The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
economist.com
economist.com
it's hard to know exactly what they class as "Athletic trainers". For Olympic athletes, there will always be staff. For the rest of us, what would that "unlikely" automation of the coach look like? Perhaps it would start with a movement sensor on the wrist? A smartphone app to track and recommend exercise?
That's not looking unlikely to me, it's looking like it's already here in plain sight:
http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us
https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/HEALTH_AND_FITNE...
(Kind of similar to "lost sales due to piracy" given some limits)
Exactly
The game is enough for you (and for a lot of people)
And that's in the universe of people that do exercise currently.
But the game doesn't replace weights/equipment (as much as the bodyweight people want to convince it's not needed) or more advanced training techniques (and frankly, several "fitness trainers" are misguided)
But trainers and gyms etc are going to keep existing for people who want to go further, or want to socialize, do something different, have specific training requirements, etc
But I'd say that there's less need for a personal trainer than ever before. You can find the how-to use video on youtube, the community on reddit/r/fitness, the training calculator on your phone, etc. I don't see that trend reversing.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/exercise-in-a-pill-...
What we can't emulate in software or robotics, shall be done in biology.
But if you have a friggin strong robo butler, it can provide all the resistance you need.
In that case, the gym and trainer were not actually necessary in the first place. Below a specific level of fitness, it doesn't matter what exercise you do. There are safer and more efficient forms, but all that really matters is that you do it and you don't hurt yourself in the process. Those trainers, and gyms, were serving an artificial market that didn't actually need them (like some restaurant waiters, bank tellers, travel agents, etc).
Perhaps a better analysis of the whole situation is a collapse of existing artificial markets that businesses have used to expand beyond their current market.
All those are strong reasons TO automate firefighting. Machines can function better in heat/smoke/violent structural collapse situations. They can make objective analysis when their own mortality is not an issue.
Nobody made money betting against advances in computing.
I would speculate that the obvious next wins for fire-fighting are drones to visualise the scene from multiple angles, remote control or self-aiming hoses and extinguishers. And various hardened eyes and arms to reach into the fire. All with human oversight, but a reduction in the number of humans involved or in harm's way.
This reduction in manpower is the pattern - e.g. supermarket self-checkouts still have some human staff, but to troubleshoot and supervise.
The biggest issue I haven't sorted out yet is the batteries... LiPo batteries are great in terms of capacity/weight, but if you keep them fully charged all the time, you kill them pretty quickly...
When one is approaching 20%, send one that's charged to replace it. Once the replacement has arrived, return the depleted one to the charging station and do not charge past 80% or so.
If you make the charger smart enough to not completely charge the battery, and you have a ..eh.. Battery of copters available, you've solved the problem
Technological advances in recent years have made life much better in the fire service. Thermal imaging cameras have gotten lighter, with much larger thermal ranges. Gas detection has similarly lighter and more accurate. Breathing apparatus have gotten 'smarter' and lighter, allowing longer working times, less fatigue, and better insights for incident commanders on the status of their crews.
Research in fire development and behavior has led to significants advances in strategy and tactics. However, those tactical decisions are still well beyond the scope of what computers (and computer vision) are capable of. There is just too much variation in how homes are build and occupied (and modified).
Here are just a few of the issues I see:
-Moving an unconscious victim requires a fair amount of care, and I don't think robotics are there yet...
-'Reading' smoke coming from a structure gives a lot of insight into the design and occupancy of the structure. I think that's well beyond the current limits of computer vision and decision making.
-There are many activities performed by firefighters outside the scope of 'putting water on fire'. Responding to medical emergencies, technical rescue scenarios, etc... Extricating a victim of a car crash is a very delicate operation that employs equipment capable of exerting many thousands of pounds of force, and a few inches is the difference between freeing someone from a deformed care and crushing them to death...
Really the biggest issues I see have to do with tactical decision making based on a huge number of subtle variables (which would involve very sophisticated computer vision), and simply navigating in and around a structure. Designing a robot that can move autonomously through all areas of a house, into closets, under beds, etc, while still being strong enough to lift and move a disabled victim, or employee various tools seems like a pretty difficult problem to solve. How would you power it? Batteries aren't anywhere close to that point, and tethers would limit mobility too much.
