Are jobs obsolete?

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/

by mcantelon • 14 years ago

160 136 14 years ago

edition.cnn.com

alpad• 14 years ago

Jobs aren't obsolete. There are plenty of jobs. Part time, low wage, no benefits jobs. Careers? Full time, living wage that can support a family, full benefits packages? Those are becoming obsolete, and fast.

Screw any politician who crows about "creating jobs". I would support one who can create careers. Won't happen.

mmj482• 14 years ago

> Jobs aren't obsolete. There are plenty of jobs. Part time, low wage, no benefits jobs.

The 600,000 the article mentioned were mostly of this type, I presume (not the part time maybe, but the other two).

E.g. Secretarial/bureaucracy type jobs which rarely pay more then $15/hour, and usually ~$10/hour, are quickly being replaced with computers.

> Careers? Full time, living wage that can support a family, full benefits packages? Those are becoming obsolete, and fast.

I wouldn't say obsolete. I doubt they're growing at the same rate of the population, but there are still many fields where building a career is a reasonable venture.

ttt_• 14 years ago

Somewhere out there there's a social model that makes a lot more sense and just works, but we can't fathom it right now because we are so busy worrying about competing over pieces on the ground.

mmj482• 14 years ago

pieces on the ground? Care to give an example of this?

ronnix• 14 years ago

or maybe it's a gallicism and he means "coins on the ground"?

mtrn2• 14 years ago

As a software engineer, I would love to see all the tedious tasks people do all day replaced by technology. If having money is the only way to stay alive and I had a job, I would even pay higher taxes, just to let people do more of what they might love more (and what in the long run would benefit society in other ways). -- I guess, that this opinion is diametrical to current ideology.

psb217• 14 years ago

The word you want in that last sentence is "diametrical", or perhaps "antipodal".

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

I presume you meant "pieces of the ground".

If my assumption is correct, let me reply- land has real value. This is for two reasons.

First, everybody occupies space. We all live somewhere; space is valuable because we all have to occupy it, the same way that food is valuable because we all have to eat.

Second, all wealth originates from two sources; human labor/effort, and natural resources. Natural resources are harvested from land.

Thus, the competition over plots of land will go away only if land becomes so plentiful (or humans become so scarce) its value is unimportant, AND resources become so plentiful their value is also nominal. An example is air; it has little value, even though we all have to breathe, because there is so much of it.

aurynn• 14 years ago

Charlie Stross brought this idea up on his blog recently; what does a post work-for-pay world look like? What would you do if you had a home, food, and health care as a basic right?

Could we even get there with our current basic cultural value being that if you don't work, you have no value?

Jare• 14 years ago

Yes we could: replace 'work' with 'contribute' and it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't believe in the mid- and long-term viability of a society that supports its members without requiring them to participate in its existence, development and improvement. Without some form of obligation, it would stagnate into a world of (so to speak) couch potatoes too easily.

If I had a home, food and health care as a basic right, what I would do? Raise my child with undivided attention, care and love. Try to make his environment a happy, safe and stimulating place. The kind of stuff that modern society apparently considers optional, or not valuable at all.

delackner• 14 years ago

Contribute is right. People might talk about how many people experienced (listened,read,saw) their work this year, which is already happening, only people worry endlessly about how they will get paid today, and tomorrow they might just worry about how they will get seen.

femto2• 14 years ago

The last paragraph suggests a new organisation for a company: one where people can job share high value jobs, in return for an average salary.

Here's an example. Let's say I am capable of earning $160,000 a year, if I work 5 days a week in a role that is optimally suited to my skills. The problem is that this role leaves me with little time for my family (or other projects) and an excess of money. What I really want is to work 2 days a week for a salary of $64,000.

The above is hard to do in the current employment system. The closest options seem to be:

1) Take part time work. Typically part time work pays a much lower hourly rate, so to get my $64,000, I'm having to work 5 days/week. No gain, only pain.

2) Go into contracting. Fine for a single person, but too unstable with dependents.

3) Work for some number of years, then quit for a number of years. Demolishes the CV, making it hard to return to work, and leads to an unbalanced all or nothing relationship with the family.

4) Doesn't seem to exist.

Option 4) might be a company that specialises in allowing high value people to work limited hours, at what they do best. It would require a new way of organising things.

a) Systems to eliminate the "fixed cost" of employing someone, allowing many people to be employed in place of one, at the same cost.

b) Systems to allow multiple people to efficiently time share on a task.

c) Systems to allow people to rapidly pick up where they left off on a task.

d) Systems to allow a person to remain up to speed on a discipline, even with restricted working hours (ie. reducing the fixed cost to the employee).

It would be interesting to see how such a company would go competing against traditional a company of full-time employees. Assuming the negatives a)-d), above, could be solved, the benefits would be:

i) A fresh, productive, low stress, "burn out free" workforce.

ii) With some flexability of hours by healthy workers, the elimination of holes in the workforce, due sickness or unexpected events.

iii) The ability to very rapidly bring extra resources to bear (eg. some people work 4 days/week) under special circumstances.

iv) A larger employment pool, by including people who would would normally be precluded from full-time work. (How to make the model work well while not eliminating those who want a full-time job.)

