The future of work in America | Hacker News Reader

The future of work in America

kurzweilai.net

26 pointsrobdoherty239 comments

I think it's interesting to look at the limit case: a Star Trek-like future in which everything is automated and individual labor is mostly unnecessary.

What happens in such a world? Under a pure free-market system, there is a real possibility that such a future would end up quite horrific. A few people would own the capital that implemented the automation, while the majority of the population would have nothing. It would be, in a way, very similar to feudal times, when a few owned the important capital of the time (land).

Manna [1] is a short story which deals with this exact scenario.

[1]: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Albeit in a very tendentious way.

However, just as the importance of owning huge tracts of land for the sake of social status and financial security has diminished over the last few hundred years, so may the importance of owning anything. Don't assume that the axioms of our current scarcity-based economy will survive a change as revolutionary as what's being discussed.

As I've said before, economic value is derived from two things- natural resources and human labor.

Even if we completely abolish the need for human labor, we are still constrained in terms of resources, so it's still a scarcity-based economy.

the way i see it, if you had no requirement for labour (that is, all work is done by machines), natural resources also become effectively unlimited. After all, materials are not depleted, they are just transformed into less useful configurations.

If no labour is ever required, it means there is basically no real reason why resources can't be automatically recycled.

Economic value is, therefore, completely based on the value generated when a human labours - whether that labour is to extract natural resources, or service another human.

That only works in the region of the development curve where you can neglect the earth's ability to deal with waste resulting from organized activity. We're already running up against those limits. E.g. in 50 years, clean drinking water is going to be a big thing to fight over in the southwest.

Don't overlook the cost of energy to run the machines.

If no labour is ever required, it means there is basically no real reason why resources can't be automatically recycled.

False- recycling resources requires energy, so unlimited resources is generally going to require unlimited energy.

You're right though about the option of recycling, which is why I have always figured "post-scarcity" essentially hinges upon unlimited, free energy. Or, well, at least so cheap as to be essentially free and so unconstrained as to be virtually unlimited.

So, get going on that cold fusion reactor.

I doubt that "owning large tracts of land for the sake of social status and financial security has diminished over the last few hundred years". Look at the lists of billionaires, hectomillionaires, and decamillionaires: a large proportion of them derive their wealth from real estate, certainly enough to make it a top 5 means of capturing wealth in our current system. [1] Perhaps over the next few hundred years what you assert may happen, but much of the world population is still subject to an economic system that richly rewards the original literal rent-seeking behavior on land.

I find it ironic that even in intelligent circles like HN, no one really discusses ways to factor out land and shelter expenses. If your payroll is your #1 expense, and the #1 expense of your employees is shelter, then why has so little attention been paid to this lowest of low hanging fruit of expenses? Individuals are generally speaking not rational actors, and I think we might all be surprised at what happens if a post-scarcity reality became feasible.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2012/03/13/how-ameri...

I doubt that "owning large tracts of land for the sake of social status and financial security has diminished over the last few hundred years".

In medieval times, you either had land, or you were nothing.

There are many more options now. Some of us even (gasp) rent.

I would characterize that more as a function of a diversifying and growing economy than a diminishment. The pie got much larger, so land holders' relative position diminished, but their absolute wealth still increased. An acre of land in medieval Paris exchanges for far less wealth than the same acre in 2012 Paris, even though the social status it conveys has diminished.

Furthermore, while I like the concept of not owning anything, I suspect that won't be remotely feasible until we engineer energy sources that provide 2+ orders of magnitude more energy than we currently consume, for 2+ orders of magnitude less cost. Holding onto material goods is another way of expressing an economic preference to not have to expend the energy it required to obtain the goods in the first place.

You'd have to work out the few remaining things that do require work from human beings, fundamentally, even to exist.

Art is one of them (speaking broadly enough to include things like music and literature). The entire value of art is that it's an expression of an artist's point of view. Recorded art is obviously on its way out, but live or commissioned art wouldn't necessarily be, and we already know how to croudsource commissioning.

