Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization

Working people don't choose. People in power and corporations choose. And the constant is that they want to expand the number of hours and reduce the pay.

The extra productivity that automation brings doesn't matter. It's not like they target X levels of productivity. They target "as much productivity as we can get, up to infinity".

Plus, what would they do with a population that had time in its hands to think and be involved instead of being a wage-slave bound by debt?

(That's not some dystopian tinfoil concept. It's a standard concern of those at the top of any given society from the age of the Romans ("panem et circenses"), to Machiavelli to modern era think tanks).

If I can get the same product at a lower price, it frees up some of my income to buy something else. That creates demand, it is is demand that creates jobs.

The problem is that workers aren't fungible. People spend years or even decades acquiring skills, and then technology can automate away what they do, leaving them stranded economically speaking. They need new skills to keep earning because demand has changed.

Also on an individual level we all resist change. If you like your life and lively-hood now, and technology threatens that, it's not surprising that people will go Luddite in order to avoid the effort and risk that comes with changing jobs.

The answer is to put in place the social institutions necessary for people to be more adaptive and fluid in how they earn a living. Give people a safety net to fall on: social insurance, and a ladder to climb to climb out on: education.

Plenty of nations are using parts of this strategy and the data seems clear it works. But it's a difficult sell politically in the US. People here aren't willing to see the taxes they pay as investment toward bettering society as a whole. And to be fair, they're justified in feeling that way since our government's spending priorities are often insane.

Personally I advocate a gradual decrease in allowed work hours - 10 minutes shorter work day every year, or so. Although France has tried this and it doesn't really seem to work.

You might be able to reduce all these administrative costs, but splitting work up among more people has its own cost. Remember Brooke's law, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" - the same effect is in play.

[Editted to fix arithmetic. This makes the example less dramatic, but still significant given the profit level of many companies]

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962...

  > But this never happens. Why? 

What good is it being rich without poor people for contrast?

Or, from another angle, I suspect (without any formal economic training) that hyper-rich with private jets is not possible in a society where most people are moderately rich, because there wouldn't be excess cash to monopolize.

To achieve the goal of working less, you need to own capital. Technology changes the capital vs. work equation towards capital at the same time when there is increasing global supply of educated workforce. It's just supply and demand. Workers are simply competing towards bottom.

To get to position where you need to work less you would need to have:

1. Change taxation from work to capital.

2. Basic income.

Sadly we very rarely see candidates in set A and even less so of set B.

Or AI could take over singularity style.

I don't know why you assume the future will be better than the past. So far it honestly seems more like computers and robots have created a situation where most of the middle class is now useless to society. We seem to be reverting back to a system where there is only an upper class and a massive pool of peasants. For us to really replace the higher end of the workforce will require a singularity type of event.

Of all the possible futures it really takes a lot of optimism to not see some kind of dystopia.

Just look at the current privacy situation. Look at what the NSA is doing. Look at how google and facebook have been allowed to build a massive database of every action that we engage in with technology, and they are then allowed to sell it to 3rd parties without most people even knowing they do this and sharing none of the profits with us for selling our information. That is the reality of the future. Add largely automated robot armies and much more powerful systems of control plus finite resources.

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-16-youtube-... [2] http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2010/6/comSc...

In an automated economy, where businesses are easily scaled if you own capital, the amazon example could apply everywhere.

You can tell yourself whatever you want, but that won't close the massive gap between your perspective and actual reality.