The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/08/the_new_luddites_what_if_automation_is_a_job_killer_after_all.html/print/

by rpm4321 • 12 years ago

46 99 12 years ago

slate.com

istjohn4• 12 years ago

Current top comment:

I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income. --Mark Russo

This.

bayesianhorse6• 12 years ago

I don't see a way to get there, for most nations. Big nations would have the most trouble introducing this. And what about immigration?

Immigration can't be effectively regulated by any means available to a moderately democratic state. Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have to pay indirectly for the BLS).

tomp4• 12 years ago

Immigrants aren't even citizens; I don't think they receive any sort of social security in most countries even today. I'm not saying that's the optimal policy, just that they wouldn't be worse-off.

tim3332• 12 years ago

On the other hand we (I'm in the UK) seem to be drifting in that direction, that if you don't work you get social security. I don't know that it will ever be a simple fixed amount though as the government want to encourage people to be somewhat productive rather than just getting drunk etc. Here's part of the UK system:

http://www.focusondisability.org.uk/brates-1.html

saticmotion• 12 years ago

A solution - though extremely unlikely in this day and age - would be to abandon the notion of nations. Especially in the far future, if we are ever to meet aliens. Imagine having to explain that you only represent one of 196 nations. Seems a bit silly to me.

dragonwriter15• 12 years ago

Immigration can't be effectively regulated by any means available to a moderately democratic state.

That's debatable. But lets assume it for the sake of argument.

Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have to pay indirectly for the BLS).

I think this claim is overly simplistic; also, I think there are several categories to consider,that I think you've failed to distinguish:

(1) Naturalized citizens should certainly receive whatever universal or guaranteed income is adopted, but immigrants don't become naturalized citizens immediately.

(2) Legal immigrants (the number and characteristics of whom a democratic state can effectively regulate), who are not citizens, probably should be eligible for the support [1] as well, but may be admitted on criteria that include having means of support that make it less likely that immigrant will be a recipient (in a GMI scheme) or net recipient (in a BI scheme).

(3) Non-immigrant, but legally-present workers, visitors, etc. should not generally be eligible for the support. In the case of non-immigrant economic admission categories, adequate support means should be part of the conditions for admission. There may be some exceptions to this (note [1] again may apply to these exceptions) or some categories of non-immigrant admits that are qualified for alternative, status-specific support.

(4) Those illegally present probably should not be eligible for the benefits, but may be eligible for some kind of normalization of status process after which they would become legal immigrants who might be eligible for benefits (to which note [1] would apply again). This normalization process might include up-front payment of a fine for those with means, or commitment to income contingent future payment of the fine with nominal interest, and might even include limitations on benefit eligibility for some period even beyond what regular legal immigrants might face, or commitments to repay any benefits claimed during a certain transitional period on an income-contingent basis. (In general, payment for normalization -- or payment for above-quota legal immigration -- makes sense for individuals who are not personally barred, since limits on levels of such immigration are a cost-of-immigration control measure, and its better for people who want to immigrate to bear the costs then for society to bear the costs of inefficiently trying to keep them out, and then also bearing the costs of them coming in anyway.)

[1] As productivity advances and if the basic support improves to provide more than a very minimal floor, its not entirely unreasonable that non-citizens might recieve less than the full support level, however, possibly based on a sliding scale based on residency; in theoretical terms, in a rent on the commons model, this represents a kind of "vesting" process where the immigrant doesn't become a full "owner" until they are naturalized; in practical terms it provides basic social support but reduces the immediate immigration incentive.

Loughla• 12 years ago

I legitimately do not believe that this would work in the US before an extreme collapse of the current system - including but not limited to a civil war.

I believe this because we have a hard enough time pushing through cursory and very basic social welfare programs. Quite literally guaranteeing someone a basic income with 0 work involved would be as palatable as thumb tacks to many individuals in the states. Logic doesn't really carry that far anymore, and I'm not sure why.

tomp4• 12 years ago

Don't worry, an obvious solution will present itself as soon as unemployment reaches 50% of the voting population.

forca• 12 years ago

Thank you, Tea Party (yes, I'm being sarcastic).

The far right in this country have driven home their stupid Ayn Rand message and too many people have listened. We now have the most polarized government since the Civil War.

The right believe that their way is the only way. To them everything is a zero sum game.