Points a)-d) would seem to be fodder for a start-up, which would dog food its own system. The selling point could a competitive advantage, delivered by points i)-iv).

EDIT: formatting + spelling

jbert• 14 years ago

Large numbers of people have home, food and health care as a basic right (e.g. all inhabitants of the UK and also I assume many other countries).

I think the major problems are:

- People like nicer food/nicer homes. Some (most?) of this is social signalling, some not. Some of the signalling issues could perhaps be addressed by raising the level of the basic provision, I'm unsure. (Basically, there will always be scarcity of some things and they can be used for signalling).

- Advanced human interaction/daily interest. For many/most people, working from home is in some ways less satisfying than working in an office environment (it may be better in other ways). I mean lack of social interaction in etc. Similarly full time mothers/fathers bemoan the lack of grown up contact/use of their higher mental faculties etc.

Lots of the issues are fixable with culture changes, but I suspect we'd need to be closer to full abundance before we could make much progress there.

dlikhten• 14 years ago

Can the same argument not be used for the industrial revolution? The job of the specialists was replaced by technology. The job of the orchestra in theaters was replaced by audio recording/playback technology. And the list goes on. Now it is no different, more automation.

The real problem is that we keep reproducing uncontrolably. The religiously crazed keep pushing having tons of kids with NO WAY TO SUPPORT THEM. Furthermore, better medicine means more kids are surviving, so that means population keeps growing. However with a growing population there is less and less opportunity for each member to contribute to society. It's a cycle. We need controlled population growth globally and an incredible education system. There is simply no other way to go.

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

Spot on. In the short term there's multiple factors, but population is a big 800 lb gorilla few in political leadership will ever touch.

evincarofautumn3• 14 years ago

Humans are going to mate regardless of religion. The only way to control population growth is to stop increasing food production. We cannot make more people if there is nothing for them to be made of.

jerf2• 14 years ago

The evidence flatly contradicts this. Give people contraception and reasonable financial security and the reproduction rate drops like a rock. You can argue about the why, but the what is at this point undeniable. There is no need to go around starving people to "control" the population. This suggestion is no longer a fashionably cynical stance to take in the face of hard reality, it's just evil.

We are not reproducing uncontrollably. This memeset needs to take a good long look around, and then die itself, before it gets enough power to do something truly unfortunate... and entirely unnecessary.

forcefsck2• 14 years ago

Developed countries have in fact lower birth than death rates. In those countries, population is increasing only by immigration.

What stops population growth is political and economical stability, empowerment of women, and education. E.g. check this video http://vimeo.com/m/2905893 to see what research on the matter has to say.

icandoitbetter3• 14 years ago

   The real problem is that we keep reproducing 
   uncontrolably. The religiously crazed keep pushing having 
   tons of kids with NO WAY TO SUPPORT THEM.

That's only the main issue if you're wearing Reddit atheist goggles. Population growth is steadily decreasing in developed countries. On the other hand, automation is becoming increasingly a problem and is partly responsible for the increasing economic inequality we are facing - people with access to the means of production have a lesser need for human labor, resulting in the disempowerment of the middle class.

angersock• 14 years ago

You know, I keep hearing this meme about the evil robot taking away our jobs... how does this compare with the actual competition from overseas cheap labor?

As I understand it, isn't it a lot cheaper to hire a bunch of third-world workers than to build out automated factories?

thebooktocome• 14 years ago

Perhaps I also have Reddit atheist goggles on, but if the religiously crazed have more children on average than the secular, at some point the number of the former will outnumber the number of the latter.

And then, presumably, every near-democracy travels back in time one hundred years.

philwelch2• 14 years ago

For one thing, population growth in industrialized countries is already at or below replacement levels. The problem is solving itself. It turns out economic development is the solution.

For another thing, population doesn't matter much anyway because the demand for most occupations probably grows linearly with population regardless of technology. You don't need linearly as many engineers, but you do need linearly as many doctors, policemen, firemen, cleaners, repairmen, prostitutes, soldiers, nurses, dentists, veterinarians, barbers, yoga instructors, and dog groomers.

jerrya2• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work

The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1]

In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He traced the devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class continues to shrink and the workplace becomes ever more stressful.

As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that will create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers.

He was mostly laughed at.

angstrom• 14 years ago

Peak Labor. Anyone that's ever argued this in the past 200 years has been called a luddite. Yet, in the past 40 years as computers have automated more work, both labor and white collar, it's become clear that the productivity gains are only making it into the pockets of the 20% or so that own investments.

ekianjo2• 14 years ago

The productivity gains also make it to everyone. That's why you are able to buy a computer for so cheap these days. A PC used to cost more than 10 000 dollars in the 80s. There's no such thing as productivity gains being valuable only to investors. It's a win-win for both investors and consumers. It's no zero-sum game.

david9272• 14 years ago

That's exactly right. Recently Foxconn in China has started to replace some of its workers with automation. Think about that: when even low paid work in China can't beat automation, you have a problem. There used to be a place for unskilled/semi-skilled labor: factory work, travel agents, insurance sales people. It's what created the middle class. And it's gone. Now you have the owners of the travel web site making a fortune and the rest struggling to find a way to contribute.

