12 ms·

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 every

by 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.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  The fear comes from the unknown. Appalachia in the United States is what people dread. High unemployment, jobs never coming back, addiction to pain killers killing you in your 30s and 40s. Really, I suggest anyone on Hacker News to take 2-3 days and drive through parts of West Virginia, during the daylight only, to see, physically see, what the commotion is about. [1] If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation. But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough. Protect against the unknown, and people will be less anxious about rapid change. Don't protect them, and risk social instability. This is what government, social programs, and taxes are for. Or we can wait for the 21st century equivalent of the guillotines to come out. [1] http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleton-W-Va-is-a-town-decimated-by-poverty-drugs/stories/201504280190 http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleto...
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    Where most economists advocating the policies behind automation and globalization have lost the plot is they map the relative resilience at the macro level of nations that they observe to the micro level of individuals. The map is not the territory, and I've yet to see solid evidence in economics literature that rigorously tests the assumption that what is good for the nation at the policy and aggregate level is automatically good for individuals as well.
  - faded242 10y ago
    Thanks to Google Street View, we don't even have to take a few days: http://bit.ly/2hKM8Yi http://bit.ly/2hKM8Yi
    - kbenson 10y ago
      I can't help but feel that your comment is both entirely valid, and also indicative of the (or at least a) general problem. I can't help but think that something is lost when viewing these through a computer screen. At least in a car the scale isn't abstract. It's right there, and there's no turning it off. The best you can do is drive away, and the time that takes is itself part of the experience.
marcoperaza 10y ago
I suspect that we'll see regulations that blunt the impact of this. E.g. long haul trucks will be automated, but will require an alert driver behind the wheel.
- Kadin 10y ago
  In the short term I suspect that's more likely. But what that turns into is a diminishment of the skills required to do the job (for a value of "skills" that includes "staying awake and driving a truck for hours at a time along lonely Interstate highways", which may not be everyone's cup of tea, but certainly acts as a barrier to entry). That generally means more competition in the job market, and more competition on the labor side of the equation means less upward pressure on salaries. It's not as bad as having your job automated out of existence, but it's still not good for people in that market. And I think there are likely to be a lot of jobs that are like that: not eliminated completely, but made in some way easier or less onerous, such that the labor pool is bigger.
danielweber 10y ago
Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can do that But most people don't. Offer retraining of entirely different work to 100 truck drivers whose jobs don't exist any more, and maybe 10 of them will go through on it. We should do what we can to help those 10 do it, but most people will want to stick with something at least related to what they know. And they don't want to be on direct welfare, even though someone typing out code would think that would be nice. We can make labor cheaper to ease the pain on people's lives. Raise my taxes to boost the EITC. Make employment cheaper by reducing payroll taxes and all other business expenses related to employment. And these are tunable fixes. Once you put otherwise employed people through long periods of unemployment, they become very very hard to get back to work. If you keep them working, even part time, it's easier to restore them to full employment should the need arise.
- Retric 10y ago
  Retraining is expensive in lost wages if nothing else. "Retraining" without that is financially difficult and minimally useful for older workers.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  Offer retraining of entirely different work to 100 truck drivers whose jobs don't exist any more, and maybe 10 of them will go through on it. Assuming that is so, to my mind the salient question is "why?" That is, why only 10? Is it that the other 90 just don't want to be retrained? Is it that the retraining wasn't accessible to them for some reason (child-care, transportation, etc.)? Or maybe some of them started it but dropped out for some reason? Is it that they "couldn't hack it" or is that we don't really know how to retrain people properly? I would hope there has been research directed at this, as it seems to me that we'd want to find a way to maximize the number of people who do take advantage of retraining, and who ultimately benefit from it.
  - monk_e_boy 10y ago
