For the record, I am no Luddite and I don’t think we should curtail technology so that buggy whip manufacturers can send their kids to college.
That said, automation will continue to displace more and more workers, often shifting them into low wage service sector jobs. Historically, new technologies have led to workers getting new, better jobs, but this is not an economic law. Transportation workers is apparently the number one sector of the American economy, employing something like 3 million workers. When driverless cars and trucks take over, where will they go? Jobs like repairing the cars and developing new ones won’t go away anytime soon, but I don’t see the demand from those new sectors filling the gap.
The upside to all this automation is cheaper goods and services. I could even see some of these becoming so cheap that they could be bought in bulk and given away, although there will certainly be a lot of pushback against that. I also see displacement due to automation (and to a lesser extent, globalization) as happening well before free food and clothes being distributed to the masses.
So, what to do?
Pushing back against technology is a losing proposition and, IMHO, a stupid one. Unions might force some employers to hang on to existing workers, but new employers could potentially avoid hiring many people in the first place.
New job sectors can’t necessarily be counted on to come in and save everyone. According to Robert Reich, a big part of the wage gap that we see comes from automation.
What do you think? Is the proposition full of shit? If so, why?
At some point people have to realize that automated production will replace the majority of workers. It’s going to be impossible for people to compete against machines in the workplace, we need to face this or the machines will suffer the same fate as the automated looms.
No one knows. It’s very hard to predict where future jobs growth will be or what new technologies will spur that growth. All I can say is that human labor is a resource, so if one sector doesn’t need it anymore than another will find a way to utilize it, and based on the past when this has come up over and over I’d say that the resource will be utilized somehow.
If you look back on what job sectors exist today that didn’t exist 20 or 50 years ago you’d be amazed. And, the thing is, we are in the position of some guy in the 60’s seeing automation making serious inroads and threatening millions of, say, auto manufacturing jobs and asking ‘What will take their place?? What COULD take there place??’. No one foresaw the rise of the personal computer, internet commerce, cell phones or the rest, so there was no way they could predict what sectors would grow to utilize labor. My job and really most of IT either didn’t exist back then or was so small as to be nearly invisible.
I think we are headed to a time when many jobs will be displaced by automation. You can see it in the fact that many stores have automated checkout today, that some restaurant chains have automatic order machines where you can order your meal and pay for it, requiring a lot less human workers in the mix…and we are just at the tip of the iceberg at this point. It’s coming and it’s going to be huge.
What will people do for work when this becomes wide spread? Not sure, but my guess is there will be new technology sectors opening up that will absorb some of them. Others might be absorbed into new sectors in energy, some into health care or bio-medicine that are on the cusp of breaking out, still others into things we can’t even envision today. Remember that as countries like China become richer and their populations have access to more technology that will mean huge new markets for us as well as everyone else. Then there is space exploration and exploitation…perhaps THAT will be the brave new world requiring human labor.
What I AM fairly confident of is that just as in the past when there were huge shifts, we aren’t going to see all of the poor people out on the streets with no jobs or the middle class collapsing because there is no work, and only rich people living high on the hog because they have robots to do everything. From a practical perspective there is no point in making cell phones or tablets or cars or whatever if there isn’t anyone who can buy that stuff.
I don’t know that we need to ‘do’ anything except make sure our social safety net is good for those temporarily displaced and to create a business environment that is allowed to innovate and push the envelope.
I agree that this is part of the wage gap, at least here in the US. American labor is pretty expensive (some of the most expensive in the world), and I think they over leveraged their price verse the value add. But automation would have come, regardless…I think it’s just been accelerated. Will new job sectors make up the difference? I think so, but really it will depend on if that human labor can add value for it’s price.
That point was decades ago. The majority of workers were replaced by machines before you were born. You’re literally generations late worrying about this.
XT sums this all up pretty well, but the simple fact is that machines can change what people do, but will never stop people from doing something.
The problem is historically there has always been *something * that humans could do better, faster, cheaper, more safely than machines. That will not always be the case. In 50 years machines will be light years better than they are now and humans will be exactly the same. In 100 years the same thing will happen, machines will have cognitive and physical abilities far beyond what they have now, humans will be the same.
It is like pack animals. They were useful for agriculture & transportation when there were no alternatives, and at first machines only replaced some functions of horses but soon there was virtually no situation where a pack animal was superior to a machine. Now 99% of them are gone compared to the past. The ones that are used are used for novelty purposes, not productivity purposes. The same thing will happen with machines, our talents as humans do not grow while the things machines can do keep growing.
If humans do end up doing something, it will be due to novelty and nostalgia. Like the people who like to listen to LPs instead of MP3s or paint instead of take a picture.
The real solution to this problem seems to be a mandated minimum wage to everyone. However getting that done politically will be hard. Giving everyone 20k a year is not going to be easy to get done. Human endeavors like art, medicine, science, etc will be for novelty purposes (not productivity) as the machines will be far better at it. The same way that a person rides a horse for fun, but if they really need to travel somewhere they use a car or a plane.
What may happen is a huge growth in subsidized/free government living situations. Government housing, food, medical care for the masses while the handful who are employed have something better. But that will lead to revolution or at least unrest sooner or later.
The end result (possibly not in our lifetimes, but somewhere down the road) is that goods are produced so cheaply that most people can choose not to work and still live comfortable lives, being supported by taxes taken from those who do choose to work. Or perhaps, people move on to pursuits that are by definition excluded to machinery–prostitution, writing, consulting, hand-knit sweaters, whatever. There’s really no way of knowing what the future holds, but it’s pretty much a truism that you can’t hold back technology, only delay it.
I don’t think you’re getting my point. Eventually there will be no way for the majority of people to earn money at a job. They won’t just get paid less, they won’t be doing more menial labor, they’ll starve. Eventually machines will produce virtually everything and only the engineers will have jobs, and at some future point they won’t be needed either. That is if there is no change to our socio-economic structure, but there will be because at some point the people will destroy the machines and kill their owners, or take control and institute a socialist system where people don’t have to be productive to provide for themselves.
I considered merging the two threads, but the different times in which various points were raised and (purportedly) rebutted would have been very confusing.
I am closing this thread, but anyone who wishes to re-post a specific comment in the other thread is free t do so.