Confessions of A Job Destroyer

http://decomplecting.org/blog/2013/03/11/confessions-of-a-job-destroyer/

by lkrubner • 13 years ago

244 287 13 years ago

vincie• 13 years ago

I'm in the midst of destroying the jobs of 1, maybe 2 workers right now. I am replacing a poor quality document generating system based on MS RTF templates with wrappers that build tex files and then calling pdflatex on them.

seivan• 13 years ago

Those jobs should be destroyed. It's well deserved.

Kequc2• 13 years ago

The comments on that article make me feel all :smith:. As if oh yea we can keep this going, raw capitalism will totally work forever.

smsm4217• 13 years ago

Where you saw "raw capitalism" in the US? Do you know how many thousands of pages federal regulations, state regulations, regional regulations and local regulations are? How many new ones are created every year?

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

The means of production are privately-owned, operated for-profit, using wage labor. Also, firms' entry and exit to/from the markets is basically unrestricted.

It's capitalism, red in tooth and claw. Doesn't have to be unregulated to be "real" capitalism.

largesse8• 13 years ago

You know, I love these posts calling for high taxation by relatively young people who are just starting their careers. Wait until you have kids about to go to college or, if you are unlucky, alimony and child-support obligations. Or major medical not covered by insurance.

We'll see what much higher taxation looks like to you then. It's not that more income equality isn't a good goal, but there are plenty of people with their backs against the wall.

I'm a strong open source advocate, but when I saw Richard Stallman years ago talk about how all software should be free, my first thought was "Easy for him to say. He doesn't have any dependents."

I do consulting work and my rates are high. Believe me, it's not because I'm greedy it's because I'm trying to get by.

tyw• 13 years ago

the article is calling for 91% marginal rate on the top income bracket. quite different than paying 91% of your income in taxes.

rlanday• 13 years ago

It’s not really, if nearly all of your income is in the top income bracket getting taxed at that rate. And if most of your income isn’t in the top bracket, why earn that income at all if at least 91% is going to be stolen from you and the marginal return is so low?

ori_b• 13 years ago

You do realize the reason they're calling for high taxation is to reduce the costs of kids going to college, child support, and the elimination of major medical not covered by insurance?

Edit: Sorry, child support should be removed from that list; I was thinking of the costs of raising a child, not what you pay after a divorce.

largesse8• 13 years ago

If the cost of those and impact of taxation varied at the same time and the same degree that would be no problem. But that has never happened. Given the state of our governmental problem-solving ability in the US all those numbers can do is diverge.

acchow• 13 years ago

Pwned.

Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Your taxes can drive up demand to make you even wealthier. Except, perhaps many wealthy people don't actually want more wealth. They just want to be better off then everyone else...

mynameishere• 13 years ago

People are calling for high taxes to reduce child support? Do you just put random words in a blender and dump out the results?

001sky2• 13 years ago

You do realize the reason they're calling for high taxation is to reduce the costs of kids going to college....

Huh? Gov't tax == subsidies == tuition inflation.

seanalltogether• 13 years ago

interestingly, all the costs you just described should in theory be written off in a sane tax system. People/families should be taxed on their net wealth gain, not gross income, and I don't understand why we only give corporations that affordance.

wwweston2• 13 years ago

> Wait until you have kids about to go to college or, if you are unlucky, alimony and child-support obligations.

From both my studies of the tax code and comparison with people who have between one to four dependents, it seems to me the US tax code mitigates these factors with exemptions (~$4k per dependent?) and various deductions/credits ($2k and up). It's also easy to see how the expenses of having a child could outstrip that, of course, but the point is that (a) it's not as if people making policy decisions have particularly decided to ignore this factor and (b) as if we couldn't visit this issue as long as we're dreaming about how we structure things.

Heck, a guaranteed income might well apply to the kids we're talking about.

> Or major medical not covered by insurance.

Yeah, the US system kindof sucks. We've socialized the costs of most expensive phase of people's lives, we privatize the "market"* for the healthiest and most productive, and we pay from the public treasury more than any other civilized nation per capita for the privilege of having inadequate coverage for major and minor events. You can also deduct a lot of this from your tax burden, though.

olefoo2• 13 years ago

So if you had fair universal taxation ( what a progressive tax plan is ) with universal education, universal health care and minimum standard housing you would be relieved of the burden of educating your kids and of housing them until their mid-30's ( which seems to be standard for the upper middle class locally ) and you think you would be worse off?

Myself, I'd go a bit further than the author, and say that rather than require that taxes be paid only with money, everyone should contribute 30 to 60 days of their year to doing government work. This gets around the whining that some are non-contributing, and it fosters a sense of shared enterprise and social justice through equality of contribution that is sorely lacking in our culture at present. Now the details of how that labour gets applied to building infrastructure for the common good would need to be worked out, it would be a much fairer system than we have now, and much less subject to being gamed. It would also serve as mixing function, forcing people who would otherwise never come in contact to deal with each other as collaborators in the cause of the greater good.

And if global climate change picks up the pace we will need such a work force. Imagine if we dealt with a hurricane Katrina every month, or three super-storm events equivalent to Sandy every winter. It's not too soon to start planning on contingencies like that.

hndude• 13 years ago

No offense but I think your second paragraph is much too idealistic. You're describing a sort of jury duty, but for doing government work.

"Now the details of how that labour gets applied to building infrastructure for the common good would need to be worked out, it would be a much fairer system than we have now, and much less subject to being gamed."

People already crack jokes about working in the government, doing a minimal amount of work. Imagine if people were actually mandated to work in government instead of paying taxes. Nothing would be achieved, because no one would seriously want to do the work. Or the people who had positions of power would abuse them to no end.

You describe a nice system, but how would it ever be implemented in practice? What kind of media campaign/propaganda would be required to convince the entire country they should work hard at serving each other? Would this shift be characterized by a revolution? Perhaps it would start small, in communes? Would the shift happen nationally or on a state by state basis (in the US)?

tomjen32• 13 years ago

Slavery has been outlawed. Thankfully.

phlo• 13 years ago

As batiste suggested below, some countries do have a mandatory army service. As someone who served a bit more than a year in just such an army, let me point out how paying taxes in cash is vastly superior a solution to paying in work:

I am an application developer with a very narrow set of "deep" skills. Working as such, I get to charge rates that reflect those skills' depth. If I pay my taxes, I am taxed for some 260 days of work at what I'll call my "peak" rate.

If I were to be drafted to do government work, the probability of me working in that very area is extremely small. Even if, every know and then, I'll get that lucky batch of work, I'd still spend a lot of time getting to know the respective code base, the objectives of that project and, after a week or two of acutal work, passing things on. Much more likely, I'd end up in an office somewhere. I am somewhat able to hackishly use Excel, so that might be what I'd do: I'd hack up a couple of unmaintainable spreadsheets to solve some problems which I wouldn't actually be proficient in. Were I to do that work for a client, I might, at best, charge half of aforementioned "peak rate". If that government work were to be sloppily organized, I might even end up working outside, cleaning up a forest or assisting in building a road. As you may imagine, I'd be a terrible fit: While I consider myself healthy, I'm not used to outdoor work. At best, I might accomplish 2 hours' worth of skilled labour in an 8 hour day, at worst I'd screw more shit up than I'd fix.

Paying cash, I get to contribute at peak_rate * tax_level and leave the government work to people actually hired for their skills, not the amount of available draft days.