It seems we have passed the tipping point for unskilled/blue collar and a good portion of white-collar labor. The future doesn't need the bottom 90% at all.

hpvic032• 14 years ago

It's not so impossible to believe.

The objection I often hear (and I recall that this is PG's stance as well) is that as old jobs disappear new ones will take their place. For example, as the article mentioned, the former toll booth operator could now repair the automated toll booth system.

So far this general idea has been true. Before computers existed as we know them, "computers" were people who did lengthy computations for a living, often for scientists. Once electronic computers arrived these people seemingly found new jobs and survived.

I'm not sure if this will continue to be the case. We may be reaching a discontinuous point on the economic timeline. If robotic and computer systems are developed that can effectively do the jobs of most humans for less than minimum wage, there won't be enough work for people to make a good living.

The key difference is the following: in the past, technology has only disrupted specific segments of the economy, allowing humans to find work other places where they could still add value. Now, technology has the potential to disrupt the majority of the economy. There won't be any work to do.

There will still be pockets where humans can add value, but there will be so much competition for this work by all the unemployed that the wages will be driven down to nil.

If this situation occurs, the Government will have to find a way to distribute resources directly to the masses lest every sitting politician be voted out of office. In fact, all the rhetoric right now about creating jobs is exactly that. Politicians are promising that they'll find a way to distribute resources to the unemployed.

kamaal3• 14 years ago

Before this thread descends to saying the 'The Matrix' is inevitable.

If the levels automation rise to crazy levels, and there are cheaper and greener sources to energy to drive them. Then Food, Clothing and Shelter won't be much of a problem. We will get those three things without much effort. In other words, you can survive without doing anything.

But you will still pay for Opera, a concert, you will pay to visit a art gallery. You will still pay for quality entertainment. You will continue to pay for a costly vacation in a foreign country. You will pay to find out the deepest secrets of the universe and traveling to get there. Somebody might invent an organic fruit which might taste nothing like before, and you might have to pay just to taste it. There might be narcotic drugs that take you heaven without killing you, and you might pay for it etc etc. .Our goals as a society will be different. But we will still have to work to meet them.

There will be reasons for humans to exist, but those will be very different reasons.

jerrya2• 14 years ago

I agree.

In the Star Trek economy (afaik), the inwention of the replicator was key to the end of money and the end of a scarcity based economy.

Well, we already have a replicator for much of the economy

    $ cp

And it looks as though soon we'll have some very advanced robots that will be able to automate most mundane jobs.

So maybe this is good and we can all become Platos, relaxing, philosophizing, self-actualizing at the top of Maslow's pyramid. If so, it should be reasonable to convince everyone to go the Star Trek way and jettison money.

What will be dangerous, is dangerous, is the transition periods like now, where jobs that are lost, never come back, not just because they have been automated away, but also because the owners would rather pay more for automation and less human involvement because they find humans to be a big pain. At that point (which is sort of like now) it is hard to convince others that it is reasonable to distribute resources to the masses.

I would certainly like to see a single payer, universal health care system implemented that separates health care from monolithic employers. That, and I'd love to see actual real encouragement and incentivization of small business entrepreneurship.

Remove the barriers that big companies have on us. Make it easy and rewarding for people to create their own jobs, form their own companies, on a semi-permanent or even ad-hoc way.

Oh well, pie in the sky.

rsheridan6• 14 years ago

> For example, as the article mentioned, the former toll booth operator could now repair the automated toll booth system.

If the toll collector had the skills, or the ability or inclination to acquire the skills to do something like fixing automated toll booth systems, they probably wouldn't have taken a job as a toll collector.

s_kilk• 14 years ago

>> We may be reaching a discontinuous point on the economic timeline.

I tend to agree. Up until about a year ago I was working as a cinema projectionist for a very successful UK cinema chain. It was a decent job, right up until the point where the company announced a plan to completely replace all 35mm projectors with new digital machines. Now, up until this point we had maybe 3 Digital projectors already installed and we had become quite fond of them, they had a lot of problems and were much less reliable than the 35mm machines but hey, progress is progress.

The real problem was that the company intended to make every single one of us redundant in the same move, as they had some crack-pot idea that the digital projectors would "practically run themselve" (which we knew from experience would never work). This is when I realised that the old myth of "as old jobs disappear new ones will take their place" wasn't true. The company had no intention of generating new work, each cinema site would simply shift the work of running the new projection suite onto the existing (overworked and underpaid) management staff, and the work of maintaining the macines would shift to the existing (overworked and underpaid) technical crew, who were already zipping up and down the country 364 days per year.

The company could have generated some new work to replace the jobs that were lost, but ultimately they don't _want_ to do that. It's much more in the companys interests to jettison as much of their workforce as possible. Fortunately for myself, I had already decided to go back to school and get a degree in software development. Better to be at the devils right hand than in his path. :)

It's not technology that's really killing the labour-force, it's companies who jump at the opportunity to get rid of thousands of employees and essentially delete their productivity from the economy.

jonnathanson• 14 years ago

In theory, gains in productivity from computerized resources would replace the need for human work. (Voicemail and word processors made secretaries obsolete in many organizations, for instance). But in practice, work has simply grown more complex and more voluminous to accommodate the productivity gains.

