Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

http://baatz.io/posts/not-a-luddite-fallacy/

by cwb • 11 years ago

40 70 11 years ago

baatz.io

Mithaldu• 11 years ago

Oh no, the singularity is coming!

klez• 11 years ago

On the same tone: "Humans need not apply"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

api6• 11 years ago

It's not here yet, but automation able to fully replace human beings for a huge number of jobs will eventually come. At that point a universal basic income will be the only option other than walling off the majority of humanity in ghettoes. Totalitarian "poverty state" or post-scarcity socialism, take your pick.

I say this as a somewhat-former libertarian, and partly out of libertarian sentiment. The totalitarian state that would have to be put in place to enforce widespread poverty in a post-employment era would be significantly less libertarian than the alternative. I imagine something that looks like a cyberpunk noir horror film with drones and scanners and gates everywhere. Since humans do possess empathy, the (few) rich would have to be surveilled and policed as much as the poor; your wealth would be absolutely conditional upon your support of the system. Ultimately the situation is unsustainable and would collapse and probably lead to something even more totalitarian.

athenot• 11 years ago

Or perhaps we will witness a return to living off of the land but with technologies to assist us. We have self-driving tractors and automated industrialized agriculture, but how about a personal yard robot that can till the vegetable garden, selectively removing weed but leaving the plants undisturbed.

Many suburban yards are large enough to grow plenty of food, and the food you grow yourself can vastly outperform anything you buy in terms of taste because you no longer have to be restricted to eating varieties that travel well.

But back in terms of wealth, owning land still remains important as it makes the above possible.

monort• 11 years ago

It seems that you do not account for falling prices due to automation. And the cost of automated machines will fall too.

digi_owl2• 11 years ago

When the customer has zero, or at least zero in any sane sense, the price will always be too high.

The basic dichotomy of industrialization is that the workers of one factory is the customers of another.

api6• 11 years ago

That will happen for automation and manufactured goods, but not for assets and anything else leveraged. If anything the in-deflation we are seeing today will be amplified as central banks will be forced to keep money cheap to avoid total deflationary collapse. Picture a $5 million starter home that costs <$1000 to completely furnish.

This is what a post-scarcity society in denial looks like.

The reason cities like SF and NYC and London already look like this is because they are the vanguard of the future. If present trends continue a house in rural Kentucky will be as unaffordable relative to average wages as one in SOMA. All that cheap money has to go somewhere, so if labor is deflating it must go into assets.

In-deflation is "deflation of labor and the products of labor, and inflation in assets, consumable resources, and essential services like health care and education." It's been the condition in the USA and to some extent Europe since 2008. It's today's equivalent of stagflation in the 70s, something else economists did not think (at the time) was possible and did not understand. Some are starting to get it, which is why you see some starting to talk about inflation in areas like housing separate from inflation in the rest of the economy. In-deflation is not visible in traditional aggregate inflation indices because deflating manufactured goods and labor are grouped with inflating assets and essential goods/services and the two cancel.

melling3• 11 years ago

Fortunately, the future is arriving slowly because so much time is wasted having silly debates on the Internet.

No need to worry about it in our lifetime.

dasil0032• 11 years ago

How old are you? The social unrest is going to come way before people are walled off in ghettoes. If, like me, you are a programmer earning 6 figures, you may not feel rich,but you are certainly perceived that way by the increasing number who are struggling.

arrrg• 11 years ago

The generalized version of the fallacy (“Labour-saving technologies increase unemployment in general by reducing demand for labour in general.”) may be wrong or not. That’s kind of hard to figure out.

However, the micro level version of the fallacy is, I think, not a fallacy at all, but very much true and can be disastrous for a great many individuals: “Labour-saving technologies increase unemployment among people with my qualifications by reducing demand for labour for people with my qualifications.” (The consequence may not be unemployment. The affected people more or less only qualify for jobs where no qualifications are necessary, probably leading to unemployment for some, a reduction in income for others.)

Put another way, while the labour market in general may be left intact, the effect on specific individuals may be disastrous. In that context luddites smashing up machines may be entirely rational for them personally, because even though the industrial revolution lifted large swathes of humanity out of poverty (eventually), along the way many individuals had to suffer greatly and it didn’t get better for them personally until they died. Maybe it got better for their kids or grandkids.