Also, I assume many a startup wouldn't take too kindly to missing each of their employees for another month a year. Some countries already do (e.g. Switzerland: 300 days of mandatory military service, done (as in "doing time", rather than "serving") in one part of 21 weeks and some 6 annual parts of three weeks), and while co-workers missing another three weeks per year is certainly bearable, it still seems a mostly useless burden.

ixacto• 13 years ago

I am not having children, I had a vasectomy. I don't live in CA, so no 50/50 divorce settlements or state income tax either. Guess what though, I would gladly pay 40% of my income as income tax if I could be assured that healthcare and education would be treated as a right rather than a campaign item. Scandinavia/Cananda/Japan are not ranked as highly as they are in the human development index for nothing.

aianus• 13 years ago

Most people I know (I study CS in Canada) are counting down the days until they graduate and leave for the US. There are few advantages to living in Canada over the US unless you're poor/disabled/unemployed.

Yhippa• 13 years ago

Do you have kids? What's your lifestyle? How much is your house worth? What kind of car do you drive?

tarr112• 13 years ago

I do not understand the dig against c# being less "efficient" than Ruby or Clojure.

largesse8• 13 years ago

He's talking about programmer productivity per line of code, not machine efficiency.

tarr112• 13 years ago

{programming language argument goes here}

Kequc2• 13 years ago

C was used to build modern languages which in turn replaced the jobs a lot of would be c developers could have had. It is the same kind of thing, progress means fewer people need to work.

darrenrogan• 13 years ago

This posting just spoke to me on so many levels. I've personally had a beer thrown in my face by someone who's job I destroyed. I really believe we are have started to eat our own tails.

Approximately 70% of the current jobs can (and will) be automated but what does that mean for my grandkids. How will we as a society cope with >20% unemployment never mind > 40%.

rtpg• 13 years ago

A big thing people has said is simply to make people work less. Sure it's "less efficient", but if that's what it takes to at least allow people the chance to work, so be it. Who cares about efficiency if we have people starving in the streets anyways.

btrask• 13 years ago

Raising the cost to employers will just encourage them to adopt even more automation.

pbhjpbhj5• 13 years ago

Isn't the answer to reduce population?

I'm not suggesting mass genocide. If family planning is right for a family then surely it's right for a nation and for nations together?

If we keep increasing the population at this rate it seems that it won't end well.

danpat• 13 years ago

Some forecasts predict a decline in the total population within the next 100 years. Birth rates in many countries (not just industrial, first world) have dropped below replacement rates for long enough that we'll likely see a plateau in total population, and possibly a drop, as there won't be enough young people having babies to replace the big bubble of old people that all start to die off together.

Interesting presentation on it here:

http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/aug/13/the-depopulation-pr...

by this guy:

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

learc832• 13 years ago

Please explain to me how a smaller population help with unemployment?

Jobs are performed primarily to benefit people. Less people means less jobs.

wsc981• 13 years ago

I wouldn't worry too much about destroying jobs - at least as far as the tech market is concerned. For every tech job that's destroyed, is seems at the very least 1 new job is created. Engineers should be flexible to take advantage of these new job opportunities.

For example once the mobile market started booming, lots of people wanted apps for their devices, ergo lots of jobs were (and still are) "created" to build those apps. Eventually the mobile platform as we know it will whither and some other platform will take it's place, requiring many new applications build with different technology and techniques (computer languages, design paradigms, etc...).

shurcooL3• 13 years ago

Pretty much this.

After all, if you're creating value, I don't think you can go wrong in the grand scheme of things. Destroyed (usually more tedious) jobs means people as a whole are now free to do more interesting and creative tasks.

I'd happily destroy my job of doing the dishes with a dishwasher (one that fills and empties itself too) by automating it, etc.

malandrew• 13 years ago

The problem is that the nature of the new problems we create that necessitate new jobs are fundamentally more challenging for humans to solve than the problems that have been automated away. There will always be jobs to be performed. The problem is if there will be enough humans capable enough to perform the jobs that still need doing.

We like to think that the industrial and agricultural revolutions created as many jobs as it destroyed. However, while it did do that for humans, the horses were not quite as lucky. Many hundreds of thousands of horses were put out of work permanently between the end of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century.

What makes people think that humans are too special to avoid the fate of horses?

ar4s3• 13 years ago

I keep hearing people say this... yet I'm confused. The operational goal of companies (and industry) as a whole is to continually increase efficiency to reap more profits.

If you take a step back, and just look at the entire machine, it seems frivolous for any industry to make investments in technology, given that your statement is true.

The big telecom I worked for was trying to automate their customer service, I highly doubt they would make the investment in the technology if they expected rehire the equivalent amount of layoffs.

Anyway, if I'm off point or misunderstanding some key mechanism at play, I'd love to be a bit more enlightened, because your opinion seems to be the dominant one.

rsofaer• 13 years ago

The idea is that they or other businesses will spend their new surplus on hiring workers to do what can't be automated.

damncabbage• 13 years ago

After finding some way to be retrained. And good luck getting back into the job market if you're 50 and have been displaced from an industry you've worked in for most of your life.

(It creates new jobs, but it doesn't necessarily mean the displaced get those new jobs.)

Maven911• 13 years ago

I still think that we are a long way from a heavy technical society

Why is it that in a 100 person company, you only have 5 IT ppl and the other 95 seem to have secured jobs?

It may happen one day, but we'll still need plenty of accoutants, pilots, truck drivers (googles driverless car is probably 40 years away from being legalized)

scotty799• 13 years ago

I we may do better than 40 years. Other countries develop their own solutions. There might be as little as 10 years to pretty widespread adoption.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIX6u6qHTK4

http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/automated-cars-succesfully-test...

EliRivers2• 13 years ago

"Why is it that in a 100 person company, you only have 5 IT ppl and the other 95 seem to have secured jobs?"

Isn't that what we expect to happen? As jobs become automated, humans stop doing them and you get more humans doing the jobs that cannot be currently automated.

contingencies• 13 years ago

Laudable for its social concern. A call for basic income, dare-I-say it... a socialist ideal. Will socialism emerge from our globally, militarily exported democratocapitalismywayorthehighway technocracy? Perhaps, but decentralization of political and mass-media control needs to be won back first.

Where does the western world want to go today? The government surveillance dyastopia and endless drone-wars of Assange's Cypherpunks introduction (http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm) or some kind of free education, basic income guaranteed, relative socialist utopia? A false dichotomy, for sure, but extremely worrisome in its validity nonetheless.

In short, it is fantastic and timely (as always) to see programmers thinking about social impact of their actions. More of this!

jboynyc• 13 years ago

> More of this!

Then you'll want to read "Four Futures."[1] It isn't by a programmer, but it has sci-fi references and the author talks about 3d printing. It's so brilliant I can never recommend it enough.

   [1]: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/

somlor• 13 years ago

Another interesting and relevant read: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

shurcooL3• 13 years ago

My dream is to outsource implementation details to computer algorithms. Programmers should be designers. Just describe what you want (not necessarily always using a programming language), and it runs.

columbo• 13 years ago

The first job I automated out of existence was by incorporating a "print all" button into an existing application. We had to hire someone, full time, to open each document and print it.

I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like in thirty years. All we know is the genie is out of the bottle and nobody is going to put it back in.

Maybe we're headed for a dystopic corporatist future where everything is monitored, calculated and automated to such a degree that people are simply told what to buy at regular intervals. Mass acceptance will lead to computers dictating through goal posting, achievements and leaderboards the vast majority of each individual's lives.

Maybe we'll simply have 80% unemployment; towering concrete skyscrapers that would rival the soviet era Paneláks with automated trains sending food in and taking waste out. Like a human powered coal plant. The vast numbers of unemployed will churn daily riots and huge sections of the country will be under military control. There will be an unspoken but utterly clear separation between the decision makers and those in the bread lines.

Maybe we'll come up with entirely new sectors in biology, space and automation which will usher in the real space-age of humanity.

My hope: We'll make some breakthroughs in science, mathematics, medicine and technology. New sectors will be created that nobody ever thought of, a few new billionaires will be added to the pile, our quality of life will improve and the threat of our complete and utter demise will have been greatly exaggerated.

ptvan2• 13 years ago

for those contemplating a dystopian future, it's good to remember that great comic from http://www.recombinantrecords.net/2009/05/24/amusing-ourselv...

unfortunately, they had to take it down, but here's the punchline: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kt5pgoInM81qaoem1o1_r1_500...

