Bill Gates: People Don't Realize How Many Jobs Will Soon Be Replaced by Software
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I write clinical decision support tools, and I interview users (doctors). Nowdays, doctors really just want algorithms to follow. They want to know what the fastest/cheapest way to diagnose problems is.
Frankly, they aren't particularly GOOD at diagnosing problems outside of these kinds of algorithms - for example, a likely cause of many Morgellons' disease cases is actually tropical rat mite (see Nick Mann http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8626767/Morgellons-Disease...). Doctors tend to diagnose delusional parasitosis just because it doesn't fit the algorithms.
If doctors are just going to follow a basic set of diagnostic procedures, we can easily automate that using the data that are put into modern electronic health record (EHR) systems. We have your vitals, we know the tests that have been done and the outcomes, and so on. As one (very blunt) doctor expressed to me, doctors just want to follow the diagnosis algorithm, he paid $100k to be a data entry technician, and I think that was pretty much on the money. That's not the only time I've heard that, either.
If doctors are going to be replaced, there's not much that CAN'T. It's just a question of designing a program/robot for the particular task, which is becoming increasingly cheap.
I am sure myself I am assuming the convenience of the technology that will take my place rather than realising the threat.
But the day will come when the machines are near-perfect.
And people already trust computers more than they did in the 70s. Perhaps not if you ask them directly, but the reality is that they do, with many areas of their lives, and without a second thought.
We are working towards a solution that takes in data to improve health outcomes: https://www.wellframe.com
It's a super exciting space and time to be in, but it's also super challenging, so we are hiring! Let me know if you have any questions!
Many? You made that conclusion from a single self-reported case of finding that bug? Seems rather far-fetched to me.
Do I think that doctors are way too eager to dismiss diagnoses that don't fit their criteria? Yup. I have a sister who has an absolutely zebra diagnosis (astroblastoma tumor, <0.5% of cases, with typical characteristics), given by top doctors. It was a case punctuated with all kinds of medical accusations regarding the diagnosis.
I write Clinical Decision Support tools for a living, for a high-level nonprofit. Our content providers suck ASS. Do I worry that I might be contributing to inappropriate diagnoses/non-diagnoses? Yes, it's a thing I bear in mind every day, every meeting, and I have gone to bat to improve.
Independent of the examples, that's a worrying philosophy. I write the tools for this - in theory, I assume the liability when Shit Doesn't Work - not that we don't do our best to push this off to Other Organizations With Medical Expertise.
Here's a quick take: http://io9.com/how-universal-basic-income-will-save-us-from-...
The Wikipedia article goes much further in-depth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
And of course, there's an ongoing conversation on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/
There will always be problems to solve for as long we are people of needs: shelter, clothing, food, social life.
If we want to go down that road, basic income is the future in my opinion.
An alternative to all of this is to tax all financial transactions: whether to family members, religious organizations, political campaigns or between large institutions or countries. The idea being that in the end there is no real way to distinguish donation from income. Everyone would pay a tax on the difference in their net worth between the beginning and end of the year. The end result would be that people who accumulate large amounts of wealth would pay higher taxes than the majority of the country which is basically living a steady state existence. This also takes care of inheritance tax because children born to wealthy families would pay their income tax the year of their inheritance.
We’ve made a mistake in this country thinking that “the government” is small group of powerful individuals. That’s not how things started. Originally the government was the people, so things like tariffs were paid mostly by businesses as a way to fund public schools and infrastructure for everyone. People voted for tariffs so that they didn’t have to pay for government expenses out of pocket. Starting with the Civil War and then at the turn of the 20th century, that system got replaced by the income tax system we have today, and people have been swindled into paying for government excess (mostly in the form of military spending and tax breaks for industry) out of pocket again.
The gist of this is that framing “taxes” as an expense rather than an income is an effective way to get people to vote against their own self interest. People earning less than roughly $100,000 per year ($16 trillion GDP minus $2 trillion for government, divided by 140 million working Americans) don’t realize that they are short the thousands of dollars that they would receive if people making more than the average paid their fair share.
Consider if the tax rate was a flat 50%, with the excess above $2 trillion for government going to everyone as a basic income. Someone earning $30,000 pays about $5,000 today. But under the new system, there would be $7 trillion going to 300 million people, or about $23,000 per capita. So that person would pay $15,000, receive $23,000, so they would actually receive a credit of $8,000, for a total annual income of $38,000. That $13,000 difference between what we’re paying now and what we could be receiving is a major motivator for the Occupy movement, the Other 98% and similar groups. I find this way of looking at things to be much more inspiring than the usual “you pay us” knee jerk stuff coming from people who have profited from the current income tax system.