That’s one reason why thinking about macro level effects is not enough (but there may also be better solutions than smashing up machines, i.e. it may well be possible to get the positive macro level effects over longer time scales while also, through other means, reducing or eliminating poverty or suffering on a micro level).

cwb6• 11 years ago

You're right, the micro-level version isn't a fallacy (either..), though I think that's less contentious, or? Many countries already have some experience with this. For example, agriculture has gone from having 70-80% of the workers in 1870 to less than 2% in 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...). Some countries now have welfare systems that introduce some security on an individual level, though in their current form they tend to rely on the average employment rate remaining fairly high.

larsiusprime• 11 years ago

Required reading anytime someone invokes the word "Luddite": http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future-Industrial/d...

Enclosure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure) is suspiciously never mentioned whenever the Luddites are invoked. It's not as simple as "technology took muh job, rar!" -- it's more like "hey, this common land that used to belong to all of us has been forcibly taken away and given to this guy with a factory who now gets to be super productive and take away our livelihoods, but he doesn't have to share any of the increased wealth he now enjoys."

Technology undoubtedly increases productivity and wealth. The question is, WHO gets to own that wealth and what gives them a right to it.

digi_owl2• 11 years ago

Another take is that people went from being largely self-sufficient (a few animals, some vegetables), to being largely dependent on the factory owners.

Never mind that it may well be that early factory products were of poorer quality, and potentially harder to repair, than the stuff made rurally.

After all, when you make something for your own use, you put effort into it in the hopes you don't have to do it again any time soon.

arethuza• 11 years ago

Good point - here in Scotland there were the Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries forcing peoples off lands - either to the cities or to emigrate or to simply starve:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

There is a lot of very murky history to land ownership in Scotland - one of the reasons I'm so pleased with the "right to roam" that we have now as well as Scottish Government policies favouring community land ownership.

Sulfolobus• 11 years ago

If you haven't already read it I highly recommend "The Poor Had No Lawyers" by Andy Wightman [1]. It can be a struggle to convince people to read a book on the history of Scots property law but it is a really fantastic book. Manages to balance detail without ending up stultified and provides a lot of context behind the current state of land reform in Scotland.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Poor-Had-No-Lawyers/dp/178027114...

cwb6• 11 years ago

Indeed, that is the question. The post tries to show that "cut your hair and get a job" will disappear as an answer to "how do I get to partake in this wealth creation" for a large number of people and we'll thus probably want to come up with an answer that scales better than today's social security for example and works for all those who live in countries without social security.

kungfooguru• 11 years ago

Even when it is as simply as technology putting someone out of work it is a joke to then tell them, "It is ok, you and your fellow workers may be out of work but ultimately the unemployment level won't rise, so chill out."

This is especially condescending before the creation of unemployment insurance and the welfare state. You can't feed your family with without your job.

Those ease the pain, ultimately a democratic economy is needed so technology cuts the amount of work we all have to do.

xorcist• 11 years ago

Luddites may be the best example ever that history is written by the winners.

Suffice to say, early industrialization was abysmal for the workers, who really had no choice but to take whatever bad deals they were given. Corporal punishments were used to inflict respect and security didn't exist.

So Luddites were bascially revolts, and in several ways a precursor to the worker's movement that came later. It nearly escalated into civil war (at one point more soldiers were occupied with fighting Luddites than Napoleon). Leaders were tortured and killed.

In propaganda, they were bascically pictured as lazy and/or against technology itself, which carried over to the modern meaning of the word. Well worth a read.

bgilroy26• 11 years ago

Great book that covers the English economy through the time of Enclosure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book...

brightball2• 11 years ago

What I always wonder about with this formula is how many human jobs from the US have been shipped overseas to other humans who cost less? Those jobs are still being done by people, we just aren't cost competitive in labor for the mass of unskilled job opportunities.

It seems like something like the Fair Tax, where legal citizens get a stipend every month to offset the sales tax against basic needs, that came with a slightly higher stipend to make it more like a basic income, would have the net effect of make low cost labor more affordable and those jobs more viable. It would basically have the effect of doubling minimum wage WITHOUT passing the costs along to the businesses and making labor more expensive.