    It's really hard. I'm doing it at the moment. I'm a 40 year old man being trained up with a bunch of 20 something women for a job. It'll take a year and it is really hard going. It was hard to get onto the course. I've taken a huge loan. I'm shitting my pants. I've got no idea if I'll like the job or be good at it. It's the biggest gamble I've ever taken. The stress is unreal. Most of my fucking hair has fallen out. My body is just falling to bits. It feels like my heart is either going 200% or 10%. When I read posts saying "Why don't people re-train?" Its for the same reason you don't re-train as a doctor or a teacher or for the police. Because it's not what you do. It's not what you want to do. It's hard to change. It's a massive gamble. I imagine if you have no qualifications it's even harder.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
It's the scale, not the pace so much. We have a terrible history of giving the opportunity to switch careers. I suggest you look into the history of former mining or steel towns in the US and UK. The majority of "regeneration" has been from younger people coming into the market rather than former workers being given opportunity. A significant proportion spend their lives depressed, broken and unemployed for the rest of it. Some of those communities never recovered. If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work. It wasn't "a problem" in the past as the scale meant that it was possible to ignore - unless you happened to live near one of those former industrial towns. This time the scale is such that ignoring it will potentially take us near anarchy. It will have to get very close for governments to do something actually substantive.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  I'm retraining at the moment. I've taken out huge loans and as a family we have decided that we'll just have to be super poor for the next few years while I'm training. It's a huge investment, and super scary when you are not guaranteed a job at the end of it. I totally understand why people put it off and hope that a job comes up that they are currently qualified for.
  - eabraham 10y ago
    I'm very curious about your experience. What career are you leaving/retraining for?
    - monk_e_boy 10y ago
      Was programmer (PHP, Drupal, Python, Linux stack, Web. MySQL, Oracle etc) Training to be an IT/CompSci teacher - 11 to 16 year olds.
      - megablast 10y ago
vacri 10y ago
> Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out. Before we get there, there is a major problem in that we don't have enough young truckers. The average age of truckers is up around 50, and we need a lot of them. Automated trucking is still a long way away - the technology still has quite a long way to go, and after that, the infrastructure and tech has to percolate out (and trucks aren't cheap).
WalterBright 10y ago
Long haul trucking should have never happened - that traffic belongs on railroads. LHT exists only because the highways are subsidized by the car traffic, whereas freight rail has to pay for the tracks. Semi trailers should be loaded onto flatcars, trained to the destination city, and picked up and dropped on a truck for the intra-city delivery.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  You're kind of missing the tradeoffs involved in long haul trucking vs rail. Even with highway subsidies involved, trucking is significantly more expensive than rail is. Like, brief google-fu puts 2007 rates at 16.54 cents per ton-mile for trucking, vs 2.99 for rail -- so, roughly speaking, LHT is over five times as expensive as rail is. Given that folks are paying for LHT, it's important to figure out why. And the answer lies in just-in-time production and pull-based production systems. These systems put a large business value on the timeliness and flexibility of delivery. For many processes, saving $150/ton or so on transport doesn't matter if it means putting another day's worth of inventory into your production system, especially if if it risks producing the wrong stuff.
LeifCarrotson 10y ago
> 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. I am having a hard time coming up with areas where careers come and go in 20 years. Truck driving isn't one, it's been around since the 1930s and only really aggressive predictions suggest its passing by 2030 - which is more than long enough. It would be more convincing to name careers that had both come and gone, rather than which are scheduled to go soon. But everything I think of is more properly categorized as a sub-type of a larger career. Punch card operators and VB6 programmers aren't tied to those technologies, they are generic computing professionals who happened to use a technology stack which has gone away. Can you think of any examples of complete career fields which have disappeared?
- aperrien 10y ago
  Medical and Legal dictation specialists, for one.
disposablezero 10y ago
A few people growing a massive amount of genetically-identical (GM) grain in a narrow band of arable land pilles risk up like a Jenga game. In the US, the median climate models suggest the majority of intensively-cultivated land and surrounding areas will experience significant desertification. Plus, cities are filled with mostly knowledge and service specialists whom depend almost entirely on massive quantities of goods and food produced in factories and rural areas.

