5 ms·

We have had similar dislocations in the past; while they were painful transitions, people took on different jobs. Up until the late 1800s, the vast majority of

by nickff 10y ago

We have had similar dislocations in the past; while they were painful transitions, people took on different jobs. Up until the late 1800s, the vast majority of Americans were farmers, who were dislocated as farm productivity rose; some of them suffered, but almost all of their children found new and more prosperous careers. There is no reason to believe this time is different.

eropple 10y ago
There most certainly is reason to believe that this time is different: because automation is owned capital that replaces labor entirely and modern automation is able to scale in ways that industrialization could never dream of. This doesn't create new jobs at scale--only so many people can be robot repairpeople. It's not "new job" territory. It's "no job" territory. And it's the recipe for a permanent underclass unless we actually use our heads for more than hat racks and re-think how a modern economy is supposed to work.
- nickff 10y ago
  I could make the same argument about farm equipment eliminating farmers' jobs, and not leaving as many jobs for farm equipment repair. The problem is that we cannot imagine what ideas for productive work others might come up with in the future.
  - lgieron 10y ago
    > I could make the same argument about farm equipment eliminating farmers' jobs, and not leaving as many jobs for farm equipment repair. This. 300 years ago, 90+% of population was working in agriculture - now it's around 2% in developed countries. And yet, there was no armageddon - we managed to develop all these new needs that keep people employed. People saying that "this time it will be different" ignore the almost unlimited growth potential of some industries, such as for example teaching (we could go back to the standard of one teacher per one pupil that rich people had back in the day), psychological counsel (potentially everybody could benefit from a shrink/coach), or human-based health care (more nurses -> better standard of care).
    - chansecodina 10y ago
      I think one of the key differences this time is the amount of retraining involved. Taking a farm worker and teaching them how to work on an assembly line involved orders of magnitude less retraining then training an assembly line worker to be a teacher, psychologist or nurse.
      - VLM 10y ago
        Also if you're into human biological differences and heretical things like IQ, the bell curve bar for "can farm instead of hunter gather" "can factory instead of farm labor" is very low, like IQ 70 or something. You don't need an IQ of 120 to put a nut on a bolt on an assembly line. However, lets say all the jobs with IQ below 120 are replaced with an IQ 120 AI or similar automation via the efforts of over IQ 120 engineers... Most of the population is physically unable, as best we understand, to ever obtain a MSEE or a PHD in computational fluid dynamics. It doesn't matter if we have 100M job openings for people with advanced CS degrees no matter how much we pay them, with only 300M people in the country the bell curve says we can't find the warm bodies to staff them.
        visarga 10y ago
        Applying machine learning is not going to be requiring a PHD, especially when great libraries and model zoos are available off the shelf. I think it's going to turn into a "maker culture" like web design. People are going to enjoy a very low entry barrier to applying ML and automation. It's going to be mix and match, a bazaar of solutions. Most of ML will be assisted by meta-ML systems and thus almost automated.
    - eropple 10y ago
      That all sounds lovely. Except modern automation means further concentration of wealth in the hands of a microfraction of society, leading to not being able to pay for any of that because a monopsonistic economy means very bounded demand which leads to crushingly low wages. And any sort of skilled-service jobs require an economic base to get into in the first place--money that you don't have because the money is not in your or your parents' hands. BRB, reinventing peasantry. Or worse. Economic activity doesn't magically happen when all of the lubrication for the engine is left in a bottle on the shelf, which is what modern automation is happily barreling towards barring a significant reworking of society that will have all the invisible hand fiction-peddlers in the tizziest of states.
  - coldnebo 10y ago
    But TFA isn't talking about 'the future', it's talking about the present. Why isn't there productive work for these people right now?
  - xenadu02 10y ago
    Have you looked into the history of industrialization? It was a huge fight on the part of workers to get a share of the profit. Companies hired private detectives who in some cases literally shot striking workers. If we look further back in history we can see feudalism in the Medieval period. It wasn't created overnight, it was introduced over time as there was a long-term surplus of labor and concentration of wealth and power in a few elites. It was only broken in Europe by the Black Death killing 1/3 of the population. Suddenly workers were in such demand that every elite from minor Lords up to Royalty abandoned the old rules and welcomed serfs with open arms. Technically you still needed your Lord's permission to travel, marry, etc. In reality if your local Lord wasn't giving you a good deal you could just leave. That was a new. My point is this: can we please avoid all the pain and suffering this time around? (My guess is no, the elites always fight against taxes and "regulations" until things get so bad that society breaks and reforms along new lines... The Great Depression was merely one in a long series of bank panics and massive recessions).
