Automation Alone Isn’t Killing Jobs
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
If all department stores adopted automated cashiers, the cashier as a retail option as we know it is dead. Killed.
If all farms adopt tractors and automatic harvesting machines, the crop picker option as we know it is dead. Killed.
Etc. Etc.
There will come a time when we can conceive of a new task to be completed, while simultaneously sketching up the automatic machine to complete the task.
In fact, this job-killing-automation already exists in the form of the latest and greatest production lines. They were not built to be filled with workers, only product.
My point throughout this thread has been to say that we are already at the point where if you have a task you should already be thinking of ways to automate it and it's THAT failure that is really killing jobs - not any act of bringing in automation.
Did the above line from the article strike anyone else as flagrantly sexist?
But you don't need a new throwaway account for each "bold" statement you make. Speak up, though. The world needs more people waking others up.
"There is also a special problem for some young women, namely those with especially docile temperaments. They aren't always well-suited to professional careers, like making hard sales or managing grown men, which require much confidence and sometimes even exercising authority."
Yes, dripping with it.
Although more condescending than outright sexist. I'm guessing the author comes from a privileged background.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
There's arguably some sexism too, but speculating that there's a class of young people that finds subordination difficult and even that there might be more young men in this category than young women strikes me as reasonable. Sexism would be looking at a young man and assuming that he's unlikely to make a good subordinate based on his gender.
I can't figure out if this is some political propaganda piece or just thrown together by someone who can't put together a coherent argument.
Paul Graham's great success was such a tool : it enabled idiots to have online stores without help. I used to work in colocation and it was amazing how many servers we rent out that are essentially custom developed online stores for various small service industry companies (e.g. retailers, accountants, call centers, ...).
Those have slowly been going away, usually we were getting replaced by larger online organisations that did lots of stores, like pg's application. These days it's mostly wordpress (it's been for a surprising number of years actually), but there was a time when it was other destinations.
An entire army of developer jobs has been replaced with a few thousands doing wordpress plugins and selling them. Now, obviously there has not exactly been a shortage of developer jobs, but you do see that you can do ever more without a developer. One day this will reach critical mass.
I'm tired of news articles that try to pass of "jobs" as some sort of discrete, easily quantifiable units. "Over a million jobs are being shipped to china", "12,000 jobs created", etc.
That's not how labor works. Or at least, it's a useless and misleading way of thinking about labor.
Sometimes automation makes a certain type of labor irrelevant. Those laborers need to find a new job (which possibly involves retooling) or starve (or, today, live off some sort of welfare or charitable income).
We are not even close to simply having no labor left that needs doing by humans. That's the only way you can really "kill" jobs; replace all human labor altogether. Otherwise, humans will just move to whatever they're still good at. Because of automation, the world will always be able to support those new jobs. The market will force this to be the case.
Perhaps, but it certainly reduces the relative value of labor vs. capital. "Kills jobs" is, as popular simplifications go, not at all bad. It's certainly more accurate than:
> Because of automation, the world will always be able to support those new jobs. The market will force this to be the case.
And while "the market" (lol) will create new jobs every time some previous labour marketplace is disrupted, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will provide the same amount of jobs (or, really: demand for the same units of labour). From there, it sorta follows that everyone's wages will drop: same number of people looking for work, but much less need for workers? The workers lose income as a result, meaning that there's both less demand for workers, and the work that is now available isn't going to pay your bills.
The upside of this is that it make many things very cheap. But it's not good news for most of us unless something change.
What a blisteringly stupid sentiment. If this were true, there would have been an obvious monotonic decrease in employment since humans started inventing things.
The situation we have today is increasingly that you either need a STEM degree or primarily have jobs that are loosing their ability to provide a middle-class income.
Those jobs in Wallmart jobs will be automated sooner or later and there is no alternative.
So call it stupid all you want. The reality is that the US is loosing jobs and not because it doesn't have a great environment for creating jobs, simply because technology allow for automation, outsourcing and the decline of the middle income job.
You're kidding, right? The industrial revolution "unemployed" orders of magnitudes more people than current technological changes.
>The situation we have today is increasingly that you either need a STEM degree
God forbid that the only jobs open to humans require mental exertion, right? I sure do love the fact that a huge fraction of the minds on earth are spending eight hours a day doing the really important things, like putting more Duck Dynasty t-shirts in aisle 12.
