Actually, since I use graphics designers for volunteer work I do, I’ve thought a lot about this. Assuming you use Illustrator and the like you are deep into automation, and I bet you are 5x as productive as you would be with pencil and ink.
I put something up on a freelance site, and in under a minute I got three people interested, one in Mexico, one in Pakistan and one someplace I don’t know. That’s the result of automation also. (I got 10 more ten minutes later.)
However demand is probably up also, as web sites require art work. If there are more e-books than print books, they all need art work also.
So your creativity is unaffected by automation, but the other parts of your job are. So, great example. And I think broadly applicable.
People have been wringing their hands over the same thing ever since the Industrial Revolution. Here’s a LIFE magazine article from the early 1960’s worried about the same thing and that’s before personal computers.
Here’s what most of those who are predicting doom need to answer: how many jobs will be created by the new technology?
We have more people working right now than ever before. Obviously technology is not leading to overall job loss.
Even that is probably an underestimate. Consdier with a hand drawing, any significant error or mistake might require a complete do-over versus just a Control-<U> in Illustrator or Inkscape. For CAD, making a change to an assembly drawing has gone from hours or days to recreate an entire drawing just to make a change to a view that couldn’t just be erased to ten minutes to pull up the model and two minutes to make a change and resubmit, not to mention the ease in distributing the change to manufacturing or suppliers. (Unfortunately, development of product data management systems have not been as smooth unless you are in a tightly integrated industry such as automotive, and most of your effort may be shepreding it through that process and figuring out how to get updated information to a supplier, but there you go: more work for some team of real people to do that is beyond the means of an automated system.)
This notion of “tittytainment” that Machine Elf mentions may have some superficial merit insofar as online services such as Youtube.com, Reddit, or Gawker allow private individuals to post and sometimes profit from the kind of base, low value entertainment largely derived from the misfortunates of others, but realistically with such ready access and such a large contingent of people willing to perform just for the ephemerial thrill of being in the public eye if but for a moment, the amount of money to be made from such venues isn’t going to support a large base of people. On the other hand, by creating a publically accessible venue via the internet, Youtube.com has allowed people the opportuntity to provide genuine entertainment of good quality outside of the traditiional production-studio based system, and such efforts done with a largely sweat equity investment but relatively low cost can serve as an entry into an professional career in entertainment, either through entrepreneurship or as a c.v. toward a more traditional venue. People will (and have always) wanted low quality shock-valued entertainment, but there has never been a better time for would-be entertainers to gain an audience through the same venues. Similarly, for people who want to make a job out of a skill or hobby such as furniture building, craft-making, or organizing, online venues provide the ability for interested parties to connect and trade. The automation of mundane work may very well mean the end of “McJob”-type employment, but then nobody really likes to work those kinds of jobs to begin with. The opportunity to find employment making or doing something that a worker can take personal interest or pride in is a real advantage of eliminating the kind of tedious work that robots and machine intelligence is suited to doing.
And as with Voyager’s example of finding a graphic artist, the ability to locate, evaluate, and engage with people with specific skills has never been as great as it is now and will no doubt only get better. Instead of having to go through some kind of recruiting or talent agency, contact a school, or pick notices off of coffeeshop bulletin boards, you can now locate and get proposals from people with specific sets of skills to perform short-term work on specific projects. I call this “acesourcing” (versus the popular meme of “crowdsourcing” a lower skill task), and while this won’t replace traditional employment methods for longer-term work where building and maintaing a consistent team trumps the agility of short-term contractors, it allows you to get a very specific skill set that applies to a narrow area of work, and for the contractor, allows them to make best use of their particular skills and experience while putting up with a bare minimum of the normal bullshit that goes along with most professional jobs, allowing them to do in, say, twenty hours, the same product that a steady employee puts in forty or more (largely unproductive) hours to achieve.
The real challenge is to make this kind of service available to more professions and create tools and methods for evaluating the requisite skill level to perform the work, especially in highly technical fields. The other challenge is that this type of employment will require regular eduation and training; a contractor like this can’t rely on just knowing one company’s system, or a single coding language that “everybody” in the field uses, but must be flexible and constantly training, such that this is actually built into the model of employment. This itself means a change to entrenched education and certification systems, all the way to the secondary education level.