Consider the humble spreadsheet, arguably the most powerful business innovation of the last 50 years. Now that people can calculate complex models in hours, not weeks, have the fields of corporate finance and forecasting gone away? Hardly. If anything, more work gets packed into each day to fill the vacuum left by not having to crunch numbers on paper for days on end. And the level of sophistication going into deal analysis has increased, allowing people to spend more time planning and less time bean-counting.

Sure, some jobs have been in outright decline since the rise of technology. Secretaries, human computers (sorry, Frank Herbert!), many factory workers, and so forth. But the net amount of work to be done hasn't decreased. If anything, it's increased dramatically. It's just shifted to the knowledge-worker side. And knowledge workers' workloads have skyrocketed. All of this technology has actually made us busier and more productive, because it has allowed us to do more each day.

The theory that technology replaces the need for X or Y work is based on the flawed assumption that the total need for X or Y work remains static over time. In the knowledge worker's domain, it does not. It turns out that meeting the need for X and Y actually increases the need for, or at least the expectation of, more X and Y. In this sense, I tend to agree with PG's argument (and the arguments of those like him).

datasage• 14 years ago

I agree with this. We have been able to absorb displaced workers because the economy had been growing at a rate higher than natural growth (population/inflation). But the us economy has matured, it is no longer growing dramatically as it once was. While some technological advancements can create new markets and growth for the economy; Many technologies are designed to address inefficiencies in the market or business processes which will ultimately result in a net decrease in employment.

Also, technology is also a poor business decision if it costs more than existing methods taking into account increases in productivity.

ctdonath4• 14 years ago

Notice the current USA administration's insistence on population reduction. No need to address the unemployed if they don't come into existence.

edwinnathaniel2• 14 years ago

IT itself is susceptible to the danger of shrinking given 2 things:

- The rise of *aaS

- The mindset of maximizing profits and and minimize expense

Some of us have said a few times in the past: building software is expensive.

Some of us have also said a few times in the past that: good programmers are expensive.

Put two together and you get a recipe as to why more companies shy away from custom-development and prefer to build IT based on OOB + small tweaks.

I've been seeing a growing demand of Microsoft Office 365 + Sharepoint Online + Dynamics CRM Online as opposed to in-house installation or using Basecamp.NEXT + Backpack (yes, SP Online is equal to Basecamp.NEXT + Backpack). Some companies don't necessarily put top premium for nice UI or super simple easy and friendly software.

Open Source software is also impacted with the rise of the cloud: in certain area of software, if the cost of the commercial offering is less than installing+maintaining Open Source software, then that particular area of software for Open Source probably will die eventually (e.g.: Open Source bug tracking and project management software => Is it more expensive to install+maintain Trac vs paying GitHub/FogCreek/Atlassian to host everything?)

We might be slowly eating ourselves as well (in the context of IT). Whether we can produce something new, innovative, and exciting, faster than we can eat is yet to be seen.

PS: There are industries with unique requirements and regulations, these industries might pay for expensive custom software until one day a new software will arise and effectively kill customization in the said industry.

csomar• 14 years ago

Some companies don't necessarily put top premium for nice UI or super simple easy and friendly software.

Aren't these companies more vulnerable to disruption? If there productivity is very low, and they don't provide digital solutions. This means they can't go bankrupt by competitive and high-tech competition (like Netflix did)

The question is "when they will go away?" It's very likely when the cost of implementing the technology is cheaper than hiring many workers.

itmag4• 14 years ago

If productivity rises to an absurd degree, I think it makes sense to start having a citizen's wage / minimum guaranteed income: http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-inc...

Sure, a lot of people might just become layabouts doing nothing. But are they really doing much right now, by enduring crappy jobs that add marginal value?

Other people might unlock vast reservoirs of creativity which would bring great positive externalities to society, if they didn't have to spend their productive hours on such a trite problem as survival.

GFischer3• 14 years ago

My country, Uruguay, implemented something like that ("Plan de emergencia"). And I don't like the results.

The problem is not that they're "doing nothing", it's that they're actively increasing their burden to the working society by having an unsustainable amount of children.

They're also REJECTING job offers (80% of those getting the emergency wage). And many of those job offers were for a good wage by local standards.

(spanish links)

http://elobservador.com.uy/noticia/214462/el-80-de-la-poblac...

http://www.mides.gub.uy/mides/text.jsp?contentid=14247&s...

It may sound fascist, but I'd like people to be able to support themselves before having children.

The idea of a citizen's wage sounds nice in theory, but implementation opens a big can of worms.

evincarofautumn3• 14 years ago

“There is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day”…except that’s not how ecology works. When a species is given a food surplus, its population grows, not the quality of life of its individuals. If you give your surplus food to an area that supports 5,000 starving people, then you have only ensured that 6,000 of them will be around in the next generation to starve even more severely.

“Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with ‘career’ be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?” I’d like to think so. We are just as much competitive creatures as collaborative ones, though, so in a world where needs are fulfilled regardless of whether you do anything, I fear people will have little incentive or inspiration to create.

icandoitbetter3• 14 years ago

   If you give your surplus food to an area that supports 5,000
   starving people, then you have only ensured that 6,000 of 
   them will be around in the next generation to starve even 
   more severely.