However, the miracle is that it's possible to get more output from the same amount of human effort with better business practices and better technology. (Though really it is more like a closer adherence to some hypothetical perfectly efficient economy than it is a miracle.) For increases in productivity, and more production not to produce more consumption would be the economics equivalent of violating the laws of conservation of mass and energy, or being able to slow down your car without converting that kinetic energy into heat.
There aren't differing opinions about whether increased production enables greater consumption, because the relationship is equivalent to a mathematical identity. However, that does not mean that there can be no debate about the effects of automation and other technological leaps in productivity.
For instance, there is the notion that making sure those who are responsible for leaps in productivity are well compensated incentivizes continued innovation. Then there is the concern that since the ultimate purpose of economies is human quality of life, those productivity gains don't actually accomplish anything if most participants in the economy fail to realize the benefits of those gains. And furthermore, sufficiently large disparities in wealth and influence are likely to establish a patronage system in place of a formerly meritocratic system, such that the talent pool for the next round of innovation is greatly constrained.
The dynamic between productivity and income is counter intuitive at times. However, consider that there were past instances where people were ready to violently riot for the opportunity to be sent down into a mine where they would possibly contract black lung, only to bring up coal that was worth less than their compensation packages. Measuring such work by the sweat and risk would mean that it was worth a considerable income. However, there were other energy sources that required less effort and factory equipment was efficient enough that a bucket of coal simply wasn't that important. Those developments were good things! That tens or hundreds of thousands of people should be paid to hurt themselves, for something that was worth less than they needed to be paid sounds nonsensical today, but was debated seriously only a few decades ago.
Changes in economies that lead to fewer people being eaten up by their jobs into an early death are good.
Anyway, one final interesting aside. The term "unemployment" when used during the era before the industrial revolution didn't refer to not being able to find how to employ oneself, but to people choosing not to work. Not-starving was a measure for being okay, and common people didn't have too many worthwhile goods and services they could buy if they had more income. The term was used by the equivalent of that eras policy makers in addressing concerns about building up surplus stores, so that they would not suffer blame and revolts when the weather was unseasonably bad, or they wanted to collect more taxes for their own consumption, or they wanted to be able to feed an army.
In case I wasn't super clear above, I believe that if there are fewer jobs that kill people, that's a very good thing. Technological progress is super legit. But you can't deny that people seem to desperately need some sort of sense of job-driven accomplishment, at least in western cultures, and finding a way to change the culture and politics such that people are able and willing to live self-driven yet fulfilling lives seems like it's gonna be the big challenge to getting everyone on board with the relentless pace of technological change.
What do you think happens when the supply of workers increases, and wages drop?
=> Production prices drop => The results of this are split between: 1. The rich make more money, and buy more stuff, draining the supply of labor and increasing wages 2. Things become cheaper, which counteracts the wage drop.
This is not rocket science. Before you just had people making things, and now you have machines and the same people making things. There are more things being made. This is, on balance, positive.
I think the empirical question has been answered unequivocally: wages, corrected for inflation, have been stagnant for thirty years. More value is definitely being made, but it's being captured by different people: that's why we've got so many more rich people who are so much richer.
That last bit, though - that there are people and machines making things - seems wrong to me. Like in a car factory: let's say I used to use machines to mount car doors. Now, there's a machine that does it a lot better than me, and I don't need to operate it. Unless I live somewhere that labour's dirt cheap, it seems unlikely that I'm gonna be (a) making things or (b) in a job doing my car-door-mounting best.
Automation does four things: 1. Drastically decrease the value of labor in the now-automated field. 2. Slightly decrease the value of all labor (by increasing the supply of free labor). 3. Slightly decrease the costs of all products (via #2). 4. Drastically decrease the costs of products which are now produces automatically (via #1).
These things all work out to be positive-sum for humanity. If this wasn't the case, it wouldn't make any economic sense for businesses to automate in the first place.
You are arguing for some sort of utopian perfect system scenario that simply isn't the case.
No, it makes sense for businesses to automate if the effect is positive-sum for the specific businesses owners whose businesses are automating, regardless of the effect on humanity as a whole.