Just makes you wonder if we wouldn't be better off finding ways to repatriate the jobs that exist than to worry about the ones that are continually more automated.

svachalek• 11 years ago

That comes largely from reduced cost of transportation (including taxes and tariffs), such that the cost of distant human production + transportation has fallen below the cost of local human production.

As production automation increases, fewer humans are required, and the cost of transportation becomes more important. Also, as the standard of living in these distant countries increases so does the cost of labor, further tilting the scale. So, we are seeing Mexico become a much bigger source of manufacturing for the U.S. recently.

As manufacturing continues to automate and costs decrease further, we may see manufacturing move back to the U.S. However for the same reason it won't be bringing any notable amount of jobs with it.

As for political solutions, in the U.S. at least, labor has quite simply lost. With a few exceptions such as the larger government employee unions there is no money and no bargaining power on the labor side and we can only expect the scales to keep tilting further in capital's favor. We'd need to see something that caused a really huge demand for local, unskilled labor in the next few years to have any chance of this happening before all labor is automated out of existence.

relate• 11 years ago

Except that increased money supply means inflation which means that middle & upper class can buy less than before. E.g. someone with a medium salary might only get 20% higher income post-stipend but prices would rise more.

brightball2• 11 years ago

Fair Tax eliminates the income tax though, which would take care of that completely.

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

I'm uneasy with talk about "getting jobs back". It means taking the bread from the mouths of third world people trying to industrialize. So we can feel better about fewer people on welfare.

mcguire2• 11 years ago

"I hope I have been able to convince you that the Luddite fallacy is not a fallacy and that this will have significant economic and social implications."

I'm sorry, did you actually make an argument? All I could find was some un-supported assertions.

cwb6• 11 years ago

No, not for it having significant economic and social implications, that's more a corollary of employment rate decreasing -- I'll change that sentence. The argument for the Luddite fallacy not being a fallacy was that humans have so far been able to compete with technology, but that we're fast losing that edge and when that happens things really are different this time. Does that make sense?

pixl972• 11 years ago

was that humans have so far been able to compete with technology

Once a ditch digging machine was created, the machine outcompeted humans in that niche, humans were still by far better generalists. A better way of looking at this would probably be systems biology. Machines started as the corollary of a specialist lifeform. More and more they are evolving into a generalist lifeform. As they become more generalist they will directly compete with a larger population of the humans. This will push more people into specialist roles in society. Any specialist lifeform runs the risk of extinction if the environment it depends on is significantly altered or disappears.

The strange thing is that is well understood in biology, but for some reason when we apply it to people we think it doesn't work that way. Most people are limited in their ability to significantly retask. If you think you'll take a bunch of 50 year old accountants and turn them into (good) computer techs for the 15 years before their retirement, I would guess it won't go so well. As the rate of change increases because of technology this becomes a bigger and bigger problem as specialisation takes time to achieve and by the time you become well learned the entire field you are in could be automated.

marcosdumay2• 11 years ago

That's an assertion, not an argument. The article also does not support it in any way (what would turn it into an argument). Thus, I'll have to agree with the GP, in that it is an unsupported assertion.

It's an assertion that I happen to agree with, but not because of this article.

joshuaheard• 11 years ago

If automation is providing all your needs, you won't need a job.

[Edit] Spotted this after reading the article:

"Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data"

(http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-c...

billmalarky• 11 years ago

Only if you can afford the upfront capital to purchase and maintain the machines.

pixl972• 11 years ago

"Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data"

"Past results are not indicative of future performance"

We can't compare the last 200 years of human to the past 20,000.

For example 66 million years ago the dinosaurs had already lived around 140 million years. In another million they would be dead because of exceptional conditions. Everyday in which we live in modern society is an exception condition based upon both the rate of change in human knowledge and rate of change in the environment.

As to your first statement. If I own the machines why should I keep you, that are now unnecessary, alive and instead live in super luxury with a few million people on the planet.

fastandfurryous5• 11 years ago

Who owns the machines and reaps what they produce?

Hint: they are the same people who own your employers, buildings and machines that currently let you do your job

mcv• 11 years ago

It's not clear why the author thinks it's not a fallacy.

What bothers me about this sort of discussion, though, is the assumption that we need to work. I want technology to do my job for me, so I can focus on fun stuff. But for that to work, we should change our economic system so we don't need to work, or at least not as much.

