13 ms·

The threat of technological unemployment

118 points by deafcalculus 10y ago

emblem21 10y ago
I don't see the problem. Just do what we did in the 1960s-2010s when globalism rendered huge numbers of people unemployed: Call them racist and suppress their voice. /s
- GavinMcG 10y ago
  The /s tag is not an excuse for comments that aren't relevant and substantive. Try to contribute to the discussion.
  - emblem21 10y ago
    Very relevant. We've seen massive unemployment due to globalism during our lifetime. And we solved all of the cultural and social problems that caused by calling anyone who complained about it racist for five decades straight. Why reinvent the wheel? Just open up the console and type: npm install ford-model
    - ss108 10y ago
      I don't know if you're actually being "/s" or not, but, if you're not, you shouldn't be allowed to spew your horseshit unchallenged. Nobody is calling people racist just because they oppose free trade. Sanders and a lot his supporters are against free trade and have a narrative of jobs going overseas, nobody calls them racist. Furthermore, I am not sure that calling out racism in the political arena was even as strong in the 60's and 70's, or even the 80's, as it is now. Can you drudge up some evidence that opposition to free trade earned a person accusations of racism as far back as the 60's? The problem in the US w/r/t free trade is that we have no social safety net. We have gained a lot from free trade, but the gains have not been spread evenly. There are cultural reasons why our laws and regulations have failed to solve this problem. One is an irrational disdain for anything remotely socialist. Another is that working class whites have very distinctly voted against their interests in this regard for, as you say, the past five decades.
      - stevens32 10y ago
        “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress Kind of seems like the inevitable conclusion of the hard-sell of the American Dream
        danharaj 10y ago
        Socialism was very popular at the turn of the 20th century. Workers movements were strong, labor had power. A socialist ran for president, even. The real reason why it never took root was because it was brutally opposed at every turn by government and business.
        ArkyBeagle 10y ago
        Even Henry Ford adopted some Progressive/Socialist principles. For every Henry Frick there were thousands of much less severe people in positions of power. But in America, wages were usually quite a bit higher than in Europe, so the need was less obvious.
        mc32 10y ago
        I'm not sure about that. One thing which I think tends to skew things is that we get so many immigrants who are intent on seeking better opportunities than they had in their home countries. For most of them, things are by default better than what they had back home [as paupers or even as middlings back home], else they would not have come and the movement to migrate _here_ would run out of momentum. Second gen + may be more receptive to more progressive ideas about security, mobility etc.
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        >working class whites have very distinctly voted against their interests. Given that Obama pushed the TPP hard, made the Bush tax cuts permanent and effectively raised taxes on the working poor with the ACA (also known as Romney Care) and Clinton passed NAFTA and shortened welfare to 5 years. I assuming you mean they should have voted Green party or something?
- dang 10y ago
  You've repeatedly posted uncivil and unsubstantive comments, and ideological rants, to HN. Those are abuses of this site, so we've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned from HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com with reason to believe that you'll follow the rules from now on. But please stop creating accounts to abuse HN with.
  - emblem21 10y ago
    Correction: I've been shadowbanned, which means only Altman can see my posts. Just as planned. :)
  - mSparks 10y ago
    please take your life somewhere else.
crystalPalace 10y ago
I'm getting an internal server error when I click on the link.
- ElysianEagle 10y ago
  For now you can find it on the front page of the blog: http://lemire.me/blog/ http://lemire.me/blog/
ranprieur 10y ago
"If human labor were to become wholly unnecessary, we are going to substitute for it through transemployment. That is, we will create work that is not strictly needed." In other words, bullshit jobs: http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.o... That's fine if employment becomes fully optional, but I fear we'll be forced into a life without the meaning of useful jobs, and without the freedom of technological unemployment.
- beat 10y ago
  Bullshit jobs are about the social order, not about productivity. People can find productive things to do on their own. "Bullshit jobs" depend on economic surplus to create work that is not immediately productive in terms of food, shelter, or safety. Most entertainers and craft artists fall under the definition of "bullshit jobs". Fine dining chefs are doing something entirely unnecessary. So are rock stars.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    It's a couple of years since I read that article but I'm pretty certain top chefs -- who work directly on products that people clearly want a lot -- are the exact opposite of the kind of alienated work Graeber had in mind.
    - beat 10y ago
      Sure they are. But those jobs exist because of economic surplus.
      - nopriorarrests 10y ago
        Well, all Apple jobs exist for the same reason.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    Bullshit jobs are jobs that are not productive at all, or are sometimes actively destructive (in adding layers of bureaucracy) in ways that require other essentially bullshit jobs to counteract. You're talking about something a bit more abstract and puritan. I was a 3602 Clerk, once, which was an essentially bullshit job created to navigate the hurdles presented by a post office clerk assigned to my company, whose skills primarily consisted of sleeping while sitting up, and storing the 12 lbs. of paperwork I generated per mailing in a closet and taking my word for its veracity. That's a bullshit job. I once worked for an agency whose primary job was procuring people willing to, for money, give permission to other people to declare evidence for a quality assigned by governing officials that obligated higher governing officials to give money to the customers of the clients for whom we procured, and whom we sought out to make a living. We were honestly just a conduit for government money that grabbed 3% of the cash that flowed through it. That's an entire bullshit agency. A comedian creates laughs. That's not a bullshit job, that's a good job.
techbio 10y ago
I would like to see a little more serious attention to the "participation" rates in the workforce. Author is a little too reliant, for this particular topic, on the 5% unemployment rate.
- rqebmm 10y ago
