After your job is gone
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That's a strange thing to say, because I'm of the opinion that more people worldwide are employed in productive economic activity than at any time in the past. In fact, that we've lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in the last decade or so.
I was going to start this off with "here we go again" because observing this great change that's overtaking us and catastrophizing about it seems to be a cottage industry -- and has been for many decades. No doubt general purpose computers and robots are going to massively change the face of society and commerce. I'll even go so far and guess that parts of our coming evolution are going to be painful -- just like it always has been.
But our relationship to the worldwide economy is a funny thing. We can sit back, assume that we're appropriately educated, tooled, and have the right attitude for success, then complain when there aren't jobs. Or we can choose to monitor and adapt to where the economy actually is. When we read about great changes coming, we should be thinking about the great opportunities we're going to have and how to adapt to meet the future, not about "what to do when your job is gone" That's self-fulfilling horse hockey.
There's an infinite amount of economic activity left in the world. The question is whether we want to learn how to engage in it or sit on the sidelines worrying about terrible structural changes that will doom us all.
You might be willing to respond with "New forms of work will open up that will allow for the employ of those people with low IQs". However, I am asking you to consider the hypothetical where every such form of work is eventually automated by machines that have sufficiently advanced AI.
Between 1850 and 1973 there were immense improvements in labor productivity that completely transformed the world, and for a long time the rising productivity created more new jobs, rather than less. But going forward, we face a situation where increasing automation will still create new wealth, and it will still create huge improvements in labor productivity, but the improvements will only be available for those who have enough IQ to understand the technologies in use.
And much of this scenario might come to pass during the next 50 years. But imagine even further afield -- imagine 200 years now. Do you think the period 1850 to 1973 offers a reasonable model to think about, say for instance, economic growth between 2100 and 2200?
What happens if there comes a day when absolutely everything is automated and humans no longer need to work? We have reached utopia, yes? But you can probably see where I am going with this: eventually there needs to be some way to provide an income to people, when the day eventually comes when no one needs to work.
The fact that you believe it could be a person's "IQ" which dictates what job they may have really shows how little regard you have for people.
The fact that you believe a persons "height" dictates their chance of competing in the NBA really shows how little regard you have for people.
That's not an agreed upon fact.
For example, a cursory googling of "correlation between iq and job" brings up a lot of articles with language like "This is why hundreds of studies have found that IQ predicts job performance best (though not all that well) at the start of a person’s career, and progressively weakens over the course of that career."[1] or subtitles like "Intelligence wins out over socio-economic status when it comes to career advancement"[2]. (But maybe that search term is biased. I just entered the most obvious thing.)
As another example, wikipedia says "The validity of IQ as a predictor of job performance is above zero for all work studied to date, but varies with the type of job and across different studies, ranging from 0.2 to 0.6. The correlations were higher when the unreliability of measurement methods was controlled for."[3]
> really shows how little regard you have for people.
Inappropriate.
1. http://danielgoleman.info/the-trouble-with-iq/
2. http://www.aftau.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=1637...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_perf...
I never understand the logic of this argument. If everything is automated and everyone is provided for (this is a utopia, after all), why would people need an income? By definition, if people do not need to work, then they do not need an income. The need to work and the need for an income are the same thing, just worded differently.
Nothing happens overnight, and confusing the challenges of the transition with the endgame, or that the challenges that existed during the transition will still exist after the endgame is achieved, presents a position that the endgame isn't worth it because the transition disturbs the status quo.
> It’s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, in which a small minority reaps most of the benefits of technology that destroys more jobs than it creates. As my friend Simon Law says, “First we automated menial jobs, now we’re automating middle-class jobs. Unfortunately, we still demand that people have a job soon after becoming adults. This trend is going to be a big problem…”
And this is of course true, the only thing that makes software cheaper is the one resource it can actually save on : people. I would even argue that, generally, when software replaces a person, it is actually less efficient in all but one metric : it generally uses more resources than a person would use for the same work.