The problem is that the jobs that are left for those without a tech degree of some sort aren't appreciated by the market and is forcing salaries down way below what is possible to live off. Wallmart is a much more accurate way to look at what automation does.
Treat every job like that job's on the endangered jobs list and try not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Now, I'd personally have a problem if you didn't add the opportunity portion I mentioned above b/c then it just turns into another "bootstrap" fallacy.
This is an exaggeration. It may be forcing salaries below the level necessary to support US middle class consumption levels, but there is a huge gap between that and "possible to live off". Where I live, even the middle class don't live in homes with 2 rooms/person or own a car (unlike poor people in the US).
A full time minimum wage job pays $14,500/year. GDP/capita (adjusted for purchasing power) in Bulgaria is $14,100. In Brazil it's $11,700, here in India it's $3800, and in Haiti it's $1200. Yet people continue to live.
(These numbers are adjusted for purchasing power, so don't argue that it's cheaper to live over here.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...
50 years ago GM was the biggest job creator in the country. Average hourly wage was quite good to live off.
Today Wallmart is the biggest and many workers need extra help from the goverment to even make it.
The problem is very real.
If you are a student, in your youth having no obligations sure you probably could. But these are people often with a family.
It's a little hard to argue that it's somehow easier to be a rural Indian subsistence farmer than it is to be a section 8 tenant. From the vantage point of the Indian farmer, the section 8 tenant is mind-bogglingly wealthy. And the rural poor in India outnumber all people in the US below the poverty line by six to one.
Chris Stucchio is right. We need to devise a reasonable argument that one of the most important social issues of our time is making a ~40 million relatively wealthy people even wealthier.
Personally, I'd prefer to keep a focus on education and equality of opportunity, and not spend so much time thinking about what 14k/yr buys you in New York City. But you'll no doubt want to tell me that it's easy for me to say that, and I agree.
What is it sopposed to be an argument for? In Scandinavia everyone is getting free healthcare. Whats the argument?
I have been talking about the fact that technology is driving some types of jobs up in yearly salaries and other types of salaries down. The middle class is disappearing and those jobs that are available for a growing number of people does not allow them to live for that salary.
So no I am not misunderstanding anything and I am not being downvoted because of that. I am being downvoted because some people are getting emotional.
Both groups of people are humans. One group doesn't have consistent running water or electricity. The other does, along with a car, air conditioning, cable television, and schools. The existence of the former group is very inconvenient for your belief that the latter group isn't paid enough to live on.
You're being downvoted because you're simply wrong. That doesn't mean income inequality isn't a problem; I happen to believe it is a problem, unlike Chris Stucchio. But not for the false reason you think it is.
If you think it's without problems that the US have to subsidize many people who have jobs because it's worse in India then we disagree. I think it's problematic that the salaries in the US seem to be pushed into two extremes.
If you think it's a problem that technology ends up pushing those two extremes in the US no matter what happens on the north pole, india or bangladesh, then we agree.
There is nothing inconvenient about other countries living situation. But if you want to play that game then lets also include the people of Scandinavia, France etc who enjoy free healtcare no matter how much they make.
The only thing that seems to be inconvenient here is discussing the situation for those who make 15000 a year. Thats the only reason why for some other worldly reason you want to ignore it by saying other people have it worse.
I am not in the wrong here you are.
You are just trying to push a premise on to me that first of all isn't an argument for anything as I can find countries where people do in fact get more than 15.000USD a year even if they have no job. And who do in fact get free healthcare.
And second of all has nothing to do with what I have been talking about at all.
But I see you guys have made up your mind so nothing fruitful is going to come from this discussion.
Further, medicine is quite cheap and easily available here. In a big expensive city like Pune, Bangalore or Bombay, you might spend 30-50 rupees on a generic "my skin is itchy" cream containing multiple medicines (anti-inflammatory, antifungal, anti-other-itchyness). You just go in and ask the pharmacist for it - no doctor needed. That's a significant financial hit, but for comparison India's National Rural Employment Guarantee (a super corrupt Basic Job for farm workers) pays about 100rs/day.
If you want to argue that wages are not high enough to sustain the moving goalposts of US middle class life, do it. But do it honestly and acknowledge that the main problem is that the definition of "middle class" (or whatever term you want to use) has risen more rapidly than low skill wages.