  The recession certainly did a number on the participation rate, but the current rate is more or less organic (as evidenced by recent gains in wages once unemployment stabilized at ~5%). A lot of baby-boomers aged out around during the recession, and will continue to do so (people born between 1943-1951 all turned 65 during the recession), and a lot of people went back into school to "hide" from it. _Under_employment is still a serious issue, but that's only reflected in labor statistics by median wages. On the bright side those have been going up too, but aggregates only tell us so much.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    I don't know what "more or less organic" means here. Using the prime age (25-54) employment rate filters out that noise, and it shows that we've retraced about halfway from the worst of the housing crash. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060 edit: ...which is really terrible if you look at it in the longer term: http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-population-ratio-remains-terribly-depressed/ http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-population-r...
beat 10y ago
It's not just the existence of technological unemployment, it's the pace of it. Over the past two centuries, we've shifted from an economy where virtually everyone is a farmer to an economy where hardly anyone is a farmer. We've mostly automated food production and distribution. But it took generations to do it. Today, people embark on careers in their 20s that disappear in their 40s and 50s. Such a pace of change is distressing. Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out. It'll be local short hauls only, places where there's a lot of human interaction and judgment calls. Long haul semis will be entirely automated. It'll save money and it will save lives, and it will be a huge boon to everyone in society - except professional long haul truckers, who will lose their livelihoods. They won't take it well. Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can do that. But what if it takes a year or more to retrain? How will they pay the mortgage? How will they feed the kids? People who can't care for themselves and their families feel weak, vulnerable, and ashamed. They'll be angry and act out. They'll listen to political demagogues who tell them what they want to hear and give them scapegoats to blame. Such a sudden social change is politically dangerous.
- moxious 10y ago
  A lot of the fear that comes from tech unemployment is based on predictions of the future, which are notoriously horrible. You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline. I'm fairly sure there are exactly zero US states where bot trucking is presently common. Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor in whether or not this even could happen. Bold predictions are, with hindsight, usually wrong. A lot of these fearful arguments boil down to a simple syllogism; "if present trends continue, then (bad outcome here)". The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, and you'll see uniformly that the future predictors expected certain trends to continue which didn't, and missed the existence of other big trends that ended up as primary drivers. People just don't know what's going to happen in the future. I suppose guessing is better than doing nothing, but we shouldn't think that the future guessing we do is actually good or accurate, past experience teaches it's actually really far off.
david927 10y ago
This is a horrible assessment of whether we are facing technological unemployment. There are more bank tellers in the US than ever before But.. there are more people than ever before. And the number of bank tellers is leveling off even as the population grows. Overall, there is scant evidence that we are undergoing a technological-unemployment crisis, if only because unemployment rates are low. Are you kidding me? (First, you have to always be careful with any metric where the collecting agent has even the slightest bias to the outcome. Unemployment is not the obvious number you might think it is for a variety of reasons.) Jobless and underemployment are the numbers you want to be looking at -- and good luck getting good numbers on those but when you do, I think they'll tell a very different story.
- Animats 10y ago
  What used to be a "bank teller" is now a sales rep, trying to sell you on loans and steer you to investments. Bank of America is rebuilding their branches into a new design. There are maybe two teller windows in the back for the occasional non-ATM cash transaction, while the front of the branch has little glassed-in sales offices like a car dealership. A lot of employment is in the marketing overhead of capitalism. There are many products, from movies to Internet access, where the marketing cost exceeds the product cost. This is zero-sum; most marketing in the US just moves demand from one product to another. (Spending is income-limited in the US; the savings rate is very low.) It's also why people are still working so hard. Marketing is inherently competitive, which means it can chew up resources out of proportion to the value produced.
  - mljoe 10y ago
    Good insight, the amount of money society spends on marketing is staggering (and that's thats only things explicitly labeled as such, which I think your case is not). Actually I would go as further and say short of high IP/high technology industries, marketing (branding) IS the product. Bank of America is a fabricated brand that happens to be in banking.
  - Kadin 10y ago
    One of the issues with the "new economy" / "service economy" model that has been pushed heavily over the past few decades is that it doesn't distinguish between zero-sum jobs that have as their end goal merely a reallocation of a fixed amount of resources, and jobs which create value and are basically industrial in nature but where the end product is intangible (e.g. movies, television, writing, software development, etc.). State and local governments have spent vast sums trying to attract "new economy" jobs to replace decimated primary industries, but I question how many of those jobs are marketing or "economic overhead" related. That's not to say that they're bad jobs at an individual level, or there's anything wrong with anyone working in them, but it doesn't seem like it's a sustainable basis for a national economy.
ivan_ah 10y ago
> [...] the unemployment rate worldwide is low. It is under 5% in the US [...] I'm not sure how this is calculated. Do people employed part-time count as employed? How has that changed over time? The problems of the precariat include under-employment and being forced to hold undesirable jobs.
- heartbreak 10y ago
  How the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the US unemployment rate: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
- zdragnar 10y ago
  In the US, the official unemployment rate cited is the U-3 rate, which is exclusively limited to those currently seeking a job, with no employment status at all. Partial employment (such as part-time) due to economic circumstances, as well as those who are within the employable age range (18-60something) but are not employed nor seeking a new job due to economic circumstances (i.e. gave up) are covered by the U-6 measurement, which is substantially higher at 9.8%. See here: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm That page also has links to historical measurements back to 2003, and you can probably find further back (though I'm not sure if there are older resources that also include the state-by-state breakdown).
