Unskilled labor is completely mechanized/robotized, what happens to employment?

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
[/QUOTE]
For someone who insists that we can’t know the future, you seem pretty certain about the future development of robotics and AI. Can you prove that somebody won’t have a breakthrough in AI, allowing robots to be moderately adaptable in the realm of dealing with slight variations in circumstances? (And the notion that we couldn’t theoretically make robots smaller and more maneuverable than, say, a nice big adult human is just silly.)

I’m not interested in limiting the discussion to 2010, or whatever near-future realm of time allows you to dismiss the scenario under discussion as being impossible. The question is, suppose it happened? Suppose it happens thirty or forty or ninety years from now, that somebody designs a multipurpose robot that’s able to do everything except innovate (and which has access to an expert system for ‘little innovations’ like ‘the wall is 0.2 degrees off true, what do I do?’), and which can be mass produced and sold for less than one year of a worker’s wages? Is that impossible?

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
[/QUOTE]
And what’s also predicatable is, if the market is overwhelmed with a massive supply of manufacturers of handcrafted goods, their price will drop like a rock. It’s called “supply and demand”; it’s part of that market you’re talking about.

The fact is, you can’t both bank on a value of handcrafted goods that is based in scarcity and then have everybody making them. The market can support some people being artists and selling handcrafted goods. Not everybody, and certainly not with a supply of similar or identical robot-made goods lurking in the wings luring consumers away from the already oversupplied market of humanmade goods.

This also applies to mass consumption labor jobs, like, to pick a totally random example, baggy-pants model. If you only need one or two baggy pants models to serve the population of millions of people, then 1) this job probably won’t pay very well, unless it takes a while lot of skill to be a decent baggy pants model (thus effectively reducing the supply), and 2) this is not a job which will employ millions of people, regardless of how much it pays the few who have it.

Now, servants might be an option for some; at least this is a case where the required supply grows linearly with the demand. Certainly the major robot owners will be able to afford servants; and they’d probably hire several, so that’ll help some. And if any of those servants are well-paid (not too likely, as there will be others happy to work for a lower price), they’ll be able to afford a servant or two of their own. But I don’t think you’ll see “half the people will be in personal employ of the other half”; that requires the employing half to have money; well more money than they themselves need to live on, if they’re going to effectively support another person. Unless half the population owns robot-run businesses (which would decrease the monetary value of robot services significantly), where are they going to get money to support the other half?

We may not know what the future will bring, but the rules of the market will continue to apply for as long as we let the market run itself. And none of your suggestions for possible scenarios work in a real market scenario, sorry. Bring others.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
[/QUOTE]
If you want to talk about robots turning evil and taking over, start a thread about it. This one is about “Unskilled labor is completely mechanized/robotized, what happens to employment?”. If that’s not realistic within a generation or two, then that time period’s not what this thread is about. (And it’s a hijack I’m not particularly interested in, expecially a hijack pretending to be the answer “No, the proposed scenario can never happen”.)

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
[/QUOTE]
And unless enough of the people can make a living making those things to support them, that’s not going to help your point one bit. Maybe everyone will value lying in the sun and soaking in the great outdoors. That’ll make no one a living.

You can propose “maybe it’ll all work out”; however I’m free to say “maybe it won’t; convince me it will.” So far, you haven’t put forth anything very convincing, especially taking market forces into account.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, yes. It’s never happened. The hypothetical under discussion is that it DOES. As you haven’t proved that it can’t happen, I feel free to stick with the given hypothetical.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Or, the employers will ber trying to snap up their own robots, and only require a vanishingly small number of robot maintainers. Millions of people go to trade school to learn that trade, and then discover that when they try to get a job, there’s always somebody else able to subsist on a lower wage cutting them out. Workers won’t be able to work, and will have a strong incentive to fight amongst themselves as they begin to starve to death, desperately trying to make handcrafted goods that aren’t comptetive against the craftsmen that were already around before the crisis. Mass numbers of unemployed people become too poor to even pay for cheap robot goods, like food. We’re not talking about a welfare state, so they all die. It’s a market correction! Yay! Isn’t it wonderful how the unrestrained free market always works, in all circumstances! And life goes on…for some!

See, I can speculate too.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Sure. Of course, maybe the people who spent the time and effort to make the simulation technology will want to be paid for the use of their work…as they do currently. And of course, all the training in the world won’t make a job profitable if there’s an oversupply of workers available to bid each other’s wages down.

Not to say that a robot workforce spells the end of civilization, however, I think your idyllic society is much more likely if we can find a way to feed all those people seeking personal fulfullment of a personal nature. Since last I checked, you don’t usually get paid for that.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Well, in all of human nature we’ve never had a glut of extremely cheap labor displacing workers out of all manual labor and low-skill jobs. So maybe, just maybe, that might have an effect on things that hasn’t been observed. And so, while I think in general that the market is fairly good at doing a passable job of serving some of the interests of most of the people, I don’t immidiately leap to the conclusion that it can handle everything from a robot invasion to an asteroid hitting the planet. Nor do I fail to recognize that the market tends to use the cheaper resources first, and ignore the more expensive ones - heck, that’s what’s good about the market! Efficiency! Unfortunately in this instance its most efficient to use the robots and fire the humans wherever possible. So maybe, just maybe, this scenario as presented is not something that the market will handle optimally. (Optimally for humans, that is.)

