But aren’t you contradicting yourself? On the one hand, you think that soon we’ll be able to make more than we can consume, but on the other you say that you think that the amount of man-hours representing the things that people have owned over history are probably close to the same.
I think your second insight is closer than your first. There will never be a time when people don’t want scarce things, and economics is about allocating scarce resources.
If you asked people 100 years ago if they would be content if they had a 1000 sq ft heated/air conditioned home, the ability to broadcast any kind of art into that home, gaming systems to entertain them, access to libraries and books to read whatever they wanted, a personal vehicle for getting them around, and as much food as they wanted to eat, they would have said “Hell, yes! Who could want more?” And yet, the poorest quintile in America has those things, and they’re sure not content.
If personal incomes are 10 times larger 50 years from now, we’ll still have people who consider themselves ‘poor’, even if they live lifestyles better than most middle class people today. And if we have so much automation that the mundane things in life are almost free, it will just change the distribution of the kinds of things we want. You’re already seeing that among the wealthy - instead of clamoring for more and more stuff, they’re wanting higher and higher quality. ‘Machine made’ is not a word in their lexicon. Their cars have to be hand assembled. They spend huge amounts on art, antiques, custom furnishings, portraits, etc.
Maybe we’ll all become a nation of artisans and craftsmakers, and as we get wealthier we’ll start abandoning press-board furniture and drywall walls. We’ll stop buying Corel cookware and plastic plates and everyone will be buying expensive crafted china. The average car will start looking like a BMW in terms of quality, and the ‘cookie cutter home’ will go away and everyone will demand custom construction.
The one thing you can count on - people will still want what they don’t have, and as they value human labor more and more, people will be more and more motivated to do jobs for others because the pay will be good.
Now, we also value leisure time, so I’d factor that into the mix. It’s entirely possible that in 30 years we’ll all be working 25 hour workweeks.
One last thing to consider, though - the populaton is aging, and in many countries the workforce is going to be dramatically decreasing in size as more people move into retirement. So even if we learn to do more with fewer people, that may just lead us to a society in which the majority is old and retired, and the relative few who are working are still working long hours.
:dubious: Like Hell you need an explanation. The message is clear: “Technological unemployment” is a real economic and social problem, for labor and for capital, and the undeniable advance in productive efficiency does not make it any less so; you can’t wish it away. And the same applies to globalization and outsourcing.
Mr. Watt’s fabulous engine, in the long run, created more and better jobs than it eliminated. It is far from certain, indeed far from likely, that contemporary automation and/or globalization will; and in any case we all eat in the short run (or else, we don’t).
There’s also no reason to think it won’t. At the risk of being simplistic, it’s worked so far, so why not keep trying it?
Honestly, how many people aren’t smart enough to go to HIGH SCHOOL? You’re talking about a rather tiny group of people, and there’ll always be something that needs doing.
Sam didn’t say labour was a resource. He said *human beings * are a resource. It’s an important distinction.
I don’t think his point is to chellenge anyone on labour economics, but rather to argue against the implicit notion that people represent a deadweight burden on the economy; the prevailing attitude when these sorts of discussions come up seem to be that people are mouths to feed who must be assigned jobs, and therefore the loss of any given job means an extra mouth to feed. The value human beings represent never seems to be considered.
Exactly. Maybe I should have used the term ‘opprotunity cost’. Whatever humans are doing today comes with opportunity cost - things they could otherwise do/build that we won’t have because they are tied up doing the other thing.
Freeing up people from certain jobs provides opportunity to employ those people elsewhere. That’s why the economy didn’t collapse when we removed 90% of the work force from the agriculture industry, but instead boomed. We freed up millions of resources to be employed in more efficient ways.
I flatly reject the argument that there are vast swaths of humanity incapable of finding valuable work in the mechanized age. There’s no evidence of that to date. In fact, I heard these same arguments 20 years ago with regard to computers. “Secretaries are losing their jobs! Now with computers, everyone who doesn’t know how to use a computer will be unemployed. Secretaries will go on permanent welfare, to be replaced by those smart people who know how to use computers!”. Guess what? Secretaries retrained.