So, we should take the “robot uprising” very seriously; not as a threat, but as an opportunity to shed off the work of doing tedious, soul-sucking jobs; just as we’ve largely eliminated the backbreaking labor of sustenance agriculture or constructing buildings out of stone and mortar.
Stranger
The coming “robot will take over your job” moment is targeting a whole new demographic.
At first, machines could carry stuff (conveyors, lifts) but could not handle individual items well
Then they developed fingers - they COULD handle even very small and delicate item. But they couldn’t see - they had to be fed the items in a specific orientation and in the same spot.
Then they developed eyes. This is what made a huge leap in capability.
But they still couldn’t think (as the term is usually meant), and they certainly couldn’t Learn.
Much of the factory work was now automated, and the jobs which couldn’t be automated were shipped to China (no more “business friendly” aka “union-busting” State bullshit) where the price of an entire state-of-the-art factory can be recouped within a year by paying workers $0.25/day.
Even Alabama couldn’t match that price
This is the current "Oh Shit! moment. The “deep learning”* “neutral network”* can clear out entire business campuses now.
They are now threatening the upper-income white collar worker.
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- do not ask me what these terms mean - except that we now have a rapidly shrinking life raft. The so-called 1% will become the .0001% and middle aged STEM majors with post-doctorate CV’s will be joining the barricades with the displaced factory workers.
We also have more people than ever before, demanding more goods and services. We also have more people in the workforce by sheer economic necessity (far fewer single-income households). The total number of people working is meaningless. More useful are questions like what’s the percentage of unemployed, how many households require multiple incomes, how many families are financially secure, etc. We could have twice as many jobs tomorrow if we hired twice as many people and paid them all half as much. Again, not very meaningful.
Hey! this latest trend is great for the “Make America Great AGAIN” crowd - we will return to the days of single-income households! And closer families - everybody lives with the only one who still has a job!
People will learn how to amuse themselves without plopping down in front of a TV because they can’t feed and house everyone and still afford “streaming” services.
There is an even more serious downside: the Over-the-Air channels will belong to whoever pays the most. The rich may not feel generous, and the OTA content may become rather unpleasant propaganda/mind control.
You only think that because as “sales and marketing of a business consultancy firm” you don’t actually know how to “do” anything. You probably think it’s important too. Don’t get me wrong. I’m in the same field. Nobody knows how to “do” anything. My last client was some financial services company where literally everyone was at least “associate vice president” or higher. They had all these layers of “management” and outside consultants and business analysts and project managers all trying to work out how to solve some esoteric technical problem. So maybe that is the future. We’ll just create a bunch of bullshit jobs for people to feel like they’re doing something productive.
But I kind of feel like we’re a long way off from robots designing robots. Besides, automation doesn’t take away jobs. It changes them. It eliminates job that are tedious, dangerous and repetitive and makes complex jobs that once required highly skilled, educated specialists standardized and automated such that a high school graduate can do them. It lets smart people work on even more complex problems and lets dumb people work on tasks that were once beyond their capabilities.
You assume that if there’s half the work, the same number of people will work half the hours. I don’t think so. Half the number of people will work the same number of hours as before and the other half will be out of a job. That way, you get the 50% best people and the overhead of training etc is much lower, and those people make a lot more money.
What will happen is that people with scarce expertise will work very hard and make a lot of money.
Most of the rest will have to compete for work that anyone can do, so those jobs will pay peanuts. This can be propped up a bit with a minimum wage but that’s mostly just a tradeoff between how many people work and how much they earn. The other way to handle this is to give people who can’t support themselves from their labor some money, but of course you need to raise taxes for that and somehow the rich manage to convince many non-rich voters that taxes on the rich should be low.
Last but not least there’s the jobs that require non-scarce talent, such as in arts/entertainment. Here, you can earn peanuts or even nothing or become insanely rich doing basically the same thing, it’s just a crapshoot. And there’s nothing people like more than gambling.
I think it’ll work out as soon as the 10% rich people realize that the only way they can stay rich is by having the other 90% buy the products they sell, so they need to fork over taxes to pay for subsidies.
