Also we should include healthcare benefits, which increase faster than income.
Fair enough, altho IMO that specific stat was far from the most significant aspect of DSeid’s post.
The linked graphs go back quite a ways further than 2000. I’m no expert at stats and graphs, but would be interested in anyone showing me what has been trending upwards over the long or short run for those in the bottom half.
Imagine explaining this question to your ancestors.
You: We now have the ability to automate an incredible number of human tasks so that they need not involve human labor activity at all.
Ancestors: That’s bloody brilliant. Wow, brave new world of the future and all that. So the people of the future will have more leisure and less toil and the necessary tasks will all get done, many of them by machine!
You: No, you don’t understand, it’s a problem! There isn’t enough toil and task and labor to go around now! People have leisure imposed upon them against their will, they can’t find jobs!
Ancestors: Doesn’t your king or chieftain assign them chores and tasks, and divide them up among the serfs or laboring class fairly equally? Why work some as hard as you ever used to and not work others at all?
You: Uhh… well, there’s an economy… I mean, we aren’t socialists or anything, and the free market means no king or chieftain assigns anything. We got rid of kings and chieftains for the most part, things are more equal now. Anyway, we compete for jobs and we compete within our jobs for wages. But now automation could take away people’s jobs.
Ancestors: You mean you still have money and stuff? I figured that would be extinct in the future. We use money in our time because some folks are lazy and won’t do their share of the work unless they have to. So we make sure they have to by charging money for bread and lodging. You don’t work, you don’t eat.
You: That’s still the philosophy in our time, too!
Ancestors: But didn’t you say you could now have machines do so much of the work that there aren’t even enough chores and tasks to go around?
Remember what we are discussing here is how to deal with a hypothetical high unemployment rate due to automation…Now if it turns out that we can have full employment and automation (which I agree with) none of my proposals make any sense. But if it turns out that there is a net loss of jobs, the “lump of labor” mentioned in your cite does not exist.
My suggestions ( they are too extreme to be proposals, since I can see the holes) are perhaps better than smashing the robots, letting people rot on the dole, or give them holes to dig and then fill up.
So, if it turns out that the alarmists are right and jobs do vanish, how would you deal with it?
However if healthcare costs are increasing faster than benefits, leaving more out of pocket expenses (co-pay, high deductibles) quality of life has gone down.
It is the converse of the argument that we are all better off because TVs today are less expensive than in the 1950s.
But the graphs have been trending upwards for the long term. I’m not sure why you don’t think they are.
Also, you need to add in benefits from the employers and government benefits. For the most recent example, with Obamacare kicking in, lots of people are getting government subsidies they weren’t getting before.
Yup, this is an old discussion, though a good one.
While I agree with the arguments that “so far it hasn’t happened” I also believe that the future holds types of changes that are different from those of the past: when it becomes possible to create vast wealth (productivity) without needing any labor and even very little human direction or detail management. Put another way, it’s possible that technology can make it so that most productivity does not require the kinds of skills that a large section (possibly the majority) of people possess or are likely to gain. What happens then?
I’m a staunch defender of capitalism, but IMHO, in this scenario – when most wealth isn’t produced by human action – today’s capitalism falls down as a public policy.
However, I’m stymied in any attempt to figure out a cure. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Piano Player” is about this very subject, and while it was written in the 50’s, I think it sheds a lot of light on some of the issues. The main one being that people aren’t happy living on a dole.
Will computers ever be able to make original, ever changing and cool music? Will they ever be able to make movies that people will want to see? Will they ever be able to create a bitchin’ custom muscle car originally designed? Will they be able to craft a new type of beer? Will they be able to create cool video games…or cool videos that people will want to see? There are myriad things that computers and robots simply can’t do, and those things are where we are headed. Ok, I get that folks are worried about losing those juicy manufacturing jobs from the good old days when some guy spent 8 hours a day in soul crushing boredom turning bolt A into slot B, or those really cushy checkout and bag boy jobs, or as a waitress in the local Chili’s, but worrying that computers and robots will take all the jobs when we are at the very start of the global data sharing revolution is just weird to me. There are new fields opening up, and new definitions of just what a ‘job’ and ‘work’ are that are coming down the pike.
