Have you even met a child? I mean, I love my children and all, but what a demonstration of marginal utility. I wouldn’t sell one of my two kids for a million dollars, but I wouldn’t give you a nickel for another one.
I’m not sure past results are a good predictor of future performance, here. Have you seen this graph?
I found this comment on a blog post and thought it was very insightful:
As I stated in my reply, it may be that the looming mass of Boomers receiving old-age entitlements will save us economically rather than doom us as is so often stated or implied. Maybe what will end up happening is that instead of raising the retirement age, it will slowly be lowered!
Your whole post is a just-so story. The crash of 2008 proves that the people at the top have no self-control where amassing wealth is concerned. And human history shows that the people at the top have no concern about the people at the bottom. These factors, combined with our computer-assisted ability to automate just about everything, points to a potentially dire outcome for practically all of us. It’s democratic socialism or death for us all, baby.
I disagree, I think it had plenty of tangible information including the cite showing that, despite a long-term trend of automation, long-term employment levels have remained the same.
I’m typing this right now from within China. The credit crunch may be all we can think about in the West, but a far more significant story has been an incredible rise out of poverty: the last 2 decades have seen more people pulled out of poverty than ever before, and China has been at the forefront of that.
I’m old enough to remember a time when chinese manufacturing was only ever mentioned in pitying tones; that it was all about the west exploiting the east. Nobody talks like that now. And how did china do it? Largely by retreating from socialism, and moving towards free-market principles, “baby”.
The talk nowadays is of the chinese “stealing” western jobs, and “exploiting” Africa, all based on a similar ignorance of economics. There is no finite number of jobs in the world, nor finite amount of money.
UNemployment levels. People are kept out of those figures by other means. Ever more people go to university, and amass debt with not much to show for it. Ever more people go to prison. Every more people live on pensions and other hand-outs. All those people are unemployed, but they’re not “unemployed” and don’t show up as such on statistics.
Before I respond, I want to make sure we’re on the same page:
Are you saying that; due largely to automation, real unemployment has increased significantly, but official figures hide this (deliberately or otherwise), by not including pensioners, students etc in the unemployment figures? And by “real” unemployment we mean people who want to work, but cannot get a job.
Is that your position?
We’re getting closer:
And on the debate just upthread about whether “long term employment levels” have remained constant, a look at this graph shows a clear downward trend over the past few years. Note too that most of that decline has taken place after the Great Recession was over, and during a period in which the unemployment rate has itself been falling.
Google is seeing the future, and that it is better to be the one who builds the robots rather than be the one who is displaced by the robots.
Look, long term, robots may lead to a future in which human beings are freed from having to labor to earn a living, perhaps resulting in an explosion of creativity and human happiness. But I worry about the transitional phase, especially in a world where most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of powerful oligarchies that don’t give a shit about the rest of society. Only well-grounded social democracies are likely to make that transition with minimal human suffering. And “well-grounded social democracy” is NOT a term I would use to describe the U.S. right now.
Yet ultimately it should become relatively worthless to be the company that builds the robots as well. Being the 22nd century’s best quarterback, or winning the 137th season of The Voice, will likely be more lucrative (to the extent that wealth is important by then–which, as I said upthread, will mostly revolve around who gets to live in the best locations and eat at the best restaurants, get good seats for the hottest ticket on Broadway, etc.).
Oh, I hear ya. That’s the basis of the uncertainty expressed in the last two paragraphs of my OP. But I am cautiously optimistic, as I think we are headed in the right direction politically. Gerrymandering and the tenacity of old white voters in off-year elections is keeping the Tea Party crowd in the mix for now. But they are so very much against the tide. Where is the wave of replacement voters ready to sweep in to buttress their movement twenty years from now? I don’t see Millennials and Latinos voting the Koch brothers’ way, no matter how much money they throw at the political system.
There was a backlash against Great Society “welfare liberalism” in the '70s and '80s to be sure. But that was before there was sufficient automation to pad the safety net and really allow for an economic system in which a large percentage of the population can be out of the labour force without really impinging on the hard-working “silent majority”. There will of course continue to be people who will get hopping mad and insist that this is just what is happening; but as long as the overall standard of living keeps going up for the average person, those who wave their copies of The Fountainhead and bellyache about “makers vs. takers” are not going to carry the day. And as the automation process continues apace, they will look sillier and sillier, until they sound first like gold bugs, then just come across as quaint curiosities like the Amish.
First of all this graph shows a small decline over a much smaller timeframe than the graph I previously linked – an order of magnitude smaller.
And in fact I didn’t go back far enough as most estimates of US unemployment from 1850 to 1900 also show it bouncing around the 6% mark, like the 20th century. If automation puts people out of jobs, period, how could there have been such mechanization in that time, and no enduring change to unemployment levels?
Secondly, on this distinction between unemployment and employment levels – the latter figure is much more misleading. Just because someone is in education does not mean they cannot get a job, for example. I myself, at the age of 30, used my own savings to study for a year and retrain in another industry, though I could have continued in my current job, which I hated.
