It's not just the existence of technological unemployment, it's the pace of it. Over the past two centuries, we've shifted from an economy where virtually everyone is a farmer to an economy where hardly anyone is a farmer. We've mostly automated food production and distribution. But it took generations to do it.
Today, people embark on careers in their 20s that disappear in their 40s and 50s. Such a pace of change is distressing. Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out. It'll be local short hauls only, places where there's a lot of human interaction and judgment calls. Long haul semis will be entirely automated. It'll save money and it will save lives, and it will be a huge boon to everyone in society - except professional long haul truckers, who will lose their livelihoods. They won't take it well.
Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can do that. But what if it takes a year or more to retrain? How will they pay the mortgage? How will they feed the kids? People who can't care for themselves and their families feel weak, vulnerable, and ashamed. They'll be angry and act out. They'll listen to political demagogues who tell them what they want to hear and give them scapegoats to blame. Such a sudden social change is politically dangerous.
A lot of the fear that comes from tech unemployment is based on predictions of the future, which are notoriously horrible.
You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline. I'm fairly sure there are exactly zero US states where bot trucking is presently common. Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor in whether or not this even could happen.
Bold predictions are, with hindsight, usually wrong.
A lot of these fearful arguments boil down to a simple syllogism; "if present trends continue, then (bad outcome here)". The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, and you'll see uniformly that the future predictors expected certain trends to continue which didn't, and missed the existence of other big trends that ended up as primary drivers.
People just don't know what's going to happen in the future. I suppose guessing is better than doing nothing, but we shouldn't think that the future guessing we do is actually good or accurate, past experience teaches it's actually really far off.
The fear comes from the unknown. Appalachia in the United States is what people dread. High unemployment, jobs never coming back, addiction to pain killers killing you in your 30s and 40s. Really, I suggest anyone on Hacker News to take 2-3 days and drive through parts of West Virginia, during the daylight only, to see, physically see, what the commotion is about. [1]
If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation.
But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough.
Protect against the unknown, and people will be less anxious about rapid change. Don't protect them, and risk social instability. This is what government, social programs, and taxes are for. Or we can wait for the 21st century equivalent of the guillotines to come out.
It depends on their form. People aren't on drugs because they don't have enough money. People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply getting a government check won't change that. A man cannot provide for his family by simply being alive to cash a check.
There are things that look a lot like welfare to the government that don't look like it to the recipients, though. Wage subsidies could keep a lot of the people who are below the threshold of self-sustainment actually engaged with their communities.
And, for better or for worse, most people engage through their communities with employment. Unemployed people, especially unemployed men, do not suddenly become poets or volunteers for Meals on Wheels.
I appreciate you poking holes in my assumptions and suggestions, seriously, because I don't know how to solve this.
I know I don't want parents/grandparents ODing on heroin in a parking lot with a child in the back of the car. [1] So where does society start to fix this? How do you give people purpose and the means to embrace that purpose?
What good are self driving cars/trucks, machine learning/AI, and all that comes with it if you've hollowed out any substance your species had? EDIT: Maybe the Amish had it right the whole time. Social fabric above "progress".
Make labor cheaper. Not for the worker, but for the employer.
1. Wage subsidy. Tax people like me more to increase the EITC. At the extreme this is make-work jobs, but there is a lot of ground to cover between here and there.
2. Make employment cheaper. Cut down on employment taxes and other expenses associated with employing people.
3. Make employment easier. This won't happen overnight, but, after coming to wage and term agreement with someone, I should be able to hire someone by clicking a few links on a government webpage. And I say "I should" as a person, not as a corporation. Make everyone in the country able to hire another person quickly and easily. If I see too much trash on a street in my neighborhood, let me hire people to clean it up a few times a week. I shouldn't need any kind of HR department.
I disagree with you here: labor should be more expensive so make work jobs (telemarketing anyone?) are driven out of the labor marketplace. I'd rather the government provide jobs in a transparent manner that build, improve, maintain infrastructure, national parks, etc. There's no reason we can't transition from consumers to stewards of our local communities and national resources.
I have yet to see an employer who is friendly to labor, so that's where I'm coming from why I don't trust employers to be the solution (removing minimum wage, wage subsidies, etc). Labor regulation should walk softly but carry a big stick.
Example: We subsidize Walmart employees pretty heavily with government resources. We should not be doing that, and I highly doubt most people in those jobs feel as useful as they could be.
Telemarketing isn't "make work." They are providing value to their employer.
You are hitting on one of my concerns, though: make labor cheap, and people could be hired to basically annoy other people. I want to keep it simple, but there are certain categories of jobs that need to be ineligible for wage subsidy: anything that involves attempting to grab someone else's attention or time. So no sandwich board walkers, no demonstrators, no telemarketers, no door-to-door salesman, no picket walkers. Those can still be employed by businesses if they want, but without subsidy.
If you don't trust employers, you can bid up the wages of labor yourself by hiring people. Think what a non-profit interested in increasing recycling rates could do with access to cheap labor. In fact, all sorts of environmental issues are reduced by cheap labor. We can stop dumping old VCRs on China to disassemble. A local environmental group can collect them, and then use a disassembly line to teach workers the basics of technology repair while breaking out all the components for responsible disposal.
If you want to keep people employed but not willing to risk employers possibly benefiting in any way, well, it indicates that improving the standards of living of the workers wasn't your real concern. Keep in mind that "the government should take care of paying for health care" would fit in with my recommendations but run afoul of your objections.
In China, when [say] 100 people are about to get fired government will negotiate a deal. That might be to have them hire 300 more for at least 2 years, get 25% of the salary in advance and have them provide training for 200.
I don't remember the exact numbers but it was some kind of custom combination like that designed specifically for the type of business.
Interesting idea, I think to some degree we already do this in an roundabout manner. We provide subsidizes (corporate tax exemptions for R&D) and billions of dollars of direct grants to scientific research for example, that can be thought as a wage subsidy for scientists. We definitely need to increase the EITC, and expand it to singles and couples without children. The EITC is probably one of the best ideas to counter an increasingly automated economy.
It is perhaps more realistic to think if those direct science grants as a subsidy to industry - it provides the fundamental research (i.e. much of the high risk hard work) results cheaply to industry, which captures most of the value later. The corporate R&D grants I think you are correct on, though.
I haven't been able to figure out why employment taxes are paid by the employer and not shown to the employee as yet another deduction on their paycheque. Is it because most employment taxes are collected by local governments who don't have power to impose "income taxes"? Is it because it's politically easier to hide the tax from employees so that they don't realize they are paying it?
In the US they are split 50/50 between the employer and the employee and go to the Federal government. If one is a contractor or unincorporated small business then they see 100% of the payroll tax as a self-employment tax.
2 and 3 for sure. Anything that makes it so small businesses can more easily and cheaply hire people will have a big impact. Employment taxes, workers comp, etc may seem like they are helpful, but because they raise the cost of hiring employees, they discourage businesses of a certain size from hiring
> Employment taxes, workers comp, etc may seem like they are helpful, but because they raise the cost of hiring employees, they discourage businesses of a certain size from hiring
The outlawing of slavery made cotton more expensive. We still have cheap t-shirts.
There is no excuse for rolling back labor protections when there is so much wealth available to society; its the distribution that's the problem.
> I know I don't want parents/grandparents ODing on heroin in a parking lot with a child in the back of the car. [1] So where does society start to fix this?
1. Provide universal access to free abortions and contraception so that people who do not want to have children will not be forced into childbirth.
2. End the war on drugs so that people can have access to safe opiates and clean needless. When both are available at your liquor store for less than the cost of a six-pack of beer, you will find that suddenly addicts can both hold down a job because they do not have problems with withdrawal symptoms due to uncertain supply, and the violent and larceny crime rates plummet because affordability and price gouging by dealers is no longer an issue.
I hope that you can get an operation performed by a junkie doctor. Maybe then, if you survive, you will understand that their inability to have a job has nothing to do with the withdrawal.
Ah ok since there are already people that drink then let's make heroine, that is orders of magnitude worse than alcohol, legal.
I tend to forget how many junkie-huggers there are on HN.
>It depends on their form. People aren't on drugs because they don't have enough money. People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply getting a government check won't change that. A man cannot provide for his family by simply being alive to cash a check.
That's a cultural issue. A man can very much provide for his family "by simply being alive to cash a check" and not think twice about it.
Unless the culture finds meaning only in the workplace -- and not in tons of other activities and pursuits.
> People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply getting a government check won't change that. A man cannot provide for his family by simply being alive to cash a check.
I think a lot of this has to do with perception. As in, "how am I perceived if I take a check from the government."
We have cultural norms as to what is "valuable". Maybe someone focusing on their art will one day have more meaning, and you won't have to feel bad taking a check from Uncle Sam while you work on your painting, sculpting, or woodworking skills.
> If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation.
But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough.
You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough.
There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas.
Without jumping to either extreme, since such policy decisions are definitely not "all or nothing" -- I'd just suggest that it's a matter of where you focus your resources. Focusing on social safety net leaves other things unaddressed. Focusing on innovation and individualism clearly leaves some people's needs unaddressed too.
Ultimately, the best (for me) is to have a wide dispersion of countries who make different choices, with the freedom to move between them to find the fit that's right for you.
There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from.
I have a few critiques of this hypothesis.
First, I do not think it's true. If by "innovation" you mean tech unicorns, then sure. But those same places tend to have world class universities churning out highly useful technological advances and scientific insights. Burning huge piles of VC cash to create a monopoly a dozen other companies are also competing for seems like a weird metric for measurng innovation... But I guess that word means different things to different people.
Second, these countries often but not always have strong economies. Necessity is the mother of innovation, and lack of necessity often coincides with wealth.
Third, Germany seems like an obvious counter example to this, as long as you're willing to consider innovation as something that encompasses a lot more sectors than young Internet services targeting highly aggressive growth curves... Their energy industry is highly innovative, for example.
>There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas.
There have been plenty of tech startups in Northern Europe, which is reputed to have the best social safety-nets on Earth right now. They also have some of the best academic institutions in scientific subjects.