62

[QUOTE=begbert2]
…I don’t immidiately leap to the conclusion that it can handle everything from a robot invasion to an asteroid hitting the planet.
[/QUOTE]

Astroid hitting the planet, yes, that would be a problem.

But robots? I can’t believe this thread has gone on this long. The robot invasion has already happened, guys. Jobs have been eliminated by the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, by robots. Typing pools, gone; what’s a computer if not a document creation robot? Telephone operators, gone by the thousands, thanks to switches. Cisco robots, you might say. Robots are to be found in factories, in farms, and in offices (fax machines and E-mail reduce the need for letter carriers.)

Robots have displaced countless jobs, and yet there’s no apocalypse in sight. People have been saying robots would cause mass unemployment for 30-40 years now; machines have taken over human duties by the truckload, and still there is no mass of peasants struggling for survival who were displaced by the robots. I appreciate that we can’t predict the future but how many more decades to we have to go - after the last three - before people accept that mechanization doesn’t result in mass unemployment?

63

[QUOTE=RickJay]
Astroid hitting the planet, yes, that would be a problem.

But robots? I can’t believe this thread has gone on this long. The robot invasion has already happened, guys. Jobs have been eliminated by the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, by robots. Typing pools, gone; what’s a computer if not a document creation robot? Telephone operators, gone by the thousands, thanks to switches. Cisco robots, you might say. Robots are to be found in factories, in farms, and in offices (fax machines and E-mail reduce the need for letter carriers.)

Robots have displaced countless jobs, and yet there’s no apocalypse in sight. People have been saying robots would cause mass unemployment for 30-40 years now; machines have taken over human duties by the truckload, and still there is no mass of peasants struggling for survival who were displaced by the robots. I appreciate that we can’t predict the future but how many more decades to we have to go - after the last three - before people accept that mechanization doesn’t result in mass unemployment?
[/QUOTE]
How many more posts do we have to go before people accept that this thread is specifically about the not overly likely theoretical scenario where it does?

64

[QUOTE=begbert2]
How many more posts do we have to go before people accept that this thread is specifically about the not overly likely theoretical scenario where it does?
[/QUOTE]
That’s not what the OP was about. The OP asked what would happen to the workers when

As RickJay rightfully pointed out, we’re already there. Compare mines, farms, factories etc. to their equivalent 50-150 years ago, and we’ve already cut the necessary employment by 90+%.

65

[QUOTE=begbert2]
For someone who insists that we can’t know the future, you seem pretty certain about the future development of robotics and AI. Can you prove that somebody won’t have a breakthrough in AI, allowing robots to be moderately adaptable in the realm of dealing with slight variations in circumstances? (And the notion that we couldn’t theoretically make robots smaller and more maneuverable than, say, a nice big adult human is just silly.)
[/quote]

You know, I actually work in this field. The company I work for specializes in factory automation and robots. I’ve been doing this stuff for decades.

And yes, I will quite happily say that we are nowhere close to a robot that can do generalized tasks like going into a house and troubleshooting plumbing and fixing it, or hanging drywall in the average home, or taking care of children, or restocking a Wal-Mart’s shelves. We don’t have the AI for it, we don’t have the battery technology for it, we don’t have the complex actuators available at reasonable prices.

The current state of the art is something like Asimo, which can walk on two legs and be programmed for specific tasks like, “follow marked line to fridge. Open fridge. Grab bottle on third shelf. Close Fridge. Carry to human.”

We’ve been working on machine AI for decades. Japan built a huge government/industry partnership to attempt the next generation of AI, and failed. Today, we’re lucky if we can get a computer to recognize printed letters. We’re making very little progress in the kind of AI required for what you are talking about.

And mechanically, we’re almost as far behind. It is incredibly hard to build a general-purpose machine that can use an infrastructure designed for humans, and despite robotics labs all over the world working on the problem for decades, we only have tiny bits and pieces of a solution.

Look - if you want to discuss the economy of 2125, it’s going to be pretty pointless, because we haven’t the foggiest notion of what it will look like or what will motivate people. We don’t know how they will live, what they will do for fun, or how they find meaning in their lives. Maybe everyone will live virtually, and no one will want more than a 500 sq foot home because anything really interesting to do will be done in a simulator. So unless you’re writing a science fiction book, discussions of practical economics and policy that far down the road are pointless.

Uh, no. If the market is functioning, you don’t get ‘overwhelmed’ with anything, because once supply reaches a certain point the price drops to the point where it makes no sense to build more. We will make exactly as much stuff as required to meet the demand for that stuff as measured against our incomes and our demands for other things we would like to buy.

I suggest you look up Thorstein Veblen and study a bit about ‘conspicuous consumption’. We may become a ‘conspicuous consumption’ society, placing value on things simply because they are scarce. A crappy handmade candle may be more valued than a much better machine-made candle, because the value comes from the owner being able to say, “MY candles are all hand made.”

See: The diamond market.

No, that one job might not. But there could be myriad jobs like that. Maybe a big growth industry will be ‘golfing buddy’, and the middle class will be hiring golfing buddies like we hire maids today. But this is just rank speculation - the point I’m trying to get across is that the laws of economics don’t go away as we get wealthier - whether that wealth comes from automation, outsourcing, or the discovery of free energy.

How much money does it take? If robots are providing us with everything we want, what’s the difference between rich and poor?

