Some predict computers will produce a jobless future. Here’s why they’re wrong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/02/18/some-predict-computers-will-produce-a-jobless-future-heres-why-theyre-wrong/

by Libertatea • 12 years ago

21 64 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

al2o3cr• 12 years ago

"This is because new technologies also increase demand for products and services. Consumers will demand more product if new technologies add desirable features or decrease the price, thanks to the smaller amount of labor needed to produce the product."

Consumers, on the other hand, will not demand more of diddly if the have no job and no money.

growupkids2• 12 years ago

Demand creates jobs. And businesses try to get ahead of demand so they can cease the market, creating those jobs sooner.

sixbrx• 12 years ago

Creates jobs for robots, is the argument.

nfoz2• 12 years ago

That will last for a while, but I know a lot of people who choose to live simple lives. You can make shiny gadgets, and I'll probably buy them, but we'll increasingly find people who are content not to have them.

a8da6b0c91d• 12 years ago

What's already happening now is the wealthy are consuming more and the middle class is shrinking. The top 20% does 60% of personal spending.

http://www.parapundit.com/archives/009383.html

I see no reason for the trend of the disappearing middle class to stop. The future is Brazil: A wealthy elite alongside impoverished masses. There's less and less business need for a large middle class.

http://www.thecollectiveint.com/2013/03/favelas-of-brazil-bo...

sharemywin2• 12 years ago

Just because demand went up in the past doesn't mean it will in the future. That Tax service argument is ridiculous. People did their own taxes in the past now they use tax software so in the future they will use tax perparers? not seeing it. The middle class was propped up by unions plain and simple. With out government intervention society trends toward the rich and the exploited.

growupkids2• 12 years ago

How did government intervention create the technology industry?

smartbuttcute• 12 years ago

ARPANET was created by DOD. The Internet evolved from that.

bdcravens• 12 years ago

Not really sure what you mean, but civilian computing technology is the product of military (think ENIAC and the Internet, GPS, and more) and other government uses (think Hollerith machine's use in census).

Nursie• 12 years ago

Errr... not sure if serious. DARPA, military and civilian projects etc etc.

Might have come about anyway, sure, but the early days of the computer industry point to a lot of Gov money flowing in and a lot of spinoffs from government-funded research.

sharemywin2• 12 years ago

Without copyright and patent law their is no high tech industry. Facebook, instagram, intel, microsoft, google all protected by copyright and/or patents. even on network effected businesses you could build screen scrapers and such that would by pass advertising without laws.

bgarbiak• 12 years ago

For example: Internet as we know it today was in large part shaped by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Bruce Lehman - they are behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. There would be no YouTube, no Facebook, and no others if not for "safe harbor" introduced in this paper.

yoha2• 12 years ago

I still don't get why there is so much worry about keeping the same amount of jobs. When people imagine future, they like to think of robots doing chores for them and having time to work on personal projects or take leisure time. It means that the first thing we are expecting from automation is not more productivity but less work. Of course, it can be socially explained because the current way of thinking about economy does not allow for a gradual change to less work.

I guess one of the topic that will have to be discussed here at some point is the concept of basic income [1]. Its advocates think that it will help such a transition by helping reducing the amount of existing jobs while making sure that everyone can sustain oneself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income

CEyzaguirre4• 12 years ago

I worry because I don't see our safety net radically changing before mass unemployment. But I agree that should be more of the focus rather than holding onto to an antiquated notion of full unemployment.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

That kind of article is what people say when they don't want anybody to talk about basic income.

chebum• 12 years ago

Basic income and increased progressive taxes are a good idea to solve mass unemployment. However, as proofed by recent London riots, they increase crime rates. People just have too much spare time they cannot fulfill with meaningful activities. We always want more money than we have today. The only way to increase income when there are no jobs is to take them from somebody around. Forcefully or silently.

