Silicon Valley doesn't create jobs; it's wiping out middle-class jobs
cnn.com
cnn.com
"And if you think your own job is safe, think again. New research predicts that nearly half of all jobs are susceptible to automation over the next two decades."
So silicon valley is bad _because_ they find more efficient ways to do things? Should we also be upset with anyone who sells a refrigerator, for making all those poor iceblock-expeditions and milkmen obsolete? Does the "\"sharing economy\"" (my quotes around their quotes, for how much they quote that term) mean that by using our cars, homes, tools, etc. more efficiently, and buying less new stuff, we're actually saying "drop dead" to the people who would have manufactured new things?
If there's a large number of people who hold degrees, who don't need the degree for the job they have, isn't that a fault with our education system? What about that bizarre arrogance that so many had in the 80s, where they thought their kids must have a degree so they don't end up in a "blue collar" job? So many would be earning good money now if they'd just gone to a trade school, and learned welding, plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, etc. instead of training for one of the office jobs which software has now made largely obsolete.
Ironically, we can attribute the flourishing of trash articles like these to the new media landscape that has arrived due to the emergence of new technologies...
Case in point, the mass hysteria around daycare sexual abuse and satanic rituals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
My point is that the barrier to entry for shoddy journalism is so low that articles like this are flooding the medium more than ever.
While I generally agree, it's up to us as a society to determine how new technologies are used. There's a difference between doing nuclear research and the research itself being the reason for nuclear weapons. People were responsible for the weapons / using technology in that way, but it is a fine line!
Silicon Valley isn't trying to fuck over Millennials. Like a paperclip maximizer, it doesn't care either way.
Exactly. People think other people are responsible and have some evil plan, while this is all Moloch's doing. Everyone follows their icentives perfectly, and the combined system drives us down to hell.
Ultimately, these companies can easily trick folks into undervaluing their own labour. Now, I grant you, the folks involved are free to make that decision. But at minimum it should be an educated decision, and this is where the role of government or organized labour institutions can play an important role.
Meanwhile, long-term, we are almost certainly going down the path of increasing automation, and that means we must, as a society, have an open discussion about what that means, and what might need to be put into place to try and mitigate some of the downsides (which is, of course, why the concept of a minimum basic income has re-entered the popular discourse). That's not to say that this trend is a necessarily evil one. We shouldn't be trying to preserve the jobs of the poor buggy whip makers. But it may very well mean a sea change in the way society views work, government assistance and the social safety net, health care, pensions and old age support, etc.
It probably isn't a very original insight, but at some point not long ago I realized that every market turns into race to the bottom as it matures.
So silicon valley is bad _because_ they find more
efficient ways to do things? Should we also be upset with
anyone who sells a refrigerator, for making all those
poor iceblock-expeditions and milkmen obsolete? Does the
"\"sharing economy\"" (my quotes around their quotes, for
how much they quote that term) mean that by using our
cars, homes, tools, etc. more efficiently, and buying
less new stuff, we're actually saying "drop dead" to the
people who would have manufactured new things?
We can let half the world starve, or we can educate and build for the future instead of the next big prophesied exit or fiscal quarter..
The fact is, tech has fundamentally restructured the labor market. Some classes of people will do well, and some will lose out. It is not good or evil. What will really determine whether we win out as a society will be how we invest in things like education and infrastructure. Arguments that attempt to write off tech full cloth as evil are useless, as are the pollyanas who think tech will solve everything.
If he's right about the automation part (I think he is), and if we're as stupid as we were in the 1930s, then the class of people who do well is likely to be quite smaller than the class of people who lose out big time.
Automation is wonderful. Destroying jobs is amazing. For most jobs, anyway. The only awful thing about that is the loss of revenue. And the stigmatization of the unemployed.
With technology that destroys more jobs than it creates, we don't have many solutions. We could generalise the 4 days work-week. Then 3 days… Or we could try unconditional basic income. Both, maybe? Or, we can wait until we're all deep in the poo, such that we get an increasing number of violent uprisings, leading to revolutions or fascism. Again.
