The Jobs Are Never Coming Back

http://thoughtinfection.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/the-jobs-are-never-coming-back/

by nemo1618 • 13 years ago

180 205 13 years ago

thoughtinfection.wordpress.com

waps2• 13 years ago

By far the most insightful little tidbit in the blogpost:

"In the 21st century, the rules of the game have changed. Capital growth has become decoupled from job growth,"

Right now we're just approaching the middle of the curve though. It's not quite decoupled yet, it's just less solidly coupled. We still need lots of people, we're just starting to have the ability to replace them through slow and tedious optimization. With currently big disadvantages, like lack of flexibility. Soon we won't need people to begin with, and robots/programs will be more efficient, even when starting a company and they need to be agile and adapt fast. We're going back to the job situation of the middle ages : there is no economic reason to have >90% of the population at all. We're at the beginning of the slide back into 90%+ joblessness.

Nothing can change that, not policy (except maybe genocide), not "green", nothing. We just need to deal with it somehow. Preferably better than in the middle ages, although, making them all build churches decorating every last little square centimeter of stone might actually not be that stupid a proposal. Certainly preferable to how the middle east dealt with it, starting a global war of conquest.

Futurebot• 13 years ago

It's great to see this topic finally getting more attention; it's going to be a defining issue for decades to come. The entire structure of our societies will need to change to acommodate populations with far smaller labor forces, and all its attendant effects. The most important place to start will be with culture, particularly the cultural belief in the "Just World Fallacy"; the old ways of thinking about social justice, and the idea of "deserving" will need to be radically altered.

The Economist has another good article on the subject:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-m...

jchrisa• 13 years ago

Thinking like this may make the idea of a universal basic income appealing. Good book I enjoyed on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0...

sowhatquestion• 13 years ago

Glad to see someone repping van Parijs on HN... while we're at it, I feel like I should recommend his longer and more systematic treatment of the subject, "Real Freedom For All" ( http://www.amazon.com/Real-Freedom-All-capitalism-Political/... ). Parts of it are sort of obtusely written (he spends a lot of time responding to other thinkers, e.g. Marx and Rawls, along the way), but there are good arguments scattered throughout.

muhfuhkuh• 13 years ago

Maybe capital growth is decoupled from job growth, but why is it that Apple and Google and Walmart and Target and Whole Foods and Starbucks and GE and your local busy restaurant and market and machine shop are still hiring like bananas?

Demand causes job growth. No amount of automation is going to prevent an Apple Store from needing a genius or a Gap from needing shirt folders. We still need plumbers and nurses and CNC machinists and spot welders and longshoremen.

Why is Kia still hiring in West Point, Georgia? And, where are those robotic unbuttoned-shirt baseball-cap-cocked-to-the-side douchebag bots that greet my nephew at Abercrombie? Oh, right, they're still human.

A lot of industries and companies are still trying to climb out of the 5 year funk we're arguably still in. A lot more companies realized that they could simply work their remaining people into the ground, create an atmosphere of uncertainty and abject fealty, and pocket the difference rather than increase headcount.

My theory? We're in a whole new ballgame full of the following people:

* Those who are willing to get their hands dirty

* Temporary workers and those who like part-time work for the flexible hours and variety of gigs

* Those smart enough to get degrees and certification past their high school diploma or GED, and get those in-demand technical jobs in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and services

* A bunch of people who are either unwilling or unable to accept any of the above and/or are still looking for Dilbertesque nothing jobs in cubicles in office parks overlooking other office parks in positions at whatever companies and having longer titles than responsibilities (e.g., Assistant to the Regional Inside Sales Manager, Northeast US [except NY]).

jiggy20115• 13 years ago

The Apple example is interesting, when you consider their market cap vs the number of people they employ (around half a million in the US according to http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/).

Now, I imagine that most of these jobs (in the US) are going to be store workers. Consider that Apple used to exist without any Apple stores at all. There will come a point when they have a store in every town that matters and they will mostly stop hiring store staff (apart from as replacements).

In fact you could even consider the possibility that they could probably close all of their stores without damaging their market cap that much, but it would be devastating from a job creation point of view.

Think of the other tech giants like Facebook, Google etc. How many jobs do they create vs their revenue?

jfoster2• 13 years ago

Exactly - those companies are hiring because they're successful. Why are they successful? Because they have better margins than their competitors. Sure, they're hiring, but they have the most attractive (from their perspective) ratio of employees to revenue.

NoPiece3• 13 years ago

Abercrombie isn't going to buy a robot greeter to a replace a human employee, they are just going to close more stores and get rid of the greeter, the folder, the cashier, the manager, the janitor, and the driver.

http://investorplace.com/2013/02/abercrombie-fitch-to-close-...

Think about how many human hands would be displaced if when I ordered an Abercrombie shirt online, it was shipped to my house directly from a factory in China. That may not be happening yet, but there is still that potential level of disruption ahead. You'll probably still need your barrista though!

zanny4• 13 years ago

I think this is a major revolution coming. The entire service industry is built off people having to drive to stores, interact with humans, and buy things there. It is much more demand reactive and inventory efficient to ship from the source the things we want, planning them in advance, and delivering them directly.

I mean, I would personally never have a waiter at a restaurant. Put a touchscreen on the table, let me pick what I want, and either I'll go to the kitchen and pick it up (and why can't a robot do the cooking?) and take it back, or even better, have it delivered to the table.

Why am I in a restaurant ordering? Why can't I just order take out and have an automated car delivery service drop it off?

jodrellblank3• 13 years ago

No amount of automation is going to prevent an Apple Store from needing a genius or a Gap from needing shirt folders.

Really? You can't imagine a robotic shirt-folding device could ever be invented? Whatever tech news you're paying attention to is about 70 years out of date.

That's not counting that if shirts were on hangers and you could easily get a hanger of "everything that fits me well" then they wouldn't need folding at all.

ximeng• 13 years ago

To help the imagination along:

https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+folding+robot

VikingCoder2• 13 years ago

You two make me laugh.

You just invented a robot that fits on the back of a horse, picking up the poop, putting street-cleaners out of business.

I don't think there's going to be a robotic shirt-folding device. More likely, shirts will be "printed" on demand. No store necessary.

notdrunkatall6• 13 years ago

Well said, with one caveat: that ballgame isn't new; it's the same ballgame that's been played, with the same players, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The sky has been perpetually falling for 300 years, yet here we are, banging away on our keyboards in our climate-controlled abodes with full bellies, worrying about whether we'll get rich or merely live comfortably.

The capacity of people to believe that the end is nigh via any of a seemingly infinite number of imaginative scenarios despite the historical precedent to the contrary is simply stunning.

venus3• 13 years ago

I understand what you're trying to say, and I agree to some extent, but you're making some very big assumptions.

