What a depressing read. At some point robotic warehouses will be the norm. Until then there will be lots of places like this. Commerce often means that the lowest bidder gets to deliver the goods. What they don't tell you is how much the lowest bidder is squeezing their employees just so they can be the lowest bidder.
Don't end up like Brian, get yourself some marketable skills other than running around a warehouse to pick orders. Or you might very well find yourself fired just when you need your job the most - for instance when your wife has just delivered a baby (which with any normal company run by people with some heart would result in paid leave).
And when those robotic warehouses roll around these jobs will simply cease to exist.
Don't assume robots will always replace people. We have, after all, seen robot factories replaced by poorly paid humans in China.
If low skilled jobs keep being handed over to robots, eventually we get a lot of people with no valuable skills. These people will be poor and largely unemployed. If you take away welfare, collective bargaining, minimum wage, and a safety net then these people will work for literally crumbs (ocnsider people who live on garbage dumps in India). For many many roles these people will be cheaper than robots.
This is, incidentally, the lot of the poor before the welfare state was created, and it's what the Tea Party wants to recreate.
How many radiologists, or programmers, or plumbers can the system absorb?
What jobs can someone with 85 IQ do in 2021?
We're safe for our lifetimes. However, we have a whole class of people that we're not going to be able to find work for, at least at livable wages, especially as agriculture is more and more automated.
That is if people who can't educate their offspring keep reproducing rapidly. If those people weren't incentivised to procreate or even disincentivised to have children, this problem could be much much smaller.
Edit: see the story about the guy being fired from his job because he wanted to attend the birth of his son which has been mentioned in another comment. This of course is a sad situation, but am I wrong to ask if it is smart to even have children in his position?
Edit2: I'm not suggesting eugenics or restricting the freedom to reproduce in any way but an education campaign.
How do you decide who gets to procreate and who doesn't?
I mean, it's difficult to judge someone's skills at parenting until after they've actually parented.
Do you let people have one child upto X years old and then go through some objective evaluation with that child to decide if they are allowed to produce more?
Assuming that the robot predictions are correct, there really won't be any other choice. Welfare will be generous, but will come with Norplant, or won't come at all.
Note that we don't have a 75% unemployment rate following the industrial revolution. You are hardly the first person to make this argument--it's been made for centuries. The market mechanism is an amazingly effective thing at providing jobs to those who demand jobs, both in economic theory and in observed reality over the last two hundred years.
When it comes to large-scale employment shifts, I'm not sure we can be particularly confident in predicting the future based on extremely limited past data. Large-scale shifts just haven't happened often in history, so it's hard to generalize from the data points we do have.
For most of human history, most human labor was engaged in agriculture. During the industrial revolution, there was a mass shift from agriculture to factory work. This produced considerable social disruption, but did result in a new semi-stable employment system: over a period of some decades, the countrysides were largely depopulated, people congregated in the cities, and the factories were an employment sink for the newly arrived urbanites. Took until probably the mid 20th century to sort out in any kind of reasonable way (the tenement slums of Manhattan were probably initially a net decrease in quality of life for many former farmers, but they were eventually cleaned up).
I'd say that's actually the only real example of a completed shift in mass employment at that scale. The key thing that made it work particularly well was that assembly lines needed a large amount of labor, with a nicely arrayed gradation of skill: they could absorb a large amount of essentially undifferentiated unskilled labor fresh from the countryside, which could then "work its way up" by gaining more skills to serve in increasingly more skilled roles.
The other example of a shift we have is the currently in-progress one, of moving from industrial employment to service-sector and/or information-sector employment. It's less clear where that's going, what the new mass employment sinks will be (if any), and what the skill ladder will be.
Past data isn't limited at all. We have at least 2 centuries of rapid innovation to draw on when we note that unemployment has not skyrocketed with technological progress. Real GDP per capita has risen almost uninterrupted over the last 200 years [1], and is on the order of 20 times what it was 200 years ago. Yet, unemployment is still exceedingly low by world and historical standards.
The market works to provide jobs to those who demand jobs. Shifts in technology are not discrete jumps, but continual trends that price mechanisms can smoothly correct for.
>assembly lines needed a large amount of labor
The reason that assembly lines became so useful was that they needed substantially less labor per product, and could produce products far more cheaply. What you're missing is that the reason that people were still employed at relatively similar levels and GDP per capitas was because consumer demand rose to meet lower prices. These are all matters of supply and demand.
> the currently in-progress one, of moving from industrial employment to service-sector and/or information-sector employment
This shift is already very much completed. Over 80% of the USA's economy is service-sector at this point, and we haven't observed any unemployment issues that can be attributed to technology growth.
What we can predict about the future is what our modern understanding of economics and historical perspectives tell us. As long as there is demand for jobs in a market economy, there will be jobs.
I don't think we have a lot of data on these kinds of large-scale transitions, even though we have a lot of data in nominal terms. That's a common problem in machine learning and data mining as well (my area of research), where a large amount of nominal data can be misleading if what you're really trying to model isn't that common.