Personally I think the next 20 years will see continued augmentation, rather than replacement of the men and women in the fire service. For instance, I would love to see an SCBA facepiece with an integrated heads up display providing an infrared image and levels of various gasses that are good indicators of air quality. Once we have that, I'd love the ability to switch between 'tank' air (which I carry a very limited amount of on my back) and 'filtered' air (which would just come from the environment, filtered for particulates, allowing me to save my bottle for when I need it).
I think there is also an opportunity for improved 'mapping' of structures as a firefighter moves through them (again, integrated on a HUD inside the facepiece). That would significantly reduce the number of deaths and injuries that occur when firefighters become disoriented and lost in zero-visibility situations.
This ended up being much longer than I expected it to be... TL;DR; The next 20 years will see augmentation, not replacement. Who knows what the 20 years after that will bring...
As for reading smoke, a machine could be adapted to ready everything - heat, smoke, particle size, explosive residue, gas leak - and factor all that in. I don't mean to denigrate an experience firefighter's skills. But a machine can sense far beyond what eyes and nose can do.
The augmentation idea is very cool. Sensors are clearly an advantage. And soon (sooner than 20 years) the suit will be more powerful than the human. Hands as powerful as jaws of life! A back that can support a roof!
The same for car accident incidents: would a precisely controlled remote robot not be able to more aptly apply the jaws of life, especially in situations dangerous for a first responder?
Of course there are a bevy of situations where first responders are still absolutely necessary. But other things also work in tandem to improve the outcome: like civilian operated defibrillators. One could also interpret the 17% as "17% more effective, through automation, per person employed." This would, as a ratio of field employed to population, look less like jobs lost and more like additional jobs unnecessary.
Perhaps, but I think the loss of situation awareness would be a big problem to overcome (certainly not insurmountable, just the first challenge I see).
I absolutely agree that this is the direction things are headed, I just think the timescale is a little optimistic.
You could probably eliminate the need for most firefighters by installing more and smarter networked sprinkler systems, using different materials for building, building smarter oven's / toasters / whatevers, or any number of other innovations... but all of that costs. It seems less threatening when viewed this way, instead of a robot replacement, but the effect is the same.
Automation is also elitist. I'm betting that a building housing Google's servers has more fire prevention capabilities and far less need of human firefighters than say a sweat shop in Bangladesh.
Another recent trend is residential sprinkler systems. Now imagine a smart sprinkler, with thermal imaging cameras that can pinpoint the source of a fire before it spreads. Then activate a directed jet spray to that source, and you have a whole building fire that has been avoided.
Or, lets say if 17% of fires are caused by space heaters. What if the heaters were equipped with a thermal imaging sensor, so that it cuts power to itself if an object in front of it gets too close to ignition temperature?
Fire prevention will only take you so far. You still need to be able to deal with the inevitable fires that still occur, and you need to have the capacity to deal with them 24/7/365. You can only reduce staffing so much and still have the ability to put a single structure fire out, and many departments are at that point already.
I do see a potential for job losses due to augmentation technologies (exoskeltons, etc) that will enable one firefighter to do tasks that previously took two, etc...
My point is that X will continue to shrink (as has been the trend for decades), but never hit 0, and you can only consider a limited area before response times become an issue (even if you somehow got to the place where you were very confident there would never be more than one concurrent fire in the UK, obviously you couldn't reduce staffing to a single company).
Its a bit pop-sciency, but its very approachable and well explained.
Would the words "service economy" even make sense back then?
Never mind that the latest in assembly line robotics are as flexible as humans in their movement, and can be programmed by demonstrating the basic movements a few times. You can pretty much tell Joe to walk away from his station, and roll this robot into the same place.
It takes some effort to start thinking out of the box, seeing things from a much farther point of view and realize none of this is bad. The human race keeps advancing, progressing, and very often the leaps we make from decade to decade radically change the way our society functions. Cars changed society just as smartphones changed society. These changes force us to adapt and while sometimes it costs people their job, there just isn't that much room for these concerns, as cold as that may sound.
For example, digital distribution cost thousands of people their jobs in retail. Yet are we arguing digital distribution is a bad thing? Only those whose current income depends on the status quo not changing ever really make that point.
I haven't looked at the stats, but I'm certain that cars cost thousands of people in the horse industry their jobs as well.
This is very parallel to the "Would you sacrifice yourself to save 10 people?" moral question. In other words: "Would you sacrifice your own comfort to improve the lives of others?".
