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Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to sur
by cousin_it 10y ago
Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency.
Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on welfare instead, and the economy as a whole is burning almost 2x more resources. Sure, the employer is spending slightly less, while screwing over the economy via prisoner's dilemma logic.
[1] http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20160704.html http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20160704.html
- usrusr 10y agoOne more for the huge but reliably fruitless pile of good arguments for an unconditional basic income: with an UBI, it becomes possible for the worker to outprice the robot even at a rate below the survival minimum. E.g. to consume 1.5x resources total compared to bare survival, which would still be less than the nearly 2x of unemployed+robot. (edit:typo)
- cousin_it 10y agoI guess it's more of an argument for a universal wage subsidy, but I'd be happy with UBI as well.
- sverige 10y agoI've been thinking about UBI a lot. Who's going to pay for it? Certainly not the big tech companies. They barely pay any taxes now, and they're the ones who stand to gain the most with automation.
- dmoo 10y agoDon't forget that if nobody gets paid then they can't consume all the wonderful output the robots produce.
- smaddox 10y agoIdeally, it would be financed using a mix of fiat currency and taxes. Then it could take the place of debt growth for building the monetary base. If inflation becomes too rapid, the mix would be tilted more towards taxes. If deflation hits, the mix would be heavily tilted towards fiat.
- dragonwriter 10y ago"A mix of fiat currency and taxes" is somewhere between poorly described and downright incoherent. Fiat currency is a thing you can use for money, taxes is a way of gathering money (whether its fiat currency or not) for the government. Do you mean a mix of printing money and taxes -- e.g., just outright abandoning the idea of independent central banking and separation of monetary policy from fiscal policy and using a mix of directly printing money and regular taxation to fund the benefit? If so, I think that's a poorly conceived idea that, in the best case, has no advantages from running monetary policy independently with similar priorities to those that drive it in principle now (managing inflation and unemployment), while paying UBI out of general government funds while funding the government through a mix of taxation and debt as now.
- usrusr 10y agoA sufficiently low UBI (survival, not comfortable survival with all kinds of nice-to-haves) would be wage subsidy (or microentrepreneurship subsidy, or subsistence farming subsidy) in all but the most extreme cases of zealous frugality combined with a heavy disinclination to work. Excess money beyond survival is a very strong incentive, much stronger at least than replacing survival level welfare with survival level earning, which is what existing systems routinely expect to happen.
- notahacker 10y agoUndoubtedly there are edge cases where that's true. But as an argument for UBI it works only if the cost savings from labourers being willing to undercut market price of robots in a UBI-era world across the whole economy exceeds the net cost of making welfare payments to a vast number of other people previously ineligible for them. At present, the numbers of people claiming welfare because their skillset has been superseded by automation are vastly exceeded by the number of people on federal minimum wage jobs or choosing not to be employed... And that's even before you look at the distributional impact of the subsidy (the benefits from cheaper labour tend to accrue to a subset of business owners; the cost of subsidising it is shared across all taxpayers, with the net burden probably falling on middle class wage earners) If a government were to decide that preserving jobs in a particular automation-threatened industry/locale were worthwhile due to the difficulty of finding alternative occupations, a targeted subsidy per job would be far more efficient
- ppod 10y agoDoesn't all of the money that was going into the operating cost of the robot still end up in human pockets? Instead of going to the worker it goes to robot developers, robot maintainers, and energy companies. Then the argument it increases inequality, but that's been the case since industrial machinery happened, as Piketty showed.
- cousin_it 10y agoDon't think about money, that only confuses things. Think about resources instead. Imagine that the worker burns oil to survive, and the robot also burns oil to function. Now replacing the worker with the robot makes the economy burn twice as much oil for the same amount of production (assuming the worker goes on welfare). If you think in terms of money and pockets, the picture will be more complicated, but the end result will be the same.
- superswordfish 10y agoThis logic is full of holes. A robot can, by not needing to rest, be vastly more productive than the same person. The robot can be designed to never make a mistake too. Indeed, automation of all aspects of bread production would increase the bread supply. And the person needed bread either way, so unless you're saying that their death is the alternative, what they do with their day is irrelevant. And about fuel, I guess "burns oil" tugs at more heartstrings than "burns solar energy."