I think in the west, we're mainly controlled by entertainment, not violence. (I guess you could call it intellectual/emotional violence.) http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kt5pgoInM81qaoem1o1_r1_500...

ptvan2• 13 years ago

I found the full version of the comic http://fatpita.net/?i=1952

jcampbell15• 13 years ago

> Maybe we'll simply have 80% unemployment;

We already do depending on how you look at it. 150 years ago 95% percent of the population worked on providing basic needs, like food, shelter, clothing, etc. In modern economies like the US, less than 3% of the population works in agriculture. We already live in this so called dystopia where people work on making social networks, inventing treatments for obscure diseases, or making triple soy lattes. All of these things are pointless for survival.

The "dystopia" you describe is already here, and it is a wonderful place to live.

scarmig4• 13 years ago

That's more than a wee bit different than the parent's scenario.

It's about interaction with the formal economy. Making a complicated camera or the social network to share its photos might not be necessary for survival, but it is the result of a series of conscious economic decisions to satisfy some human desires by all parties involved.

Unemployment simply means someone providing nothing in that sphere.

Interestingly, it's happening even now. Much of the apparent decline in unemployment seems to be coming from people dropping outside of the workforce permanently, not people having their desire to participate in the economy satisfied. What happens if/when this trend continues to 60%? 50%? 40%?

My ideal solution would be a basic income guarantee and a cultural acceptance of people working only in the gray or uncompensated sectors, but we'll see if the political impetus for that ever occurs.

Edited to add: well, apparently author leads up to the same suggested solution I do. A thousand jackass points for me =)

waterlesscloud2• 13 years ago

What happens when automation completes all tasks more efficiently than humans?

quadlock• 13 years ago

The guy doing the "print all" job spent months looking for a new "print" related job, worked a McD's for a while and eventually went back to school to be retrained and is now employed as filterer for 'inappropriate' images on a social network. So, don't feel too bad.

jonny_eh• 13 years ago

Who will build the concrete skyscrapers?

mjmahone172• 13 years ago

Why not machines?

LarryMade2• 13 years ago

I think we probably will get back to having a lot of service jobs. Computers can do the job but they aren't all that understanding, with a large portion of the world aging and not dying, we are going to have a lot of need for assistance, care, entertainment services. Maybe not more construction (cept the areas where the folks flooded out of the coasts go) but probably a lot of repair and reconstruction because we have let a lot of our transportation/utility infrastructure go to pot.

Current barrier is the mentality those jobs are lame, lack of affordable vocational training, and the uncertain pay for those jobs. A lot of our society is geared for "toss it and get a new one," not fix what you already got.

beatpanda5• 13 years ago

It's also worth pointing out that sometimes automation helps create an increase in production of things with no commercial potential but potentially high artistic or social potential.

I worked for a nonprofit that was in the business of not paying people to manually complete a bunch of tasks, and barely staying afloat even then. I spent about 8 months helping them automate a bunch of processes, so that they're now able to provide more social services with fewer people.

Someone might have "lost a job", theoretically, but nobody was paying them anyway. Now the organization gets to spend more money paying talented people to come up with and implement interesting programming, instead of, say, manually reconciling a checkbook.

canweriotnow3• 13 years ago

Wow, I wrote this post and it's gotten more points than my cumulative HN karma. But it's also gotten better discussion than anything I've ever posted to HN, so I'm totally okay with that. Thanks, guise, this is fun.

ar4s3• 13 years ago

Hi Jason,

I've been reading a few of these articles lately, and I really enjoyed your first person perspective on what is otherwise being dubbed "Technological Unemployment".

I'm wondering if you think that a re-localized economy, namely one created around the local production of food through urban farms could be a viable way to offset the growing problem of unemployment.

smartician• 13 years ago

Instead of job destruction, you could say we're just becoming more efficient at doing things. This is nothing new, it's a trend that started with division of labor in the Stone Age. Then we invented currency to distribute the fruits of this divided labor somewhat evenly among the participants. Now we're seeing that the value and income gap between professions is becoming wider and wider, and it's developing into a real problem.

Some proposed fixes like raising the minimum wage will only work temporarily, as it increases the pressure to become more efficient. A basic income might indeed be a better approach, but the problem is that we'll have a lower class of bored, but somewhat poor people. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I think Europe's "social market economies" with high taxes and high benefits are in a better position to handle this than the US's gung-ho capitalism.

And to say that higher-level languages and open source products are making software engineers obsolete is a bit short sighted. Sure, languages and frameworks have become more powerful, but the problems to solve have become orders of magnitude harder, and new problems have arisen. You still need people proficient in lower level languages to build those high level tools and frameworks.

simonsarris2• 13 years ago

In the idle moments of any day my brainpower eventually leads to these sort of questions that we will have to ask ourselves about the future of societies. (this CS + Philosophy degree I "purchased" has been a very expensive anti-sleep aid...)

The anthropological world has gone through several ages as far as I can see it, from an Agricultural to Industrial to Mechanized (post WWII) to Digital (post 1990). I made up the names, but I'm sure the paradigms are obvious.

I want to make it clear that this "crisis of abundance" is not exactly a new question. Even moving to agrarian living had growing pains. The best example philosophically detailing this, I think, is the work by Thomas Paine called Agrarian Justice. (that's the same Paine as Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Age of Reason)

Agrarian Justice is a short pamphlet that I think everyone should read. It details in simple terms how civilized society is different from those who live off the land (such as some Native Americans of the time). Civilization clearly makes some people much better off, but others in civilization seem to be much worse off, condemned to lives of destitution, pollution, etc.

Land ownership and development is a clear plus, but in agrarian societies people "lose" their natural inheritance of the land because of this ownership, and land taxes should be levied to make up for the loss of a natural inheritance.

In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society.

Nothing was done in 1795, and little to the same effect is being done today, though ownership has become a lot more pronounced (we are no longer largely farmers after all). Unfortunately, I think society today would think the idea far more radical than those of Paine's generation, not least of which we owe to certain political elements.

A copy of the pamphlet is hosted on - where else - the official US Social Security website. I really do recommend you give it a read, it isn't long!

http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html

(If we want to discuss the pamplet itself in depth, we might want to do so on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5360056)

_delirium6• 13 years ago

Bertrand Russell is another person who's written on that subject. His question was more or less: if we reach the point where our basic needs can be taken care of by robots, will that mean everyone starts with their basic needs taken care of... or will it instead mean that whoever owns the robots, and claims their labor, will be in a very strong position?

kamaal• 13 years ago

I think our concept of basic needs is highly flawed. The moment some of our basic needs get taken care of, the new ones replace them.

In general any thing given away for free, will always be perceived as worthless. That is how it works!

neutronicus3• 13 years ago

It depends on whether the people without robots can kill the people who own the robots.

hipsters_unite• 13 years ago

Or you can take natural law thinkers like Grotius - in essence, their thinking derived from religion thus: you are owned by God -> you cannot kill yourself -> in times of hardship (an in extremis condition) you must take what you need in order to live. Very interesting, as he also defined property in terms of his religious beliefs...

I guess what I'm getting at is either you have the people breaking into the grain stores (in Grotius' day, anyway) or you provide some means of subsistence.

pfedor• 13 years ago

In the USA as of 2013, everyone already has their basic needs taken care of--or at least what Bertrand Russel would consider the basic needs, of course we have redefined them since to mean things which in his time would have been considered luxuries.

wwweston2• 13 years ago

> In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society.

Another Marxist philosopher, eh?

Forced contribution backed up by violence of the state doesn't sound like justice to me, and is fundamentally incompatible with the liberty envisioned by America's founding fathers. If only we'd listen to them, we'd all be better off.

