Some predict computers will produce a jobless future. Here’s why they’re wrong.
washingtonpost.com
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Through automation, the basic necessities of all of Humanity can be produced/met by an increasingly smaller proportion of the human population. The new jobs are moving to the "other stuff" category. At some point, someone is bound to notice that "basic necessities" are now potentially dirt cheap, and that we can all be free from work we do not desire.
We are now living through a weird transition phase were most jobs are bullshit, but they are necessary purely to distribute wealth. This is a horrible and absurd system which forces people to be prisoners for a good chunk of their lives for no good reason whatsoever.
Also: I really can't stand "Here's why..." titles. They come across as arrogant and cliché at the same time. If you're going to be arrogant, make sure you're also brilliant.
You are either extremely arrogant or you are trolling. I can't believe you can say things like this and nobody is pointing you how absurd and how bad this sounds. What now? The only real "job" is typing letters in a text editor? Didn't they cut a lot of those jobs already? I mean, things like frameworks must cut a lot of programming jobs, right? They were bullshit jobs before they were cut?
Most of those "bullshit" jobs are in companies that create massive wealth. You are either saying that such companies are complete idiots, or I don't know what you are saying, nobody, nobody, hires for the sake of hiring.
Of course they do. Two examples:
- managers at all levels have an incentive to expand their fiefdoms (common interview question: how many people report to you?);
- politicians have an incentive to lower unemployment and the power to create incentives for companies to hire people that they don't need.
On paper, they do.
What really matters in life is being able to satisfy your needs. Everything else is luxury. If you have clean air, food, water, sex, sleep, sanitary waste removal, housing, electricity...
You're just talking about companies accumulating small pieces of green cloth / paper with numbers written on them. Or just numbers in some bank computer somewhere. Or worse, piles of the element gold. None of things INHERENTLY satisfy your needs. But since satisfying your needs requires resources that used to be scarce, then currency used to be the best way to allocate those resources, and also direct labor. Yay, capitalism!
When you have a division of labor, how do you decide how many chickens a farmer needs to give a doctor for performing an appendectomy? Well, that's an economy.
But when there is no shortage of resources, and there's essentially no labor that needs to be directed, strictly in order to satisfy your basic needs... Then we're just negotiating for our own luxury, and getting people to create luxury goods and services for us.
So, yes, to a degree, those jobs are just bullshit. And when your bullshit, luxury job allows you to acquire luxury amounts of food and water making those resources even more scarce, at the expense of people who actually NEED that food and water to live, yes, it is at least somewhat rational to begin questioning the entire system.
Got a source on this? I know a lot of burgeoning fields (bureaucracy, law, advertising, rent seeking) are all either zero sum or negative drains on society for the most part, but most people are still doing something marginally useful, even if it isn't worth paying them minimum wage for it.
The article mentions tax consultants, which is a really nice exampe of a totally useless job. We need a certain amount of tax revenue in order to pay for collective stuff. But nobody wants to pay more than they have to, so they hire a tax consultant. End result: society still has to pay the same amount of taxes (because they get adjusted so revenue still matches the need), plus the cost of these tax consultants. With an easier tax system and no consultants, we'd all be cheaper off.
So that is why you have tax consultants and an absurdly complex tax system - niche benefits profit, and invest to keep it that way (ie, lobby, ie bribe).
People want to be able to talk about what they do with their life in a way that makes them seem important. "I collect my basic income and paint" may be satisfying, but it isn't impressive. People are vain animals who want to one-up other vain animals. "I'm a project manager at BigCorp" or "I'm an accountant at a multi-million dollar company" sounds much better, even if the actual work is insipid and unimportant.
People often work jobs they don't like because of the secondary (non-monetary) benefits associated with them. Having a perfectly fair (for whatever definition of "fair") system of distributing wealth would not eliminate the effects of basic human vanity and irrationality on society and the economy. There will always be bullshit jobs because people use bullshit for the self-serving purpose of improving their apparent worth to others.
But let's say basic needs are met through automation, I'm sure cultures will keep some degree of competitiveness / judgement of others through voluntary works and human pursuits e.g. art. But we'll also all have food.
I guess one of the topic that will have to be discussed here at some point is the concept of basic income [1]. Its advocates think that it will help such a transition by helping reducing the amount of existing jobs while making sure that everyone can sustain oneself.
The London riots were not to do with "boredom", but poor race relations between the Metropolitan Police and the black community. The trigger event was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mark_Duggan ; rather similar to the 1992 LA riots, although not on the same scale. Once the race riot had got going and the police lost percieved control of the streets, opportunistic looting started.
Oh and maybe food and shelter.
That's a strong causal claim you're making there, where's your evidence?
This has already happened. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and mass produced food have turned what used to be a full time difficult job into a chore for your spare time. It created more time for people to do paid work. The ironic thing is that nowadays people love some of those chores (like cooking, growing vegetables, or making bread). We should aspire to a society where people have the choice to take pride in what they do.
And to do what they take pride in.
How many people today are really proud of what they do? How many aren't? How many are simply doing it because it pays the bills? Wouldn't it be much better if they didn't have to do that drudgery anymore, and could instead focus on what they really want?
It's not condescending towards the people, it's criticism towards the system. The system is wrong, the people are its victims.
I am a bad person. My stated goal is to make it so you never have to call a company (like expedia) and talk to someone in a foreign country (Like the Philippines).