CEyzaguirre4• 12 years ago

Do Londoners have basic income? It seems like unemployment, police brutality and perceived social exclusion were major factors rather than "spare time." All those factors are why we should be concerned with the creation of an adequate safety net because exclusion and unemployment fostered by extreme income inequality create the conditions for violence, although we should be concerned about alleviating suffering regardless of the of potential for it to affect rich folk.

ballard4• 12 years ago

Subsidize mobiles, laptops and tablets.

Oh and maybe food and shelter.

gnaritas• 12 years ago

However, as proofed by recent London riots, they increase crime rates.

That's a strong causal claim you're making there, where's your evidence?

ballard4• 12 years ago

The jobs markets and cost of living between countries will gradually level out. The UN data from that TED talk shows there is much less horrible poverty but it still exists. I think the risk is virtually every country becoming a Balkinized, classist place like India. Unfortunately, it seems the momentum is going that way.

79522• 12 years ago

> robots doing chores for them and having time to work on personal projects or take leisure time

This has already happened. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and mass produced food have turned what used to be a full time difficult job into a chore for your spare time. It created more time for people to do paid work. The ironic thing is that nowadays people love some of those chores (like cooking, growing vegetables, or making bread). We should aspire to a society where people have the choice to take pride in what they do.

mcv5• 12 years ago

We should aspire to a society where people have the choice to take pride in what they do.

And to do what they take pride in.

How many people today are really proud of what they do? How many aren't? How many are simply doing it because it pays the bills? Wouldn't it be much better if they didn't have to do that drudgery anymore, and could instead focus on what they really want?

yoha2• 12 years ago

Exactly. It about having the choice in doing them or doing something instead.

neals2• 12 years ago

At some point in our Utopian future of mastering every form of science and technology, don't we all just get to sit around, plugged into our virtual worlds, living an endlessly happy simulation until we die of old age at 500? Wouldn't robots be keeping the simulation running, no jobs required for infinity?

Or am I just an optimist?

CEyzaguirre4• 12 years ago

Once we solve this whole scarcity problem, sure.

tostitos1979• 12 years ago

In a virtual world, they need be no scarcity :D

Edit: I thought it was interesting that in Marshall Brain's manna story, a class of people in the utopian world decide to live their entire lives in the virtual world. Their bodies are kept healthy and they get a longer lifespan as I recall. I'm not a fan of such existence but it is an interesting idea. Also see: Matrix, 13th floor.

ballard4• 12 years ago

And eventually converge to various degrees implanted tech, worn tech, other improvements and "improvements."

prestadige• 12 years ago

Or am I just an optimist?

Yes, the future can be bright providing we work to ensure that civilisation isn't destroyed, which itself requires optimism.

drakaal3• 12 years ago

I am working on Natural Language Processing.

I am a bad person. My stated goal is to make it so you never have to call a company (like expedia) and talk to someone in a foreign country (Like the Philippines).

I have a very nice demo of doing a Cable modem tech support call where you only talk to a machine. It works well. Is faster than a human can be, and if it got adoption would cost a few Million jobs.

What are those people going to do? I don't know.

Do I think that the savings that Comcast, Cox, or Expedia will have will be passed on to consumer so that they can buy more stuff? Not likely.

Do I think that my tech might end up increasing the divide between the upper and middle class (global not domestic classification [middle class on a global scale include people in call centers in India, Philippines and such who by US standards live at poverty levels])? Yes.

Do I think that it will raise the quality of living for the those living at the poverty level? Yes. The lowering of the cost of things like Internet, Cellphones, and such will help those at the lowest income levels.

So am I a bad guy or a good guy?

-Brandon Wirtz CTO PlexiNLP http://www.PlexiNLP.com

Feel free to tell me why I'm a bad guy as a comment. I do have this discussion in my own head on a regular basis.

