Was reading this article on CNN and thought it might be an interesting discussion. The title of the article is the same as the thread…Are jobs obsolete? In the article, the author, one Douglas Rushkoff posits that ‘jobs’:
So, it’s all a plot from the aristocracy to allow them to remain on top…or something. But leaving that aside (Europeans in the late Middle Ages were thriving before the invention of ‘jobs’??), the author here actually hits on a key point…as we automate and increase efficiency and productivity, what are people going to do? I’ll give an example from my own work. One of the reasons we have a relatively large staff here is that our network systems and infrastructure sucks. Plain and simple, it’s a clusterfuck of inefficiencies. However, it keeps our IT department and helpdesk hoping to keep the thing working and keep the users connected. We’ve given a ton of suggestions on how we could make it better, more efficient, more productive with greater uptimes and recovery times, but it would cost money to do that. However, if we DID do it, and we did it right using the tools available today then we would need a lot less staff…or we’d have a staff that was doing a lot less work (or even no work at all in some cases).
Eventually that WILL happen…we’ll get the network, systems and infrastructure up to 2011 standards and tools and we’ll need less staff, less support from our vendors and less administration. Then what? Every increase in efficiency will mean we need even less staff. Every new expert system will mean we need less vendor support and/or less senior staff. Less jobs. And this is happening everywhere, not just in the US but world wide. Watching Discovery this weekend they were taking about mining, and they were saying that improvements in techniques, tools and processes allow them to mine more material with fewer and fewer people. This goes for just about all manufacturing today, and everything else for that matter…you need fewer and fewer people, and each of those people are more and more productive.
So, what is the end game? If we need fewer and fewer workers to produce more and more goods and services then what is everyone else going to do? How do you stop such a progression, even assuming we SHOULD stop it? Eventually this will be a world wide phenomena, as even cheap labor in 3rd world countries simply won’t be able to scale wrt cost to benefit…it will be cheaper to pay the up front costs for automation and highly efficient systems than it will be to build a manufacturing plant that uses even the cheapest labor. Then what do we do? The author has some speculative answers to this, but what say you guys?
I thought it was an interesting article, though I don’t the solution of every creating digital media is a satisfying one. As a thought experiment, I’ve always liked the idea of having robot slaves. You would own a robot, or robot fleet who would toil away and you would get paid a salary for their work and you would be responsible to pay for their repair. This would free people to either enjoy a life of leisure, work along with the robots or some combination there of. I’m sure there are plenty of holes where this could fall apart, but I find it as compelling as any other utopian solution put forth.
The endgame that xtisme is looking for may go one step further than that. Robots could become so plentiful that all menial labor is done by them, and is virtually free. At that point it would be relatively easy for a government to assemble a fleet of robots that would provide goods and services to its citizens completely free. Privately owned robot fleets would become redundant.
Then it’s just a matter of deciding what to do with ourselves. Hopefully we’ll be able to spend most of our time making and enjoying art, traveling, dining, pursuing hobbies, and learning.
Full disclosure: to my shame, I’ve never read him (though I did read a sort of spin off/deconstruction of him, Tik-Tok by John Sladek) but from what I understand part of his writings revolved around the question of whether or not it was ethically defensible to enslave AIs at all, even if the Three Laws ensure there will never be a robot uprising or other robot-induced nastiness (not that they do - that’s sort of the point, I gather).
I’m not sure (and I work in IT) - it’s a game of catch-up most of the time - and the complexity never seems to abate. In theory, we should be able to trim things back, simplify, consolidate and automate. In practice, some customer always wants to add something new to the mix, and that makes the whole thing more complex.
Maybe we’ll eventually run out of new ways to keep making it difficult, but I don’t see that happening soon.
I think Rushkoff does raise an interesting point (although his grasp of economic history is a little shaky).
Historically, there was a direct connection between the number of people your society had working and the number of goods your society produced. Economics was a matter of translating man-hours into products. There was a limited role for using livestock like horses and oxen but they basically functioned on the same system - you turned work into goods.
The industrial revolution changed that equation. Societies learned how to harness other resources and turn those into goods and the pace of this have kept increasing. It’s no longer realistic to talk about something like a man-hour because the amount of work that can be produced is really dependent on the manufacturing system used rather than the amount of labor used. A factory with ten workers may produce more goods than ten thousand employees.
