The Robot economy and the future of work
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When the number of jobs available to the labor pool is reduced by automation, the market value of human labor goes down, but the amount of work humans are required to do to survive remains the same, or often it increases to take advantage of the efficiencies create by automation. Obviously, people will tend to wind up either unemployed, because there are fewer jobs, or working harder for less money, because their time is worth less.
This isn't a failure of the system, this is the system working as intended.
Do we need to pass through that kind of trouble in order to pay attention ?
And the dream has a simple origin, we knew birds could fly, so why couldn't humans?
The Industrial Revolution posed a similar question, if machines can do some kinds of work, why can't they do every kind of work?
A cynic would ask, what happens to the workers when there's no work? But I suspect the scarier question is, what happens when there's not enough work for everyone to be employed?
And modern transportation creates another question of what happens when the remaining work is happening elsewhere?
2. After a new technology is invented, people who do the work the old way continue until it's no longer feasible.
3. When it becomes infeasible, they have to find other lines of work, rely on family and friends, or some combination thereof. We'll call this displacement.
4. Here are 2 ways to measure displacement: speed* (time to render old work infeasible) and size (number of displaced people).
5. Speculation: the time after something like the cotton gin is invented, displaced workers increase. But over all it's speed* is slower.
6. Speculation: increasing centralization has increased the scale at which automating solutions displace people. Other advances in technology possibly increase the number of innovations. Advances in logistics and information increases their speed*.
7. Speculation: The automation fallacy may apply, but there are still an increasing number of displaced workers. So that the nature of this scale is nonlinear. It increases drastically with centralization, speed, and generalizability.
That's the real interesting question. What will they be ?
Some i can see:
- more machines -> more machine maintenance and setup. But it'll be under the guidance of machines(AR, AI), So it won't require expertise, it would only require a medium or low amount of "good hands" skills. So the pay won't be good.
- i would have said more marketing/selling, but given the amount of marketing and tiny niches that exist today, i'm not sure that's the case. And in any case AI will be better than us at that.
If there would be more money( a big if, maybe we're heading for a different equilibrium):
- more money -> more goods being bought -> more jobs on the manufacturing/retail/supply-chain which mostly will be machine maintenance etc.
- more money -> more human based services being bought(basically selling good interpersonal skills, and care).
- more money -> more/better healthcare
- more money -> more travel, hospitality ?
Anybody got other ideas?
Every choice has positives and negatives, however. Robots are good at some things, and bad at others. This could lead to an interesting clash. Robots, modular manufacturing, etc is very good at producing large numbers of identical copies of a product. There is no guarantee that society will continue to value this over production of a wide variety instead. If every production run is in numbers of dozens rather than millions, the advantages of automation start to falter. It's also important not to underestimate the power of human brain flaws. One of the flaws of the human brain is 'essentialism'. It's a complicated concept, but boils down to people might see robot-produced goods as not as 'rich' as human-produced goods, even when they are identical. Essentialism is the belief that an objects history is somehow attached to it. And if society decides that an object which has a human hand in it is far more valuable than a 'soulless' robot-produced good... whoops. That could seriously limit what products robots are actually able to bring value to. Human sense of value is what rules the economy, not objective value.
There were many tradeoffs made back when production centralized into factories and big companies. All of those tradeoffs are up for renegotiation, and those who simply assume the choices made 100+ years ago are going to stand will be, I think, sorely disappointed.
It seems we are addicted to it.
Inequality is up!
I mean that those two sentences, repeated over and over in the news weekly, don’t make the masses stop and think is a sign that the media machine is doing its job.
We need better incentives to encourage large organizations to expand in smaller cities with room to grow, while discouraging job growth in larger cities, and then people will move to less expensive places for the jobs.
I suspect what has happened is that change hasn't been spread out evenly. We spend more time in education so start work later. We retire earlier either through choice or otherwise. Hourly workers tend to work less than they would like and salaried workers work more.