And I'm not judging. I've never been in the situation where I had to make the choice... but if I were, I would have very little actual input on the outcome. Nor should I.
"For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others."
Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? Why not fire the bullshit job person and use that money to take my family on vacation 4x a year?
It amazes me that some people think there is some ruling cabal in a dark castle somewhere, deciding how to keep the masses in line. Maybe the answer is less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to automate it yet, or it is not currently possible.
What does the author think of the maker movement? This "Capital Equipment" is now priced at a weeks wage for many US workers. Marx would love it - it puts the means of production in the hands of the common man. I sold capital equipment for years, and what I used to sell for $50,000 you can now do with a $5000 machine. Prices keep coming down, and the machines I sold are no longer made. My job was eaten by progress :)
People will keep re-inventing themselves. It's what humans do.
I feel like these kinds of emergent pathologies are a species scale IQ test that so far we have utterly failed.
One reason bullshit jobs exist is because decisions are made by managers, not some ultimate rational owner who thinks only of profit. In many big companies a manager's status is based on the number of people they manage, if they invent more jobs for people they are more important and get promoted. The same problem exists with corporate budgets, the more money a manager spends/controls the more status that manager has, the faster they move up the ladder, thus managers are incentivized to get as much of the budget as possible and to claim that all the projects and things they purchased helped the company. This prevents the company from even understanding the level of waste which is occurring.
Same thing happens in governments or any hierarchical organisation above a particular size. It is an extension of Celine's second law[0].
For a deeper and much more cynical view of corporate dysfunction read the Gervais principal[1].
>Marx would love it - it puts the means of production in the hands of the common man.
Not sure Marx would love it as it could individualize production and thereby reduce the mechanization and discipline of the proletariat which he felt was necessary for the class to act effectively. I think Proudhon would love it as he was more in favor of individual freedom.
You might be interested to know that Mao tried a maker revolution[2]. It was a complete disaster because it was poorly planned and executed, but shows that Mao was at least open to ideas of radical decentralization.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws#Celine.27s_Seco...
[1]: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
I've always wondered if a very broad range of metrics gathered at all times, and a constantly changing formula picked at the last moment, coupled with an explicitly-written policy that if everyone hit the selected high mark then everyone would get rewarded Lake Woebegone-like, would avoid people working towards the formulae.
If adding new employee costs less than the overhead, then it could make sense for manager to do that.
Arguably the inverse of a maker revolution.
Consider our tax system. Government bureaucracies refine the tax code. The same bureaucracies that fight each year for their budget allocations from Congress. Districts reward Congressmen who bring jobs home. Increased staffing, cost, taxation and knock-on bureaucracy ensues across government. And complexity. That complexity keeps accountants and tax lawyers employed. They are not interested in having the complexity legislated away [1].
Thus a system generating more and more self-fulfilling (and -employing) complexity. To keep civil servants and tax professionals employed. Cabal-free bullshit jobs. (Consider the difficulty with which structural reforms are being introduced in Greece, Italy and Spain. Those countries' elites are being forced to retrench the bullshit. They will likely pay with their seats of power.)
[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/04/15/303356915/sto...
Beyond a certain scale of business, sales and marketing management at those levels sometimes becomes very abstract, and relies as much upon suppositions as actual data. This is why brand marketing still exists, even though far more accurate and precise quantitative methods are available now.
Call center cold calling has a miserable return rate, but for some at scale businesses, it need not actually yield a measurable, tangible, positive return to justify its existence. For some businesses, simply the act of making the cold call itself is sufficient justification, because it puts the business' name "top of mind" in the public.
One of Graeber's points is that businesses engage in these activities because the management in decision-making positions at these businesses believe that if they do not engage in these activities, their competitor who does will gain a competitive edge. Most such activities are to generate some kind of constant, dim awareness of the brand name in the buying public.
Being so dismissive of brand marketing is a big hint that you might not fully understand it. Consider that even companies that are very savvy about data collection and analysis engage in brand marketing, like Google.
This, I think, is basically the situation -- yet the end result looks a lot like the Evil Ruling Cabal Theory of Crap Jobs.
In general, the decision to automate, outsource/contract, or employ is made according to whether (at a very high level), the ability to and cost of automation and/or outsourcing a job (technically and in terms of market expectations); the price of labor; and the number of employees engaged in a company.