As I said, you have NO IDEA what the market will bring, and neither will I. But what you don’t have any evidence of is a discontinuity in the rules of the market brought about by mass automation. You claim this will be horribly destructive to society, but you’ve provided no evidence that this is the case, while I’ve provided plenty of evidence to the contrary - namely, the history of major societal changes brought about by automation, which have already displaced the kinds of percentages of workers you’re worried about, and society has adapted to the change every time. There’s nothing in economic theory that suggests it won’t continue to do so.

As I said before, the key question isn’t ‘skilled’ vs ‘unskilled’, although class warriors like to present it that way, because they can then claim that the poor will get poorer and the rich richer. But in fact, automation cuts across class and intelligence lines. For example, draftsmen used to be a big part of an engineering team. Autocad and PC board design software decimated their ranks.

What determines whether or not a robot can do a job isn’t whether the job is currently done by ‘skilled’ or ‘intelligent’ people - it’s the nature of the job site and the complexity of the task. For example, it doesn’t take much in the way of skill to climb a ladder, walk across a pitched roof, and hold up an antenna. Go try to design a robot that can do it.

It does take intelligence to do math on a slide rule. But a computer can do much better easily.

If robots are making all our stuff, why do you need to ‘make a living’?

Okay… So let’s assume that a magical robot fairy sprinkes robot dust on the land, and suddenly machines spring up that eliminate 80% of the current jobs we’re doing. Will disaster ensue?

It already happened. It was called the mechanization of agriculture. Go look up how many people were involved in the production and distribution of food as a percentage of the population in 1900. Then compare to the number of people working in agriculture in 1970. For yucks, throw in all the people that worked in the old 19th century transportation industries. And logging industries. And mining industries. And textile manufacture.

In fact, go make a list of ALL 19th century jobs, and the percentage of the population that worked in them, and compare it to 1970.

Wait… Aren’t robots making free food for everyone? Why would anyone starve?

If your answer is that people will have a monopoly on robots and artificially hold the prices high, I suggest you look into how the market actually works. If a robot can make food for almost free, then competition will ensure that food is almost free minus a small amount of profit. because as long as profits are high, competition will push prices down.

I don’t think you’re following the consequences of your own premise.

Sigh. They’ll bid prices down until they’re not willing to work for less, just like they do today. If demand for their services is high, the price will be higher. If the demand is low, it won’t be. If it’s so low that simulation desiigners can’t make a living, we won’t have a job description called ‘simulation designer’, and those people will do something else.

You mean food won’t be produced by the robots? That’s the one thing that’s going to remain expensive?

Mechanization of agriculture. At the time, most people were employed that way. Now, only a small percentage are.

I note that you still seem to think that the problem will manifest itself as the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. If the magical AI comes along, what if it replaced stock brokers, accountants, and CEOs, and the only jobs left were plumbers and electricians, and they wind up feeding off the dregs of the old elite?

That doesn’t quite fit in with the class warfare fear mongering, does it?

66

[QUOTE=Mijin]

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.
[/quote]

Sure, but I don’t see how that point undermines my claim. Again, it’s like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and shouts “so far so good” at each floor.

I agree. As I mentioned, most unskilled jobs these days actually require a good degree of mental sophistication to perform.

67

[QUOTE=begbert2]
How many more posts do we have to go before people accept that this thread is specifically about the not overly likely theoretical scenario where it does?
[/QUOTE]

That’s what we’re talking about. It’s not theoretical. It has already happened.

68

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Okay… So let’s assume that a magical robot fairy sprinkes robot dust on the land, and suddenly machines spring up that eliminate 80% of the current jobs we’re doing.
[/QUOTE]
Welcome to acknowledging that it’s possible to discuss a hypothetical. In return I will cheerfully acknowledge that the likelihood of anybody actually developing worker-replacing robots anytime before we all devolve back into monkeys is vanishingly small. There. Now we can move on with the discussion.

For the sake of the hypothetical, I’m going to assume that the world and its economy are not spectacularly dissimilar than the current one. I’m also going to assume that these robots were actually invented, such that somebody has designed them, owns the patents, and is at least initially going to want to charge for the things, and that persons who own them are going to want to charge for their labors. Ergo, not everybody will be able to get one. (I make this assumption because it seems most realistic. If you can’t stand to believe that robots could ever be invented, feel free to pretend that this one guy/company has the sole inside line to the magical robot fairy.)

So, the robots are displacing workers all over in massive quantities, because the robots are far cheaper labor than any human employee. And the robots can do any job that a human can, except for the ones they can’t, presumably ones that require creativity and innovation. (This much I think is implied by the OP.)

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Uh, no. If the market is functioning, you don’t get ‘overwhelmed’ with anything, because once supply reaches a certain point the price drops to the point where it makes no sense to build more. We will make exactly as much stuff as required to meet the demand for that stuff as measured against our incomes and our demands for other things we would like to buy.
[/QUOTE]
You’re the one who wants to route some significant fraction of the unemployed laborers into making handcraft goods, not me. From where I sit, most goods are already mass produced, by machines if not robots. So it seems to me that there probably already is a market for handcrafted goods, and it’s filling itself already without using all those members of the working populaion that currently aren’t making handcrafted goods.