- witty_username 10y ago
  "no job" is unlikely, salaries would go low though. And with modern automation the low salaries would allow living at a similar quality of life.
- visarga 10y ago
  > This doesn't create new jobs at scale The idea is to not need a job, by being a direct beneficiary of automation. If you own land, solar panels and a robot you could be self sufficient.
Annatar 10y ago
There is no reason to believe this time is different. There is one major reason this time is different: it requires a highly educated workforce. In practice, since there are so many unemployed and so many underpaid, it means that most of those people are incapable of transition, for one reason or another. And it's a double whammy: even if every unemployed worker went for re-qualification / re-education, and they all became knowledge workers, the market would be saturated and everybody would end up being underpaid again (underpaid meaning "not enough to live off of comfortably / normally"). In that theoretical scenario, engineers and scientists would be dime a dozen, so even that's a dead end. Some new solution is needed. Theoretically speaking, if everything were 100% automated and dynamically produced, money would be obsolete because we could have anything built: material extraction would be automatic, processing would be automatic, resource renewal and recycling automatic, the solar energy to produce it free. But what do we do in the meanwhile?
- xyzzyz 10y ago
  Science job market is already well saturated. I think software engineering as a profession will be the last to go, but it doesn't mean its final days will be all glory and prosperity.
- zip1234 10y ago
  Meanwhile, there is plenty of demand for trades such as construction. I wonder if the government's focus on everybody going to college and providing unlimited loans has caused people to end up with degrees that they cannot use and salary requirements to pay off loans that are much higher than their degree affords them?
domador 10y ago
Some reasons to believe that this time, it is different: Humans Need Not Apply (a CGP Grey video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
serg_chernata 10y ago
However, and I'm just thinking out loud here, we have come quite far as humanity through all of those changes. Each time fulfilling a certain core need. From mass production and steam engine / electricity to growing enough food. These issues are still present in many portions of the world but are we reaching a certain critical mass of progress? Are we running out of problems to be solved with large amounts of manual labor? These are just my own naive thoughts more than anything.
- nickff 10y ago
  With every increase in technology level, we have produced larger, and more complex assemblies of parts, in greater quantities. High volume production of the plow was once an innovation, followed by production of steam engines, then trains, then cars, then aircraft, then spacecraft. At each turn, the simpler goods were produced in greater quantity, and more complex goods were created. A modern car has tens of thousands of components, an airplane has hundreds of thousands, and the most complex spacecraft have millions. My current belief is that humans will soon be producing items with 100k components in the same volumes that we currently produce machines with 10k components. I cannot imagine what the first products with 10 million components will be.
RobertoG 10y ago
"There is no reason to believe this time is different." I don't understand the reasoning here. Human physical work had become obsolete, so, new jobs appeared in intellectual domains. Now, machines are going to be more efficient than humans in intellectual work, what are those new wonderful jobs that human can do but machines can't do cheaper? We could argue that the last wave made obsolete the horse, not the humans, it's just that the new horses are so powerful that one human can control innumerable horses. This is the first time that we are the obsolete worker. That's what makes this time different.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
VLM 10y ago
The optimists list successful nonviolent transitions where both the start and end point have roughly balanced ratios of job positions vs hungry qualified employees and ask why all transitions can't be as successful. The pessimists point to every collapsed society or culture or subculture and every violent bloody revolution in our own past and ask why in this more cutthroat era we won't all be drowning in rivers of blood. HN is very optimistic. Go ask the Easter Island Forestry Company what the lumberjacks are currently doing for employment. Hungry urban poor have led to all kinds of fun for centuries, in France around 1800, Germany in the 30s, arguably USA in the 60s... Arguably most transitions have been of the less than peaceful variety.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
Every time some physical job was eliminated, workers have gone into doing work with their minds instead. When some desk jobs have been eliminated, workers have found other desk jobs. The problem this time around is that there seems to be no limit to what AI could do. This is the crux of the matter. How far can AI go? Can it do any desk job whatsoever? If the answer is yes, then tremendous changes lie ahead.