I would settle for a Scandinavian or Swiss-style system. The older I get, the less I like capitalism as described by the right.

istjohn4• 12 years ago

Such a reform would be difficult since it would require substantial compromise from both sides of the aisle, but some of the conservatives' favorite economists have endorsed the idea. Also certain tax credits and Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend resemble the concept of a guaranteed minimum income on lesser scale.

githulhu• 12 years ago

Yeah, but then you're creating a whole class of people who basically don't have anything anything to do. They will inevitably find things to fill that vacuum, such as having lots of babies. What happens when population growth outstrips the ability of production to provide for the needs of non-production? Unless you assume that productivity can scale up indefinitely, those people will just get poorer and poorer as wealth needs to be shared between more and more non-productive people.

tomp4• 12 years ago

First of all, the consequence of free time isn't necessarily more children. In fact, as people move up from poverty to "middle-class" lifestyle (with more free time as well), they have less children.

Second, China solved the overpopulation problem quite well with the one-child policy (maybe too well, even).

draugadrotten• 12 years ago

Productivity doesn't need to scale up indefinitely - it just needs to be able to scale up until it's enough.

Silly but simple thought experiment: - 10 people on an island - 2 people can pick enough coconuts for all 10 to eat well - Using a ladder, productivity picks up enough so 1 person can pick enough coconuts for all 10 - A coconut picking robot is developed, picking enough coconuts for all 10 The coconut picking robot's productivity can't scale indefinitely but it doesn't have to.

I am sure you can see the implications of using robots in the real world.

Edit: Speaking of babies, prof. Hans Rosling's TED talks are mandatory. http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies

cousin_it• 12 years ago

I agree that basic income isn't a permanent solution. We don't need it to be permanent, though. We just need to survive the period of increasing automation leading up to self-improving AI, and ensure that the AI is Friendly. At that point, either overpopulation and all other problems get solved automatically, or we all die.

istjohn4• 12 years ago

The assumption that people will have more children if they do not have to work is highly dubious at best. Some people would find new ways to contribute to society, some people would be a drag on society, and some people would live a quiet life. Any prediction of the net influence of a new leisure class on society at large is wild speculation.

grinnbearit6• 12 years ago

Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Then allocate a fixed amount of tax revenue to fund it, say 10%. Then as productivity goes up and goods become cheaper, this 10% can provide even more.

Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out of fear of death, only for want of choice.

istjohn4• 12 years ago

In kind welfare is notoriously inefficient. The bureaucracy required weighs down the system. No one knows what they need better than the people themselves.

taeric• 12 years ago

I would think your proposal is actually harder. Providing money is relatively straight forward. All of the decisions that would go into producing and distributing basic food, clothing, etc would be a bloody nightmare. Especially since it could be avoided by simply offloading it to the "private" sector.

jfoutz2• 12 years ago

I'm not completely clear i understand the distinction. With basic income, you just get cash (or a tax deduction if you're making money - the original proposal was around 2x the deduction vs cash). you can do whatever you want with it. like eating steak more than having a large living space? Do that.

I get the impression you're wanting to provide standardized essentials, a room, 5 shirts, 5 pants, government cheese. This invariably leads to weird market issues, people want more of X so they sell off some of Y - for example, using foodstamps to buy steak, then selling it in the parking lot for a big discount. Why bother with that administrative hassle, and innefficiency? the vast majority of people want what they want, and balance their resources as well as they can. The biggest complaint about US welfare is it's so inflexible. "Easy" to get food, but sometimes people need extra cash to fix their car. That's pretty much impossible in the current system.

TuringTest2• 12 years ago

The idea of the government issuing a basic income is that people can choose in their own way how to get food, clothing and shelter, instead of having to settle with whatever the government provides.

Moreover, it would discourage working to get more money, since if you want to move into a less frugal home, you would lose all the benefits of having a government issued one. That choice would then be seen as a net lose.

dragonwriter15• 12 years ago

Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs.

Because basic income respects human freedom, and as automation advances and the rewards of the economy in pure-market terms increasingly shift even further from labor to capital, a basic income that is adjusted in amount as the economy shifts provides a comparatively light touch redistribution represent rents on the commons that maintains opportunity (as the recipients can choose how to allocate the basic income between present consumption needs and investment in personal development and/or capital) whereas "basic welfare" creates a permanently dependent, effectively unfree, class with no mobility, opportunity, or effective choices.

jcromartie2• 12 years ago

Can you imagine government-issue food, clothing, and shelter? That's destined to be some horribly depressing Soviet-type shit right there.

