His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
When they get supermarket self-checkouts to be as foolproof as staffed checkouts (eg some kind of NFC/RFID based walk-through scanning, and not this current "customer does the work" one that still needs constant assistance and staffing), you're already putting a HUGE number of people out of work.
McDonalds has been pushing their automated systems HARD here in Australia, with all kinds of perks if you use their app or in-store touchscreens to order and pay. Our local one in the last couple years alone went from 4-5 staff on front, to 1, maybe 2 in peak.
Online grocery shopping is so common here now that I don't know many people who actually go to the shops for their big weekly shop, just to grab a few items for cravings and bits and pieces on the way home from work. Of my 5 closest local friends, 4 do their primary weekly groceries online, whereas a couple years ago it was 1.
Ikea does self-checkout now, and sometimes has no staffed checkouts open here, unless you have special needs then they'll open one for you (we're usually dragging kids and prams so they'll open one for us).
I now renew my car rego, insurance, license, etc online. Just a few years ago that HAD to be done in person, at the dreaded roads authority. I haven't been in there for a couple years now, and it used to be 2-3 times a year for various things.
The robots aren't coming, they're already here.
It just hit me that the Mythical Man Month might have entail pretty important consequences for the future of mass (un)employment.
The same old busted argument again and again and again and again.... ad infinitum
The difference this time is that cars can do one job: The job of a horse and cart. There were plenty of other industries for the farriers, wainwrights etc. to move into. There's not that many productive jobs that an unskilled human can do that can't be automated.
Western Europe, East Asia and the US will be much less affected than those whose natural populations have not stabilized. You can expect upheaval there from generations with no future either at home or abroad (if Yang's predictions come true).
What's surprising to me is that you have two different factions on the left: Traditional pro-labor camp who are worried about this possibility and the new technocratic progressive left which is trying to downplay the possibility.
Almost our entire cultural value is based upon labor and hard work being able to make a living for yourself. If you can no longer do so, what happens?
Underdeveloped economies may or may not be able to achieve widespread affluence, if there is no natural ladder to climb in an economy. On the other hand their expectations are lower than that of the pops in mature economies. Still, it seems calamitous.
Still, if his prediction plays out, then pain lies ahead. If it's slow coming like the one Japan is virtually experiencing, it may be palatable, to a great degree.
Turns out people rather like working, at least more than the alternative. Most jobs suck. I'm not hoping for or expecting a future without jobs; I'm hopeful for a future with better jobs.
Which is why we have what we have now - a few overworked people doing stupid hours trying to hold everything together, and a lot of underemployed / unemployed people who can't break in because they don't have the skills or proven track record required.
And that's when the battle begins. If I work a little more with more work available to me, I have a little bit more to spend. And spend it I will... Probably on housing. Now you can't afford a place to live, so you have to start working a little more so that you can also afford a place to live. And so on.
It is not a coincidence that women started entering the workforce en-masse at the same time automation was coming into its own. Previously there wasn't enough work for women to do, but once automation created an abundance of jobs there were some who started to take jobs. Once they did, soon all households needed both a man and a woman (generalizing for simplicity's sake) to have jobs to be able to afford anything.
But now we don't have another gender to help fill the void. It has been fascinating (albeit unfortunate) to watch people start to flounder as this plays out, and it will be interesting to see what happens when it all comes to a head as there is only so much work one person can do.
On the other hand, a lot of the work that needs to be done is stuff that needs to come from collective action (Replication crisis, aging infrastructure, global warming, cancer research, environmental destruction, food scarcity, etc.), which we don't seem to have much a a political/societal will for at the moment. And a lot of the work that people are currently doing seems rather pointless, or even having a net negative impact on society (soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, arguably almost all advertising, etc.).
It's possible that we'll end up as a society where a larger and larger percentage of the population will end up working parasitic jobs meant to leech off of the smaller and smaller percentage of the population doing actual productive work. Again, this seems to stem from the lack of political and societal will to try to allocate resources more efficiently.
Most people on HN don't have real jobs. The entire premise of venture capital is gambling that you'll be able to fund the next Facebook or whatever.
The reason that jobs would go away is more automation, but more automation means markets are more winner-take-all. And if more markets are winner-take-all, then that which means higher expected returns to capital if you can back a winning startup.
I don't know to what extent they balance out, but it seems at least plausible that as technology centralizes the economy then most jobs could basically be in service of gambling with investor money.
Its not zero sum.