Eventually (skipping over the model and proof), what you end up with are, in general, tiny numbers of expensive, high-value employees whose skills are critical to the company, rare and hard to automate; large numbers of cheap, low-value employees whose jobs are too trivial to automate or send elsewhere; and a small number of employees in the middle, who carry out important, hard-to-automate tasks but whose skills are relatively easy to replace. Good jobs are scarce, crap jobs are plentiful, and the traditional middle and upper-middle classes will reasonably fear that they could be replaced at any point by fungible labor.
As we have seen across the world, such conditions create a political and social drive towards correction, though the nature of such corrections are themselves the result of parochial political prejudices (resulting in the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, "living wage" efforts, anti-immigration legislation, the invasion of Crimea, the Daily Express' circulation numbers, and so on).
Historically, such stagnation has also been corrected by the accessibility of new employment markets (physical frontiers, industrial and postindustrial revolutions or, more recently and on a very small and temporary scale, new petrochemical extraction methods), or the destruction and concomitant rebuilding of industry (such as the post-WW2 efforts in Europe). In the absence of either solution, it remains to be seen what will happen to our societies, but the histories of left- and right-wing revolutions are not encouraging.
People jealously guard their career territory through legislative or other means and seek to expand it, even though what they are doing is ultimately of little (or even negative) value. Anyone who has spent any time in an organization of any size has no doubt seen micro examples of this. No dark cabal needed.
However, a company with professional managers and systems that are somewhat separated from ownership or the putative goals of the business itself will, in an unintended-consequences sort of way, end up creating a bunch of bullshit jobs. The company is too big for a single, rational, human owner to comprehensively supervise, and meanwhile there are legions of middle managers who want to increase their relative importance in the company by having more direct and indirect reports.
I don't think it's a conspiracy to keep control over the lives of others, although there are probably a lot of pathological managers who would be motivated by that that. I think it has more to do with unintended consequences. What Graeber is arguing is essentially a conspiracy theory, and it shares the same weakness of every conspiracy theory, which is that it underestimates just how bad things can get purely out of unintended consequences. Managing large organizations is hard. The difference between doing it right and doing it poorly is literally what creates and destroys most large fortunes. And even if you do it well, you're going to get some inefficiencies that smaller organizations just don't have. It's essentially a scaling problem.
Haven't you ever wondered why companies lay people off when they're in trouble? You'd think they wouldn't hire someone in the first place unless they were pretty sure that hiring that person would somehow contribute to improved profitability, and if it turned out that they didn't do so, they would just be fired in the normal course of their work. No, aside from redundancies created by merger and acquisitions, layoffs are a means of clearing out these backlogs of bullshit jobs.
Here's the relevant part of it:
"Can we do the same trick here and stop thinking about competing firms and rather start thinking about competing individuals?
After all, firm isn't a person and can't really strive to maximise profits. Only people can.
And when you look at the problem from the point of view of a rational individual, the situation is pretty clear: I need to work to feed myself and my family. If only 50% of population is needed to do all the necessary work, I have to cope with that. I have to accept a meaningless work if that's all I can get. If it's necessary to keep the work, I have to pretend and lie and cheat and support the whole edifice of bullshit work. Damn, I even have to beg, bribe and blackmail others to create a new bullshit position for me, if I can't get an existing one.
So, in the end, large portion of the population, from CEOs to the lowliest interns, are trapped in bullshit jobs and none of them can really speak against it as they are all complicit and the only alternative they have is having no job and starving."
Why, what problem do you have with Democracy, err, I mean this tax-rate?
Of course, this sort of thing would never happen in a "True Democracy". Maybe they have it in Scotland, run by the Scots, perhaps?
Ostensibly, representatives and senators decided to modify the tax code in this way. Unfortunately, the commercial entities that wanted it really didn't give them a choice in the matter - so it was no decision at all (reduce them: get re-elected; don't reduce them: don't get re-elected).
It all comes down to who holds the purse strings ... on campaigns.
But, the rates of taxation are so arbitrary. Legislators get together to determine fixed rates and tiers of taxation.
Aside from the complexities of accounting (which should be simpler with computers), couldn't it make more sense to tie tax rates to real mean wages? Then, the very rich would have incentive to increase jobs and increase mean wages.
How would that work in practice?
Actually, it only means that with that taxation system, the concentration of wealth was slower than without that taxation system.