Edit: my delivery is either a bit too deadpan, or HN readers have encountered enough would-be libertarians who are completely unaware that Paine is arguably a founding father and Marx wasn't borne until 1818 that my attempt at satire has already been beaten by reality. I'll hope it's the former.

simonsarris2• 13 years ago

Oh bull.

Failure to pay taxes due is theft from the rest of society. And don't claim any ownership of founding fathers in your ideology - Old Ben Franklin has been sticking it to "all taxation is theft" Libertarians since 1783, in absolute and direct contradiction of your sentiment:

> "The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.

> "All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."

saraid2168• 13 years ago

I can't tell if you're serious or not...

ejp• 13 years ago

Does Thomas Paine himself not qualify as a 'founding father'? "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” --John Adams [1]

Whenever I see arguments rooted in the founder's intent, I always wonder exactly which founding fathers the arguer will choose.

In truth the people who might qualify as 'founding fathers' had a wide variety of political opinions. Perhaps the only unifying trait was that they were able to compromise to get things done.

I'm hoping your comment was purposeful hyperbole...

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books (via Wikipedia)

DannoHung• 13 years ago

I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and say I think your sarcasm matrix is miscalibrated. You need to add a little more bite to the snark to make this batch correct.

obstacle1• 13 years ago

I hope you're joking, I really can't tell. In case you're not, Marx wasn't even born until 1818. Marxism as an ideology wasn't really a thing until at least the very late 19th century. Thomas Paine was most definitely not a Marxist philosopher.

invalidOrTaken• 13 years ago

I agree. We must take into account, however, that changing zeitgeists often make it more difficult to go it alone; legally, its probably harder to be a subsistence farmer today than it was in 1750. Perhaps you want to grow some corn and sell the rest; but perhaps it is now required that all corn sold meet some minimum standard, requiring a certain fertilizer only sold in 1000-acre doses. This is fine for the agribusinesses that corn farms had become by the time the standards were set, but not so great for the guy who decides to become a small-time farmer 200 years too late.

So I agree that the state mandating your charity is a bad thing, but the yearning for freedom from such must be coupled with an alternative.

Small solar, small-garden farming techniques: we figure these out, and no one will be mad at the computer guys for automating their backyard garden.

scarmig4• 13 years ago

Perfectly hit the sweet spot. 9/10.

steveklabnik• 13 years ago

It's not so much that you're too deadpan, it's just that it's Poe's Law for anything Marx related around here.

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, you invoked Poe's Law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of ~~Fundamentalism~~ Proprietarianism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.

skyraider2• 13 years ago

Milton Friedman also advocated a universal minimum income.

The thing is, he advocates a minimum income, not a minimum set of social services. There's a huge difference in the economics between goods or services that are (ideally) competitively purchased on an open market and good and services that are delivered by a monopoly (whether the monopoly is in the market or is government itself) or monopsony (in the case of some govn't welfare programs, which can be thought of as single entities that negotiate pricing for arrays of goods and services).

A hybrid between Milton Friedman-style minimum income and more socialist notions of welfare is something like the US food stamps program, where you have to spend the money on food-related goods, but where you can shop at a larger set of providers and still deliver the benefits of competitive purchasing to the food market.

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

lolo Marx railed against the commodification of labor and the implications of making it a commodity (one of which happened to be how a wage was no longer just a worker's time put into something he could just 'do')

jchrisa• 13 years ago

Here is a more modern argument for a guaranteed basic income. http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0...

sirmixalot• 13 years ago

Paine's 10% tax rate would be welcomed by even the most ardent Tea Partier.

pbhjpbhj5• 13 years ago

Isn't his tax rate on all wealth, so 10% of the value of your home and possessions too? Or was it only on income?

hessenwolf• 13 years ago

What you have written looks really interesting... but I am curious as to why you think this is not already in effect? Just thinking about Ireland, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia... the minimum income concept is firmly ingrained in unemployment benefits and means-tested social welfare. It needs a lot more to really restore equality, because equality of opportunity requires investment in education and rules against monopoly and nepotism/cronyism, but they are there too!

Mithaldu• 13 years ago

As a german who grew up in Eastern Germany i can tell you that the only thing stopping a full base income is influence from american politics. I say full, because we do have a de-facto base income with the unemployment payments labeled "Arbeitslosengeld II". Read up on it. :)

pbhjpbhj5• 13 years ago

Certainly in the UK there is no base benefit, no right to an amount to support continued life.

minimax3• 13 years ago

This is a facile take on the economics of technology. Productivity increased steadily throughout the 20th century and while in the short term that may have eliminated certain (mostly unskilled) functions, it didn't lead to widespread unemployment. Improvements in technology move the world forward, there's no reason to feel guilty about it.

aaron695• 13 years ago

The concept we can keep consuming to keep ourselves out of trouble is naive.

We can not sustain the growth required to replace lost jobs, it's just not mathematically possible, the world is finite.

Concepts around consumption composing of the arts(Attempting to loophole limited resources) are also misplaced, already we are seeing computer generated actors and artists.

chatmasta• 13 years ago

Sincerely, Adam Smith

rattray2• 13 years ago

There is no reason the 30th century will repeat the same patterns as the 20th. It's certainly true that raw employment numbers in the US haven't dipped significantly since the dawn of industrialization, and they've gotten better around the globe as a whole. But that doesn't mean we'll continue to be able to come up with jobs for people to do as fast as we can come up with ways to make them obsolete. Technological improvement tends to be geometric if I'm not mistaken, and I doubt the same can be said for the creation of meatware-only, service-industry duties.

It's also important to keep in mind that real wages for the majority of American workers hasn't risen in the past 40-odd years [citation needed]. Of course, they can buy cooler shit now than they could in the 70's, but that doesn't mean there's no cause for pause when we look at the benefits of technological improvement.

dclowd99012• 13 years ago

It just doesn't work that way anymore, especially as we approach the robotics age. I'm pretty sure the jobs everyone's freaking out about are never coming back: 6% unemployment is a vestige of a former world.

My concern with OP's idea of a minimum income and the requisite tax that it would require is the very real possibility that a person would rather do nothing than sacrifice 91% of the pay for their hard work. I mean, logisitically, how do you even determine such a tax structure? And if there becomes a generation of people who can sufficiently live with doing no work at all, how do future generations ever bridge that gap, as it inexorably becomes even more gaping.

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

Here's an arrangement:

Tax everyone a flat percentage X%. Collect all the money, and distribute it in living stipends of T/N, where T is the total money and N is the size of the population paying in. Thus everyone gets a stipend of X% of the mean income. Rises and falls in total income will naturally be reflected by the stipend (with a short time-delay for tax collection and stipend distribution to occur), and various markets will eventually balance out between those who just live off the stipend, those who have jobs to earn more, and the owners of the means of production who were taking in all the big money anyway.

minimax3• 13 years ago

"I'm pretty sure the jobs everyone's freaking out about are never coming back"

There's nothing wrong with that. In 1900 something like 40% of all employment was in agriculture, but improvements in technology have reduced that to 2-3% now (all the while increasing crop yields), but we don't have 40% unemployment because of all those jobs that never came back.

zurn• 13 years ago

> Productivity increased steadily throughout the 20th century and while in the short term that may have eliminated certain (mostly unskilled) functions, it didn't lead to widespread unemployment

It certainly has lead to widespread unemployment especially among younger people.

Look at eg. ILO's outlook summary: http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_1...

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

You're ignoring the social and governmental factors.

Technological improvement actually did lead to widespread unemployment once: the Great Depression. There was simply no need for so much farm labor after it turned out that unlimited and leveraged stock-market investment wouldn't make returns on every last penny and bushel.

(Everyone in those days, no matter their political slant, knew what overproduction was.)

