The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less

by bootload • 12 years ago

164 131 12 years ago

economist.com

SideburnsOfDoom4• 12 years ago

They estimate in their chart that Athletic trainers have a 0.007 chance of being automated, the third lowest chance after therapists and dentists.

it's hard to know exactly what they class as "Athletic trainers". For Olympic athletes, there will always be staff. For the rest of us, what would that "unlikely" automation of the coach look like? Perhaps it would start with a movement sensor on the wrist? A smartphone app to track and recommend exercise?

That's not looking unlikely to me, it's looking like it's already here in plain sight:

http://www.fitbit.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us

https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/HEALTH_AND_FITNE...

anon4• 12 years ago

So you're saying the future is in robotics.

SideburnsOfDoom4• 12 years ago

The future is monitoring and surveillance. That's what these systems do. That and a few data-driven suggestions here and there.

raverbashing2• 12 years ago

But then again, the intersection of people who would pay for a trainer and had it switched to a fitbit is not so huge

(Kind of similar to "lost sales due to piracy" given some limits)

_lex• 12 years ago

This shows me how myopic and out of touch these guys are - I already use the biggest loser on xbox kinect, and it's replaced both a gym and a trainer for me.

raverbashing2• 12 years ago

"and it's replaced both a gym and a trainer for me"

Exactly

The game is enough for you (and for a lot of people)

And that's in the universe of people that do exercise currently.

But the game doesn't replace weights/equipment (as much as the bodyweight people want to convince it's not needed) or more advanced training techniques (and frankly, several "fitness trainers" are misguided)

But trainers and gyms etc are going to keep existing for people who want to go further, or want to socialize, do something different, have specific training requirements, etc

jared314• 12 years ago

and it's replaced both a gym and a trainer for me

In that case, the gym and trainer were not actually necessary in the first place. Below a specific level of fitness, it doesn't matter what exercise you do. There are safer and more efficient forms, but all that really matters is that you do it and you don't hurt yourself in the process. Those trainers, and gyms, were serving an artificial market that didn't actually need them (like some restaurant waiters, bank tellers, travel agents, etc).

Perhaps a better analysis of the whole situation is a collapse of existing artificial markets that businesses have used to expand beyond their current market.

JshWright10• 12 years ago

Yeah, the same chart lists a 17% chance that "firefighters" will be automated... I'm equally curious what then definition of "firefighter" is. If they are talking about woodland (or "forest") firefighting, then _maybe_ (I could see drones accomplish at least some of the tasks involved). But for structural firefighting? No way... Not in 20 years.

JoeAltmaier4• 12 years ago

Why not? Is it the chaotic environment? The temperature extremes? The unpredictability of each situation?

All those are strong reasons TO automate firefighting. Machines can function better in heat/smoke/violent structural collapse situations. They can make objective analysis when their own mortality is not an issue.

Nobody made money betting against advances in computing.

vosper2• 12 years ago

But this is exactly the right reading of the chart - the description says "chances that automation will lead to job losses", not "chance that all jobs will be replaced by automation". So, perhaps it will be drones assisting in wildfires that reduce the need to pay as many people to fight that type of fire, whilst structural firefighting remains the domain of humans - for now.

derekp7• 12 years ago

Actually, that 17% doesn't mean that robots will replace firefighters -- it just means there will be 17% less need for human firefighters. This could take a number of forms -- we've already seen some of them, such as better electrical codes that have reduced the number of electrical fires.

Another recent trend is residential sprinkler systems. Now imagine a smart sprinkler, with thermal imaging cameras that can pinpoint the source of a fire before it spreads. Then activate a directed jet spray to that source, and you have a whole building fire that has been avoided.