> The sky has been perpetually falling for 300 years, yet here we are

Maybe the sky takes 300 years to fall. Did you think about it that way?

> The capacity of people to believe that the end is nigh [..] despite the historical precedent to the contrary

What historical precedent? Come on, tell me what happened to the last human civilisation to go through industrialisation and computerisation and, lastly, robotification. I'm dying to know what happened to them and see what lessons we can learn from how they handled the utter demise of manual and low-skill labour in their societies.

minikites• 13 years ago

Why does growth even need to keep occurring?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/peter-victor-def...

"Technological advances make workers more productive every year. In the mainstream view, these labor efficiencies make goods cheaper, which leaves consumers with more disposable income—which they invest or spend on more stuff, leading to more hiring to fulfill demand. By contrast, the no-growthers would do things differently; they would use those efficiencies to shorten the workweek, so that most people would stay employed and bring home a reasonable salary. If new technology continued to drive productivity gains, citizens in a nongrowing economy would actually work less and less over time as they divvied up the shrinking workload."

gms• 13 years ago

Because for the latter scenario to hold true every society and organisation would have to agree to stop chasing growth. How would that even be done? Have a universal law that sets a ceiling on the amount of work one is allowed to perform in a week? That is unrealistic.

gizmo6863• 13 years ago

Or some form of socialism. Even a guarantee of some minimal income, even for the unemployed, should do the trick. With this method, you can think of the economy as a sliding scale of jobs that need to be done, and people willing to do them. As you increase the minimum income, you decrease the people willing to do the jobs, and as you decrease the minimum income you increase the people willing to do the jobs. The trick is to find the income that makes the two numbers equal. Now, as technology allows people to work more efficiently, the economy can support a higher effective minimum income.

We can see how this could work even in our current system. At the moment, we have people willing and able to work who cannot. If we start giving every citizen some amount of money, either the unemployed will stop wanting to work, or the employed will decide that they would be happier working less because the additional money is no longer worth their time.

afterburner• 13 years ago

People still need jobs to live well, low goods costs still doesn't necessarily compensate for rising rents, and the population keeps expanding.

With a shrinking population on the other hand...

jandrewrogers3• 13 years ago

I agree with the basic argument that economic growth has a weakening correlation with job growth. However, the idea often proffered that you solve this by making people with jobs work less is silly. First, at the limit spreading the work around over more people still results in the same outcome. Second, it also assumes that the real problem is a shortage of jobs when the problem is actually a shortage of people capable of doing jobs where it makes economic sense to employ a person.

The problem is that we have a (figurative) glut of job openings for neurosurgeons and a severe shortage of neurosurgeons. The answer not to make the existing neurosurgeons work fewer hours; they are serving a valuable, irreplaceable (in an availability sense) function every hour they work. You can't give a lawyer, janitor, and accountant a crash course in neurosurgery, split the job between them, and expect a comparable result in the aggregate even though you created more jobs. At some point we will have to come to terms with the idea of decoupling a job from a decent life in the same way that jobs are being decoupled from economic growth.

The limit of this scenario is interesting as a hypothetical. When we get to the point where only 5% of the population is employable and they are all employed with very valuable skills that are in extremely short supply by definition, how are those people treated once the vast majority of the population depends on their continued work while 95% of the population no longer needs to work and is not usefully employable in any case? Can the 95% not working force the 5% to work long hours because there is a desperate need for their skills and talents which are not easily replaceable? It is a different political dynamic than when the majority of the population is contributing to the economy that supports society.

Spooky23• 13 years ago

You're using examples that are fundamentally flawed, as the high end jobs you named tend to be folks more likely to be partners or principals in their own businesses.

For a good part of the 20th century, white-collar, salaried jobs were 40 hour jobs. Blue collar or non-exempt jobs were 40 hour jobs with overtime. Today, we declare almost everyone to be an exempt employee, work them ragged, and run as lean as possible. We do this because unlike in the 1960's, companies bear no cost -- those burnt out 45 year olds don't get disability pensions or insurance anymore. Those costs are borne by the public at large via social safety net programs.

If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, you would provide companies with a powerful incentive to deal with the high fixed costs associated with hiring an employee. It doesn't make "economic sense" to hire people because the law has been changed to make that the case. Now it makes sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.

jandrewrogers3• 13 years ago

I was not intending to name any particular high-end jobs. In fact, I picked "neurosurgeon" randomly so as to pick a profession far outside most people on this forum. The point that you missed is that the people who will still have jobs in this scenario are likely to be people in professions where the demand exceeds the supply and is not easily replaceable (or the demand would not exceed supply).

To bring it back to an HN audience, consider high-end software engineers. There is ferocious demand for them and they can demand wages that is an integer multiple of the average wage in the US and employers will pay that. Most of these companies hiring high-end software engineers are essentially in a price war with other companies. The pool of new software engineers capable of the job does not grow fast enough to fill the growth in demand. When a company poaches a software engineer from another company, all they have done is move the demand to a new company. Forcing people to work less does not create a vast pool of highly skilled workers with deep technical expertise, nor does it make it any easier to develop that expertise. The number of jobs increase on their own. The number of workers qualified to fill those jobs does not. As the average skill required of those jobs continues to rise, the number of qualified people will diminish.

nthj• 13 years ago

> Now it makes sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.

I imagine it's different for software developers than, say, graphic designers or copywriters, but why do you feel freelancers/contractors are easier to abuse? In my experience, W2 is more likely to turn into "hey work 60 hours a week for free!" with little I can do about it because the employer is my sole source of income.

With contracting, I have my eggs split into multiple baskets. When one client tries to take advantage of me, their work is put on the back burner until they pay up / shape up / whatever and I still have a half-dozen other sources of income. So long as I'm semi-diligent about marketing, I'm now in the position of power. And sure, 60-hour weeks still happen, but I get paid for every hour, so there's that.

intended3• 13 years ago

The reason for smaller pensions and so on aren't internal factors alone.

Often the fact is that some nation abroad can salary and staff workers, with fewer regulations, more health risks, lower costs and almost equivalent products.

If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, be cognizant that many companies would just throw in the towel. (And now you have two problems.)

This was the thesis of the original blog post. What do you do with a world or nation where 95% of the jobs are uneconomical to perform locally?

When job growth is no longer linked to the economy, how do you employ people?

Honestly the hard answer is "bring the standard of living around the world to the same level". Arguably the easiest way to do this is to lower your own.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

bunch of wimps, I grew up on a farm, still know people who farm. I work in an office now, its air conditioned, its heated, I sit all day, how is my forty hours or more being worked until ragged? Burned out at 45? Really? How about it being that your leaving so many productive hours on the table is what really is burning you out?

I am not saying you have to work fifty or sixty hours a week, I know some successful and happy people who have, but I am saying most people shut down at the end of their day as if work is all they are. So yeah, that forty and out is going to burn you out. Stay active, even if it means more work.