What technology has really done, is not so much take away people's jobs, but make capital investment an increasingly large part of productivity, leading all the profits of this increased productivity to end up with the small elite that controls the capital. Look at how much wealth inequality has grown over the past 100 years, particularly in the US.

Keynes predicted in the 1930s that due to increased productivity, we'd all have to work a lot less than we're currently doing. He's wrong because the benefits of our increased productivity are not distributed equally.

In short: we need a basic income. Or something else to ensure that everybody benefits from this.

cwb6• 11 years ago

Sorry I couldn't make it more clear. Was there anything particular that you didn't understand?

Agree on the basic income (in general, I'm not sure about the details). Jobs so far have been a convenient and pragmatic (not necessarily fair) way to both create and distribute wealth. At the same time, we should note that popular alternatives like communism or socialism have failed rather badly.

fredkbloggs4• 11 years ago

Let's suppose for a moment that we accept the thesis that due to automation, there won't be much work for humans in the future.

Instead of taking wealth from the smaller number of humans who are creating that wealth and giving it to those who are not, why don't we just accept that we don't need so many of us any more? Let the extras die off naturally (note to angry skimmers: I SAID NATURALLY) and migrate to a new lower-population equilibrium. There have been a lot of explanations offered for why the world's more advanced economies have been seeing lower birth rates for decades, but one rarely reads the most obvious one: people are having fewer children because fewer humans are needed. This isn't a problem to be solved, it's a boon to future generations.

While some resources are created through economic activity driven by humans, others (most notably land, in the form of space between neighbors who desire it, frontiers, the economic viability of wilderness conservation, and of course land for economic purposes) are fixed. If fewer humans can create just as much of the variable stuff while leaving more of the fixed stuff for each one, how is that not better for all? The vast majority of humans, if not literally every last one, will be much wealthier. And that's even before we consider the fundamental unfairness of redistribution, or the waste associated with the political and bureaucratic machines it entails.

Instead of thinking about how to redistribute the dividends from automation, we should be making sure we won't have to. In a given environment, every species has an optimal population. If we alter our environment such that fewer humans can produce the same amount of wealth as more humans, that optimal population has decreased. We need to accept that and adjust to it, not fight it with gimmickry and theft. If (and it's a big if) automation is really going to put billions of people out of productive work, then the only sustainable answer to that is fewer people. Embrace it.

jal278• 11 years ago

You're making an assumption that the purpose of humanity is to work to create wealth. That's a very narrow view of our potential. Many would view human flourishing more through the lens of creativity, relationships, and meaningful work (which may not be economically productive).

While I do believe that smaller populations may be more desirable, the logical conclusion of your line of thinking would be that once we automate everything, then humans should naturally bow out to their technological creations.

fredkbloggs4• 11 years ago

That assumes it's possible to automate everything that creates wealth (I'm using "wealth" in the author's extremely broad sense; it does not mean "money"). It sounds like you're saying it isn't, and I agree. That is, the optimal human population will never be zero.

tangent128• 11 years ago

Even if you embrace a lower population target, you still have to deal with the billions of people already here.

Enough people want to leave a biological legacy, so halving population each generation seems optimistic. (yes, many people don't want children at all, but many that do also want their child to benefit from having a sibling. I will assume these numbers cancel out.)

So it will take centuries to get down to the "low millions" range, even longer if lifespan extension pans out.

Automation, meanwhile, is already happening, and the current wave is more likely to be felt in a span of decades rather than centuries. Unless you count "starving in the streets" as a "natural die off", redistribution is going to be needed regardless.

eli_gottlieb3• 11 years ago

Instead of taking wealth from the smaller number of humans who are creating that wealth and giving it to those who are not, why don't we just accept that we don't need so many of us any more? Let the extras die off naturally (note to angry skimmers: I SAID NATURALLY) and migrate to a new lower-population equilibrium.

Because we value people's lives and happiness, so "You're unemployed now, please die quietly" is actually only slightly less unacceptable than "You're unemployed now, we'll take you out behind the chemical sheds and shoot you." It's the misery and death we take chief issue with, and only a little the violence.

And that's even before we consider the fundamental unfairness of redistribution

You mean the fundamental unfairness of forcibly giving over the vast majority of the Earth's spoils to a tiny minority who don't care about anyone but themselves? Because if you don't, we disagree on the definition of "unfairness".