by nickff 10y ago

eropple 10y ago

There most certainly is reason to believe that this time is different: because automation is owned capital that replaces labor entirely and modern automation is able to scale in ways that industrialization could never dream of. This doesn't create new jobs at scale--only so many people can be robot repairpeople. It's not "new job" territory. It's "no job" territory. And it's the recipe for a permanent underclass unless we actually use our heads for more than hat racks and re-think how a modern economy is supposed to work.

nickff 10y ago
I could make the same argument about farm equipment eliminating farmers' jobs, and not leaving as many jobs for farm equipment repair. The problem is that we cannot imagine what ideas for productive work others might come up with in the future.
- lgieron 10y ago
  > I could make the same argument about farm equipment eliminating farmers' jobs, and not leaving as many jobs for farm equipment repair. This. 300 years ago, 90+% of population was working in agriculture - now it's around 2% in developed countries. And yet, there was no armageddon - we managed to develop all these new needs that keep people employed. People saying that "this time it will be different" ignore the almost unlimited growth potential of some industries, such as for example teaching (we could go back to the standard of one teacher per one pupil that rich people had back in the day), psychological counsel (potentially everybody could benefit from a shrink/coach), or human-based health care (more nurses -> better standard of care).
  - chansecodina 10y ago
    I think one of the key differences this time is the amount of retraining involved. Taking a farm worker and teaching them how to work on an assembly line involved orders of magnitude less retraining then training an assembly line worker to be a teacher, psychologist or nurse.
    - VLM 10y ago
      Also if you're into human biological differences and heretical things like IQ, the bell curve bar for "can farm instead of hunter gather" "can factory instead of farm labor" is very low, like IQ 70 or something. You don't need an IQ of 120 to put a nut on a bolt on an assembly line. However, lets say all the jobs with IQ below 120 are replaced with an IQ 120 AI or similar automation via the efforts of over IQ 120 engineers... Most of the population is physically unable, as best we understand, to ever obtain a MSEE or a PHD in computational fluid dynamics. It doesn't matter if we have 100M job openings for people with advanced CS degrees no matter how much we pay them, with only 300M people in the country the bell curve says we can't find the warm bodies to staff them.
      - visarga 10y ago
        Applying machine learning is not going to be requiring a PHD, especially when great libraries and model zoos are available off the shelf. I think it's going to turn into a "maker culture" like web design. People are going to enjoy a very low entry barrier to applying ML and automation. It's going to be mix and match, a bazaar of solutions. Most of ML will be assisted by meta-ML systems and thus almost automated.
  - eropple 10y ago
    That all sounds lovely. Except modern automation means further concentration of wealth in the hands of a microfraction of society, leading to not being able to pay for any of that because a monopsonistic economy means very bounded demand which leads to crushingly low wages. And any sort of skilled-service jobs require an economic base to get into in the first place--money that you don't have because the money is not in your or your parents' hands. BRB, reinventing peasantry. Or worse. Economic activity doesn't magically happen when all of the lubrication for the engine is left in a bottle on the shelf, which is what modern automation is happily barreling towards barring a significant reworking of society that will have all the invisible hand fiction-peddlers in the tizziest of states.
- coldnebo 10y ago
  But TFA isn't talking about 'the future', it's talking about the present. Why isn't there productive work for these people right now?
- xenadu02 10y ago
  Have you looked into the history of industrialization? It was a huge fight on the part of workers to get a share of the profit. Companies hired private detectives who in some cases literally shot striking workers. If we look further back in history we can see feudalism in the Medieval period. It wasn't created overnight, it was introduced over time as there was a long-term surplus of labor and concentration of wealth and power in a few elites. It was only broken in Europe by the Black Death killing 1/3 of the population. Suddenly workers were in such demand that every elite from minor Lords up to Royalty abandoned the old rules and welcomed serfs with open arms. Technically you still needed your Lord's permission to travel, marry, etc. In reality if your local Lord wasn't giving you a good deal you could just leave. That was a new. My point is this: can we please avoid all the pain and suffering this time around? (My guess is no, the elites always fight against taxes and "regulations" until things get so bad that society breaks and reforms along new lines... The Great Depression was merely one in a long series of bank panics and massive recessions).
witty_username 10y ago
"no job" is unlikely, salaries would go low though. And with modern automation the low salaries would allow living at a similar quality of life.
visarga 10y ago
> This doesn't create new jobs at scale The idea is to not need a job, by being a direct beneficiary of automation. If you own land, solar panels and a robot you could be self sufficient.