> You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough.
I have never seen a libertarian argue for social safety nets. Instead they argue that private charity would somehow rise up out of nowhere and people would give more than they currently do in taxes, all to help the needy. Of course, this doesn't make sense to anyone that knows a) people and b) history.
Libertarianism is a way to say "fuck off, what's mine is mine and you can't take it", dressed up in flowery language. There is no provision in there to help our hypothetical unfortunate who is dying in the street. In fact, libertarianism argues that anything other than some random citizen helping in a purely voluntary manner would result in a trip to the courts.
In short, libertarianism is a caricature. It requires a lot of willful ignorance of how people behave, and a lot of magical thinking about what would result from a libertarian society and how humans behave. Something like Poe's law applies here.
Hayek is generally considered a Libertarian and he argued for social safety nets.
If you get your libertarianism from cartoonists ( and they are extremely plentiful ) then you'd of course think it a caricature. Any libertarian that basically denies all public goods is simply not to be taken seriously. I think Rothbard is generally the source for most of that.
We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes. Some are government, some are not. The peak brightness for the sort-of New Deal approach was LBJ. You may or may not agree, but Charles Murray is at least thinking about this, takes social welfare seriously and has an idea or two.
My argument to other libertarians is that SSI and SNAP are simply in the noise of the general economy, have massive velocity and seem to work fairly well. They're "low load" - they will not prevent you building that new plant because of them ( indeed, it might be just the opposite ).
I'm skeptical of claims of mass technological unemployment. That's partly because machines made stoop labor uneconomic, and stoop labor sucks really hard.
We don't know what our problem is right now.
Now - where are they right? There is a lot of load. When people complain.... Trumpishly ... about regulation , they're not kidding. They're not wrong. Some of it is a rock in the shoe; some of it is better founded. That's not an argument against regulation. It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people. And it fits the anti-elite narrative that's popular these days.
After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value - they think that liberty has emergent properties that create additional value.
What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians. But the shouting continues...
I get my libertarianism from listening to people online who identify themselves as libertarians. They often use very flowery language, which many believe to be persuasive because of its floweriness rather than its content. It's from online self-identifying libertarians that I hear these stupid redefinitions of the word 'violence', for example - no cartoons required.
> We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes.
No, we absolutely have not. Historically, you got help if your benefactors find you personally appealing in some way, but otherwise you're short on luck. An industry might have had a 'widows and orphans' fund, but even these were supplements to other income. And if you had a mental illness like schizophrenia, you were really short on luck.
Even today, private charity really only works for one-off disasters (eg: katrina) or easily-marketable charities (eg: kids with cancer). Private charity does not work if it's not marketable (eg: pancreatic cancer) or if the person needs ongoing help throughout their life (eg: schizophrenia).
> It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people.
Yes, better regulation is good, but libertarianism is against proactive regulation - everything is okay unless someone can prove harm done by a specific party, who then has to be taken to court (because everyone has those kind of resources, right?). Libertarianism couldn't give you the Clean Air Act, for example.
Hell, plenty of libertarians even believe that private courts paid for by the applicants would be fair, and rely on the honor system to weed out the bad ones... of course, I've never heard what happens if the parties refuse to agree on a court. Curly realities like that just don't happen in the libertarian worldview - everyone is a fair, fully-informed actor with equal resources.
> After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value
No, that's an overbroad definition of the political movement, and pulls in a lot of people who do not fit the libertarian mold (myself, for example).
> What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians.
Believe it or not, but liberals are big on civil rights and personal freedoms. Equal wages, equal opportunities, and helping those who have been historically downtrodden to make the playing field a bit more level. They just don't believe in the cartoonish "courts will solve what the free market doesn't" ideology of libertarianism.
Have you never found it odd that the vast bulk of libertarians are white males with skills that are in demand? Libertarianism is just a nice-sounding way for these people to preserve their network effects; to preserve the historical leg-up they have over others.
Never ask people what they identify as. The descent into self-parody is just one of those things. It's really curious to me that basic ideas, like the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, are still such hard nuts to crack.
"Private courts paid for by the applicants" - go read "Machineries of Freedom" by David D. Friedman. Catch the finer points. He writes well; it's just a foreign concept.
His grounding is non-Anglo Saxon law, from the perspective of literally SCA stuff.
I think of the book as sort of a ... Talmudic dialogue on alternatives to what we're used to. Is it something that should or can be implemented? Can't say. Probably not if I had to guess - crosses too much path-dependence.
The framework I use for "what is libertarianism" tends these days to be the three axis model from Arnold Kling.
To wit: conservatives are concerned about barbarism, "liberals" are concerned about oppression; libertarians about coercion.
"... white males with skills..." - well, that's very path dependent. It's also the target audience for say, Heinlein novels. Y'know, nerds :) The internet of the '90s was a big vector for libertarian ideas. "Normal" people won't bother with it. So you have had 20+ years of libertarian bikeshedding online.
Finally, the Clean Air Act... it's easy to forget the junkyards full of cars where all the air control stuff just stopped working, to forget the rather steep learning curve, to forget it all really didn't work out until adaptive control in engine control modules became commonplace. To treat it as ... "holy writ" ( uggggh, horrible metaphor ) is leaving a lot of information on the floor.
Yeah when unemployment in California tops out at 350 every two weeks after taxes it's a joke to call it a safety net. It's also a joke to tax the unemployed when we refuse to tax billionaires.
Where most economists advocating the policies behind automation and globalization have lost the plot is they map the relative resilience at the macro level of nations that they observe to the micro level of individuals. The map is not the territory, and I've yet to see solid evidence in economics literature that rigorously tests the assumption that what is good for the nation at the policy and aggregate level is automatically good for individuals as well.
I can't help but feel that your comment is both entirely valid, and also indicative of the (or at least a) general problem. I can't help but think that something is lost when viewing these through a computer screen. At least in a car the scale isn't abstract. It's right there, and there's no turning it off. The best you can do is drive away, and the time that takes is itself part of the experience.
"The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, "
My favorite is one of the first of such modern predictions:
"I have an asthma that the doctors have warned me should give me great consideration regarding my future health. My only consolation is that the total of medical knowledge has doubled during the last 7 years, and should our venerable surgeons continue to gain as they have up till now, those in the future will suffer less than I. Indeed, if my parents could only have so arranged their affairs such that I was born 25 years later than I actually was, then I believe I would live in an era where medical knowledge should have a cure for my ailment."
That was Laurence Stern, writing in 1759 (in Tristam Shandy). He was dying of tuberculosis, which he referred to as an "asthma". In fact, if he had been born 25 years later, he still could have easily died of tuberculosis. The first antibiotic (not counting some minor sulfa drugs) was Penicillin, discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928.
That was 169 years later than Stern was writing. Quite a bit more than the 25 years that he thought would be necessary.
We don't have to guess though, the fundamentals are there. It'll be safer. It'll be cheaper. How would it not happen? It doesn't seem bold at all to think people won't be driving manually in the future.
Some trends will always hold true; cost of hardware goes down, capabilities of software goes up. I don't think anyone is saying it'll happen in 7.8 years, but as the HN group is aware, we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale. There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this?
> Some trends will always hold true; cost of hardware goes down, capabilities of software goes up.
That's not at all true, or at the very least, it requires a raft of other assumptions which may not hold, to all stay true, in order for the consequence to stay true. Like for example the cost of rare earth metals, good trading relationships between nations, and so on.
> we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale
I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars.
> There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this?
There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time...
>That's not at all true, or at the very least, it requires a raft of other assumptions which may not hold, to all stay true, in order for the consequence to stay true. Like for example the cost of rare earth metals, good trading relationships between nations, and so on.
Sure, those lines aren't monotonically decreasing/increasing but the trend isn't likely to reverse direction any time soon.
>I'd agree, but only for a very narrow set of "solutions". Scaling something like twitter is just in no way whatsoever equivalent to scaling something like self-driving cars.
There'll definitely be a costly hardware buy-in for a lot cases, but some applications of AI might only need a camera - say, a replacement for a cashier at a grocery store.
>There is a risk, but there are risks of many things happening. My guess is that we're not going to handle this. Just as in software development we have the YAGNI principle, I don't think it's a good idea to make policy based on future predictions that are very cloudy at best. Sure, there's a risk it will happen, but there are actual problems here today demanding resources and time...
I think it's worth discussing because waiting for the bad outcome to happen before trying to handle it could be too little too late. Even if the percentage risk of an economic shock is low, the magnitude of the potential damage is high.
The average pre-tax income of the bottom 50% has stagnated since 1980 at about $16,000 per adult [1]
These people are more likely to live paycheck-to-paycheck and more likely to work jobs which might be targeted by automation. I think it's a recipe for disaster.
I don't think you're taking into account the inevitable regulatory and legal issues that will slow or halt the progress of self driving trucks in the coming years. The moment a robot kills a family with young children on the road you will see policy banning their use show up in the halls of congress so fast it'll make heads spin.
We have regular mass shootings, and yet guns are still a protected industry.
As much as many might believe that moral outrage drives policy, the reality is that in the US, industry drives policy.
The transportation industry is powerful, and the transportation labor force is incredibly weak. I think we'll see the national government push for accelerating autonomous vehicles long before we see them push for banning them.
Yet those who are regulated cannot be expected to simply salute and execute. There kind of has to be a dialogue. And as things get more "competitive", the allure of seeking rents in the capture of regulation shines brighter.
I think autonomous vehicles mean there won't be a transportation industry, per se. There would have to be some barrier to entry that's not readily apparent now. After all, "Uber for self-driving semis" under an Amazon style aggregator ...
> I think the industry will have the safety numbers to back up any policy decision
Why are you then confident that safety numbers will carry the day? When someone is killed by a driverless car, that's going to be an emotional issue, and the appetite for cold hard data may be limited.
If safety numbers were really what people were after, it's hard to see how the US would have the gun culture that it does.