With a basic income, even the people who are not working can participate in the market and drive the competition and innovation of people who are producing goods and services.

guizzy• 12 years ago

Because centrally planned economies have been notoriously unable to predict and meet demand. Adequately meeting demand is important, especially considering how fresh and healthy food is for the most part perishable. Perhaps one day, when/if something like Soylent can be supplied as a utility this would work.

sillysaurus32• 12 years ago

Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income.

That decision would have lots of consequences. People usually live slightly beyond their means. Decrease their means, and suddenly the majority of your population is living way beyond their means.

Any guaranteed minimum income can't ever go down for this reason. You could try to drop it, but then you'll wind up paying them the same amount anyway in welfare, because many more people will be seeking welfare to supplant their missing guaranteed income.

imgabe• 12 years ago

People usually live slightly beyond their means

^ Citation needed. Maybe it's become common since the advent of easily available credit, but for most of human history it was physically impossible to live beyond your means.

brazzy2• 12 years ago

I don't think you've grasped the idea of basic income: it replaces welfare.

And yes, I'm pretty sure that the USA is the only country in the world where "People usually live slightly beyond their means".

dragonwriter15• 12 years ago

People usually live slightly beyond their means.

There've been brief periods in US history where that was true (where the savings rate was negative), but that usually been when there's been an economic downturn [1] in the wake of stronger economic times, and in any case relies on credit availability or savings to make possible.

A drop in guaranteed minimum income or basic income doesn't mean welfare automatically reappears, it means that the standard of living drops for those dependent on the GMI/BI. But that's what you'd expect in a broad-based economic downturn -- the mean standard of living drops.

(Even if you keep GMI/BI at the same nominal level, lower productivity will increase the inflationary effect of GMI/BI, which will have the same net effect as cutting the nominal level -- its just that price levels will go up rather than payments going down.)

[1] which may include an "effective" downturn for most people during what is in aggregate terms an expansion, but where narrow distribution means that most individuals/households are making less with a small class making all the gains.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

So we're just done with providing natural stress on the population, where each person strives to learn and do things that other people appreciate? Instead, we provide the option for "checking out" and getting paid no matter what?

Even if I bought into the narrative of the end of useful labor, which I don't, and even if I bought into the narrative of people who can't be trained, which I don't, the economics of this don't make any sense to me.

I wouldn't oppose it, though. Instead let's get a few dozen small experiments going, see how they work out. Even bad ideas are good if you can learn from them. The real enemy to progress is the idea that we are forced to either reject new ideas like this in their entirety or embrace them at some huge scale.

pconner• 12 years ago

This sounds a lot like the world in Vonnegut's "Player Piano"

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

tomjen37• 12 years ago

Not this.

A minimum income means that it is in everybody who doesn't works interest to raise it, which is what will happen (because that is what will win elections) which will cause more people to not work, which will further the pressure.

This will banckrupt any state that starts down that path, assuming you set the initial income about what 10% or so makes, which is typically enough to swing an election.

dalore• 12 years ago

Then bring in mandatory voting like in Australia.

Or better yet, let's vote on issues collectively and do away with representation system. We have the internet. Then the majority of people who make more than the minimum income will vote out the ones who do.

MadManE• 12 years ago

How do you determine what "minimum" means? Depending on who you ask, "Basic Living" is high speed internet and all new iProducts on release along with a new car every 5 years. Where do you draw the line?

Also, how does this propagate after a few generations? We can already see the welfare lifestyle being inherited - will this be any better? Especially since there is much less reason to try to be better under this system.

dllthomas2• 12 years ago

For the record, "guaranteed minimum income" typically labels a different policy than "basic income" - where in the former the government pays you N-M when you make M<N. I don't know that this is what was being proposed; the term is fairly frequently misapplied to basic income.

For the record, I favor a (reasonably sized) basic income, and would object to a minimum income.

ibisum• 12 years ago

Get rid of income tax, how about that. Its not needed so much any more, since there will always be innovative ways to avoid paying tax; that is the purpose of technology, so far, it seems.

m0nty• 12 years ago

This is a serious and interesting subject which requires a better treatment than emotive words like "hand-wringing" and "worriers", and a conclusion with more depth than "in the long run, we're all dead." All the author really says is that experts disagree on the effects of automation (who would have guessed?) and that this might lead to lower pay and fewer jobs (again, hardly news).