Using phrases like "possible to live off" is simply a lie. If it were true then I should be surrounded by over a billion dying people and I should be dead myself.
Check your privilege, dude.
Billions of your fellow human beings do not live in New York or SF or in the US for that matter. Comparing with other countries is so misinformed it's not even worth taking serious.
If you want to play with rethorics be my guest. You very well know what I mean and is just trying to dodge the real issue here.
Most people once they move out of their early twenties have obligations bigger than themselves. Sure some people can choose to live for 1400/month but most people can't and therefore the government is stepping in to help.
Maybe you don't have a problem with that. I do.
If only I were smart enough to have thought of that. Then I might have cited PPP-adjusted numbers rather than nominal ones. I'd have said this: "GDP/capita (adjusted for purchasing power) in Bulgaria is $14,100...here in India it's $3800"
If I were really smart, I might also have anticipated your dishonest response and said this: "These numbers are adjusted for purchasing power, so don't argue that it's cheaper to live over here."
[edit: It's amusing that in your response you bring up food. Fun fact: poor people over here aren't fat. You really need to leave the US at some point in your life. Canada and the UK don't count.]
As I understand it, yummyfajitas is saying [roughly] "here's how much money people make around the world, adjusted for purchasing power which means that it does make sense to compare. It's less than most people in the US. Obviously, they also live in much worse conditions, but that isn't the same as to literally be dying."
What yummyfajitas concludes from the above is that having less money won't lead to people literally being "unable to live", but rather "unable to live with the lifestyle they are currently accustomed to".
This is his position as I understand it.
Which part of that are you disagreeing with?
But I see strawmen works.
NOTE: I accidentally posted this comment to the wrong parent earlier. reposting.
As I have said the problem is that it's not enough and so they need to get help from the government which many of them get.
It's bordering an absurd rethorical nitpicking if you really aren't able to discuss this in a normal manner with a fairly normal understand of the US system.
It may be forcing salaries below the level necessary to support US middle class consumption levels, but there is a huge gap between that and "possible to live off".
If you actually agreed with me but simply used a different definition that I did for the term "live off", why not just say "by 'live off' I actually meant 'maintain US middle class consumption levels'"?
But Chris Stucchio obviously does know many things about what life is like for people in the US who make 15k/yr (he's from the US, for what it's worth). He's demonstrated that amply in this thread and elsewhere.
For your comment to be a real argument, you'd need to accompany that shrill statement with a list of specific things about what it's like to live on 15k/yr in the US; in other words, you'd need to support your statement with evidence.
We talked about the term "to live of". It's pedantic as was claimed that with that i meant would die from. Especially if you know anything about what happens to people who make that little a year in terms of government subsidizing.
Let me repeat. This discussion has NOTHING absolutely nothing to do with what other people do in other countries. We were talking about the US we where talking about the problem of wages being pushed into two extremes.
Specifically, you said that the reason that wage disparity is a problem is that it is impossible for a family to "live on" the incomes from a Wal-Mart job, and therefore the government is required to subsidize them.
You made an argument that was trivial for Chris Stucchio to dismiss: for every Wal-Mart employee making $14,000/yr, 6-8 Indian people are living with far less (PPP adjusted!), and raising families while doing it. Now you're stuck; you either have to come up with an argument that Indian people are different from Americans, or that Indian people are "not really living". Neither argument is fun to defend, as you've made very apparent.
My suggestion is, make better arguments, or at least, don't complain so loudly when your bad arguments are routed by facts.
Look: neither of us are going to solve income inequality by talking about it on HN. As you can see by the pale cast your comments seem to be taking on almost as soon as you write them, it's unlikely you're going to do much of anything to move the world forward by advocating for this issue today.
But one thing we can do to make the world better is to get better at having discussions with people that disagree with us. Maybe start with that here on HN.
I find 'yummyfajitas arguments painful to read. Most of the time, they create an annoying feeling of knowing he must be wrong, via a sort of deontological spidey-sense, but not knowing exactly how to rebut him. But that's a good thing, not a bad one: it means that to argue with him, you need to do better than playing to a crowd of people who already agree with you. And after all, what would be the point of doing that?