In this case the relevant event is sector-wide shifts in employment, of the farms->factories variety. We have very little data on those, because they occur once or perhaps twice in our data set. So we can't really generalize with any confidence about them: which features of that particular transition are general features of a sector-to-sector transition, and which ones depend on idiosyncracies of farms or factories or the particular time? Will factories->X look the same as farms->factories? We do have somewhat better data on which depend on idiosyncracies of place, since you can look at the industrial revolution in the U.S. versus in the UK or Germany or Japan (though those aren't independent data sets).
We have a lot of data in raw terms, but I think of that as just having data on a small number of macro-scale events, but at high resolution (monthly or better for many years). Now if we had observed 4 or 5 such macro-scale shifts (at least), that's the kind of data that would be needed to build a good model of how such transitions work. So I don't think we can say with much confidence, certainly not statistically valid confidence, how market mechanisms handle such shifts. What we have very good data on is how market mechanisms work in the "normal" case, within a largely stable paradigm. But for farm->factory type transitions, we have basically small-N case studies that people are trying to extrapolate from. The "market will sort it out—it always does" view is certainly one possible extrapolation, but I don't think the evidence confirming it is very strong.
>if what you're really trying to model isn't that common.
Technology increases are quite common. Again, look at that GDP per capita chart I linked; the logarithmic growth of technology as measured by GDP per capita benefit has been both continual, and, importantly, very steady. It's surprisingly steady, all the way up to the end of the 20th century. To echo some of the articles that have been posted on HN recently, we are in a time of unprecedented growth and social change; but we always have been. It's not like something is magically different this time around just because the HN demographic is the one participating in it, and everyone is making smartphone apps instead of web 2.0 pages, or laying intercontinental fiber before that, and so on. Technological growth is gradual and smooth in aggregate, even if individual markets can be disrupted more noticeably, which is one of the prime reasons why the job market is able to keep unemployment as low as it has been for so long, and will continue to do so in the future.
The "data set" you're thinking of seems to be something along the lines of one data point being "the industrial revolution happened, and long-term unemployment levels didn't rise." But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how we know that technology has been increasing for hundreds of years, as measured by things like the GDP per capita chart I linked, something including hundreds and thousands of data points. That all comes down to a single check: despite hundreds of years of technological growth, which is growth just like we are experiencing now and will be in the future, is unemployment higher? No. Assembly lines were a paradigm shift, cars were a paradigm shift, the modern western office environment was a paradigm shift, computers were a paradigm shift, and the internet was a paradigm shift. The entire country was always unprepared in terms of skills to capitalize on those shifts, but the unemployment rate stayed low. Apparently, if people want and need jobs, jobs will come into existence. The law of supply and demand.
I really want to stress that there's nothing substantially different in terms of innovation currently, contrary to your argument. If nanotechnology makes physical manufacturing of products functionally costless, or if the singularity makes all decision-making and programming jobs irrelevant, then sure. But social media? Smartphones and tablets? Hardly. The skills required to do these things have existed for decades; the underlying technologies are very iterative, as technological progress usually is.
Technology levels can be measured in terms of GDP per capita, which can be followed back hundreds of years. Same with unemployment rates. But in the end, is the unemployment rate 50% or 75% right now because half of the workforce is simply unneeded or unskilled, or unable? No. Non-recessionary unemployment baselines are still around 5%. To say that this particular, incremental paradigm shift that we're currently experiencing of increasing virtualization of our lives is any different is to be mistaken into thinking that our current era is a special snowflake apart from all the others before it; and that your judgement of technological change being too much for the job market to handle is different than that of Thomas Malthus's two centuries earlier, or all those thousands of voices in between.
I want to note that I'm very optimistic about the future of technology. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the human era will be over by the end of the century. But I also recognize that Malthusian-spectrum arguments never pan out, no matter how unique this current era is supposed to be in comparison to all the previous unprecedentedly unique eras.
edit: and can I add that I would be quite happy to see some technological change so rapid and sudden that it would put something like 5-10% of our workers out of a job pseudo-permanently. That would mean that some tremendous benefit to the economy has suddenly descended from the heavens of innovation. But those kinds of things just don't happen in eras like our own--unemployment shocks are instead currently temporary (usually being fixed in less than a decade) and due to very non-technology reasons, like the housing bubble and credit crunch this past decade.
People survived the industrial revolution, but horses largely didn't, because for the first time ever we had machines that could replace them in nearly all of their niches. People have never been threatened in this way, even as particular industries disappeared there was mostly enough menial work to retreat to that required a little too much perception and decision-making to automate. What do they do when all menial work can be done by some machine that doesn't eat or sleep or complain? We're finally starting to raise the bar on how clever and creative you must be to be relevant on the job market, and a growing number of people are inevitably going to fall below it.
That's a flagrantly false analogy. But see above--it's not time for humans to be outmoded quite yet. And when it is, it won't just be low-skill jobs that disappear.
Why not? Jobs don't require uniform levels of creativity, and we aren't waiting for a singularity before we start. We already have GPS-guided tractors replacing farmhands and self-checkout registers starting to replace retail clerks, while white-collar fields like engineering and software have merely shed some rote work (drafting and data entry) and medicine and law have changed even less.