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  Unemployment has the potential to be very misleading. It is a count of people who are actively looking for work but not yet employed. It doesn't count people who have dropped out of the workforce but would prefer to be working or people who are underemployed or working less hours than they'd prefer, for example.
csallen 10y ago
As I understand it (and I say this as a fellow "techno-optimist"), one of the most significant challenges is that cultural and political change occur much more slowly than technological change. So it's not that we can't adapt, but that adaptation is exceedingly painful to various segments of the population. We tend to accept certain facts as "permanently true", which ends up tearing holes in society and in our lives when these facts inevitably change. For example: * Building a long-term career at a single company is safe. * Traditional college degrees are worth the monetary cost. * Society can only function if everyone works a job. I'm a bit skeptical that "we'll always find a way to quickly replace jobs" will stand the test of time, especially when the primary evidence given is, "Well that's how it's worked out so far."
- jdross 10y ago
  It's not just that it's how it's worked out in the past, but it's that it continues to work out that way every month in the present. Roughly 24% of jobs are permanently replaced in the US every year (which I found very surprising) "Researchers’ estimates on the scale of threatened jobs over the next decade or two range from 9 to 47 percent. For context, every 3 months about 6 percent of jobs in the economy are destroyed by shrinking or closing businesses, while a slightly larger percentage of jobs are added— resulting in rising employment and a roughly constant unemployment rate. The economy has repeatedly proven itself capable of handling this scale of change, although it would depend on how rapidly the changes happen and how concentrated the losses are in specific occupations that are hard to shift from." source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Artificial-Intelligence-Automation-Economy.PDF https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docume...
  - csallen 10y ago
    Individual businesses shrinking and closing isn't the same as entire industries and professions being automated or "globalized" away. For example, plenty of tech startups fail, but that doesn't affect the market for programmers in the Bay Area, because plenty of tech startups are being created, too. Now, let's say the VC money dried up somehow, or we invented an AI capable of programming anything based on a vague description. Lots of programmers would be out of a job.
DrNuke 10y ago
Global economy & services may be fully automated pretty soon but local economies? No chance, we are still going to have humans doing local trades and services to other humans for the foreseeable future, just go back to your roots as a member of a family, village, community.
- visarga 10y ago
  > just go back to your roots as a member of a family, village, community. I think unemployed people will start teaming up to solve their needs directly - farms, small fab shops, schools, construction - we can make all these with local workforce, "self employed for self reliance". We'd only need access to raw materials and some land.
CodeSheikh 10y ago
The main thesis of this article is true but honestly the author has done a very unconvincing job to back it up. For example my problem is with his references: "Firm investments in high-tech equipment and software is falling"...whereas the liked article is about "The recent slowdown in high-tech equipment price declines and some implications for business investment and labor productivity"
awinter-py 10y ago
hmm -- his 'transemployment' concept where complex processes are created and assigned to people as 'jobs' is brutal. We've all worked at process-heavy orgs and most of us have left them. Process-heavy orgs will get out-competed by orgs managed almost any other way. If you're optimized to create useless work for people, you'll probably lose to an org that's optimized for something almost as silly like optimizing for high cost of labor. My consultancy is optimized for high cost of labor and I do okay. Some people argue this is what's happening to France now. 40 years of shaping labor law to improve retirement & reduce unemployment has taken its toll. Paris is a smart tech-savvy and beautiful city that could have been Europe's silicon valley, but you're not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week and you can't fire people. Ah, 20-20 hindsight.
anf 10y ago
> Some authors fear that technology will result in a radical concentration of wealth, the like of which we have never seen… while a few people will be super wealthy, all of us will slowly starve. Except that fewer people than ever in history are starving! Starving is how revolutions happen, so probably not literally starving. But poor people in the US are already wholly politically disenfranchised, and children of poor parents likely to be poor. The two questions which are important to consider in the light of extreme automation: "how large and diverse is our oligarchy?" and "how much social and economic mobility is there between generations?". We are well on the way to having a small oligarchy like Russia and mostly inherited wealth, at which point our society will simply cease to exist.
imagist 10y ago
The idea of transemployment (work that is not needed, but is created to prevent unemployment) is a terrible idea. Have we really become so brainwashed that we have forgotten that the entire purpose of work is to create value? Simply letting people not work doesn't remove incentives to perform: the incentives that we have are already broken. We don't live in a meritocratic economy: the Monsantos and Blackwaters of the world are rewarded for destructive behaviors, while advertising allows inferior products to drive superior products out of business. If we have enough surplus to support these massive inefficiencies, surely we can spare enough to support the unemployed. Further, transemployment actually costs us. It requires infrastructure to create fake jobs.
- danielweber 10y ago
  Anyone who has spent any time in a poor community knows that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. We will only hit real make-work jobs when we can no longer answer the question "how would I solve this problem, if only I had access to a lot more workers?"
  - imagist 10y ago