Bill Gates has been saying this many times and I really, really don't get it.
Of course when the price of a commodity goes up, demand goes down; but if there's a perfect substitute that's free, demand for the non-free alternative should be zero anyway, so its "price" is irrelevant (as long as it's non-free).
Why would anyone hire a human at any cost to do a repetitive and low-added-value job that a robot can do perfectly, without error, without ever arguing or getting tired, etc. AND AT NO MARGINAL COST??
How does "minimum wage" matter in this scenario?
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Humanity has been wanting to not work since the dawn agriculture, 10 000 years ago at the latest. It's finally happening and we're freaking out about it.
What we need to think about is not how to get people employed, it's how to redistribute wealth so that what you earn is not somehow morally related to the job you're holding.
The solution is universal basic income, not "minimum wage".
Because the robot costs money up front. If energy, maintenance, depreciation, and amortization of the robot exceeds the marginal cost, errors and oversight of the human, then it's rational to keep paying the human.
Raising the cost of the human makes the robot more attractive sooner.
Which is exactly why the minimum wage should rise. Just like the price of coal energy should rise or the cost of unsustainable goods should rise.
People are a limited resource and you can get only so many people over time. It is important that people, who are entities of incredible intelligence should be repurposed to harder and mentally more involved processes.
For a few reasons I think a basic income is a better way to raise the price of labor than a minimum wage.
That's not at all the same thing.
Tell me again why you deserve to profit from my hard work? Or why I deserve to profit from your hard work? Shouldn't we both just profit from our own work?
This isn't to say I don't think we shouldn't help those less fortunate than ourselves. I try to give a decent amount to charity, but I don't think for a minute that everyone should get paid the same. If you don't provide any benefit to society you shouldn't be as well off as people who provide enormous benefit to society.
Take Mark Zuckerberg, and have him do everything he did to build and launch Facebook, working just as hard, but instead of being in the U.S. targeting a product at Ivy-League kids, he's in Bangladesh. Is he worth $33 billion in that scenario? Is he worth $3 billion? Probably not even that.
Every unit of hard work we put in here in the U.S. is multiplied using social and economic infrastructure we did not personally build but rather inherited. Robotic technology is the ultimate expression of that. Whoever owns the robotic technology in the future will not have built that technology from scratch. And when the robots do all the work, why should distribution of the production be based on something like who owns the robots?
The problem is that in an ideal situation, two things will happen: 1) human labor will be replaced by technology and 2) human population will increase with technology. Both trends will leave us with a society where there isn't enough work to occupy 40 hours per week for each person.
As we move closer to this 'utopia', I think it makes sense as a society to decide on a basic standard of living and provide that for every person while having additional lifestyle benefits for those that contribute to society.
It will also help if we move towards more employees working for fewer hours, so we all have more free time and more people have employment.
Obviously, the implementation of something like this is extremely hard and will probably create problems, but I think it is the ideal future situation. Additionally, to implement this type of society, it will require some level of 'redistribution'.
Conflating your concept of "everyone should get paid the same" and basic income is a logical fallacy (false equivalence?). Nothing about basic income requires that everyone's total income be identical.
Further your "you don't provide any benefit to society you shouldn't be as well off" again has nothing to do with basic income. Nothing about basic income requires everyone to be as "well off" as everyone else.
What will society look like when there are only highly skilled jobs available? How would unskilled parents improve the lot of their children? I find it difficult to imagine that a permanent underclass is likely to lead to a society that is stable over the long term.
Basic income will need to come from somewhere. As these costs increase, the people actually earning above and beyond the basic income will be have their income redistributed in the form of high taxes and depending on how high these costs increase over time, will reach a point where the reward != effort. I predict that with a system like this, the costs (and taxes associated) will most definitely reach this point.
Human nature is a bitch. Why would I even bother putting the effort into working when I can get almost the same amount of money back from the government, for free? If enough people think the same way, there won't be enough to fund the system anymore. The government will then need to assign jobs to people to keep the system going.
A Utopia where nobody needs to work sounds great, until you need to figure out how to divide all of the resources.
Most of the great technologies and innovations we see today are a result of a great risk->reward structure. Any system that doesn't foster this doesn't see this sort of innovation.
Basic income is not about utopia, it is about creating a long term stable society where member's basic needs are meet (food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, security, etc).