But let’s suppose that everyone suddenly becomes all into buying handcrafted goods; maybe they hate the robots. (A lot of people would have reason, one supposes. Of course, they’re not the ones with money to spend right now.) How much more demand for handcrafted goods do you think the market can support? Enough to employ another 20% of the population? 30%? 60%? The whole 80%? Myself I think that a fair number would try but that lots of people wouldn’t be able to support themselves on it, even with the lowered prices of robot manufactured goods decreasing the cost of living.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
I suggest you look up Thorstein Veblen and study a bit about ‘conspicuous consumption’. We may become a ‘conspicuous consumption’ society, placing value on things simply because they are scarce. A crappy handmade candle may be more valued than a much better machine-made candle, because the value comes from the owner being able to say, “MY candles are all hand made.”

See: The diamond market.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, yeah. I don’t doubt for a moment that of those people still employed, some percentage of them will purchase enough specifically human-crafted goods to support some percentage of the population. Heck, that already happens, as you note. But how many more such artisans and craftsmen will be able to make livings this way? We have a lot of population to employ.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
No, that one job might not. But there could be myriad jobs like that. Maybe a big growth industry will be ‘golfing buddy’, and the middle class will be hiring golfing buddies like we hire maids today. But this is just rank speculation - the point I’m trying to get across is that the laws of economics don’t go away as we get wealthier - whether that wealth comes from automation, outsourcing, or the discovery of free energy.
[/QUOTE]
Right - but the laws of economics say nothing about everyone being able to find a job, or even everyone being included in the system - to the contrary, everyone who is unwilling to pay as high or sell as low as the equilibrium price is excluded from the market. And by adding the robots to the pot, we’re altering the scheme of the game - especially since the impression is that there are as many robots as it takes to fill all the positions they can. The effect is that they lower the equilibrum price of labor below the ability of human’s ability to sell at it, and thereby exclude humans from the labor market entirely - for all positions that robots can hold. That’s the economics of it.

Of course, with all these people unemployed, they’ll naturally stop buying things. Demand will fall. Prices and employment (including, one presumes, of human workers) will drop accordingly. This will, of course, not bring fully unemployed people back into the market, since they won’t be able to pay anything for things; however it does make ‘low-pay’ jobs like artisans and servants more feasable - though there will only be so much demand for handcrafted goods and golf buddies. (Remember, most people are unemployed; the unemployed don’t jure servants or buy handcarved candles.) Left to itself, the market would, I think, stabilize around here; with prices low enough that those who can get jobs as craftsmen or servants will be able to feed themselves and live, but not low enough of course to feed persons with no job at all - which from what I can see would still be a substantial percentage of the population.

Such people are simply excluded from the system - that’s economics! It doesn’t care who starves, as long as prices are in equilibrium it’s perfectly happy.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
How much money does it take? If robots are providing us with everything we want, what’s the difference between rich and poor?
[/QUOTE]
The robots aren’t just handing things out; they’re replacing employees in actual jobs and professions. As this will only remove the labor costs, this will not make things entirely free. And ‘not entirely free’ is still too expensive for ‘totally unemployed’, unless you’re going to go welfare state here.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
As I said, you have NO IDEA what the market will bring, and neither will I. But what you don’t have any evidence of is a discontinuity in the rules of the market brought about by mass automation. You claim this will be horribly destructive to society, but you’ve provided no evidence that this is the case, while I’ve provided plenty of evidence to the contrary - namely, the history of major societal changes brought about by automation, which have already displaced the kinds of percentages of workers you’re worried about, and society has adapted to the change every time. There’s nothing in economic theory that suggests it won’t continue to do so.
[/QUOTE]
Nothing in history is comparable to the proposed situation; there have always been other existing and emerging low-and-no training fields available when one field shuts down. Not so in the current situation: the robots will move into new fields as easily as humans, chasing them from job to job until the humans have been entirely chased out of all the prior and existing jobs that the humans can do. This has NEVER happened in history, so your historical evidence is quite literally irrelevent.

And I have enough education in economics to have SOME idea what the market will bring - though I admit I am only a neophyte in such matters and will willingly cede ground to someone with more knowledge in the field. Such knowledge would not of course include pointing at historical examples of people moving from one low-level job to another, as that clearly couldn’t happen in this hypothetical.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
As I said before, the key question isn’t ‘skilled’ vs ‘unskilled’, although class warriors like to present it that way, because they can then claim that the poor will get poorer and the rich richer. But in fact, automation cuts across class and intelligence lines. For example, draftsmen used to be a big part of an engineering team. Autocad and PC board design software decimated their ranks.

What determines whether or not a robot can do a job isn’t whether the job is currently done by ‘skilled’ or ‘intelligent’ people - it’s the nature of the job site and the complexity of the task. For example, it doesn’t take much in the way of skill to climb a ladder, walk across a pitched roof, and hold up an antenna. Go try to design a robot that can do it.

It does take intelligence to do math on a slide rule. But a computer can do much better easily.
[/QUOTE]
Right. Except that these robots are hypothetically able to do all the ‘manual labor’ type jobs. That means they can definitely climb a ladder, walk across a pitched roof, and hold up an antenna.

The OP presented this as being the difference between “skilled” and “unskilled”, and included the manual labor jobs in as ‘unskilled’, not me. I’m just playing by the rules of the scenario. (Though, this would be a much less interesting thing to discuss if the robots were limited to a few fields; yout historical examples would apply and we’d be done.)

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
If robots are making all our stuff, why do you need to ‘make a living’?
[/QUOTE]
'Cause the stuff still isn’t free.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Okay… So let’s assume that a magical robot fairy sprinkes robot dust on the land, and suddenly machines spring up that eliminate 80% of the current jobs we’re doing. Will disaster ensue?