Let me give you an example. When I was first dating my wife I had recently gotten my degree in aerospace engineering. I could have (in fact I was expect too) gotten a job at some aeronautics company and basically learned the ropes of building planes or boats or whatever. I was, however, captivated by the emerging field of computers and networking/systems. To me, it was much more interesting (as well as you didn’t have a lot of old school types who had been in the industry for 40 years and knew everything). So, I went that path. My in-laws, especially my father-in-law couldn’t understand it. Why didn’t I get a ‘real’ job (his words), because this computer thing was small time and just a fad, and when push came to shove it would evaporate and I’d need to do a mans work for a mans wage (maybe dump the whole engineering thingy as well, since that was above my station and do a REAL mans job…construction or something equally manly).
To me, many of you younger types are making exactly the same error. You don’t see that those old dead end jobs were just that…dead ends. If automation didn’t take them then they would die in the US anyway, because our labor is very expensive and there is no value add (aside from it being here and speaking American English). The future is in the data revolution that makes it possible for us to have this discussion in the first place, the very thing each and every one of you reading this is using right now to do so, and the potential of that for the future. Because computers and robots SUCK at doing original stuff or creating new things or envisioning new concepts. They are good at doing what humans tell them to do, and they don’t get bored or ask for more money or need sick days…and they get cheaper all the time.
I think in the magical future where humans get replaced completely by computers, robots or nano-assemblers that work off unicorn wishes and fairy dust will be a great time for humans. All our physical needs will be taken care of for nothing. But once that happens is when folks will need to be entertained and engaged the most. And here we have the tool to do that right in front of us, yet folks are worried that there just won’t be anything left for humans to do in this magical future.
Like an earlier poster said, if we ever CAN make everything and do everything using only computers and robots, well, that sounds like a great world. If computers can ever do EVERYTHING humans can do without us at all, well, then there won’t be any need for humans anymore, regardless of whether they are rich or poor or what color their skin is or what religion they espouse. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for even the world where all out goods are made by computers, robots or nano-tech, because it’s not going to happen any time soon.
I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, most people suck at this also. Those who can be successfully creative will do well, but most people don’t. Almost anyone can publish an e-book today. Almost no one makes any money at it.
So your correct statement about what computers can do doesn’t make me feel any better.
Aside: when I was at MIT studying Computer Science my father told me that I should take some business classes to have something to fall back on. So I hear you.
My point before is that though very few people can successfully write a game or a novel or a piece of music, lots of people can successfully help others in ways that computers cannot and will not, even when they are able to write books better than most. We just need to value these skills more as a society than we do today.
There was once a day when pretty much everyone sucked at being anything other than a subsistence farmer.
Somehow we got past that.
Truth be told, talk of everyone doing creative jobs is probably wildly unimaginative. The economy of 2150 is quite beyond our understanding. What we will be doing with our time will be as amazing and incomprehensible to us as today’s economy would have been to the people of 1870.
I’ll take today’s medicine at today’s price over 1950s-style medicine, thanks. We didn’t even have open-heart surgery in 1950. Better healthcare costs money. It’s hard to have a quality of life when you’re dead. We all end up there eventually; we can get there faster and at lower cost if we want to kick it old-school.
So net compensation and quality of life are continuing to increase.
No graph is a straight line but the consistent trend for all but the upper 40% is down for the last 15 years and overall flat since the late 80s. The Economist article linked to earlier put it more starkly:
We are in an era where technology can take over even highly skilled jobs. Computer programs taking over many aspects of radiology and pathology is on the horizon. The impact of the current sorts of technology are best captured by looking at this period of rapid change, not at the period when vets returned from WW2 and gave birth to a Boomer generation.
Again, overall flat real incomes over multiple decades and in rich countries across the world and dropping as the cost of smarter more capable machines have dropped.
No it is not only Luddites who see the recent trends only accelerating.
The longer term trend is for increased income equality and the fact is that the middle is increasingly less well populated.
The benefits of increased productivity per worker go to the 1% who own the capital, not to the workers. Even highly educated ones.