Right. Increasing efficiency is a double edged sword, and we will have to walk a very fine line if we want to make this ongoing tech revolution work for the greater good.
EDIT: 'nostromo @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008
As is techno-determinism, in which we pretend that technology determines the structure of society rather than society choosing what sorts of technologies it builds.
Moreover, society itself doesn't really control itself, it's just a big group of agents with different goals and ideas, that all follow incentive structures. It seems much easier for a new technology to change the society than for the society to decide "what sorts of technologies it builds".
Besides, you're begging the question. The jury is still out on whether or not overall quality of life will in fact decrease. Historical trends strongly suggest otherwise. Let me be clear, I'm not saying everything will be dandy. I just don't know. And you don't either.
But I accept that there is some grayness around the idea of intent. I think that that gets resolved with the concept of responsibility. Once the possibility that our actions could be causing harm is raised, we have the responsibility to be aware of this and avoid it if we can, otherwise we are just as culpable as someone who 'intended' harm. Not taking the possibility seriously makes us culpable if harm occurs.
I am not a Luddite. The government policy is run by the super winners, whose interest is not so much about the losers, except by getting votes from the losers by throwing some breadcrumbs.
Before getting too dismissive of the article: ask what happens when there are large numbers of underemployeed young men and women with no money, no jobs, no prospects.
They don't just stay at home.
Sure, people need jobs, but not jobs that can be done by cheaper and more effectively by machines. Employment opportunities are not a means of themselves.
This (IMO flawed) economic thinking is best captured by economist Keynes:
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." [0]
[0] Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6 pg.129 "The General Theory.."
Jobs aren't really created by a central authority. They just kind of appear as people find better things to do with their time/talents. The future may not follow the past, but so far we've been okay.
Society can choose to allow or not allow society to be destroyed by creating a large class of underemployeed.
We are choosing a tax structure that allows jobs to be outsourced.
No, they don't do the same thing. If I automate in 5 minutes with software a process that used to take three people with pencils and erasers four months, I have not done the same thing as taking out insurance policies against bad mortgage securities that only I know are bad because I'm the one who took the good mortgages out and replaced them with bad mortgages because the fine print allowed me to do this.
Yes, both do eliminate some jobs. One because those jobs can now be done more efficiently by machines. The other, because massive amounts of wealth was destroyed by financial trickery.
It's so hard to get past that point that I almost didn't read the more sensationalistic presented but nonetheless worthy of consideration issues that followed.
Yes, social media and other internet behemoths are doing alarming things to privacy. Yes, we need to be concerned if we send millions out of work, with no clear path to employment. Yes, we should be concerned about the intense concentration of wealth in a winner-take-all economy.
All kinds of interesting ideas have been presented (minimum basic income, for instance). But you won't find any discussion of them in this article.
Not that I'm disagreeing with your larger point. In comparison to Silicon Valley, Wall Street is a city of charlatans.
I remember thinking along similar lines during the enron scandal. Evidently, employees moved all their retirement account money into Enron stock, and lost everything when the company tanked. There was an article about a couple who had lost $500,000. At the time, I do remember thinking - did they contribute $500k in principle, or was 500K the peak value of their 100% enron portfolio before it all fell apart? If it's the latter (and it probably was), then it's entirely possible that they contributed no more than 50k (perhaps even considerably less) to the account.
Not that this makes anyone feel any better about losing their life savings - but risk is risk... and betting all your life savings on something as fickle as an illusion carefully sculpted by financial giants to pad their coffers, protected by bills carefully designed by lobbyists to protect what might as well be fraud, all buoyed up by public opinion of those chasing the dream of endless wealth [which about sums up the entire financial market], is a gamble no matter how you look at it. What did we learn about gambling in school? The odds always favour the house... and unless you're the house [which you're not, because the house is the conglomerate of banks that propagate this mess], you're extremely unlikely to win.