I think the jobs most likely to disappear are terrible wastes of human minds; I just wish we weren't so vicious towards people we can't find a need for right now.
This was already answered in my big comment. There is no trend towards any unemployment at all; there never has been any unemployment associated with tech growth; tech growth is smoother and more iterative than people are conceptualizing, so it's not like there's any technical reason that this would change; and the current tech is no revolutionary exception to the trends of tech growth we've had in the past. Basically, you assume that a certain level of tech growth implies that people who can't keep up with it will be out of a job, but we empirically observe that there is no reason to suspect this. The sorts of events that could break these patterns are singularities, not mobile apps.
I've been saying this for a long time: It will have to end with heavier taxation on the rich end and a heavily subsidized welfare system. Maybe implemented through negative taxation, where if you earn below a given minimum the government will pay you for doing nothing. Either something like that, or letting the poor starve.
>Don't end up like Brian, get yourself some marketable skills other than running around a warehouse to pick orders. Or you might very well find yourself fired just when you need your job the most - for instance when your wife has just delivered a baby (which with any normal company run by people with some heart would result in paid leave).
Or move to a better country, one where that's legally guaranteed. Seriously, it's stories like this that keep me out of the US.
This is the article where one of the author's warehouse colleagues is fired because he attends the birth of his son without giving seven days notice. Can't find the quote though - was it removed, or am I searching for the wrong thing?
Edit: thanks vhf. Here is the horrible quote I was looking for:
"Brian already went through this training, but then during his first week his lady had a baby, so he missed a day and he had to be fired."
Yes, I've worked in a few pretty bad places in the past (though not this bad).
Problem is that the main incentives for an employer to provide decent working conditions are so that A) They don't leave for a competitor and B) Make people happy and more productive.
A doesn't really apply, because if these people had options they wouldn't working there. Also it costs so little to train up a new hire and there is a constant pool of unskilled , unemployed people to pick from.
B doesn't really apply either, because these type of jobs suck almost by definition, there is also unlikely to be much difference between a more and less productive employee due to the repetitive nature of the job.
These people are also very unlikely to sue you for wrongful termination or whatever, so it means that it is worth it to get the small productivity increase you might get from being unreasonable.
That's a pretty poor argument against the concept of "wage slavery", and I'm saying that as someone who is skeptical of the concept. You could educate yourself on the subject before publicly opining on it (it's best practice to first understand the best arguments in favor of a position before formulating a counterargument). Even just reading the Wikipedia article would be a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
The term "wage slave" is fairly well understood to not be literal. So your one line dismissal of this article (which has been posted before) is obtuse.
If you can stay at home and get in more debt, or work and have less debt (but still lose money month-on-month) does that make you a slave? Does it make you enslaved to your debt?
What if the wage earns you only enough to live on? Some slaves were provided with sustenance and not much else. What's the difference?
The fact that you have to work in order to be able to live doesn't mean that you're a slave. You might as well say that "life is slavery".
This is all quite insulting to the plights of people who were slaves throughout history, and those who still are slaves today. Please don't equate the first-world gripes of people who are unprecedentedly well-off to actual slavery.
This is why I criticize using the term "wage slave". People actually think the lives of people who literally didn't have any human rights and were bought and sold as property are comparable to people who work under poor conditions.
The author mentions that she earned $60 a day after taxes.
How do you advance to something more with no time to learn anything new? With no money to gain transferable skills? Continuously working 10+ hour days with no chance for advancement, where your employer could care less about your well being just to make enough to survive is in my opinion slavery.
This is a great read. I've been a call centre worker in the past (sitting through 400 automated number dials a day, half of which are straight to voicemail and I was targetted to sell to 2 a day. Horrible job) and this just reminds me that I'm lucky that I have skills and options.
The Chinese have it bad, but American factory workers don't have it all that much better. You're still dealing with a lot of easily-replaceable people who have little or no leverage to push back at unreasonable demands.
That's a recipe for unhappiness no matter where you live.
this sounds pretty bad - however i find it hard to have sympathy given past experiences.
the real problem here is that people feel they are entitled to things and don't have to earn them. if you lack the ability to get out of these kinds of situations (which is difficult a lot of the time) then you just have to suck it up and survive - and be grateful you are being paid money for a job instead of having to survive at even lower levels.
on the other hand, bravo for doing your bit to raise awareness of the poor quality of life that many people must endure to survive. a nice reminder that we are in the top 1% of the top 1%...
just my opinions as a former starving african child who once had to steal and find food to survive... actual survival where if you don't do it you die - and where things like law and society mean nothing because they are mere fabrications and reality is king.
Don't end up like Brian, get yourself some marketable skills other than running around a warehouse to pick orders. Or you might very well find yourself fired just when you need your job the most - for instance when your wife has just delivered a baby (which with any normal company run by people with some heart would result in paid leave).
And when those robotic warehouses roll around these jobs will simply cease to exist.