So I'm arguing that mostly the efficiency gains from technology are negative, but you're trading expensive resources (people) for cheap ones (power, computers, robots ...).
A few more arguments for this : 1) machines are more precise, but require better inputs, which require more resources, and what they can't deal with is generally not recycled, as that would destroy the value of those machines. 2) the human body is surprisingly efficient (especially knowing how general it is in function. Usually the more generally useful something, the less efficient. Humans are among the most efficient animals and are vastly more general). Our body beats oil based energy, and beats coal based energy by a large margin (input in watts versus output in work). 3) saving the expense of keeping the human alive is useless ... unless, of course you intend to kill/starve/ignore till they're dead/... said human. You're just creating a negative externality. 4) as the past centuries have pointed out, saving human labor is completely useless if they're your market. The last French king had a much less comfortable life than a homeless man has today, with few exceptions : servants and available space. But seriously, even the food that was served to that king, I wouldn't touch it (I shudder to think what medieval kings ate). His toilet is only slightly better than a hole in the ground. Sheets, beds, ... all are cleaner, more functional and a LOT softer today. And about cleaning ... well people actually clean themselves today. I shudder to think of the smell of Versailles in the 19th century.
The argument "but life never gets worse in history" has plenty of counterexamples, the biggest one (imho) the end of the Roman Empire, which took half a millennium to recover from. But there were plenty, say, the muslim conquests of Northern Africa would be another example. Started out with >50% of the population pretty comfortable (e.g. running water, heating, public fountains, roads, working medical infrastructure, surgical procedures available to middle class and even a significant part of the slave class), working travel infrastructure, life expectancy at ~57 years and ended with tribes who effectively lived in the stone age (average life expectancy at one point under 20), and a few lords who lived at a comfort level that was at best what it was at the beginning of the iron age. They would remain locked in this situation for more than a millennium. Some pockets of technology remained, like Cairo, which retained it's Christian institutions up to this day. But technology can't compete with free labor, so it couldn't expand despite many, many tries.
I think this overlooks a very real problem. There are a large number of real people out there who lose their jobs because of this. Essentially their skills are no longer valuable, so they need to learn new skills. How are they going to afford the insane cost of going back to school? It's a tough situation, and even tougher if they have a family. And if both spouses worked in the same labor market, they could easily fall into poverty trying to feed their children.
Of course structural changes won't "doom us all". It does doom many people who suddenly find themselves in expired labor markets with no way out. We need technological advances, but we also need to find ways to adapt to those changes better in order to minimize the collateral damage.
As for societal tectonic shifts needed, we just need a safety net to make it safer to fail, and easier to try. Things like socialized healthcare, simplified accounting rules for small businesses, annual instead of quarterly filing requirments for small business, no corporate minimum tax (I'm looking at you massachusetts) can help make this work.
There are human-required jobs that won't be infinitely scalable. Artist, masseuse, daycare provider, teacher, author, sales, marketer, circus performer, mover, software engineer, owner, landlord, nurse, doctor. The dystopian argument is usually that technology will require less of these jobs. It usually doesn't go as far as saying "none" and that is where the people who aren't cut out for entrepreneurship will land.
Anything involving a repetitive task like assembling a phone, pouring a beer, flipping a burger or folding a box is of course naturally going to at some stage be almost completely automated. You can't win in a fight with a machine when it comes to efficiency. However, good luck seeing a robot replace an electrician, a plumber, a web developer, a dentist, police officer or paramedic any time soon.
I think the whole, "robots are going to take our jobs" argument is a little blown out of proportion. People have been saying since the 50's that they're worried machines are going to take their jobs and it hasn't really happened on the large scale people like to think it has nor will in the next 50 years.
We can automate the service of robots.
>I think the whole, "robots are going to take our jobs" argument is a little blown out of proportion. People have been saying since the 50's that they're worried machines are going to take their jobs and it hasn't really happened on the large scale people like to think it has nor will in the next 50 years.