The eventual solution was to raise wages, shorten working hours, allow unionization and go to war. I'm only partially joking.

On some level, widespread technological unemployment is a sign that our productivity is too high for our designated amount of work that constitutes a "real job" or "full time".

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/

eurleif3• 13 years ago

But it's more efficient to hire 1 worker for 8 hours than 2 workers for 4 hours. The latter has more overhead in terms of training, etc. Why would an employer choose to do that?

minimax3• 13 years ago

"Technological improvement actually did lead to widespread unemployment once: the Great Depression."

Economists argue about the causes of the Great Depression, but the idea that the Great Depression was caused by improvements in technology is not one I've ever heard.

neutronicus3• 13 years ago

Looking at real wages versus employment suggests that Labor is taking a beating from Capital in the marketplace.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

This meme has become an ego stroking impulse of knowledge workers but it evinces a gross misunderstanding of economics on a fundamental level. More than that it represents a disturbingly insulting implicit characterization of "unskilled workers" who are incapable of adapting to a changing economy.

The economy is not static, and it has never been static. Indeed, it's actually far less dynamic today than it has been many times in the past. And no, you and your software are not going to change the world so drastically that suddenly people won't be able to find work. People will still work, they'll do different jobs than they did before. Supply and demand. Today many processes and systems are more efficient, by orders of magnitude, than they've ever been before. And yet at the same time a much larger percentage of the population is active in the work force than before (since many more women work today than in the past, among other factors). Is this a deep paradox or just simple economics?

wvenable2• 13 years ago

> People will still work, they'll do different jobs than they did before. Supply and demand.

The unaddressed issue is the real possibility that the majority of human effort is merely not cost effective anymore. In other words, human effort isn't worth paying a living wage. You say we have more population active in the work force ever than before but the total earnings have decreased steadily.

I'm currently working a project to eliminating a few good office jobs. They had a choice, hire more staff or build software to improve efficiency enough that the staff isn't necessary. The company chose to build the software.

So I can easily see where software has eliminated jobs, I haven't seen these "different jobs" that people are supposedly doing.

mjmahone172• 13 years ago

It seems that far fewer women work now (as a percentage of all women) than did in 1810. Sure, the rich women whose husbands could afford slaves didn't work. But that might have been 10% of the population. Tops, 20% of the female population did not have to work. Most women (especially peasant women) either worked the land/animals, or were seamstresses, or prostitutes, or did various household tasks to bring in extra income (or to free up their husband and children so that they could earn extra income). And women generally couldn't retire like they do now, especially as most didn't live beyond middle age.

sowhatquestion• 13 years ago

The question isn't whether people will "do different jobs than they did before." The question is whether any of these "different jobs" will not be low-skill, low-paying service jobs. Basically, the argument that employment is being eliminated by this "software eating the world" trend is oversimplified and a bit hasty, but give it time...[1] But in any case, the argument that employment is being polarized seems unassailable.[2][3][4] Basic income is one solution. Unionizing those shitty Starbucks/McDonald's/Walmart jobs is another, although I personally prefer basic income since it covers the entire economy.

[1] http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/ (kudos to another commenter who reminded me of this fantastic article by posting it elsewhere in the thread)

[2] http://www.frbsf.org/economics/conferences/0311/alm-skillcon...

[3] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robo...

[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/28/h...

CurtMonash3• 13 years ago

Let's start by pulling this discussion apart into three questions:

1. What effect will technology-based efficiency gains have on total wealth? 2. What effect will technology-based efficiency gains have on the distribution of total wealth? 3. What should we do about #1 and #2, especially #2?

The answer to #1, IMO, remains very favorable. And I think that's obvious so long as you measure wealth by the value and owner-/consumer-perceived quality of what is owned and consumed, rather than by market prices.

As for #2 -- a rising tide is clearly lifting a lot of boats worldwide. In the richer countries, that's more debatable -- but I think it's still true. Dollar incomes may be flat, inflation-adjusted, but electronic entertainment (for example) is a lot better than it used to be.

But it's hard to deny that income disparities are on the rise. And it's reasonable to think about those income disparities in part by counting numbers of "good" jobs (probably down) and (of which there are fewer) "great" jobs (probably up).

Historically, "good" jobs have arisen to more than make up for those lost, perhaps after an uncomfortable transition period. If that's what's going on again, we can muddle through without great answers to #3. But if This Time It's Different -- and it well may be -- then we need to reorganize our economy, our work practices, and everything else, rebalancing work/leisure in the way some people (often socialists) were already (and falsely) arguing was necessary decades ago.

--------------------------------------------

And finally -- at a minimum, we're causing problems that society needs to deal with in terms of general job loss. We're also causing other problems, such as privacy threats. So it's our duty, as very fortunate individuals, to also put some effort into alleviating them, or in some other ways of improving the world.

I, of course, have put some effort into the privacy issue. (http://www.dbms2.com/category/liberty-privacy/page/2/ -- more coming soon). Others may look at general economics (e.g. the OP here), or censorship, or the need for better STEM teaching, or in unquestionably beneficial applications of technology, or whatever. But we all should be thinking of what, personally, we can do to try to help.

aspensmonster• 13 years ago

I think you've already highlighted an interesting signal that This Time It's Different: in the U.S., productivity has increased while wage gains have flat-lined. Workers aren't sharing in the additional created wealth. Sure, the aggregate amount of wealth to the poor has increased over time. I'd think that's a given. If that hasn't happened something has gone horribly wrong. But its value relative to other wealthier groups has steadily declined. That's a bad spot to be in. The workers' increasing productivity is earning themselves a smaller return over time. Indeed a shrinking return. The nastiest consequence of this in my observation has been political; when a large majority of the population has relatively little wealth to toss around (even taken as a whole) it's easy for their political representatives to become unresponsive.

Now, whether It's Different This Time because of characteristics inherent to a steadily improving economic system, or simply because of self-destructive tendencies that wealth-hoarding tends to exhibit, is a question I'd love an answer to. But I'm sure there will be others to tell me that this time is just like all the others too. Maybe I'll hear a decent explanation that allays my concerns.

smsm4217• 13 years ago

If you can get a flat-screen TV for $300 today, you're sharing the wealth - never before you could get anything close to that, let alone for so little money. If you compare the things accessible even to somebody who is considered "poor" today - in terms of quality of food, shelter, gadgets, etc. - it has never been more. 62% of people considered "poor" have two or more TVs. 48% own a computer. Look here: http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/01/news/economy/poor-income/ind...

The average household defined as "poor" in 2005 had air conditioning, cable TV and a DVD player, according to government statistics cited by Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. If there were children in the home, the family likely had a game system, such as a Microsoft Xbox or Sony PlayStation.

If you go back 50 years, would any poor person have access to anything like that? Would many middle-class ones? If this is not sharing the created wealth - albeit unequally, but undeniably - then what is it?

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

I don't think it is Different This Time. But the thing is, last time the world's response to overproduction and depression was social democracy version 1, also known as the Postwar Consensus. That deliberate rebalancing of society's wealth distribution resulted in the huge boost of consumption, demand, innovation and productivity we saw for 30 years after that.

Then came the oil shocks, which led to a completely different politics: neoliberalism, or, an economy once-again organized around maximizing capital gains rather than net earnings.

holmak• 13 years ago

Whenever the income inequality of the US is discussed, I wonder about the global income distribution. The US is no longer a closed system, so it may not be meaningful to consider the US income distribution on its own. Does anyone here know how income inequality is doing globally?

CurtMonash3• 13 years ago

I don't have numbers at my fingertips. That said:

Less developed countries seem to be growing faster than developed ones. That said, while gratifying huge numbers of people in China, India and smaller countries are moving up in the middle class, they're leaving many of their poorer countrypeople behind.