Get a second job, get a hobby. Do something. Sometimes I think that farm life was better because there was always something to do. People turn off more than their job when they adapt that forty hour mindset.

old-gregg• 13 years ago

> Can the 95% not working force the 5% to work long hours because there is a desperate need for their skills and talents which are not easily replaceable?

Indirectly, perhaps via taxation. You can look around (at least here in US/CA) to see what may happen. The unemployable ones will be voting for increasingly larger government to "employ" themselves while simultaneously raising taxes on the working to pay for unemployables' retirement.

eli_gottlieb13• 13 years ago

As Spooky23 pointed out below, their very "unemployability" is also a function of public policies (like employer-linked retirement accounts and health insurance) that continually increase the fixed-costs of each marginal worker, discouraging hiring.

ippisl• 13 years ago

You're neurosurgeon scenario is interesting because healthcare is the one industry where there are proven models where we can deskill jobs and by this create many good jobs for people with less training.

One example is that of minute clinics where nurses + computers are doing the job of a physician.It's cheaper , it's a good job and the nurses can afford more time per patient , so this creates more jobs. And the u.s. don't steal doctors from the this world this way , which is nice.

There is/could be plenty of stuff like that in healthcare.

notdrunkatall6• 13 years ago

Good point, but you should proofread before you post.

stephencanon3• 13 years ago

Will you allow a nurse + computer to perform an emergency craniotomy (a very simple neurosurgical procedure) on your spouse?

Large parts of the healthcare industry can be deskilled as you describe. Actual neurosurgery might not be so easy.

jiggy20115• 13 years ago

I think at the point where it is 5%/95% it will become apparent enough that there is a problem that a solution will have to be proposed.

Though you could end up with an interesting sort of inverse slavery where the unemployed masses resort to coercion to force the highly educated/intelligent minority into doing the work for them.

What I think is scarier though is thinking about what happens if the unemployment rate hits say 20% and starts moving towards 30%. The majority of people will still be in work, so those who are unemployed will still have a stigma attached and you will have the usual arguments about "why should I have to work to pay somebody to stay at home?". These arguments will become louder as the amount of money that will have to be collected through tax from those who are working to support those who are not will become a huge sum.

At that point a far right wing party who campaigns on the basis of removing all government support from those who do not work could gain considerable traction and possibly be elected.

At that point you have a huge section of the population without any means at all, this will naturally lead to massive crime and civil unrest. At which point the government will have no choice but to respond with strong force against a large section of the population.

ido• 13 years ago

    What I think is scarier though is thinking about 
    what happens if the unemployment rate hits say 20% 
    and starts moving towards 30%.

That is already the case in some countries (even some western ones, like Spain: 26.1% as of December 2012).

bd_at_rivenhill5• 13 years ago

Inverse slavery won't happen because the minority will simply leave. This is what happened in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism, and what currently happens in places like Cuba and Venezuela. This is even happening to Western Europe right now; I've personally met several intelligent, ambitious 20-something French expats who indicated that they have no intention of returning to France due to excessive taxation and lack of opportunity.

dspeyer3• 13 years ago

The question isn't whether the 95% can do neurosurgery. It's whether there's anything they can do better than a robot that other people want.

Given the overall flexibility of the human mind, and the complete failure of general-purpose AI, I bet there's something. I could be convinced otherwise, but it would require much stronger evidence than a half decade of unemployment that could easily come from economic or political causes.

cargo8• 13 years ago

Do you really believe the success (at this time in technology) of general-purpose AI has a strong correlation to the potential for human labor to be replaced by machine labor? It would seem with the plethora of startups being created every day at providing services and products in different markets by utilizing technology means that there will be plenty of different companies willing to focus on a particular market / product / service to develop their AI. Does the success of general-purpose AI really limit the possibility of developing specialized machine labor AI? I can see how it will be slower to reach the point of replacing all of these jobs than if general-purpose AI worked well, but I don't think it really limits the possibility.

flyinRyan9• 13 years ago

The failure of general-purpose AI is simply the failure of general purpose robots. We've already seen the future: specialized "appliance" robots that do one job to perfection. They don't need to duplicate human conciseness, they need only enough AI to accurately do one specific job and nothing more. I don't think that's hard at all, just currently expensive.

seanp2k24• 13 years ago

We'll never get to 95% of the population not working so long as more profits can be extracted by having more people than 5% working.

You don't work now because you /must/ for humanity to survive. You work now because someone wants to get richer and you're helping them.

paduc• 13 years ago

Not true because if the profits aren't high enough, you won't be able to pay these workers enough money for it to be interesting to them.

If you can make 2 cents/hour by employing someone, that doesn't mean someone will accept the job. People will prefer not working (and maybe resorting to crime to survive) at all rather than not making enough to live properly.

I believe we are already at the limit here. Many people work for less than enough to live properly. In France, we know what happens when people start starving to death while others are fat and rich.

The social measures are meant to prevent the poor population from killing the rich. It's the price to pay for peace and security.

seanp2k24• 13 years ago

It's not as silly when you have stuff like this already happening http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/03/news/economy/record-corporat...

Companies, and in turn, powerful individuals are getting richer and richer while unemployment rises and wages grow less quickly than inflation.

wasdman• 13 years ago

That only encourages people to work the minimum at X shitty job, and then leave. Then when you get unemployment, you also work contract jobs and other cash jobs.

Like hell anyone would report it, considering how bad unemployment insurance is. "you were paid 102k a year, but were downsized. Now get paid 446/mo."

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

>>Second, it also assumes that the real problem is a shortage of jobs when the problem is actually a shortage of people capable of doing jobs where it makes economic sense to employ a person.

As someone who holds a degree in economics, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the problem is not a lack of people who are capable of doing the jobs, but rather a lack of demand for the products and services that the said job would provide.

philh3• 13 years ago

In other words, that's not a job where it makes economic sense to employ a person.

(I can't tell if you're being serious or not; "absolute certainty" makes me guess not, but it looks like I'm replying anyway.)

Daniel_Newby2• 13 years ago

> ... while 95% of the population no longer needs to work and is not usefully employable in any case?

I hold great hope that genetic engineering will have eliminated such people before then.

flyinRyan9• 13 years ago

Wow. If someone can't be suitably tasked with making some rich people richer they should be killed? One has to earn their right to exist in your eyes?

Nursie• 13 years ago

"when the problem is actually a shortage of people capable of doing jobs where it makes economic sense to employ a person"

I would argue that there's another way of looking at it, there are actually a lot less jobs that need doing that unskilled people can do. When food production and manufacturing become largely automated, and there are only so many people can go into the service industry, what happens?

