Why Dilbert Is Doomed

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2009/11/02/healthcare_employment/print.html

by ojbyrne • 17 years ago

29 40 17 years ago

salon.com

DanielStraight2• 17 years ago

Out of curiosity, what constitutes the fifth (I refuse to use an even more obscure -ary word) sector?

queensnake• 17 years ago

Mortuary services.

More seriously, I think there are a couple of possible meanings to the '-ary' progression: if more abstract, making use of the lower levels, the quintary must be finance. If the progression is 'less directly crucial to life', then it probably is the whole service sector. Entertainment would be pretty far out there.

A 'mixed feeling' aspect to this is, that free software is greatly helping this along.

DanielStraight2• 17 years ago

I ask primarily because I'm curious where programming lies. Programming seems inescapably meta. Also, thank you for an excellent answer to a rather vague question.

kalendae2• 17 years ago

My rather incoherent take on this is that wealth is really not generated by people as much anymore. The things we use/want are really produced by machines plus a few workers. It is not really that worker producing the products, it is a combination of historical capital leading up to that machine and then some time the worker is putting in. Basically, we are moving towards a system where wealth is generated by machines but distributed by a weird combination of factors that is heavily historical (who spent the capital on this production to have it happen?). If you work in the stock market you get a certain share of that distribution, if your dad owns a hotel chain you get a certain share, if you collect aluminum cans on the streets of SF you get a certain share. It is all a heavily artificial system of distribution that is very historically based (more so than incentive based i think). Yes, being a successful entrepreneur will get you are larger share percent, but for the same effort/luck 1000 years ago (even if the political system was same as now and favorable to startups) the same share percent would be tiny compared to today. (kinda like bill gates added a lot of value but he got way more cuz its amplified by all the machines in the world) But my point is it is no longer about how much you produce directly but how much of that distribution goes to you.

Traditionally, a humongous proportion came here to the US and its workers, again due to historical reasons (and personally i feel deservedly so or atleast close enough). But it basically went like the US increase the whole pie so much that it got more of it. But as globalization happens it is apparent that unless you are a capitalist, your share of the distribution simply has no reason to grow but a lot of pressure to shrink so that it equalizes more globally.

so i think short of the US coming up with more things that just dramatically increases the whole pie again, theres only two choices to maintain your standard of living, have capital so you have the power to get your share, or support some form of socialism that hopefully doesn't reduce incentive to the point of reducing the whole pie.

cwan• 17 years ago

The reality is that technology is making capital less relevant to capitalism. The world today is far more favorable to startups/good ideas than ever before.

If you have a great idea, it takes less money and effort to develop it and spread it around. Capital actively looks for you. Take any of the support services to business as examples (from printing to telecommunication - long distance fees anyone? mobile phones? to computing power to manufacturing). Who cares what percentage of the pie you have? It's your living standards that matter - and that's what's risen dramatically for almost every socio economic and demographic group with the exception of a few in places like Africa who live under horrific despots. I can't remember who first made the comment that the average 12 year old today gets more intellectual stimulation than Queen Victoria might have in her day.

You can lament the fact that even if you're extraordinarily successful you might not control as much resources as Bill Gates does as a percentage of the pie, but look a little further back in history to those like Rockefeller, JP Morgan, who controlled even more and wielded considerably more power. Is Bill Gates' life better than theirs? I would suggest that with the exception of the ability to use their power (which has declined considerably) nearly all other metrics would suggest this is the case. This, at least for the rest of us, seems like a good thing to me.

This idea that short term unemployment is relevant to anything at all is somewhat silly since it doesn't even begin to explain US unemployment versus Europe's chronically high unemployment rates. Further, while I can accept that industries change, this fear that technology results in less employment just doesn't track with history.

The pie grows with better ideas. With the average person increasingly being able to contribute directly to the development ideas, I suspect we will have a considerably brighter future than some of these pundits suggest.

Retric• 17 years ago

While that's true, the advantage of investing in mildly stable developing countries is such that we will run out of developing nations faster than you might think. China has something like 40 years until it has US level consumption per person with India not all that far behind. When 50% of the worlds population has modern education and infrastructure the cost savings of shifting your work force around the world shrinks. Japan might be the poster child for this transition but without massive destruction there is little to slow things down.

PS: The ability for science and technology to progress has had a lot to do with the number of people who focus on such things, when 80% of the world is developed we might see 10 times as much research which is then quickly spread around the globe. And like the old VC equation having 1/3 of 50 trillion is worth less than 1/20th of 5,000 trillion.

rms3• 17 years ago

Unemployment is going to increase even more in the future. There just isn't enough work to be done anymore. Increasingly sophisticated robots are going to render even more workers irrelevant. Exactly what happens to these unemployed humans is going to determine whether we are living in a dystopia or a utopia. If the corporations have their say, it will be a dystopia.

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

Your comment reminds me of the early 19th century. There was this group called the "Luddites" that believed the same thing. It didn't turn out as they predicted.

natrius4• 17 years ago

There's an important difference between the 19th century and today. We are nearing the point when computers will be mentally equal, if not superior, to humans. They are already physically superior in many regards. Even before that point, there are tons of jobs that can be done by machines with minimal intelligence. If a machine can do everything that many humans can, but for less money, those humans will be unemployable. If machines are stronger than you and smarter than you, then there's nothing for you to shift to that they aren't already doing.

conflux0• 17 years ago

I think the main difference here is that this is an across the boards increase in complexity of technology. Whereas during the Luddites time any bloke could become a worker in a textile mill. Now technology is increasingly moving in a direction that requires more intelligence and a larger skill set to operate in a useful way. The eventual problem will be that unless we evolve or engineer ourselves to become more than we are now, we will eventually hit a wall where we simply cannot comprehend beyond.

rms3• 17 years ago

No, there is enormous difference in my thoughts on this matter and the Luddites. Freedom from work should be a great thing for humanity.

dualogy• 17 years ago

Disagreed. No matter how much you automate, there will always be more work to do, even if you don't as a species "climb up the value latter" which of course we will do.