But we’re still locked in a social system that insists on people supplying their labor in order to earn the goods they consume, even though the value of the labor and the cost of the goods are decreasing. I think at some point, we’ll see this disconnect and just stop insisting on this exchange. Goods will be so cheap that it’ll be easier just to give people whatever they want rather than insist on them earning it (especially because the declining value of human labor will make the average person’s earning potential virtually non-existent).
I don’t think so. When I started out in this field there was a 1 to 10 support personnel to user ratio and it took senior engineers to design, build and configure what today would be a pretty simple network. Everything was command line oriented and it was a stone cold bitch to integrate networks. Today it’s more like 1 to 100 or even more for support to user ratio (we are using 1 to 150) and any halfway competent engineer could whip up a design and build out a system today…really the only challenge these days is the specialization of systems/network and security types (and granted, the security parameters HAVE gone up quite a bit from the old days, so there you have me).
Over all though, support today is MUCH easier, with integrated monitoring and helpdesk software, and tools that allow the techs to hop on a users system and fix a problem or walk them through an issue. On the systems side you have VM servers that can be more easily managed, kept up to date and recovered if something goes wrong, or server tools that allow stand alone servers to be imaged and restored, kept up to date automatically with updates, etc etc…something that you used to need a systems staff to keep on top of. Infrastructure is the same thing…tons of tools that allow you to automate punch downs, do change management and recover from disasters. Plus most systems have GUIs and expert systems and install wizards such that stuff that you used to need a senior person to figure out is done automatically now…just a selection in a wizard.
No, I didn’t mean to imply that all of this was going to happen tomorrow. It’s a gradual progression, IMHO. I don’t even notice it unless, like today when I was reading the article in the OP, I consciously sit down and think about it…about how things have changed in my own lifetime and where we are headed with all of this.
I don’t think anyone should have to do any work in the here and now. People who invent things and are productive could still gain large rewards for them, but people who don’t want to work should be able to have a decent standard of living.
Our ancestors invented all these ways to provide food for us, so why should we still have to work so hard? In ancient times, food was completely FREE and plentiful during most of the year. I think that the people receiving food stamps and the like shouldn’t consider themselves to be getting anything but what they already own. They aren’t allowed to roam free and obtain their own food where they like, this is just compensation for that.
I suppose the “endgame” would be a world in which the vast majority of essential services and goods are supplied by robots, with a number of people repairing and servicing the robots. The remainder of people would be free to research new things deemed beneficial to humans, ie. better robots, more efficient government, space travel, cures to diseases, etc. Other people would focus on art, in a variety of forms, or more abstract science.
So long as we’re talking about Asimov, I basically copy pasted this from first and last men, a very good book by Olaf Stapledon.
We might also not see the predicted phenomenon. For instance, read this:
The short of it is: transformational jobs (harvesting/mining matter and then transforming it into another good), transactional jobs (e…g: bank tellers, sales people) will decrease when many are replaced with machines or software.
Interactional/tacit jobs (relying on knowledge or collaboration with others), on the other hand, will grow. You can increase a lawyer’s, physician’s quantity of units produced, but not anywhere near as much as you can a factory worker’s or a farmer’s.
Also, productivity for them is more a question of quality of output rather than quantity. A great doctor doesn’t see 10 times are many patients as a mediocre one; he treats them better. A great lawyer doesn’t take on 10 times as many cases as a mediocre lawyer; he wins a greater percentage of cases, takes on more difficult or important cases and drafts more secure contracts. Quality goes up much more than quantity, unlike transformational and transactional economic activity where productivity increases are mainly a question of increasing the quantity of units, often at the cost of quality.
Two negative points related to the growth of interactional work are:
A) Perhaps a large number of people can only work at transformational or transactional work and will not be able to perform interactional tasks; not everyone has what it takes to be a lawyer, a doctor or an engineer.
B) Baumol’s cost disease* may strike at interactional workers since the quantity of their production doesn’t go up much. They might be saved by the fact that it isn’t quantity alone that matters, but the total utility of their output, which is to say the quality of the average unit multiplied by the quantity of units produced.
This is the type of economic setup I always imagined them having in Star Trek. If you wanted to better yourself by doing something like, say, joining Starfleet and exploring strange new worlds, you were free to do so.
But OTOH, if you wanted to sit on your duff, or wanted to take time off to write the great Federation novel or were simply content with doing some menial job like flipping burgers, or the 23rd century equivalent thereof, you would still have all your needs met
While you’re making games and educating and inspiring each other, who makes (to take an example) the microchips for the computers that are essential to all this neat non-job work you’re working at? “Stuff” is always going to be needed. Some of it is hard to make - probably impossible for one person, or even a modest number.