Academic study would certainly be another, at least in some forms.

Interpersonal services of various forms would also be important. These might include various forms of counseling and prostitution.

There would still be a market for handmade things, if only for the status involved.

The people who owned the capital that implemented the automation would have to find a way to tell the robots what to make and how, and would likely require assistance in doing so. There's a lot of essential, un-automatable difficulty in merely expressing requirements clearly.

I'm even assuming most of the actual design and engineering (post-requirements stage) can be done by computers, though I highly suspect it cannot.

This might seem very bleak, but consider that with all this automation around, everything would become exceedingly cheap. In the past it's only been cost-effective to make a living off of, say, music with thousands or millions of fans per individual musician. Perhaps it would be possible to make a living off an audience of hundreds or maybe less since it would cost a pittance to satisfy all your basic needs.

Actually, in a automatic production economy, design becomes king and whoever can design the best product becomes the most important person.

This already happened in the case of the internet. Cost of labor is almost zero upon scaling, and the people who make the most valuable and well thought out websites gains the most market shares. It is not the people who owns the capital that profited the most on the internet, but great individual and team of designers and makers.

It is also not assumed that the automation would be owned by the few instead of owned by everyone. Personal 3d printers are on the rise, and I foresee a future where we print our products and 3d printers spreads like the personal computer.

And how many of those displaced workers will be able to design?

very few designers are the majority shareholders of the powerful and profitable companies.

Its also interesting to think about totally post-scarcity societies, as in Iain M. Banks' Culture novels.

The concept of ownership is predicated on a party with the power of enforcement of law. If a few people ended up with everything I doubt the vast, vast majority with nothing would just say "well, sucks to be us". All the money in the world only protects you from armed mobs as long as there are people willing to accept money for said protection duties and enough deterrent from an authority to discourage the mob from simply overpowering the rich and their guards. Dystopian futures where a small number of people "have everything" seem highly unlikely if for no other reason than people can be beaten to death with stones.

Stones are ineffective against guns. Hence, 2nd amendment.

Also, walls and moats. I don't see Chinese factory laborers rising up against rich Americans.

Guns run out of bullets. I don't think you are seriously thinking of what a mob of say 50k people with absolutely nothing to lose is capable of doing. The Chinese factory workers aren't rising up because the govt still has more than enough power to quell things and more than enough people benefit from the current system to "keep it in play". I was responding to a proposed future in which a very small number of people had everything and everyone was entirely subservient to them for even their most basic needs. What reason would exist for not rising up against the elites? It's not like that hasn't actually happened numerous times in recorded history. Especially if the situation was worse than it had ever been. How is any government overthrown ever if all it takes is superior weapons to hold control? I wasn't suggesting they would literally use stones, only that there are weapons that don't require the means of manufacturing to produce. I don't think people understand that there isn't anything inherently pre-determined or inherently stable in the current status quo and people, when faced with no real shot at anything in life, tend to react poorly (and violently). Money is only useful in a stable political system where rule of law exists. The richest man in Somalia probably doesn't sleep terribly well.

I agree with your assessment. It this realization that encouraged me to start learning about alternative economies; binary economics is one alternative I've explored. In the end, we live in an era of increasing scarcity (especially with regards to food, water, and land) and automation will continue to erode the job prospects of humans moving forward. In the meantime, medicine is working towards increasing one's longevity. Personally, I hope we find a peaceful resolution to this mess, but it does seem to be a recipe for disaster.

People bemoan Kurzweil's vision of the future, but we may be forced to virtualize ourselves to survive peacefully. Otherwise, I want to be in the country with the strongest military.

What if you are drafted to serve as cannon fodder in a bat military?

The struggle in such a society won't be for food, clothing, shelter and medicine.

Just imagine if every guy in the world gets to eat, wear, live and heal himself without work, then humans will have better work to do. We will have more productive work.