    That's not the question businesses are asking. They're asking, how can I solve this problem as cheaply/efficiently as possible? And the answer is increasingly not human labor. There is work to be done in poor communities in the sense that there is need, but there isn't much work to be done in the sense that not many people are offering jobs (because not many can pay). Anyone who has spent time in a rich community knows that there's plenty of surplus that could be shared. It's not a problem of lack of resources, it's a problem of distribution. The problem with redistribution, we're told, is that the current distribution is based on merit: those who provide the most value are given the most value. Joe is a billionaire because he's provided billions of dollars of value to the world, while Bob is starving because he doesn't provide any value. If we take from Joe to feed Bob, then Joe won't have any incentive to provide value, so he'll stop, and society will collapse. However, I don't think that's true. Joe doesn't provide more value than Bob necessarily--he just is better at manipulating the abstractions we've created around value. We don't live in a meritocracy. But the lie of meritocracy isn't a complete lie. People do often provide more value if they receive more value. Honest actors do exist and provide value, and while most don't get to be Rich Joe, most don't become Homeless Bob either. However, with technology, these honesty actors are no longer needed, and the lie of meritocracy becomes even more bald faced. In a future where robots do all the work, are we to believe that someone provides value simply because records show that they own the robots? Transemployment is just an attempt to maintain the current distribution of resources: ostensibly the transemployed would work for someone, and that someone would determine how much they are paid. And of course that person would be paid more. I think that a better solution is to drop the pretense that the distribution of resources is meritocratic, and as technology makes it even less meritocratic, we should look at ensuring that the benefits of technology are distributed more evenly. Creating fake jobs to maintain a tiered distribution of resources is only going to make things worse.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
I used to think techno-optimists were delusional but history is on their side. You could argue there is a phase shift happening and this one will be different but I doubt it. Like the author says we'll make up new jobs.
Animats 10y ago
The real deal with technological unemployment is that the list of things humans can do and machines can't keeps shrinking.
- moxious 10y ago
  That has been true for at least 400 years. Humans have generally adapted by inventing new things to be done that didn't exist previously. (The app industry was very small 20 years ago. ;) The interesting question is why people think this time around is different. Answers seem to vary from just "computers" to, "the same change is happening but now it's happening faster". The compensatory mechanisms still work though, yet it seems no one things they will.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Many of the "new things to be done" are done by machines from the very beginning now. No human or combination of humans can do what Google does.
    - Kadin 10y ago
      And yet Google employs a lot of people to do what Google does. No human or combination of humans can turn iron ore into stainless steel tubing. Yet a whole lot of people, acting in concert, can build and operate a bunch of terrifically complex machines which will do just that. The end result is an entity that you can draw a box around, which takes in that human labor plus iron ore and coal and minerals and produces steel tubing (and slag and acid rain). And it'll continue to do that, optimizing itself, as long as the market price of the outputs exceeds the market price of the inputs. Google is similar (without the air pollution, though it has its own externalities). It's a bunch of people building and operating a bunch of terrifically complex machines which organize information, in such a way that the outputs have more value than the inputs inclusive of labor. It's a pretty nice business model, particularly when the inputs are basically free (because of the Internet). But I don't see any reason to be especially threatened by Google, or at least there's no reason to be more threatened by Google, than the steel plant. Google can and probably will optimize itself to reduce labor costs, just as steel mills have optimized themselves; a modern steel mill can produce a hell of a lot of steel without very many employees, which isn't good if you're a steel mill worker. Google in 20 years may not employ very many people to maintain its search products, either. It's something to be aware of if you work in that industry, but it's not especially unique.
pcmaffey 10y ago
Unemployment is not the problem. The problem is that the surplus / wealth created by technology is controlled by the 1%. Redistribute that wealth and the majority of the workforce will no longer need to be truck drivers, or farmers, or laborers. Then, we can start paying people to learn.
- devoply 10y ago
  Total wealth in the world 241 trillion / 7 billion people = 34428.5714286/person Might do something for a Mexican, won't do much for me.
- zip1234 10y ago
  Without truck drivers, farmers, or laborers, the world would have a big problem
  - elliotec 10y ago
    Probably not if they are replaced by automation, which is the entire point of this discussion.
- eikenberry 10y ago
  Well, considering employment is the standard way of redistributing wealth then unemployment is a problem. We need more ways of redistributing wealth. More than we have now anyways which seem to be limited to taxes and employment.
- zxcvvcxz 10y ago
  I think it makes much more sense to go the other way, reduce regulations so that truck drivers / laborers who think their current setup isn't fair can start their own businesses and get paid what they're worth! But no, you'd rather people put in the effort they want, while arbitrarily rounding out the outcomes. You'd rather subsidize laziness. Socialists don't make good entrepreneurs.
  - grp 10y ago
stevens32 10y ago
AI is a fundamentally different technological innovation than the ones he compares against in the post. It's not an incremental improvement on methods, it's a complete replacement of the labor force for many industries. But the problem to solve isn't how to blunt the impact of AI, rather how to handle the newly freed labor force. I don't think this should be seen as a bad thing. Tasks a machine can take care of should be left to a machine, and other work should be handled by a human. We'll have a lot of open human capacity to accomplish something, but if the transition isn't handled well it could be really painful.
russell 10y ago
I have often wondered what happens when large scale technological unemployment occurs, or even the threat of it. I think we have seen the result in the 2016 Presidential election with the election of Donald Trump, probably the least qualified president since Harding. He's a psychopath, for god's sake. And his cabinet is beyond comprehension. The possible result is an attack on all branches of the executive except the military. Replacement of Social Security and Medicare by virtually worthless vouchers, elimination of the departments of Education, Housing, and Energy. emasculation of the EPA. And on and on. This could be as self-destructive as an armed uprising with fewer deaths (maybe). Many of the issues are easy to fix. Remove the wage cap on Social Security taxes. Convert to health insurance to Medicare. Some of the unemployment issues can be mitigated by making the workweek 30 or 32 hours. Turning truck drivers into nurses or medical technicians takes a few years of training. Many of them are smart enough to do it. The current stumbling block is that they must have income support during the education period. Giving someone $100K to manage the transition doesnt seem like much to me. Fundamentally increased productivity and wealth should lead to more leisure and a better standard of living for everyone. Eventually everyone should get a minimum guaranteed income so they have time to pursue their education, raise families, be artists or novelists. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome for an experiment on a guaranteed income.