It already happened. It was called the mechanization of agriculture. Go look up how many people were involved in the production and distribution of food as a percentage of the population in 1900. Then compare to the number of people working in agriculture in 1970. For yucks, throw in all the people that worked in the old 19th century transportation industries. And logging industries. And mining industries. And textile manufacture.

In fact, go make a list of ALL 19th century jobs, and the percentage of the population that worked in them, and compare it to 1970.
[/QUOTE]
Already addressed. These examples are non-applicable to the scenaro.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Wait… Aren’t robots making free food for everyone? Why would anyone starve?

If your answer is that people will have a monopoly on robots and artificially hold the prices high, I suggest you look into how the market actually works. If a robot can make food for almost free, then competition will ensure that food is almost free minus a small amount of profit. because as long as profits are high, competition will push prices down.

I don’t think you’re following the consequences of your own premise.
[/QUOTE]
As noted, the food ain’t free; it can’t be as there are other costs besides labor. And “not free” is sufficently not-free to be pretty expensive to the totally unemployed. Those are the consequences of my ‘premise’.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Sigh. They’ll bid prices down until they’re not willing to work for less, just like they do today. If demand for their services is high, the price will be higher. If the demand is low, it won’t be. If it’s so low that simulation desiigners can’t make a living, we won’t have a job description called ‘simulation designer’, and those people will do something else.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, they’ll flock to all those other jobs out there. Which we’ve determined that there must automatically be lots and lots of, because the market always provides. Using market magic. :rolleyes:

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
You mean food won’t be produced by the robots? That’s the one thing that’s going to remain expensive?
[/QUOTE]
The robots won’t be magically creating it out of thin air, so it’ll still cost something to produce. Ergo, it will be not-free. And if you happen to be totally unemployed…hmm, I seem to be repeating myself.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Mechanization of agriculture. At the time, most people were employed that way. Now, only a small percentage are.
[/QUOTE]
Another irrelevent historical example.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
I note that you still seem to think that the problem will manifest itself as the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. If the magical AI comes along, what if it replaced stock brokers, accountants, and CEOs, and the only jobs left were plumbers and electricians, and they wind up feeding off the dregs of the old elite?

That doesn’t quite fit in with the class warfare fear mongering, does it?
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know where you get this class warfare crap from. I’m not some kind of activist, I’m just not in denial about the terms of the hypothetical scenario.

As far as “classes” go, in this scenario, there are three classes: 1) people who own robots, or rather, enough robots that they can make piles more money than they need without lifting a finger; 2) people who are working for rather lesser wages in jobs that essentially exist to serve the ‘robotic elite’, and each other, and 3) people who can’t get any form of job at all, since the robots are doing all the mexican immigrant work and the market of class-2 type jobs is already at equilibrium and therefore can’t soak up any more workers.

I don’t care WHO is in which class; for all I care class 1 can be entirely full of former mexican immigrant farmworkers, who now happen to own armies of robots; I don’t mind if class 3 is entirely composed of former CEOs and Stockbrokers, who now can’t get a job at a lemonade stand. It doesn’t matter to me who’s where; the issue is that there would be a class 3, and I think that the economics of the situation imply that there’s going to be a large class 3, comprising a substantial percentage of the population.

69

This is getting pointless, because you’re not getting the point. What you’re asking of your ‘hypothetical’ is something along these lines:

“Let’s say that, for the sake of argument, the air had 10% more oxygen. What will the ecosystem look like in 1000 years? I want specifics! Won’t the bugs take over? They can get bigger! That will upset the whole ecosystem, and it will all collapse! Prove me wrong.”

The only answers to that hypothetical is:

  • no one knows the exact form a thousand years of evolution will take.
  • nonetheless, we have plenty of evidence from the past that when similar distruptions took place, the entire ecosystem didn’t collapse and destroy itself.
  • Therefore, we can guess that a new equilibrium will be reached with some new mix of animals and plants in some quantities, but it’s foolish to attempt to predict the details.

Your messages are full of ad hoc assumptions that you have absolutely no reason to make, and you’re trying to extrapolate conclusions from these to ‘prove’ your case that automation would cause the poor to be permanently unemployed. Your ‘scenario’ in the last message is cooked up out of thin air, and represents nothing more than fiction. There is no economic principle you can point to which gives you a roadmap to that particular scenario.

Hell, we couldn’t even predict what the internet would do to society starting from 20 years ago, when it was already completely designed, in place, and starting to take off. We had no idea if we’d all become messaging junkies, or whether we’d become rich from sharing of information, or poor from neglecting real productivity in favor of hanging out online. I could have constructed a plausible-sounding scenario that all information control would wind up in the hands of big ISP’s, and we’d have a new class of the ‘internet ignorant’ who couldn’t afford the outrageous connection fees, and the rich would reap all the benefits and the gap between them would grow like crazy. I could probably have even constructed a pretty plausible chain of events that could lead there. But that’s not exactly what happened, is it?

Some people have this narrative which they repeat every time there’s a societal change - the rich will take advantage of the change, and the poor will get screwed. Everything is always viewed through the filter of the never-ending class struggle. Mechanized agriculture? Only rich farmers will be able to afford machines, pushing the poor farmers under. Once they control the food supply, they can jack up prices and force all give all our wealth to them so they can eat! I actually heard variations on that argument long ago. Computers? Only the educated would be able to understand them, so the gap between the smart and the dull would grow into a chasm and leave half the country behind. I remember those arguments as well.