- cousin_it 10y agoThe argument is talking about the marginal case [1] where the robot is about as cost-effective as the worker it's displacing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_concepts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_concepts
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- JulianMorrison 10y agoHopefully the worker gets another job so now you have a productive robot and a productive worker doing something else.
- Noseshine 10y agoHas that worked the last few decades? And don't just count "job yes/no", look at the actual job - prestige, quality, income.
- notahacker 10y agoThe proportion of people in full time work is much higher than it was when people worried about mechanization eliminating all those not-very-prestigious jobs in the post-WWII period...
- Noseshine 10y agoMy comment was pretty short - yet you managed to ignore a major part? Looking at statistics telling you that now both adults in the family have to work to home ownership to private debt levels doesn't support your story. Look at the number of dual-income families, for example.
- notahacker 10y agoIs there any income quartile in any developed country that has less prestigious or lower real incomes per full-time worker than the equivalent in the immediate post war period? Disproportionate rises in house prices and growth in consumer credit and student debt are consequences of a region having access to better employment opportunities, not worse ones.
- cousin_it 10y agoYeah, if you assume that workers never go on welfare, the argument falls down.
- js8 10y agoAnd what does he think that having high living standard is about, other than burning resources? By his definition of efficiency, a dead planet is the most efficient.
- cousin_it 10y agoThe burning of resources by robots doesn't by itself contribute to a higher living standard, unless you're measuring the living standard of robots :-)
- Noseshine 10y agoYou are correct, yet I don't see the connection between your reply and the comment you replied to? Nor even to the parent-parent comment. I'm baffled. Similarly for maxerickson's comment here. "Living" is about using resources, if "saving" them is the goal a dead planet is the best solution, or at least removal of all consumers of the resource in question. I don't see any "robot vs. worker" component in that statement.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- js8 10y agoI thought the point of having robots is to produce more so more can be consumed by people, having higher living standards. Robots (as described in the article) do not have living standard, because they don't have consciousness. They are conceptually no different from any other tool, which requires maintenance, but increases productivity. So they eventually should contribute to higher living standard (that's their raison d'etre), although of course there are issues of social inequality, which however the OP's argument doesn't seem to address at all. The efficiency in economics is always defined under assumption that it's somehow externally given (by human desires) what we want to produce. For example, efficiency in producing 1000 cars is given by how much materials and energy you need. But you cannot say that producing 100 cars is always more efficient than producing 1000 cars, because this is given by human desires; by that logic, the most efficient would be if Earth had no humans or even life at all.
- maxerickson 10y agoI think the decision to automate is usually based on the capital cost of the automation, with the productivity/consumption ratio of the automation usually being higher than the displaced workers. Take a robot truck. The difference in energy consumption per mile will be nil, but the auto truck can easily and safely drive 168 hours a week, compared to the death march legal limit for humans, 70 hours. The per mile cost of the automation system will also likely be close to nil (a few tens of thousands of dollars amortized over a million miles). So a system that isn't really more expensive (compare the up front cost of the automation to several years of labor) is more than twice as effective.
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- baq 10y agothat's easily(?) fixed with a flat tax on efficient robots.
- MichaelBurge 10y agoWhile we're at it, let's tax people whenever they write a Python script to read information out of a spreadsheet instead of hiring an intern.
- simonh 10y agoI fail to see how it's the employer screwing anyone over. Should automation be outlawed? What kinds of automation? It's a problem that society needs to deal with, sure, and some of that might involve some regulation of automation, or some social support for manual jobs, but there's nothing inherently immoral about automation. If a company reduces it's work force through automation there's nothing immoral about that. If they don't do it, someone will start up a rival company that automates from the get-go and drive them out of business. This is what's killing the French economy right now because their labour laws mean employers are biased against hiring new workers. If they have to lay them off it costs a fortune. So existing French companies are locked into high cost structures and are being driven up against the wall by competitors with higher levels of automation on the one hand and massive redundancy costs on the other. I am not in any way arguing for unregulated market forces and let the devil take the hindmost. We do need a balanced and sustainable solution that allows business to thrive and gainfully employ the population and automation is making that harder, but the key word there is sustainable. A French model that tries to freeze the current labour economy in aspic isn't sustainable.