118 points by deafcalculus 10y ago

I don't see the problem. Just do what we did in the 1960s-2010s when globalism rendered huge numbers of people unemployed: Call them racist and suppress their voice. /s

GavinMcG 10y ago
The /s tag is not an excuse for comments that aren't relevant and substantive. Try to contribute to the discussion.
- emblem21 10y ago
  Very relevant. We've seen massive unemployment due to globalism during our lifetime. And we solved all of the cultural and social problems that caused by calling anyone who complained about it racist for five decades straight. Why reinvent the wheel? Just open up the console and type: npm install ford-model
  - ss108 10y ago
    I don't know if you're actually being "/s" or not, but, if you're not, you shouldn't be allowed to spew your horseshit unchallenged. Nobody is calling people racist just because they oppose free trade. Sanders and a lot his supporters are against free trade and have a narrative of jobs going overseas, nobody calls them racist. Furthermore, I am not sure that calling out racism in the political arena was even as strong in the 60's and 70's, or even the 80's, as it is now. Can you drudge up some evidence that opposition to free trade earned a person accusations of racism as far back as the 60's? The problem in the US w/r/t free trade is that we have no social safety net. We have gained a lot from free trade, but the gains have not been spread evenly. There are cultural reasons why our laws and regulations have failed to solve this problem. One is an irrational disdain for anything remotely socialist. Another is that working class whites have very distinctly voted against their interests in this regard for, as you say, the past five decades.
    - stevens32 10y ago
      “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress Kind of seems like the inevitable conclusion of the hard-sell of the American Dream
      - danharaj 10y ago
        Socialism was very popular at the turn of the 20th century. Workers movements were strong, labor had power. A socialist ran for president, even. The real reason why it never took root was because it was brutally opposed at every turn by government and business.
        ArkyBeagle 10y ago
        Even Henry Ford adopted some Progressive/Socialist principles. For every Henry Frick there were thousands of much less severe people in positions of power. But in America, wages were usually quite a bit higher than in Europe, so the need was less obvious.
      - mc32 10y ago
        I'm not sure about that. One thing which I think tends to skew things is that we get so many immigrants who are intent on seeking better opportunities than they had in their home countries. For most of them, things are by default better than what they had back home [as paupers or even as middlings back home], else they would not have come and the movement to migrate _here_ would run out of momentum. Second gen + may be more receptive to more progressive ideas about security, mobility etc.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      >working class whites have very distinctly voted against their interests. Given that Obama pushed the TPP hard, made the Bush tax cuts permanent and effectively raised taxes on the working poor with the ACA (also known as Romney Care) and Clinton passed NAFTA and shortened welfare to 5 years. I assuming you mean they should have voted Green party or something?
dang 10y ago
You've repeatedly posted uncivil and unsubstantive comments, and ideological rants, to HN. Those are abuses of this site, so we've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned from HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com with reason to believe that you'll follow the rules from now on. But please stop creating accounts to abuse HN with.
- emblem21 10y ago
  Correction: I've been shadowbanned, which means only Altman can see my posts. Just as planned. :)
- mSparks 10y ago
  please take your life somewhere else.

crystalPalace 10y ago

I'm getting an internal server error when I click on the link.

ElysianEagle 10y ago
For now you can find it on the front page of the blog: http://lemire.me/blog/ http://lemire.me/blog/

ranprieur 10y ago

"If human labor were to become wholly unnecessary, we are going to substitute for it through transemployment. That is, we will create work that is not strictly needed." In other words, bullshit jobs: http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.o... That's fine if employment becomes fully optional, but I fear we'll be forced into a life without the meaning of useful jobs, and without the freedom of technological unemployment.

beat 10y ago
Bullshit jobs are about the social order, not about productivity. People can find productive things to do on their own. "Bullshit jobs" depend on economic surplus to create work that is not immediately productive in terms of food, shelter, or safety. Most entertainers and craft artists fall under the definition of "bullshit jobs". Fine dining chefs are doing something entirely unnecessary. So are rock stars.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  It's a couple of years since I read that article but I'm pretty certain top chefs -- who work directly on products that people clearly want a lot -- are the exact opposite of the kind of alienated work Graeber had in mind.
  - beat 10y ago
    Sure they are. But those jobs exist because of economic surplus.
    - nopriorarrests 10y ago
      Well, all Apple jobs exist for the same reason.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Bullshit jobs are jobs that are not productive at all, or are sometimes actively destructive (in adding layers of bureaucracy) in ways that require other essentially bullshit jobs to counteract. You're talking about something a bit more abstract and puritan. I was a 3602 Clerk, once, which was an essentially bullshit job created to navigate the hurdles presented by a post office clerk assigned to my company, whose skills primarily consisted of sleeping while sitting up, and storing the 12 lbs. of paperwork I generated per mailing in a closet and taking my word for its veracity. That's a bullshit job. I once worked for an agency whose primary job was procuring people willing to, for money, give permission to other people to declare evidence for a quality assigned by governing officials that obligated higher governing officials to give money to the customers of the clients for whom we procured, and whom we sought out to make a living. We were honestly just a conduit for government money that grabbed 3% of the cash that flowed through it. That's an entire bullshit agency. A comedian creates laughs. That's not a bullshit job, that's a good job.

techbio 10y ago

I would like to see a little more serious attention to the "participation" rates in the workforce. Author is a little too reliant, for this particular topic, on the 5% unemployment rate.