Now it’s robots. They’re coming, and obviously the people who will benefit are the rich, who will control the robots. The working class will have no jobs, and starve to death.

Uh huh.

70

Here’s the thing.

It’s a strange sort of robot where a robot can perform almost any job a human can, yet the prices of goods and services stay about the same. The argument was that all you eliminated were the labor costs, all the other costs are present. But at the end of the day all costs are labor costs. Raw materials aren’t counted as labor costs, but somebody had to go dig up the copper and iron and gravel.

If labor costs vanish in the copper mining industry, what happens to the price of copper? It plummets. Is this a disaster? No, it’s a cause for celebration, because now copper is dirt cheap. After a few rounds of automation and the prices of raw materials go through the floor. What about the price for capital goods…tools and factory equipment and cars and office buildings and computers? They plummet. What about the price for financial capital? Meaning, how hard is it to borrow money? Contrary to the scenario postulated by the OP, we’re going to see automated financial services long before we see a robot that can climb onto a roof and fix your antenna, or visit your home and unclog a drain. We’re going to see an AI Federal Reserve Chairman before we see an AI plumber.

In other words, the price of everything drops precipitiously. The robot factory owners don’t get outrageously rich, because the goods and services they provide are dirt cheap, not expensive. At this point, even if most people are on welfare it doesn’t matter much, because everything is cheap, even food, housing, fancy clothes, electronic gizmos, transportation, everything. Future welfare recipients would live better than upper-middle class people today.

As for the contention that no one would provide, say, entertainment for the masses, because the masses don’t have any way to pay for it, well, just look at the Straight Dope. We entertain each other here on the Dope for free, in fact we pay not to BE entertained, but to provide the entertainment! That’s right, when the man dances the piper pays him. User created content. Who cares if the next Rolling Stones can’t earn millions of dollars selling music, if we have thousands giving away music for free? People will make movies for free, sew clothes for free, music for free, write books for free, teach for free, dig up dinosaur bones for free, track comets for free, make pornography for free. And they already do all this for free TODAY, because our standard of living is so high and things are so cheap that no one has to work 80 hours in a coal mine just to keep from starving.

And in the postulated future of ubiquitous automation, things will be even cheaper by orders of magnitude. Heck, a generous robot tycoon could fund a massive welfare state privately out of his petty cash.

Economics is based on the reality that some things are scarce, and therefore we have to have some method of dividing up those scarce resources. Even in our robotopia there will be some sort of economics, because some things will be scarce. But our present day notions of what things are scarce and what things are abundant are likely to be totally wrong. And the job “Robot Factory CEO” is just as liable to be obsolete as “Waitress”.

71

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
This is getting pointless, because you’re not getting the point.
[/QUOTE]
Then what do you think the point is? Because it’s clearly NOT to whine pointlessly about the impending disaster of robot takeover like you seem to think it is. They’re not about to take over; you’ve said so yourself repeatedly!

So, what’s the point? Or rather, what’s your point; I’m here to discuss a hypothetical, and since you seem not to be, I have no idea what you think you’re doing.

Plus, this:

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
What you’re asking of your ‘hypothetical’ is something along these lines:

“Let’s say that, for the sake of argument, the air had 10% more oxygen. What will the ecosystem look like in 1000 years? I want specifics! Won’t the bugs take over? They can get bigger! That will upset the whole ecosystem, and it will all collapse! Prove me wrong.”
[/QUOTE]
This is absolutely, 100%, completely false. Stop trying to stick words in my mouth; I don’t care if it’s your last recourse due to a total incapability to form a coherent response to my actual argument, or whatever your personal problem is; just stop doing it. NOW.

I stated what I consider the hypothetical to be at the top of my prior post. If you want to gain some faint idea of what game I’m playing here, try reading it.

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Now it’s robots. They’re coming, and obviously the people who will benefit are the rich, who will control the robots. The working class will have no jobs, and starve to death.

Uh huh.
[/QUOTE]
Go eat bricks and shit gravel. Nobody around here thinks this is actually happening, no matter how desperate you are to throw that strawman around.

72

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
In other words, the price of everything drops precipitiously. The robot factory owners don’t get outrageously rich, because the goods and services they provide are dirt cheap, not expensive. At this point, even if most people are on welfare it doesn’t matter much, because everything is cheap, even food, housing, fancy clothes, electronic gizmos, transportation, everything. Future welfare recipients would live better than upper-middle class people today.
[/QUOTE]
Right, no argument here. But some people around here seem to be dead-set against the idea of a welfare state.

Realistically, if this scenario actually happened, sooner or later the US, at least, would convert to a place where everybody (or nearly everybody; we’re well-practiced at dropping people through the cracks) lives fat and happy on the back of our robot slaves, either because everyone owns their own robots, or because wealth and prosperity are flowing out from the few robot owners to everyone else via a wealth redistribution/welfare system. In fact, the only thing that prevents me from saying that a conversion to such a system is inevitable is that there are places in the world where the wealthy elite hoard enough wealth to make a fair stab at caring for their literally impoverished people, but manage to keep it all to themselves anyway.

73

Well, the other thing is, this robotopia is going to include Von Neumann machines. In other words, a robot factory will be able to produce a team of robots that can go someplace and build a new robot factory, which will produce robots that are capable of building another robot factory.