- cousin_it 10y agoHow does outlawing automation make employers biased against hiring new workers?
- simonh 10y agoI didn't say that it does. However one of the justifications given by the French left for high redundancy payments is to compensate workers if their jobs are taken by automation, so they are related issues.
- klenwell 10y ago> I fail to see how it's the employer screwing anyone over. Should automation be outlawed? I would look to the automation in scheduling in the service sector over the last couple decades for a pretty clear example of employers screwing over labor. Sure, you can make a good argument, as you do, that it's probably more amoral than immoral and the inevitable result of a race condition among the competition. But it's hard not to read articles like these articles in the New York Times[0][1][2][3] and not feel like employees are getting screwed pretty hard and that it's only the plausible deniability that the appeal to market forces offers that allows executives in these organization and politicians in the communities where these people live not to see the pernicious effects of their policies. I know some politicians have begun to take note and offer some sympathy and protections.[4] But I think that now that full automation is gaining more steam, finding that balanced and sustainable solution most of us would probably like to see is only going to get harder. In the meantime, we're seeing in this election very clearly how the some (many?) of the displaced have decided to articulate their solution to the problem. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-workers-scheduling-hours.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-w... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/business/late-to-bed-early-to-rise-and-working-tired.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/business/late-to-bed-early... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/manipulating-the-work-schedule-to-keep-worker-pay-low.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/manipulating-the-w... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/business/starbucks-falls-short-after-pledging-better-labor-practices.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/business/starbucks-falls-s... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/business/retailers-scrutinized-for-schedules-and-staffing.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/business/retailers-scrutin...
- grondilu 10y ago> Unless you're willing to kill the worker Talk about black and white reasoning. The loss of his job is supposed to reduce his income, making him poorer, thus forcing him to consume less resources. But you're right in the sense that being poor increases chances of dying, thus contributing to solving the problem of dealing with useless workforce.
- wangchow 10y agoHence the communist manifesto dropped 200 years too early. Countries that use communism are far too early at adopting the philosophy because it requires production to exceed consumption on a massive scale. The hybrid model in mixed capitalist/welfare doesn't work so well because we're introducing a labour force (robots) that doesn't fit our economic model. Edit: What we'll probably see is an introduced free basic income to help the economy along (and the people who lost those jobs) at the expense of other tax payers. And that, my friends is gravitation toward the end of capitalism. If we're talking 60% of the labor force.. Seems like it anyway
- wolfpwner 10y agoCommunism is the ultimate future of human beings ;-)
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI think the counterargument here is that if you don't need to move humans to work and back home again every day, and if you don't need to optimize workplace conditions for humans - by providing creature comforts and safety equipment - your unemployed human is using much less resources than a working human, and the robot is also using much less resources than a working human, so the sum of unemployed human + working robot may add up to less than working human alone. That, and also resources are here to be burned for our comfort. We should, by all means, burn the minimum amount of resources required for said comfort. But still, there are here to be burned. Otherwise, to minimize resource usage, let's all give up on civilization and go back to caves.
- e40 10y agoWe the unemployed are just warehoused at home? In that case, they consume less resources from lack of commuting, but they still eat and do everything else they would have.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoHaving to maintain human-comfortable conditions at workplaces consumes a lot of resources.
- unprepare 10y ago>That, and also resources are here to be burned for our comfort. what an incredible argument to make.
- d4nt 10y agoIf the worker now gets to stay at home and pursue a hobby they enjoy, while the economy is still producing the same amount of goods, isn't that a net win? The problem is (a) people feel bad about being on welfare, and (b) we stop paying welfare again the moment that worker makes any money, creating a disincentive to engage in any form of small scale productive activity.
- sverige 10y agoPeople feel bad about being on welfare because they want to work. They want to be productive. They want to have a purpose.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agobeep beep I. am. a. person. I want... proooductive. I want... puurpose. I will. Take the orders. From a capital-supplier. To proooduce economic vallll-ue. I. am. Totally. Not. a robot. beep beep /s Seriously, though? People want to be exploited because they need a wage-paying employer to give them purpose? Then where are all the people who don't work for someone else getting this much-vaunted "purpose", eh? Whatever happened to all that individualism stuff, about people being ends rather than means?