Engineers put far too much faith in data, and it's why they're often so bad at politics. Look at the incoming president; what people want is frequently more important than what is.
You might be right, but it people really cared about car deaths they would be banned. Almost a million people are killed every year due to cars, 10x injured.
You're right, I'm projecting a level of reasonableness that may not be there. It will be an emotional issue, and it will probably be influenced heavily by how the media decides to play it out. Elon Musk is literally every millenial's hero, if it takes long enough that the voting population shifts heavily into that demo getting the support would be easy. But maybe not right now.
>You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline.
Are 20 years a "near-term timeline"? Because all it takes is for self-driving cars to be approved for market, and today they are under heavy testing, and we even have some (Tesla etc) where while not "self-driving" they are very close.
It's not like some feature cpu/storage/battery/etc technology, where some lab breakthrough or another frequently gets reported in tech outlets, but it never arrives.
This is a mature field, with multiple multi-billion investments and heavy activity.
> Are 20 years a "near-term timeline"? Because all it takes is for self-driving cars to be approved for market, and today they are under heavy testing, and we even have some (Tesla etc) where while not "self-driving" they are very close.
You know, it's funny when people talk about job disruption from tech, one of their key platforms is that things are changing so much faster now than they used to be. That's one of the things that's supposed to be really different about 2017.
If you accept that as valid, then 20 years is a preposterously long timeline, and nobody could take seriously a prediction that far out. As an example -- in 20 years time, Hyperloop could easily become the dominant form of transportation, leaving people to shrug off as irrelevant the self-driving car stuff. Not saying that's going to happen, just saying that 20 years is so long, that level of change could happen in the same timeframe.
Me personally - in terms of the economy, available goods & services and such, I think you can take a really good guess 1 year out. 2 years out it's a bit fuzzy but still OK. 5 years out you've only got the broad outlines. 10 years out, you're just straight-up guessing.
>If you accept that as valid, then 20 years is a preposterously long timeline, and nobody could take seriously a prediction that far out.
I accept it ("things are changing so much faster now than they used to be") as valid AND I don't find 20 years a "preposterously long timeline".
"Much faster than they used to be" is not instantaneous, it just means that in the ancient world it took millennia, in the industrial world centuries, in the electronics world decades, and in the internet world years.
But self-driving cars are more in the electronic's world than the internet world. It's not like they are some new website or web business that takes over in a couple of years or so.
They need engineering work, safety tests, government compliance, infrastructure, etc, which take decades.
>in 20 years time, Hyperloop could easily become the dominant form of transportation
No, it wouldn't.
>20 years out? Unrecognizably different.
Hardly. 20 years is a perfectly good horizon to make realistic predictions. 1996 to 2016 for example: more mobile, more internet (which tons of people rightly predicted) would be totally correct. Policy decisions work in even larger timelines than that. Only superficial crap wouldn't a 1996 be able to recognize about 2016.
Self-driving trucks are a lot more likely than hyperloops to every possible location. Who's going to build the hyperloop to the Best Buy in Moorhead, MN?
Twenty years ago, accessing the internet from your cell phone wasn't "presently common". Twenty years is a long time in tech terms. Self-driving vehicles are just on the verge of becoming viable. And it's not some oddball garage startup stuff... giants like Google, Tesla, and Apple are throwing their full weight behind it. They see this as a future market worth hundreds of billions.
And why? Because driverless trucking solves tremendous problems. It's less expensive. It's safer. I'd feel much, much safer on a highway filled with robot trucks than I do on a highway filled with fallible humans with limited reflexes. So yes, yes. It will happen, despite resistance, because it will be so much better than what we have now.
And I'm not fearful about the future. But others are, and for good reason. In general, I think it'll be great. If I was a 35 year old trucker looking at seeing my industry evaporate when I'm 50, I wouldn't be so positive.
> Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor
The need to replace truck fleets would be one reason why it won't happen overnight. It would take time to replace millions of expensive vehicles.
A career lasts 40 years. Once the technology is good enough to deploy in one instance, how long until it is dominant?
Say it takes 10 years to replace most of the fleet. That still means someone driving a truck at age 25 will be facing an extremely different job situation at age 35.
We could use the tech to enhance the worker instead of replacing the worker, though. Right now, drivers are limited in the number of hours they can do in a day, for safety reasons. If drivers become mobile managers, there is still a need for them. Still less of them, obviously, but it does mean we don't suddenly get rid of 80% of their job openings in 10 or 20 years.
I agree that it won't happen overnight, but I would guess that with really popular models it will be very cost effective to retrofit the trucks with an automated system.
I think it comes down to what you mean by "soon". I would be surprised if in 10 years a huge number of trucking jobs hadn't already been replaced, and in 20 years they will almost gone outside of a few niches.
You're assuming no countering disincentive that would offset those savings. How much will the operators pay for software liability license, so if their truck does crash, someone gets paid out? How much will the annual software updates cost?
These sorts of things get waved off with tech enthusiasm as things that will just somehow get figured out; this leads to a straw man where the real costs of human drivers today are compared against the hypothetical, unknown, but believed to be effectively zero costs of the glittering future.
Not a very fair comparison I'd say, comparing fantasy to reality. We'll see how it shakes out in the years to come.
These answers are the speculative tech-positive viewpoint that is the conventional wisdom on HN. But since this hasn't happened yet, I think it's important for you to acknowledge that these are projections based on no actual data. They should be afforded an appropriate level of credulity.
The key trend we're concerned about here is technology increasing productivity. That's a long-term trend (you can go back to the wheel, writing etc. if you want to stay in the domain of humans) that has accelerated over time, and hasn't shown any sign of letting up.
Output increases because people are freed up; when what they used to do is more efficiently done with technology, they can apply themselves to something else.
What's the end of that trend?
For my part, I can think of only three ends.
A) We stop creating new technology. The trend of development simply ends. We learn nothing more that can be used to increase efficiency. We know everything there is to know that can be applied to production. Seems unlikely and is contrary to the history of life on the planet.
B) We invent technology that replaces people with low ability - not low skills, but low ability, so that they can never be productive - completely. This is part of what we're concerned with in this article.
C) We start modifying people to increase their abilities to keep pace with what our technology is able to do. Seems dystopian.
Another way to put it is that technology can do an increasing proportion of what a person can do on their own. It's a trend line that has increased throughout history. There are only three extrapolations: the trend line stops short of 100% (case A), the trend line goes past 100% (case B), or our own capability starts growing at least as fast as technology (case C).
Do you have any reasonable argument about how the transition between the first real self-driving truck¹ being around and more than 90% of the trucks being self-driven could take more than 5 years?
The only way I can imagine it would take this long is if governments just prohibit it. Even then, they'll get a big chunk of the market in 5 years.
1 - By real, read commercially available, that can run into any reasonable road without anybody inside.
We have a terrible history of giving the opportunity to switch careers. I suggest you look into the history of former mining or steel towns in the US and UK. The majority of "regeneration" has been from younger people coming into the market rather than former workers being given opportunity. A significant proportion spend their lives depressed, broken and unemployed for the rest of it. Some of those communities never recovered.
If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work.
It wasn't "a problem" in the past as the scale meant that it was possible to ignore - unless you happened to live near one of those former industrial towns. This time the scale is such that ignoring it will potentially take us near anarchy. It will have to get very close for governments to do something actually substantive.
For many people in dying rust belt towns, no amount of "real retraining" is going to make a difference. Universal access to all the skills in the world is of little use when realizing that value means having to leave your family home, the only community you've ever known, and move to a scary metroplex. Everything costs more there! The people are different - they look different, talk different, think different, work different.
The obvious response to this, of course, is that if people in dying rust belt towns have skills then jobs will come to them. This makes sense! Why put your factory or office in an expensive city when it can go in a cheap small town? Clearly a ridiculous notion, right?
The problem is that whole towns don't re-skill at once. Ten or twenty or fifty thousand people don't become educated, experienced professionals all at once. It happens in drips and drabs, a little bit at a time. If you're in a major metro area, this means the professionals come to you. If you're in a small town, you've probably either shut down or paid out the nose to import a handful of experienced and educated professionals to run the automation.
And all of this is making some pretty big assumptions, too. Not everyone wants to start over at the age of 40- or 50-something. Not everyone has the mental or physical acuity to do so or wants to go head-to-head with more energetic 20-somethings. It's humiliating, to a great many people, to have to accept that the trajectory of their lives has been a dead-end. It's a terrifying risk to leave behind everything you know and look for a new life and a new career. Even if all the education and training in the world was 100% free in every way, those would still be true.
Trucking is different than mining in the sense that truckers are scattered throughout the entire US. Mining was especially impactful to certain towns because the main industry in those towns was mining. That said, I have no idea how it will play out. It would just seem like spreading the burden geographically solves one of the issues, which is the necessity to move to find a job.
>For many people in dying rust belt towns, no amount of "real retraining" is going to make a difference. Universal access to all the skills in the world is of little use when realizing that value means having to leave your family home, the only community you've ever known, and move to a scary metroplex. Everything costs more there! The people are different - they look different, talk different, think different, work different.
Then we have to talk about the fact that under capitalism, these people are condemned to starve. Only something like a basic income can really help them.
Let's also talk about the fact that under a basic income, these people will be absolutely miserable.
They don't want money. They want work. Their identities revolve in no small part around dignity rooted in a fair day's work for a fair day's wage. Accepting charity is humiliating for them because it implies they cannot earn money. How do you think these people would feel about the prospect of being paid a basic income for life when they cannot work?
It's humiliating beyond words. It's patronizing as all hell. It strips them of all respect, all dignity. It leaves them unable to look at themselves in the mirror, because they are now worthless in their own eyes. What do you think that does to a person?
In one sense, you're absolutely right. Only something like a basic income can really save them. In another, also very important sense, a basic income will destroy them. Not by death, but by unmaking who they are.
I think you're somewhat right. Anecdote != data of course, but here's mine.
Grew up in a rural area, of about 3K people. Lot of farmers, and this was the '90s so lot of broke farmers. (Family farming economically collapsed in the mid '90s and is hard to make work even today).