Annatar 10y ago

There is no reason to believe this time is different. There is one major reason this time is different: it requires a highly educated workforce. In practice, since there are so many unemployed and so many underpaid, it means that most of those people are incapable of transition, for one reason or another. And it's a double whammy: even if every unemployed worker went for re-qualification / re-education, and they all became knowledge workers, the market would be saturated and everybody would end up being underpaid again (underpaid meaning "not enough to live off of comfortably / normally"). In that theoretical scenario, engineers and scientists would be dime a dozen, so even that's a dead end. Some new solution is needed. Theoretically speaking, if everything were 100% automated and dynamically produced, money would be obsolete because we could have anything built: material extraction would be automatic, processing would be automatic, resource renewal and recycling automatic, the solar energy to produce it free. But what do we do in the meanwhile?

xyzzyz 10y ago
Science job market is already well saturated. I think software engineering as a profession will be the last to go, but it doesn't mean its final days will be all glory and prosperity.
zip1234 10y ago
Meanwhile, there is plenty of demand for trades such as construction. I wonder if the government's focus on everybody going to college and providing unlimited loans has caused people to end up with degrees that they cannot use and salary requirements to pay off loans that are much higher than their degree affords them?

domador 10y ago

Some reasons to believe that this time, it is different: Humans Need Not Apply (a CGP Grey video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

serg_chernata 10y ago

However, and I'm just thinking out loud here, we have come quite far as humanity through all of those changes. Each time fulfilling a certain core need. From mass production and steam engine / electricity to growing enough food. These issues are still present in many portions of the world but are we reaching a certain critical mass of progress? Are we running out of problems to be solved with large amounts of manual labor? These are just my own naive thoughts more than anything.

nickff 10y ago
With every increase in technology level, we have produced larger, and more complex assemblies of parts, in greater quantities. High volume production of the plow was once an innovation, followed by production of steam engines, then trains, then cars, then aircraft, then spacecraft. At each turn, the simpler goods were produced in greater quantity, and more complex goods were created. A modern car has tens of thousands of components, an airplane has hundreds of thousands, and the most complex spacecraft have millions. My current belief is that humans will soon be producing items with 100k components in the same volumes that we currently produce machines with 10k components. I cannot imagine what the first products with 10 million components will be.

RobertoG 10y ago

"There is no reason to believe this time is different." I don't understand the reasoning here. Human physical work had become obsolete, so, new jobs appeared in intellectual domains. Now, machines are going to be more efficient than humans in intellectual work, what are those new wonderful jobs that human can do but machines can't do cheaper? We could argue that the last wave made obsolete the horse, not the humans, it's just that the new horses are so powerful that one human can control innumerable horses. This is the first time that we are the obsolete worker. That's what makes this time different.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

VLM 10y ago

The optimists list successful nonviolent transitions where both the start and end point have roughly balanced ratios of job positions vs hungry qualified employees and ask why all transitions can't be as successful. The pessimists point to every collapsed society or culture or subculture and every violent bloody revolution in our own past and ask why in this more cutthroat era we won't all be drowning in rivers of blood. HN is very optimistic. Go ask the Easter Island Forestry Company what the lumberjacks are currently doing for employment. Hungry urban poor have led to all kinds of fun for centuries, in France around 1800, Germany in the 30s, arguably USA in the 60s... Arguably most transitions have been of the less than peaceful variety.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

Every time some physical job was eliminated, workers have gone into doing work with their minds instead. When some desk jobs have been eliminated, workers have found other desk jobs. The problem this time around is that there seems to be no limit to what AI could do. This is the crux of the matter. How far can AI go? Can it do any desk job whatsoever? If the answer is yes, then tremendous changes lie ahead.