(Also, beware of any attempt to present the numbers so simply that commodity price swings are allowed to have a major influence.)

qu4z-22• 13 years ago

This is not directly replying to you, but something you said made me think:

> so long as you measure wealth by the value and owner-/consumer-perceived quality of what is owned and consumed

What about things that aren't really owned or consumed? Clean air/water, forests. Do they factor into this function somehow? If not, I have difficulty trusting any suggestions based on that definition of "wealth".

And just in general, I'd much rather optimise for happiness than wealth. But it's much harder to quantify, so I guess that's why people don't.

trippy_biscuits• 13 years ago

Why is making a job obsolete destroying a job? I see it as progress. It frees up a human resource to find a more rewarding opportunity. Any worker(s) made redundant certainly don't feel that way at the time of impact because they get the opportunity to evolve by trial. One observation I've made regarding replacing people with technology is the inherent brain drain: all the details get abstracted away into the new technology or system and no one remembers or thinks about them anymore. When something goes wrong, those details matter. That creates a different demand and the cycle continues.

jkonowitch• 13 years ago

150 years ago the agricultural sector employed roughly 80% of American workers. Today, it employs less than 3%. It may be hard to imagine looking forward rather than back, but dynamic economies are capable of experiencing such dramatic shifts AND of absorbing and reallocating the labor towards more productive uses. They key thing to understand is that once certain modes of production become less efficient relative to alternatives, often because of technological advances, it frees our resources and productive energies to engage in new enterprises. It's true that employment dislocations that occur from rapid technological advancement can cause great transitional distress; that is why it's important as a society that we find humane and efficient ways of supporting people through these changes. However, the net result of progress is that we are all better off. No one can say exactly what the baristas or the project managers of today will become, no more than anyone could have predicted what would have become of the farmworkers who were displaced in the great migration towards a service economy. But, the last 150 years have seen a veritable explosion in the specialization and profusion of occupations which were previously economically unviable. I see no reason why we should not expect the same kind of evolution going forward.

wvenable2• 13 years ago

What happens when machines are stronger, have greater endurance, and are cheaper than humans? What happens when machines are smarter, faster, make less mistakes, and are cheaper than humans?

The "same kind of evolution" is no longer ours -- it belongs to the machines. How does your optimism work when most human effort is simply obsolete?

lolfallacy• 13 years ago

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

mleach• 13 years ago

Agricultural age, industrial age, information age...

Cannibalizing our past has always been the path to creating more wealth.

scotty799• 13 years ago

When a labor saving innovation occurs people get fired, but after some time they get rehired by new markets that develop thanks to this innovation.

But as labor saving innovations occur more and more often newly developed markets get automated before they can soak up unemployed generated by previous innovation.

001sky2• 13 years ago

Great post,

up to ending.

Economics =/= politics.

& Politics is the supreme art.

andyl• 13 years ago

"What one or two lone hackers can readily achieve today, once could only have been accomplished by a team of engineers, business analysts, project managers, and QA testers, with tools purchased from vendors that employed legions more engineers, analysts, project managers, and QA testers"

This is true, and is the reason why I left general management to become a developer. People don't realize just how powerful the new tools have become. I can do by myself what once took a large team.

There is a lot that could be said about the potential industry-wide ramifications of this power-shift. I know one thing for sure: team meetings just got a whole lot more efficient.

beatpanda5• 13 years ago

I want to zoom in from the big picture and look at something more local. Let's say you're like me and you're a well-paid knowledge worker in, say, San Francisco, and lets further suppose that your industry is creating an incredible stratification of wealth in a very small, volatile space.

And let's say you're like the OP, and you're feeling a little bit guilty that you're putting people out of work, and making it harder for people to meet their own basic needs in other ways.

Instead of arguing that we should all pay more taxes, tax yourself. Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent.

It's called Noblesse Oblige. It used to be a thing. It ought to be again.

jvm2• 13 years ago

IMO the "self-taxation" ideas you mention would be much less welfare-enhancing than donating to givewell-approved charities, I like the spirit though!

Details: http://www.givewell.org/giving101/Your-dollar-goes-further-o...

dclowd99012• 13 years ago

Idea on the roommate thing that I've always found works well: add everyone's income in the house together, determine Each's percentage of the household income, and divvy up bills accordingly.

theorique2• 13 years ago

That's sort of socialist, isn't it?

smsm4217• 13 years ago

But you miss the important point. It's easy to do what you think is right (at least when it comes to spending money that you have), but what's the use of it if others keep behaving in the ways you consider wrong? The whole point of it is to control other people so that they would behave right too! And if you don't have to persuade them but actually can force them to comply using the threat of violence - even better! What enlightened and liberal person wouldn't want everybody to act as he likes under the threat of violence?

beatpanda5• 13 years ago

I guess you're being sarcastic? I'm not really sure. What you're describing is the reason I'm not a "liberal", but I also think it's bullshit that so many of San Francisco's service workers have to live on the other side of the Bay when there's so much money in this city.

bluedanieru3• 13 years ago

Do you think you would fare well under an anarchy?

eru4• 13 years ago

Why would you shop local? That just biases in favour of people who already live in high wage San Francisco vs, say, poor labourers in China or Vietnam.

Similar to the roommate. That's just helping one random guy.

That's all fine. But there are better uses for your money to help humanity. Give to Doctors without Borders, or so.

nazgulnarsil2• 13 years ago

why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth? It gets worse when you take the marginal utility of money into account. Capitalism has this wonderful feature where industry goes and sets up shop wherever people have it worst off because their labor is the cheapest. This infrastructure improves the crappy areas until it is no longer the worst, repeat. The world has thus been ratcheting itself out of extreme poverty since the industrial revolution.

pigou• 13 years ago

> why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth?

This seems to be the implicit assumption whenever certain segments of the political class bemoan jobs being "shipped overseas". On a local/national scale, inequality does increase as unskilled workers face international competition. But on a global scale, inequality actually decreases as those living in the world's poorest countries see their incomes go up.

In this case at least, a likely explanation for why geographically proximate workers are deemed more worthy is that they are part of the relevant political constituency and the foreign workers are not.

arethuza• 13 years ago

"It used to be a thing"

More like blatant PR by aristocratic nobility.

cbr• 13 years ago

    Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the
    local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of
    using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on
    roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent.

These are all ways that you can spend money to help people, and as someone who is rich (globally speaking) this is a good approach. But if you care about how far your giving goes [1] then you can do better via carefully evaluated charities like GiveDirectly [2] or the AMF [3].

[1] and you should: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...

[2] http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-dir...

[3] http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF

beatpanda5• 13 years ago

I'm working on a longer answer to satisfy the people who think there's a zero-sum game between whether my neighbors get evicted or whether there are enough mosquito nets for African children, but I want to take a stab at it:

I care more about the immediate social fabric I live in than the relative poverty of people in other places. It's because I think that other social problems are merely symptoms of a mindset that allows people to think of themselves as seperate from the social fabric where they live.

I believe the way we solve the problem laid out in the OP is by creating resilient local communities that can take care of their own needs with minimal resource input, and I believe that geographic arbitrage and global division of labor have created many of the problems that responses to this post have suggested my money is better spent alleviating.

I further believe that when we solve social problems in our own commuities, we create templates for action that can be used by others, and that this is more efficient than using charity to impose solutions for social problems from without.

Lastly, I think anybody who thinks of themselves as an island, disconnected from the people and place immediately surrounding them, is delusional.

canweriotnow3• 13 years ago

OP here. I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

scotty799• 13 years ago

Societies deal currently with job destruction and unemployment in very pathological ways.

USA criminalized, what unemployed often do, locked significant amount of them up and hired other people to watch them. USA unemployment could be as much as 2% higher in total if they didn't.

