Sure, but even in that situation it’s not simply the case that if a robot does a job then that means numberOfJobsForHumans–;
The robot has just made that company more productive and that will boost the economy, ultimately creating jobs. It also makes certain enterprises feasible when previously they were not, also creating jobs.
This might be seen as idealistic thinking, but look at the data. US unemployment has wobbled around the same spot for decades, even as millions of jobs have been automated / programmed away.
What companies choose to do with their profits and whether there are tax loopholes is an entirely separate point from automation and whether it increases productivity.
If you’re asking me, sure, I think we should make it harder to move profits offshore, whether or not a company uses automation.
However I disagree with any implication that being able to make widgets cheaper means companies simply pocket more money and nothing else changes. We’ve been mechanizing tasks for thousands of years. When costs come down prices usually follow since companies are in competition and want to increase their market share.
Right. These are productive companies and productivity is continuing to increase.
The question is whether this decreases the number of jobs overall. Well, we see no long-term trend of increasing unemployment so clearly jobs are being created elsewhere. Just like they always have been when we’ve mechanized tasks in the past.
And whether it would be a bad thing if one day humans were put out of work… I would say no, since it implies humans would be getting their needs met without working in such a scenario. As I always say: The fewer people that can afford AI-made goods/services, the less effect they have on the economy.
You said, “The robot has just made that company more productive and that will boost the economy, ultimately creating jobs. It also makes certain enterprises feasible when previously they were not, also creating jobs.”
I was saying, making the company more productive will NOT create more jobs and make certain enterprises feasible, because companies are sending the profits created by that enhanced productivity overseas, not reinvesting it.
Most of the job growth we’ve experienced has been in shitty paying retail jobs and the “sharing” economy (things like Uber) whose most notable feature is that people can’t make good money from them.
I agree … in the long term. But in the short term, I see America driven by a wealthy oligarchy that does not give one shit about regular Americans. A lot of Americans could be rendered jobless, homeless and poverty stricken in a society with a tiny, tattered excuse for a social safety net and a government run by people who don’t give a shit. I think it looks kinda likely right now. Once we get the social safety net together and base our economy on taking care of people instead of extracting wealth from them and discarding them if you can’t, things will be great. But getting there might be hell. I’d rather it not be. I have chldren.
Some companies are sending some of their profits abroad. This is not proof of an overall trend, let alone one caused by automation.
And generally companies that stash profits cede market share to companies that reinvest and/or cut prices.
(I won’t say that happens 100% of the time, as the markets are not perfect and sometimes monopolies can spring up, but that’s not the norm and is also a separate issue from automation).
I don’t see such an obvious pattern in the data. Seems like a much bigger spread with large growth areas in software development and nursing.
Agree that the US is not well placed for such a social transition.
No doubt; however, whatever I think of the fellow, I have never heard that he was a particularly vindictive employer, and as far as unearned Universal Income could be implemented, he would be 1000 x more likely to agree than professional welfare cutters such as Romney or Mrs. Clinton.
Not that they ‘hate’ poor people, merely that the undeserving had their chance to be as wealthy as they, and wilfully chose their lot through poor decisions which should not be rewarded.
Ridiculous charge against Hillary, but let’s please not let this develop (degenerate) into yet another thread arguing about electoral politics. There are plenty of those and I’d much rather see this one stay on topic.
Forgive me I haven’t read the whole thread so perhaps someone has addressed this. I don’t think this fundamental premise of your position is as clear as you keep asserting.
Cheaper production through automation means less profit per unit. It also means more ability for fewer and fewer people to control the production, which consolidates the remaining profit into fewer and fewer richer people.
Take agriculture: actually “farmers” today are very, very rich. Sure, they don’t make as much per unit of product as they used to pre-industrialisation. But automation allows consolidation. As farming becomes ever more systematised, you don’t need a thousand knowledgeable and motivated farm owners. You just need ten guys with advanced qualifications in agriculture and management. So whichever farm owner can afford it buys out his neighbour and runs his place too. Over and over until you have massive highly profitable corporations who are, in the Western world, the "farmers’ of today.
