One of my first comments on this site pertained to this issue:
>As computers begin to become capable of more and more jobs, the demand for human labor will decline. Automation is qualitatively different from mechanization. Education is a thin gilding on an impressive but non-optimal brain architecture. To say education will cure the ills of automation is a bit like saying fitness training could have saved workhorses from obsolescence. Workers of the world, you're fucked.
My opinions haven't changed much since. Though years off yet, we are heading into uncharted territory here. Sure, the labouring classes survived, actually thrived, after the economic obsolescence of their muscles; I doubt we will do well after the obsolescence of our minds. If a body's worth a penny a day, a mind a nickel, and it costs a quarter to eat - we will not survive even if the lump of labour fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy. It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work.
> It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work.
Perhaps on an individual basis, but not in large groups. An economic and social system in which most humans are starving will rapidly collapse, and be replaced - if necessary, through violent revolution - by a system that at least keeps most people fed, assuming there's still sufficient real resources to produce and transport the food.
Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread.
>Food stamps exist not out of genuine compassion for the poor, but because those in power know very well what happens when starvation becomes too widespread.
someone needs to cc that memo to the right wing American Oligarchs.
While I don't necessarily dispute American oligarchy existing... don't you think capitalizing the term makes you seem a bit too much like a conspiracy theorist?
"imaginenore", I see you like straw men, here is another one for you:
And on the other side of the coin, we have a legion of well-fed, opinionated individuals who, from the comforts of their warm home, tell the poor: "You can not help yourself, only we can help you, using the state. Don't mind me and how I got here, that's irrelevant, what's relevant is that WE are the only ones that can help you!" - With the implied assumption that the poor are pathetic and can't help themselves.
Goes to show how stupid right wingers are, it doesn't take much to make people happy consumer slaves these days. Much less of a problem than having angry mobs at their gates that want to lynch them.
But if food costs more than most people can afford, it'll have to drop prices - after all, the 0.1% richest aren't enough to sustain the market. You can say that one quarter is already the cost, so it can't drop more, but that just poses the same situation for the suppliers instead. In the end, there's no absolute floor for prices, they'll have to drop until there are enough buyers.
Of course, that doesn't mean the new equilibrium will be good compared to current western standards.
You're assuming there's not a more economically efficient use for farmland than feeding really, really, really poor people. The floor for the price will be the opportunity cost of using the land to grow food rather than, say, covering it with solar panels and exporting computation or whatever else can be dreamed up. At some point, it costs more to feed people than their economic worth over their lifetimes. I think in the long term, computers and robotics will be ridiculously efficient replacements for labour.
If the "really, really, really poor people" are a minority, I can believe that, but then again that's already the case.
But if those poor people are most of the current salaried people, which is the threat of automation, who will buy that computation or whatever else? Do you think EC2 would be successful if all services running on it where only used by the very rich?
When you only have a small number of buyers, there's only so much computation or whatever that is economically feasible to produce.
To make an analogy to the current world, the profit margin of luxury cars is much higher than of small compact cars. If markets worked like you're saying, every car manufacturer would exclusively switch to making luxury cars.
You're starting to sway me. But suppose we cloned the least-productive 0.001 percent of the population such that they outnumbered us all one hundred to one. Suppose, too, that all resources on earth were multiplied by the same amount. Do you think that would end well for the clones? Would Honda start making cheaper cars for the clones? What forces are at work that would guarantee the survival of these unproductive clones?
To keep the analogy fair, resources (like arable land) would also need to be cloned 100:1 - after all, automation doesn't affect the people:resources ratio. I think they would survive, yes.
What forces? Greed from everyone who could see an opportunity to profit by selling stuff to an untapped market.
Yes. I just noticed that - an idiotic oversight. I added that in. I think in general I'm more wrong than I thought I was. But at some point it breaks. If all the clones have an IQ of, say, 50 there's no way they would be able to survive. To take it to an absurd extreme, suppose we cloned chimps instead of people. The vast majority of the new 100x resources would end up in human hands.
That is, it seems obvious to me that humans would find a use for that land that is more efficient than selling its outputs to the chimps, whose value would be absurdly low - 100 chimps being worth less than one human. I think it's more likely the humans would up their land use by 100 (even supposing a static population) than attempt to sell food for nearly worthless chimp labour.