Does he raise valid points? Sure. Some tech companies are just as guilty as Walmart is of exploitative labor practices, but one can't help but take his commentary with a grain of salt, as he slams "crappy automated phone systems" he ignores all of the benefits of new technologies.
Why can't the US government pass a plan to push us slowly to a real living wage instead of a minimum wage?
Why can't we push for a $12 to $15 an hour living wage across the board and tie it to future inflation?
Not enough to be crazy, but enough that people are not stuck in a perpetual trap of poverty.
The intellectual vacuum of this article can be summed up by the fact that the author chose a fictional character as his Silicon Valley CEO strawman. At least point to a real villain!
Totally anti-tech reactionary. He was railing about how word processors were going to destroy literacy, and we should all write with pencils like a Real Journalist.
Right off the bat- do we? Or do we just give them slaps on the wrist and then big bonuses once the news cycle's over?
If these kids went to college, then surely they learned how to learn, so why not adapt to the market by learning new skills that the market values more? Better than sitting on your ass waiting for the market to adapt to you.
Or join the military, file for disability, or get a second crappy job since your free time is likely spent watching netflix and playing games.
As alluded to in the article, even the low skill, low paying jobs will be going away soon so the time to act is now.
Luddite (noun) : one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest;
From Wikipedia : The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-replacing machinery from 1811 to 1817. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work.
>As anyone who's talked to an automated system on the phone lately can attest, "automated" usually means "worse."
He does have a point there. It takes me much longer to buy my groceries using self-checkout than it does to go stand in line for a human to ring up my purchases. Using an automated phone system is similarly pretty irritating.
You're literally doing the same thing as a cashier, using the same equipment - as long as you don't suck at scanning things, it should take exactly the same amount of time.
! 45k? And here I thought my 30K job in mid 90's after college was a windfall.
$30k in 1995 is around $45k now adjusted for inflation.
One important factor to remember is that the cost of education has risen a lot (even in real terms) since the 90's. A student graduating today is way more likely to carry a substantial student debt so that money just doesn't go as far as it used to once you factor in wealth.
Since you mentioned it, I wonder how much the percentage of graduates that actually had to take out loans has changed.
College has increased in price so much compared to inflation. My parents paid for all their school bills while working part time, you can't even pretend to do that now.
First, Silicon Valley sucks but it's not the fault of "technology". The Valley has been successfully conquered by the mainstream business elite. They've won, we've lost. It's not our territory anymore.
The corporate elite has been wiping out jobs for generations and, to be fair, that's not always a bad thing to be doing. The crime isn't that jobs end. It's that these corporations won't pay to train people up into the new jobs that are created, dodge their taxes and therefore emasculate the government, and lobby for an economic status quo that is harmful to most people.
Second, "technology" (as a force) generates wealth but doesn't distribute it well. There are a number of reasons for that, but one is that engineers don't care enough to change the distribution of newly-created wealth from what it is. If the engineers who build technology are at fault, it's through inaction rather than malice. We'd rather be curing cancer than helping businessmen unemploy people, but when you look at the current socio-political structure of society, it's only set up to go one way on that.
Look: I don't want "jobs", not as an abstract commodity produced because someone decided everyone has to have a job, and that's that. I want a job that matches my skillset (it's reasonably good), compensates me well, and lets me actually contribute to human progress. If human progress has advanced so far that even someone with my skills is mostly unnecessary, I want a means of supplying for myself that minimizes the personal burden of labor on other people (note: not robots, not corporations, people), and enables me to get on with my life and have fun -- there's more to the world than careerism.
Yes, the sharing economy has been built on the extreme precarity of its workers. Yes, technology destroys "jobs". But overall, the problem here is not technology: it's capitalism.
Here in the US, only those with means have a decent chance of getting the kind of education that enables them to join in the new class of workers, which results in a feedback loop and a widening income gap.