Same with industry. You give the example of factory owners in China unable to make much because their products are so easy to make that their profit is marginal. Firstly there is an emerging rich class out of China and they come to at least a substantial extent from manufacturing. Secondly, China is not a stable situation, it’s in flux. There are numerous small factories there but the same thing will happen as is happening or has happened with agriculture. Automation will mean that it becomes easier and easier for a small few to control ever larger production capacity. The slightly bigger fish will eat the smaller fish till there are a few mega-manufacturers who will be mega rich.
Yes, I guess that’s correct but I don’t think it alters the position much if at all. Manufacturers will never charge nothing for what they produce (otherwise why bother?). If they make a penny from each unit they sell, they won’t become poor. They will just consolidate until they have so much of the market that they sell enough units to be rich.
In other words, Lemur866 says as the value of things produced becomes less, factory owners will become less rich because there is less value derived from production. But the other possibility is that fewer owners become rich. And (heavy government regulation aside) since the natural tendency of capitalism is towards monopoly, that is what will occur IMHO.
This is a refutation of course to the idea that the rise of robots and automation will be countered by the creation of new jobs that never existed before to replace the old jobs being lost. I have argued that the much more capable robots and automation will be the ones who do the new jobs. You can reprogram software and robots faster and easier than you can train workers. But this stat seems to indicate that these miraculous new jobs don’t arise in numbers that will compensate for major inroads into employment.
This begs the question, however: if this does not occur, how did workers survive the deep and pervasive disruption caused by the collapse of ag employment due to farm machinery at a time when not even the concept of a social safety net existed? The answer of course is that many did not survive the move to the cities, their lives were greatly shortened, and that many who did experienced horrible living standards, which were only masked by how horrible living standards were for the rural poor prior to the industrial revolution.
I suspect this is why we are seeing the despair death of white male lower class Americans … they are the canary in the coal mine we call the American economy. Of course, many on this board are not lower class white males, and will only believe it as it begins to affect THEM … then they’ll be warbling … well, gaspiing ahd choking … a different tune.
Yes, but the thing is, what is a factory? It’s a pile of capital goods used to produce stuff. The whole point of the robot revolution is that it’s easier and easier to toss some capital goods into a pile, shovel in some inputs, and watch the outputs get cranked out on the other side. How does manufacturing become a monopoly when automated production gets so cheap that people have fabrication units in their garages that can produce the same sorts of goods that 100 years ago required giant steam engines and thousands of workers and vast foundries and so on?
And so manufacturing itself becomes a commodity. How can you get rich producing things that millions of other people can also produce at competitive prices? If you own the only Model T factory in the world, and nobody else knows how to manufacture Model Ts then you get very wealthy selling cars. Then when other people learn how to manufacture cars they make lots of money selling cars, and you make a lot less.
Except in this case instead of methods for producing cars, we’re creating methods for producing factories. Order your FabricaTron 3000 online and it shows up at your doorstep 2 days later and you’re now a Capitalist who owns the means of production. What are you going to do to extract value? Nothing, because even if you have a great idea to make shit that nobody else has thought of, within a few days your design has been copied all over the world and anybody with a FabricaTron 3000 can have one.
And every factory owner in the world is subject to the same competition. Sure, some things are going to be hard to manufacture from a unit that fits in your garage, and there’s always going to be profits for people who make stuff that it turns out to be very hard to make. But as a class “Industrialists” will no longer be the economic elite, just like “Landowning Aristocrats” stopped being the elite 200 years ago.
And again, selling 100 million widgets and making a dollar profit on each one really will make you rich. But how do you get that dollar? Especially since the consumers don’t have any money anymore because they’re all out of work?
It does nothing of the kind. 100 years ago nearly 40% of American jobs were on the farm. Those have been almost all automated away. We still have plenty of jobs.