Tsagadai• 13 years ago

Imagine if we could outsource prison guard duties (especially the dangerous, interpersonal stuff) to robots. And if those robots could also ensure the prisoners work efficiently in their prison jobs.

scotty799• 13 years ago

That's one of the reasons why putting people from highly unemployed groups in jails is not the right long term solution. Eventually you won't even have jobs for jailers as a side benefit.

You might always imagine that eventually all people end up in jail that will get pretty relaxed till then and robot jailers will become just become security beneficial mostly to prisoners since there won't be much people outside only industry and ai-s that will have to be reasonably protected from descendants of monkeys in mutual interest of all involved. That would be cool idea for dystopian/utopian short story or novel.

100k• 13 years ago

I will always remember my first project at my first job out of school. The project manager sat down the team to explain the goals of the project. My company made digital asset management software, and it had sold a license to a major client.

It was pitched to the team like this: "The client has already announced to shareholders that this project is going to lay off 20 people, so we need to get it done by such-and-such date."

I felt really awesome about those poor smucks who got unemployed partially due to my work. As programmers at our best can create whole new industries, but most of what we do is automate repetitive tasks.

That's good for productivity, but might not be an unvarnished good for society if the gains are not distributed in a fair manner.

Paul Krugman has written a lot lately about "capital-biased technological progress" and potential remedies.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robo...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/capital-biased-t...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/policy-implicati...

smsm4217• 13 years ago

Fixed lump of labor fallacy detected. Counterfactual statements about politics (many republicans signed "no tax raise" pledge - which of course includes everybody's - including author's - taxes) detected. Calling unbased hypothesis "common sense" because the author couldn't find any proof - detected. Unbased assumption about how drastically raising taxes would generate tons of new income - instead of widespread evasion - detected. New and useful ideas - not detected.

scotty799• 13 years ago

Lump of labor of course grows as economy develops but it doesn't have to always grow faster than automation reduces it.

Given that we automate things faster and faster and economy needs time to grow to increase lump of labor there might be time where lump of labor starts shrinking.

Lots of currently held jobs are pretty much useless already but can't be removed in business as usual mode due to various social agreements.

US economy used crisis as an excuse to shake off lots of them. Output regrew fast after crisis but jobs didn't come back.

smsm4217• 13 years ago

Automation does not reduce available labor - it reduces only the number of specific workplaces available, but since it frees the resources by doing it and produces more value, this value can - and will - be turned into buying work of somebody else. Maybe instead of buying services of a clerk, the owner of the company would buy services of a Ford dealer and Ford workers by buying a new car. So what? I have no reasons to prefer clerk's job for Ford dealer's job - the only difference is that people apparently need the latter but not the former. Transition can be painful for the individual, but beneficial for the economy as a whole.

eru4• 13 years ago

> New and useful ideas - not detected.

If you ignore the author's prescription, their analysis reads quite well.

smsm4217• 13 years ago

Author's prescription - which is basic "let's have the government rob the rich and feed the poor" is neither new nor interesting nor working. It was tried many times in many forms. It fails. As a software engineer, one should know better than propose using something that spectacularly crashed so many times before.

jvm2• 13 years ago

My thinking about this is that people are both sellers of a product (their labor) and human beings. I think this is what got way too mixed up in the Marxist framing of socialism and needs to be unwound.

I don't think people should have rights qua producers. Acer doesn't have the right to have people buy their products, their purpose in our society to produce a good value proposition for computers. If nobody wants what's on offer, they can and should go out of business. Otherwise they're wasting resources that could have gone to their superior competitors. The same goes for a redundant worker.

But qua humans, I think people should have tons of rights! I think people should have equal opportunities (I'm thinking especially of children and how unfair life is to those with poor parents), and in addition, I honestly don't think someone should have to go hungry or homeless no matter what they do.

A basic income serves not to replace capitalism with socialism (in the Marxist sense) but to work in concert with capitalism to make sure nobody is ever dehumanized by a process that makes us all richer.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

Sure, we can’t destroy all the non-Job Destroyer jobs… yet. Burger King and Starbucks still need human subjects employees to make Whoppers and skinny lattes, but how long before these jobs are deskilled to the point they can be done by machines — i.e., by software?

Interestingly, there is a robotics company in SF (Momentum Machines) that is trying to automate fast food (burger) assembly.

http://www.businessinsider.com/burger-robot-could-revolution...

curt• 13 years ago

Why do people keep asking for the old days with the 91% tax rate? Do they realize that today the effective tax rate is nearly the same as it was then. Not only that but today the 'rich' carry a far larger percentage of the overall tax burden.

Kliment• 13 years ago

[citation needed]

chaz• 13 years ago

The contention is that 1950s tax law enabled tax shelters which allowed wealthy filers to heavily reduce their income tax bill.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732470510457815...

paulhauggis2• 13 years ago

Even if the rich paid 100% in taxes, there will still be people complaining...

phaemon• 13 years ago

That's very odd, putting 'rich' in quotes like that.

It's as though you're trying to imply they're not really rich. But that would mean that it's not the rich who're carrying a larger percentage of the tax burden after all. Which negates the very point you were trying to make! You seem a little conflicted on this issue ;-)

kevinskii• 13 years ago

By this logic, anyone who improves anything is a job destroyer. One small team of factory workers can ruin thousands of blacksmith careers. One good therapist may wipe out an entire local industry for divorce lawyers. A single medical research scientist could prevent countless would-be morticians and undertakers from ever discovering their true calling.

The solution to joblessness seems simple: We just need to ensure that no one ever does anything important.

rumcajz• 13 years ago

We need a lot more educators. We need people to take care of elderly. We need more people to work on preserving the environment. We need much better public services. The amount of work needed is astounding.

The fallacy of putting equals sign between work and production of commodities is what causes this dim view of our economic future.

zanny• 13 years ago

There seems to be a good bit of "if you are in the unemployment camp, you aren't contributing to society and are effectively worthless" that I get from some comments in this thread.

I know for a fact if a basic income surfaced I would jump immediately into solving a long-run "big problem" like learning robotics, brain-computer interfaces, etc. Without the burden of having to seek someone to pay me for my time to eat, I'd go tackle what I cared about more than what people with money to feed me cared about. I think that would have pervasive implications on everyone, and with a necessary cultural shift away from consumption towards conceptualization and self actualization, we might be able to get a majority of people taking up creative endeavors to improve the world in ways our current economic engine doesn't come close to promoting.

greggman• 13 years ago

Maybe in some future world where we invent AI (could be right around the corner for all I know)

But, right now. No, programmers are job creators. Guess how many programmers in the world create browsers? Probably less than 10k. Guess how many jobs browsers have created? Millions. Guess you many programmers+engineers made networking stacks? Guess how many jobs networking has created? How many programmers made the top illustration or photo editing packages? Now compare that to the number of jobs of artists created using those packages.

That tide might turn someday but right now programmers are job creators not job destroyers.

DanielBMarkham3• 13 years ago

Sigh.

"...We (programmers) all are, on some level or another; we’re taking mundane repetitive tasks and automating them with code..."

Yes, and no. I have been programming or improving things all my life. That means, if you don't look too deeply, yes, I am a jobs destroyer.

But if you're not going to look too deeply, just don't bother looking at all.

We programmers take inefficient things and make them efficient. Old, bloated code gets streamlined. What used to take a person an hour takes five minutes.

You'd think -- if you kind of squinted your eyes the right way -- that eventually we'd just make the entire universe efficient and there would be no more jobs. You'd think something and it would come into existence. Many people are able to think this far ahead, and it scares them. Along, presumably, with many other things.

The problem is that such simple-minded projections of the future never pan out that way. Over and over again we make something more efficient, take away entire categories of jobs, and still people have more to do than ever. Why? There's a book in that response, but let's just say in deference to Jurassic Park, "jobs find a way". An economy is a complex system where people are always wanting something -- even when they're fed, clothed, housed, and taken care of -- and other people are always providing it. They trade, and it's this species-programmed pattern of trading that led us out of the Savannah and onto the moon.