One factor that so many analysts across the spectrum fail to account for is something that I think is going to lead to a great surprise for a lot of people. All of this technology, all of the data platforms, robots, etc.... it's CHEAP. Everyone focuses so closely on how these technologies will affect the factory floor, the centralized gigaproduction facility, they completely miss the fact that the distributed back yard shed operation can outcompete them. It doesn't have the overhead and the limitations of those centralized factories. Advancements in distribution, shipping, and logistics are available to everyone for a pittance. Services like Uber at their heart provide nothing but some server space for some software. That 'server space' can have its necessity disappear into the ether with distributed computing platforms simply aggregating the compute of its users. Not something currently regularly done, but there is no technical impediment to such a thing. And software like that has a tendency to just pop out of nowhere some weekend and change the landscape immediately. The software part could be handled like any FOSS project. Uber is a center in a system that doesn't need a center. (I'm not saying centers don't have advantages, I am saying that their presence is not an iron clad 100% absolute necessity for the system to work.)
At the same time companies have been abandoning every bit of value they ever offered to workers since the 1980s, welching on pensions they tricked people into working for them with, adopting wage stagnation so that workers have to jump ship every few years to remain solvent, etc... technology has been making it such that those displaced workers could pretty easily outcompete the companies that ejected them. The companies are still restrained by Baby Boomer execs who refuse to leave and refuse to abandon the management practices drilled into them in relation to manufacturing and retail business. They're blind to the outrageous overhead and inefficiencies of their offices and practices because, as far as they see it, 'this is how it has always been done.'
It is impossible to predict when any of these things will come home to roost. It is also nearly impossible to explain just how large of a change we are in for. It is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution which created central factories in the first place. That led to urban centers exploding in population. It changed how we built houses. It changed the moral norms of society. It changed the food we ate. It changed how we married. It changed family structure. It is not much of an exaggeration to say it changed everything. And now it's fundamental tenets (that production must be centralized, that distribution networks must be built, that large numbers of relatively low education physical laborers capable of extended periods of mindless repetitive actions are necessary, etc) no longer hold. It will probably take a long time. And it will unfortunately probably come with a great deal of conflict and bloodshed. That's just based on how history has gone in the past with changes of this scale.
Nothing else is an issue at all. Everything else is essentially trivially cheap (excepting cases of disability).
A year's worth of food costs about as much as 1 month's rent on a small flat in London. (Many people increase their food expenditure, but the basics are doable for that).
Even in the northern towns 100K for a house is fairly standard. That's a ridiculous amount of money - a home does not take 5 man-years to produce any more.
The only thing anyone works for is rent, indirect rent (e.g. paying 5 quid a pint because of the pub's rent and the pub workers' rent and so on), their mortgage, whatever.
Yes, and this seems true in basically all the similar-ish countries too. (It's 100% broken in the the vast majority of the US and Canada. It looks like it's mostly broken in Australia and New Zealand too)
The situation in SE England in which 95%+ of those under, say, age 30 or so, will never own a home (and are currently in little rooms sharing with others if they're not partnered off) is not something that is a result of some sort of economic formula.
Individuals still have to decide that it's better than their alternatives (e.g. lower cost towns, rural living, staying with parents, emigrating, ...).
Beyond that there's also political action.
“The robot economy” allowed each WhatsApp developer the power to supply 18million users each with their service[1]. It’s not that we are working more to accomplish the same amount of work. Total productivity of the economy compounds as innovation and specialization increase.
Also, from what I can tell, those who are highly productive seem to have phenotypes that drive them to constantly work at a high level (curiosity, grit, drive, etc). Those who don’t have these things are likely to be unable to find decent jobs, keeping them forever working for stagnant hourly wages while resentlful that they can’t find a rung to a ladder that leads higher.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-...
Even though the documentary “Living in the Future’s Past” is about the environment, it hits great points on how our society is in need of a reset, that we need to all decide what we can do to help society and have a net positive effect on the world. Jeff Bridges and his friends did a fantastic job producing this documentary, I strongly recommend it.
(and why is this a pdf? it's not even published
socialism is already everywhere. communism on the other hand failed on all fronts.
The economic system in communist countries was generally called socialism, while 'communism' is used for the political movement and its ideology.
Naming things is important and all, but I'd prefer to evaluate policies on their individual merits instead of simply classifying them as X is part of Y and total Y is bad therefore X is also bad.
Are worker co-ops bad just because they are socialist? Is it bad to regulate a company dumping chemicals in your drinking water because it saves them a few bucks?
On the flipside, is it bad to have reasonable pay discrepancies (not 300x, but maybe 8x) which markets naturally produce?
I think as a general rule we should strive to avoid concentrations of power in the hands of the few. Which has been a side effect of both capitalism and communism.