It "has happened", but it's just called automation of the industry. Service jobs have replaced a lot of the jobs in the industry.
There is a difference between automation and people losing jobs on a large scale. I'm not talking about automation making the life of a manual worker easier like it was during the 50's, I'm talking about people being replaced completely by robots. Even a lot of car production lines which were the first to embrace machine automation still employ manual workers to operate some of the equipment and ensure any downtime is minimal.
Even those self service kiosks at supermarkets require staff standing around because they fail often and people struggle to use them and prefer going through an actual register and being served. Those self-serve registers drive me nuts when it incorrectly weighs your groceries and tells you to wait for assistance.
The same thing that happens if we were talking about humans instead of robots. They are replaced.
Or just destroy/recycle them when they wear out, because whatever's available as a replacement is probably better/cheaper in some way than the old unit. In fact if you design them with that explicitly in mind, it becomes very efficient.
We do the same with computers and phones, it's usually better in our personal big pictures to just get a new unit.
The author says, "let them eat cake, smoke pot, and play video games." I say let them study art history (or CS). Who knows, maybe it will inspire them to do something useful in our brave new world.
Why is work good? N.B. this is not the same question as "Why is income inequality bad?"
Before reasoning further you need to answer very simple question "From where wealth comes?". If your answer is "from employer", "from the bank" or "from the VC". Please, think again. I'll wait.
Money always come from customers. Who are the customers in this bipolar model of the world?
Jobless class cannot be sustainable customer. All the money they have comes from elite class. It is very strange from the side of elite to donating jobless. Jobless can pay for elite's product by elite's money. Oh, miracle, elite can has all their money back! It is stupid cycle. If there is no spoils in process, elite has no reason to start it.
Elite as a customer is a more gloomy variant.
Maybe, maybe not.
>> We juxtapose the effects of trade and technology on employment in U.S. local labor markets between 1990 and 2007. Labor markets whose initial industry composition exposes them to rising Chinese import competition experience significant falls in employment, particularly in manufacturing and among non-college workers. Labor markets susceptible to computerization due to specialization in routine task-intensive activities experience significant occupational polarization within manufacturing and nonmanufacturing but no net employment decline. Trade impacts rise in the 2000s as imports accelerate, while the effect of technology appears to shift from automation of production activities in manufacturing towards computerization of information-processing tasks in non manufacturing.
In a way activities like urban farming and doomsday preppers share a value system we'll see on a rise. The value system shared between these two activities is being self sufficient and control of your own destiny. We'll see this value of self sufficiency rise as the economy provides less and less to the unemployed. No one wants a hand out.
Nothing to worry about.
Ethically, we're compelled to support these people. But does it make sense to maintain a population that contributes absolutely nothing? I imagine they'd start to get restless as well... I suppose we could always put them into giant hamster wheels to generate power.
Why not? Isn't it possible that we are affecting our own evolution? Those with rational and logic-oriented minds will thrive, and the numbers of those who aren't able to develop that capacity will begin to dwindle. Given the inclination towards pacifism, scientific reason, and tollerance that most rational people exhibit, seems like a net win for the future of humanity.
I only hope the government create a free and continuous education system for those who are out of work, so that they may develop their minds. I hope education in this new world becomes cultural.
The same thing could happen to humans. I'm sure the 1% or the 53% wouldn't miss the irritating 99% or the 47% once we're no longer needed to maintain their lifestyles.
"Look Daddy, that family has a human gardener! Can we get one? Please?"
Ive been a software engineer for 15 years, I have chosen to not work for almost 2 years.
I could get a job tomorrow, but I would quit in a couple months because the working conditions in software shops is pretty bad and the economic reward that looks good on paper doesn't really translate into anything I need or want.
And its not that I cant get a GOOD job. The working conditions at big company X, Y, Z are frankly terrible. Ive been there.
I may not represent the average unemployed person (and no I dont collect unemployment) but I can see where people are coming from, and I empathize.
Economic motivation will always trump automation.