Not sure how well that applies to human societies. Poorer countries tend to have a higher population growth because poor people have children so that they can put them into labor. In developed societies, the general quality of life is increasing while population growth is decreasing, something that contradicts your assumption.

   so in a world where needs are fulfilled regardless of 
   whether you do anything, I fear people will have little  
   incentive or inspiration to create

That's a typical libertarian argument that borders on sadism (is producing great creations more important than living comfortably?). It can also be easily dismissed: Money is not the only incentive for producing art or science. In fact it's far from the most important incentive. Are you saying that important scientists or artists have produced their works merely in order to fulfill material needs?

I wish I didn't have to care about making enough money to survive so that I would have time to pursue my lofty research ideas.

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

I am a fungus.

zanny• 14 years ago

It is more a problem of motivation. Since we have not yet stopped universal entropy to guarantee our unending existance forever, we still have progress to be made.

Too bad we have probably billions of human beings not contributing towards that progress.

We need people motivated to enter the sciences and engineering disciplines to make the future happen. We will probably see our means of survival fully automated in our lifetimes, and besides the imminent highly coupled crisis of global warming / overpopulation / resource depletion this century, we will probably emerge from it in a state where no person born will ever need to toil to survive to the next day.

We might even get to the point where people don't die, or aren't bound to biological form.

But we are too busy complaining about celebrities on TV and our neighbors to have a collective motivation towards progress. The greatest problem to solve in the 21st century is one of motivating people to tackle hard problems to progress the whole of humanity, en masse.

moddedarmstrong• 14 years ago

I accept that humanities continuation as a species depends on science/tech, there has to be more to it. Living longer and expanding further should be the how, not the why.

Unifying people into action is historically only possible by getting them to engage in shared values and beliefs. We need culture, politics, philosophy and, dare I say it, religion to motivate people into tackling these problems. Promoting science beyond these seems unlikely to result in the kind of Utopian vision you are talking about.

Also, is toiling always such a bad thing? Hard work can be rewarding too.

ChristianMarks• 14 years ago

Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

The article doesn't mention Lanier's extensive writing on what he calls Digital Maoism: the notion that collectives always solve problems better than individuals, who should give their digital content away for free. If there were some way of monetizing this digital content that did not benefit only a few well-positioned social networking hubs and that did not require draconian intellectual property legislation (which mainly benefits a few monopolists), then there might be some hope.

marshray3• 14 years ago

Yeah was getting into the article until near the end when it started to feel like a not-so-subtle defense of "intellectual property", i.e., "if only we could better monetize our digital creations Utopia would be within reach".

I honestly feel that the way our government is run by lawyers (who seem to actually believe in this silly idea of an IP-based economy) is the reason so much manufacturing has fled the country. Americans today just don't know the value of mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Germany and Switzerland didn't make this mistake. They love and value manufacturing and look where their economies are.

(And by the way kids, get off my lawn :-)

dantheman• 14 years ago

No.

danielharan• 14 years ago

"That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need."

Really? We found a way to cure cancer and power our economy with clean energy?

read_wharf• 14 years ago

We have enough to live as well as we've ever lived, which is pretty well.

There'll always be something more. Some day, when a sizable portion of humanity lives to 115, we'll consider the genetic limit of 115 year life spans to be as important as cancer is today.

philwelch2• 14 years ago

I love how the media overreacts to everything. Here's a pretty obvious maxim: nothing is as good as it seems at its best, and nothing is as bad as it seems at its worst. To wit: the recession and slow recovery of the last couple of years are just that, a recession and slow recovery--they aren't a harbinger to the end of capitalism or conventional labor or employment. The jobs are already coming back.

Psychologically, people seem to have a basic need to do something productive with at least a good chunk of their time, and jobs do fulfill this important need. The jobs might become more abstract and more indirectly removed from everyday necessities, and hours might even drop, but I don't think they'd go away.

icandoitbetter3• 14 years ago

    To wit: the recession and slow recovery of the last 
    couple of years are just that, a recession and slow 
    recovery--they aren't a harbinger to the end of   
    capitalism or conventional labor or employment.

The recession and slow recovery are what we make of them. The future is not already determined. There may or may not be the end of capitalism, but that doesn't say anything about whether that's a goal we should pursue.

Even though Rushkoff believes that automation is killing jobs, he doesn't believe that the alternative he proposes is inevitable. He just invites us to consider it.

maxs• 14 years ago

A relevant short sci-fi novel about robotics, economic and societal change brought about from change in value of labor:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

socrates1024• 14 years ago

I love this novella. Also on Marshall Brain's site are a handful of essays/articles on this topic, e.g.: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

His suggestion is very simple: provide an annual stipend of about $25,000 to each citizen.

ctdonath4• 14 years ago

He fails to note that wealth decays. It cannot be redistributed indefinitely. Those who create wealth must have enough incentive to keep doing so to support (voluntary or not) those who don't. Take away too much wealth from those who created it and they'll stop creating more, and what wealth there is will be consumed and/or squandered out of existence.

Note that, in the USA at least, federal government revenue never exceeds 20% of GDP. Try taking more, and GDP declines - to wit, producers slow or stop.

jimmytucson3• 14 years ago

Yeah, I like this part:

"The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised."