rqebmm 10y ago
The recession certainly did a number on the participation rate, but the current rate is more or less organic (as evidenced by recent gains in wages once unemployment stabilized at ~5%). A lot of baby-boomers aged out around during the recession, and will continue to do so (people born between 1943-1951 all turned 65 during the recession), and a lot of people went back into school to "hide" from it. _Under_employment is still a serious issue, but that's only reflected in labor statistics by median wages. On the bright side those have been going up too, but aggregates only tell us so much.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  I don't know what "more or less organic" means here. Using the prime age (25-54) employment rate filters out that noise, and it shows that we've retraced about halfway from the worst of the housing crash. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060 edit: ...which is really terrible if you look at it in the longer term: http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-population-ratio-remains-terribly-depressed/ http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-population-r...

beat 10y ago

It's not just the existence of technological unemployment, it's the pace of it. Over the past two centuries, we've shifted from an economy where virtually everyone is a farmer to an economy where hardly anyone is a farmer. We've mostly automated food production and distribution. But it took generations to do it. Today, people embark on careers in their 20s that disappear in their 40s and 50s. Such a pace of change is distressing. Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out. It'll be local short hauls only, places where there's a lot of human interaction and judgment calls. Long haul semis will be entirely automated. It'll save money and it will save lives, and it will be a huge boon to everyone in society - except professional long haul truckers, who will lose their livelihoods. They won't take it well. Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can do that. But what if it takes a year or more to retrain? How will they pay the mortgage? How will they feed the kids? People who can't care for themselves and their families feel weak, vulnerable, and ashamed. They'll be angry and act out. They'll listen to political demagogues who tell them what they want to hear and give them scapegoats to blame. Such a sudden social change is politically dangerous.

moxious 10y ago
A lot of the fear that comes from tech unemployment is based on predictions of the future, which are notoriously horrible. You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term timeline. I'm fairly sure there are exactly zero US states where bot trucking is presently common. Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech readiness is only one small factor in whether or not this even could happen. Bold predictions are, with hindsight, usually wrong. A lot of these fearful arguments boil down to a simple syllogism; "if present trends continue, then (bad outcome here)". The trouble with that is that trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50 years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, and you'll see uniformly that the future predictors expected certain trends to continue which didn't, and missed the existence of other big trends that ended up as primary drivers. People just don't know what's going to happen in the future. I suppose guessing is better than doing nothing, but we shouldn't think that the future guessing we do is actually good or accurate, past experience teaches it's actually really far off.

david927 10y ago

This is a horrible assessment of whether we are facing technological unemployment. There are more bank tellers in the US than ever before But.. there are more people than ever before. And the number of bank tellers is leveling off even as the population grows. Overall, there is scant evidence that we are undergoing a technological-unemployment crisis, if only because unemployment rates are low. Are you kidding me? (First, you have to always be careful with any metric where the collecting agent has even the slightest bias to the outcome. Unemployment is not the obvious number you might think it is for a variety of reasons.) Jobless and underemployment are the numbers you want to be looking at -- and good luck getting good numbers on those but when you do, I think they'll tell a very different story.

Animats 10y ago
What used to be a "bank teller" is now a sales rep, trying to sell you on loans and steer you to investments. Bank of America is rebuilding their branches into a new design. There are maybe two teller windows in the back for the occasional non-ATM cash transaction, while the front of the branch has little glassed-in sales offices like a car dealership. A lot of employment is in the marketing overhead of capitalism. There are many products, from movies to Internet access, where the marketing cost exceeds the product cost. This is zero-sum; most marketing in the US just moves demand from one product to another. (Spending is income-limited in the US; the savings rate is very low.) It's also why people are still working so hard. Marketing is inherently competitive, which means it can chew up resources out of proportion to the value produced.
- mljoe 10y ago
  Good insight, the amount of money society spends on marketing is staggering (and that's thats only things explicitly labeled as such, which I think your case is not). Actually I would go as further and say short of high IP/high technology industries, marketing (branding) IS the product. Bank of America is a fabricated brand that happens to be in banking.
- Kadin 10y ago
  One of the issues with the "new economy" / "service economy" model that has been pushed heavily over the past few decades is that it doesn't distinguish between zero-sum jobs that have as their end goal merely a reallocation of a fixed amount of resources, and jobs which create value and are basically industrial in nature but where the end product is intangible (e.g. movies, television, writing, software development, etc.). State and local governments have spent vast sums trying to attract "new economy" jobs to replace decimated primary industries, but I question how many of those jobs are marketing or "economic overhead" related. That's not to say that they're bad jobs at an individual level, or there's anything wrong with anyone working in them, but it doesn't seem like it's a sustainable basis for a national economy.

ivan_ah 10y ago

> [...] the unemployment rate worldwide is low. It is under 5% in the US [...] I'm not sure how this is calculated. Do people employed part-time count as employed? How has that changed over time? The problems of the precariat include under-employment and being forced to hold undesirable jobs.

heartbreak 10y ago
How the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the US unemployment rate: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
zdragnar 10y ago
In the US, the official unemployment rate cited is the U-3 rate, which is exclusively limited to those currently seeking a job, with no employment status at all. Partial employment (such as part-time) due to economic circumstances, as well as those who are within the employable age range (18-60something) but are not employed nor seeking a new job due to economic circumstances (i.e. gave up) are covered by the U-6 measurement, which is substantially higher at 9.8%. See here: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm That page also has links to historical measurements back to 2003, and you can probably find further back (though I'm not sure if there are older resources that also include the state-by-state breakdown).
nommm-nommm 10y ago
Unemployment has the potential to be very misleading. It is a count of people who are actively looking for work but not yet employed. It doesn't count people who have dropped out of the workforce but would prefer to be working or people who are underemployed or working less hours than they'd prefer, for example.