CEyzaguirre4• 12 years ago

Someones going to push technology forward inevitably, so I think it's not productive (or correct) to point the finger at those working on these innovations as "bad people." Rather, we should direct our energy towards those that oppose the creation of a safety net to support the unemployed affected by such innovations.

yardie• 12 years ago

Everytime I've had a problem with my cable I just say cancellation and it takes me directly to a human. NLP isn't bad but most of my problems are with billing, something that should have been easily solvable by an early 80s mainframe. Yet every few months the cable company managed to screw it up and I'm fairly sure they were doing it on purpose.

talmand2• 12 years ago

There's a contradiction in there. It is thought that the savings that Comcast, cox, or Expedia will have will not be passed down to consumers but the quality of life at poverty level will be better because Internet, Cellphones, and such will cost less?

Anyway, that's not enough information to determine if you are a bad guy or good guy. I would say you're just a guy working on something with little idea of what the future holds. Much like the rest of us.

drakaal3• 12 years ago

They won't pass 100% of it on in the US, but in Rural America which tends to be served by small ISPs not having technical support could lower the costs such that there would be some margin in a market that larger companies wouldn't serve because the profitability was too low.

Companies like DMCI that provide the Internet at my parents have high costs for support because it is done locally, and by a small team. They could provide more affordable service in underserved areas.

scarmig• 12 years ago

You're not a bad guy. I'd go further: you're a hero who is part of a social transition away from the drudgery of work. That's a dream humans have had since time immemorial.

You do have to be wondering how we as a society can adapt to technological change to make sure quality of life improvements are broad based. But given the gist of your comment, I don't think that's an issue, at least in motivation and general inclination.

As for how: that's the big question. I'd suggest you look into basic incomes or job guarantees as two possible approaches (though I lean strongly toward the former).

twobits2• 12 years ago

You are neither a good nor a bad person, due to working on nlp. You describe how bad entities could use your work (big corp in a given socioeconomic context), and then you assign blame to yourself. I find it strange you feel the need to have this discussion with yourself on a regular basis. It points towards you being good/soft/emotional/conscientious about others/emphatic.

drakaal3• 12 years ago

If you don't debate the merits of your work you aren't working on something big enough.

When I worked on h.264 and VC1, I knew what I was doing would do two things. By Making it cheaper and easier to create and distribute video the world would get more content creators.

The two things that all adds up to:

1. Greater Democracy of Content and More freedom of Speech Expression.

2. Dumbing down of content, more exploitation of people through extreme porn, gore, and bully videos.

I only work on things that can change the world, and anything that can change the world can have a negative impact as well, but I won't work on something that only has a negative impact.

allendoerfer• 12 years ago

Someone will do it, so it does not really matter whether you are a good guy or not.

The question is, if governments can keep up with the companies (read: Google) buying your technology. They need to be taxed properly to invest in education and wealth distribution to keep up with the job losses.

If the technology reaches a point where it cannot be improved but gains characteristics of a natural ressource (e.g. green energy), which should be accessible to the people, governments should restrict and/or take over in some way for example by letting pension funds invest in it.

transfire• 12 years ago

BZZZ! WRONG ANSWER!

First and foremost this article totally disregards technological acceleration. Its conclusions draw on a past that will look as quaint as the 1700s do today, and in only a few more decades.

Secondly, the tax example is the perfect demonstration of the fallacy of the argument. Those jobs have only managed to grow b/c the government keeps creating ever more complex tax regulations. Which is exactly what happens when a society puts the "jobs numbers" and "full employment" above actual economic efficacy -- They have to create bullshit work to keep people busy.

ballard4• 12 years ago

The other point is we have to look at a way that somehow voluntarily redistributes some gigawealth for necessities of those that are struggling to survive. There is so much wealth now that survival is pretty much assured, but it's the degree of pleasantness and dignity where a little can go a long ways.

saintgimp• 12 years ago

As computers/robots get better and more versatile, they inevitably "compete" for jobs and provide downward wage pressure the same as if the skilled human labor pool (but not the human consumer pool) had drastically increased. Fundamentally it's all about who can do the job better and/or cheaper. If you aren't the one at the top of the "better" or "cheaper" list in some category, you don't have a job. Period.

