Don’t Fear the Robots: Why Automation Doesn’t Mean the End of Work
rooseveltinstitute.org
rooseveltinstitute.org
The analogy is humans now are to AI as 19th century horses were to the internal combustion engine. For centuries technological advance just increased the demand for horsepower. But when a better, cheaper substitute was developed, demand for horse work dropped rapidly and never recovered.
As soon as there is an AI that can perform better and cheaper than unskilled human labor, the change will come fast.
The Luddite movement for instance wasn't a group of people against technology in general. They we're against being put out on the street to starve while factory owners got rich because new machines were invented. That sort of rioting and destruction can easily happen again if we take a "tough shit" attitude to people who lose their jobs en masse to technological improvements
Unfortunately, I don't think the lesson was learned, because people mostly just demonize the displaced workers by calling them racists, bigots, and nazis so that they don't have to confront the fact that the magnifying lens of creative destruction might fry them next -- and their families and friends and children and town and any adjacent industry they might attempt to flee to.
On one hand, that's such a terrifying prospect that it's hard to blame people for wanting to avoid the thought of it, but on the other, we really, really need to find a way to address this, because it's a recurring theme that at best won't go away and at worst... well, I don't want to think about that either.
Globalization wasn't really why they lost their jobs. The old jobs left, but they could have had new jobs if we had something resembling an industrial strategy and a progressive monetary policy.
We underinvested in literally every job-creating public good from education to infrastructure since the Reagan era. We decided we could make up for it by putting working people in debt and slashing taxes on unearned (investment) income until it asymptotically approaches zero. Any time the economy gets hot enough that wages might rise, the Fed starts screeching about inflation and hits the brakes on the economy. We've gone out of our way to make sure that people who need to work for a living be as desperate as possible.
But the part about conjuring up new jobs out of thin air - that's probably never gonna happen.
With advancing automation, there will never again be as much demand for 'labor' as historically. We've been in a bubble where industrialization still had a need for somebody at the switch. But that's ending, and for good.
In the easily-forseen future, there will be diminishing use for labor. All those with only labor to bring to the marketplace (i.e. most of us without access to capital or goods), there will be no place in our capitalist system as it stands.
You sure? Globalization vs robots is entirely incidental to the fact that jobs regularly disappear en masse and we deal very poorly with that as a society, but I disagree that it was obviously robots and not globalization:
https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
Witness: factories come back to America, but only once scale increases (or automation gets cheaper) to the point robots are even cheaper than India or China. The returned factories have no labor jobs - its all robots.
So ok, its all the same effect - nobody is going to pay a living wage for labor any more.
A better approach would be to simply establish a favorable business climate and leave it up to the free market. Help the displaced workers with income redistribution and subsidizing training.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the...
Do we just let citizens in our society starve because rich people didn't need them?
It's entirely incidental to the subject at hand, but I disagree:
https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
> We underinvested in literally every job-creating public good from education to infrastructure
Absolutely true, and there are massive marginal gains to be had by increasing our investments in education and infrastructure at this moment, but it's important to acknowledge that in the limit of appropriately high funding, education does not guarantee the existence of satisfactory jobs for everyone.
While this time things might be different, the analogy people always make in on-line discussions about the jobs for horses is silly. Horses do not have agency. In economic terms, horses were capital, not labor.
Their old job might be gone, but a worker can develop skills that make them more employable - that might be learning about new software, taking classes, getting certified in a new area, etc. A worker can move to a different location where jobs are more prevalent, etc. Automation won’t force all jobs in all industries in all areas of the country to displace workers over night.
As technology changes, economists would say that new job categories tend to be created. While it might be true that this time “things are different” and the job growth will be much slower than in previous times of technological change, that is a very different argument to make than simply using the horse analogy. Are you arguing that a worker is as helpless as a horse when they lose their job?
Tbh I don’t think it will ever be cheaper to build a robot to do simple manual labour tasks. More likely we will incrementally create environments that require less humans to have the same level of productivity.