This is due to the fact that once basic meets are met, whether by manual labour or mechanisation, then more sophisticated needs will evolve for the markets to satisfy.

The same fears have been around during industrialization. How about thinking again about some basic principles that are unlikely to change from one technological/civilisatory wave of change to the next?

rms3• 17 years ago

My point is that there already is not enough work to do. We can fill the basic needs of humanity with well below full employment and this will only become more obvious in the future.

msluyter2• 17 years ago

Marshall Brain discusses this in Robotic Nation:

American society has no way to deal with a situation where half of the workers are unemployed. During the Great Depression at its very worst, 25% of the population was unemployed. In the robotic future, where 50 million jobs are lost, there is the potential for 50% unemployment. The conventional wisdom says that the economy will create 50 million new jobs to absorb all the unemployed people, but that raises two important questions:

What will those new jobs be? They won't be in manufacturing -- robots will hold all the manufacturing jobs. They won't be in the service sector (where most new jobs are now) -- robots will work in all the restaurants and retail stores. They won't be in transportation -- robots will be driving everything. They won't be in security (robotic police, robotic firefighters), the military (robotic soldiers), entertainment (robotic actors), medicine (robotic doctors, nurses, pharmacists, counselors), construction (robotic construction workers), aviation (robotic pilots, robotic air traffic controllers), office work (robotic receptionists, call centers and managers), research (robotic scientists), education (robotic teachers and computer-based training), programming or engineering (outsourced to India at one-tenth the cost), farming (robotic agricultural machinery), etc. We are assuming that the economy is going to invent an entirely new category of employment that will absorb half of the working population.

Why isn't the economy creating those new jobs now? Today there are millions of unemployed people. There are also tens of millions of people who would gladly abandon their minimum wage jobs scrubbing toilets, flipping burgers, driving trucks and shelving inventory for something better. This imaginary new category of employment does not hinge on technology -- it is going to employ people, after all, in massive numbers -- it is going to employ half of today's working population. Why don't we see any evidence of this new category of jobs today?

Gormo• 17 years ago

Incredibly sophisticated robotics will also enable new innovations, create entirely new markets, and make it feasible to develop certain existing niche technologies into marketable goods and services.

Thank goodness all of that human capital will be freed up to explore the new frontiers.

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

The most numerous and stable jobs of tomorrow will be those that cannot be offshored, because they must be performed on U.S. soil, and also cannot be automated, either because they require a high degree of creativity or because they rely on the human touch in face-to-face interactions. The latter are sometimes called "proximity services" and they include the fastest-growing occupations, healthcare and education.

I don't think that jobs that can't be automated will in demand unless they also add to US competitiveness on the world market. If healthcare or education is just about bloat, it's not going to grow forever...

msluyter2• 17 years ago

Obligatory link to Robotic Nation:

http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

windsurfer• 17 years ago

I always sigh in frustration when I read things like "The problem is that these systems will also eliminate jobs in massive numbers.".

Honestly! If these jobs are eliminated, that's a wonderful thing! It increases the average work that the average worker is doing. This increases their average salary. This is not a problem!

The only real problem is getting these temporarily unemployed people an education and a new job. That's not a very big problem, as markets tend to make work when work is available. For instance, where did all the factory workers come from at the start of the industrial revolution? Everyone was working before then, presumably, as there was no such thing as welfare from the government. The workers came from industries that were torn down by the industrial revolution. We don't have cotton pickers anymore. We don't plow by hand. We don't have many of the menial labour jobs we had a hundred years ago, yet unemployment is less than 10% in Canada. The market equalized itself.

Where can these cashiers go? Perhaps preparing food. I wonder if we could start seeing more healthy restaurants that are more closely approaching the true cost of food at a grocery store. Since it costs less to have the store open, since the cash is automated, one could easily see that there would be more money available for food preparation.

The market will find a place for these workers, and everyone on average will see a net benefit from getting rid of non-producing jobs.

moe2• 17 years ago

The market will find a place for these workers, and everyone on average will see a net benefit from getting rid of non-producing jobs.

You're being optimistic and I hope you'll be right.

The big question is if we will be able to adapt fast enough, without erasing ourselves in a nuclear war or such.

Robots are just a different ballgame than the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was mostly confined to the production-sector. A modern machine could replace a hundred workers with one. Robots on the other hand could very well erase entire industries, reaching far into the service-sector.

What do you do with hundreds of millions of humans who suddenly are not needed for productive work anymore?

nopinsight• 17 years ago

Peter Drucker wrote a while back that jobs in high demand in the 21st century will be those that combine both knowledge and manual skills.

From the article, it seems that he was as prescient as in most other cases.

rmason• 17 years ago

The pundits are poor at predicting future jobs. When I was a freshman in college I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be an electrical engineer or a journalist.

I was counseled that there would be few opportunities in electrical engineering, four graudates to every job. But in journalism there would be four jobs for every student.

So I chose Journalism and in four years it was exactly the reverse. You have as much chance of these guys being right as knowing what the weather would be like in a month.

Why Dilbert Is Doomed

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