- sverige 10y agoWork is exploitive only when you're not compensated adequately for it, or if you cannot leave that job voluntarily. And I assume that by "people who don't work for someone else," you are referring to people who still work rather than, say, landowners who collect rents whose main work is to go to the bank to make a deposit. People can be both ends and means and be quite content. Personally, I think there is too much emphasis on people being ends unto themselves in the current culture. Madonna is a great example of this. She ceased to be entertaining more than 30 years ago, yet I still come across news snippets about her. Why?
- Drakim 10y ago
- oli5679 10y agoYou've got the 1st order effects completely right, but there would be several second-order effects that would undermine this result. (1) There would be a fall in non-skilled wages, increasing demand for non-skilled labour output. (2) The reduction in marginal costs would increase supply of the good and reduce its price. (3) The increased profits earned by the firm/robot inventor would increase demand or saving/consumption of other goods. (4) The change in relative wages would encourage workers to retrain and switch industries. In 1850, 60%+ of the American labour force were farmers and over the next 100 years their jobs were automated out of existence by range of more efficient 'robots'. This was no-doubt harmful for many specific farm labourers, but didn't 'screw over the economy'.
- cousin_it 10y agoI don't think the existence of jobs you could quickly retrain to is an eternal law of nature :-(
- oli5679 10y agoDefinitely not, but it needs to be explicitly discussed. The previous claim seemed to have the implicit assumption that any retraining/reallocation is de-facto impossible. Automation isn't unambiguously bad news for society at large, although you would expect it to be negative for the people being automated. The extent to which this can be mitigated by retraining/wealth transfers is an interesting question that depends as much on the country's culture and political climate as the properties of the technological advancement.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoNo, but at the moment there are many such jobs. Maid, cook, child care, a significant amount of construction labor, etc. I blogged about this a while back. Until robots do all the jobs that are actually done in India (e.g. robot cooks, robot maids, robot cigarette walas), there still exist jobs people can do. Americans just refuse to do them, since it's easier to not work. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_our_jobs.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou... That may happen one day, but at the moment we have a scarcity of labor rather than a surplus.
- aninhumer 10y agoYou're not factoring in the utility created by freeing up the worker to enjoy themselves. They're consuming the same amount of resources, but they're much happier as well.
- cousin_it 10y agoYeah, that's a good point. Though work could be both positive and negative utility-wise. I guess that depends on the job.
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- Noseshine 10y agoSarcasm? Happy to be laid off? Note that I'm not for keeping people employed in useless jobs, but saying about laid-off workers that "they're much happier" is a little weird to me. It would be good if that was so, and the fact that it isn't to me is an indicator that the system does not work well, because it should be that way - but it isn't.
- aninhumer 10y agoWell the original argument assumes that the welfare is equivalent to their salary (otherwise they'd be consuming less resources), so yes they'd probably be happier.
- Noseshine 10y agoThat assumes that all the worker cares about is money. However, not having a job has psychological consequences, and the chances for being able to switch to another job are reduced dramatically the longer one is unemployed. Humans are more concerned about their outlook than their current condition, and the outlook for the unemployed worker is worse than for the employed one.
- aninhumer 10y ago
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- eli_gottlieb 10y agoI mean, just to point out, if the way to avoid a doubled usage of resources is to kill a guy, you can always kill the employer and sack the management. Or to be less flippant, this kind of reasoning only makes sense if you assume that the split of revenues between the state, the worker, and the employer overwhelmingly favors the worker and the state. That doesn't seem like a situation in which the employer chooses to hire someone at all, actually, so I'd consider it somewhat unlikely.
- dominotw 10y ago> he goes on welfare instead he goes on to do something higher level, something more human.
- alanwatts 10y agoWhen workers' wages are lowered/replaced by a typical welfare program as a result of automation, the workers no longer have the purchasing power to purchase the goods produced by the automation, thus rendering such automation useless. If prices for the end user do not decrease proportionately with the savings created by automation, the whole point of automation is nullified.