So don’t vote for people who want low taxes for the rich because you’re probably not going to be one of those rich people anyway, and living as a rich person in a poor country is not much fun (although better than the immediate alternative of course). Also don’t vote for people who want to increase taxes a lot, because if the rich people don’t get to keep a good part of their money they won’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning and earn that money that needs to be taxed.
You said my own opinion beautifully for me, thanks!
I will also add the following problems:
• Humans are dicks and love pecking (peckering?) orders, so even if we can arrange society such that people can live without having to “pull their weight,” we will still see a division in society between those who have jobs and those who don’t, and there will always be a temptation for those who have jobs to grab more than their fair share–which is already happening.
• A lot of shitty jobs will still be left that don’t pay much but are hard to automate. Cleaning toilets and general janitor work is one of them. Despite it being low-grade work, you would need something like an android with something close to Strong AI to be able to go into a building and handle every conceivable cleaning task. So how are those crapper jobs going to be divided?
• How will higher education work? What will kids be studying to do? If they study for a job and can’t get one, that’s bad. But if there is widescale giving up on educational endeavors, that’s not great for the human race either.
I read somewhere, forget where, but it was someone speculating that the Internet could be the first technology that actually costs jobs instead of creating them.
For example, the rise of the Internet has been a disaster to the music industry and those who had dreams of making money from music. First there was illegal downloading of course, but now the streaming services are making it so you don’t even have to do that! And the artists get paid almost nothing.
I am a Japanese translator. I live in Indy, and most of my work comes from Japan. That’s the plus side: to do this job in the past, I would have had to live in Japan, pretty much. The downside is that Japanese companies can easily source terrible translation from in Japan and overseas. If Japanese companies insisted on quality, then I would have work coming out every orifice and then some.
I plan on doing a thread here on the threat of AI to my job. It’s a long way off if we are talking about good translation. But since Japanese companies already hire translators (mostly Japanese people) who translate like idiot robots, they will gladly compromise by using Shitty AI R Us when it can at least do a D+ job.
By the way, we can see the effects of this Brave New World in Japan already. The bubble burst there in 1989 and Japan has been “just about to recover for sure this time” ever since. Just as our shit has been offshored, so has most of theirs. Well, due to the bad economy and social malaise, Japan is expected to lose 1/3 of its population by 2050, with the remainder of course getting older.
People can and will vote on this whole “it’s not fun or affordable to be a human any more” by not having babies. Doing so, of course, creates a death spiral in which consumption and thus business results continue to collapse.
We are in for a very rough social and economic ride. It’s really sad because, with the right leadership, we could and should be doing better than ever before. But we haven’t figured out how to handle the abundance of modern technology, and I doubt we will for awhile.
FWIW, successful local Indy factory getting shut down for one reason: insatiable corporate greed and a broken economic system. OK, two reasons.
I don’t think it was proposed as a source of jobs/income for people; rather, it was proposed as a way to placate the unemployed/unemployable masses, by essentially paying them to sit on the sidelines while the few who still have skills that can’t (yet) be easily automated continue to do the actual productive work. A variant on “bread and circuses.”
iljitsch sums it up:
The reflexive answer to the elimination of your job is “find another one.” But what if your entire field of work is eliminated? The reflexive answer there is “get training and get a job in a different line of work.” But what if retraining is beyond you? Automation started out by eliminating tasks that required little brain power and little dexterity, but as robots get more and more sophisticated, they’re eliminating jobs that require a significant amount of intelligence. 100 years ago, if you had an IQ of 80, you could nonetheless earn a living harvesting carrots. These days, you (and 20 of your not-so-bright colleagues) are competing against this machine. So now what do you do? With your 80 IQ, you’re not going to get a job in IT; simple manual labor is your only marketable asset, and there’s precious little demand for it these days. How many homeless, unemployed beggars are we willing to tolerate? How numerous can the homeless, unemployed beggars become before they are no longer content with their lot and begin causing massive civil unrest? Eonwe speaks of “calcified expectations of how the world ought to be,” but “ought” is frequently incompatible with reality. In the coming decades, those of us who continue to enjoy a roof over our heads and a steady job will need to come to grips with a new reality; we will indeed need to start paying people to sit on the sidelines, and offering low-cost entertainment to absorb all of their spare time.