Both Captor and Lemur make important points. While the industrial and agricultural revolutions ultimately created widespread prosperity, the transitional period created widespread misery and concentrated wealth. The oft-mocked Luddites were acting rationally for themselves and their families.
But Lemur’s last point is important: the painful transition may be shortened because corporate lobbyists join the effort to get a universal income. If certain advanced countries are early adopters and they see benefits for the wealthy as well as the poor and middle class, this will serve as a powerful example for others to follow.
That’s certainly what I hope will happen. I just hope that ideology doesn’t blind corporate owners to reality in that case. The top tenth of the one percent tend to be very conservative, much more so than the one percent. And they are the ones that call the shots. Could make for a rough transition even if the Euros, say, adopt a universal income and everything goes swimmingly for them.
BTW, while composing my previous post on my phone, I noticed an improvement in the Google Android AI that is a sign of how these things incrementally get better in ways that would have been utterly amazing to us a few years ago. It was when I was composing the following sentence:
“The oft-mocked Luddites were acting rationally for themselves and their families.”
For those not familiar with suggested text, both the Android and Apple mobile platforms will suggest the next word as you type. It used to be that it only suggested words after you had started the first couple letters. But now it will immediately make a suggestion based on your previous word and probably based on the rest of the sentence (or even paragraph?) as well. But I’ve never seen it make a suggestion this uncannily accurate. After I typed the word “for”, every remaining word was suggested for me without my having to type in the letters.
The first three of those were impressive enough, but on a par with the best I have seen it do in the past. But I couldn’t get over its suggestion of “families”. Where did that come from? How would this relatively rudimentary AI know that was where I was headed? Even though there is nothing that looks particularly different about the interface, I don’t believe it was capable of doing that a year ago or even a few months ago.
You aren’t talking about currently imaginable technology here, you are talking about magic. Let’s say I want to manufacture (choosing a random object from my desk) a computer joystick. OK so I need in my garage stocks of copper, several sorts of plastic, steel (spring and mild), ceramic, aluminium, fibreglass, rubber, carbon and the exotic substances used for creation of modern electronics. And that’s just the substances I can think of off the top of my head without taking the cover off, which I haven’t done for a while. And that is one single object from my desk. If want to be able to make most of the stuff I use in life, the list of basic ingredients is going to multiply by ten.
Meanwhile I can buy a joystick for cheap now, and as automation increases I’ll be able to buy it for substantially less.
You think I’m going to bother with having a thousand exotic and not so exotic materials in my house when I can get a joystick flown to me by drone for $2 from a specialist factory that churns them out by the million?
No matter how amazing the theoretical abilities of your in-garage manufacturing device become, it is just plain monstrously inefficient to be distributing all the required inputs for all household items to every household instead of just to specialist factories.
This logic doesn’t follow at all. Nobody claimed that the created jobs had to be new kinds of job, let alone that new kinds of job should alone be able to make up for all the jobs displaced by automation.
Maybe an example will make this clearer.
I do a business plan in 2015 for a venture that will employ a salesman and a truck driver. I crunch the numbers and find it will be difficult to turn a profit so I shelve the idea. 2025 I do the same thing but this time I only need to employ a salesmen as the truck can drive itself. Now the business is feasible so I put out an ad for salesman wanted.
Salesman is not a new kind of job.
Is the implication that people dying off made up for a decrease in the absolute number of jobs?
If so, neither is supported by the data; in the US, population increased sharply, as did immigration. And still there was a huge demand for workers.
And yes, living standards were pretty horrible compared to the modern developed world, but so of course was the case prior to the industrial revolution. People chose to go the cities and work in coal mines because, as hard as it is for us to appreciate now, they felt it was a better option for them.
No, not really. You said “many did not survive”, as if people were dying off like rats. There was no great layoff of farmers; they just retired while their children went to college or learned other trades.