It's a very difficult problem. Thankfully not one that I (as a skilled worker/business owner) am going to be on the sharp end of.

bloaf• 13 years ago

Here is a really neat look at a historical analogue:

http://www.context.org/iclib/ic37/hunnicut/

Kellogg at one point realized they didn't need very many people-hours to produce their cereal, so they opted to move to 6 hour shifts 4 days a week. The point is that you don't have to cut jobs, you can cut hours. The side effect is that those workers have more time for their family and leisure activities. Since leisure is the basis of culture, such an arrangement would be helpful to society as a whole, even if the workers had to take an overall pay cut.

maxerickson4• 13 years ago

I wonder what increased automation has done to the people hours since then.

jfoster2• 13 years ago

In such a situation you can cut hours, but you can also cut pay rate. Eventually both. The end result is surely economic contraction. The masses will not be able to continue paying the same amounts for the luxuries they currently enjoy, but the newly found efficiencies might enable lower price points.

matterhorn• 13 years ago

Green energy is a scam. Government-directed economic activity is a scam. Jobs will come and go with cyclical economic activity. Right now, most of the developed world is suffering from the effects of cronyism and socialism, which are economically inefficient. The massive debt situation in Europe, Japan, and the United States will have significant effects on politics and economics sometime in the next 10 to 20 years. Might get better, might get worse. We'll find out when it happens.

eli_gottlieb13• 13 years ago

There is not one single socialist (worker control of the means of production) country on Earth. Please argue from something other than the blatantly religious bunk of the Austrian "economists".

Just because you ethically or morally disagree with someone's politics (like social democracy, or Keynesianism) doesn't mean they must always fail or caused all our problems. The world is largely engaged in trying or pressing-for approaches that are actually quite non-radical and known to work at least some of the time, if not always.

kshatrea• 13 years ago

Firstly, there is no need for an ad hominem attack on Austrian economics (which matterhorn did not identify in his small para) and so you cannot say it will not work since you obviously never tried it, and you never gave a reason for it to not work. Keynesianism has had control of the economy for the last 5 years atleast, and look at the result. Yet, you say it will work. I say it can only create bubbles. Bring on the attacks. And yes, I agree with matterhorn that government directed economic activity is essentially malinvestment. It is production that is important; most government activity has been focussed on spending/debt. EDIT: No socialist controlled economy? Which world are you living in? India,my country has strict labour laws for about 85% of the businesses, including all in manufacturing, textiles etc. You cannot make a profit without offering workers a fair wage as decided by them & the GOVERNMENT first. Have you heard of autorickshaw pricing here? Who controls the prices? Customers? No, rickshaw unions, & the GOVERNMENT. So, all investment into autorickshaws, clean cars is distorted by these disincentives. That is one of about a million examples. The only place where there is no intervention (or less intervention) here is IT, which is why you see so much progress in IT. Have you been to Vietnam? Sri Lanka? I have, and I know business owners and I do know workers as well in these nations. No more ad hominems please.

ams61102• 13 years ago

I found the entire piece pretty tiresome as well. A lot of redistributionist ideas being sold with a good dose of FUD.

How are we going to structure a society that needs radically less human labour?

"We" can't even come to an agreement on federal spending for the NEXT YEAR. Do you really think anybody in government is remotely capable of tackling a question like that? If they did, do you think anybody in that dysfunctional alternate reality has any chance at all of arriving at a workable answer? I know what I think.

Society will, if allowed, figure it out on its own.

angersock• 13 years ago

I was pleasantly surprised to read this and not get thrown into a crazy post-scarcity singularity hugfest. I was really worried about that.

Anyways, I think the novelty to almost anyone here of the idea of decreasing job availability has worn off--as the author states, job and capital growth are decoupled. I don't think anyone would really argue that point.

There are, though, some questions that suggest themselves, a few of which have even already appeared in this thread:

* Is there some kind of morality involved in electing not to work, if the option is available but not required?

* Do we want to work towards establishing a society where leisure is the default, guaranteed state?

* If we do want to work towards that state, what then does it mean to live a good life?

* If we don't want to work towards that state, what is our justification for inflicting toil upon future generations?

* If we manage to eliminate all non-creative jobs (stocking, cooking, manufacturing, etc.), what do we do with all those folks? Is it reasonable to ask them to retrain?

Some of the great questions of life, while perhaps not unsolvable, are neatly sidestepped in one's pursuit of the lower levels of Maslowe's hierarchy; being unable to make rent has more than once gotten me out of a funk caused by a girl, for example.

If leisure becomes the default (which job trends would tend to suggest), it becomes a lot harder to punt on these existential issues--you don't get the shelter of the daily grind or shitty retail job to protect you.

eli_gottlieb13• 13 years ago

My mother always calls that "a better class of problem". God willing humanity should someday have to confront its existential "issues" like a bunch of spoiled schoolchildren rather than going cradle-to-grave without confronting anything more important than how to reach next year!

jodrellblank3• 13 years ago

The way you put issues in quotes and use the word 'spoiled' implies that even though you call it a "better class" of problem, you still look down on it and wouldn't want it.

s_baby2• 13 years ago

I think Maslow's hierarchy implicitly answers many of your questions. "Keeping your head above water" would be defined in terms of navigating existential nihilism and meaningful self-actualization not unlike we navigate our more fundamental needs.

philwelch• 13 years ago

In other words, the post scarcity world will be just like high school forever? Ugh.

coldtea3• 13 years ago

>Do we want to work towards establishing a society where leisure is the default, guaranteed state?

Leisure will not be the "default, guaranteed state".

Slums and ghettos with huge masses of devastated ex-middle class left to mostly rot and a much smaller semi-middle-class and extra rich leave in closed guarded communities will be the default.

notdrunkatall6• 13 years ago

People love to believe the sky is falling. Fortunately, it rarely does.

dspeyer3• 13 years ago

Well not if we don't work toward it!

A leisure-filled society is an inherently stable thing. It's just not a direction we're headed. But perhaps those of us with long-term vision can steer things a little.

After all, those slums aren't a stable thing. They're a civil war waiting to happen.

seanp2k24• 13 years ago

I would argue that we're mostly there already.

intended3• 13 years ago

To be honest, capital vs job growth has been delinked locally, but I suspect it is still linked globally.

A huge number of people in India and China are now employed for example. The tablets being bought and sold around the world are being manufactured somewhere.

I am a bit surprised by the comments here, which constantly look temporally, while the issue really is geographic.

China/India/Brazil and the third world workers endure horrible conditions to create work.

They are cheaper than automation.

Its only once they start unionizing, and fighting for their rights (after they have been able to improve their country in the first place), that the automation starts appearing in their countries.