Or, lets say if 17% of fires are caused by space heaters. What if the heaters were equipped with a thermal imaging sensor, so that it cuts power to itself if an object in front of it gets too close to ignition temperature?

douche• 12 years ago

I was under the impression that more modern building construction and heating technologies have already made a large percentage of professional firefighters redundant - hence why they spend as much time responding to car accidents and working as EMTs as actually fighting fires.

digi_owl3• 12 years ago

I recall seeing articles on what may be described as high tech long johns. They were covered in sensors that would give you a readout about every major muscle on your body. Hook that up to a stripped down Watson that can tell you exactly when and how you are doing wrong.

danmaz743• 12 years ago

Very interesting analysis. But they don't consider at all one very relevant change that happened during the last 30 years in most wealthy economies, especially the USA: That the taxation of the rich and the highest-earners in general was massively lowered. This contributed a lot to the concentration of wealth and capital in fewer hands.

vixen99• 12 years ago

The UK in the 70s had a tax rate of 95% thus encouraging payment of much higher salaries to make it worthwhile for talented staff. If the tax rate is thereafter lowered to something sensible then the differentials are going to be significant. Quite a number of higher earners now have an effective tax rate of 60% which is not exactly low - but that's in the UK.

danmaz743• 12 years ago

95% is crazy, but today there are lots of multi-millionaire CEOs who as a percentage of their income pay less taxes than their secretaries...

ap22213• 12 years ago

Taxation for the purpose of running a government and providing basic services seems to be long gone. Most of the discussions these days are more about what the 'right' and 'fair' level of redistribution should be.

But, the rates of taxation are so arbitrary. Legislators get together to determine fixed rates and tiers of taxation.

Aside from the complexities of accounting (which should be simpler with computers), couldn't it make more sense to tie tax rates to real mean wages? Then, the very rich would have incentive to increase jobs and increase mean wages.

Adlai2• 12 years ago

As much as I like this idea, there's an equally strong incentive, for those who can afford to do so, to engage in "tax optimization".

IndianAstronaut• 12 years ago

couldn't it make more sense to tie tax rates to real mean wages?

How would that work in practice?

zo13• 12 years ago

Your point has one tacit component that you failed to mention. If what you say is true, then before "taxation of the rich and the highest-earners in general was massively lowered" occurred, the concentration of wealth stayed constant. So, if we've now reduced the transfer from the rich to the power a-la the taxes you mention, then that must mean that before, and now after, wealth has always been naturally (if you want to use that term) flowing towards the already rich.

danmaz743• 12 years ago

If what you say is true, then before "taxation of the rich and the highest-earners in general was massively lowered" occurred, the concentration of wealth stayed constant

Actually, it only means that with that taxation system, the concentration of wealth was slower than without that taxation system.

Regarding the wealth "naturally flowing towards the already rich", define "naturally".

josephg• 12 years ago

There's a great 15 minute video by CGP Grey introducing the same set of concepts that technology will contribute to unemployment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Its a bit pop-sciency, but its very approachable and well explained.

jholman• 12 years ago

That was good, yes. And link-browsing from there led me to this feller's site, which so far is also relevant and interesting.

http://federicopistono.org/

ExpiredLink• 12 years ago

It sounds like the technology forecasts in the 50ies and 60ies but with a pessimistic instead of an optimistic undertone.

josephschmoe• 12 years ago

In all fairness, most desk jobs that existed in the 50's and 60's are now heavily consolidated (it now takes one journalist and Google what it used to take 10 to do). And most factory work is either also heavily consolidated or moved overseas.

Would the words "service economy" even make sense back then?

scrollaway• 12 years ago

CGPGrey himself says the video is neither pessimistic nor optimistic: it's neutral. The video talks about something that has started happening and is almost certain to keep happening at ever faster paces.

It takes some effort to start thinking out of the box, seeing things from a much farther point of view and realize none of this is bad. The human race keeps advancing, progressing, and very often the leaps we make from decade to decade radically change the way our society functions. Cars changed society just as smartphones changed society. These changes force us to adapt and while sometimes it costs people their job, there just isn't that much room for these concerns, as cold as that may sound.

For example, digital distribution cost thousands of people their jobs in retail. Yet are we arguing digital distribution is a bad thing? Only those whose current income depends on the status quo not changing ever really make that point.

I haven't looked at the stats, but I'm certain that cars cost thousands of people in the horse industry their jobs as well.