So scenario with a shortage of robots, with a wealthy few owning vast robot plantations, and the rest of us on welfare, seems kind of silly. What’s the difference between a RoboCorp stockholder who has his every whim fulfilled by an army of robots, and a welfare recipient who has his every whim fulfilled by an army of robots?

74

[QUOTE=begbert2]
Right, no argument here. But some people around here seem to be dead-set against the idea of a welfare state.
[/QUOTE]

Well, I’m dead set against the idea of a welfare state because, you know, the postulated robots don’t actually exist.

And even we do have superamazing future robots of the future, I think Sam’s scenario is much more realistic. We won’t need a welfare system that supports 80% of the population, because those people who’s carpet cleaning jobs are replaced by carpet cleaning robots will do other things. It’s only when we are required to stipulate that 80% of the population can’t work anymore does it make sense to say that we’ll just include a modest welfare payment.

But we don’t even have to call it “welfare”. For instance, the government provides all sorts of services that are free for the end user, and we don’t usually call those “welfare”. And people give away services to their friends and community all the time, and often those aren’t called “welfare”. I can imagine, for instance, people running restaurants that give away food for free to anyone who walks in, and the people staffing the restaurant do so purely for fun, just like you and I post here on the Dope purely for fun.

In a future affluent society many things that we pay for today will just be given away and not neccesarily by the government. And we see things like this even today…companies giving away free hats and tshirts, free samples at the supermarket, libraries, advertising supported free newspapers, and so on. In a really affluent society companies could offer free houses who test-drives the new OmniMegaCorp Whirlagig 2108. Not a welfare state as we know it, just a society where you can live a comfortable lifestyle and pay for it by watch TV for a few hours a week or answering a few survey questions or something equally trivial.

75

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
Well, I’m dead set against the idea of a welfare state because, you know, the postulated robots don’t actually exist.
[/QUOTE]
They certainly don’t, so any actual welfare states that may or may not occur have nothing whatsoever to do with this discussion, unless and until such robots do exist. Which they don’t.

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
And even we do have superamazing future robots of the future, I think Sam’s scenario is much more realistic. We won’t need a welfare system that supports 80% of the population, because those people who’s carpet cleaning jobs are replaced by carpet cleaning robots will do other things. It’s only when we are required to stipulate that 80% of the population can’t work anymore does it make sense to say that we’ll just include a modest welfare payment.
[/QUOTE]
Well, truth be told of the theorized %80 was just the guess at the number of people who would initially lose their jobs to robots. There have been passable arguments given that some substantial portion of those people might be able to find other, human-only work, if they had to have a job and make a wage. I still have grave doubts that the market will magically create another many millions of jobs, just because the robots took a bunch of the old ones, though. So I still theorize a significant level of hypothetical unemployment, where the ‘do other things’ that people are going to be doing is composed of things they’re not getting paid for.

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
But we don’t even have to call it “welfare”. For instance, the government provides all sorts of services that are free for the end user, and we don’t usually call those “welfare”. And people give away services to their friends and community all the time, and often those aren’t called “welfare”. I can imagine, for instance, people running restaurants that give away food for free to anyone who walks in, and the people staffing the restaurant do so purely for fun, just like you and I post here on the Dope purely for fun.
[/QUOTE]
Or volunteering their robots to run such places, while they sit around the cafe and yak with the locals, sure. Assuming that the robots weren’t entirely, 100% owned by social reprobates like myself, they’d make it real painless for their owners to do a little community service.

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
In a future affluent society many things that we pay for today will just be given away and not neccesarily by the government. And we see things like this even today…companies giving away free hats and tshirts, free samples at the supermarket, libraries, advertising supported free newspapers, and so on. In a really affluent society companies could offer free houses who test-drives the new OmniMegaCorp Whirlagig 2108. Not a welfare state as we know it, just a society where you can live a comfortable lifestyle and pay for it by watch TV for a few hours a week or answering a few survey questions or something equally trivial.
[/QUOTE]
Hmm, I’m not sure this is applicable, on account of the fact that all these giveaways are done entirely and for the sole purpose of marketing and selling a product. While I can see testers and those who actually are employees being lavished with gifts and benefits, I don’t think there would be much incentive to give surveys (and accompanying rewards) to persons who are discernably without means to eventually buy the product.

76

Look, either the robots make everything so plentiful that there are no scarcities of any sort, every good you can imagine is dirt cheap. This would make poverty as we know it a thing of the past (there may well still be “poor” but they’ll be very well off by current standards).

Or there are scarcities, in which case there will be economically viable activities filling those scarcities. That is, gainful employment providing needed or wanted goods and services.

You simply can’t have “everything is done by robots leaving no work for people” co-existing with “some people are left with significant needs unmet, and no way to meet them”. At least, not without radically altering our current economic and societal structures. I suppose you could have a sociopathic dictator with a robot army oppressing the unwashed masses, using these amazing robots to meet his every whim and those of his friends. But that has nothing to do with mechanization, just with one powerful person doing malicious things. You seem to want to talk about what would happen in a democratic, mostly capitalist society, and you’ve been answered quite thoroughly. Your imagined mechanization has already happened, and we’re all the better for it. If you want to argue that more of the same is going to produce radically different results in the future, you need to provide us for some reason to think that future mechanization is going to be different from past mechanization.

77

[QUOTE=Gorsnak]
Look, either the robots make everything so plentiful that there are no scarcities of any sort, every good you can imagine is dirt cheap. This would make poverty as we know it a thing of the past (there may well still be “poor” but they’ll be very well off by current standards).

