Will robots steal our jobs? The humble loom suggests not

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/25/what-the-humble-loom-can-teach-us-about-robots-and-automation/

by GlennCSmith • 12 years ago

27 45 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

hobs2• 12 years ago

One of the arguments of this article is that as technology stabilizes we will be able to demand higher pay.

Technology will likely not stabilize.

slurry• 12 years ago

Overall, technology hasn't really "stabilized" since the loom, either.

It has, however, stabilized locally for periods of time in one area of industry or another.

And it is likely to do similar things again.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

Well, it must, some day. But I'm not betting on any specific millennium.

I just love those articles that state that "we have no problem" because "everything just settles out at the end", while forgetting that one of the mechanisms for everything to settle up is a huge share of the population dying. It's survival bias acting at slaughter time.

WalterBright3• 12 years ago

I don't know about England in the 1700's, but during the industrialization of the US, 1800-1900, the life expectancy and just about every other measure of health got dramatically better throughout that century.

Another way to look at it as go visit Fort Williams in New York, they have a display of 18th century clothing. Look how tiny it was. It's a dramatic illustration of how hard life was in pre-industrial America.

Next visit some Civil War museums and look at the uniforms on display. They're about halfway between colonial sizes and modern sizes.

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

Internet technology has stabilized already: we're still using HTML, HTTP, javascript, etc. The Space Jam website from 1996 still loads in a browser. Most servers and clients still use IPv4. Etc.

hobs2• 12 years ago

Using the article's analogies, they talk specifically about web designers.

Would a web designer from 1996 have a job in today's market? In the same vein, it would be like saying the autoloom would still work today, obviously it would, but no one would use it to produce goods to sell commercially.

dllthomas2• 12 years ago

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

mhb• 12 years ago

Richard Posner's view:

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2014/01/secular-stagnation...

tomp3• 12 years ago

TL;DR:

It is difficult to imagine productive activities that cannot be automated—mining, construction, many medical services, house cleaning: the list goes on and on.
A decline in the demand for labor, caused by automation, will result in lower wages, without necessarily producing an increase in employment (work effort will not grow if there is no work), let alone an increase in national income.

However, as he also states, "with no truck drivers to pay, the cost of truck transportation will fall, and price will follow". In my view, this will further reduce the main necessities of living (food, hygiene products, energy) which will in turn allow people to live with much less money. Therefore, the poverty levels should fall, as well. It is not hard to imagine the government paying enough social welfare so that everyone can afford basic stuff. Actually, government could also just buy enough robots and produce all the necessities itself.

GFischer• 12 years ago

As long as population stays manageable, which sounds feasible in developed economies, and the owners of capital accept being taxed to fund that, or go the Bill Gates way.

hershel• 12 years ago

To get some sense of the numbers:

labor currently takes around 65% of gdp[1]. Owners of the automation will take some of that gain ,so at best we'll see 50% reduction in prices.

According to one calculation, a $10K per person over 21 is a possible basic income proposal[2]. So for family , after adding the 50% deflation, each family will receive $40K in today's dollars.

$40K is close to the median family income in 2012($53K). And we still haven't factored non-automation based innovation.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share

[2]http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/11/a-basic-income-of-about-100...

zackmorris2• 12 years ago

To extrapolate on what you said: "which will in turn allow people to live with much less money", I think this is absolutely true but the endgame is that most things will be nearly free but people will have no money to buy them.

For example computers are effectively free now, they are widely available on Craigslist for under $100 and capable smartphones are bundled into most cellular plans. Flat screen TVs, for all their perceived excess, halve in price each year. However houses and cars still cost $100,000 and $10,000, even used. What's beginning to haunt me is that soon there will be no money in so many industries that people think of as lucrative now: computing, transportation, services, etc, yet the things that constitute the core infrastructure of our society only appreciate in value. You'll be able to get what you want, but not what you need.