In essence, isn't work going to those most capable and efficient at working at it, with lip service being paid to labor and human rights?

svantana• 13 years ago

> that the automation starts appearing in their countries

Well automation is already happening there - do you think the ipads are built entirely by hand? Automation will continue to increase globally whether they unionize or not, those types of things will only accelerate an inevitable process.

bcoates2• 13 years ago

I don't think the decoupling argument has been made as conclusively as everyone seems to be assuming. Look at the source in the OP for this [1]: These are some seriously misleading graphs.

First, plotting both labor productivity and GDP doesn't make much sense, as the former is almost exactly determined by the latter. They're just measuring GDP.

Secondly, they zoom in on the post-WWII era, then proceed to ignore the biggest long-term economic issues of the time period: The hangover from WWII, with the corresponding stable demand for US infrastructure and labor as the world rebuilt itself, and the housing/derivitaves bubble, as a combination of fraud and self-delusion caused the computed GDP numbers to shoot off into the hypothetical-wealth stratosphere even as the economy was faltering.

Once you account for the elephants in the room, there's nothing surprising left in the graph that would lead you to believe that the robotic obsolescence of labor is around the corner.

[1] http://andrewmcafee.org/2012/12/the-great-decoupling-of-the-...

VLM5• 13 years ago

"* If we do want to work towards that state, what then does it mean to live a good life?"

We solved that a long time ago. Rich people's offspring (ancient equiv of trustafarians) got an education to learn how to live the good life. Aka the liberal arts. Philosophy, etc.

There is a long corrupt history afterwards where at least some businesses wanted the aristocracy in their corporation, so suddenly "gettin an education" becomes an aspirational good for the middle class and down. Then it turns out a world owned by very rich philosopher kings works pretty well, you can't have a world operated by philosopher peons, so "education" is very carefully conflated with "training" and for prole-schools has completely replaced education with training (see vocational and tech schools) Then the middle class has to have ALL kids pay ANYTHING at all, ANYTHING, in order to keep up with the other kids who are already paying ANYTHING they'd like to charge as tuition. In fact the .gov has their backs, raise tuition sky high the .gov will guarantee the loans.

So kids (aka 20-somethings) today are poor, because for generations they've been willing to pay "anything" for credentials so the monopoly-ish providers are more than willing to charge "anything" (kinda like health care). All because GGG-Grandpa lost his job to Sir Earl Duke of BumbleF and politely blamed it on his lack of .edu rather than being a peasant where Sir Earl is a Duke. Its the long term effect generations later of monarchy-phillia or whatever its called.

jodrellblank3• 13 years ago

Somewhat related to the mention of 95% of the population being unemployable anyway in this future, The Last Psychiatrist on unemployed graduates:

When we see a welfare mom we assume she can't find work, but when we see a hipster we become infuriated because we assume he doesn't want to work but could easily do so-- on account of the fact that he can speak well-- that he went to college. But now suddenly we're all shocked: to the economy, the English grad is just as superfluous as the disenfranchised welfare mom in the hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the skin color. Not irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- _irrelevant forever_.

Gerry already had a living wage-- he spent it on the University of Chicago, 41 years of food stamps in 4 years. If everybody knew in advance the outcome was going to be unemployment and living wages, then why doesn't Frase challenge the capitalist assumption that college is money well spent-- could have been used differently? He can't. This thought cannot occur to him, not because he is dumb, he clearly isn't, or because he is paid by a college-- money is irrelevant to him. He can't because his entire identity is built on college, academia. He is college. Take that away, he disintegrates. So in the utopia he imagines, college still exists AND people get living wages. Call me a Marxist, _that's what we have now_.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam...

sukuriant• 13 years ago

When I started reading this post (and honestly, I haven't finished reading it), I began to think about jobs, and that ideal human world that's written about. The one where people don't have jobs, robots do all the work; and most of us just play and tinker and all of our lives' necessities are taken care of.

Along the path to that place, I wonder if there was a period where there honestly weren't enough jobs for people to fill. Mass unemployment just because, honestly, there really wasn't a need for those employees. The entire world functioned and provided enough food WITHOUT those workers.

Is it possible that, at least in the first world, we're beginning to approach that place? (Honestly, probably not. I have arguments regarding greed and the 40 hour work week and underpaid employees and managers that don't know how to schedule their workers, and businesses that don't believe everyone in the business deserves a percentage (however small) of the net income of that company, rather than a flat, functionally minimum, wage)

Or, at least, that a rise in unemployment rates and an honest difficult of finding jobs due to robots/etc IS the beginning of that 'fewer jobs, more playtime, fewer NEEDED jobs' world, where humans act more like otters than ants?

ynniv2• 13 years ago

Jobs were the secret sauce that made capitalism work. If your neighbor was wildly successful, there would be some modicum of trickle-down that would benefit the community. Now that success and job creation are almost entirely decoupled, the world is looking a lot more like the private enclaves of Snow Crash. I'm not sure how capitalism stays socially progressive in the global banana republic of the future. The post-scarcity crowd talks about the better life everyone will have, but I suspect the reality is that the ultra wealthy will have little to no reason to support others when most jobs are automated. Some claim that they will require someone to buy their products (a la Ford), but really that's only for the economically mobile. The established money will be able to live on their 10,000 acres with enough toys to think they're living life, while the newly urbanized global population fights for a couple dozen square feet to call home. It doesn't seem pretty to me.

SomeCallMeTim• 13 years ago

>Jobs were the secret sauce that made capitalism work

Based on what I have read and seen, I would say that a scarcity of workers was what made capitalism work so well for so many in the US up through the 70s. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-KqeU8nzn4

flyinRyan9• 13 years ago

Don't you imagine that the 99%, instead of fighting each other over a couple dozen square feet would simply go kill these established money people and take what they had?

ynniv2• 13 years ago

That's a great question, possibly the defining question, and I think the answer is a resounding "No". Humans seem to rarely buck the system, so it's much easier to deal with the occasional seed individual before the problem becomes systemic. And "deal" doesn't mean remove, as it's pretty easy to destabilize revolt when you have the right information. And boy do we have access to lots of information.

Plus, how would a revolution change anything? The newly powerful would behave the same way the old guard did.

wpietri6• 13 years ago

Why hello my old friend, the Lump of Labor Fallacy![1] I get why people think this in theory. But they never seem to notice that we have been living in an age of untold abundance for quite a while.

From the perspective of anybody who grew up in a subsistence agriculture economy (which is the perspective of most people in human history), we developed-nations types live better than kings. And all the agriculture jobs are gone! From that viewpoint, none of us should need to work.

But we still mostly have jobs. Why? My take is that, as the Buddha said, desires are numberless. People find new things to want, and other people find ways to satisfy those needs. This will always happen.