(Big alcohol problem. County next county over had a huge _huge_ meth problem. Got the impression they were a former logging/mining town, then things got Bad.)
Heard a lot of stories about folk whose pride wouldn't let them use welfare, and some "avoid charity of any kind" people. Kind of folk where it'll be a hard pill to swallow to use charity to feed your family. (They'd do it, but only when things got bad and then only once or twice)
I'm not sure what would happen to these people if you said, "Hey, here's $30,000/year for free (avg income, today, of that area), for nothing, when you broke your back for $15,000/year last year."
It's going to be an interesting day when these people want to work, NEED to work to earn money (because elsewise it's charity, and you've failed as a man (woman?)), but there are "no" jobs for humans. Unless suddenly magically employers start paying good money for 6 hour/week blue collar minimally training positions (so probably not robot repairfolk, although maybe). But this is a dream because (late stage) capitalism.
Is busywork really that much less humiliating? I'm not going to dig ditches so that someone else can come and fill them up in time for me to dig them again.
What if we create factory amusement parks, where people go to build things for a wage that nobody will ever buy? Does that seem any less patronizing?
Everybody is going to have to shift their sense of identity, self-worth, ambition, etc. in the years to come. I don't see any way out of this.
If the problem is that there are no jobs, then "faking it" seems so much worse than simply providing a basic income, and encouraging education, non-profits, civil service, startups, etc.
Myself, I don't see a good answer. Busywork isn't going to cut it. Workers are harder to fool than many give them credit for. Plus, this approach yielded Saudi Arabia, and it's not going well for them right now.
Attitudes are going to need to shift, but that doesn't happen overnight. That happens over the course of multiple generations... which is the issue, because economic shifts are much faster now.
The populations we're discussing don't want either of those. They want to have back what their culture remembers as... not glory days, but days when hard work was valued and was enough.
I've always thought that ecological conservation work might be a decent solution (to redundant mine workers and the like refusing welfare/UBI). Reclaiming former mining land for forests via tree planting and land stabilisation etc is an important job that will pay dividend in the future. Not really hard to re-skill for that, it's still hard manual labour, and it's a positive for the environment. There's also forest fire mitigation/fighting work, volunteering and so on.
>It's humiliating beyond words. It's patronizing as all hell. It strips them of all respect, all dignity.
Welcome to how many of us feel about wage-labor in the first place.
>In another, also very important sense, a basic income will destroy them. Not by death, but by unmaking who they are.
I need a good term for the extreme sense of entitlement inherent in yelling loudly, "Yes, definitely, give us a more brutal capitalism in which market forces override workers' preferences!" and then appending, "Except when doing so would violate my sense of identity".
Since when was imagined personal identity so sacred, let alone that the imagined personal identity of this particular demographic should be far more sacred than the imagined personal identities of everyone else put together?
What gives these people a right to live out their "identity" as blue-collar wage-workers, receiving high wages while rejecting unions at every opportunity, while people like me don't get to live out our "identities" as other things? Should we build custom-made bubble realities for everyone in which we can all pretend the world works exactly the way we want it to, and we never have to face hard truths about ourselves? Should society pay certain friends of mine to be artists, just because they self-identify as artists? Can I have a tenured academic job instead of a computer engineering job just because I "self-identify" with the values of academia more than with those of industry?
Jobs don't exist so anyone can actualize the little movie in their head about The Good Life. Jobs exist to make money for the employer, and arguably to exploit the worker. There are lots of useful things that need doing: infrastructure to repair, housing to build, communities to maintain. I support employing people to do those things: whoever wants to work should be handed the tools and told to show up on Monday because we're building a goddamn high-speed rail system like we should have done almost a decade ago.
I don't support building people's entire lives and livelihoods on lies.
Here, I think, we have reached the root of the issue. You believe that the very identities of millions of Americans are wrong.
You're free to believe that. You may very well be right. I don't know. For my own part, I think that they're unlikely to agree with you any time soon and likely to continue acting in what they see as their own interests.
>Here, I think, we have reached the root of the issue. You believe that the very identities of millions of Americans are wrong.
No, I believe it's wrong that government policy and macroeconomics should be shifted away from the norm for the sake of one particular cultural identity. Instead, I want it shifted so that everyone can live how they think they ought to, without markets compelling anyone.
The unfairness is in Bob getting his unprofitable coal-mining job subsidized while Alice the starving artist can't even get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and of course Eve the Executive getting to exploit everyone else for her own profit.
I think he is saying, the world is changing, and everyone has to change with it. One of the things have to change is this old way of thinking about identity.
I'm saying that lots of people don't want change, and telling them they must change is unlikely to be persuasive. In a democracy, this has practical consequences.
Many people desperately want to be artists. They may go to college and study Art. But the world only needs so many artists. So, if they don't have any other skill, these people inevitably find employment making a low wage in the service industry.
You're right! There are many people who want to be artists! There are many people who find happiness and fulfillment in nature, civil society, activism, music, and more. These people want these things desperately and they want to not have to work to do them.
You're completely right. There are lots of these people. I simply do not believe that this number is large enough to significantly alter the analysis I have offered.
Am I generalizing? Of course I'm generalizing. There's no other way to meaningfully talk about tens of millions of unique, special, individual human beings.
So make it not charity. Make it part ownership in the entities that generate all this wealth. It's not basic income, it's dividends from the society you're a part of.
Capitalism got us this far, but it's rapidly approaching the limits of its usefulness. Time to move beyond it, and not to some centralized government planning, either. Why do we need massive government power structures when all other jobs are being eliminated?
We're discussing people who are inevitably going to view a basic income as charity. You can tell them it's their human right. You can tell them it's what society owes everyone. You can tell them they deserve it for existing.
I honestly believe that how you frame it isn't going to matter. Not with the populations and identities we have today. They're going to see those Other People over there paying them to shut up, sit down, and be useless.
If you want to discuss how people who identify differently would react differently, that's cool and fun. I don't believe we're in a scenario where that's a relevant discussion, though.
I tend to agree with you: without MEANINGFUL employment (and I don't mean some feel good no value job), people's self worth on these areas would tank, and dive into coping and depression.
>They're going to see those Other People over there paying them to shut up, sit down, and be useless.
Right. And what I'm getting at is removing those Other People from the equation. I see that as a completely essential part of the process, and one not many people have come around to yet.
We can't have overlords of any sort for this to work out well. Not a government handing out checks. Not a few companies in Silicon Valley handing out checks. Ownership (if the concept even survives) of the sources of production and wealth generation must be shared equally by all.
For it to work out well, at least.
We can easily not go down that radical path, of course. Continue with small modifications to the systems we have. No doubt that's what we'll try at first. But as you're pointing out, that's not going to be a satisfactory solution. I agree with you on that point.
So I think it's worth looking at what the ideal would look like and then try to find the least painful path in that direction.
UBI as currently envisioned is a half-measure. A stopgap at best.
You know, it occurs to me that this radical idea you describe has a name. It seems like maybe people have tried to get their previously with revolutions.
While it resembles some concepts of the past, it doesn't resemble any actual implementations of those concepts, so I intentionally avoid attaching those labels to it. They do not accurately describe what eventually needs to happen.
I will say only this: you may wish to think long and hard on how all previous attempted implementations went in the same undesirable direction. It's perhaps possible that this is somewhat less than entirely coincidental.
Think about what I've actually suggested here and not the comparisons you're leaping to. As I said, I didn't avoid those comparisons by accident. What I'm suggesting is not the same thing.
There are wide swaths of people who (even though they collect it) rail against social security and disability etc...
Their claim is that they "earned it" and "those people" didn't earn it. Ok, well if it's obvious that nobody earned something then you have the same problems.
The majority of american workers aren't going to see a paycheck in the mail and say "Wow, great this means I can spend more time whittling/hiking etc..."
You're totally generalizing here. There are plenty of people who happily accept their "disability" or Social Security. Do you really think that "work" is the only path to fulfillment? Perhaps you would feel worthless if you didn't work, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who would be happy to hike, bike, go to the library, participate in civil institutions, and play my mandolin, etc. all day long.
You're absolutely right! I'm generalizing about large populations here. I'm doing this because the subject is public policy. Discussing millions of people individually is utterly intractable in such a scenario (EDIT: or any scenario, really).
I do not in any way, shape, or form believe that "work" is the only path to fulfillment for humanity. I do think that in much of the rust belt, a majority of the population has incorporated the dignity of work into their identities.
You are absolutely correct that a great many people love to do other things and find fulfillment in them. I simply do not believe that this number is large enough to significantly alter the analysis I have offered.
>Perhaps you would feel worthless if you didn't work, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who would be happy to hike, bike, go to the library, participate in civil institutions, and play my mandolin, etc. all day long.
Yes, but the problem is to stop insulting people for taking that option by constantly making them "prove" to society that they "suffer enough" to be given automation-money.
I think you nailed it. I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis and think that generally speaking people underestimate how big of a deal being without employment is mentally.
Work gives people a purpose - even if it isn't the best purpose, it also gives people a community - even if it isn't the best community.
I think people in the tech world fail to actually understand the mindset of the majority of workers. They need to watch Dirty Jobs more.
Pittsburgh here. This happened - mills all closed. Tens of thousands out of work. Pure "Capitalism" doesn't exist. It's an economic theory like "market clearing". In real economies people vote. And they can vote to give themselves benefits.
What really happened is that the local economy remained "depressed" until some more of that "market clearing" occurred. Now, a generation later, we are a much smaller city. The mill workers are gone to pasture (with their benefits they voted for themselves) or passed. The new generation works in the financial, service, or "Eds and Meds" economy, and we're doing fine. There is in fact still a good amount of manufacturing in the region. Being "depressed" actually makes us attractive to young adults since they can afford to buy a house here.
> Then we have to talk about the fact that under capitalism, these people are condemned to starve.
No they aren't. At the very least, capitalism in no way outlaws private charity. They are still free to move. Someone might still bring work to them under a scenario you haven't imagined. Etc.
