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Comment by kanamekun | Hacker News Reader

This is a key quote, and anecdotally I've seen it playing out with people I know: "[T]he drying up of cognitively demanding jobs is having a cascade effect. College graduates are forced to take jobs beneath their level of educational training, moving into clerical and service positions instead of into finance and high tech. This cascade eliminates opportunities for those without college degrees who would otherwise fill those service and clerical jobs. These displaced workers are then forced to take even less demanding, less well-paying jobs, in a process that pushes everyone down. At the bottom, the unskilled are pushed out of the job market altogether."

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It's happened once before with horses. During the industrial revolution horse-employment plummeted to the point that there were very few horses left laboring. IMHO, the most disruptive technical solution in the pipeline is self-driving cars. Once we enter the age of the "driverless carriage", the amount of unemployment that occurs will be unprecedented. People completely under-estimate how many industries are touched by automobiles.

The industry I'm most curious about with respect to the downward ramp is medicine. The hollowing out and automation is likely to happen with doctors more than nurses. With that in mind, will doctors suffer the most or will they push out the nurses underneath them.

I wouldn't say this is necessarily a bad thing, but more like the effects of market correction as our entire workforce transitions to a higher level putting pressure on people to operate at a higher cognitive level. And, I think we would want as much of our population as possible in cognitively demanding positions, and having the ability to outsource labor to other countries helps that happen. Now the next question I see is- 'Is our education system ready for that?' and I don't know a lot about the inner workings of it, but my gut feeling says we're not there yet.

"we would want as much of our population as possible in cognitively demanding positions, and having the ability to outsource labor to other countries helps that happen"

1) What if you had a brother with an IQ of 98. Would you rather he had a respectable factory job, or become homeless?

2) Are you aware that many of the least-tradable services are the least "cognitively demanding"? So I guess you want to tailor the bell curve of the population so that everyone is either > 120 so that they can do very highly cognitive work, or < 80 (so that they are content doing extremely menial work). Isn't it a little inconvenient that around 68% of the population is 85-115 IQ?

I would rather that the respectable factory job is done by a robot. I don't think we should force humans to do repetitive work that can be automated just so that they can somehow justify their existence in a society that is obsessed with work. Our goal should be as little employment as necessary paired with a basic income.

Marshall Brain's Manna which has been mentioned before on HN is an interesting take on where automation and robots will take us.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

"will"?

s/will/may

Rereading it again. He basically foreshadowed Amazon warehouse workers. Though he may fall short on the leap from Amazon to the rest of the working class.

Interesting read. It starts off showing a nightmare scenario of capitalism gone wrong ... similar themes with the original Robocop movies (without the violence and gore). It finishes with a dreamy scenario of communism gone well, though it ignores many issues, hand-waves others, and ends rather abruptly.

It was interesting to see where one futurist believes we could go.

Ok, where are the money for the basic income coming from?

All the people getting replaced by automation will be less able economically to buy stuff, use services - and pay taxes. Automation removes a lot of costs, frees up a lot of resources and increases profits. But all those positive effects does not compensate for the negative effects unless there is real net gains. For most of the society.

A long term stable basic income would be paid for by an income tax + a wealth tax. Suppose you set those numbers at 5% income tax and a 0.1% wealth tax. Now today that's not going to pay for much of a basic income, however it's better than a farmer in 1800. Keep pushing effecency and your quality of life keeps going up.

According to the article, the demand for cognitively demanding work peaked in 2000 and has been falling ever since, first sharply then at a slower but steady pace.

Shockingly, the NYT didn't use this article to call for MOAR IMMIGRATION.

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