Sure, it's possible that this time machines will actually eliminate all the jobs, and we'll live like the lillies of the field. But that has been failing to happen for the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began. And people have been fearing machine-induced joblessness since the beginning. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labor_fallacy [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

altcognito• 13 years ago

It isn't that ALL of a fixed number of jobs are going away: that is not what the article is saying. it is saying that the need for good paying manual labor is changing faster than societies' ability to cope with it. Not only that, we are pretty much doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

sopooneo• 13 years ago

"This will always happen." I am dubious. It seems a lot of econ people hold this notion with almost religious faith. And I may be mistaken in my doubting and you may be correct. But I wonder if a paradigm shift is on the horizon that will wash some old truths away for good.

WalterBright• 13 years ago

I see new kinds of jobs being created all the time. For example, look at the explosive growth of the entertainment industry. How about the car customization industry? People pay a lot of money for personalized cars. The fashion industry. Comic book conventions are a big industry. Sports, sports equipment, trainers, etc. How about that minor industry to escort hundreds of amateurs up Mt. Everest each year?

The increasing wealth of society and the decreasing costs of food/shelter enable all these more frivolous demands.

s_baby2• 13 years ago

The difference is there was a rational reason to put people to work as capital and rational incentives were established to get people to work. What happens in a hypothetical when the only "numberless desires" unmet are those that are literally astronomical in scope due to abundance?

jiggy20115• 13 years ago

People's desires are numberless, but the question is who will fulfil those desires?

Machines are getting better at fulfilling our desires a lot quicker than we ourselves are.

wpietri6• 13 years ago

Depends on what you're looking at. Look at the credits for modern films. These days they use more people, not fewer.

Or look at food. We've already figured out what a future of minimum-cost food looks like. There's a lot of growth in more human-intensive agriculture, production, and cooking. The best restaurants aren't the ones with the most automation.

Sure, if Strong AI Jesus ever descends from the clouds or comes up from the labs, some things may change. But maybe not. Humans are evolved to deal with other humans. They like doing it.

jamieb• 13 years ago

"But that has been failing to happen for the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began. And people have been fearing machine-induced joblessness since the beginning."

What has actually happened is that as labor was replaced or reduced in one industry, jobs moved to others. The agricultural revolution reduced the cost of food, thereby reducing the amount of "money" that a human had to earn to survive. They could then be employed doing something else. During the industrial revolution more goods were produced cheaply, making them more affordable, and allowing more people to buy them. The industrial revolution increased production but still required people. Each innovation created a new opportunity that required people to do the work.

At each stage, we dealt with hierarchy of needs. Food. Clothing. Shelter.

The assumption made in the quote above is that there is an endless list of jobs, and that the fact that we've had 200 years without the end of society proves it. Analysis of the data, however, suggests that at each stage, the "revolution" has left less jobs available, and/or those jobs have paid lower salaries. The trend is that at some point in the future, human labor and, some time later, human thought will have such tiny value as to be worthless.

A robot or an AI will be vastly more cost effective than paying a slow moving, slow thinking organic entity that requires money in order to purchase proteins, carbohydrates and increasingly rare elements like phosphorus.

Just as for millennia, smart people have been attempting to fly, so too have smart people been attempting to eliminate humans from production. Why are we surprised, why do we deny, that they are succeeding?

The evidence is right here. Nobody here on HN is forming a startup to automate some aspect of our lives with the express goal that the labor saved be used to create new jobs. Nobody is saying "My start-up automates X so that the people who were paid to do X can get a new job doing Y". That last part is just not on anybody's radar. Does PG ask this in YC interviews: "And what will the people who are made unemployed by your new startup do?" No. So why are we surprised that the world is turning out exactly according to all our plans?

The article is correct and asks the right question: "The jobs are not coming back. What are we going to do about it?"

YokoZar• 13 years ago

It is entirely possible to invent technology that both saves on labor costs and creates more jobs in aggregate. A historical example was the very thing the luddites protested: weaving machines that replaced expensive weavers with greater numbers of ultra-cheap immigrants.

Usability can make it so normal untrained people can do something that used to require expensive experts. It's also a kind of technology we can all agree on, and many of us work on it every day.

wpietri6• 13 years ago

Nobody says it now. Nobody has said it at any point in the past, either. But here we are, all as busy as ever.

I look forward to seeing your data, but looking at historical workforce participation rates and average wealth suggests that the singularity has not quite happened yet.

bcoates2• 13 years ago

Why are you assuming all productivity increases are reducing labor needs? Look at your YC example: AirBnB's entire premise is to make use of capital that would otherwise go to waste (unused residential real estate). When you lower the cost of capital, you increase the value of complimentary labor. If nothing else, I'm sure it's boosted demand for the local housecleaners. Given how elastic vacationing is as a whole, the dollars saved by the travelers are almost certainly being shifted into other goods and services at the destination.

VLM5• 13 years ago

"human labor ... will have such tiny value as to be worthless"

Hairdressers. Here on HN there is the background assumption that face to face office work is useless and sitting at a desk at home works just as well. Its so entrenched that occasionally you'll get an ultra-extremist counterreaction that of course we all need to work in offices because no multiple office multinationals exist, or some such nonsense.

Anyway, Hairdressers. There's a large fraction of the population who like driving 30 minutes, waiting 30 more minutes, gossiping with the hair lady, and paying $30 for the privilege, and spending 30 minutes driving back home. And they call it relaxing and "spa like" and a privilege blah blah. Personally to show my HN street cred I do the equiv of work at home and spend 5 minutes with a buzz-cut thing and a #3 attachment every two weeks which means my Imperial hair is always between 3/8 and 1/2 inch long. But the world is full of people who wanna spend enormous amounts of their limited time and money for someone else to F around with their hair.

Ditto investment advisors (duh, just push the highest commission), Insurance salesman (duh, figure out the most they can spend, convince them to spend a little more, and be a data entry clerk), real estate (see insurance salesmen, but without the data entry skills). XXX personal services.

If you've ever read the HHGTTG the "B Ark" is not a current social commentary (well, mostly) its more a blueprint for the future. When I/everyone can no longer make money slinging code I'll probably be running my buzz cut hair trimmer with #3 attachment for a line of you goofballs going around the block, for $30 a piece and it'll take you 2 hours and you'll be just thrilled at the privilege of getting a genuine VLM haircut. And I'll take my dough and do equally stupid things like ask my life insurance salesman if I'm spending enough with him, followed by a nice $50 restaurant dinner cooked and served by genuine humans blah blah blah.

steveklabnik3• 13 years ago

> But they never seem to notice that we have been living in an age of untold abundance for quite a while.

That's probably because they're too busy trying to find a job, pay off their debts, find health care, or all the other things needed to live.

_Some_ people have been living in abundance, not most.

whatusername• 13 years ago

While they have running water, electricity, lights, internet, all kinds of fresh food on demand, Health Care that actually works, all kinds of abundance like that.