I'm retraining at the moment. I've taken out huge loans and as a family we have decided that we'll just have to be super poor for the next few years while I'm training.
It's a huge investment, and super scary when you are not guaranteed a job at the end of it.
I totally understand why people put it off and hope that a job comes up that they are currently qualified for.
I've been doing it for 20 years, there is no progression for coders in my local area. I started on about 22K and progressed to 30K over many jobs. There is no way into management or team leader as most companies are too small.
For the last few years the coding has been eroded by automation.
Yep. Automation. Most of our clients want websites to sell some stuff. This no longer needs a team of 10, now you need an Amazon account, Facebook and Twitter, eBay, Etsy... or Drupal and other shopping templates make it too easy for designers to cobble something together that is 'good enough' that a team of coders can't compete on price. In the good old days we were bashing out 30K websites and running them for our clients. These days no one spends that much on a website.
We have a few companies left, SEO (lots of interesting coding there) Cloud computing (Perl and Python) Games (cut scenes, testing etc) not enough to support many coders. And again, you can get a job, but no pension, no perks, minimum holiday, no job stability (each time we lost a contract half the team would be laid off) and for me, no progression. I'd like to think in 10 years time I would be running a team of coders. No chance in my local area.
Miners learn 'on the job' for the most part. Obviously the engineers don't, but miners don't go to 'miner college' for a few years to get their certification. So I'm not sure what you mean by 'REAL retraining' - what would suit a demographic that largely isn't interested in tertiary education?
What would you train them in, anyway? There aren't many skilled industries that are looking for that many fresh folks. There's plenty of crappy labour jobs to be filled in places like agriculture, though even these are fading, and only certain places like fruit picking are hard to automate. What kind of jobs do you see this demographic doing?
Not at all true. There are LOTS of jobs in the service economy in most any region. Robots won't be building or maintaining the physical plant any time soon. We need carpenters, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, gardeners - the list goes on. The market will do it's thing to match this supply and demand. The successful retraining programs that I've witnessed just use small carrots and sticks to facilitate this transition.
If I ever get swept to the curb with the detritus of destroyed jobs, I might just teach former truckers how to hijack automated trucks, and then charge for the course on how not to get caught.
Many of the people in those dead Appalachian coal mining communities distill untaxed alcohol, deal prescription painkillers, cook meth, or grow cannabis to pay their bills. If you don't retrain people into lawful careers, they might just retrain themselves into prohibited ones.
And that spills over onto everyone else around them.
> If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work.
Real retraining would be free, universal access to vocational schools and higher education. You are very correct in pointing out the shortfalls of current US retraining programs. Most of thoes came about during the Reagan administration and I think they are first of all a Republican trick to distract people from the need for free universally accessible vocational and higher education, and second of all a privatization scam to benefit people running the private retraining programs. Recommended reading on the topic: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010004030...
I think it is a bad idea to have free higher education as you say. Studying doesn't help. Studying the correct things does. Free education in no way encourages people to study the correct things (the in-demand skills that pay). All it does it make people raise the bar for hiring to 'college educated' for jobs that probably don't require it.
> Studying the correct things does. Free education in no way encourages people to study the correct things (the in-demand skills that pay).
Your argument implies that everyone is too stupid to go to school for the "correct things." Do you realize that the truck drivers had to go to truck-driving school to get their truck-driving jobs? Implying that people are incapable of choosing a field of study that will lead to employment, to argue for denying people the right to education, is a vicious and idiotic lie of the "kill the poor" variety. You should be ashamed for even suggesting it.
The argument could be made that non-zero numbers of people currently choose courses of study that very rarely lead to employment in that field. In such a context, is it unreasonable to consider that perhaps this might continue to occur in an environment where tertiary education is free?
You may also wish to consider dialing back the vehemence of your rhetoric. Accusing people of adopting "kill the poor" rhetoric in response to relatively polite disagreement may potentially be seen as a somewhat less that reasonable reaction.
Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can do that
But most people don't.
Offer retraining of entirely different work to 100 truck drivers whose jobs don't exist any more, and maybe 10 of them will go through on it.
We should do what we can to help those 10 do it, but most people will want to stick with something at least related to what they know. And they don't want to be on direct welfare, even though someone typing out code would think that would be nice.
We can make labor cheaper to ease the pain on people's lives. Raise my taxes to boost the EITC. Make employment cheaper by reducing payroll taxes and all other business expenses related to employment.
And these are tunable fixes. Once you put otherwise employed people through long periods of unemployment, they become very very hard to get back to work. If you keep them working, even part time, it's easier to restore them to full employment should the need arise.
Offer retraining of entirely different work to 100 truck drivers whose jobs don't exist any more, and maybe 10 of them will go through on it.
Assuming that is so, to my mind the salient question is "why?" That is, why only 10? Is it that the other 90 just don't want to be retrained? Is it that the retraining wasn't accessible to them for some reason (child-care, transportation, etc.)? Or maybe some of them started it but dropped out for some reason? Is it that they "couldn't hack it" or is that we don't really know how to retrain people properly?
I would hope there has been research directed at this, as it seems to me that we'd want to find a way to maximize the number of people who do take advantage of retraining, and who ultimately benefit from it.
It's really hard. I'm doing it at the moment. I'm a 40 year old man being trained up with a bunch of 20 something women for a job. It'll take a year and it is really hard going.
It was hard to get onto the course. I've taken a huge loan. I'm shitting my pants. I've got no idea if I'll like the job or be good at it. It's the biggest gamble I've ever taken. The stress is unreal. Most of my fucking hair has fallen out. My body is just falling to bits. It feels like my heart is either going 200% or 10%.
When I read posts saying "Why don't people re-train?" Its for the same reason you don't re-train as a doctor or a teacher or for the police. Because it's not what you do. It's not what you want to do. It's hard to change. It's a massive gamble.
I imagine if you have no qualifications it's even harder.
Demand for a good or service is what's going to drive employment. Why would I keep a worker around, even at zero cost, if I didn't need them to be employed?
When those 100 truckers are put out of work, how is cheaper employment going to make them useful to another business owner?
Long haul trucking should have never happened - that traffic belongs on railroads. LHT exists only because the highways are subsidized by the car traffic, whereas freight rail has to pay for the tracks.
Semi trailers should be loaded onto flatcars, trained to the destination city, and picked up and dropped on a truck for the intra-city delivery.
You're kind of missing the tradeoffs involved in long haul trucking vs rail. Even with highway subsidies involved, trucking is significantly more expensive than rail is. Like, brief google-fu puts 2007 rates at 16.54 cents per ton-mile for trucking, vs 2.99 for rail -- so, roughly speaking, LHT is over five times as expensive as rail is.
Given that folks are paying for LHT, it's important to figure out why. And the answer lies in just-in-time production and pull-based production systems. These systems put a large business value on the timeliness and flexibility of delivery. For many processes, saving $150/ton or so on transport doesn't matter if it means putting another day's worth of inventory into your production system, especially if if it risks producing the wrong stuff.
> Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out.
Before we get there, there is a major problem in that we don't have enough young truckers. The average age of truckers is up around 50, and we need a lot of them. Automated trucking is still a long way away - the technology still has quite a long way to go, and after that, the infrastructure and tech has to percolate out (and trucks aren't cheap).
A few people growing a massive amount of genetically-identical (GM) grain in a narrow band of arable land pilles risk up like a Jenga game. In the US, the median climate models suggest the majority of intensively-cultivated land and surrounding areas will experience significant desertification.
Plus, cities are filled with mostly knowledge and service specialists whom depend almost entirely on massive quantities of goods and food produced in factories and rural areas.
> Today, people embark on careers in their 20s that disappear in their 40s and 50s. Such a pace of change is distressing. Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out.
I am having a hard time coming up with areas where careers come and go in 20 years.
Truck driving isn't one, it's been around since the 1930s and only really aggressive predictions suggest its passing by 2030 - which is more than long enough.
It would be more convincing to name careers that had both come and gone, rather than which are scheduled to go soon. But everything I think of is more properly categorized as a sub-type of a larger career. Punch card operators and VB6 programmers aren't tied to those technologies, they are generic computing professionals who happened to use a technology stack which has gone away.
Can you think of any examples of complete career fields which have disappeared?
I suspect that we'll see regulations that blunt the impact of this. E.g. long haul trucks will be automated, but will require an alert driver behind the wheel.
In the short term I suspect that's more likely. But what that turns into is a diminishment of the skills required to do the job (for a value of "skills" that includes "staying awake and driving a truck for hours at a time along lonely Interstate highways", which may not be everyone's cup of tea, but certainly acts as a barrier to entry). That generally means more competition in the job market, and more competition on the labor side of the equation means less upward pressure on salaries.
It's not as bad as having your job automated out of existence, but it's still not good for people in that market. And I think there are likely to be a lot of jobs that are like that: not eliminated completely, but made in some way easier or less onerous, such that the labor pool is bigger.
As I understand it (and I say this as a fellow "techno-optimist"), one of the most significant challenges is that cultural and political change occur much more slowly than technological change. So it's not that we can't adapt, but that adaptation is exceedingly painful to various segments of the population. We tend to accept certain facts as "permanently true", which ends up tearing holes in society and in our lives when these facts inevitably change. For example:
* Building a long-term career at a single company is safe.
* Traditional college degrees are worth the monetary cost.
* Society can only function if everyone works a job.
I'm a bit skeptical that "we'll always find a way to quickly replace jobs" will stand the test of time, especially when the primary evidence given is, "Well that's how it's worked out so far."
It's not just that it's how it's worked out in the past, but it's that it continues to work out that way every month in the present. Roughly 24% of jobs are permanently replaced in the US every year (which I found very surprising)
"Researchers’ estimates on the scale of threatened jobs over the next decade or two range from 9 to 47 percent. For context, every 3 months about 6 percent of jobs in the economy are destroyed by shrinking or closing businesses, while a slightly larger percentage of jobs are added— resulting in rising employment and a roughly constant unemployment rate. The economy has repeatedly proven itself capable of handling this scale of change, although it would depend on how rapidly the changes happen and how concentrated the losses are in specific occupations that are hard to shift from."