Wow. Understatement? Volumes of economic thought have been written about why communism doesn't work and he just kinda brushes it off like, "minor bug, nbd".

ctdonath4• 14 years ago

Soon followed by "We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights."

Obviously he never grew a significant fraction of his own food, or built his own house. That I can do so by the proxy of writing software (to wit thinking real hard) does not devalue them to the point that those who don't/won't create food & shelter, or do something exchangeable therefor, can demand I provide them with such necessities. Advocates of this "jobs are optional" meme don't grasp, or won't admit, how little most people are willing to live on if they can get it for zero effort and can be entertained indefinitely ... funny, that sounds a lot like the "bread and circuses" stage of a civilization on the brink of collapse.

Make them "rights"? Obvious discussions of "you have no right to compel me to provide for you" aside... I've figured $10/day is a workable, albeit stark, minimum "living income" (see http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com for the mindset). Few indeed are incapable of earning $10/day and making that livable, save only for lack of will. There is no need to declare a "right to food & shelter" (manifested thru confiscation) when so little effort is needed.

But, as you note, he just tosses out the "human rights" premise as "nbd". Never mind the 100,000,000 dead from prior attempts at the memes he proposes as new.

When he grows half his own food, and builds his own home, and gives 90% of his income to the state (just write a check to the treasury, nobody's stopping him), then maybe he'll have standing. Methinks he won't hold those views if he lived them a while.

sc68cal• 14 years ago

The USPS may not be an ideal case study, since it is the only entity that is required to pre-fund 75 years worth of health benefits to employees.

http://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2011/pr11_102.h...

"Without enactment of legislation by the end of this month, the Postal Service faces default, as funds will be insufficient to make a congressionally mandated $5.5 billion payment to pre-fund retiree health benefits, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe told a Senate committee today."

This was a manufactured crisis, passed by a lame duck Republican congress in 2006. See Title VIII - Postal Service Retirement and Health Benefits Funding in the following link:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-6407

Yes - E-mail has made an impact on the USPS' bottom line, but it's because of POLITICS that the USPS is in such bad shape.

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

Specially considering that the average volume/weight/cost by package must have increased tenfold because of e-commerce.

thaddeusmt• 14 years ago

The abstraction of "jobs" from "the things we do to survive" is interesting. The only things we "need" to do are reproduce, and find food and shelter towards that end. It's crazy that we have blown past the struggle for survival so far it's almost been forgotten, like the binary code under our lovely Ruby scripts.

But we still feel the flutter of our primal fears for survival, even in the abstraction, and fight to the death over increasingly excessive piles of wealth, as if we might not "survive". And because we do that, in the global picture not everyone DOES survive. If you are convinced you do not have enough to survive, it's very hard to share.

Even worse, as our personal bar of "survival" continues to rise in this abstract world, our frantic and instinctual struggle to "survive" is apparently driving us towards an incredibly sad and ironic demise - if you believe the headlines about nuclear war and global warming.

I agree with the article's idea that as technology takes care of more and more basic needs we should move to "information-based products" to keep ourselves busy and satisfied. We have to. All the world's billions can't have two cars in the garage, but they can all have giant digital art and music collections. (I guess we could do more recreation/sporting too, that's not a finite resource.)

But it's another level of abstraction. How far can we get from our concrete instincts for food and babies and still find sufficient meaning and purpose?

n_time• 14 years ago

I think you need to take a closer look at poverty in your country, dude. Maybe you're abstracted away from it, but it's not a fairy tale.

itmag4• 14 years ago

Are you familiar with the 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness? Sounds like you're describing a negatively imprinted first circuit (or "bio-survival anxiety").

http://theuniverseas.com/bio-survival

skylan_q• 14 years ago

Not many have mentioned policy here, just automation.

How are we to create sustainable jobs if we keep taxing, regulating, etc... such that we increase the requirement for marginal productivity of labor in order to turn a profit?

Basically, on-the-job training and low skills employment could be made more profitable by making it so that there is some room left for the free market. If they have lower non-employment costs, then they will be able to hire less productive people. This drives demand for employment, and thus, wages.

But I'm not suggesting that this will ever happen. ;) Some people in power pay lip service to the free market while attacking it, and others aren't shy about attacking it. We create "make work" jobs that come at the cost of companies and individuals. If it didn't come at the cost of companies and individuals their costs would be lower. If enough wiggle room was given, on-the-jobs training would be possible, and low-skills labor more profitable.

As of April, the US will have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. This approach doesn't seem to be solving the inequality of wealth problem, and it doesn't look like it's giving people a way to earn their living.

yason2• 14 years ago

I've never understood taxing of income, except that for the point of a taxing bureau it's a very convenient spot to impose taxes.

Namely, taxing reduces whatever that is taxed. Taxing work makes work less desirable, and sometimes not worth to be done at all. Taxes should target things that are unnecessary or harming.