Define "end up". Humans could own the majority, but they couldn't possibly consume the majority, and in the end it's still more profitable to sell those resources to chimps as long as you get any benefit from it, as opposed to just letting it rot.
Of course, that means chimps would be forced to work for humans to eat, but then again, is that new?
Your hypothetical situation is not very hypothetical. We already let food rot to get the benefits from letting it rot. Accounting for the whole production process we throw away 1.3 billion tons per year.[0]
In Before the wall came down I see a supermarket in East Germany where products in the process of expiring got new price tags 2 or 3 times. But in the west for as far as I know we just put the vegetables and the fruits on display, people can pay what it says on the label, and the rest is all thrown away, every day, all of it. If food doesn't fit the high standards set in that scheme is it thrown away even before it goes there. Then, much of the food that does get sold expires before it is eaten.
To simplify: The supermarket has to guess if you are going to buy the strawberries. If you chose beans in stead the strawberries go in the bin. The supermarket will try sell you the strawberries a few more times but eventually they will just remove them from the assortment and a scale down of the strawberry production will follow.
Yes, I know. But the hypothetical situation is one where the majority of people in the world starve. That's certainly not what happens today.
By the way, here in Portugal supermarkets do discount some perishables when their expiration date is near. And they're not thrown away every day, at least for most vegetables and fruit.
I don't think there's anything chimps could do that would cause humans to provide for more than a tiny fraction of them; farmland that produced bananas for chimps last year might be converted to biofuel or parkland or just lie fallow this year.
Ultimately the problem will be that for the vast, vast majority of tasks, it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to spawn a new process to take care of it than to ask a human to do it.
>It seems likely that, considered as a whole, Extremistan is far more creative and productive than Mediocristan. But while its economic pie may be much larger, it is also much more unequally distributed.
Consider what would happen if the pie was 1000 times larger and was distributed 100 times more unequally than now. Is this ideal? No, but the worst off would be 10 times better off than right now. This is something very important to consider when we think about increasing industrial efficiency. To bring out an old argument, the freezer eliminated the entire ice industry and put lots of people out of jobs, yet everyone was better off for it.
This completely ignores fact that "be better off" also includes control of one's environment (also called freedom). Considering that, in your example, most people would be worse off. They would all have higher material standards, but if you consider amount of wealth equal to "voting rights" about their environment, then they got a cut.
To say this less abstractly: Rich and poor are not a separate phenomena. Most people who are rich are so because they have power which they exercise over the poor.
Like I said, that much wealth inequality is not ideal. I just think that considering what maximizes the mean/median of world prosperity is as important, if not somewhat more important, than considering how wide the standard deviation of wealth distribution is. We should consider both things.
Exactly. Inequality is not a problem - poverty is. I'd much rather be in a place where I'm a millionaire between trillionaires, than having little and be between millionaires.
Sadly, envy and need for the social status are very strong.
To echo what asgard1024 wrote: inequality is a problem if you are concerned with your own ability to make decisions for yourself. We see that today in our political system: money buys access, and concentrated wealth breeds concentrated power.
Envy and social status are not the primary reasons people fear inequality; instead, it is the fear that someone else has control over your destiny, and you are powerless to stop it. And this is what we see every day, even as entrepreneurs--regulatory capture by entrenched interests (and government corruption generally) prevents innovation and real competition, keeping too much wealth in the undeserving hands of those who have rigged the game in their own favor.
Furthermore, it is also quite possible that levels of inequality that we are seeing in the United States drag down economic growth, at least to the point that the material status of the poor is decreasing in absolute, objective terms. This makes perfect sense when you consider how important individual freedom is for broad economic growth--if economic inequality makes people less able to pursue their own objectives and best interests, all but the rich and politically connected will find themselves unable to contribute the best of themselves to society and to the markets.
It's entirely conjecture to attempt to assert that high levels of inequality are an inevitable result of sustained economic growth, and that high levels of inequality are necessary to sustain growth. However, it makes it very easy to hold conservative views in opposition to redistributive policies if you also believe that redistributive policies hurt growth--even when there is no actual evidence backing that belief.
Again, there is no evidence that redistributive policies as such harm growth. However, there may be evidence of a "goldilocks zone", an ideal level of inequality that spurs growth most effectively--where the opposite extremes of communism and the modern "gilded age"--and their well-documented drawbacks--are both avoided. To me this seems like common sense.