My prediction for America in 10 or 20 years, assuming there is no intervention soon, is that corporations will replace the state as the primary wealth manager and that nearly the entirety of the population, probably 400 million people by then, will have no wealth to speak of. People will be struggling to find high paying jobs because raises will be a thing of the past once automation progressively lowers costs each year. There will be a profound sense of being "locked in", running a perpetual rat race where work that used to be worth $100 per hour slips to $50, then $25, and so on until even the most trying work is not profitable, and stabilizes on some rate set by fear, perhaps $10 an hour. With everyone making this across industries, we'll have neo-communism. Your boss won't be able to afford a home, and neither will his or her boss. But go high enough up the ladder and houses will be gifted out as perks.

Then there will be some kind of revolution, it's tempting to think we don't know what form it will take, but if it's to be successful it will be a peaceful one. Basically we'll all look around and wonder why we're all working so hard in the most productive economy that's ever existed, and we'll throw out the bosses by deciding not to participate in the activities that they depend on. Suddenly everyone will have a substantial level of public wealth, you'll instantly own the home you're in, and it will be unclear whether you'll still pay a mortgage. The way it works is that the people and policies that help society are carried over post revolution, and the ones that hinder it are cast aside.

I kind of hope I'm wrong about all of this, but I know in my heart I'm not. We're living in the last heyday of the industrial age, "enjoy" it while it lasts. We can even pretend that we don't know what the post-revolution age will look like, but that's not true either. Everyone's standard of living will go up to what it would have been without oppression. Only this time it will feel unthinkable to coerce people into doing work you would disdain to do yourself, so robots will fill that role instead of other ethnicities, genders or foreigners. It may very well be the last revolution before we're a spacefaring society.

In fairness, and because this got so long, I just want to say that this is only one possible future, and that we may very well adopt robots on a personal level like the PC (hydroponic gardens, off-grid homes and cars built of recycled materials, a sharing economy like Airbnb for everything) before then and the next generation may follow a completely different path. I just think this is the most likely forecast, based on the evidence I see around me now.

hrishirc• 12 years ago

why would anyone want to job in the first place...? If you're in a place where you need to mindlessly execute duties, it's not a good place.

vshade• 12 years ago

If you have some kind of basic income then what you said makes sense. If not, people still need food and shelter.

scotty79• 12 years ago

I thought humble loom is a name of some weird startup.

chrisdevereux• 12 years ago

On the other hand, the mechanization of agriculture had devastating social consequences when introduced to the UK in the 1700s, leading to mass unemployment, crimewaves and the introduction of the death penalty for stealing food. The industrial revolution eventualy created replacements but things got very ugly for a few generations.

There's no reason to assume that replacement forms of employment will automatically appear when needed.

YokoZar2• 12 years ago

The loom was an example of a technology that actually had a more egalitarian effect on wealth distribution: expensive skilled labor was replaced with greater numbers of cheap unskilled labor.

Given the right prices, this sort of technology can make sense even if it doesn't actually "save" labor at all -- replacing one efficient skilled person with two inefficient unskilled ones for the same output makes business sense if the skilled labor is more than double the price.

Today's market has a lot of disparity in labor prices like this, especially when you look at it globablly. So it's entirely possible for new tech that doesn't actually save labor in terms of output per worker to find a niche.

At the same time, it's also possible for tech to do the inverse, and replace three expensive unskilled workers with one skilled one who commands double the wage.

So in terms of income inequality, at least, it's not entirely clear where technology will take us.

al2o3cr• 12 years ago

"In the 19th century, the maturation and standardization of weaving technology finally brought long-overdue raises to textile workers."

Wow. Way to completely write out of the story the PEOPLE who fought tooth-and-nail to get those raises, WaPo....

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

Of course, acknowledging the real struggle might seriously impact the whole "things will get better by themselves, just keep sleeping" argument of the piece...

FD3SA2• 12 years ago

Keep in mind that The Washington Post was recently acquired by Jeff Bezos.

This article makes much more sense when viewed in the light of Amazon's current PR problems due to their treatment of poorly paid warehouse workers. They are desperately trying to automate as fast as possible, and this piece tries its best to spin it as a win-win for everyone.

TDL• 12 years ago

You of course have evidence that Bezos is interfering in the editorial operations of the Post, right?

minouye• 12 years ago

The idea that Bezos has already turned the WaPo into Amazon's personal PR factory seems highly unlikely. Esp. when you see articles like this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/16...