This is very parallel to the "Would you sacrifice yourself to save 10 people?" moral question. In other words: "Would you sacrifice your own comfort to improve the lives of others?".

And I'm not judging. I've never been in the situation where I had to make the choice... but if I were, I would have very little actual input on the outcome. Nor should I.

api4• 12 years ago

Pessimistic because we now live in an "I've got mine, screw you" society where the means justifies the end.

j1o1h1n• 12 years ago

Decent sci-fi reading list in the sub-headings.

devingoldfish• 12 years ago

Good catch, thanks for pointing it out.

jfoster• 12 years ago

The interesting thing is that a wave of redundancy due to automation or unprecedented efficiency contains problems that those made redundant might be able to work on.

Eg. Joe can't afford X due to lack of employment, and Bob can't afford Y for the same reason. Assuming Bob can supply X and Joe can supply Y (or some more complicated network of bartering), it seems like should be possible for an economy to arise.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

That's a big assumption. In fact, that's the only thing that may be different this time.

If machines are more productive than humans at everything, it break down. If the most productive infrastructure relies on big capital, it breaks down. If Bob and Joe become too poor, it breaks down.

d4nt• 12 years ago

This relies on the assumption that there are things Joe wants that Bob can supply and vice versa. But as we climb higher and higher up the hierarchy of needs that may not be the case.

We are already very effective at keeping people alive and mildly entertained indefinitely. (Although we currently look down on these people as trash for not contributing to society). But I can envisage a time when meeting all my material needs requires almost no human input and meeting my emotional needs cannot be monetised.

pacala• 12 years ago

While commerce and trade are important, the basis of our existence is physical. We are physical beings with physical needs. Physical resources (energy, land, lumber, food, water, etc.) all have owners in the real economy. Joe and Bob are unemployed, thus have no resources, thus have nothing to trade. The best they can do in your scenario is called dumpster diving, assuming recycling tech is not making garbage valuable to the real economy as well. Mass dumpster diving, that's your dystopia right there.

guard-of-terra• 12 years ago

Specifically, Bob and Joe need oil (energy) to produce anything and it's expensive. If they create less value than oil they spent, they're a net loss for society.

desdiv• 12 years ago

The chart claims that economists have a 43% chance of being replaced by automation.

If they're wrong, then they'll be replaced by algorithms that are better at predicting economic trends than they are.

If they're right, then...

vosper2• 12 years ago

I've pointed this out elsewhere in this thread: That's not what the chart is saying. The description reads "Probability that computerisation will lead to job losses in the next two decades", not "probability that computerisation will completely replace this job".

For example, in economics, there might be a need for fewer economists because computers are able to do some of the work that previously had to be done by humans. But they're not suggesting that there's a 43% chance that there will be no human economists in 20 years, or that there will be such a thing as a computerised economist - it'll be aspects of the work that are automated (at least initially), not the whole job.

doctorstupid• 12 years ago

Of course, the other side of the coin says that there are too many people.

tomwalker• 12 years ago

I think that this is a very important piece of the discussion. Improving the efficiency of a lot of workers and increasing automation does not marry up well with a constantly increasing world population.

sumedh• 12 years ago

The growth rate is falling though.

JoeAltmaier4• 12 years ago

For the planet, sure. But for economic analysis its irrelevant. All metrics are per-capita.

selmnoo• 12 years ago

For the planet, sure. But for economic analysis its irrelevant.

No, for economic analysis overpopulation is very relevant. Maybe not in the extremely short term, but in the long term when overpopulation strains the finite supply of goods like energy and raw material, this becomes very relevant. In addition to the fact the reversing man-made climate change would also take incredible capital and resources to pull off, it's actually probably one of the biggest things to be seen in economic analysis.

aaronhoffman• 12 years ago

I'd recommend reading Economics in One Lesson http://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

Science is by definition the creation of causal chains. If I do X in this system, Y will result. Hence the importance of falsifiability and reproducibility.

This is yet another in a series of economic articles that sound much more like a typical op-ed column than an observation, hypothesis, or proof.