Assuming we are talking about people living in a Developed nation.

wpietri6• 13 years ago

Compared to a subsistence agriculture economy? You must be kidding me. Good luck finding somebody tilling a few acres of land in sub-Saharan Africa who wouldn't instantly trade places with pretty much anybody in America.

Yes, people in the first world end up dissatisfied with what they've got. But that's my point. Desires are numberless.

inkaudio• 13 years ago

"This argument is wrong because it ignores the impact of war and corruption has on our economy. The economy can’t grow when trillions of dollars are lost to fighting wars and bailing out wall street. Inefficiency does not add value to society, technology never killed a job that is of great value to society. Advance technology has not replaced the highly skilled worker, craftsman, engineer or artist. "

Don't Blame Technology - http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technolog...

The 3 Trillion War - http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/stiglitz...

Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Loans http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristoc...

calhoun137• 13 years ago

I'm sorry but where did the jobs go, did they get taken by computers or robots? No, they didn't.

Is capital growth decoupled from job growth? No it isn't: all the jobs are simply being shipped off to places with forced/slave labor, abysmal working conditions, and don't even think about benefits.

Green jobs might help, sure, but why can't we manufacture clothes, computer chips, smart phones and tablets in america?

qdog3• 13 years ago

You should get more upvotes.

Reading the Wealth of Nations gave me a new found appreciation for Capitalism. At the beginning, the ability to profit from improvements was the motivating factor, and helped to achieve some of the freedom people enjoy today. Unfortunately, times have changed, so your average worker does work on something that they cannot increase their personal profits by improving. Wage-earners are indentured servants, with little incentive to improve their output. Most people think Capitalism is all about the man at the top, but Smith's theory was that the power of the individual to retain the profits of their work was the main cause of the destruction of the feudal system.

Smith actually believed late-stage Capitalism would look like all the profits were generated by financiers and bankers, and once that happened it would destruct as unsustainable.

So at some point, labor becomes valuable in some manner, or we won't be Capitalists anymore.

Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor involved come from).

zanny4• 13 years ago

> Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor involved come from).

For one, several companies are already moving their "jobs" out of China and back to the US, but they are just investing a few million in an automated factory with half a dozen overseers and a contracted out engineer corp to fix broken things.

It isn't magic or far future. We can, right now build a machine to do almost anything. For the last decade, it was just more economically feasible to just use slave labor in China than pay the upfront costs for a factory that takes in raw materials and pumps out a car.

The only thing we don't easily reproduce in machines is the human ability to react to unnatural circumstances. Adaption in machines is still state defined limited or dependent on a lot of machine learning try and fail scenarios. That will probably be a solved problem really soon™.

> or we won't be Capitalists anymore.

I don't think we have been for a while. Like you said, working for fixed pay for fixed hours is much more feudal than reaping the profits of ones productivity. A extremely small fraction of the population actually (or even can) engage in entrepreneurship, and almost all ventures always end in a few taking the profits and the rest taking fixed pay.

I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff. Besides really tiny tech startups, they always devolve into fixed wages. I also think the tech startup is a fleeting passion, in a decade the app boom will be saturated. Taking a new software idea and a couple friends will be prohibitive in an era where all the best ideas were exploited years ago and now are super massive, and taking advantage of the laxing of big business to jump on opportunity just isn't as big a market as a completely empty field of untried creations.

halhen• 13 years ago

If you're interested in this, are willing to contrast your view on things, and have the time and stamina for it, I'd recommend you to take read Marx's Capital. In the books, Marx accepts the premises of a free market capitalism utopia as laid out by contemporary economists, and logically derives the contradictions and instabilities that arise on a societal level. Whether you remain a free market believer or not, the books will deepen your understanding and enrich your view of the world.

It is an intellectual challenge to get through. David Harvey has produced two free video lecture series that can help: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/.

Schwolop2• 13 years ago

There's another link between climate change and jobs, but it's a lot less pleasant. If we fail to do anything about climate change, chances are large chunks of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans. The rich and useful will move where they can live and work in comfort, and those countries that become uninhabitable will slowly become unable to afford the social welfare necessary to keep their population alive. Climate change will thus 'fix' the joblessness problem by causing widespread death of immobile humans.

I hope we do something about this because it sounds fucking awful.

prewett• 13 years ago

> chances are large chunks of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans.

That's a pretty big assertion there. We really don't know what will happen, but certainly some places will become more habitable (the Arctic and Antarctic). Heat doesn't necessarily mean desert, either. The tropical areas are great for plant growth. Also, historically, warm periods of global history had pretty abundant life. The Cretaceous period, for instance, was hotter and had more CO2 than the current amounts, but had huge plants and reptiles (dinosaurs). A warmer climate with more CO2 might make plants grow even better, giving better crop yields, for instance. I wouldn't mind a larger availability of tropical fruits, either.

Schwolop2• 13 years ago

I've been re-reading Tim Flannery's 'The Weather Makers' again so perhaps I'm in a more pessimistic mood than usual. And yes, some places will become more habitable, but it seems fairly clear that these will be fewer in number than the areas that become less habitable. Not only this, but if (for example) all the areas that can currently grow wheat later cannot, but an equally large area subsequently can - we still won't be as well off as we are now due to the switching costs.

sigil• 13 years ago

"Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, was published in 1952. It is a dystopia of automation, describing the dereliction it causes in the quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class -- the engineers and managers who keep society running -- and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)

I read the book as a young person and was convinced. Now, I'm not so convinced.

Technology automates and thereby destroys jobs, but there is always value-producing work to be done beyond the reach of technology. Unless disincentivized to do so, the displaced will seek out those jobs. That may mean a new economy where 45% of people are technology creators or maintainers, 45% of people are in the service or entertainment industries, and 10% are transitional.

But we are not going to see 95% unemployment (the Player Piano scenario IIRC) or anything near that, ever. If there's anything certain in life, it's that there's always more work to do.

tomjen3• 13 years ago

Service and entertainment?

We need, what, a 1000 musicians, about the same number of actors and supporters to produce all the tv and music we have time to hear or watch.

They are already starting to make robots that can make burgers, call centers have robots, etc.

So 45% of the population have to be employed as dog walkers, massage terapists and nurses?

Seems unlikely to me.

rdouble• 13 years ago

...45% of people are in the service or entertainment industries...

70% of the US economy is service industry already.

dscrd• 13 years ago

This is why social security needs to be rebranded as "citizen's pay" or some such, funded by progressive taxation and bound to the relative GDP of the country, or even the planet's. And tax loopholes obviously need to be destroyed.

The current model of humiliating an ever-growing lump of people into a state of depression (both mental and financial), while growing the richest's wealth vastly beyond what's useful for them is not going to end happily.

znq2• 13 years ago

A lot of rich people actually contribute their wealth to society in a much more efficient and effective way than most governments do.

zanny4• 13 years ago

And a lot of rich people don't contribute their wealth at all.