I remember reading an article about 15 years ago which claimed that auto mechanics were a dying breed, because as cars became more sophisticated and computerized, your average auto mechanic wouldn’t be able to keep up. They’d all lose their jobs, to be replaced by smart people who knew computers. It didn’t happen that way. Auto mechanics turned out to be amazingly capable of learning. Not only that, but computerized diagnostics made them more efficient, and their salaries went up. This raised standards, and the average educational level of the typical auto mechanic increased over time. The market adapted, and auto mechanics are better for it.
In fact, there are very few jobs that require a stupendously high IQ. Or even a higher than average IQ. You could even made the case that things like computerized diagnostics lower the required intelligence because the computer assists your brain.
So no, automation isn’t going to destroy all the lower-than-median-IQ jobs.
This reminds me of the old chestnut about a guy who claims he can jump off the Empire State Building and survive. As he passes each floor on the way down, he shouts “so far, so good!!”
Actually, just about every job today requires a good deal of intelligence. Is easy to forget that when you see a low-IQ person performing a menial job. But the fact is that natural language processing; coordinating one’s muscles to perform tasks; adjusting to new circumstances; and so forth, all require a good deal of cognitive sophistication.
Right now, machines aren’t even close to performing many of the tasks than an adult with an IQ of 75 can perform. So if Simple Simon is made redundant by a machine, there will still be work he can perform that a machine cannot. But if that changes, all bets are off.
This is the future. We are automated and mechanized to a degree that would be unfathomable to people a hundred years ago. Thousands of types of jobs no longer exist. For example, few people in the US hunt full time for meat. Now we have specialized workers who inseminate , graze, fatten, transport, slaughter and butcher cattle.
So the presumption is that people will always be able to ‘educate up’ to fill jobs that have been significantly reduced in quantity or eliminated by advances in technology, is it? Well, I can easily concede that that’s what’s happened so far, for the most part. And the OP does specifically state that only the lower-level level, ‘unspecialized’ jobs are gone, so one supposes speculating about a future where robots are superior to and have replaced humans in all jobs is unwarranted.
However, I find myself wondering what percentage of jobs out there (in america, say) would qualify as ‘unskilled’? Noting that in including “fast food joints” in the mix we’re possibly including the roboticization of some or all customer service jobs, which is a lot of jobs. Pulling a number out of the air, what would happen if in a matter of years some 80% of jobs disappeared?
Also, as a mild side note, it might be worth noting that if all unskilled-labor jobs are mechanized away, this would (by definition) make it nigh impossible for persons who hadn’t completed their education to get jobs. That is, teenagers and college-aged persons (and the lingering set of older persons out there who never completed their educations). Besides making life tough for kids whose parents don’t want to give allowances until the age of twenty-five, one presumes that this would be a nice shot in the arm for the student loan industry, and a punch in the eye for people who were expecting to work their way through college.
Well, I would dispute that we even know that people will have to ‘educate up’. Some unskilled jobs may vanish - but others may flourish. You might see a further automation of factories, but how about bricklaying?
And we have to be careful to not equate ‘skill’ with ‘intelligence’. A plumber may not have to be a rocket scientist, but he sure needs to have skill. Around his, the jobs that are most in demand are blue-collar jobs. An insulator or electrician can pull down over $100,000 per year around here right now. Do you suppose that we’ll have automated electricians running around any time soon?
Likewise, all the artisan-type jobs may go through a huge growth spurt, because people will value human-made goods more when machine manufacturing grows. So maybe all those assembly line workers will get jobs making custom candles and pottery for people. Who knows?
That’s a pretty big number you just pulled out of the air. It’s nowhere near that high. And a lot of the jobs that are ‘unskilled’ are still impossible for computers to do. A computer can’t hang drywall, and we’re not going to get robots that can hang drywall any time soon, but that task can be taught to an apprentice pretty quickly.
And anyway, 80% of jobs HAVE disappeared. Go make an inventory of all the jobs that existed 50 years ago, and then make one of all the jobs that exist today. See how much overlap there is.