SixSigma3• 12 years ago

Ftee trade destroys wages, of this there is no secret.

De-regulation subverts democracy.

Time to revisit the relationship between capital and well-being. Ricardian theories of comparative advantage drive wealth into the hands of those who control capital, not into the calloused hands of the poor suckers who sweat.

Houshalter4• 12 years ago

Automation destroys far more jobs than free trade. If anything we should ban automation.

SixSigma3• 12 years ago

It wasn't automation that destroyed US manufacturing

grandalf3• 12 years ago

If unemployment ever becomes a problem we can simply outlaw the wheat combine, which will open up hundreds of thousands of jobs harvesting grain manually.

glesica2• 12 years ago

I hope you were being sarcastic... but in case you weren't, why would we ever create meaningless work instead of just giving people money for pursuing whatever makes them happy? A basic income guarantee seems like a much more reasonable solution than "put everyone to work digging holes and filling them in again".

cle• 12 years ago

No doubt GP is being sarcastically cynical.

But the cynicism is well-founded. We might create meaningless work because it would protect the income of the richest (the most politically influential). There is a strong historical precedence for this. It's socially accepted to some degree, due to our widespread belief in the cargo cult of "jobs".

thirdtruck2• 12 years ago

OP likely was sarcastic, and I agree with you that basic income appears to provide a better solution. That said, they're also extrapolating from existing trends. An inordinate amount of office work today (including a lot of software development) exists solely to keep people busy.

While that might sound absurd, consider the following:

* Companies, particularly large ones, need to have staff on hand for when heavy work hits, but can't just fire them in their off season, not without destroying morale.

* Classic hiring practices are terrible at selecting for actual technical ability, and no one wants to trust the demonstrably valuable work to "the new person." Busy-work provides a way to test their proficiency without ruining the business in the process.

* Management prestige (and pay) is often tied to one's direct report head-count. Worse, stack rankings and similar systems tie career survival to extraneous, buffer head-count.

* Firing someone is surprisingly hard in most companies. A single lawsuit or a few days of outage from a legacy system maintained by only one curmudgeon can wipe out all the (on-paper) savings from firing an ineffective or even counter-productive person.

* Some managers genuinely care about their employees, and want to shield them from the existential and health threats of losing their job and insurance.

eli_gottlieb4• 12 years ago

Many people, for some strange reason, believe they would rather see the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

kamaal• 12 years ago

>just giving people money for pursuing whatever makes them happy? A basic income guarantee seems like a much more reasonable solution

Because recent history suggests, when offered money/stuff/income gurantee for free:

a. In the eyes of the individual receiving money, the value, importance and the perceived hard work that had to be done to earn it, as time passes, tends to zero.

b. A vast majority of people tend just take the money and chill doing nothing, while wanting others to work and make more free stuff/money for them.

c. Because a few people tend to do nothing and keep the status quo going, other people who like to break the norm and make value/money are immediately perceived as heretics who break the 'equal misery for all' norm and are perceived as evil.

d. Brilliant, hard working and creative people like to work with people of their own kind and generally go and live at places where they can find them. And such places always exist.

e. 'Right to free stuff' generally becomes the norm after a while and people who the real work are expected to make over the skies sacrifices and offer bulk of what they do 'for greater good of society'.

f. Equality for all in general tends toward, equal misery for all. Over big periods of time.

maerF0x03• 12 years ago

or we could have a national slingshot gift to all children. Window jobs for everyone, and a few eye doctors too.

jokoon• 12 years ago

the domain of computer science that seems to have a bright future is machine learning.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

I see the dateline of this interesting submission (which looked familiar) is "Jan 18th 2014 | From the print edition." There seems to be a whole spate of year-old submissions to Hacker News this weekend. Are we trying to do a year in review, to see which predictions of 2014 turned out in reality?

As for the substance of this interesting submitted article, the historical facts are reviewed in a key paragraph before the article goes off into speculation about the future: "For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass." The nub of the article's argument is that new forms of technological change might not leave us with any new forms of gainful employment.