While the internet has been bad for the record companies, the artists are doing just fine.
The way the record companies were set up, the artists made almost no money selling records. The artists put out records to advertise their live shows, which is where they made their money. Except for rock & roll: the cost of moving the equipment was so high that most rock bands made their money off the tee-shirt sales.
Some artists saw this a long time ago: The Grateful Dead allowed fans to record their concerts, but were very zealous in protecting their trademark. They knew that the tapes being passed around just made people want to come to their concerts, and people who came to the concerts wanted to buy a tee-shirt. So they made sure they got a cut of the tee-shirts, and didn’t try to stop people from passing around the tapes.
Of course, there are now AI that are writing music, so technology isn’t done changing the music business.
That doesn’t jibe with what I’ve heard. I’ve heard that record companies don’t nurture artists at all these days. They don’t send new(ish) bands on tour. I’ve heard it’s very hard to make it in the industry–harder than ever, basically, if we are stating the goal as being a genuine popular pop/rock performer.
Good observations.
And I think it’s even worse than that, since we are seeing a decline in demand for, well, pretty much everything except certain industry-specific skills sets. In the 1970s, if you had a college education, you were getting a job. My dad, a smart guy but with issues, would get fired from jobs and just go get another one. Today, if you have a college education, well FUCK YOU! All these young people are sitting on the sidelines with fuck all to do, not building careers, not going anywhere.
We don’t need to wait for the distant future for a really shitty situation. It’s already here, and it’s only going to get worse.
Japan’s economic trouble (their so-called 20 year “Lost Decade”) is not a result of automation. It is a result of the collapse of a massive equities and real estate bubble in the 90s. Low inflation/deflation, low worker productivity and an aging population are the main issues.
You are talking about a very tiny segment of a relatively narrow creative industry. Economic policy should not be based on turning people into “rock stars”.
Do you know why that is?
It’s because anything you might “get”, is the result of someone else’s labor. The house you live in, the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the doctor you visit when you get sick. Unless you live in a frontier cabin in the 1800s, you didn’t create all of these things yourself. So the fundamental economic question is this. If you are unable (or unwilling) to contribute to the economy, why should other people who are working provide for you?
Of course, the ironic thing is that Fox News has duped all these people into thinking that the 1% someone work so much harder and smarter than everyone else that they deserve to own 90% of the wealth in this country. To me that just seems like a traditional aristocratic oligarchy where the rich own everything and everyone else are de-facto peasants and serfs who serve to grow their wealth with their labor.
You do realize Daft Punk is just a couple of guys in robot suits?
Hate to break it to you, but they call that “reality TV”.
Actually, I read up on “deep learning” a little bit last night, and I’m intensely curious to find out what a Watson or one of these Google AIs might spit out as a “good” piece of music after listening to every performance of classical music that they can get.
Daft Punk is a music band? I just assumed it was some kind of performance art set to random club music that was an unironic tribute to The Flying Conchords robot song.
Stranger
Yes, I mentioned the bubble. The Japanese economy has been a dysfunctional pile of shit ever since, but the trends people are talking about here have also affected Japan. There is the word kudouka (空洞化) “hollowing out” to describe the offshoring of a large percentage of manufacturing there. And I would guess that automation has progressed as much there as in the US, if not more, though I don’t have stats.
That was an example of the Internet destroying jobs, nothing more.
Yes, this is the ingrained attitude that was discussed above.
Regardless of the individual’s contribution to the economy, civilization needs to continue. People need to have kids and raise the next generation. With Japan again as an excellent example, it’s become “common sense” there that having two kids is too expensive. Hell, having one is pretty tough to do. So the fertility rate there is now 1.4:
That’s the kind of common sense that halves your population in a generation, were it not for grandma living to age 95.
So yeah, you demand everyone to produce! produce! produce! or fuck you, and soon they’re, you know, not producing kids. And there are fewer people to buy stuff, and down she goes, the economy, further into nothingness.