If increases in higher education is a smokescreen for increasing poverty levels then…we should also see stats of increasing poverty levels. We don’t.
I think we may be talking past each other here. I’m not saying, like the Luddites, “oh noes, all this mechanisation is destroying jobs and leaving the poor workers desperate to find jobs but unable to do so”. No no, not at all. I would fully expect that unemployment rate to stay pretty steady, even as the labour force participation rate continues to drop, down into the 50s, 40s, and who knows how far down. At the same time, the safety net will be increased, the overall wealth of society will rise, standards of living will go up even for all those people not in the workforce.
IOW people will be perfectly content not to be in the labour force and will not tell government surveyers that they are “unemployed”, nor will they beat the pavement looking for work or send out their CVs. (I can imagine a lot of them doing some little craft or the occasional odd job to call themselves “self employed” for social reasons, without earning significant income from their “businesses”.) This state of affairs will cause a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of “bootstrap” conservatives, but everyone else will just go on with their lives and ignore them.
BTW, if you look at statistics for *male *participation in the labour force, the trend is more stark as it is not hidden by the increase in female participation in the wake of the women’s movement.
In the past couple days I have come across two news stories that are uncannily resonant with this discussion. Someone in this thread posted a link to an online story or novel that was not terribly well written in a literary sense, but which had some very interesting futurism notions in it. The most innovative, and seemingly unique, element was that it predicted the “rise of the robots” would not initially happen with robots at all–but with software that would tell humans how to do their jobs down to a ultra-micromanaging level.
This first story from NPR, about how UPS electronically monitors everything from the amount of distance a driver backs up, to how long it takes them to unlock a door, and a zillion other little elements of their work, is eerily reminiscent of that scenario:
Another issue we have been discussing is what happens when things that were formerly scarce become essentially free, or at least very cheap and plentiful. This New York Times piece about the future of diamonds and Picasso paintings in an era of increasingly sophisticated 3-D printers comes to a similar conclusion as I have: that real estate in an attractive location will be the status symbols of the future, to a much greater extent even than now.
I haven’t read the entire thread, but the idea that robots will only take over menial jobs is a fallacy. Robots are becoming better and better at cognition, reading, comprehension, language, etc. Robots will be vastly superior to humans at skilled tasks like art, medicine, law, etc. in a few decades. There is pretty much nothing a human can do that a robot won’t be able to do better within our lifetime (or if not in that timeframe, probably within the century). That includes things like interpreting emotions, being a good listener, being a physician, creating art (or determining what art you’d enjoy) etc. Robots will not only be smarter than us, they will have better social and artistic skills.
Bill Joy was right when he said the future doesn’t need us.
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
The idea of robots doing the menial work while we humans do the artistic, touchy feely and intellectual work is never going to happen. The robots will be vastly superior to those things too.
The Watson machine from IBM is rapidly becoming an expert clinician.
As far as a post scarcity society, a major problem with that is that we may run out of natural resources before we can achieve that. That will take some adjusting to. There is also the fact that the robots will be earned by the capital class, and unless there is mass redistribution of wealth nobody will have the money (since jobs will be eliminated) to buy the products.
Here is a book worth reading.
It talks about a period of upset when mass unemployment and concentrated capital causes social unrest. He prescribes a mandatory wage redistribution for everyone.
I own and have read that book. I strongly suggest though that you read through the thread and then weigh in. There’s a lot of great stuff in those three pages.
Could this be why no alien civilizations have stopped by to say hello?
It’s not so much that the problem of interstellar travel is intractable, but rather that all other civilizations eventually become too fat and lazy to be arsed?
Ha, like in Wall-E? I like it.
I dunno, I think at the very least we’d set the robots to the task of exploring the universe, too. They’re actually much better suited to it than we are in some ways - they don’t mind G-forces, are less susceptible to radiation, don’t need food or air, and they don’t get bored during journeys between stars.
Today my wife called tech support because our Internet was acting up. Throughout the entire call, she never spoke to a live human, but she did interact with a kind of rudimentary AI, who was convincing enough that although my wife knew it was a computer (Turing test!), still referred to with third person female pronouns when describing it to me. This 'bot asked some questions (when my wife replied that yes, there were lights illuminated on the modem, the 'bot responded “Hmmm…” before going on to the next step), tested the connection, and gave directions to my wife on what steps to take. Then “she” tested the connection again, and found that “her” advice had worked, asked my wife if she needed help with anything else, and then wished her a nice day. Pretty much the same as tech support from that company has done in the past, except that those people are now out of a job.
They’re definitely getting better! I was fooled, just a couple days ago, by a cold caller who was a robot, not a man. He even engaged in the “Hello?” “Hello?” “Hello?” dance that happens these days with a poor initial connection. Finally he asked something cogent, like, “Are you interested in furthering your education.” I was silent for a while, trying to think of a polite way to say no, and he took my silence as definitive…and hung up.
Artificial discourtesy!