I cannot live in the US on a Chinese factory worker’s wage, and it’s my government’s job to protect me, not the free market.
I have said this repeatedly, so forgive the repetition, but this is not progess if we’re all going to live in poverty in slums paycheck to paycheck except for the wealthy.
You are born, learn a bunch of stuff to behave like other humans so you can live together instead of being dead, and then you select an initial training or education. Once you finish that, you usually start trading your knowledge and time for money. While you are doing that, you can look around, watch the world changing, change yourself, and maybe even arrange more change in your environment (i.e. by applying knowledge, skill and creativity to create something that wasn't there before). This process continues in an endless loop until you die (independent of doing something that would be called a 'job').
There is no case where you get born, learn some basic stuff on how to be a human, and then stop and pretend to be a basic automaton doing the same thing over and over until you stop existing (which is what protectionism, tariffs and artificial jobs boil down to at some point).
People are very adaptable and given the option of living in poverty or going back to school, I'm pretty sure I know what most people would pick. Say what you will about coding bootcamps, but I'm willing to bet that someone who completes a 15 week course will have much better job prospects (and receive higher pay) than someone who does not. A lot of people just need a little financial help to make the transition and that is where the government can help.
There's no magic involved here. Just common sense policy and hard work.
Technology seems to be a field where the more tech is created, the more problems come up. There used to be typists who specialized in punching cards until the IDEs and compilers automated away their jobs. Their used to be entire staffs of people who would run programs one-after-the-other, until modern operating systems automated away their jobs.
Each time a job is automated away in tech, it seems like 10 more pop up.
So if that robot took the job of 100 laborers, then lets say those 100 laborers decided to become technologists... then for every robot made we'd have 3 technologists employed to design robots and 93 technologists unemployed. How is this problem solved? Please don't say universal income.
Knowledge has the property of needing only a few people who can fill demand.
However, I don't think it's a law of nature that "things will always work out ok". It's not written in stone anywhere that the AI/automation/whatever revolution will result in people having jobs, just different ones than what the Industrial revolution resulted in.
What if the future turns out to be that those in control of the capital (automated factories, data for running AI algorithms on, data centres, whatever..) manage to get by without the services of a vast middle class? Will it mean the return of a fabulously wealthy 1% and the rest living in squalor, like the royalty and serfs of bygone eras?
So long as people like you keep asking the critical questions, we're not lost :)
Lots of resources/jobs could be spent making life better for the majority of people. UBI is an extreme example of this. Universal health care, free higher education, solving homelessness, a human justice system, entertainment, could all use more resources.
The question is if America has the will to make this happen. As it won't be possible with state-sponsored wealth redistribution. I suspect European countries will be a lot better at finding the balance.
To me it seems perfectly reasonable that in 50-100 years people would no longer need to work to stay alive (as the norm). Productivity will continue to grow due to the high output (assisted by automation) of those who continue to work. The limits of a life supported by public infrastructure will still encourage anyone capable of doing useful work to do so, but no one would be cast away and suffering from lack of work.
I write about this at: http://tlalexander.com/machine
I think Marx's analysis of capitalism is over emphasized as a cause of the murderous regimes we saw under the "Communist" label in the 20th century. Stalin wanted control of the people, and he knew that Marx was very popular among the people at the time. But while I'm not an expert on all of these things, I don't think Marx advocated for the violent methods we saw used by those brutal regimes who used his name. And remember, Capitalist nations like the US were violent too (millions killed in Vietnam, and for what exactly?), but we don't blame Adam Smith or David Ricardo for those horrors.
When I do mention communism, I mean an agreement between people where some good or service it shared amongst them without any individual or individuals laying specific claim to more than their fair share. Families operate this way with food for example, and employers like Google share food freely this way too. I'm advocating that we build robots that are owned by huge groups of people who then share the rewards of the machines freely.
So it's "communism" because certain things are shared by the community, but people can still have their own private property and make other choices about what they do. It's a libertarian, non-violent non-coercive way to achieve a sort of voluntary communism for only life's most important goods (as decided by the people who choose to participate in these sharing schemes).
I hope that clears it up somewhat!
It's not as though someone wrote a Capitalist manifesto that initiated the practice of Capitalism.
There is such a thing as a Sovereign Wealth Fund:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/19/investing/norway-pension-fun...
"The fund is among the world's biggest investors in stocks, owning $667 billion worth of shares in over 9,000 companies globally. It owns on average 1.3% of all listed companies worldwide"
But yeah, if it turns out that the AI/automation revolution leaves vast numbers of people unemployed, we're in for some drastic social upheaval. Hopefully it will not result in a repeat of the bloodbaths of the 20th century communist revolutions.