Individual businesses shrinking and closing isn't the same as entire industries and professions being automated or "globalized" away. For example, plenty of tech startups fail, but that doesn't affect the market for programmers in the Bay Area, because plenty of tech startups are being created, too.
Now, let's say the VC money dried up somehow, or we invented an AI capable of programming anything based on a vague description. Lots of programmers would be out of a job.
I'm a bit skeptical that "we'll always find a way to
quickly replace jobs" will stand the test of time,
especially when the primary evidence given is, "Well
that's how it's worked out so far."
Perhaps your skepticism can be allayed by looking at the mechanism. Money, in the form of capital, flows through an economy from providers to consumers. With a functional banking system capital doesn't accumulate. Even when a company like Apple has $200B in "the bank", that money is being lent out to others to build things and start businesses etc. Building stuff consumes labor and that transfers money back to the labor force which then uses it to purchase goods and services. All basic economics but the key is that the existence of money (capital) creates an economic force. Banks cannot simply sit on a pile of dollar bills and pay out 1.2% interest on that, they would go broke. They need to make a return on it so they find people (economic force) who will use the money to create additional value.
In many ways its like "running out of water" which on its face is preposterous. The planet is literally covered in the stuff. The mechanism (evaporation and condensation) which move it around the planet can put too much or too little somewhere but we'll never be permanently "out" of water. It will rain somewhere at some point (or snow) because water is evaporating from the oceans every day.
Economies are very much like that as well, they may have capital dry up in one area (like Appalachia) but it is probably raining somewhere else (like San Francisco). But the mechanism of buying and selling products or services is a constant force to move the money around.
So that money will always find a way to be spent. And that means jobs. They may be different than the ones before but they will get created.
I don't disagree with what you've stated, but I think the disconnect with what you've stated and what the GP stated is that a specific unit of money doesn't buy/pay for the same amout of jobs when applied in different areas (whether "area" be geographic or sector). For example, taking money that previously was applied to 1000 coal miners and applying it towards a software company yields far fewer software engineers.
Additionally, people are a resource, but a very finicky one. You would expect them to move to where there is a need for them, and to do what it takes to make themselves usable, but there are many external factors that make that far less likely than it could be, such as family, property, and various features of human nature. So, as money flows from labor-intensive industries to non-labor intensive industries, or transforms a previously high-labor industry into a low-labor one, what happens to labor as it increasingly loses value? What happens when the value of labor falls below the threshold required for human survival for increasingly more segments of the economy?
Fair enough, but this "what the GP stated is that a specific unit of money doesn't buy/pay for the same amout of jobs when applied in different areas" is the basic fallacy. It is misses the point.
At a microeconomic scale, people are displaced. We saw last week an article on one of the few book binders left in Manhattan, there used to be hundreds of book binders. They stopped binding books. But the number of jobs in Manhattan didn't go down to n - (# of book binders) because in a macro sense what used to be spent on book binding is being spent on something else. Maybe it created a thousand jobs at print shops (for example).
We completely agree that people aren't fungible. Just like cattle die in a drought, people without marketable skills go hungry and homeless. I, and many folks I have talked to agree that one of the reasons you tax business is to fund transition plans for people being left behind by changes in the job market. Whether that is retraining programs, temporary shelters, or tuition assistance for additional education. In my mind I consider that social justice matter to be independent of the macroeconomic mechanism of job creation.
> But the number of jobs in Manhattan didn't go down to n - (# of book binders) because in a macro sense what used to be spent on book binding is being spent on something else. Maybe it created a thousand jobs at print shops (for example).
But the assumption here is that there are still lots of jobs that need people to shift people into. As a resource, we're consistently reducing the areas in which it's appropriate and cost effective to use people instead of some other resource.
This happens. Resources that were previously used for many things are displaced by other resources which are fundamentally better in those categories. Think stone age. Eventually stone as a resource was completely surpassed in almost every area it was previously useful in. It's value has been reduced to the point that if you have a large quantity of unsorted stone material, it probably costs more to sort the useful bits than you can make selling them, and without a local market that wants to use it, you're stuck trying to figure out the least costly way to either store or dispose of it.
I hope we aren't transforming ourselves into the equivalent of stone, where we end up that figuring out which select few of us is capable of contributing in some way is more costly than producing a product slightly worse quality but much cheaper using automation the majority of the time, for the majority of fields.
Hopefully I'm dead wrong and we transition to something far more uplifting, because it's depressing to think this way.
I don't think you have to assume that at the time of the shift there are lots of jobs to shift into, only that as it shifts the economy will create new jobs. Further I think those shifts are on the order of years not days, as things shift over its going to be useful to cross train. For example, right now there is a possibility that trucks can become self driving so if you drive a truck you need to think of three things; 1) How much longer might this be a viable way to earn a living, 2) what sort of new jobs are currently being advertised as unfilled, 3) what resources can I apply to cross train into something different than truck driving.
...because in a macro sense what used to be spent on book
binding is being spent on something else. Maybe it created
a thousand jobs at print shops (for example).
This assumes that there will always be a "something else". Something else for people to work at, something else for banks to invest in. My question is, what guarantees the appearance of this "something else"?
Looking at past examples, these new jobs seem to come from advancements in technology that both improved human lives (and thus were in high demand) and also required human labor to operate (and thus provided jobs). For example, we no longer need nearly as many farmers, but these people have all been freed up to pilot commercial airplanes, program computers, repair cars, operate print shops, etc.
But what if these trends don't hold up? What if the value-producing technological advancements of the future continue to eliminate jobs, but require radically less human labor to operate?
My best guess is that people will be pushed into less technology-driven and more service-driven pursuits. Instead of print technologies eliminating book binders but providing print shop jobs, we will be eliminating print shop jobs and getting — I don't know — more masseuses, therapists, cleaners, gardeners, personal chefs, etc? Basically the service economy we see emerging now — people performing what were previously considered "luxury tasks" for other people.
I suppose I've talked myself out of some of my former skepticism. We don't need new jobs, because we have plenty of "old" ways to provide value that become more broadly affordable as workers are freed up to do them. However, if this leads to a society in which the masses perform menial tasks for the rich who fill a limited number of high leverage technological positions, that could cause tremendous cultural problems.
Actually I was trying to point out a causal relationship between capital (in this case money) in an economy causing new jobs to appear. There isn't an assumption there.
You can flip that around, if there wasn't "something else" to spend money on there would be no reason to have it.
>>In many ways its like "running out of water" which on its face is preposterous. The planet is literally covered in the stuff.
The vast majority of that water is not drinkable. THAT is the main issue. Obviously we won't ever run out of the H2O molecule, but there is a good chance that the availability of cheap, potable water will be a major issue in the coming decades.
... but there is a good chance that the availability of
cheap, potable water will be a major issue in the
coming decades.
Actually there isn't. It is possible that for a given population of people in a particular place on the planet they may find there is a shortage of water, but as long as the sun shines it will continue to evaporate trillions of tons of water which will then move over land and condense out of the atmosphere. Its also possible to get water out of the air where it didn't previously condense on its own.[1][2]
>>It is possible that for a given population of people in a particular place on the planet they may find there is a shortage of water
Yes, that's what I meant. And this can be a MAJOR issue. Not sure why you're trying to downplay its importance. I mean you can look at places like Haiti today to understand the true effects of regional clean water shortages. They are absolutely devastating.
The other thing you haven't mentioned is contamination, which is a lot more difficult for the natural water cycle to handle. For example, underground water reservoirs are an important source of clean water for many villages, towns and cities all over the world. If they get contaminated, you can't just wait for that water to evaporate and then condense back as relatively clean water.
I can see why you think I'm downplaying its importance, I assure you that I am not. I am responding (perhaps too strongly) to the notion that we can "run out of water" which literally we cannot do. The problem is people can use all of the water around them and that leads to a crisis. To address that crisis we need better water transportation. And that has times where it too is impractical, like importing water to the Bahamas because the natural water cycle doesn't produce enough water for the population. Rather than tell the Bahamas "limit the number of people who will need to consume that water" we work on ways to either transport water too, or manufacture water on site. The latter is always possible with the addition of energy. And if that makes water "too expensive" we're back to the "limit your users of water" solution.
Your analysis is correct, money does flow and tries to get used,thus creating jobs. but still, the gdp share that goes towards workers salaries, in 2013, was the lowest since 1929:
The idea of transemployment (work that is not needed, but is created to prevent unemployment) is a terrible idea. Have we really become so brainwashed that we have forgotten that the entire purpose of work is to create value?
Simply letting people not work doesn't remove incentives to perform: the incentives that we have are already broken. We don't live in a meritocratic economy: the Monsantos and Blackwaters of the world are rewarded for destructive behaviors, while advertising allows inferior products to drive superior products out of business. If we have enough surplus to support these massive inefficiencies, surely we can spare enough to support the unemployed.
Further, transemployment actually costs us. It requires infrastructure to create fake jobs.
> If we have enough surplus to support these massive inefficiencies, surely we can spare enough to support the unemployed.
This is demonstrably not true. I mean, it's tautological. We have the economic surplus to support the unemployed, yet we do not. Therefore, the problem is not the lack of economic surplus.
People have noted this apparent perversity for well over a century, but it seems unlikely to change anytime soon. So the question isn't whether transemployment is preferable to some lower-friction redistribution scheme, but whether transemployment is better than letting those same people starve, or die from opiate addition, or alcoholism, or diabetes, or any of the other methods of benign neglect by which society has found to execute the economically redundant.
Also, I'm not sure that "the entire purpose of work is to create value" really encompasses the role of "work" in American society. The creation of value is, to the worker, often a side-effect, since that value in the capitalist model generally accrues to someone else besides the worker. The purpose of work for most workers is to bring in wages, which are necessary for personal comfort, but more importantly (above a certain level) as chips in a zero-sum game of social hierarchy. Extracting value from labor is the province of the employer; extracting wages from time spent, regardless of value created, is the province of the worker. The capitalist market's labor economy is the resulting intersection.