The economy is very dynamic. Leave it alone, and it will adapt.
[quote]
Also, as a mild side note, it might be worth noting that if all unskilled-labor jobs are mechanized away, this would (by definition) make it nigh impossible for persons who hadn’t completed their education to get jobs. That is, teenagers and college-aged persons (and the lingering set of older persons out there who never completed their educations).
Of course, if we replace all those jobs, we’ll be far wealthier, and maybe those people won’t actually need to work, and can spend more time studying or enjoying their later years in early retirement.
Or the market will adapt in some other way. For instance, there could be a huge rise in ‘co-op’ educational choices where people essentially intern in their skilled industry while going to school. Or maybe there will be even more jobs for young people, because we’ll find something else interesting for them to do that we’re willing to pay for. Maybe extreme sports or being a baggy pants model will become a career path for millions of kids.
Do you think that when the hordes of blacksmiths, livery owners, saddle makers, and street cleaners bemoaned the ‘destruction of jobs’ brought about by the automobile they could have predicted the employment opportunities in the car-hop or drive-in movie industries? Or when telephone switchboard operators bemoaned the loss of hundreds of thousands of semi-skilled jobs they could have foreseen the rise of the computer ‘call center’?
We don’t know where the market is going to take us. We have not the foggiest clue today of how society might reorganize itself around advanced in automation or anything else. It’s impossibel to predict. But we can draw on general principle s and predict that we’ll deal with it and the sky won’t fall.
Hey, I backed off from diverging from the OP; so you should play within the sandbox too. The OP said “I’m sort of implying that almost all jobs will require some degree of specialized education.” Unless you’re implying that bricklaying requires specialized education, then it’s out; enter the bricklay-o-bots.
For this OP it’s not about intelligence, it’s about specialized education. I’d suspect that electricians might qualify, maybe; I don’t know about insulators. Of course, “construction sites” are explicitly among the list of places described as “completely populated by efficient, economical, semi-autonomous machines, maintained and supervised by a small number of engineers”, so I think there you have it.
Hmm, clearly candle-making, even ‘handmade’ candle-making, is unskilled labor, so by definition the robots should be doing it, according to the OP. Maybe they’ll be wearing human-costumes?
But suppose we grant this point to you. You’re going to have all of the people currently in our manufacturing and service industries competing with each other to sell craft goods to each other? That’s a lot of kitsch; prices will be low, especially with the robots making not-so-handmade goods of the same type. So, not much money to be made there; that’s not going to feed everyone, or even hardly anyone. There’ll still be room for actually good, skilled artists like we have now, but if there was really room in the market to support so many unskilled people, it’d already be doing so.
By the OP, the robots can hang drywall. We’re talking the entire service industry, massive chunks of the manufacturing industry, all agriculture, animal husbandry, and resource collection; we’re talking a LOT of the jobs out there. I think %80 might be conservative.
Sure, we found, created, or invented other unskilled jobs - which the robots would immidiately fill. Sure, we could all become rocket scientists, but then who would hire us all? And how many rocket scientists does the market need anyway?
Sure - it just might not adapt in ways that are comfortable for everybody. Like, I’m sure that the economy will be very comfortable for the robots. And the people with rich parents who pay their way through robot-supervision school. But what about everyone else?
Assuming any of these people has an income, sure. And yes, “welfare state” is the easy, fix-all answer to this situation. It doesn’t sound like that’s where you want to go, though; it’s not market-driven enough.
Interning I can see to some degree, though it would be pretty harsh if there’s any population growth. (I suppose we could do like they did in mideval times and send the second son to the army and the third son to the church - assuming there are no soldierbots or preacheroids of course.)
But, millions of baggy pants models? They’d be a dime a dozen - and paid accordingly. You wouldn’t be able to pay for college that way.
They sure would have if a rush of rollerblade-waitressoids, projectionistbots, and telemarkedroids pushed ahead of them and filled all the positions for them.
That’s one vote for “I don’t want to talk about it”. Check.