It's not that there aren't jobs that need to be done. Instead, your laws and economy are structured to give an advantage to those who used to offer jobs that are no longer valuable.
In my mind, the thing that makes humans greater than machines is our talent to think, design, create and reason our ways to greater things; to do things that require a human touch - like caring for people. If machines are taking care of all the BS jobs that don't make use of our cognitive abilities, that leaves us to do what we do best - think, design, create and be human... and that is what everybody's J.O.B. should be, anything less than that is a complete failure of technology as far as I'm concerned.
Right. Capitalism is designed to maximize shareholder value. A higher standard of living for workers was a side effect. Was.
No other country has a working solution. Japan had their real estate collapse 18 years before the US, and never fully came back. Japan is an innovative country, yet they couldn't crack this problem. They tried heavy infrastructure spending to pump up the economy, and it helped a little.
The golden age for American workers coincides with the Communist period in Russia. That's not coincidental. From the 1920s to the 1970s, capitalism had competition. There was real fear among capitalists that if capitalism didn't deliver the goods to workers, the workers would vote to socialize industries. Britain did that, with the government running the coal, steel, railroad, airline, electric power, and telecommunications industries. It wasn't an unreasonable fear.
So the US had the New Deal under Roosevelt, and strong unions. After WWII, unions worked to keep wages high. There were explicit arrangements in the auto industry requiring wages to track productivity, so workers kept up. The auto and steel industries set the pattern for the rest of the economy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USSR started to look like a serious economic competitor. The USSR built an atomic bomb, H-bombs, nuclear submarines, and a space program. Communism as a system looked like a threat.
That ended in the early 1980s, as the USSR stopped believing in its own "workers paradise". With fear of competition gone, capitalism could take a much harder line on its workers. It took a while, but now employers can do pretty much anything they want to without fear of retribution.
It seems especially dire when you consider that the western world's main export isn't a physical good, and it basically all hinges on the fact that the smart and able are allowed to succeed and produce "value", where as the smart and able in poorer countries don't have those opportunities. India and China make up half the world's population, an order of magnitude larger than the "western world", so I expect that they have far, far more able and smart people there just waiting to take the opportunity if it's given.
I think that when (if?) those countries catch up to our "modern standard of living", they'll quickly leave us in the dust.
At the same time I'm not sure it's quite as possible in such a connected world to have a competitor as isolated as the USSR was. The economy is far more global and intertwined than it was, maybe we'll all just boost the worldwide standard of living with cooperation instead of competition?
I honestly don't know what's going to happen down the road (and hold no strong ideas of what might, all outcomes seem equally as likely/unlikely to me), and neither does anyone else, but I wouldn't be surprised if the world doesn't change all that much. Factories have closed down, jobs were lost, and people ended up in a different kind of factory, now sitting at a desk staring at a computer instead of a machine on an assembly line.
Many people (here on HN especially) seem to think that jobs will disappear and not be replaced. In 1930, no one could have accurately predicted the world 100 years later. When machines started replacing factory workers, I doubt anyone would have expected us to all be staring at glorified tv screens and while banging away on our typewriters as a job, and that the some of the biggest companies around wouldn't actually sell anything physical, yet here we are. So who's to say that the next step is indeed something like basic income, instead of yet another version of the same factory? What if the next change in type of employment seems just as ridiculous and unimaginable today as today's world would to someone 100, even 50, years ago? Job Opening: Virtual Reality Tour Guide, must have at least 5 years experience in navigating WorldBook.com's(Facebook's VR world, launched 3 years ago) .
Well this got really off topic towards the end.
I feel that there's not a lot of concern here about the possibility of falling behind, because we're all entertained to a degree where we just don't care. So many people are always entertained by television, radio, music, sports, infotainment, and as a result they barely take their education, families, and work seriously, let alone global balance.
If we lost the 24/7 entertainment, we'd see a shift in perception and an increase in competitiveness and motivation.