I have a very nice demo of doing a Cable modem tech support call where you only talk to a machine. It works well. Is faster than a human can be, and if it got adoption would cost a few Million jobs.
What are those people going to do? I don't know.
Do I think that the savings that Comcast, Cox, or Expedia will have will be passed on to consumer so that they can buy more stuff? Not likely.
Do I think that my tech might end up increasing the divide between the upper and middle class (global not domestic classification [middle class on a global scale include people in call centers in India, Philippines and such who by US standards live at poverty levels])? Yes.
Do I think that it will raise the quality of living for the those living at the poverty level? Yes. The lowering of the cost of things like Internet, Cellphones, and such will help those at the lowest income levels.
So am I a bad guy or a good guy?
-Brandon Wirtz CTO PlexiNLP http://www.PlexiNLP.com
Feel free to tell me why I'm a bad guy as a comment. I do have this discussion in my own head on a regular basis.
Anyway, that's not enough information to determine if you are a bad guy or good guy. I would say you're just a guy working on something with little idea of what the future holds. Much like the rest of us.
Companies like DMCI that provide the Internet at my parents have high costs for support because it is done locally, and by a small team. They could provide more affordable service in underserved areas.
You do have to be wondering how we as a society can adapt to technological change to make sure quality of life improvements are broad based. But given the gist of your comment, I don't think that's an issue, at least in motivation and general inclination.
As for how: that's the big question. I'd suggest you look into basic incomes or job guarantees as two possible approaches (though I lean strongly toward the former).
When I worked on h.264 and VC1, I knew what I was doing would do two things. By Making it cheaper and easier to create and distribute video the world would get more content creators.
The two things that all adds up to:
1. Greater Democracy of Content and More freedom of Speech Expression.
2. Dumbing down of content, more exploitation of people through extreme porn, gore, and bully videos.
I only work on things that can change the world, and anything that can change the world can have a negative impact as well, but I won't work on something that only has a negative impact.
The question is, if governments can keep up with the companies (read: Google) buying your technology. They need to be taxed properly to invest in education and wealth distribution to keep up with the job losses.
If the technology reaches a point where it cannot be improved but gains characteristics of a natural ressource (e.g. green energy), which should be accessible to the people, governments should restrict and/or take over in some way for example by letting pension funds invest in it.
Consumers, on the other hand, will not demand more of diddly if the have no job and no money.
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/009383.html
I see no reason for the trend of the disappearing middle class to stop. The future is Brazil: A wealthy elite alongside impoverished masses. There's less and less business need for a large middle class.
http://www.thecollectiveint.com/2013/03/favelas-of-brazil-bo...
That's the same fallacy most socialists succumb to. Because their ideas are so deeply rooted in the concept of jobs and employment they can't even envision a future in which most people make do without a proper job.
The real question isn't: "How will we still be able to keep employees chained to their jobs in the future?" but: "How will we manage to liberate people from doing meaningless bullshit jobs?"
The answer to the former question would be: "Of course: Have them buy even more useless trinkets and gadgets so they still have to work their asses off."
An answer to the latter could be some sort of basic income.
I'm not saying at all that luxury goods are inherently bad. However, the value of time has to be put into perspective.
While time is the most valuable luxury good many people frivolously spend it on the ability to buy essentially useless consumer goods. Currently, most people simply can't say 'Look boss, I don't need so much money anyway so I'd much rather work for 20 hrs / week. OK?' so they just spend their disposable income for things they don't actually need. The income's at your disposal anyway so why not just spend it on gadgets in order to make up for the time lost while earning this income?
In my opinion, this is a vicious circle humanity in the long run needs to break out of if we want to be truly free.
Or am I just an optimist?
Edit: I thought it was interesting that in Marshall Brain's manna story, a class of people in the utopian world decide to live their entire lives in the virtual world. Their bodies are kept healthy and they get a longer lifespan as I recall. I'm not a fan of such existence but it is an interesting idea. Also see: Matrix, 13th floor.
Yes, the future can be bright providing we work to ensure that civilisation isn't destroyed, which itself requires optimism.
As a simple thought experiment, imagine a world in which a computer or robot could do literally any job a human could do better and cheaper than a human could do it. In such a world, the only reason a human would draw a salary would be due to charity, not good business sense. Of course, in such a world you don't have an economy as we know it either, which is kind of the point. Our current social contract won't survive in that kind of a world. We'll need a new one.
You might argue that such a day will never come; that there will always be a large class of jobs that humans can do better or cheaper than machines. Perhaps that's true. But that's what this conversation is really about: do machines have fundamental limitations due to physics that will keep them below the level of a large majority of humans forever? I think that's a strange position for most of us at HN to be arguing. Even software development will someday be automated to a large extent, I expect (yes, not anytime soon), and then where will we be?
Might have come about anyway, sure, but the early days of the computer industry point to a lot of Gov money flowing in and a lot of spinoffs from government-funded research.
First and foremost this article totally disregards technological acceleration. Its conclusions draw on a past that will look as quaint as the 1700s do today, and in only a few more decades.
Secondly, the tax example is the perfect demonstration of the fallacy of the argument. Those jobs have only managed to grow b/c the government keeps creating ever more complex tax regulations. Which is exactly what happens when a society puts the "jobs numbers" and "full employment" above actual economic efficacy -- They have to create bullshit work to keep people busy.
Of course that requires a totally different economic system. Our capitalist system basically requires people to work (if they want to live), but doesn't require people for work (to be done). It's contradictory.