Well, the OP is diverging from reality. There is no way in hell that we are going to have robots that can go around and do various general tasks like building houses and fixing plumbing. Maybe in 100 years, but certainly not in a time frame short enough that we can intelligently discuss the ramifications. So I’m talking about the real world - plausible futures in which automation goes further than it has today. I’m assuming that the OP is asking about a hypothetical possible future in which automation is taken farther - automated hamburger dispensers, open pit mines that are fully automated, etc.
If we’re having a serious talk about where automation might go, it has nothing to with either intelligence or ‘specialized education’. There are jobs that require high intelligence that a computer could take over (professional chess player, for example), and jobs with ‘specialized education’ that robots have already taken over (factory assembly, welding, etc). So the criteria is wrong. What makes humans unique is the ability to adapt to changing conditions and to go/do things that weren’t accounted for. For example, you might make a robot that can lay drywall in a perfectly squared up room, but lets see you build one that can go into a home and lay drywall where the walls are out of plumb, there are obstacles and access points, etc. This robot also has to get down stairs and work in tight places. This is not going to happen for a long, long time. If ever.
Really? You think making this doesn’t require skill?
You have no idea what people will value once most goods are machine-made. You can get a hint by looking at what the rich today buy. The people who can afford to buy pretty much any good you can imagine. They spend their money on designer fashions that are intentionally limited in volume to keep scarcity and prices up. $50,000 watches that are handmade by one person. $10,000 hats. $500,000 cars hand assembled by small teams of people with nary a robot in sight.
This isn’t ‘kitsch’. For all I know, our society will evolve into one where we measure our wealth by our possession of other people’s time in the form of one-off goods, personal assistants, paid golfing buddies, etc. Maybe half the people will be in personal employ of the other half.
But I don’t know. And neither do you, and neither does anyone else. Society evolves. It’s not predictable in detail, but what is predictable is that when our needs change, the market will change along with them.
Well, if you’re going to go that far, then maybe we should start talking about what happens to the economy when the robots turn evil and start slaughtering us. Let’s leave the science fiction out of it and talk about extrapolating from current trends to a more realistic level of automation that we might have in, say, a generation or two. I guarantee you we won’t be replacing anywhere near 80% of our current jobs by then.
By the way, I had this exact discussion repeatedly with a friend in university - in 1985. His timeline for the date when the robots do everything was 2010. So we’ve got two years before we can all relax and let the machines take over.
You’re missing the point. We might wind up valuing jobs that robots can’t fill, because robots can’t fill them. If robotically-produced goods are ubiquitous and almost free, people will just value other things.
And yet, despite the enormous changes that have happened to the world over the past 150 years, society pretty much HAS adapted in ways that are comfortable for everybody. Yes, I know there are still poor people and still people who think they’re getting the short end of the stick. But that’s compared to others today, not to their ancestors. We didn’t leave whole classes of people behind and starving when we mechanized agriculture and eliminated over 50% of all jobs. We didn’t do it when we got steam engines and trains and eliminated stagecoaches. We didn’t do it when we learned how to build long fences and eliminated the cowboy. We didn’t do it when we created the car and eliminated the huge horse-related economy. We didn’t do it when we invented the airplane and devastated the passenger train industry. We didn’t do it when we invented the computer and wiped out millions of low-skilled jobs in everything from typesetting tto telephone switching to number crunching.
And yet, each time new technologies came along we heard the same predictions of disaster and millions of displaced, starving people.
I’m not talking about a welfare state. I’m talking about an adaptive economy. If millions of people lose their jobs, there will be trade schools opening hoping to get retraining business. There will be employers trying to snap up the available labor. The workers themselves will have a strong incentive to learn new skills. Life goes on.
I just threw that out there as a hypothetical. Truth is, we just don’t know how society will evolve to meet the new realities of the future.
That was a joke. By the way, why are you assuming that college will be expensive? With our robo-teachers and the internet, college may be close to free. Maybe simulation technology will let anyone learn any trade, art or skill at home for zero cost, and we’ll see an explosion of talent and capability. Maybe we’re headed for a glorious world of incredible wealth, no manual labor, and everyone free to seek personal fulfillment of almost any nature.