Or there are scarcities, in which case there will be economically viable activities filling those scarcities. That is, gainful employment providing needed or wanted goods and services.

You simply can’t have “everything is done by robots leaving no work for people” co-existing with “some people are left with significant needs unmet, and no way to meet them”. At least, not without radically altering our current economic and societal structures. I suppose you could have a sociopathic dictator with a robot army oppressing the unwashed masses, using these amazing robots to meet his every whim and those of his friends. But that has nothing to do with mechanization, just with one powerful person doing malicious things. You seem to want to talk about what would happen in a democratic, mostly capitalist society, and you’ve been answered quite thoroughly. Your imagined mechanization has already happened, and we’re all the better for it. If you want to argue that more of the same is going to produce radically different results in the future, you need to provide us for some reason to think that future mechanization is going to be different from past mechanization.
[/QUOTE]
Except that with our real mechanization, there’s still people without jobs, who rely on the dreaded welfare to meet their needs. If you want to argue that more of the same is going to produce radically different results in the future, you need to provide us for some reason to think that future mechanization is going to be different from past mechanization. (Besides that it in the hypothetical would likely be harder to find jobs, which would make the problem worse.)

You can have “everything is done by robots leaving no work for people” and “some people are left with significant needs unmet, and no way to meet them” together by the simple expedient of “the robots and their owners aren’t giving things to the people with no work.” Goods don’t automatically distribute themselves; the people who have them have to give them or sell them to those who don’t.

78

Except that living on welfare today will generally result in a higher standard of living than being middle class before the mechanization of agriculture. So what, exactly, are you worried about?

Anyways, the point I was making which completely eluded you is that if the robot owners are hoarding all the robot goods and services for themselves and their elite friends, the have-no-robot segment of society can just build their own non-robotic economy, producing and selling goods amongst themselves. You are trying to postulate both unmet needs and no available employment simultaneously. But if there’s an unmet need, I can employ myself in filling it. Or, if I can’t, there’s something more going on, like an evil dictator preventing me from acting freely.

79

[QUOTE=Gorsnak]
Except that living on welfare today will generally result in a higher standard of living than being middle class before the mechanization of agriculture. So what, exactly, are you worried about?
[/QUOTE]
I see a welfare economy as being a viable ‘answer’ to the situation; as has been stated, cheap robot labor (in combination with seller competition) would drive prices down to such a degree that the well-supplied robot owners (or robot-owning government) can easily afford to support all their citizens in relative comfort, whether those citizens have jobs of their own or not. I am primarily arguing against the stance offered by Sam Stone, that ‘the market will provide’, jobs will magically appear for all, and the market will make everything wonderful; despite the fact that this scenario turns the preferences of the market explicitly against the former-manual-laborer. Besides that outragous position, nothing anyone’s proposed seems too invalid, though I might occasinally question things that seem not-quite-right, like advertisement-driven handouts to a class of non-customers and the like.

[QUOTE=Gorsnak]
Anyways, the point I was making which completely eluded you is that if the robot owners are hoarding all the robot goods and services for themselves and their elite friends, the have-no-robot segment of society can just build their own non-robotic economy, producing and selling goods amongst themselves. You are trying to postulate both unmet needs and no available employment simultaneously. But if there’s an unmet need, I can employ myself in filling it. Or, if I can’t, there’s something more going on, like an evil dictator preventing me from acting freely.
[/QUOTE]
This eluded me because I don’t think it’s correct. The arbitrary person A’s problem would be that they are unable to find a job. This would be due to the lack of generally unmet needs - he can’t break into the workforce because he can’t convince an employer that the employer needs him instead of a cheaper robot. As a result of this (absent welfare), he is unable to draw a wage at all, preventing him from purchasing even the cheaper robot-supplied goods. (This of course doesn’t apply to anyone who can find a job, or happens to be a robot owner. Or the ones with a healthy supply of savings either, I suppose, for as long as that lasts.)

So, the person is both unable to enter the robot-supplied market, and is also simultaneously in competition with the robots if he decides to try and start his own separate economy - he has to convince people to buy from him, not the robots, despite the fact that the robots are cheaper and his prospective customers are likely poor. So, while I suppose a sufficiently determined bunch could isolate themselves enough to establish their own economy (perhaps fanatic luddites?), it seems unlikely to me that such a group could build up any value without its members going and spending it outside the group.

80

I think what we’re down to at this point is that in begbert2’s science fiction hypothetical in which there is, by definition, no solution, there is no solution. No possibile solution offered so far is acceptable, apparently, so that’s that. It’s circular, of course, but that appears to be what he wants.

But I don’t even understand how the hypothetical works. The logical, inevitable end state of the hypothetical scenario as it is now being presented is that only one person would end up owning all the robots, since, if our hypothetical robots can do any sort of manual labour needed, the first person to build a robot-building robot wins, and will quickly drive out all inferior robots. The world would be divided into the Robot Tycoon, surrounded by the robot army he’d need to prevent the rest of us from killing him, and everyone else, and he would, under this hypothetical, have nobody to sell anything to, because, according to the hypothetical scenario, all the other people in the world have no jobs or money.

So what good are the robots? How do they have any value, or confer any advantage, upon Robot Tycoon if nobody can buy anything? The robots are of almost no value at all except to build and maintain Robot Tycoon’s personal mansion.