But I think you are missing my point. Certainly we will need folks to write games, books, produce movies and the rest. We will, in fact, need a lot more of all of that and to wider and wider audiences, since every year more and more humans from more and more diverse parts of the world connect to the world wide web and those internets thingies. But yeah, certainly that (being creative) isn’t for everyone. But in the magical future where all our other, physical needs are taking care of I think there will be new opportunities emerging along this path. Data and content are going to increase by huge amounts over the next few decades.
Consider this message board, as a for instance. Many of us are willing to pay, even though we don’t have to, to be members and to have little titles under our names. We pay for the privilege and honor of saying our piece, of debating each other and just for the fun of it…for providing this board with interesting content that others can read and enjoy (or get all pissed off at when they don’t agree with us :p). It takes nothing special to be able to contribute here or give ones thoughts. I think THAT is going to be the direction we will go in down the road, with people being ‘paid’ to contribute, to critique, to add content, or to simply play. It will be no more like work than what we do is like work to someone a hundred or a thousand years ago.
Of course, this is in the magical future where the computers and robots are a hell of a lot smarter and more capable than they are today and could actually do most or all of what humans do to make stuff. And, of course, you’ll still need humans in the loop, regardless. But I think that fretting about where the jobs will go is a pointless exercise, in the end, since we just don’t know what will BE a job even 10 years from now. I can say with confidence that folks will still be working 10 years from now, and that this exact same subject will come up many times between then and now, and that we’ll all dance the same steps in those future discussions.
There will be a lot more readers, and a few new writers (actually there are a lot more writers now that the barrier to entry is so low) but why won’t the new readers read the same things the old readers do? There is a very long tail of books which sell in the dozens at best, and those sales are unlikely to increase much. Anyhow, I thought the debate was making money off of being creative. If that is not it, I agree there will be more books published, but the publishing industry (e-publishing) will be mostly write-only. There are a lot of people out there who are satisfied about having their book in “print” and who don’t care that much if anyone reads it.
As this board shows, lots of people are willing to talk for free. (I pay so that I can see my post count, and also just to support the board. And I hate ads.) People with blogs can already get paid for content, more or less. I think the big opportunity will be in the area of selection. With more and more content out there, we’ll be willing to pay trusted reviewers and editors to help us decide which of the thousands of books are worth reading. No matter how much bandwidth and storage you have, there are still only 24 hours in a day.
But this job is still not going to make lots of people money, since it is exclusive by definition.
I came here from Usenet because even in the few groups I read, the content was becoming overwhelming, and the crap levels were getting high. SDMB has selection in the sense of moderation but also in self-selection. The fervent creationist does not last long here since people offend him with some facts.
I agree. Though in ten years not much will change. In 50 it might be interesting. I’m pretty sure the kids I hire today will still be around here (or a place like this) doing more or less the same stuff. I could be working on the same stuff I worked on 35 years ago when I started (though that would be boring) though back then it was research and today it is more software maintenance.
I think I will print a T-shirt - “What if the Singularity Happens and Nobody Notices.”
What you originally wrote was factually incorrect. If you want to change that analysis, fine, but don’t act is if I was wrong in correcting you. But still, I can pick different places on the graph to make things look better, and all those folks have done is picked the two places that make it look the worst. There is nothing special about those places other than they are the ones that make it look the worst.
Again, you need to look at wages + benefits and in the latter you need to include both private sector and government benefits. I’ll see if I can find a cite later today that does that analysis. I remember seeing one a few months ago, but I can’t find it right now. One reason wages have pressure on them is the increasing cost of medical insurance/care. But if I were to look at what “big thing” happened around 1980 is that China and India entered the world market. You can’t expect to introduce some 2B people to the world market without there being disruptions. It makes more sense to look at average wages world-wide rather than focusing on particular countries. I agree that the period after WWII was unique, and only tells us what happens in the US when the rest of the industrialized world is blown to smithereens.
It’s certainly possible/likely that we’re seeing automation also putting downward pressure on average wages (in highly industrialized countries), but that’s also a different matter than what the OP is postulating, which is the reduction in the total number of jobs available.
True, people live today who would have died 60 years ago. But people die today who would live in 2075. The difference is that in the 1950s almost no one worried about going bankrupt because of medical expenses.
I’m not disputing the benefits of advanced medicine (I had my heart rebooted) but those benefits affect a fairly small number of people for a relatively short time, while fear of not being able to afford care is constant for many. Fewer after ACA at least, but still too many.