WalterBright3• 12 years ago

Consider Fred, who is paid $1 and produces $10 in value. Every employer would love to have Fred come and work for them. In fact, another employer would likely offer Fred $2 to come and generate $10. Fred, not being an idiot, takes the offer.

Another employer offers Fred $3, and so on, until Fred is making ($10 - opportunitycost).

In other words, Fred being way underpaid according to the value he produces is an unstable situation.

gerbal• 12 years ago

Unless of course there are 10,000 Freds and only 1000 jobs like Fred's.

eli_gottlieb• 12 years ago

Thought experiments cannot be used to prove real points.

georgeoliver• 12 years ago

To write an entire article using historical textile production as an example and not mention the impacts of contemporary globalization on the same industry is confusing at best and hopelessly optimistic at worst.

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

The point of the article isn't what is happening presently in terms of textiles and globalization, but how technological innovation affected the industry in 18th and 19th century Massachusetts.

That said, there are some omissions. The American Colonies / Early United States were labor-constrained. The economy was growing rapidly, and there simply weren't enough warm bodies to meet demand (discussed in Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter VII). Wages were high, supplies of finished goods were limited, and the benefits of industrialization were high. This contrasted with England in which factories drew masses of labor from the countryside, city populations exploded (Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham grew from small towns of 4,000 - 6,000 in 1685 to major cities of 393,000 - 552,000 by 1881, see Arnold Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution), and working conditions in general were abysmal.

Which suggests other reasons why picking the Lowell factories as the analysis point is somewhat misguided. Toynbee's Lectures paint a markedly different picture of how industrialization proceeded in the UK.

The challenge now is that virtually all basic needs of survival ... and then some ... are satisfied. Does this mean that there's no additional demand or demand growth possible? No. But ... the situation's markedly different from the late 18th century.

Too: the dawn of the Industrial Revolution was a period in which there were vast untapped natural resources -- virgin land (or, if you prefer, newly cleared land by way of the aboriginal genocide and pandemics) in the Americas, forests, untilled prairies, and of course, untold gigatons of coal, oil, and gas in the ground. William Stanley Jevons noted that increased efficiencies tended to increase consumption of resources by increasing their marginal utility (the so-called Jevons Paradox)

We're looking at a constrained resource environment going out, which may well invert the logic of Jevons Paradox and see fewer resources consumed with increasing efficiency. Which would mean that automation would idle, not employ, hands.

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

Could the inventors of the loom, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, have imagined the types of jobs most of have today, in the morning of the Information Revolution? I doubt it.

There will be industries and jobs enabled by today's technologies, that we can't picture today. My bet is on biotechnology. We know only a very small amount about the systems of life.

sixbrx• 12 years ago

Yeah there may be new jobs, but why would you have a human doing them, when a robot could?

We can't pretend that a new tool for humans to use is equivalent to a fully autonomous robot which can think for itself beyond any human capacity. Those two things are fundamentally un-alike.

lhgaghl• 12 years ago

Will robots steal our jobs?

It's not stealing if I don't want it.

aridiculous• 12 years ago

This is conveniently forgetting that demand (which eventually ends in consumer demand) isn't necessarily infinite. We have this thing called a planet we live on, that needs to remain intact (or Elon Musk needs to get a move on getting us to other planets :)

ealloc• 12 years ago

as the market for cotton cloth matured in the mid-20th century, further automation no longer generated such increases in demand and new technology slowly eliminated jobs in the textile industry.

This seems to be a counterpoint to his thesis: Technology does indeed create unemployment if all demand has already been satisfied.

His point should thus be stated with a caveat: Technology does not destroy jobs as long as demand increases along with the increased supply. In order to know whether robots will steal our jobs, we have to first determine whether human demands are already being met or not, and it seems plausible to me that they nearly are today (though the inverse also seems plausible).

YokoZar2• 12 years ago

"Demand" can be a bit of a fuzzy thing. For instance, all those people who were now had "enough" clothes and were saving money from the lower prices were instead buying other things, creating increased demand for some other sector of the economy. Which, presumably, would eventually lead to more jobs elsewhere.

I think a better moral for the story is to expect technology to have significant local effects on employment in particular industries (either up or down), but the evidence for the economy as a whole seems to be much more neutral.

Will robots steal our jobs? The humble loom suggests not

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