems-wi...

China has a lot of immigrants. Mostly from rural areas to urban areas. They are Chinese, sure, but because the different laws governing rural areas vs. cities they might as well be from another country. These cities (Shenzen, Hong Kong, Shanghai...) work with special trade regulations that are comparable to any other free-market countries around the world.

China has 380m people making about $4-$10 a day in rural areas dying to migrate to better living conditions. That's more workers in rural areas than the US has people in total: men, women, children, students, retired, etc. These situations aren't comparable.

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2016/09/16/china_is_s...

As of 2014, over half of China’s roughly 770 million employed workers were urban workers. The problem is that the other half – almost 380 million people – are employed in rural areas. The urban households aren’t exactly raking it in, but the rural households have not progressed far enough beyond the World Bank’s arbitrary $3.10 to say they have escaped much of anything, and certainly not poverty.

Those cities are full of immigrants, taking up the badly paid shit jobs. They're all Chinese immigrating into China so "it's not immigration", but only in the same way Polish workers in the UK are "not immigrants" (not meant pejoratively, and frankly I admire what those people in the UK do, they deserve to be treated better than the British treat them. On the other hand, I do understand why the British labour class doesn't like them : they depress wages, conditions, and opportunity).

China is a country of 1 billion people. A slight minority, let's say 400 million people, live in the countryside (ie. everywhere except for some 30 dots on the map). Not in abject poverty (certainly not compared to 20 years ago), but certainly making a LOT less money than they do in cities and living in nicer natural environments, but worse conditions. So they migrate to the cities, take total shit jobs, and slowly become part of the Chinese cities.

This process has started, but is far from finishing (although I do think it's more than halfway through, but it's got another decade or so before it fizzles out)

So TLDR: China is not doing this without immigration at all. It's just that it doesn't really look like immigration for the same reason that the pretty sizable migration out of Chicago doesn't really look like immigration.

And china is a WTO member; if you look at it honestly, its trade is not more restricted than the US. Yes, it does try to make its own special standards, but they are similar to what the US does (e.g. with automative regulations or electronics regulations) -- it's simply that the US is a far more valuable market so people are more willing to jump through the necessary hoops).

Yes the US is even more open, but part of that is via agreements (like the now dead TPP) that were specifically intended to give preference to countries that were not China.

As for "flourishing"...let's just say that most of the poorest quintile in the US are wealthier and healthier than most of the richest quintile in China. Any absolute growth from a small number is a relatively large percentage.

Note: I am very much opposed to Chinese policies in many areas including the ones described above. But I can form that opinion without cliches like you hear from politicians).

The problem is as China's acquiring a "middle-class" that begins to resemble its American counterpart in the 1950s, the pool of people in China who will do just about any job is decreasing. Middle-class people use their increased economic security to develop a sense of vested agency and are less likely to voluntarily let their living and working standards dip. Therefore, the most exploitative production is moving out of the Chinese mainstream and into the rural fringes of its own society, or elsewhere altogether.

And even if our current economy truly can't flourish without immigrants and trade, there's still a viable argument to be made that building an economy on immigrants and trade was a bad idea and we should try to undo some of that.

The rational person recognizes that, in fact, NONE of these things depend upon mass immigration. The elites aren't daft, and so they clearly want it for a separate, undisclosed, reason.

Primarily, their growth (in terms of the Cobb-Douglass equation) comes from increasing technology (the "A" in the equation) by adopting already-created technologies.

If you're at the frontiers of technology, you can't just implement pre-existing technology. You need policies that will help you invent new ones.

Because it won't work. Tell a company to pay higher wages for the same positions by bringing them home, and that'll push them toward automation even faster.

These jobs may return for a short while. But that only brings false hope. And then we're right back to where we are today, hurting even more people in the process. It's extremely short-sighted.

Here's just one article on the matter https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602869/manufacturing-jobs...

Also note that Foxconn has already begun automating their plants. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 So it's already a demonstratably viable option for these companies.

What we really need is to bring _automation_ home and have some serious discussions around solutions for these real struggling people instead of spouting the hand-wavy "bringing jobs back to the US" rhetoric.

Here is a study that finds a number around half of all jobs being replaced: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Futu...

With these advances, you could easily train multipurpose robots to perform all manner of tasks. The industries that will be decimated first are all the minimum wage industries. Stocking grocery store shelves, deliveries, moving things around the warehouse, laundry, folding clothes, all things retail, etc.

The tech necessary to replace humans in all of those jobs already exists. The only remaining question will be if we allow robots to replace those jobs or not.

Some what further in the future, more skilled work like construction, plumbing, welding will be done by robots. Hell medical care and counseling will be done by robots.

Given sufficient mobility and energy there is no limit to what can be achieved with AI. It's only a matter of time.

What we're seeing now is a country that combined the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism. For example, free university education. There are two problems with this. First not everyone needs a university education, but making it more common forces people to have it just to compete. Second, the university system that the US has is too expensive to support such a plan due to the confluence of capital and social engineering. Our school want to have private room dorms. This makes the infrastructure more expensive than our EU counterparts with common living styles. As a nation, we now expect such accommodations. The US government, with tax payer money, can't afford to sustain such a system, but the voters will require it. As a result we are stuck.

Now how does this second point relate to the first? The US is still able to experiment. Look at Udacity or Coursera. We're trying to move to certifications for technical skills rather than requiring a full degree. Will this pan out? No idea (as an OMSCS student I hope it does). It does bring the cost down. This hopefully will offset the expenses associated with college, as well as its debt. Notice we've removed the expensive part, housing, from the college equation by decoupling it from the official school.

Causation is not correlation, however, at the height of taxation and regulation, the middle class was the strongest ever. That has eroded since the '70's until today, with wages staying relatively flat.

So tell me why deregulation is better then? If things are worse now, and they obviously are in terms of wages. In the '60's a man could work at the factory and support a family of four. That is an absolute impossibility now.