Regarding the wealth "naturally flowing towards the already rich", define "naturally".
If they're wrong, then they'll be replaced by algorithms that are better at predicting economic trends than they are.
If they're right, then...
For example, in economics, there might be a need for fewer economists because computers are able to do some of the work that previously had to be done by humans. But they're not suggesting that there's a 43% chance that there will be no human economists in 20 years, or that there will be such a thing as a computerised economist - it'll be aspects of the work that are automated (at least initially), not the whole job.
But the cynicism is well-founded. We might create meaningless work because it would protect the income of the richest (the most politically influential). There is a strong historical precedence for this. It's socially accepted to some degree, due to our widespread belief in the cargo cult of "jobs".
While that might sound absurd, consider the following:
* Companies, particularly large ones, need to have staff on hand for when heavy work hits, but can't just fire them in their off season, not without destroying morale.
* Classic hiring practices are terrible at selecting for actual technical ability, and no one wants to trust the demonstrably valuable work to "the new person." Busy-work provides a way to test their proficiency without ruining the business in the process.
* Management prestige (and pay) is often tied to one's direct report head-count. Worse, stack rankings and similar systems tie career survival to extraneous, buffer head-count.
* Firing someone is surprisingly hard in most companies. A single lawsuit or a few days of outage from a legacy system maintained by only one curmudgeon can wipe out all the (on-paper) savings from firing an ineffective or even counter-productive person.
* Some managers genuinely care about their employees, and want to shield them from the existential and health threats of losing their job and insurance.
In a dynamic economy there will always be lots of demand for labor. At the margins, some labor is priced very low, which is a separate social issue for which I favor some kind of welfare system.
We should be wary of the idea that anyone "deserves" a job or a particular wage, since the next thing we know we are all being required to pay for something we don't want or need. Imagine how much a loaf of bread would cost if we outlawed the combine and required all the workers to be paid minimum wage.
I strongly support a social welfare system to help people adapt to changing economic conditions, but in my opinion it does not make sense to try to pretend that the economy is something it is not. Just because we may nostalgically want manual wheat harvesters working on honest day for an honest wage, someone will come along and invent a combine that drastically increases society's productivity because it frees up that labor for some more productive purpose, benefitting us all.
Some of us in the course of our careers will be forced to find another line of work b/c someone invents a "combine" for our industry. There is nothing noble about holding a job that exists only because some politician outlawed that combine.
Fearmongering about massive economic shifts is particularly silly b/c never before in history has it been so easy to learn new skills, and never before have there been so many low cost ways to obtain education.
Because recent history suggests, when offered money/stuff/income gurantee for free:
a. In the eyes of the individual receiving money, the value, importance and the perceived hard work that had to be done to earn it, as time passes, tends to zero.
b. A vast majority of people tend just take the money and chill doing nothing, while wanting others to work and make more free stuff/money for them.
c. Because a few people tend to do nothing and keep the status quo going, other people who like to break the norm and make value/money are immediately perceived as heretics who break the 'equal misery for all' norm and are perceived as evil.
d. Brilliant, hard working and creative people like to work with people of their own kind and generally go and live at places where they can find them. And such places always exist.
e. 'Right to free stuff' generally becomes the norm after a while and people who the real work are expected to make over the skies sacrifices and offer bulk of what they do 'for greater good of society'.
f. Equality for all in general tends toward, equal misery for all. Over big periods of time.
Could you be a little more specific? What "recent history" are you talking about? As far as I am aware some basic income experiments proved to be successful. See Mincome for example.
You can read more about the idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
There is also:
http://isa-global-dialogue.net/indias-great-experiment-the-t...
and
Eg. Joe can't afford X due to lack of employment, and Bob can't afford Y for the same reason. Assuming Bob can supply X and Joe can supply Y (or some more complicated network of bartering), it seems like should be possible for an economy to arise.
If machines are more productive than humans at everything, it break down. If the most productive infrastructure relies on big capital, it breaks down. If Bob and Joe become too poor, it breaks down.
We are already very effective at keeping people alive and mildly entertained indefinitely. (Although we currently look down on these people as trash for not contributing to society). But I can envisage a time when meeting all my material needs requires almost no human input and meeting my emotional needs cannot be monetised.