Meaningless assertions like "the education system has to change to prepare young people for a world in which most of today’s jobs are automated" don't begin to answer the real question - how are we to be prepared for this change? What are we expected to do with our time without paid work? How does an economy run if a significant number of people are not earning more than a basic wage?

Fascinating subject, superficial and unhelpful article.

crisnoble2• 12 years ago

What are we expected to do with our time without paid work?

What would you do if you had infinite free time? I would spend more time exploring my city, read more books, and finally get around to my garden project. In fact, I fantasize about retirement all of the time because I imagine myself doing these things.

wcummings• 12 years ago

"in the long run, we're all dead."

On a long enough timeline...

Kiro• 12 years ago

Technological innovation is more important than any job.

oddevan• 12 years ago

Can you elaborate? For example, what is the end-goal of technological innovation? What's the end-goal of any job?

To me, the point of innovation is to make people's lives better. Growing pains, a temporary loss of one type of job, those are inevitable when talking about innovation. But people adapt, they get new jobs, sometimes enabled by the very innovations that displaced them in the first place. That's fine, that's the pattern in the world so far.

A blanket statement like this seems to say that progress for its own sake should be prioritized over the people said progress is supposed to help.

tomjen37• 12 years ago

A job is a means to an end. Technological innovation is a means to make our lives better. There is no end goal because there is no limit to how good we can make it.

wyager• 12 years ago

Right up until we invent strong AI (and probably even then), there's no particular reason the same thing that always happened won't keep happening; unskilled laborers will get replaced, most will retool, and no one in the next generation will train for the now-automated job. This happened to cordwainers, calculators, etc.

The reasoning for this is very simple. It's why the Luddites were wrong then and the Luddites are wrong now. When a job is automated away, the benefit is distributed among three areas: 1. Automation company profit 2. Automation user profit 3. End customer costs. The net benefit is always positive, or else the automation would not be used in the first place. These 3 groups do not take their earnings and hide it under the mattress. This newly produced value has to be spent somewhere. So we end up with fields that were historically not viable, but because automation lowers the overhead of doing other things, now are viable. These fields recreate the labor requirements "lost" to automation.

The question, of course, is how long it will take for unskilled laborers to retool, and what will they do in the time between jobs? Perhaps there will be technical solutions to speed the retooling process.

m-i-l• 12 years ago

The argument resolves around the "longer-term trend toward income and wealth inequality". There is nothing however to directly link this to technological innovation. In fact I believe it is government policy which is increasing inequality rather than technology. In the UK for example, we have been seeing some clear cases of policies which have (either deliberately or inadvertently) transferred wealth from the state (i.e. the population as a whole) to the elite (i.e. the rich), e.g. the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

crdoconnor• 12 years ago

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, among others, see a “great decoupling” of productivity from wages since about 2000 as technology outpaces human workers’ education and skills. Workers, in other words, are losing the race between education and technology. This may be exacerbating a longer-term trend in which capital has gained the upper hand on labor since the 1970s.

Yeah, not really. Capital gained the upper hand through systematic lobbying/corruption of government and trade policy. It wasn't robots in Wisconsin that took American jobs, it was Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Guatemalan and other factory workers in factories built with American money.

This article is not really supposed to be a serious analysis of technological trends. It's mostly insinuation (wealth inequality is getting worse and robots are getting better. coincidence?), anecdotes about robots and a survey asking a bunch of experts what they think will happen in the future (this has never been a reliable way of predicting the future).

Now for the really interesting question: why does this article exist?

This article decrying the 'new luddites' exists for mostly the same reason why somebody paid a bunch of money for this advert:

https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg

The reason this meme is really pushed, in both adverts like the one above, talking heads on TV and editorials like this (hastily researched; mostly cribbed from the output of think tanks) is largely to keep workers afraid and insecure.

Insecure workers keep their head down, don't strike, don't demand raises and work overtime without complaint. All of these things are good for profits.

This isn't to say that automation won't make job roles obsolete, just that its purported effect on net job destruction (i.e. jobs lost - jobs gained) is likely to be significantly overstated for very clear political reasons - keeping the working classes disenfranchised.

bottled_poe• 12 years ago

Job-killing is a GOAL of technological innovation, and this is a good thing. In an ideal world this would free up our time to be spent doing things we as humans WANT to do. Technological improvements should decrease the price of good and services because less resources and efforts are required to provide them. Sadly, this is not what we have seen. Working hours go up, and so do the prices. Perhaps it is due to the nature of capitalism, something like Jevon's paradox or some other unexpected behaviour.

The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

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