by beat 10y ago

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.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
The fear comes from the unknown. Appalachia in the United States is what people dread. High unemployment, jobs never coming back, addiction to pain killers killing you in your 30s and 40s. Really, I suggest anyone on Hacker News to take 2-3 days and drive through parts of West Virginia, during the daylight only, to see, physically see, what the commotion is about. [1] If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation. But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough. Protect against the unknown, and people will be less anxious about rapid change. Don't protect them, and risk social instability. This is what government, social programs, and taxes are for. Or we can wait for the 21st century equivalent of the guillotines to come out. [1] http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleton-W-Va-is-a-town-decimated-by-poverty-drugs/stories/201504280190 http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleto...
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  Where most economists advocating the policies behind automation and globalization have lost the plot is they map the relative resilience at the macro level of nations that they observe to the micro level of individuals. The map is not the territory, and I've yet to see solid evidence in economics literature that rigorously tests the assumption that what is good for the nation at the policy and aggregate level is automatically good for individuals as well.
- faded242 10y ago
  Thanks to Google Street View, we don't even have to take a few days: http://bit.ly/2hKM8Yi http://bit.ly/2hKM8Yi
  - kbenson 10y ago
    I can't help but feel that your comment is both entirely valid, and also indicative of the (or at least a) general problem. I can't help but think that something is lost when viewing these through a computer screen. At least in a car the scale isn't abstract. It's right there, and there's no turning it off. The best you can do is drive away, and the time that takes is itself part of the experience.

marcoperaza 10y ago

I suspect that we'll see regulations that blunt the impact of this. E.g. long haul trucks will be automated, but will require an alert driver behind the wheel.

Kadin 10y ago
In the short term I suspect that's more likely. But what that turns into is a diminishment of the skills required to do the job (for a value of "skills" that includes "staying awake and driving a truck for hours at a time along lonely Interstate highways", which may not be everyone's cup of tea, but certainly acts as a barrier to entry). That generally means more competition in the job market, and more competition on the labor side of the equation means less upward pressure on salaries. It's not as bad as having your job automated out of existence, but it's still not good for people in that market. And I think there are likely to be a lot of jobs that are like that: not eliminated completely, but made in some way easier or less onerous, such that the labor pool is bigger.

danielweber 10y ago

Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can do that But most people don't. Offer retraining of entirely different work to 100 truck drivers whose jobs don't exist any more, and maybe 10 of them will go through on it. We should do what we can to help those 10 do it, but most people will want to stick with something at least related to what they know. And they don't want to be on direct welfare, even though someone typing out code would think that would be nice. We can make labor cheaper to ease the pain on people's lives. Raise my taxes to boost the EITC. Make employment cheaper by reducing payroll taxes and all other business expenses related to employment. And these are tunable fixes. Once you put otherwise employed people through long periods of unemployment, they become very very hard to get back to work. If you keep them working, even part time, it's easier to restore them to full employment should the need arise.

Retric 10y ago
Retraining is expensive in lost wages if nothing else. "Retraining" without that is financially difficult and minimally useful for older workers.
mindcrime 10y ago
Offer retraining of entirely different work to 100 truck drivers whose jobs don't exist any more, and maybe 10 of them will go through on it. Assuming that is so, to my mind the salient question is "why?" That is, why only 10? Is it that the other 90 just don't want to be retrained? Is it that the retraining wasn't accessible to them for some reason (child-care, transportation, etc.)? Or maybe some of them started it but dropped out for some reason? Is it that they "couldn't hack it" or is that we don't really know how to retrain people properly? I would hope there has been research directed at this, as it seems to me that we'd want to find a way to maximize the number of people who do take advantage of retraining, and who ultimately benefit from it.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  It's really hard. I'm doing it at the moment. I'm a 40 year old man being trained up with a bunch of 20 something women for a job. It'll take a year and it is really hard going. It was hard to get onto the course. I've taken a huge loan. I'm shitting my pants. I've got no idea if I'll like the job or be good at it. It's the biggest gamble I've ever taken. The stress is unreal. Most of my fucking hair has fallen out. My body is just falling to bits. It feels like my heart is either going 200% or 10%. When I read posts saying "Why don't people re-train?" Its for the same reason you don't re-train as a doctor or a teacher or for the police. Because it's not what you do. It's not what you want to do. It's hard to change. It's a massive gamble. I imagine if you have no qualifications it's even harder.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