>fear that someone else has control over your destiny
That's true for people here. Most of society want "bread and circuses". Money is not the only motivator, so not inevitable to sustain growth. There is also problem with growth measurements e.g. Github improved my life by a lot, but contributed little to GDP.
Missing how economics work here. Prices will be adjusted to what the market can bare. There's still a 10^3 difference. That's being work like being worth $1,000 when everyone else is a millionaire.
Edit: sorry, was calculating for billion. it's a 10^6 difference. $1 vs $1,000,000
I think people are talking about wealth here, not money per se. If everyone can afford at least two houses, three boat and 12 cabins, they are certainly more well-off than most people are today, no matter what relative money-wealth is being discussed.
Yes, but in that vein we can say that even America's poorest are better off than some middle class in other countries, or even the wealthy over 100 years ago.
It's hard to objectively define "well-off" because psychologically people will be comparing what they have and don't have to those around them. So if a person owned 2 houses , 3 boats, and 12 cabins think they're well-off if everyone around them owns double/triple what they do, or would they think they are poor?
Just a different perspective.
Edit: Please note that my line of thought would eventually lead to which is better? Objectively more "things" vs psychological well being (where things are relative to what others have).
Are America's poorest better off because of technology, or better off because of America's dominance over the rest of the world's resources?
My suspicion is that as the developing world becomes more educated, the poor and middle class in the US will look poorer. Some of this might be an actual loss in standard of living as the share of global resources the US can consume drops. This change, induced by technology (mass education) is going to be a bigger issue for the developed world sooner than computers-taking-away-jobs will be.
Presumably more educated people are less likely to give away their resources for cheap (or in corrupt countries for free), less likely to work 16 hours a day in a factory, to accept mass pollution as a by product of manufacturing, etc. That is just an assumption, it could be wrong and education will have no impact on these things.
The psychological aspect -- comparatively, might have more to do with whether an individual thinks their condition is improving as opposed to the distance between individuals.
If you generally believe what Ray Kurzweil predicts, none of this will really matter in 2100 as we could be well in to the post-human era. Humans, in their natural form, could very well be relics in a zoo.
> Are America's poorest better off because of technology, or better off because of America's dominance over the rest of the world's resources?
The rest of the First World seems to be doing OK, even without anything remotely close to the US military. Though I would be surprised if developed countries didn't continually try to suppress underdeveloped nations, maybe not by military force but by market forces etc.
You compare yourself with the people you know who tend to be those in similar economic positions to yourself. I've never felt jealous of a billionaire CEO with a private jet for example but I'm more likely to feel jealous of a friend who has a better laptop or car than me.
Wait, what can robots do to increase the size of the pie as it were. The size of the pie represents the market. And the size of the global market is fed by the population of the earth. So while the population may be growing at some steady pace, it has nothing to do with automation except in cases where demand currently.overshadows supply. "Currently" is the key word here.
No, automation is simply a tool for those who can afford it to cut out a large expense from their manufacturing process and increase profit. Not saying there's anything wrong with it. It's just you have to consider if nobody is left working and earning a decent living for themselves, then the size of the market starts to shrink.
When a competitive industry cuts a large expense out of their manufacturing process, they increase profit and make cheaper goods. That's why Amazon is so successful, because they used technology to trim costs. Amazon also has small profit margins; they make up for small profit margins with high volume, which they get because of their low prices and convenience.
To assume the size of the market is fed by the size of the population is to assume that human appetites for goods and services are finite. That is most definitely NOT the case. Some people want 100 fancy cars that they put in a garage or other ridiculous things. The size of the pie is what is available for consumption that people happen to want. Robots increase the size of the pie by making goods cheaper and more plentiful. That means people can consume more with the same amount of money... their money is worth more, so they're richer in real terms. For instance, if fancy cars were $10 each, you would be richer even though you have the same amount of money.
"distributed 100 times more unequally" doesn't mean anything, certainly not anything that implies anything about "the worst off". You need to characterize what happens to that specific part of the distribution if you want to estimate the impact.
In particular it is possible to reduce the shares of the top N%, and the bottom N%, increasing the share of the middle, and have many measures of inequality go down.
If (e.g.) doctors are automated out of a job, it will mean that health care has become dramatically cheaper, which is a widely distributed rise in living standards. This is more egalitarian, not less.
Thousands of doctors lose and millions of humans win.
