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Coming to an office near you

economist.com

91 pointsDanieru30 comments

"Education is the solution" always seems to me like punting. Nobody ever explains the mechanics of how education is going to allow a newly-unemployed secretary to train for a new job, or even whether that new job exists at all.

Refrains of "oh we'll adapt to it like we always do" ring hollow as well. It might not be apparent in San Francisco, but large parts of the country haven't really adapted to the loss of manufacturing in the U.S. Good middle class jobs that existed in the 1960's and 1970's haven't been replaced with something equivalent, but rather jobs that are worse + more government support.

Agreed on both counts.

The whole thing about "education" as the answer that bothers me is the quicker these changes accelerate, the less realistic that option becomes. Humans just don't really learn that fast. Being "educated" (and here I'm including self-education, not just school learning) enough to be an in-demand technology worker is like a decade or more of learning currently and we're still pretty close to the start of the coming hockey stick of increased automation and job specialization so the amount of time required to learn skills that make you highly employable relative to a mostly automated replacement is likely to get worse, not better.

The part about people just assuming the economy will sort this out like it did during/after the first mass-automating of manufacturing also bothers me in that there seems to be this misunderstanding that our modern economy is some old, almost geological timescale system (the sun will come up tomorrow, like it always does!), when it just... isn't. This modern economy we have is pretty new, just a few generations old. Basing any future predictions for it on a very limited set of past analogues seems incredibly dangerous and silly to me.

My concern with any comparison of the Industrial Revolution to today is where we establish the mean. What, precisely, is the "normal" state of labor w/r/t capital? Looking back over the last several hundred years, it seems there isn't one. It's in been in a state of flux. There are many parallels to be drawn, relatively speaking, between then and now. But there are few absolutes (theoretical concepts notwithstanding).

It's tough to set an arbitrary pin in, say, in the 1940s in the US -- or conversely, the 1800s in the UK -- and claim that such an era represented the natural equilibrium of things, and that eventually, we'll smooth back out towards it. There simply isn't enough longitudinal data on capitalism and industry, both of which are fairly recent inventions.

The very idea of a regular, salaried job is astonishingly new in the sweep of human history. The idea of a salary can be traced back to the Romans, but in a very idiosyncratic context [1]. Where we go from here is going to be fascinating to watch. But we're deluding ourselves if we believe it necessarily must bear a strong resemblance to where we've been.

I'm optimistic about the future, but I draw that optimism from the benefits of technology, and from the ability of humanity to adapt. I don't draw my optimism from any certainty about the way things "should" be. The only thing we should always count on is change.

[1] "Salary" derives from salarium, the wage paid to a Roman soldier in order to buy salt (among other things). This is notable because, prior to the reforms of Gaius Marius, the Roman military comprised only noblemen who could afford to drop everything, buy their own gear, and go to war as volunteers. Rome's move to a professional army, manned largely by peasant-soldiers paid in salaries, marked one of the first instances of a permanent, professional, wage-based class in Western society. (In some Eastern societies, a rice-based wage served a similar purpose.)

"Many of the jobs most at risk are lower down the ladder (logistics, haulage), whereas the skills that are least vulnerable to automation (creativity, managerial expertise) tend to be higher up"

Your job vulnerability, I think, is not only a matter of automation. It also a question of "commoditization". If you become a commodity, meaning that, if * what you do can be well described * your workflow can be well described * the tools you use are becoming standard * there is no real barrier for entering your field. Then, you'll lose very quickly any bargaining power and your 'salary' or 'margin' will decrease.

Technology, as it progresses, tends to commoditize 'producers', whereas usually 'distributors' are less vulnerable.

There's an interesting consequence here. The easier your job is to describe, the more subject to commoditization it is. But the harder it is to describe, the harder it is to sell.

In the future, we'll all be weird data scientist/UI/product dev/entrepreneurs.

Those looking to sell themselves will have to do so on results, fad-of-the-day, or personal relationships.

"Those looking to sell themselves will have to do so on results, fad-of-the-day, or personal relationships" 100% agree. Actually I tend to think more and more that personal relationship is really a big big one.

While it's true that we'll continue to feel the hurt of job shirts, people have thought that technology would kill the economy for hundreds of years.

Keynes thought people would be working 15 hours per week in 2030.[1] If anything we'll be working 55 hours per week.

Education needs to change, certainly. The economy will move forward, certainly. But there's no reason to freak out. Society has moved through economic change before and we'll find a way through the internet-induced havoc as well.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics

True, but that doesn't mean we aren't finally seeing the reality pan out.