I've met Richard Wolff and have read his book Democracy at Work (which he signed). I'm also interested in what Gar Alperovitz talks about among others.
Chomsky has talked at length about automation. AI is a new one, but even back in the 1960's Martin Luther King Jr was talking about how to overcome the problems of automation. This Noam Chomsky interview [1] from 1976 talks about his belief in something like The Machine. He says that it makes sense for an advanced technological society to automate away the drudgery of survival. He goes further to elaborate how work that can't be automated could be shared amongst the people rather than relegating one class of society to do that work. In a way, deciding not to have class suddenly means you want to automate as much as possible, because in either case you don't want to do the hard work yourself. We can only maintain a class based society because we're satisfied making some people do work we don't want to do.
What I write about, is how you can make your society in to sort of a small closed system, where there becomes a fixed number of things needed to maintain a certain standard of living. People can then decide if that standard of living is better than life in the more traditional worker-based capitalist system, where most people end up being workers. And to reiterate - the system I'm describing still meets the definition of "capitalist" by most western libertarian standard, because it is still based on voluntarily agreed contracts and depends on the notion of private property (shares) to operate. It also necessarily requires economic (capitalist) exchange to the outside world to get things the society cannot itself produce. It's an engineering solution, in my mind, to what Chomsky and others talk about.
> We are never going to be able to compete with the Chinese or other southeast asian countries with human labor costs
Immediately followed by:
> The next part of the solution is education and re-education of the labor force
We educate our labor, they educate their labor; theirs is still cheaper.
A knowledge-based economy isn't a panacea; knowledge, like capital, is really cheap to move around (compared to manufactured goods).
The GGP says "Artificially 'creating' or 'protecting' jobs doesn't help anyone, at least not in the long run". Having worked in a large company, I find that statement quite amusing. The proportion of "actual" jobs to "artifical" jobs is tremendous. I'm not saying that all those people with "artifical" jobs don't do anything, but from a pure economic efficiency standpoint their work is probably unnecessary. So if successful companies can do it, why not at least entertain some amount of protectionism at a country level?
[1] With that said, I think education is important for the long term health of our society. I just don't think education will fix the economic struggles currently facing many residents of the US.
I actually agree though that Chinese citizens or anyone else can learn the same information, so overtime we can expect these jobs to become cheaper as more and more people learn them. In fact, I think some re-balancing of economic power is inevitable as a knowledge based economy likely favors the country with more brains. (This is why I think the US should actually be encouraging immigration or at least not actively trying to deter it) The one downside China has going for it (which is perhaps a benefit for the US) is the level of totalitarian control that exists with the government. If China was more of a democracy then I think the economic future of the US would be in even more jeoparady. People don't like to be controlled and more information will make people resistant to that control.
I don't think a knowledge-based economy is a panacea, but it's much better than what we currently have going and I think UBI will play a role in providing the country-level protectionism you reference.
Does that take into the account that automation can more easily eat away at the low end of the (broad) IQ requirements of specific jobs? Otherwise it will only benefit some subset of the population and further increase wealth inequalities.
What happened to those other 99%? OMG they must be living in slums paycheck to paycheck.
The onus is on you to explain which entirely new sectors of the economy are suddenly going to spring into existence to provide jobs for people whose skills can't compete with those of ever more capable machines.
Automation is something that's been happening for hundreds of years, and any automation that people could do last year was done already.
I don't understand why there is this feeling that there is a backlog and therefore automation is sneaking up on us to put everybody out of work next week.
Perhaps there is too much handwaving about the "technological singularity".
My point was that at a macro level, automation seems to be a steady process that's gone on for much longer than any of us have been alive. But right now, it seems fashionable to assume a sudden discontinuous increase in the rate of automation is right around the corner. This only makes sense to me if there is a lot of "low hanging fruit" that people have not been automating until now. Which I think is implausible.
Also, instead of a thinking in terms of a "backlog", I feel like the average human only has a roughly fixed amount of ability, while hardware+software is increasing in capability all the time, such that it might become more cost-effective than any human worker for any economically valuable task eventually.
Yes, humans are very flexible, and the same body+mind that can live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle can also live a modern office worker's lifestyle, but we're never going to be able to outrun a car, or beat a specialised chess AI.
There is no law of economics which says that the economy will always create jobs which humans can do better and cheaper than machines, unfortunately.
There's no rule that says jobs will get 'created' at all. It hasn't happened for factory workers the last 10 years.