After its interesting text discussion and chart predicting what kinds of employment are least likely to be automated out of existence, the article points out one difference between the world of the past and the world of today: "Another way in which previous adaptation is not necessarily a good guide to future employment is the existence of welfare. The alternative to joining the 19th-century industrial proletariat was malnourished deprivation. Today, because of measures introduced in response to, and to some extent on the proceeds of, industrialisation, people in the developed world are provided with unemployment benefits, disability allowances and other forms of welfare. They are also much more likely than a bygone peasant to have savings. This means that the 'reservation wage'—the wage below which a worker will not accept a job—is now high in historical terms. If governments refuse to allow jobless workers to fall too far below the average standard of living, then this reservation wage will rise steadily, and ever more workers may find work unattractive. And the higher it rises, the greater the incentive to invest in capital that replaces labour." Indeed, it may be that the funding of governmental benefits will become secure enough through rising productivity that many current workers will have children who do not need a job at all.

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

I don't blame technology for the stagnation of the American middle class. I blame poor leadership, but I think there's something else going on that isn't getting a lot of press: latency skew.

Instead of waiting two to three days for a piece of postal mail, we're annoyed if that email takes two minutes. I'm not going to moralize about "instant gratification" as if it were wrong, because it's mostly not conscious and it's not a moral issue; we're just being neurologically retrained to resist delays. From a website, 10 seconds means "never": it's down, or in an unusable state. We're also (some of us, at least) at a ridiculous level of comfort; we have people who program their garages to heat up 30 minutes before they leave for work, because they can't stand the thought of 45 seconds' exposure to winter cold.

What's not becoming instant is human learning. If something can be learned quickly and will become rote, we can now program a computer to do it. So the things that we need humans for tend to be those that require subtlety or experience. That hasn't gotten faster. It still takes 6+ months before someone is good at his job. That's not a new problem. It's just less tolerated because people are more primed to expect instant results. So we're seeing an aversion to training people up into the better, more complex jobs that technology creates.

gregpilling• 12 years ago

I am always stunned with statements like this:

"For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others."

Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? Why not fire the bullshit job person and use that money to take my family on vacation 4x a year?

It amazes me that some people think there is some ruling cabal in a dark castle somewhere, deciding how to keep the masses in line. Maybe the answer is less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to automate it yet, or it is not currently possible.

What does the author think of the maker movement? This "Capital Equipment" is now priced at a weeks wage for many US workers. Marx would love it - it puts the means of production in the hands of the common man. I sold capital equipment for years, and what I used to sell for $50,000 you can now do with a $5000 machine. Prices keep coming down, and the machines I sold are no longer made. My job was eaten by progress :)

People will keep re-inventing themselves. It's what humans do.

api4• 12 years ago

Bullshit jobs arise in two ways. One is through the crazy inefficiencies of huge companies and governments. This is likely not you. Second is as an emergent property of red queens races in the economy, escalating complexity or overhead that does not actually increase overall macro productivity. The latter requires at least a casual familiarity with evolutionary game theory, but once comprehend cannot be un-comprehended. Most global military competition also falls into this category, and that's double digits of the economy in some countries.

I feel like these kinds of emergent pathologies are a species scale IQ test that so far we have utterly failed.

toomuchtodo2• 12 years ago

Great comments from both you and OP. Thanks for this.

eli_gottlieb4• 12 years ago

Utter failure would have been nuclear self-annihilation.

dropit_sphere• 12 years ago

This should be higher.

EthanHeilman2• 12 years ago

Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that?

One reason bullshit jobs exist is because decisions are made by managers, not some ultimate rational owner who thinks only of profit. In many big companies a manager's status is based on the number of people they manage, if they invent more jobs for people they are more important and get promoted. The same problem exists with corporate budgets, the more money a manager spends/controls the more status that manager has, the faster they move up the ladder, thus managers are incentivized to get as much of the budget as possible and to claim that all the projects and things they purchased helped the company. This prevents the company from even understanding the level of waste which is occurring.

Same thing happens in governments or any hierarchical organisation above a particular size. It is an extension of Celine's second law[0].