At the end of the day, we will have, out of ~9 billion people, ~8 billion who have nothing to do, be it they are not capable or skilled enough to take on the most ultra-high-skilled positions that will still require human labor. We will have the means to create the food, shelter, and power for all those people, for no human effort, but tremendous capital investment. It will be a transition towards post-labor, where people pursue their interests, passions, and innovation rather than money. I wonder how that will go.

Also, those wealthy will probably own all the automated farms, factories, etc that create this stuff. It is, from the capitalist perspective, the best deal they can make - they have lots of money, and they can make things that infinitely print money for almost no cost and no human labor involved. But productivity without humanity involved breaks capitalism.

timedoctor• 13 years ago

I think the premise of the article is that goods will be extremely cheap to produce.

It's not as simple as that. We need to make them extremely cheap to produce, for people to find them, select them, and distribute them.

I think the distribution is one of the hardest challenges ... how do you automate distribution and have a robot take the place of a UPS worker. I thought about it the other day. We already have self driving cars, so why not self driving UPS vehicles?

I think it is possible (but not in the next 10 years) to have a logistics company that delivers items to the consumer's door using robots. Self driving delivery van, robot gets out of the van, goes up to the door and rings the doorbell, asks for the person. Signature not necessary (they just take a photograph of the person accepting the item).

andyjohnson0• 13 years ago

Related article: "Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs" [1]

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-c...

Evenjos• 13 years ago

Certain local infrastructure jobs will always exist. These are the basic jobs that exist in every country on Earth: Food workers (farmers, waiters, cooks), medical people, and personal assistants (beauty salons, clerks, holy priests, etc).

When a country exports a product or service that other countries want, such as cars or silicon chips, that country gains a robust economy and that industry thrives.

When a country ceases to export the desirable product/service, or is out-competed, then the industry weakens and jobs are lost. The U.S. built its robust economy on innovations in many industries. Now many of those industries have waned, and the computer industry is what's propping us up. The other tent poles have collapsed or weakened.

The only thing that can revitalize our economy (and job market) is more innovation from within. We need to export superior products and services, and/or create new industries.

icebraining• 13 years ago

The US is still the third largest exporter in the world (in USD), and has the second largest manufacturing output, which has more than doubled since 1975.

This graph tells a lot: http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/manufacturing-for-we...

_mulder_• 13 years ago

>We are headed towards untold abundance with little need for actual human labor. Examples like people who transport things (ie truck drivers, taxi drivers etc…)

I've been considering a blog post along the lines of 'Jobs that today's Kids should not consider'. Obviously Truck and taxi drivers are high on the list (along with Pilots, Train drivers, etc.)

Perhaps less obvious (to a non techie) is a Family Doctor. For generations being a Doctor has been up there with being a Lawyer as a safe, secure, well paid career to be proud of and hundreds of very bright kids are encouraged to pursue this as a career by their pushy parents. Now though, a Doctor seems top of the list of jobs to be replaced by technology. What does a Doctor actually do? They look at symptoms and make an educated guess (A prognosis) as to what's wrong. The internet, or a machine will be able to do that very shortly. When you get to analysing DNA and blood samples at home, then you don't need a Doctor at all!

So what jobs will survive? Ones that require human interaction of creativity. So Surgeons and very highly skilled doctors will remain because they're on the cutting edge of medical science. Drama and sports teachers will remain but perhaps generic, non-interactive subjects like Maths or History, could be better served by online courses?

Any other suggestions?

EGreg2• 13 years ago

It's very simple to describe, but rather challenging for us to solve. The situation is that local comparative advantage has been eroded by outsourcing, and the demand for human labor (both local and remote) has been eroded by automation. Now, this has been happening for hundreds of years, and the luddites are rightly laughed at today for trying to stop the progress by breaking the machines. But they do have a point -- if the net effect on the labor markets is that the workers will be in a race to the bottom, then who really wins?

Of course, we can tax the capital just enough to subsidize the consumption activities of the population, making a permanent welfare state for everyone. This will release people from the effects of market discipline which may otherwise very well ruin the lives of many people and towns who are out of work in the new economy -- as happened in the Great Depression. But is this really the solution? Research has shown that crime goes up in disenfranchised neighborhoods where people hardly help each other. On the other hand, crime goes down when everyone is locked away at home on their computer and independent of everyone else. The situation we will have is somewhere in between, being out with smartphones and google glasses, iWatches and other things, interacting with each other, but mostly contributing as consumers and not producers. It's a scary world where most people will be the equivalent of poets or other liberal arts majors -- trying to find a meaning for their existence, ever more plugged into the collective hive, which provides for them.

Humanity is doing this to itself. I wonder if we will ever become the Borg :-P

flyinRyan9• 13 years ago

>if the net effect on the labor markets is that the workers will be in a race to the bottom, then who really wins?

The same ones who always win: the richest 1%.

EGreg2• 13 years ago

Well then we better get crackin and get into those richest 1% soon :)

tomp2• 13 years ago

We will soon be able to produce food, houses, energy and tools automatically. We will soon be able to enjoy leisure all the time, and not work at all.

Except the doctors. Medicine is, AFAIK, nowhere near being automated. But the doctors won't accept a situation where they are the only people still needing to work where the rest of us are out having fun. That's why the rest of us still have jobs, even if they are pointless, and will continue for the forseeable future.

flyinRyan9• 13 years ago

Much of medicine could absolutely be automated. Most doctors these days just work out from your symptoms all the possible things you could have, then generate a list of all medications that deal with all those problems, filtering out medications that fight with each other. Sounds like it would be a short Haskell program connected to a big database.

The reason the rest of us will still have to have jobs, especially pointless ones and will continue to for the foreseeable future, is that there are very rich people who wish to continue being in a much higher class than the rest of humanity and have their fingers in exactly the right pies to ensure this stays the case.

tomp2• 13 years ago

Ok, my mistake.. whenever I say medicine, I mostly mean ER, surgeries, etc., as that's the only things I've been in contact with. You're completely right, though; Most doctors that just prescribe medication could easily be replaced by AI.

msluyter• 13 years ago

On topic, from this morning's NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/business/economy/corporate...

ajdecon• 13 years ago

Whether or not we get the same number of jobs back out of the economy, the newer jobs are unlikely to be equivalent to the jobs lost. In general, the new jobs have different and higher skill requirements than the original jobs did.

In the long term, this all balances out with new workers and education. In the short term, if this is a large enough disruption, it's probable that the actual people who are unemployed will either need long-term support of some time, or subsidized retraining (if even possible).

While it's often neglected in these discussions, the short term disruption does matter for both moral reasons (we don't like to let people starve, or let them sit around doing nothing when we could retrain them); and for practical reasons (large numbers of unhappy and needy people can cause major social disruptions).

The Jobs Are Never Coming Back

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