I don't think horse work is a problem. If anything, now they can enjoy their day wondering large vast fields in the summer , and eating high quality alfalfa hay made by a tractor in the winter. And since the invention of the Horse Trailer, they can travel with their owner on interstate highways at speeds as much as 55mph while eating the same high quality hay going to another field.
If anything, the horses benefited the most from the technology improvement.
That's not exactly a scenario I would call an improvement for human beings.
Maybe. Progress in AI has been fast recently, but it has not always progressed at a constant pace. And meanwhile in the US we have very high employment and a national shortage of truck drivers.
I'm not just interested in electronics and programming languages. I'm also interested in mathematics and the history of science and technology. Science and technology not just in this century but in the previous ones. The evolution of writing systems is fascinating. Check out the Hebrew or Phoenician alphabets. You can almost see them being scratched into clay by some sort of knife. Or look at the cursive writing of the founding fathers of the United States and then look at the writing instruments of the day.
They ask me to stop using technology. Just take a break. And I immediately wonder if they want me to stop reading. Stop writing.
Mathematics also has a fascinating development. And it also has quite the impact in how I think and analyze problems. Am I supposed to stop thinking all together when I go on my technology cleanse? Isn't the objection to technology that it stops you from thinking.
Similarly, people fear automation because it's a new form of technology, but they also ignore all of the exotic technology that they regard as baseline. The absolute primitive limit was once cutting edge. And no doubt was feared in its own day.
Yes, new technologies can be used to cause you personal pain. But that's also the case for old technologies. You shouldn't seek to stop progress, but rather stop those who are making progress from externalizing their failures such that they are paid for by those who will not share in the successes.
It's not so different from when I see a post on Reddit or even HN stating that its author is currently taking a break from social media, mostly in reference to Facebook or Twitter, but which is what these forums are as well.
On the whole, it's not too different from various back-to-nature philosophies that have been in vogue at one time or another. There must be an exception, but I don't recall anyone roughing it to the point of giving up clothes and campfires while still having money in the bank.
What is the source of the notion that there is something corrupting or corrosive about new technology which is not perceived in established technologies? Is it merely the speed of societal change is being outpaced, and people want a way to take a breather and catch up?
Also "news fasts" are commonly recommended.
Information diet is analogous to food diet. Taking an occasional fast and making more conscious choices about consumption is healthy.
And if you want more then you'll have to work in some high skilled job to earn extra money on top of UBI. But there won't be enough such jobs for everyone, so there will be fierce competion for these jobs, because those who'll be able to work will enjoy a higher standard of living than people on UBI.
Then people would want to work to regain at least their previous standard of living.
The purpose of UBI as I understand it would be to provide a stable floor of income for people independent of employment. I think of it as being like a minimum wage - not high enough for a middle class standard of living, but hopefully higher than the poverty line. Enough to keep food on the table.
There are arguments that UBI is not attainable/sustainable, but that's different then getting the definition wrong
I think shelter, clothes, internet, and food would be a reasonable modern standard but that shelter doesn't have to mean a 3000 sq ft house, and internet doesn't mean they have the fastest connection speed possible in the area, and food doesn't mean steak and lobster every night.
That standard should increase as technology improves, for instance if we did this in the 90s having internet access would have been a luxury and not a requirement for being part of society, but it doesn't have to be something luxurious compared to the time period its paid out in
Or try your hand at entrepreneurship, since you've got a net. Or write a book, which you turn into passive income. Or, or, or...
A UBI should take us to a place where jobs are optional. This is an unambiguous net good, IMO.
Plus UBI probably creates a disincentive for work. This is not just some hypothesis. In trials of UBI people receiving UBI worked less. Fewer people working -> less tax revenue -> less money available to finance UBI.
UBI isn't a panacea or a route to utopia. Jobs can't be optional until we have some sort of robotic labor force, which is a long way off.
Isn't that around the amount YC typically puts into a project?