If you want to call all jobs "jobs" then fine: Another way of looking at it is: 150 years ago people didn't have jobs the way we do today at all. It was completely different.

So we can expect the "jobs" of the future, e.g. the life experiences of the future, to be completely different.

That difference will have major unavoidable ramifications for government, taxation, freedom, democracy, everything.

I'm pretty sure that if someone from 150 years ago shadowed me for a day, they would conclude that what I do is not "work".

that is a very good point - effectively what they did was work in the mechanical sense - now we have outsourced that to machines.

What you do would have been clerical, logistical or planning work, or possibly creative. And the first three are definitively going to be outsourced to computers soon.

So what will the person in 150 years do that you will not call work?

The US was primarily agricultural, but there was quite a lot of manufacturing, commercial, and government employment back then. So I think that "at all" is putting it too strongly.

Aristocratic work in particular was not so different from today.

The article recognizes that, but things are moving faster now. Also, people should be working less now, and instead many work 60-70hours a week while others are out of work.

"Society has moved through economic change before and we'll find a way through the internet-induced havoc as well."

You say that as if this process has gone well in the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike

If anything, history shows us we should expect great unrest potentially leading to violence at times of rapid technological change.

yes http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/13/uber-paris-confirms-attack...

The concern of what advancements in technology mean for web workers has recently blossomed in main circles.

Jeff Croft wrote that being a web designer isn't enough to sustain a career.[1] Jeffrey Zeldman countered that argument with the notion that being an expert in the field is enough to sustain oneself, but only if you can expand on your knowledge with other skills.[2] Andrew Clarke then followed-up on both of those pieces.[3]

It's an interesting time to be involved in tech, especially on the web. What comes next is simply more adaptation, what other choice to we (as workers) have?

1. http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2014/jan/03/web-standards-killed-t... 2. http://www.zeldman.com/2014/01/06/its-2014-is-web-design-dea... 3. http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/its-2014.-web-desig...

> What comes next is simply more adaptation, what other choice to we (as workers) have?

By downcasting us to "workers", you miss many of the options. Play with a full deck[1]:

1. http://thecloud.crimethinc.com/images/deck/play_with_a_full_...

Thanks for the comment, but "downcasting" is your interpretation.

Perhaps your response is one of the wider HN group too, in which case let me clarify: I love being someone who does work (in web development and marketing, no less), and I don't see any negative or restricting connotation as a result of using the word "workers." A worker is someone who works, nothing more and nothing less in the context of my comment.

So you're recommending adding sabotage, theft, mutual aid, and "the counter culture" to our skill set?

I'm adding them to my resume right now.

Meta: This is a terrible title for this HN post. It doesn't describe what the article is about.

Interesting if the Singularity mean there were no jobs. But even more interesting is what happens if productivity crosses a tipping point where all the GDP for a country like the US can be provided by .1% of the workforce? I always loved how Gene Roddenberry envisioned a future in Startrek where everyone had jobs but nobody used money. Sort of like ClubMed but for work. That made the Ferengi in the Star Trek universe interesting in their focus on wealth.

Of all the arguments for basic income, this one (100x productivity gains) is the strongest. It then changes the way to reward people for work. Perhaps the employed have extra perks or something.

Sounds like communism (the ideal of it)

The elephant in the room is: is there any place in the future for people who are not skilled in abstract thinking?

There is lots of work to be done, assuming you consider building family, health / taking care of people, education, etc. as things that require work.

So assuming that most industrial jobs require 'smarts' eventually -

- educators will need to be smart

- parents will need to be smart to raise smart kids

- 'care' i agree will always be in demand

So you might have a society composed of an 'intellectual class' and a 'care class.' The alternative would be having a large 'leisure class' who don't do much work at all but nevertheless have everything they need.

Those 3 sound like a good breakdown. You can have celebrity intellectuals, celebrity care takers, and celebrity good people / entertainers? :)

A lot of the automation may be removing jobs that used to be done by humans by doing it for less, but a byproduct of this is the drastic decrease in barriers to entry for starting your own business, especially as services like Shopify specialize in making the efficiency and cost gains accessible to everybody.

In the past, merchants were often those without land who became merchants because it was their best option. Now, basically anyone can become a merchant immediately.

> In the early part of the Industrial Revolution the rewards of increasing productivity went disproportionately to capital; later on, labour reaped most of the benefits.

This whole article is BS. At what point in history has labour reaped most of the benefits of any industry?

Haven't RTFA yet, but it may be a poor attempt to reference the time-frame in which, as labor movements (unions) spread and the foremen on the line elevated themselves to higher positions, that there was a small disruption in the otherwise overreaching power of capital.

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