csallen 10y ago

As I understand it (and I say this as a fellow "techno-optimist"), one of the most significant challenges is that cultural and political change occur much more slowly than technological change. So it's not that we can't adapt, but that adaptation is exceedingly painful to various segments of the population. We tend to accept certain facts as "permanently true", which ends up tearing holes in society and in our lives when these facts inevitably change. For example: * Building a long-term career at a single company is safe. * Traditional college degrees are worth the monetary cost. * Society can only function if everyone works a job. I'm a bit skeptical that "we'll always find a way to quickly replace jobs" will stand the test of time, especially when the primary evidence given is, "Well that's how it's worked out so far."

jdross 10y ago
It's not just that it's how it's worked out in the past, but it's that it continues to work out that way every month in the present. Roughly 24% of jobs are permanently replaced in the US every year (which I found very surprising) "Researchers’ estimates on the scale of threatened jobs over the next decade or two range from 9 to 47 percent. For context, every 3 months about 6 percent of jobs in the economy are destroyed by shrinking or closing businesses, while a slightly larger percentage of jobs are added— resulting in rising employment and a roughly constant unemployment rate. The economy has repeatedly proven itself capable of handling this scale of change, although it would depend on how rapidly the changes happen and how concentrated the losses are in specific occupations that are hard to shift from." source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Artificial-Intelligence-Automation-Economy.PDF https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docume...
- csallen 10y ago
  Individual businesses shrinking and closing isn't the same as entire industries and professions being automated or "globalized" away. For example, plenty of tech startups fail, but that doesn't affect the market for programmers in the Bay Area, because plenty of tech startups are being created, too. Now, let's say the VC money dried up somehow, or we invented an AI capable of programming anything based on a vague description. Lots of programmers would be out of a job.

DrNuke 10y ago

Global economy & services may be fully automated pretty soon but local economies? No chance, we are still going to have humans doing local trades and services to other humans for the foreseeable future, just go back to your roots as a member of a family, village, community.

visarga 10y ago
> just go back to your roots as a member of a family, village, community. I think unemployed people will start teaming up to solve their needs directly - farms, small fab shops, schools, construction - we can make all these with local workforce, "self employed for self reliance". We'd only need access to raw materials and some land.

CodeSheikh 10y ago

The main thesis of this article is true but honestly the author has done a very unconvincing job to back it up. For example my problem is with his references: "Firm investments in high-tech equipment and software is falling"...whereas the liked article is about "The recent slowdown in high-tech equipment price declines and some implications for business investment and labor productivity"

awinter-py 10y ago

hmm -- his 'transemployment' concept where complex processes are created and assigned to people as 'jobs' is brutal. We've all worked at process-heavy orgs and most of us have left them. Process-heavy orgs will get out-competed by orgs managed almost any other way. If you're optimized to create useless work for people, you'll probably lose to an org that's optimized for something almost as silly like optimizing for high cost of labor. My consultancy is optimized for high cost of labor and I do okay. Some people argue this is what's happening to France now. 40 years of shaping labor law to improve retirement & reduce unemployment has taken its toll. Paris is a smart tech-savvy and beautiful city that could have been Europe's silicon valley, but you're not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week and you can't fire people. Ah, 20-20 hindsight.

anf 10y ago

> Some authors fear that technology will result in a radical concentration of wealth, the like of which we have never seen… while a few people will be super wealthy, all of us will slowly starve. Except that fewer people than ever in history are starving! Starving is how revolutions happen, so probably not literally starving. But poor people in the US are already wholly politically disenfranchised, and children of poor parents likely to be poor. The two questions which are important to consider in the light of extreme automation: "how large and diverse is our oligarchy?" and "how much social and economic mobility is there between generations?". We are well on the way to having a small oligarchy like Russia and mostly inherited wealth, at which point our society will simply cease to exist.

imagist 10y ago

The idea of transemployment (work that is not needed, but is created to prevent unemployment) is a terrible idea. Have we really become so brainwashed that we have forgotten that the entire purpose of work is to create value? Simply letting people not work doesn't remove incentives to perform: the incentives that we have are already broken. We don't live in a meritocratic economy: the Monsantos and Blackwaters of the world are rewarded for destructive behaviors, while advertising allows inferior products to drive superior products out of business. If we have enough surplus to support these massive inefficiencies, surely we can spare enough to support the unemployed. Further, transemployment actually costs us. It requires infrastructure to create fake jobs.

danielweber 10y ago
Anyone who has spent any time in a poor community knows that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. We will only hit real make-work jobs when we can no longer answer the question "how would I solve this problem, if only I had access to a lot more workers?"
- imagist 10y ago
  That's not the question businesses are asking. They're asking, how can I solve this problem as cheaply/efficiently as possible? And the answer is increasingly not human labor. There is work to be done in poor communities in the sense that there is need, but there isn't much work to be done in the sense that not many people are offering jobs (because not many can pay). Anyone who has spent time in a rich community knows that there's plenty of surplus that could be shared. It's not a problem of lack of resources, it's a problem of distribution. The problem with redistribution, we're told, is that the current distribution is based on merit: those who provide the most value are given the most value. Joe is a billionaire because he's provided billions of dollars of value to the world, while Bob is starving because he doesn't provide any value. If we take from Joe to feed Bob, then Joe won't have any incentive to provide value, so he'll stop, and society will collapse. However, I don't think that's true. Joe doesn't provide more value than Bob necessarily--he just is better at manipulating the abstractions we've created around value. We don't live in a meritocracy. But the lie of meritocracy isn't a complete lie. People do often provide more value if they receive more value. Honest actors do exist and provide value, and while most don't get to be Rich Joe, most don't become Homeless Bob either. However, with technology, these honesty actors are no longer needed, and the lie of meritocracy becomes even more bald faced. In a future where robots do all the work, are we to believe that someone provides value simply because records show that they own the robots? Transemployment is just an attempt to maintain the current distribution of resources: ostensibly the transemployed would work for someone, and that someone would determine how much they are paid. And of course that person would be paid more. I think that a better solution is to drop the pretense that the distribution of resources is meritocratic, and as technology makes it even less meritocratic, we should look at ensuring that the benefits of technology are distributed more evenly. Creating fake jobs to maintain a tiered distribution of resources is only going to make things worse.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