Remember, economics is not about the distribution of money, it’s about the distribution of valuable things. In this example, health care is the valuable thing and its distribution seems greatly improved.
It means that a combination of machines and lesser trained people will be providing care. If your condition falls outside of the protocols said robots and PAs can treat, hope there is an expensive doctor around!
For programming, in the same way as computer science education works right now: people write programs that are useless to anybody else, but teach the person writing the program. You can see a hint of how this might work on a large scale with the current crop of massive online courses.
I think the definition of "mundane" is continually shifted, at least WRT to programming.
At one point, "mundane" was Minesweeper in Win32. Now it's a Rails app with authentication, monitoring, logging, background services, queues, AJAX, etc. Or a mobile app with remote backend services. Both are well-covered by intro level MOOCs today, letting new devs cut their teeth by building a Twitter clones.
Maybe the next step for "mundane" programming is distributed computing in the form of Akka, Spark and so forth.
The issue in the article isn't that there will be novice programmers or lawyers, it's that if you can even become a novice programmer or lawyer, you're supposedly already in "Extremistan". The premise is well-contained in the quote early on that "most people are like horses" and can't operate in fields that require primarily intellectual labor.
I'm not sure that I agree with this premise, but it means that it's not an issue of crowding out newbies, just an expression of the popular sentiment that "[insert highly-paid professional position here] are really, really smart" and that to even attempt to become a highly-paid professional x is out of the reach of most people.
It seems that the want to keep out sufficiently bad workers is already being seen by some that employ programmers - that they would rather not have an extra programmer than to have a sub-par programmer, because the 'contribution' that that programmer brings is on the whole negative by mostly introducing bugs that others have to clean up etc. We'll see if the bar for sub-par will keep being raised...
This is already a big problem in journalism, since the local newspapers (where journalists often started their careers in the past) have, of course, been decimated by technology.
There's blogging. I know, I know, almost all of it is terrible. But it's still a place to practice writing, and the best ones (were "best" should not mean "most followers" but "actual quality", of course) could be contacted by good newspapers.
Blogging isn't professional writing in most cases. Without ruthless editing, writers drift toward the navel gazing and general laziness.
Newspapers had their faults, but they were producing a good product. Pick a commonly blogged about topic, and everything is corrupt -- half the computer storage people are EMC. Baby stuff? Chances are the mommyblogger got free junk from a family of brands that she happens to like.
> The best companies hire the best engineers, who, by definition, are a minority; the best engineers work at, or launch, the best companies; technology increasingly allows the best companies to dominate their markets like never before. Extrapolate that twenty years into the future, and what do you get?
I have to disagree with this statement. Even if the best engineers were all working at a small number of companies, you still don't need the best (global maximum). It is hard to be the best. And that is why the consulting product of companies like Thoughtworks have suffered as they've scaled (they can't continue their rate of hiring at the same quality they had in the previous past).
Yes, there is a power law distribution in programming ability because you cannot rate programming ability on a 1-10 scale (it is an exponential scale). Where 10 is Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy and 1 is someone who does not appear to harbor any thoughts of logical thought.
If you work to become better and what you do - and contribute back to the ecosystem with open-source code, talking at user groups small (local user groups) and large (conferences), teaching the next generation (from mentoring junior developers to teaching), I believe you will receive more than monetary compensation, you will be helping to move the field and community forward.
Marx's solutions were crap but his criticism of capitalism was spot on. That's hardly surprising: in the social sciences it's usually easier to find problems than to fix them.
Assuming you're referring to Karl Marx, much of what he said of capitalism is very much true- it's a game of winners and losers. What he didn't give is what many historians would refer to as a 'viable alternative'.
This (or, I suppose, a corollary which is that the capital owners/means of production are always in the strongest position) is what I have recently been thinking. If you are afraid of this development, invest heavily in the stock market. That way, you have a big hedge in the form of capital ownership in case your career gets automated away: Automation benefits capital owners. You would of course have to do this before this development goes too far, or capital in the successful part of the economy will already be too expensive.
Most people are already aware that being wealthy is a good way to make capitalism work in your favor and that saving money is a good way to become wealthy over time.
It's not a coincidence that most people aren't in a position to save enough to live off their capital.
You missed my point: if we are indeed moving towards a world of very heavily automated processes and hence an increased rich/average divide, owning capital will be a lot more profitable than it is today. So you probably wouldn't need an extraordinary income to invest enough to be in a very strong position. As I said, it's a hedge.