If (and it's a big if) automation is really going to put billions of people out of productive work, then the only sustainable answer to that is fewer people. Embrace it.

We can stabilize the population for ecological purposes just fine while keeping the non-parents happy and healthy for their entire natural lives (or even well beyond that).

fredkbloggs4• 11 years ago

If your idea of happiness and health is a bipolar world in which everyone is either:

(a) A producer, whose entire production is taken from him or her by force of arms and given to others, or

(b) A consumer, who does nothing and contributes nothing but lives off the work of others, and

in either case one lives in a horribly crowded, polluted, sweltering world, then we will have to agree to disagree. I'm not even sure which of (a) or (b) would be worse, but I know I'd choose suicide if those were the other options.

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

Instead of taking wealth from the smaller number of humans who are creating that wealth and giving it to those who are not, why don't we just accept that we don't need so many of us any more? Let the extras die off naturally (note to angry skimmers: I SAID NATURALLY) and migrate to a new lower-population equilibrium.

Because in practice that doesn't work: natural population growth is inversely correlated with the strength of social safety nets; if you want to negative natural population growth to move toward a lower population, you need more, not less, redistributive policies by which those who profit the most from the structure of society support those who don't to get there.

If you want to get to a "lower population equilibrium" and avoid taxing those at the top more to achieve it "naturally", you aren't going to be able to be that passive about it.

fastandfurryous5• 11 years ago

Why is redistribution unfair? There have been hundreds of years of theft, violence and political misgivings against labor to get to the point where, as a class, labor is neutered against having a chance to have a piece of the pie they built for industrialists and owners.

So why is it suddenly unfair to suggest redistribution?

Why are the deaths of billions of people somehow more just than a redistribution of wealth accumulated through centuries of ruthlessness?

The vast majority of humans, if not literally every last one, will be much wealthier.

What makes you think that there would be any wealth made available for those who are not owners of wealth producing businesses? This is a serious question, because it is the same problem your solution is trying to fix.

We need to accept that and adjust to it, not fight it with gimmickry and theft

Or we can recognize that the current state of affairs was brought upon by years of gimmickry and theft by a slim margin of people against the whole. If you rely on trading your time for money, you are not part of that slim margin.

Honest question: where do you think you'd be in this situation? On the side of vast wealth holders who will welcome you with open arms into their enclaves where a multibillion dollar net worth is required? Or rotting with the rest of us who rely on programming a computer to pay the bills?

This reads like an earnest Modest Proposal and efficiency porn mashup.

nsajko• 11 years ago

How do you redistribute?

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

Maybe we could provide a robust social safety net and expanded access to birth control, instead of leaving people to starve (NATURALLY!).

AnimalMuppet2• 11 years ago

I think the whole question shows that people are thinking wrong.

Think of a society/civilization spending people. Oh, we can automate much of agriculture? Great; we don't have to spend 90% of our people on growing food. Now we can spend them on factory jobs, and our society becomes better off. Now we don't have to spend so many people in factories? That's a good thing, too - we can spend those people on more productive things. Again, our society will become better off.

There are a couple of ways this could not work out, though. First, there is the social unrest that can happen in the time of transition. Second, we can lose one kind of jobs before we figure out what the new kind is, and so leave a lot of people idle. Third, we could eventually create jobs that are beyond our ability to train the bulk of people to be able to do them.

eli_gottlieb3• 11 years ago

But human idleness is the goal! Working, for most people, is a bunch of miserable drudgery.

AnimalMuppet2• 11 years ago

Even accepting your premise (which I'm not sure that I do), that still doesn't disprove my point. When farm workers went into factories, we got a bunch of stuff like cars, dishwashers, and refrigerators. That means that I can go to the store less often, and I don't have to walk there when I go, and I don't have to wash the dishes myself each night. We gained a bunch of idleness from that - but we couldn't have done so without moving people from farms to factories.

fastandfurryous5• 11 years ago

Profit maximization is the goal behind automation.

We'd need to see changes in human nature or society to ensure that misplaced labor can still have a quality of life if idle, because profit optimization says you won't see a cent if I don't have to give it to you.

cholantesh• 11 years ago

I wonder what they'd transition to. When I'm not working, I feel depressed and anxious to a fault.

Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

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