This is just semantics. Typically wages are valuable--I don't know anyone who is being paid in smiles. Ostensibly when work is done and paid for, value has been created.
The purpose of work for many people is to pay for food, housing, transportation, personal pleasure, etc., not to create value. Most people don't primarily care if their job directly creates value, they just want to comfortably survive and provide for their families.
It's fantastic if your mechanism for surviving creates value for lots of other people. We should strive for that.
Anyone who has spent any time in a poor community knows that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.
We will only hit real make-work jobs when we can no longer answer the question "how would I solve this problem, if only I had access to a lot more workers?"
That's not the question businesses are asking. They're asking, how can I solve this problem as cheaply/efficiently as possible? And the answer is increasingly not human labor.
There is work to be done in poor communities in the sense that there is need, but there isn't much work to be done in the sense that not many people are offering jobs (because not many can pay).
Anyone who has spent time in a rich community knows that there's plenty of surplus that could be shared. It's not a problem of lack of resources, it's a problem of distribution.
The problem with redistribution, we're told, is that the current distribution is based on merit: those who provide the most value are given the most value. Joe is a billionaire because he's provided billions of dollars of value to the world, while Bob is starving because he doesn't provide any value. If we take from Joe to feed Bob, then Joe won't have any incentive to provide value, so he'll stop, and society will collapse.
However, I don't think that's true. Joe doesn't provide more value than Bob necessarily--he just is better at manipulating the abstractions we've created around value. We don't live in a meritocracy.
But the lie of meritocracy isn't a complete lie. People do often provide more value if they receive more value. Honest actors do exist and provide value, and while most don't get to be Rich Joe, most don't become Homeless Bob either.
However, with technology, these honesty actors are no longer needed, and the lie of meritocracy becomes even more bald faced. In a future where robots do all the work, are we to believe that someone provides value simply because records show that they own the robots?
Transemployment is just an attempt to maintain the current distribution of resources: ostensibly the transemployed would work for someone, and that someone would determine how much they are paid. And of course that person would be paid more.
I think that a better solution is to drop the pretense that the distribution of resources is meritocratic, and as technology makes it even less meritocratic, we should look at ensuring that the benefits of technology are distributed more evenly. Creating fake jobs to maintain a tiered distribution of resources is only going to make things worse.
Unemployment is not the problem. The problem is that the surplus / wealth created by technology is controlled by the 1%. Redistribute that wealth and the majority of the workforce will no longer need to be truck drivers, or farmers, or laborers. Then, we can start paying people to learn.
I make a good standard of living for my location and I don't really ever spend money so I'm saving it for retirement. If I invest it through standard channels then that mainly benefits the 1% because they control investment banking.
I'm thinking that one of the most disruptive things we could do is to invest our money in nonstandard channels. For example, promote systems that solve problems once and for all through research and then place the solutions into the public domain. A handful of engineers working over the span of months or a few short years could automate everything from wifi mesh networks to drone delivery to robotic home gardens. In a very short time we could remove basic need dependency from the system. Kind of like "a penny saved is a penny earned" on steroids.
Once people are not dependent on a system that tends towards wealth inequality, it would give them the leverage to demand a basic income because they could choose to no longer buy the goods and services from which the 1% derives its income. I'm not saying that members of the 1% are bad, just that whatever benefits they bring society will likely be commoditized like everything else when full automation provides cheaper (or free) alternatives.
Well, considering employment is the standard way of redistributing wealth then unemployment is a problem. We need more ways of redistributing wealth. More than we have now anyways which seem to be limited to taxes and employment.
I think it makes much more sense to go the other way, reduce regulations so that truck drivers / laborers who think their current setup isn't fair can start their own businesses and get paid what they're worth!
But no, you'd rather people put in the effort they want, while arbitrarily rounding out the outcomes. You'd rather subsidize laziness.
This is a horrible assessment of whether we are facing technological unemployment.
There are more bank tellers in the US than ever before
But.. there are more people than ever before. And the number of bank tellers is leveling off even as the population grows.
Overall, there is scant evidence that we are undergoing a technological-unemployment crisis, if only because unemployment rates are low.
Are you kidding me? (First, you have to always be careful with any metric where the collecting agent has even the slightest bias to the outcome. Unemployment is not the obvious number you might think it is for a variety of reasons.) Jobless and underemployment are the numbers you want to be looking at -- and good luck getting good numbers on those but when you do, I think they'll tell a very different story.
What used to be a "bank teller" is now a sales rep, trying to sell you on loans and steer you to investments. Bank of America is rebuilding their branches into a new design. There are maybe two teller windows in the back for the occasional non-ATM cash transaction, while the front of the branch has little glassed-in sales offices like a car dealership.
A lot of employment is in the marketing overhead of capitalism. There are many products, from movies to Internet access, where the marketing cost exceeds the product cost. This is zero-sum; most marketing in the US just moves demand from one product to another. (Spending is income-limited in the US; the savings rate is very low.) It's also why people are still working so hard. Marketing is inherently competitive, which means it can chew up resources out of proportion to the value produced.
One of the issues with the "new economy" / "service economy" model that has been pushed heavily over the past few decades is that it doesn't distinguish between zero-sum jobs that have as their end goal merely a reallocation of a fixed amount of resources, and jobs which create value and are basically industrial in nature but where the end product is intangible (e.g. movies, television, writing, software development, etc.).
State and local governments have spent vast sums trying to attract "new economy" jobs to replace decimated primary industries, but I question how many of those jobs are marketing or "economic overhead" related. That's not to say that they're bad jobs at an individual level, or there's anything wrong with anyone working in them, but it doesn't seem like it's a sustainable basis for a national economy.
Good insight, the amount of money society spends on marketing is staggering (and that's thats only things explicitly labeled as such, which I think your case is not). Actually I would go as further and say short of high IP/high technology industries, marketing (branding) IS the product. Bank of America is a fabricated brand that happens to be in banking.
> Some authors fear that technology will result in a radical concentration of wealth, the like of which we have never seen… while a few people will be super wealthy, all of us will slowly starve. Except that fewer people than ever in history are starving!
Starving is how revolutions happen, so probably not literally starving. But poor people in the US are already wholly politically disenfranchised, and children of poor parents likely to be poor.
The two questions which are important to consider in the light of extreme automation: "how large and diverse is our oligarchy?" and "how much social and economic mobility is there between generations?".
We are well on the way to having a small oligarchy like Russia and mostly inherited wealth, at which point our society will simply cease to exist.
I would like to see a little more serious attention to the "participation" rates in the workforce. Author is a little too reliant, for this particular topic, on the 5% unemployment rate.
The recession certainly did a number on the participation rate, but the current rate is more or less organic (as evidenced by recent gains in wages once unemployment stabilized at ~5%).
A lot of baby-boomers aged out around during the recession, and will continue to do so (people born between 1943-1951 all turned 65 during the recession), and a lot of people went back into school to "hide" from it.
_Under_employment is still a serious issue, but that's only reflected in labor statistics by median wages. On the bright side those have been going up too, but aggregates only tell us so much.
I don't know what "more or less organic" means here. Using the prime age (25-54) employment rate filters out that noise, and it shows that we've retraced about halfway from the worst of the housing crash.
hmm -- his 'transemployment' concept where complex processes are created and assigned to people as 'jobs' is brutal. We've all worked at process-heavy orgs and most of us have left them.
Process-heavy orgs will get out-competed by orgs managed almost any other way. If you're optimized to create useless work for people, you'll probably lose to an org that's optimized for something almost as silly like optimizing for high cost of labor. My consultancy is optimized for high cost of labor and I do okay.
Some people argue this is what's happening to France now. 40 years of shaping labor law to improve retirement & reduce unemployment has taken its toll. Paris is a smart tech-savvy and beautiful city that could have been Europe's silicon valley, but you're not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week and you can't fire people. Ah, 20-20 hindsight.
"If human labor were to become wholly unnecessary, we are going to substitute for it through transemployment. That is, we will create work that is not strictly needed."
That's fine if employment becomes fully optional, but I fear we'll be forced into a life without the meaning of useful jobs, and without the freedom of technological unemployment.
Bullshit jobs are about the social order, not about productivity. People can find productive things to do on their own.
"Bullshit jobs" depend on economic surplus to create work that is not immediately productive in terms of food, shelter, or safety. Most entertainers and craft artists fall under the definition of "bullshit jobs". Fine dining chefs are doing something entirely unnecessary. So are rock stars.
Bullshit jobs are jobs that are not productive at all, or are sometimes actively destructive (in adding layers of bureaucracy) in ways that require other essentially bullshit jobs to counteract.
You're talking about something a bit more abstract and puritan. I was a 3602 Clerk, once, which was an essentially bullshit job created to navigate the hurdles presented by a post office clerk assigned to my company, whose skills primarily consisted of sleeping while sitting up, and storing the 12 lbs. of paperwork I generated per mailing in a closet and taking my word for its veracity. That's a bullshit job. I once worked for an agency whose primary job was procuring people willing to, for money, give permission to other people to declare evidence for a quality assigned by governing officials that obligated higher governing officials to give money to the customers of the clients for whom we procured, and whom we sought out to make a living. We were honestly just a conduit for government money that grabbed 3% of the cash that flowed through it. That's an entire bullshit agency.
A comedian creates laughs. That's not a bullshit job, that's a good job.
It's a couple of years since I read that article but I'm pretty certain top chefs -- who work directly on products that people clearly want a lot -- are the exact opposite of the kind of alienated work Graeber had in mind.
I think he just defined it as any job not fulfilling a direct need: food, shelter, reproduction. So, most jobs are transemployment. It doesn't seem like a super useful distinction.
edit: I understand, you're just giving the source of the phrase rather than a definition of bullshit jobs. I don't think bullshit jobs and "transployment" are similar.
I have often wondered what happens when large scale technological unemployment occurs, or even the threat of it. I think we have seen the result in the 2016 Presidential election with the election of Donald Trump, probably the least qualified president since Harding. He's a psychopath, for god's sake. And his cabinet is beyond comprehension.