You are basically saying that we can't discuss the US because there are other places where people are worse of. Otherwise it make no sense to point to other places where people are worse of.
This is not about argument, this is about premise for the discussion. I am not buying yours or any other who use other countries as an argument for why it's not a problem that people on low wages have to be subsidized.
If you don't think it's a problem they have to be then we disagree. It's as simple as that.
The (rather gigantic) example of Asian rural poor might foreclose on your argument that Wal-mart wages are "un-livable". It might not if you can marshall a better argument, but that's not the tack I'd take.
What you're missing is that "Wal-mart wages are un-livable" isn't the only argument against income inequality; in fact, it's one of the poorer ones, as I think you've now seen.
Here is what I wrote:
"...The problem is that the jobs that are left for those without a tech degree of some sort aren't appreciated by the market and is forcing salaries down way below what is possible to live off. Walmart is a much more accurate way to look at what automation does..."
That was then turned into a discussion about the term "possible to live off" which frankly in the context we are talking here is juvenile and unnecessarily pedantic. Do you really believe that I meant will die from?
But sure I am guilty of falling for it given I was assuming at least some intellectual honesty from the person I was discussing with. I now see it was just a way to throw the "someone is worse off" card which is very convenient yet completely besides the point.
I never even made an argument against income inequality so why you judge my posts on that is beyond my understanding.
And unless you or anyone else is talking about a global redistribution of wealth comparing to other countries is not only weak it's a false claim of morality.
Each country should be able to discuss the merits of it's own societies status quo without having to point to people starving to death in Ethiopia.
You know, I'm not sure if you're talking about me or yummyfajitas here, but I think you're being unfair. We had a discussion in which clearly there was at least some misunderstanding. yummyfajitas raised a valid point (it is possible to live on less salary, just with lower standards of living). You made your own point, which is that this is still not a very desired outcome. It took us several posts to realise what everyone was saying and what everyone meant, which is regrettable, but I don't think it's "intellectually dishonest" of any side.
Honestly, it's kind of disheartening to try and have a discussion with someone and to be called "intellectually dishonest" and "juvenile". I don't think anyone here is mean or acting in bad faith, I honestly think this thread just had a lot of "talking past each other". Not grounds for insulting one another, surely?
It became a discussion because yummyfajitas started nitpicking on "possible to live of".
With regards to the intellectual honesty. When you start claiming that "being able to live of" means "to die from" and keep claiming it as if it's me who is using the term in wrongly you are into that territory.
The discussion we where having was about what technology does to salaries but yummyfajitas managed to turn it into a discussion about whether it's possible to live of 15K a month and then a discussion about how people in other countries have it worse.
But I digress. The little army of libertarians is on a downvote mission so no matter what i say is being sent to obscurity.
Part of the reason for this is that my underlying values are nearly the same as yours. In terms of values, I'm nearly a standard NY liberal [1]. For example, you probably favor either Basic Income or a Welfare State - I prefer a Basic Job. Our underlying reasons are the same (don't let people starve), we just differ on which policy will actually achieve the best outcome for the lowest price.
In contrast, someone with libertarian values would be fine letting people starve, even if he preferred a Basic Job to other policy proposals.
[1] The only big points where my values differ are on inequality, which I don't view as an intrinsic problem (maybe it's an extrinsic one, but I'm unconvinced). I also don't buy into the racial/sexual collectivism of modern liberalism - I.e., I don't believe "women" have rights, I believe only an individual woman does.
Also: perhaps because you're better at math than I am, you come across to me as somewhat astringently rationalist. It's noticeable in discussions where logic and orthodoxy conflict, for instance in discussions about race and IQ.
I get how that's a result of the issues selected for discussion on HN, and the way they tend to get discussed; you could be mistaken for a libertarian in the same way I could be mistaken as a shill for NSA.
Happily, in neither yummyfajitasland nor tptacekland will anyone be starving, although tptacekland also has single-payer health care.
Interesting--normally I see neo-reactionaries linking progressivism with christian tradition; and it's not meant as a compliment. I don't think I've ever seen a progressive endorsing that link before.
Also, I should note that I'm a consequentialist (although in practice I try to use virtue ethics), and closer to tptacekian politics than yummyfajitian politics.