May be space colonization, advanced research etc will be the aims of such a human race.

People told the inventor of the steam shovel that he would cause massive unemployment because "one steam shovel replaces dozens of men with conventional shovels."

He replied "Or thousands of men with teaspoons."

I'm surprised how many people still think productivity will be the source of collapse... or how many people think low productivity is the answer to all economic woes.

That view point has always been wrong in the past, and I'm skeptical anything will change to make it right in the future.

The difference is that at that time people weren't hitting up against natural resource limits. Productivity decreases the need for labor, and society reacts by producing more overall which keeps people busy. But that only works when there are no other constraints on growing overall production.

From an economic theory point of view, productivity increases generally increase the demand for labor.

The suggestion that there is some level of "need" for labor suggests that there is a certain "need" for produced goods, and we happen to be at it right now.

But we used to be below this level of output (which suggests our current level isn't a "need"), and consumption is still increasing... rather than leveling off.

What makes you so sure we're not witnessing it right now? During the recession, millions of people lost their jobs. If you look at the numbers, those companies are doing all right again, so why haven't those people all been hired back?

I think they have been hired back, not in the same places but elsewhere.

Given that unemployment is higher than when the economic downturn began - many have not been hired back. In the US, it's important to realize that the 'official' U3 unemployment rate does not paint the whole picture. The U6 rate considers those worker who have stopped looking for work because there's no work to be had and includes part-time workers. Furthermore, there's a large difference in unemployment between college educated workers and high-school educated workers. In addition, those that have been hired elsewhere are generally hired back for lower wages or less secure positions.

What would cause you to change your mind on this?

Great question. I thought about it this afternoon, and I'm not sure what would cause me to change my mind about this... That seems like a red flag that I'm not being open minded enough about it.

Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking question.

Beware graphs not starting at 0. I'm not saying there isn't merit in the argument, but the attempt to mislead the reader by placing 57 at the bottom of the graph isn't a good start.

Every. Single. Time. There's one of these in every controversial article.

You can see the whole data here (and change the scales):

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PRS85006173

It only goes back to 1940, but it would be interesting to know what the labor share was before that. I'm guessing it was smaller, especially in the late 1800s.

This is the point where it's worth pointing out that the portion of the population involved in food production has collapsed massively over the last couple of centuries. People generally seem to find new things to value when their time frees up.

"Technology and the Web are destroying far more jobs than they create."

Sorry to be skeptical, but neither this article nor the original that it links cites a single reference to support this claim. How could you even quantify how many jobs the web destroys? A business can go under for many reasons other than direct competition from web-based businesses.

"The Internet is destroying vast income streams that once supported tens of thousands of jobs in industries from finance to music."

Yeah, we've heard over and over again that the music industry is being destroyed by the internet and that draconian copyright enforcement regimes are required to prevent the industry's demise. But it doesn't seem like less new music is being produced today than in the 1980s. And for every record store owner that went out of business there's now an RIAA lawyer or lobbyist taking his place. As for the financial industry, yes, some stockbrokers have been put out of business by online trading, but that seems to be a really good thing, since I now get to pay $10 for a trade instead of $400, and I can spend that extra money to support the employment of sushi chefs.

SPOILER: This being on kurzweilai.net means--some pages around--that the solution is the (gradual) merger of humans with machines and thus an enhancement of human physical and cognitive abilities. See the trailer on http://transcendentman.com/

The loss of jobs is part of the adaption phase, a dead time until the system reacts. People often assume that the world changes but humans stay the same, a case of improper ceteris paribus.

For a hypothesis of past human structural (genetic) change in a short time (in this case as a driver, not a reaction) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Clark_%28economist%29#A...

The Kurzweilai.net blog-spam barely summarizes the article, the original is here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-day-2012-the-future-of-...

Here's the actual original:

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept12/future-of-work8-12.html

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