The possible result is an attack on all branches of the executive except the military. Replacement of Social Security and Medicare by virtually worthless vouchers, elimination of the departments of Education, Housing, and Energy. emasculation of the EPA. And on and on.
This could be as self-destructive as an armed uprising with fewer deaths (maybe).
Many of the issues are easy to fix. Remove the wage cap on Social Security taxes. Convert to health insurance to Medicare. Some of the unemployment issues can be mitigated by making the workweek 30 or 32 hours. Turning truck drivers into nurses or medical technicians takes a few years of training. Many of them are smart enough to do it. The current stumbling block is that they must have income support during the education period. Giving someone $100K to manage the transition doesnt seem like much to me.
Fundamentally increased productivity and wealth should lead to more leisure and a better standard of living for everyone. Eventually everyone should get a minimum guaranteed income so they have time to pursue their education, raise families, be artists or novelists.
Global economy & services may be fully automated pretty soon but local economies? No chance, we are still going to have humans doing local trades and services to other humans for the foreseeable future, just go back to your roots as a member of a family, village, community.
> just go back to your roots as a member of a family, village, community.
I think unemployed people will start teaming up to solve their needs directly - farms, small fab shops, schools, construction - we can make all these with local workforce, "self employed for self reliance". We'd only need access to raw materials and some land.
AI is a fundamentally different technological innovation than the ones he compares against in the post. It's not an incremental improvement on methods, it's a complete replacement of the labor force for many industries.
But the problem to solve isn't how to blunt the impact of AI, rather how to handle the newly freed labor force. I don't think this should be seen as a bad thing. Tasks a machine can take care of should be left to a machine, and other work should be handled by a human. We'll have a lot of open human capacity to accomplish something, but if the transition isn't handled well it could be really painful.
I used to think techno-optimists were delusional but history is on their side. You could argue there is a phase shift happening and this one will be different but I doubt it. Like the author says we'll make up new jobs.
The main thesis of this article is true but honestly the author has done a very unconvincing job to back it up. For example my problem is with his references: "Firm investments in high-tech equipment and software is falling"...whereas the liked article is about "The recent slowdown in high-tech equipment price declines and some implications for business investment and labor productivity"
That has been true for at least 400 years. Humans have generally adapted by inventing new things to be done that didn't exist previously. (The app industry was very small 20 years ago. ;)
The interesting question is why people think this time around is different. Answers seem to vary from just "computers" to, "the same change is happening but now it's happening faster". The compensatory mechanisms still work though, yet it seems no one things they will.
People think it's different this time because the new machines are more generally capable than the specific purpose machines of the past.
It's not "the new machine can gin cotton" or "the new machine can weave cloth", it's "the new machine can handle an extremely wide range of problems, and we're moving from having to teach it each problem individually to having it teach itself."
This time really is different and it's crucial everyone realize why as soon as possible.
> It's not "the new machine can gin cotton" or "the new machine can weave cloth", it's "the new machine can handle an extremely wide range of problems, and we're moving from having to teach it each problem individually to having it teach itself."
It's funny you mention this because in the past few days on HN there have been a number of articles whose general point was that the machine learning stuff presently in use is well tailored to very narrow, specific problems, and that the AI tech that would tackle a broad range of problems is still very elusive.
This new machine that tackles a very wide range of problems without massive programming investment is something I've been wanting for 20 years, and I still don't see anyone with plans to bring it to market.
> the machine learning stuff presently in use is well tailored to very narrow, specific problems
It's more accurate to say the machine learning in use now works on narrow classes of problems. But even that is a giant leap forward from teaching the machine to solve each problem individually.
Teaching a car to drive very specific routes is one thing (and has been effectively done for decades now). Teaching a car to drive entire classes of routes is something else, and where we are now. In a decade or so cars will drive all classes of routes better than humans, and that will be something else again.
A thing that gets lost often in these discussions is that while human populations are fairly good at adjusting, individual humans often are not. Sometimes the end result to a tech shift eating your job is that you will never have a comparably good job, regardless of what you try. And maybe your kids will not either. This is a hard truth.
If it happens to you and enough of your peers in one area, it can devastate the local economy. None of the solutions for this are easy, and history is full of examples of it.
> while human populations are fairly good at adjusting, individual humans often are not
(...)
> None of the solutions for this are easy, and history is full of examples of it.
This is demonstrably true in the past, but it doesn't have to be that way in the future. But if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.
Solutions are all about the next generation. If a human did adapt to a change, it was because of training, mindset, and education they received before the change. Humanity has to get ahead of these things, and be prepared for changes, rather than trying to figure out what to do when they happen, when options are already drastically limited.
Probably the cheapest, best, most flexible way to do this is to educate them better in the first place. It's probably also the most efficient, since even if the world doesn't change, the education demonstrably improves their outcomes and has positive return.
And yet Google employs a lot of people to do what Google does.
No human or combination of humans can turn iron ore into stainless steel tubing. Yet a whole lot of people, acting in concert, can build and operate a bunch of terrifically complex machines which will do just that. The end result is an entity that you can draw a box around, which takes in that human labor plus iron ore and coal and minerals and produces steel tubing (and slag and acid rain). And it'll continue to do that, optimizing itself, as long as the market price of the outputs exceeds the market price of the inputs.
Google is similar (without the air pollution, though it has its own externalities). It's a bunch of people building and operating a bunch of terrifically complex machines which organize information, in such a way that the outputs have more value than the inputs inclusive of labor. It's a pretty nice business model, particularly when the inputs are basically free (because of the Internet).
But I don't see any reason to be especially threatened by Google, or at least there's no reason to be more threatened by Google, than the steel plant. Google can and probably will optimize itself to reduce labor costs, just as steel mills have optimized themselves; a modern steel mill can produce a hell of a lot of steel without very many employees, which isn't good if you're a steel mill worker. Google in 20 years may not employ very many people to maintain its search products, either. It's something to be aware of if you work in that industry, but it's not especially unique.
Most of Google's 57,000 headcount is ad sales reps. Before search personalization, the core search team was under 100 people. It's probably larger now, but nowhere near the size of the sales organization.
What's the relevance of the ratio between engineers and sales people?
Seems the point you're making is that it takes 57,000+ people to make google run. You'd think they'd want to automate those sales reps, except that's human work and they can't. Which is the point the previous poster was trying to make.
Sales reps mostly talk to people and convince them to buy things. Relationships and human interaction are paramount.
I'm unwilling to speculate a couple of decades out when I don't think anybody has any clue what's going to happen in the next 5 years, forget decades.
But what I will say is this - there is no plausible way to automate human sales relationships in the foreseeable future. I don't even know of companies who are even seriously trying right now.
If you take the unbridled enthusiastic position that everything can be automated in 20 years, sure, all those sales guys are toast. I just don't see a pragmatic basis for taking that perspective. Tech gets better and that's great, but what you're talking about would be some Manhattan Project stuff. People have been talking about the potential of those advances since the 1960s. Wake me up when someone announces a date when they'll ship a product.
You don't have to replace sales relationships, you just eliminate them.
My life has become so much better with the advent of Amazon Prime and related services. I go to a website, find what I want, click a button, and whatever I want shows up on my doorstep two days later. It's fantastic, and nobody is trying to mislead me, or upsell me, or convince me to add on some shit that I really don't want. More things should be this easy.
> [...] the unemployment rate worldwide is low. It is under 5% in the US [...]
I'm not sure how this is calculated. Do people employed part-time count as employed? How has that changed over time? The problems of the precariat include under-employment and being forced to hold undesirable jobs.
In the US, the official unemployment rate cited is the U-3 rate, which is exclusively limited to those currently seeking a job, with no employment status at all.
Partial employment (such as part-time) due to economic circumstances, as well as those who are within the employable age range (18-60something) but are not employed nor seeking a new job due to economic circumstances (i.e. gave up) are covered by the U-6 measurement, which is substantially higher at 9.8%. See here: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
That page also has links to historical measurements back to 2003, and you can probably find further back (though I'm not sure if there are older resources that also include the state-by-state breakdown).
Unemployment has the potential to be very misleading. It is a count of people who are actively looking for work but not yet employed. It doesn't count people who have dropped out of the workforce but would prefer to be working or people who are underemployed or working less hours than they'd prefer, for example.
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I'm not sure about that. One thing which I think tends to skew things is that we get so many immigrants who are intent on seeking better opportunities than they had in their home countries.
For most of them, things are by default better than what they had back home [as paupers or even as middlings back home], else they would not have come and the movement to migrate _here_ would run out of momentum.
Second gen + may be more receptive to more progressive ideas about security, mobility etc.
Socialism was very popular at the turn of the 20th century. Workers movements were strong, labor had power. A socialist ran for president, even. The real reason why it never took root was because it was brutally opposed at every turn by government and business.
Even Henry Ford adopted some Progressive/Socialist principles. For every Henry Frick there were thousands of much less severe people in positions of power.
But in America, wages were usually quite a bit higher than in Europe, so the need was less obvious.
>working class whites have very distinctly voted against their interests.
Given that Obama pushed the TPP hard, made the Bush tax cuts permanent and effectively raised taxes on the working poor with the ACA (also known as Romney Care) and Clinton passed NAFTA and shortened welfare to 5 years. I assuming you mean they should have voted Green party or something?
Today, people embark on careers in their 20s that disappear in their 40s and 50s. Such a pace of change is distressing. Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out. It'll be local short hauls only, places where there's a lot of human interaction and judgment calls. Long haul semis will be entirely automated. It'll save money and it will save lives, and it will be a huge boon to everyone in society - except professional long haul truckers, who will lose their livelihoods. They won't take it well.
Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can do that. But what if it takes a year or more to retrain? How will they pay the mortgage? How will they feed the kids? People who can't care for themselves and their families feel weak, vulnerable, and ashamed. They'll be angry and act out. They'll listen to political demagogues who tell them what they want to hear and give them scapegoats to blame. Such a sudden social change is politically dangerous.