As a simple thought experiment, imagine a world in which a computer or robot could do literally any job a human could do better and cheaper than a human could do it. In such a world, the only reason a human would draw a salary would be due to charity, not good business sense. Of course, in such a world you don't have an economy as we know it either, which is kind of the point. Our current social contract won't survive in that kind of a world. We'll need a new one.

You might argue that such a day will never come; that there will always be a large class of jobs that humans can do better or cheaper than machines. Perhaps that's true. But that's what this conversation is really about: do machines have fundamental limitations due to physics that will keep them below the level of a large majority of humans forever? I think that's a strange position for most of us at HN to be arguing. Even software development will someday be automated to a large extent, I expect (yes, not anytime soon), and then where will we be?

TelmoMenezes2• 12 years ago

An important distinction that this sort of "there will be jobs forever" rhetoric never seems to address is that of basic necessities vs. other stuff.

Through automation, the basic necessities of all of Humanity can be produced/met by an increasingly smaller proportion of the human population. The new jobs are moving to the "other stuff" category. At some point, someone is bound to notice that "basic necessities" are now potentially dirt cheap, and that we can all be free from work we do not desire.

We are now living through a weird transition phase were most jobs are bullshit, but they are necessary purely to distribute wealth. This is a horrible and absurd system which forces people to be prisoners for a good chunk of their lives for no good reason whatsoever.

Also: I really can't stand "Here's why..." titles. They come across as arrogant and cliché at the same time. If you're going to be arrogant, make sure you're also brilliant.

kfk3• 12 years ago

We are now living through a weird transition phase were most jobs are bullshit

You are either extremely arrogant or you are trolling. I can't believe you can say things like this and nobody is pointing you how absurd and how bad this sounds. What now? The only real "job" is typing letters in a text editor? Didn't they cut a lot of those jobs already? I mean, things like frameworks must cut a lot of programming jobs, right? They were bullshit jobs before they were cut?

Most of those "bullshit" jobs are in companies that create massive wealth. You are either saying that such companies are complete idiots, or I don't know what you are saying, nobody, nobody, hires for the sake of hiring.

null_ptr• 12 years ago

If not bullshit, how else would you describe driving long commutes each day and night, only to park your ass in a cubicle for 10 hours and shuffle PowerPoint reports for some dick that doesn't even know what he needs them for in the first place? A lot of white collar jobs are adult busy work. A lot of blue collar jobs are wasting away people's potential and creativity all the same, burning them out and making them bitter. The sooner people are free and confident to pursue their genuine interests the better off we'll all be.

TelmoMenezes2• 12 years ago

nobody, nobody, hires for the sake of hiring.

Of course they do. Two examples:

- managers at all levels have an incentive to expand their fiefdoms (common interview question: how many people report to you?);

- politicians have an incentive to lower unemployment and the power to create incentives for companies to hire people that they don't need.

VikingCoder• 12 years ago

create massive wealth

On paper, they do.

What really matters in life is being able to satisfy your needs. Everything else is luxury. If you have clean air, food, water, sex, sleep, sanitary waste removal, housing, electricity...

You're just talking about companies accumulating small pieces of green cloth / paper with numbers written on them. Or just numbers in some bank computer somewhere. Or worse, piles of the element gold. None of things INHERENTLY satisfy your needs. But since satisfying your needs requires resources that used to be scarce, then currency used to be the best way to allocate those resources, and also direct labor. Yay, capitalism!

When you have a division of labor, how do you decide how many chickens a farmer needs to give a doctor for performing an appendectomy? Well, that's an economy.

But when there is no shortage of resources, and there's essentially no labor that needs to be directed, strictly in order to satisfy your basic needs... Then we're just negotiating for our own luxury, and getting people to create luxury goods and services for us.

So, yes, to a degree, those jobs are just bullshit. And when your bullshit, luxury job allows you to acquire luxury amounts of food and water making those resources even more scarce, at the expense of people who actually NEED that food and water to live, yes, it is at least somewhat rational to begin questioning the entire system.

zanny2• 12 years ago

were most jobs are bullshit, but they are necessary purely to distribute wealth.