But of course, it's a hedge that has positive expected value even if this scenario does not pan out, so I really don't see the problem here. The stock market still beats all other savings options for long-term (>5 years) investments. No need to see the glass as half empty; we could all be running around gathering nuts and berries and trying not to get eaten by lions.
You missed my point: as capital makes labor ever more redundant, it will be more and more difficult for labor to secure enough capital to live off of. The present value in dollars of said quantity of capital will decrease over time, of course. But I see no reason to believe that the value in terms of man-hours (or anything else that labor actually possesses) will decrease, and every reason to believe that it will increase.
and history has proven it wrong. The increase in productivity happened, but whoops! All the increases went to capital, diluting the pool so that it was just as hard as ever for the working class to jump to the capital class, despite the increased productivity! Funny how that works. Now Marc Andreessen is trotting out the old canard again. Fool me once...
> it's a hedge that has positive expected value even if this scenario does not pan out, so I really don't see the problem here.
I save. You save. Most people that can save do save, because everyone already knows what you're saying. Every gradeschool and every highschool in the US repeatedly burns the lesson of compound interest into the minds of our kids. They even use an interest rate that doesn't take into account inflation or reserve policy so as to exaggerate the effects of saving, if anything.
Some people lack the self-control to save, but they're in the minority. The majority don't save not because they don't know that it's a good thing but because they can't. They're barely scraping by. If the car breaks, there go their savings. If the toilet breaks, there go their savings. Labor these days simply doesn't have the leverage required to carve out a livable chunk of the capital pie, and your suggestion that they have the leverage but not the self-control or knowledge of how compound interest works is patronizing in the extreme.
Where I live (*Norway; so this post is based on observations in my own economy), 90% of the income-earning part of the population put their savings into real estate, even though this appears to yield a very poor return on capital. So I don't think this point is nearly as universally accepted as you claim.
Also, this 90% of the income-earning population earn more than enough to save considerable portion of what they earn - I earned less than the average before going to grad school, and I still saved >50% of my post-tax income through economically sensible lifestyle choices (shared housing, cheap car and low car usage, home-cooked meals, low consumption on gadgets). This situation is certainly not identical for everyone in the world, but for my five million fellow countrymen, there is vast room for beneficial changes here. Please refrain from accusing me of being patronizing without asking about the background. This is a discussion of a small part of a big issue; this is one idea of what to do for insurance if e.g. you're a programmer and worried about the future prospects of your profession.
You have a point with regards to the "working poor" and other below-median groups, and this is a very serious structural issue. I have never implied that the solution to poverty is to buy stocks.
No, he wasn't. Marx was about the state owning the means of production, and that isn't the case here. We have a handful of super rich people (oligarchs) owning the means of production.
Mmmm, maybe you need to refresh your understanding of Marx. This oligarchy was well described by Marx, what you're saying he 'was about' was his solution to said problem.
I see a lot of this lately. The problem isn't the automation, it's that the benefits of that automation primarily benefits the wealthy few. We need a different economic system where those benefits are more equally spread around.
Basic Income + a (progressive?) wealth tax, for example.
The predicted outcome is probably correct but technology is not its root cause. The primary cause is the animal preference for hierarchical social structures where the top have the largest possible amount of power and control over those at the bottom. These structures have existed throughout human history - certainly long before the industrial revolution.
Modern communications technologies are simply increasing their reach and extent.
Maybe it will turn out that the big middle class of the latter 20th century was just an intermediate state between the exploited workers during the early Industrial Revolution, and the mediocre-humans obsolescence of the later 21th century.
>As computers begin to become capable of more and more jobs, the demand for human labor will decline. Automation is qualitatively different from mechanization. Education is a thin gilding on an impressive but non-optimal brain architecture. To say education will cure the ills of automation is a bit like saying fitness training could have saved workhorses from obsolescence. Workers of the world, you're fucked.
My opinions haven't changed much since. Though years off yet, we are heading into uncharted territory here. Sure, the labouring classes survived, actually thrived, after the economic obsolescence of their muscles; I doubt we will do well after the obsolescence of our minds. If a body's worth a penny a day, a mind a nickel, and it costs a quarter to eat - we will not survive even if the lump of labour fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy. It's entirely possible to starve to death while never once wanting for work.