Humanity evolution is clearly follows the trajectory with well known "strong points" (in math sense) Slaveholding, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, …
Point (in math sense) has no dimensions so you cannot say "we are exactly at Capitalism now" but rather somewhere on that trajectory between strong points. Closer to Capitalism, closer to Socialism are the right terms I think.
It is obvious that, let's say, Europe now is somewhere in between of Capitalism and Socialism. And in 1900 it was around pure Capitalism point, in some countries between Feudalism and Capitalism.
And "Robots economy" will move us closer to Communism where 95% of population will not participate in goods/services production activities. So that will be that famous "... to each according to his needs" [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
If you have private ownership of production you are still capitalist. All the Nordic countries do this. They are not so much socialists as welfare states. If we must have a welfare state, I would much prefer the "citizens as shareholders of the country" model with a basic income, rather than the overweening paternalism of current welfare states.
Did they have a house though?
i personally think there will no difference. automation has been happening for at least two centuries, and so far it’s been a major success on all fronts.
i think this fear of automation just shows how conservative people really are.
If you mean that when majority of work is free, people simply by existing will produce enough value for other people to deserve UBI large enough to live(1), then yes, but it is not a system that is called socialism today.
(1) the value for other people will be produced simply by increasing the likelihood of new science and art being created, so like investors are happy to waste lots of money to get one really successful startup, people as a whole would be happy to waste lots of money on UBI to many people, to get some really talented scientists.
This is only true in some kind of socialism, counterexample: mutalism.
"social ownership of the means of production"
Social ownership: can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity.
The problem with all of this, is that if someone works better than others, and creates his own "means of production" there must exist someone else who will seize it and distribute it to the collective, otherwise the means will again concentrate at the hands of lucky or more hardworking people.
In some cases whole population of a country may behave as a single group. Let's say USSR at 1941 was clearly one single group focused on "do everything for the victory".
As of the humanity... Global warming and other global threats will group us all.
That's a very good example of a case where people were not acting as a single group at all. Most of the soldiers were simply leaving everything and retreating, because at first they were not sure if Hitler was really worse than Stalin (http://www.solonin.org/en), groups of people were joining with German army sometimes hoping to get rid of soviets and sometimes because wanting to kill neighbours (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera), food was being captured from all the areas that potentially could end up under German control, which ended up causing the famine in Leningrad. So even if from afar it looks like a single group, it was much more complex and turbulent close up.
But nowadays we should have taken another step (4x7?). Millenials are the first generation living worst than their parents, inequality increases and wealth and work are not well balanced.
Why? Because capitalism has won and socialism is not watched as an alternative.
(Note: this reasoning of past progress doesn’t apply to the US)
Is that so far from Walmart?
It's a fact that we're witnessing the concentration of capital into the hands of fewer and fewer. You can see that by looking at what the top 1%, 0.1% own compared to the bottom 80%, 50% etc.
It's also a fact that the bottom 60+% rely on work to get their needs met, to sustain their lives.
So it only follows that should the rate of automation explode, devaluing the work that currently sustains a huge portion of the population, we've got a huge problem on our hands, making the system unsustainable.
But we're also seeing governments, especially in northern Europe, employing taxation policies that are in a way trying to prevent this growing inequality. And in fact, the level of inequality of a nation has been correlated with a lot of undesirable problems. UBI is a natural extension of that.
There was a time when you barely had enough time or energy to ensure survival. Doing less was an obvious optimization. But now I think we're pushing the system on the opposite limits. Doing nothing is also detrimental.
In any case there is so much work in science, that we should be happy for every human that is freed from physical work.
It's not about being free from physical work, it's about choosing what problems to work on -- before other problems choose you! In most cases people who work a job are having their problems chosen for them. So they are still, in this sense, slaves.
And this is itself a problem. We haven't found the solution yet. But we may...
Automatisation should be priority of everybody unless people want keep being slaves and keep shitty jobs that they don't like, keep living poor and hungry.
Job is demand - if demand for something will be satisfied that doesn't mean everyone will take it and don't want anything else.
The best basic example I know is bread. Someone want white bread, someone dark bread other ones want sweet bread.
I have a small experiment for You reading this shitty comment, try to find exact number of how many types of bread people are buying and making around the world right now. Can you do that because I can't (Why ? One word - entropy).
We are people for god sake not animals so maybe it's time to start behave like one, don't you think ?