Got a source on this? I know a lot of burgeoning fields (bureaucracy, law, advertising, rent seeking) are all either zero sum or negative drains on society for the most part, but most people are still doing something marginally useful, even if it isn't worth paying them minimum wage for it.

mcv5• 12 years ago

If they're zero sum or a drain, how are they useful?

The article mentions tax consultants, which is a really nice exampe of a totally useless job. We need a certain amount of tax revenue in order to pay for collective stuff. But nobody wants to pay more than they have to, so they hire a tax consultant. End result: society still has to pay the same amount of taxes (because they get adjusted so revenue still matches the need), plus the cost of these tax consultants. With an easier tax system and no consultants, we'd all be cheaper off.

john_b• 12 years ago

On the other hand, what the "technology will eliminate all jobs" crowd never seems to understand is that mere survival is only part of the motivation for having a job. It may be the base of Maslow's hierarchy, but a lot of people who have "bullshit" jobs have already climbed above that base.

People want to be able to talk about what they do with their life in a way that makes them seem important. "I collect my basic income and paint" may be satisfying, but it isn't impressive. People are vain animals who want to one-up other vain animals. "I'm a project manager at BigCorp" or "I'm an accountant at a multi-million dollar company" sounds much better, even if the actual work is insipid and unimportant.

People often work jobs they don't like because of the secondary (non-monetary) benefits associated with them. Having a perfectly fair (for whatever definition of "fair") system of distributing wealth would not eliminate the effects of basic human vanity and irrationality on society and the economy. There will always be bullshit jobs because people use bullshit for the self-serving purpose of improving their apparent worth to others.

nfoz2• 12 years ago

These anecdotes about human psychology/sociology are observations from systems where work was expected and understood to contribute to the private, if not public, good. It's not at all clear that they would remain very long in a post-scarcity economy.

But let's say basic needs are met through automation, I'm sure cultures will keep some degree of competitiveness / judgement of others through voluntary works and human pursuits e.g. art. But we'll also all have food.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

No one's arguing that people should be forced to not work. Basic Income advocates think that if you're already stuck not having a job, you shouldn't also be stuck with as many of the other things that not having a job currently implies. And if you have something important to do that's not "a job" that brings you satisfaction, we don't need you taking a job away from someone who wants one.

mcv5• 12 years ago

We should get rid of the idea that people need to have jobs. People need to have food, shelter, and the opportunity to develop themselves. The more stuff gets automated, the less we need people to work.

Of course that requires a totally different economic system. Our capitalist system basically requires people to work (if they want to live), but doesn't require people for work (to be done). It's contradictory.

BjoernKW• 12 years ago

This article tries to answer the wrong question. It just iterates the Industrial Age 'You got to have a proper job to be a valuable member of society.' meme.

That's the same fallacy most socialists succumb to. Because their ideas are so deeply rooted in the concept of jobs and employment they can't even envision a future in which most people make do without a proper job.

The real question isn't: "How will we still be able to keep employees chained to their jobs in the future?" but: "How will we manage to liberate people from doing meaningless bullshit jobs?"

The answer to the former question would be: "Of course: Have them buy even more useless trinkets and gadgets so they still have to work their asses off."

An answer to the latter could be some sort of basic income.

I'm not saying at all that luxury goods are inherently bad. However, the value of time has to be put into perspective.

While time is the most valuable luxury good many people frivolously spend it on the ability to buy essentially useless consumer goods. Currently, most people simply can't say 'Look boss, I don't need so much money anyway so I'd much rather work for 20 hrs / week. OK?' so they just spend their disposable income for things they don't actually need. The income's at your disposal anyway so why not just spend it on gadgets in order to make up for the time lost while earning this income?

In my opinion, this is a vicious circle humanity in the long run needs to break out of if we want to be truly free.

Some predict computers will produce a jobless future. Here’s why they’re wrong.

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