Thus, income shouldn't be taxed at all. Conversely, consumption should be taxed with a VAT roughly equal to the lost income tax. Food could certainly be taxed less than cars but the general rule should be that you're taxed for consuming. Because income wouldn't be taxed, people's purchasing power would increase but taxing the consumption would make them think twice where they spend their money. Consider that this is the opposite of the current situation: people are all pre-taxed (=license to consume) and items and products are so cheap they can get spent money on and ultimately discarded without anyone blinking an eye.

devs10104• 14 years ago

we are taxed at consumption as well, I'm assuming you mean you want even higher sales tax than we currently have but no income tax? I have felt that the current sales tax of up to 10% in some places is already fairly high as is

desas• 14 years ago

The counter argument is that taxing spending adversely impacts the poor. They have to spend a higher proportion of their income. The richer you are the more of your income you're likely to save/invest. It's hard to progressively tax consumption.

nodemaker• 14 years ago

This was discussed before at

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2970007

kamaal3• 14 years ago

Let us put it this way. As automation increases and there are cheaper and greener ways to harness and use energy. What we are likely to see is change of goals in life.

We may no longer strive for food, clothing and shelter. Many things may come automatically. But we will have to still work to make a living for many things like medicine, travel, vacations etc but the basic stuff may all come at cheaper prices.

There will still be 'rich' and 'poor' people. People will pay for greater things. The poor will no longer strive for basic survival, but they will have to strive for luxury.

The whole point is the definition of poverty and luxury will change. And we are likely to have better standards of living at the lowest levels.

jules2• 14 years ago

Funny that you include medicine in the list of luxury things you have to work for. In a large part of the world that's the one thing you don't have to work for.

snambi• 14 years ago

Yes, we are using less USPS for sending payments and letters. That is only one aspect of USPS. People are shipping way more stuff than they do using USPS. A lot of stuff that is bought in websites like eBay and amazon goes through USPS. eCommerce is growing year over year, which means growth for USPS.

IMHO, USPS is more important now than ever.

josscrowcroft• 14 years ago

I'm sure someone else picked up on this...

"New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete."

I wasn't aware that "Google-controlled self-driving automobiles" was rendering taxicab drivers obsolete any time in the near future... call me a luddite, but we've probably got several decades of legal and social hurdles before that even approaches being a reality.

parsnips• 14 years ago

Or that toll booth collectors were a vast segment of our economy... These sort of articles by this sort of author indicate, if anything, that our economy is robust enough to produce such inane nonsense.

jebblue• 14 years ago

>> What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

Sounds like a campaign speech writer for Obama. Regardless any other analogies, everyone needs to pull their fair share unless they either already have (elderly or injured or medically incapable) or have enough wealth to hire those of us who are willing to pull our fair share.

In the latter case, workers don't need Union boss thugs to protect us from you; we just need your respect.

WalterBright• 14 years ago

I think this is just hysterical nonsense. Remember, it used to be not that long ago that 95% of the labor force worked on farms, and still famine was a regular occurrence. Now only 1 or 2 percent work on the farms.

I can't imagine people running out of productive things to do. After all, can making movies be automated? How about becoming a professional dancer or athlete? Writing books? Building a custom car? Making art of any sort? Elder care (a booming business as baby boomers age)? Research? Tutoring?

There have never been greater opportunities for productive work than now.

mcantelon2• 14 years ago

Largely due to globalization, nearly half of Americans are poor or low income.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/census-shows-1-2-people-103940...

There is, of course, no shortage of productive work, but getting paid for that productive work is another matter.

zeroonetwothree3• 14 years ago

This is just based on changing definitions of "poor" and "low-income". Wages are still around all-time highs for every quintile.

eldavido• 14 years ago

Whether a human being or a machine is doing a task, value is being created; the overall economy isn't worse off.

The issue is value capture -- who derives the benefit of this value creation, and how?

If a human being does a job, they're compensated through wages. Machines have owners, which earn income in exchange for the productive output of their machines.

There are a lot of ways to earn income besides having a job. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we'll get beyond this absurd "job creation" mentality around which so much of modern politics revolves.

andr3w321• 14 years ago

The idea of this has been around for a LONG time and is not a new one. I think the term for this type of society is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism or a socialist utopia.

New jobs always pop up though. The problem with this logic is that because all of today's jobs will likely be automated in the future you think everyone will be unemployed, but in reality you just can't fathom what the jobs of the future will look like. Can you imagine trying to describe to someone that lives in 1900 your job description? You write code for a living? You're a computer scientist? Wtf is that? They pay you to just sit there all day and press buttons?

noonespecial• 14 years ago

Its getting harder to imagine us not eventually splitting into Eloi and Morlock.

jimmytucson3• 14 years ago

"Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves."

I feel kinda stupid for saying this but I always thought people stopped producing their own "stuff" when we really got the hang of money. In other words, thanks to money, I can do one thing all day (and maybe get really good at it!) instead of doing all the little separate things I need to do to survive. And then I can exchange the fruits of that one thing for all the other stuff I might need or want.

I appreciate this more now since I started learning how to write code. By my second or third go at a script, I figure out how to factor out common functions and reuse them. Good thing these lines of code aren't laborers because what I'm essentially doing is firing all of them and replacing them with a workhorse (a function or a subroutine) which will do all the work for me, multiple times.