It's the scale, not the pace so much. We have a terrible history of giving the opportunity to switch careers. I suggest you look into the history of former mining or steel towns in the US and UK. The majority of "regeneration" has been from younger people coming into the market rather than former workers being given opportunity. A significant proportion spend their lives depressed, broken and unemployed for the rest of it. Some of those communities never recovered. If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work. It wasn't "a problem" in the past as the scale meant that it was possible to ignore - unless you happened to live near one of those former industrial towns. This time the scale is such that ignoring it will potentially take us near anarchy. It will have to get very close for governments to do something actually substantive.

monk_e_boy 10y ago
I'm retraining at the moment. I've taken out huge loans and as a family we have decided that we'll just have to be super poor for the next few years while I'm training. It's a huge investment, and super scary when you are not guaranteed a job at the end of it. I totally understand why people put it off and hope that a job comes up that they are currently qualified for.
- eabraham 10y ago
  I'm very curious about your experience. What career are you leaving/retraining for?
  - monk_e_boy 10y ago
    Was programmer (PHP, Drupal, Python, Linux stack, Web. MySQL, Oracle etc) Training to be an IT/CompSci teacher - 11 to 16 year olds.
    - megablast 10y ago

vacri 10y ago

> Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out. Before we get there, there is a major problem in that we don't have enough young truckers. The average age of truckers is up around 50, and we need a lot of them. Automated trucking is still a long way away - the technology still has quite a long way to go, and after that, the infrastructure and tech has to percolate out (and trucks aren't cheap).

WalterBright 10y ago

Long haul trucking should have never happened - that traffic belongs on railroads. LHT exists only because the highways are subsidized by the car traffic, whereas freight rail has to pay for the tracks. Semi trailers should be loaded onto flatcars, trained to the destination city, and picked up and dropped on a truck for the intra-city delivery.

ThrustVectoring 10y ago
You're kind of missing the tradeoffs involved in long haul trucking vs rail. Even with highway subsidies involved, trucking is significantly more expensive than rail is. Like, brief google-fu puts 2007 rates at 16.54 cents per ton-mile for trucking, vs 2.99 for rail -- so, roughly speaking, LHT is over five times as expensive as rail is. Given that folks are paying for LHT, it's important to figure out why. And the answer lies in just-in-time production and pull-based production systems. These systems put a large business value on the timeliness and flexibility of delivery. For many processes, saving $150/ton or so on transport doesn't matter if it means putting another day's worth of inventory into your production system, especially if if it risks producing the wrong stuff.

LeifCarrotson 10y ago

> 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. I am having a hard time coming up with areas where careers come and go in 20 years. Truck driving isn't one, it's been around since the 1930s and only really aggressive predictions suggest its passing by 2030 - which is more than long enough. It would be more convincing to name careers that had both come and gone, rather than which are scheduled to go soon. But everything I think of is more properly categorized as a sub-type of a larger career. Punch card operators and VB6 programmers aren't tied to those technologies, they are generic computing professionals who happened to use a technology stack which has gone away. Can you think of any examples of complete career fields which have disappeared?

aperrien 10y ago
Medical and Legal dictation specialists, for one.

disposablezero 10y ago

A few people growing a massive amount of genetically-identical (GM) grain in a narrow band of arable land pilles risk up like a Jenga game. In the US, the median climate models suggest the majority of intensively-cultivated land and surrounding areas will experience significant desertification. Plus, cities are filled with mostly knowledge and service specialists whom depend almost entirely on massive quantities of goods and food produced in factories and rural areas.