Hasn't the internet proven how cheap entrepreneurship can be?
Not having to burn yourself out just to feed and shelter yourself would afford you vastly more opportunity to find a niche that you can make an extra buck in, if you're inclined and motivated that way.
I don't see why this is such an un-obvious notion, or why people seem not to think that could net us a far richer economy — of goods, services, and ideas — than the one we've got, where you on the whole only get what someone who already has money (either the founder or their backers) decides to make.
It is a mental state and a type of personality. You can be one and be successful starting with 0 dollars.
Entrepreneurs don't even need office space, and can get going with extremely limited equipment.
Honestly you have a profound misunderstanding of what an entrepreneur actually is.
Not if you spend it on office equipment. The $20k buys you $20k worth of free time in your life to work on your personal projects, ideas, hobbies without your life falling apart as a consequence.
That's enough time to set up a small leather-working shop in your garage, or build an app, or start a podcast, or write a few chapters of a book.
How often has automation in the past led to the unemployed leading lives of intellectual pursuit and luxury? Never. Typically those made surplus to requirement are left to scrape by in meager poverty, as has happened in the American rust belt and Appalachia, because automation has lowered their value in society to be barely worth the cost of keeping them alive.
We need to prepare for that, rather than hoping for a utopian, post-scarcity fantasy that isn't going to happen.
"Who will pay for all this?!" is the usual outcry. Ignoring the very premise that automation has taken over the role of producing all this. Its a circular argument that has roots in the Protestant Work Ethic (independent of Capitalism) where "If I have to work, they everybody has to work dad gum it!"
In the US, that's going to be a difficult sell. States threatened to secede over the ACA and that was nowhere near as "socialist" as a universal income or right to food and shelter would be.
It could happen, but it seems like it would take a serious social and political upheaval, and the winds currently seem to be blowing in the other direction entirely. I hope it doesn't take something on the scale of the Great Depression to bring it about.
And before anyone calls that hyperbole, I don't see how refusing to provide some sort of garunteed welfare that provides food and housing is not "if you're poor you are gonna starve" in a system where access to food and shelter is tied to your income
There will still be jobs requiring higher education, but not as many as many simple jobs are eliminated. You need less robot maintainers than garbage men.
One high skilled worker does the job of many low skilled ones and if robots do the low skilled jobs then low skilled workers won't find other low skilled work.
Or if they invent cleaning robots which can clean malls and shops then lots of cleaners will be out of job.
So the robots won't have to take all the simple jobs, because if they take a lot of them then those changes will still cause serious social problems.
People will only work for leisure if they value leisure. What's changed over the past century is that we have more choice in what that leisure is should we choose to do it.
Output is essential. Automation will increase our output and free more people from manual work. Will the transition be smooth? not likely. But it will be better. None of these jobs would automate if the automation wasn't worth it overall.
But if non working people can only be provided some minimum sustanence then those who work will be the elite, because they will be able live on a higher standard of living than the rest and this could lead to some serious social tensions.
If the policy changes the author outlines are needed to avoid this, we're in big trouble. Because they are nowhere near happening.
Here's the deal. Automation should mean the end of compulsory status as an employee. It should mean that we no longer need to fear poverty and homelessness, simply because we weren't feeling the bullshit rat race. It should mean that we can have a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, medicine to cure ailments, because production and accounting for such necessities is automatic.
Automation should mean that we get to take on the jobs we enjoy, or at least try to. Automation should mean that we get to throw the full weight of ourselves at our passion.
Automation should NOT mean:
We don't write your paycheck, so out in the cold with you.
I finished the paragraph this sentence started and closed the browser tab. I don't come to NH to read fiction, especially not bad fiction.
Firstly, we still have to work after all of this?
And secondly, when exactly was it agreed that leisure is the enemy? Someone really should have let me know.
On a more serious note, this article is thrown into sharp relief if you follow it with David Graeber's essay "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs" - https://libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gr...
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