1400 would require ~10.50 an hour.
1208/mo, actually.
So then people in the future get a tech degree, and humanity will be better off, because instead of a million people with a tech degree and 999 million farming, we now have 0 people wasting their precious mind on farming and a billion solving hard problems.
Like I said, people will be forced to retool. That is a good thing.
You used to be able to retool fairly easily. That is just not the case anymore. The jobs where that is possible is increasingly paying less and less.
THAT is the problem. The real problem. The increasing problem.
You know, I've never actually seen any evidence of this. People say it a lot, but it's not reflected in the numbers.
However, if it is true, it's simply the case that there will be a slight permanent increase in the number of people who are unemployed.
The market isn't a magic wand. If buyers and sellers can't agree on terms then the sale won't happen, and the labor market is particularly illiquid. It's not at all clear that businesses want to hire large numbers of unemployed people under any reasonable terms.
Horses lost out because they weren't retrainable to perform other productive activities. Up until now most new jobs have been within the grasp of those people willing to go through a little training. However, now we're eliminating jobs fast enough and the new jobs we're willing to fill require a level of knowledge that are either impossible for certain workers or at least "economically impossible" since the cost and time necessary to train is too high to make sense.
I mean, if a dude gets shot and dies, we tend not to argue too much about whether it was the bullet that killed him, or the corresponding massive blood loss.
They used to have factory jobs. These have been automated.
Agriculture is increasingly automated.
We are finding ways to build our systems around fewer and fewer people. More capable people are fighting further down the food chain.
Do we just throw people who can't adapt on disability? That's what we did for the group below them, after all. (Who themselves, mind you, we're once capable of being functional members of society, even if they needed help and we're often exploited.)
The whole point of technology is to increase production output. To do more with less.
This might open up new areas but it doesn't follow at all either. And unless you can point to something like the semiconductor revolution it's hard to see what you are referring to.
Job A gets replaced by Automation 1.0. Automation 1.0 required the labor of Jobs B, C, and D to become a reality. Now, not only can Jobs B, C, and D become greatly automated but Automation A is going to eventually lead to Automation 2.0 which led to Jobs E, F, and G being created. Within one generation of the death of Job A, six other jobs were created.
You're arguing that specialization isn't opened up but someone specialized in something enough (robotics, AI, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, something) to lead to the automation in the first place.
You could have jobs for everyone if you just gave them 50 cent an hour so no that is not question as it's missing the point.
I find the continued apologetic nature of your and some others argument amazing. Technology does not create more jobs than it destroys it help create new markets.
But at the same time it removes jobs from the middle class and leaves only either high tech jobs or Wallmart like jobs in the US (and europe)
If you think that is a sustainable model and proves that the market works just fine I think you are mistaken.
These people will not suddenly be able to get jobs in IT.
Now, I'm not saying that automation is bad, but I am saying we have a structural unemployment situation on our hands and we are going to have to figure out something.
What you have seen is new markets getting liberalized and that made it look like technology would just open up new industries that everyone could get into. In reality that is not the case.
It's all part of a spectrum where specific jobs die but "jobs for people to have" more or less stay the same, if they don't actually increase.
Those that are still around outside the Wallstreet/Tech scene are becoming less and less valuable wallmart being a great example.
Everything else is just a poor attempt to rationalize our way out of that reality.
We teach people to go to school and to get a job and to hold onto that job for as long as possible. That used to be playing it safe but it's playing it pretty not safe these days.
If these opportunities don't exist, it's not the death of the job who is to blame. It's the system that failed to provide for opportunities when the job dies (as it is likely to do).
You are hanging on to some unrealistic notion of it's just a matter of changing your skill-set. Many of these people can't.
I agree that a low-skilled worker is at a disadvantage, but assuming that a tech/finance slanted world offers no low-skilled jobs seems incorrect to me.
We want to feel important. And we want freedom to do whatever we want to do.
While automation gives more freedom, it makes us feel less important? What we can do with a washing machine, everyone else can do too. But the question is, do they want to?
With more automation we will see more and more services. And even more possibilities.
Coming from an economist (a professor at least), I'd expect a little bit more positive economic analysis and objectivity. This reads more like a sociology commentary.