It's based on history and human nature. My point still stands and it's not a "fallacy"..which it seems you just made up on the spot because you don't agree with my reasoning.
I also didn't say that "everyone would eventually do nothing". I said that we would cross a threshold where the amount of people just getting a basic income would eventually outweigh the people working and putting money into the system, and the system would need to be changed by the government or it would collapse.
"it is about creating a long term stable society where member's basic needs are meet (food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, security, etc)."
The best way to help someone is to teach them to go out and help themselves...not just pay for all of their needs and tech them to depend on the government.
Edit: After rereading you comment I realized you were talking about something else completely. My bad. This is still a discussion I'd like to have with somebody, if not you.
But then again, I have found that earnings usually commensurates intelligence and efficiency. A highly intelligent individual gets disproportionately more money than his counterparts because he is smarter than the median intelligence in the industry.
that being said the problem with valuing all work the same is that people's definitions of what work has any value at all will be different. it's much easier if the work actually has to have value, i.e. someone willing to pay for it.
If you're interested in related material I recommend a book by Martin Ford that's freely available online, The Lights In The Tunnel:
https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...
The trouble is, the idea being so novel, I don't think I could convince any investors to get on board with it. It requires broad awareness and years of propaganda to make it a commonly accepted practice.
Alternatively, I imagine the disrupted themselves should have a pension fund or a trade union seeking out disruptive innovations and investing in them ahead of time. But in practice they don't, so that where it ends.
A bunch of the skills displaced are so trivial (sales clerk? taxi dispatcher? a person to look up airline tickets and report back what the prices are?) that anybody can (and will) claim complete mastery of those skills and excruciating unemployment caused by your startup.
Conceivably, someone who held employment in a disrupted profession for 10 years could qualify.
Alternately, retraining could be open to anyone who comes in, if not too many people come in practice there is no need to keep the doors closed.
Like I said, I don't have a good answer.
If you do end up making as much as the original industry it's because you are doing MORE than the original industry in which case you now have to question if the original industry didn't deserve to be destroyed.
Everything that can be software, will be software, what needs to happen is that the number of things that are software needs to outnumber the things that exist now. Software will create work for people to do as long as it keeps pushing what we can do as people. People need to adapt to a world with software at the heart, everything else is very dangerous.
And what do they do? Administration and process? Easily automatable. Hiring and firing (teams do this better), "magically know what to do in uncertain times" (guess my views). A lot of this can be replaced with high trust, open environments and "team empowerment"
But when do turkeys vote for Xmas?
This comes from (iirr) Gary Hamel (https://hbr.org/2011/11/fire-all-the-managers)
This is false. With any revolutionary change in technology, jobs lost in one field will be jobs gained in another.
The agricultural revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when farmers were replaced. The industrial revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when small merchants were replaced. The software revolution won't either.
It's not that there is to little work out there, the issue is are economy keeps changing so rapidly that people are unprepared for new occupations. Worse while low skilled jobs that are often easiest to automate, productivity increases also kill off some high skilled jobs. And people are both reluctant to higher workers for less than they where making especially if they have been out of work for a while.
Actually, it did. The labor oversupply crisis fueled the World War 1, which killed the bulk of the displaced agriculture workers. Had everyone been productively employed, there would be no one left to fight the war.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/242gea/47_of_all_...
To put it shorly, sure, living wages will probably be forever affordable to a large hypothetical company in a future where software/hardware is extremely advanced: tasks like art asset creation, customer support, advertisement, get increasingly cheaper, relatively. But it won't necessarily make sense to pay a large wage to workers on non-core activities (a few developers/designers/engineers/managers): income inequality and maybe unemployment should tend to rise.
I believe the US will soon be forced to adopt increasingly European-like well-being policies to amend this trend. Possible measures that come to mind are rising minimum wage , providing incentives to hiring, increasing taxes at the high income end, providing universal services (the health care reform comes to mind).
We're moving from machines which are better than humans at specific tasks to machines which are better than humans at general categories of tasks.
This is a fundamentally different situation. The new jobs that are created will also be filled by robots/software.
So then what?
Take for example my scenario at work: I want to move mountains and can get times more work done than I am able to do now. How do we do it? Extract the routine tasks and assign it to a computer, or to someone who can follow directions. That would free me to do more inordinate things. Maybe then I can move mountains. Also, become more managerial in my tasks with my computer serving as my subordinate. That is another way of growing. Lastly, diversify my newly found time to more ambitious projects where roads and directions have yet to be paved.
And there's A LOT more people now...