For a deeper and much more cynical view of corporate dysfunction read the Gervais principal[1].

Marx would love it - it puts the means of production in the hands of the common man.

Not sure Marx would love it as it could individualize production and thereby reduce the mechanization and discipline of the proletariat which he felt was necessary for the class to act effectively. I think Proudhon would love it as he was more in favor of individual freedom.

You might be interested to know that Mao tried a maker revolution[2]. It was a complete disaster because it was poorly planned and executed, but shows that Mao was at least open to ideas of radical decentralization.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws#Celine.27s_Seco...

[1] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace

ScottBurson• 12 years ago

Somewhere, in the last few months -- alas, I don't recall where -- I read about a company that rates its managers on how much their teams accomplish, divided by the size of the team. They claimed, plausibly I think, that this system effectively discouraged such fiefdom-building.

AndrewKemendo• 12 years ago

Not to be pedantic but the wholesale culling of available iron during the great leap forward was not at all similar to the maker revolution. The goal was to pull resources (iron) from the population to be centralized for re-distribution so that the iron could be turned into communal tools like plows and railroad ties.

Arguably the inverse of a maker revolution.

JumpCrisscross• 12 years ago

Creating "bullshit jobs" doesn't need a coördinated cabal. The wrong incentives can manufacture such roles in a distributed fashion.

Consider our tax system. Government bureaucracies refine the tax code. The same bureaucracies that fight each year for their budget allocations from Congress. Districts reward Congressmen who bring jobs home. Increased staffing, cost, taxation and knock-on bureaucracy ensues across government. And complexity. That complexity keeps accountants and tax lawyers employed. They are not interested in having the complexity legislated away [1].

Thus a system generating more and more self-fulfilling (and -employing) complexity. To keep civil servants and tax professionals employed. Cabal-free bullshit jobs. (Consider the difficulty with which structural reforms are being introduced in Greece, Italy and Spain. Those countries' elites are being forced to retrench the bullshit. They will likely pay with their seats of power.)

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/04/15/303356915/sto...

digi_owl3• 12 years ago

One example i recall Graeber using for such jobs are call center cold call marketing. Rooms filled with people who sit there all day calling number after number with the hope that whoever answers have any interest in their product.

HillRat• 12 years ago

Maybe the answer is less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to automate it yet, or it is not currently possible.

This, I think, is basically the situation -- yet the end result looks a lot like the Evil Ruling Cabal Theory of Crap Jobs.

In general, the decision to automate, outsource/contract, or employ is made according to whether (at a very high level), the ability to and cost of automation and/or outsourcing a job (technically and in terms of market expectations); the price of labor; and the number of employees engaged in a company.

Eventually (skipping over the model and proof), what you end up with are, in general, tiny numbers of expensive, high-value employees whose skills are critical to the company, rare and hard to automate; large numbers of cheap, low-value employees whose jobs are too trivial to automate or send elsewhere; and a small number of employees in the middle, who carry out important, hard-to-automate tasks but whose skills are relatively easy to replace. Good jobs are scarce, crap jobs are plentiful, and the traditional middle and upper-middle classes will reasonably fear that they could be replaced at any point by fungible labor.

As we have seen across the world, such conditions create a political and social drive towards correction, though the nature of such corrections are themselves the result of parochial political prejudices (resulting in the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, "living wage" efforts, anti-immigration legislation, the invasion of Crimea, the Daily Express' circulation numbers, and so on).

Historically, such stagnation has also been corrected by the accessibility of new employment markets (physical frontiers, industrial and postindustrial revolutions or, more recently and on a very small and temporary scale, new petrochemical extraction methods), or the destruction and concomitant rebuilding of industry (such as the post-WW2 efforts in Europe). In the absence of either solution, it remains to be seen what will happen to our societies, but the histories of left- and right-wing revolutions are not encouraging.

jqm• 12 years ago

To some extent, bullshit jobs, given however slight of a start, make and propagate themselves.