As insurmountable as it may seem, people living in and affected by these innovative societies just need to adapt accordingly. It is in our innate nature to do so rather than remain stagnant and perpetuate mediocre jobs that were created as a result of the industrial revolution. People can acquire new skills and leverage themselves to appropriate some of the "handsome gains". Also, globalization would only exacerbate the issue of "dwindling employment opportunities". Nowadays, more and more corporations seek to outsource jobs to other countries due to cheap labor costs. For most people, it'll be a paradigmatic shift in thinking and seeking ways to contribute to society. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will only serve those who can transcend the repressive jobs which are inherently repetitive and meant for a machine to accomplish as they are the jobs most susceptible to computerization.
No, for economic analysis overpopulation is very relevant. Maybe not in the extremely short term, but in the long term when overpopulation strains the finite supply of goods like energy and raw material, this becomes very relevant. In addition to the fact the reversing man-made climate change would also take incredible capital and resources to pull off, it's actually probably one of the biggest things to be seen in economic analysis.
As for the substance of this interesting submitted article, the historical facts are reviewed in a key paragraph before the article goes off into speculation about the future: "For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass." The nub of the article's argument is that new forms of technological change might not leave us with any new forms of gainful employment.
After its interesting text discussion and chart predicting what kinds of employment are least likely to be automated out of existence, the article points out one difference between the world of the past and the world of today: "Another way in which previous adaptation is not necessarily a good guide to future employment is the existence of welfare. The alternative to joining the 19th-century industrial proletariat was malnourished deprivation. Today, because of measures introduced in response to, and to some extent on the proceeds of, industrialisation, people in the developed world are provided with unemployment benefits, disability allowances and other forms of welfare. They are also much more likely than a bygone peasant to have savings. This means that the 'reservation wage'—the wage below which a worker will not accept a job—is now high in historical terms. If governments refuse to allow jobless workers to fall too far below the average standard of living, then this reservation wage will rise steadily, and ever more workers may find work unattractive. And the higher it rises, the greater the incentive to invest in capital that replaces labour." Indeed, it may be that the funding of governmental benefits will become secure enough through rising productivity that many current workers will have children who do not need a job at all.
The Nissan anecdote starts on page 3.
Why? Will technical instructions be automatically generated? How?
This is yet another in a series of economic articles that sound much more like a typical op-ed column than an observation, hypothesis, or proof.
Instead of waiting two to three days for a piece of postal mail, we're annoyed if that email takes two minutes. I'm not going to moralize about "instant gratification" as if it were wrong, because it's mostly not conscious and it's not a moral issue; we're just being neurologically retrained to resist delays. From a website, 10 seconds means "never": it's down, or in an unusable state. We're also (some of us, at least) at a ridiculous level of comfort; we have people who program their garages to heat up 30 minutes before they leave for work, because they can't stand the thought of 45 seconds' exposure to winter cold.
What's not becoming instant is human learning. If something can be learned quickly and will become rote, we can now program a computer to do it. So the things that we need humans for tend to be those that require subtlety or experience. That hasn't gotten faster. It still takes 6+ months before someone is good at his job. That's not a new problem. It's just less tolerated because people are more primed to expect instant results. So we're seeing an aversion to training people up into the better, more complex jobs that technology creates.
De-regulation subverts democracy.
Time to revisit the relationship between capital and well-being. Ricardian theories of comparative advantage drive wealth into the hands of those who control capital, not into the calloused hands of the poor suckers who sweat.
More labour intensive farming would be a good thing. At the moment the US uses 10cals of energy to produce 1cal of food. Pre "get big or get out" it was 1 in 2 out.
Back to manufacturing, it is free trade that has gutted US manufacturing capability. Just look at the trade deficit, the rest of the world benefits greatly, capitalists get great returns on their free movement of money. The US loses taxes, jobs, and wealth and is eroding its long term economy while the short term policy makers make hay.
No, in the last 2 centuries we have simple automated the vast majority of farm labor.
>More labour intensive farming would be a good thing. At the moment the US uses 10cals of energy to produce 1cal of food. Pre "get big or get out" it was 1 in 2 out.
This is an entirely meaningless metric.
>Back to manufacturing, it is free trade that has gutted US manufacturing capability.
Yes but my point was that banning automation would be more effective at creating jobs than banning trade. They are economically equivalent. A port is essentially a machine that produces stuff with less (local) labor.