This is the nth article along the same lines -- the future is devoid of jobs. I'm very sorry that our educational system in many western countries is ill-preparing many for work, and they face long periods of unemployment made worse by debt. It's a travesty and a scandal and we need to fix it. But don't extrapolate current unfortunate structural unemployment with the end of life, the universe, and everything. Don't flatter yourself. You are not a jobs destroyer. You're just some schmuck doing his job like the rest of us.

yairchu3• 13 years ago

That's because we haven't yet produced a general-purpose quality AI which can do everything humans can do and more cost effectively than they do it. But when this happens, pretty much everything, even creative work like graphical design - everything will be cloudsourced.

DanielBMarkham3• 13 years ago

You are confusing things with value.

Most commenters seem to confuse needs with value. They think that once we are all fed and housed there will be no more jobs.

At least you've taken it to the next step -- tangible things. Congrats.

You need to ask yourself a question: why do rich people create things for each other? A millionaire grandmother may make a scarf for her grandchild. A middle-aged man may take time to create a scrapbook for a friend that is retiring. A billionaire may go to yard sales and haggle over the price of a toaster.

It's not about needs, and it's not about things. It's about trade, creation, giving, social interaction. These things are not going anywhere, no matter how many AIs there are. In another 100 years we're just all going to be the equivalent of today's billionaires. That means having purpose and creating things, ie, continuing in some form of semi-structured creation and trade process.

Look at it this way. Describe the life of an early 21st century person to somebody from 1000BC. They will have no idea why you work. Guaranteed meals every now and then? Communicate with anybody on the planet? Water, sewage, and light for the dark -- all without effort? We live in an incredible far-fetched place beyond dreams. There's no point in working. From their perspective.

But that's not the way things panned out.

mcgwiz• 13 years ago

I agree overall, but I don't think the basic mechanism of why we have more work than ever is "jobs finding a way." That characterizes the process as jobs self-replicating, mutating, and adapting.

It's more that improvements in information processing generally (over the long-term) raise all boats, and do not fundamentally alter capitalism's competitive essence. Increasingly complex information processing can be automated, but that just moves the competition to a different playing field (er, boat pond). Until computers can create optimal, marketable solutions to novel problems, competition will always provide jobs for humans. They will just be different jobs.

cousin_it• 13 years ago

When AIs or uploaded humans can do everything that flesh-and-blood humans can do, more cheaply, then there will be more reason to pay flesh-and-blood humans for anything. And they won't have any spare land or resources to return to past ways of living, because technologically advanced corporations will be able to extract more value from that land or resources, so flesh-and-blood humans will be outbid, and subsequently perish. Basic econ 101.

(Programming seems like a task that's especially suited for AIs or uploaded humans, because it doesn't involve any physical manipulation of mass. So programmers should be the first, not the last, to worry. And don't kid yourself that you'll be an uploaded programmer earning a living wage. That honor will go to the the most productive and undemanding uploaded programmer in the world, who will get copied a billion times. See Robin Hanson's "Crack of a future dawn".)

One possible answer is transhumanism, making humans smarter so they can stay competitive. But even so, the majority could still get left behind.

yaddayadda• 13 years ago

"Sure, we can’t destroy all the non-Job Destroyer jobs… yet. Burger King and Starbucks still need human subjects employees to make Whoppers and skinny lattes, but how long before these jobs are deskilled to the point they can be done by machines — i.e., by software?"

Actually it's already being done http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/22/robot-serves-up-340-ham...

naner• 13 years ago

Some coffee shops still have manual espresso machines, which require training, skill and finesse to operate.

I worked at two different Starbucks a decade ago and have used the manual machines. They require a tiny bit of manual labor and attention but not really an special amount of skill and finesse. Anyone that can learn to make a scrambled egg can do it. I was in high school at the time.

Let's not romanticize this crap. Most of these jobs we are destroying aren't that special. And people will be forced to focus on learning more useful skills.

I think there needs to be a revolution on training people for work and careers. There are a lot of jobs in the US currently that cannot be filled, we don't have enough skilled workers. It seems like displaced workers should have the option of getting into some kind of fast-track training to enter these roles, at no cost to them and while keeping their family fed.

The countries that figure out how to do this fairly, effectively, and without crazy costs will be unstoppable.

Also I think moderate mental health issues are a massive economic problem that nobody seems to notice but I don't know how to fix that.

canweriotnow3• 13 years ago

Yeah, I exaggerated the amount of skill needed to operate manual espresso machine. But I don't think it diminishes the point about de-skilling. The point I think most people missed reading TFA (due to my so very highly nuanced brand of snark) is that I don't really have a problem with jobs disappearing... I have a problem with the political rhetoric that we should be creating more jobs. I want less work to do, or at least less _boring_ work, dammit!

protomyth• 13 years ago

There is an amazing and unjustified arrogance on the part of the author on what "software" can do. Add to that the author missing whole areas of our labor force (creative, vocational non-factory, farming).

I would say the labor force makeup is changing and our schools have done a piss poor job of picking the right trends, but we still haven't got to the point a robot can do construction, in the field building / maintenance, or what's left of farming and ranching. I don't see robots getting there for a great while. I haven't seen the robot who can do even basic creative jobs.

The way forward is still humans. If you want to really help the workforce, get micro-transactions that work. That will change everything.

jlebowski• 13 years ago

some jobs will never be destroyed, i.e. prostitution

i still jerk off manually

TheCoelacanth• 13 years ago

Two words: sex robots.

npsimons• 13 years ago

By using the most efficient possible languages (Ruby and Clojure, in my case, rather than Java or C#) and relying on free and open source software (Postgres rather than Oracle, for instance), I’m potentially destroying jobs in my own sector!

And that's where I stopped reading. Anyone who doesn't understand the economics of OSS is probably not going to be writing very insightfully on economics in general (hint: the large majority of OSS is produced by paid programmers).

ludflu• 13 years ago

> the amount of socially necessary labor decreases with each passing year.

Isn't this Lump of Labor fallacy? There is not a fixed amount of work available because human desire is limitless. (and therefore so is human suffering, but that's a different discussion!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

fghh45sdfhr3• 13 years ago

I honestly believe that many decades from now, 20 to 50 years, at least one industrialized country will have something like a Basic income guarantee.

It happened to Rome. When all of their work was done by slaves, the free Romans got bread and circuses on the government's dime.

I think we will reach a point where unemployment will just grow despite a growing economy. And it will steadily grow for months, then years, and over the years we'll go through a long and painful political process which I think will eventually result in a a Basic income guarantee.

At that point a staggering percentage of our economy will be 100% automated.

hnal9433• 13 years ago

Of course, "Bread and Circuses" is a pejorative describing the fall of Rome: ...Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses

paulhauggis2• 13 years ago

Open source developers have also been killing developer jobs for at least 5 years now.

As a business owner, why would I want to hire a software engineer when I can hire a software mechanic? Most of what I want is already given out for free and the hard parts are already engineered. I'm not talking about things like PHP, Mysql, or Apache.

I just need someone to make changes to this code..and you really don't need to find someone with that much experience to do it properly (IE: they are cheaper).

As business owners get more and more tech savvy, I predict that this will be the norm.

norswap2• 13 years ago

I think programmers do in fact create some jobs. Programmers are really self-replicating entities. Think about it, every time you start a project you create a burden of maintenance. For yourself, which means you can't tackle as much work as you could before, work which will go the way of another programmer; or for the lucky dude who will end up maintaining your work. Of course, the project can end up abandonned, but in that case nothing is destroyed either.

The more we create complex systems, the more we need people to grease the cogs at all levels, people to oversee them, people which have non-local view (or even a global view, as far as it is possible) of the system, etc...

Confessions of A Job Destroyer

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