Actually back then if someone was going to be a goldsmith, say, they got trained at it, and didn’t start selling jewelry. Even before history there were skilled makers of tools and weapons.
Our jobs will be very different in 2150. Our brains are going to be pretty much the same. And creativity will be just as prized. We don’t care that much about the tools from 1600 - but we still read Shakespeare.
Right, nobody worried about going bankrupt because of medical expenses, because instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on treatment you’d just die. If you want to choose a 50s lifestyle, that means accepting dying from medical issues that are expensively treatable in 2015. Of course, there are also inexpensive medical advances that can save your life or improve your quality of life that don’t require spending thousands of dollars.
Also note that in many parts of the world, like Europe, medical insurance is handled slightly differently than it is here in the United States. I mean, it’s easy to imagine a dystopian future world where lifesaving medical treatments exist, but only the 1% can afford them, and the 99% are expected to die in the gutter. Or we could imagine a system of universal medical insurance, like, you know, lots of places in the world already have. Trends that can’t continue forever won’t continue forever. It seems like it’s politically impossible in 2015 to implement universal medical insurance in the United States, even though other countries have done so without much problem. But the barriers to solutions can vanish overnight, when the people who think they benefit from the status quo suddenly realize that they aren’t actually benefiting from the status quo.
And let me attack the notion of the “robotic high school dropout” for a moment. This is not going to happen. The idea of mechanical man who can do everything a hu-mon can do except use contractions and understand jokes is nonsense. Google isn’t building automated cars by building a stupid general purpose robot chauffer that sits in the drivers seat and converses with you in natural english, instead we’re getting sensors and systems built into the car. We don’t have robot maids who get the vacuum cleaner out of the closet, instead we have roombas. We don’t have robot chefs that take ingredients from your pantry and whip up dinner in your kitchen, instead we have meals prepared in an industrial factory and frozen.
The point is, automation proceeds not by figuring out how humans do a job and then building a robot to do the the job the same way. And also let’s note that communication and transportation infrastructure can work the same way, even though it’s not technically automation. The newspaper industry cratered, not because computers are writing the news, but because instead of 200 people writing 200 stories for 200 newspapers, we can have 1 person write one story which is linked/reposted on 2000 websites. Instead of having expensive classified ads in every newspaper, we have free national Craigslist.
In one sense Craigslist automated classified ads because we don’t need 2000 clerks standing at counters in newspaper offices all over the country waiting for someone to come in to place a classified ad, then writing the ad down on a form, making change, filling out the receipt, then taking the stack of paper forms down to the printers. Classified ads used to be a huge cash cow for newspapers, now all gone. But would we be better of if we banned Craigslist? Get this, posting an ad on Craigslist is free. The value added by Craigslist is immense.
More and more stuff in the future is going to be essentially free, or bundled as part of a package. Evil Captor imagined a future where the 99% are useful to the aristocrats only as consumers. Except if the 99% are unproductive consumers, what exactly are they giving to the aristocrats in exchange for the goods and services the aristocrats own? How can you get rich selling consumer goods that nobody can afford to buy? Your factory that makes flying cars without employing a single human being makes you rich…how? You sell the flying cars? To who? What do they pay you with?
No it was not. It was precisely correct. If want to claim that the decrease in real wages since the 1999-2000 peaks does not matter because the line down wiggles, fine. But it is a silly thing to say.
But sure, you want to take a longer view then overall real income has been flat for all but the highest percentiles for decades. And the recovery has been mostly the middle getting rehired into lower paying jobs and industries.
Again, I cannot state whether or not middle class jobs are being outsourced to machines or to other countries, but the new jobs are lower paying, are predicted to be lower paying in the decades to come, and the benefits that the 1% have been getting from increased productivity per worker are not trickling down so well. I a. m not arguing the op position of unemployment as a result of technology; I am arguing that increased income inequality is a result. Again I offer no solution; I merely suggest that Pollyannaish pretending there is no problem or reason for concern is not a useful response.
Excellent point. First, not all the bankrupting treatments save lives. And, as you said, there are places where you can get modern medicine and not go broke - for instance just north of us. It is a better quality of life because you don’t have to have conversations about affording a doctor. And of course there are those who go broke and die anyway.