I guess I'm sort of brainwashed into thinking the efficiency gained by factoring my code is more important than the livelihood of all those little redundant lines I figured out a way to delete. But what this guy's saying sounds too politically charged for me to be fully persuaded by it. I'm like 88% persuaded by it but there's the nagging 12% saying, "He's got an agenda, Jimmy. Don't listen to him!"

zeroonetwothree3• 14 years ago

This isn't true at all. Working "for" someone else goes back to the earliest governments and religions. Corporations only took off much later, after the end of mercantilism.

jimmytucson3• 14 years ago

Oh, alright. So, he's talking about "being employed by some organization", rather than just "having a job" in general. The article definitely makes more sense now.

I guess, maybe naively, I don't care as much about the arrangement between employer and employee as I do about the apparent dark side of rapid efficiency gains through specialization. I wanted him to say, "Hey, look, specialization is awesome until we're so efficient we don't need all the humans we're giving birth to!" But I'm slightly disappointed because I think I just read something about how evil and oppressive corporations are.

mjwalshe• 14 years ago

Acualy in that period a lot of people owed their living to their feudal overlord and some where efectivly owned by the landowners.

yason2• 14 years ago

If we assume that old jobs lost to automation and efficiency are simply replaced with new jobs, then how can we measure we are actually producing something of relevance and actual utility with the new jobs?

For example, farming is pretty vital as work per se and it used to cover the majority of people. But these days, if a percentage of people can do the farming for everyone then what would constitute equally meaningful jobs for the rest of the 99%? We basically need food, clothes, housing, and heating. Then there are things that we "need" (but can do without) such as electricity, plumbing, running water, etc. Some people would become artisans to produce specialized goods or merchants to trade those goods. These are pretty quickly and efficiently implemented with the current efficiency and if that was all, we'd probably have employed few percent of the work force. What's there left to do that would genuinely cover the rest 90% of the work force?

meow• 14 years ago

"And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high."

is this true ? is it legal..

molsongolden2• 14 years ago

I can't find a quick source for the disposal of crops but the US does heavily subsidize farmers to the tune of tens of billions per year.

forcefsck2• 14 years ago

It's funny how the recipe to fix the economy, that our current leaders are pushing, is by trying to raise productivity and competitiveness, by giving corporations the flexibility to increase working hours without extra compensation for employees. Then raise the retirement age at 67 while unemployment in under 30s is in a peak. Yeah, all those counter-intuitive measures they keep preaching for on the media all the time.

Scarcity of a resource is the most profitable opportunity for those who own it. Scarcity of jobs is an opportunity for profit to some people.

olalonde• 14 years ago

> The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now)

The US government is arguably going in the opposite direction of libertarianism.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/0...

> would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer.

I think most people don't want to let the poor "simply suffer". Libertarians simply argue it shouldn't be government's role to help the poor.

aseembehl• 14 years ago

Captain Jean-Luc Picard states in the film Star Trek: First Contact that "The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

Disclaimer: Copied from the comments on the original article.

zerostar07• 14 years ago

Generally, one ought to start thinking about this instead of the "End of jobs". Jobs are an industrial-era economic construction, work is something we always had and will probably always have, even as an evolutionary relic.

hef19898• 14 years ago

In Europe, some people are thinking of replacing welfare by a certain ammount of money being payed to everyone, without condition, everymonth. Could be solution, even if you have to work out the details of such a scheme. What makes this different from any system we have today is, that people not working are most likely not stigmatised anymore. Currently you have condition attached to recieving money from the state, so as soon as you can get away from these conditions you will. Meaning you need a job , a.k.a. employment. The result is, that everybody without a job has nothing to offer to an emplyeer. Hence, the stigma that he's worthless. But he isn't, maybe he only has talents nobody is willing to pay enough to make a living these days. If this really is a solution or how we can get there, well no idea. But we should think about it. As soon as there's enough for everyone, why not letting everyone participate on it. And when you look at the conditions you have to get your money when you ARE employed, well I'm not sure you're better of than without a job, from a self-respect point of view I mean.

paraschopra• 14 years ago

In 1900s, with Nietzsche, we killed God but at least people had distractions of "work".

But in 2000s, we are slowly killing work itself and replacing it with automaton.

Without a world with religion or necessary work, I wonder, what is there for (majority of) humans to "cling to"? Without distractions, won't their "freedom" drive them insane? Without God and profession, what would give meaning to their life?

molsongolden2• 14 years ago

The State and war. Then once we abolish those we will have reached communist nirvana.

Drbble5• 14 years ago

Drugs. C.f., Brave New World.

mark_l_watson• 14 years ago

I get into friendly arguments with family and friends on the conservative and liberal side of things over this. While I believe that paying taxes partially to support people who can't work or can't get jobs is simply part of the cost of living in a (reasonable) civil society, I also believe that there has to be a strong incentive built into the system.

I believe that able bodied people and their families who don't have means of earning money should be supported in clean and safe tent cities and incentivized to put effort into accepting and working with training programs and education. Incentives might be things like cable TV, etc. in their housing.

No one should starve to death or go hungry in our country. People who simply don't want to work or accept training and education should get fewer perks in life, but should still have enough to be happy if that is the lifestyle they want.

All children should have good educational opportunities, including free meals at school if they need them.

Are jobs obsolete?

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