I used to think techno-optimists were delusional but history is on their side. You could argue there is a phase shift happening and this one will be different but I doubt it. Like the author says we'll make up new jobs.

Animats 10y ago

The real deal with technological unemployment is that the list of things humans can do and machines can't keeps shrinking.

moxious 10y ago
That has been true for at least 400 years. Humans have generally adapted by inventing new things to be done that didn't exist previously. (The app industry was very small 20 years ago. ;) The interesting question is why people think this time around is different. Answers seem to vary from just "computers" to, "the same change is happening but now it's happening faster". The compensatory mechanisms still work though, yet it seems no one things they will.
- Animats 10y ago
  Many of the "new things to be done" are done by machines from the very beginning now. No human or combination of humans can do what Google does.
  - Kadin 10y ago
    And yet Google employs a lot of people to do what Google does. No human or combination of humans can turn iron ore into stainless steel tubing. Yet a whole lot of people, acting in concert, can build and operate a bunch of terrifically complex machines which will do just that. The end result is an entity that you can draw a box around, which takes in that human labor plus iron ore and coal and minerals and produces steel tubing (and slag and acid rain). And it'll continue to do that, optimizing itself, as long as the market price of the outputs exceeds the market price of the inputs. Google is similar (without the air pollution, though it has its own externalities). It's a bunch of people building and operating a bunch of terrifically complex machines which organize information, in such a way that the outputs have more value than the inputs inclusive of labor. It's a pretty nice business model, particularly when the inputs are basically free (because of the Internet). But I don't see any reason to be especially threatened by Google, or at least there's no reason to be more threatened by Google, than the steel plant. Google can and probably will optimize itself to reduce labor costs, just as steel mills have optimized themselves; a modern steel mill can produce a hell of a lot of steel without very many employees, which isn't good if you're a steel mill worker. Google in 20 years may not employ very many people to maintain its search products, either. It's something to be aware of if you work in that industry, but it's not especially unique.

pcmaffey 10y ago

Unemployment is not the problem. The problem is that the surplus / wealth created by technology is controlled by the 1%. Redistribute that wealth and the majority of the workforce will no longer need to be truck drivers, or farmers, or laborers. Then, we can start paying people to learn.

devoply 10y ago
Total wealth in the world 241 trillion / 7 billion people = 34428.5714286/person Might do something for a Mexican, won't do much for me.
zip1234 10y ago
Without truck drivers, farmers, or laborers, the world would have a big problem
- elliotec 10y ago
  Probably not if they are replaced by automation, which is the entire point of this discussion.
eikenberry 10y ago
Well, considering employment is the standard way of redistributing wealth then unemployment is a problem. We need more ways of redistributing wealth. More than we have now anyways which seem to be limited to taxes and employment.
zxcvvcxz 10y ago
I think it makes much more sense to go the other way, reduce regulations so that truck drivers / laborers who think their current setup isn't fair can start their own businesses and get paid what they're worth! But no, you'd rather people put in the effort they want, while arbitrarily rounding out the outcomes. You'd rather subsidize laziness. Socialists don't make good entrepreneurs.
- grp 10y ago

stevens32 10y ago

AI is a fundamentally different technological innovation than the ones he compares against in the post. It's not an incremental improvement on methods, it's a complete replacement of the labor force for many industries. But the problem to solve isn't how to blunt the impact of AI, rather how to handle the newly freed labor force. I don't think this should be seen as a bad thing. Tasks a machine can take care of should be left to a machine, and other work should be handled by a human. We'll have a lot of open human capacity to accomplish something, but if the transition isn't handled well it could be really painful.

russell 10y ago

I have often wondered what happens when large scale technological unemployment occurs, or even the threat of it. I think we have seen the result in the 2016 Presidential election with the election of Donald Trump, probably the least qualified president since Harding. He's a psychopath, for god's sake. And his cabinet is beyond comprehension. The possible result is an attack on all branches of the executive except the military. Replacement of Social Security and Medicare by virtually worthless vouchers, elimination of the departments of Education, Housing, and Energy. emasculation of the EPA. And on and on. This could be as self-destructive as an armed uprising with fewer deaths (maybe). Many of the issues are easy to fix. Remove the wage cap on Social Security taxes. Convert to health insurance to Medicare. Some of the unemployment issues can be mitigated by making the workweek 30 or 32 hours. Turning truck drivers into nurses or medical technicians takes a few years of training. Many of them are smart enough to do it. The current stumbling block is that they must have income support during the education period. Giving someone $100K to manage the transition doesnt seem like much to me. Fundamentally increased productivity and wealth should lead to more leisure and a better standard of living for everyone. Eventually everyone should get a minimum guaranteed income so they have time to pursue their education, raise families, be artists or novelists. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome for an experiment on a guaranteed income.