That seems more likely than the gloom-and-doom ‘the robots are taking over!’ scenario, and more consistent with the overall rise in standard of living we’ve seen with each new technology.
Ah. Because I say that it’s impossible to know the specifics of what society will look like in 50 years, I don’t want to talk about it? I seem to be perfectly willing to talk about it, given the amount of time I’ve spent today doing so.
What I’m not willing to do is give you specific answers to your long-range hypothetical about how we’ll deal with the millions of workers displaced by robots. You seem to think that the economy is something to be managed, to be pushed and prodded into the ‘right’ direction, and that we should come up with solutions and drive the economy towards them. That’s not how it works. Technocrats and socialists think it works that way, but the law of unintended consequences always bites them in the ass.
I look at the nature of human interaction and how markets have always evolved to changing conditions and in ways that improved our overall standard of living, and feel pretty confident that in the future they will continue to do so. And I’m equally confident that during the whole process we’ll have people screaming that this time, it’s different and we’re all going to hell unless we DO SOMETHING.
Thing is, there will never be one single point where robots take over 80% of jobs. It may happen over time - we’d be talking a couple centuries I’d think - but it will always only be a percent here and a percent there. That may make for some discomfort for those couple percent, but the rate of change will be absorbed by the economy without any real issues. The displaced workers will move on to other things.
I think there’s a danger of this thread turning into a snobbish “What will the stupid people do, when machines are smarter than them?”.
When in fact the OP never mentioned intelligence and was merely talking about unskilled labour.
Discussing intelligence is pointless, because the very nature of computers means that if we can make a machine with cognitive and reasoning abilities equivalent to an IQ of 75 today, then we can probably make one with an IQ of 150 the next, simply by linking up ‘IQ75’ units in parallel, improving the hardware etc.
So either we should all be worried or none of us should be. But your (presumably) average or better IQ doesn’t put you in a better position wrt this hypothetical.
The reality is that unskilled labor tends to be done by folks with lower IQ. But anyway, I think you missed my point a little bit. I specifically stated that “that natural language processing; coordinating one’s muscles to perform tasks; adjusting to new circumstances; and so forth, all require a good deal of cognitive sophistication.” If a machine is built that can do all this stuff, it’s likely to make people unemployed and make it difficult for them to find new jobs.
Just because this argument applies to higher IQ people too doesn’t make it invalid.
I don’t know if it’s that simple, but I agree that if an IQ 75 machine is built, an IQ 150 machine will follow pretty quickly.
I basically agree with this too, and I think that we should all be worried.
Again, that’s probably true, at least as far as likely reality goes. And the point I made about “Simple Simon” applies to people of all IQ ranges.
Ah, I guess I somehow skipped over that part of your post.
OK, but I disagree. We know it’s possible to build machines that can do unskilled jobs, and put people out of work, without possessing anywhere near human intelligence because it’s already happened.
Sure, adding things like pathfinding through the world will add a great deal of complexity but it still doesn’t follow that this must mean a human-like ability to reason and learn, at any IQ level.
A robotic cleaner that simply flags an error if it comes across something completely unlike what it’s been programmed for could still be useful.
Indeed for many tasks an insect-like level of intelligence is enough to be useful (e.g. the current level of robotic vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers).
Having said that, in another sense I’d agree with you. The OP said when all unskilled jobs were automated. It’s almost-certainly true that to bring about this hypothetical situation would involve humanlike AI, since there are no doubt unskilled jobs that are nonetheless not possible to convert into programming and heuristics to any level of usefulness.
In answer to the original request for SF answers, you can read Frederick Pohl’s short story The Midas Plague. The premise is that, in the future, all menial labor is done by machines, including robots, and people are left with not only too much leisure time, but too many material goods as well. The solution someone comes up with is to make the robots into consumers as well, thereby using up the rapidly-accumulating goods.
It’s always struck me as a hopelessly optimistic evaluation of the result of super-mechanization. I’m a pessimist, and even if the circumstances emerged as the story suggested, it seems to me that people, being what they are, would still find a way to shut out and disenfranchise large portions of the population, with most of the profits held in the hands of a relative few.