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoThe worker would be using vastly less resources. In my life I spent so much money/time/energy commuting to work and everything that entails having a job, not to mention time wasted in adult education, post grad degrees, trainings, etc I would never need as non-working welfare person. Heck, college is questionable as well. So there's a majority of my debt/spending there, ignoring my mortgage. Also, a robot doesn't need breaks, a cubicle, vacation, etc so its using vastly less resources. Businesses would be forced to compete so those savings would be passed to the consumer which means a lower cost of living. Not to mention taxing automated businesses to pay for this new welfare/UBI/whatever. Seems like a win-win to me once things shake out.
- PeterisP 10y agoThe big issue with such a situation is that for the worker, there is no difference if they work or not, since they are anyway in both scenarios earning the bare minimum to survive - so in essence such a system is stating in practice that the value of that labor is already zero. However, in a concept where the "bare minimum to survive" is unconditional, then the incentives of employer and employee become aligned with the true situation of economy, since the amount that the employer would be replacing by automation is equal to the amount that the employee is getting above that bare minimum, and the decision to automate this task or not becomes the same for a particular employer as for the whole economy. Also, even for the classic welfare model, this argument fails in the normal case where there cannot be workers earning the bare minimum to survive, as there is a labor price floor, the minimum wage, which is supposed to be (and in any currently functioning welfare state, actually is) a "livable wage" that's strictly larger than the bare minimum to survive, and larger than the long-term benefits such a worker would receive.
- klipt 10y agoBy that logic, society should have collapsed already. The combine harvester automated the work of millions of peasants-with-scythes, and that was decades ago. And yet most people agree that society is better now that most of us aren't forced to spend all day scything the fields!
- imgabe 10y agoThis only makes sense if the robot consumes as much resources as the human. I think a robot would consume far far less. Maybe 1% of what a human uses at most. 1. To build a robot you have to mine raw materials and refine them and assemble them and program them. This takes a while, but to build a human worker you need to feed, house, clothe and educate them for 18+ years. 2. The human can only reliably work 8 hours a day. During that time you need to provide ample overhead lighting, and heat or cool thousands or millions of cubic feet of air to a comfortable temperature (this alone takes a tremendous amount of energy). Outside of those 8 hours, the human consumes an entirely separate structure that also has to be lit and heated and cooled. Further, the human has to be fueled with food that has to be grown out of the ground or via livestock that has to be carefully tended. The robot, on the other hand, can stay in one place it's entire life. Doesn't need much light or temperature control. It runs on electricity which can be easily generated compared to growing a cow or a field of corn. Eventually it may even be solar powered. Aside from that it will work 24 hours a day without complaint (with some occasional maintenance). So, if you replace 100 humans with 100 robots, you might use the extra resources of 1 additional humans. Now, if out of those 100 humans even 1 of them does something productive that can't be done by a robot, you've got a net win. I think the resource consumption advantage is tilted heavily towards robots.
- digitalarborist 10y agoI think you're likely underestimating the resources it takes to make robotics work. They get better all the time, but they do so by a lot of blood sweat and tears. We haven't even managed to make them walk at all convincingly yet, it's a really tough problem. As messy as the virtual world can be, the real world is a lot messier. In the long run robots are almost certainly cheaper, in the short term though they are usually very expensive resource wise.
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- kamaal 10y agoFor any mass replacement of humans with robots, you will need AGI and with that will come ethical issues of treating robots as humans themselves. By having robots you are only replacing humans with a biological body with humans with a robot body.
- vorotato 10y agoAs I understand it destroying/preventing automation is an example of the broken window fallacy. The problem is not automation, but rather the system that punishes a worker for being displaced for the sake of efficiency. The economy would be burning .8x the resources, as you admitted the efficiency increased, and my worker on welfare does not consume more than when not on welfare. "Bastiat used the parable of a broken window to point out why destruction doesn't benefit the economy. In Bastiat's tale, a man's son breaks a pane of glass, meaning the man will have to pay to replace it."
- vorotato 10y agoI realize now where you are getting the 2x, but if you are paying a full man's wages to power a robot you really need a different energy provider. The costs of powering and maintaining a robot are a fraction of the cost of a human.