People jealously guard their career territory through legislative or other means and seek to expand it, even though what they are doing is ultimately of little (or even negative) value. Anyone who has spent any time in an organization of any size has no doubt seen micro examples of this. No dark cabal needed.

philwelch• 12 years ago

You, as a rational individual who owns and operates a business, will not hire people to do bullshit jobs.

However, a company with professional managers and systems that are somewhat separated from ownership or the putative goals of the business itself will, in an unintended-consequences sort of way, end up creating a bunch of bullshit jobs. The company is too big for a single, rational, human owner to comprehensively supervise, and meanwhile there are legions of middle managers who want to increase their relative importance in the company by having more direct and indirect reports.

I don't think it's a conspiracy to keep control over the lives of others, although there are probably a lot of pathological managers who would be motivated by that that. I think it has more to do with unintended consequences. What Graeber is arguing is essentially a conspiracy theory, and it shares the same weakness of every conspiracy theory, which is that it underestimates just how bad things can get purely out of unintended consequences. Managing large organizations is hard. The difference between doing it right and doing it poorly is literally what creates and destroys most large fortunes. And even if you do it well, you're going to get some inefficiencies that smaller organizations just don't have. It's essentially a scaling problem.

Haven't you ever wondered why companies lay people off when they're in trouble? You'd think they wouldn't hire someone in the first place unless they were pretty sure that hiring that person would somehow contribute to improved profitability, and if it turned out that they didn't do so, they would just be fired in the normal course of their work. No, aside from redundancies created by merger and acquisitions, layoffs are a means of clearing out these backlogs of bullshit jobs.

rumcajz• 12 years ago

I've wrote down some thoughts on possible economics of "bullshit jobs" here: http://250bpm.com/blog:44

Here's the relevant part of it:

"Can we do the same trick here and stop thinking about competing firms and rather start thinking about competing individuals?

After all, firm isn't a person and can't really strive to maximise profits. Only people can.

And when you look at the problem from the point of view of a rational individual, the situation is pretty clear: I need to work to feed myself and my family. If only 50% of population is needed to do all the necessary work, I have to cope with that. I have to accept a meaningless work if that's all I can get. If it's necessary to keep the work, I have to pretend and lie and cheat and support the whole edifice of bullshit work. Damn, I even have to beg, bribe and blackmail others to create a new bullshit position for me, if I can't get an existing one.

So, in the end, large portion of the population, from CEOs to the lowliest interns, are trapped in bullshit jobs and none of them can really speak against it as they are all complicit and the only alternative they have is having no job and starving."

perfunctory2• 12 years ago

Have you not watched "The Office"? Or seen the "Dilbert"?

api4• 12 years ago

If it does turn out to be different this time, it will be because Turing complete automation is qualitatively different from single purpose machine automation.

wittedhaddock• 12 years ago

The article refers to a 2013 paper by David Autor of MIT... http://economics.mit.edu/files/9014

The Nissan anecdote starts on page 3.

13hours• 12 years ago

This makes me think : what are good ways to try and protect myself against this? How can I, as a software developer and entrepreneur leverage this to my advantage? What does this tell me about where the big opportunities will be in 3,5 and 10 years so I can begin positioning myself there?

prodigyboi• 12 years ago

"However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages."

As insurmountable as it may seem, people living in and affected by these innovative societies just need to adapt accordingly. It is in our innate nature to do so rather than remain stagnant and perpetuate mediocre jobs that were created as a result of the industrial revolution. People can acquire new skills and leverage themselves to appropriate some of the "handsome gains". Also, globalization would only exacerbate the issue of "dwindling employment opportunities". Nowadays, more and more corporations seek to outsource jobs to other countries due to cheap labor costs. For most people, it'll be a paradigmatic shift in thinking and seeking ways to contribute to society. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will only serve those who can transcend the repressive jobs which are inherently repetitive and meant for a machine to accomplish as they are the jobs most susceptible to computerization.

yellow_and_gray• 12 years ago

A table in the article says Technical Writers have an 89% chance of losing their jobs. But it's only 6% for editors.

Why? Will technical instructions be automatically generated? How?

The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

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