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Actually my point is that we are in a unique time. Up until now technology replaced skilled labor positions. So people who would have gone into something like

Actually my point is that we are in a unique time. Up until now technology replaced skilled labor positions. So people who would have gone into something like economics instead went into computer science and we just did more with what we had. Now we're getting to the point where technology can replace unskilled labor and that creates a unique problem because, though it might not be politically correct to say, some people simply don't have the capacity to go into a high tech vocation. Put it this way. There have always been people whose job was one of pure labor. Lifting boxes, tightening screws and so on. Once robotics gets to the point where it's cheap enough and skilled enough to do those jobs where do the people who have done those jobs in generations past go?

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Nope. I understand you, and my point still holds. At each step in modernization people wondered what was going to happen. What you are saying has been said dozens of times before. Maybe thousands. The average unskilled laborer in the U.S. works at a much higher level of abstraction than he did a couple of generations ago. Nothing is simple any more, and computers are everywhere. The day laborer that does the gardening down the street has a pickup, a cell phone, a notebook computer and a bookkeeping system, a GPS, etc. If he is competitive he might do analysis of the soil, use special tools, pick up knowledge at the local college, etc. And it's going to a long, long way from robots among us to really cheap multi-purpose robots everywhere. Market dynamics will have a lot of say in the meantime. You may be right. it's just guessing on both of our parts. The future will tell. But I seriously doubt it. Claims of uniqueness need better proof than hand-waving about talking about robots. EDIT: You also may be right -- but in a thousand-year timeframe. And as Keynes famously said, in the long run, we are all dead.
- TomOfTTB 16y ago
  With all due respect you're guessing, I'm not. You're basically saying "it's worked itself out in the past so it will surely do so in the future." But that's not a logical conclusion. Things do change. What I'm saying is the fact that we won't have enough jobs for everyone is inevitable just by extrapolating on current trends. The welfare state being discussed exists because people have been able to retire much earlier without negatively impacting society. That in itself shows a trend towards the amount of human labor our society needs growing smaller. My original point is that we need to start innovating in how we govern to deal with the eventuality of that trend reaching the point where there aren't enough jobs for younger people. We shouldn't destroy the infrastructure we already have and then try to solve that problem when it becomes a real crisis.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    I would like to continue this thread because I believe I am wrong -- the question is of degree. I also believe you are wrong, and much more wrong than I am (smile) Plus I believe we are being civil, and I enjoy a civil conversation that makes me think. Using past examples as indicators of future performance is called induction. Great thing. Not bulletproof by any means, but the more examples that exist the more comfortable I am with drawing conclusions. Think of it this way: given your logic, the vast majority of people will become intellectually disabled in the future, unable to find productive work or work the complex machines required to live. Sort of an Idiocracy. The problem here is that you can't take a number like "jobs" and extrapolate it, because of the very problem you're stepping into: it's an aggregate, not a metric. They don't make buggy whips any more, car manufacturing isn't done the way it used to be done in Detroit. The average guy who used to just sit behind the back-end of a horse on the farm all day somehow has managed to make it into the 21st century just fine, however. Markets are funny things. I am not one of those that thinks the free market can do everything -- but I also have a healthy respect for the unpredictable, unmanageable nature or a market. They continuously show the ability for groups of people acting creatively to come up with all kinds of ideas that I cannot forecast. If you are asking me to forecast the total number of fast-food employees over the next hundred years I have no doubt the line heads towards zero. But there's a long way from that to saying that all jobs for average people are disappearing. A long, long way. I don't know about what to do about this, although I am sure lots of folks have ideas. I think if we couldn't afford the welfare state and promises we had at the beginning of the century, I seriously doubt we're suddenly going to be able to afford it in the next 20 years. My guess is that 2012-2020 will see a huge Charlie Foxtrot with the welfare state worldwide (more than currently exists). That probably means that right now is a good time to talk about these things, because as politicized as they are now, I think they're only going to get worse.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    You're basically saying "it's worked itself out in the past so it will surely do so in the future." But that's not a logical conclusion. It certainly can be. Daniel is basically arguing for the outside view, and the outside view is often the best predictor of outcomes. Now, it may be that this time is different, but when you have a long history of specific failed predictions based on the details of a transition, it's certainly worth paying attention to the trend as a guide to this instance.
- rsheridan6 16y ago
  Technology really did eliminate jobs and they never came back - the jobs of horses. There nothing a horse can do, outside of hobbyist niches that a motorized machine can't do. When motorized machines took over jobs traditionally done by horses, they were not freed to pursue niches where they had a comparative advantage. They were simply replaced. Right now, there are still a lot of things that the dumbest human worker can do that give robots a hard time, mostly having to do with visual recognition - being able to find a berry on a bush to pluck, or find the corners of a crumpled shirt to fold. There's been enough of that kind of work to employ an essentially unlimited number of unskilled workers, no matter how much work that requires little or no pattern recognition has been automated. But if somebody can figure out how to get a computer to "see," it's all over for unskilled workers. I'm no expert in AI, but I would consider it fairly likely that we'll live to see that happen, and I don't see any reason to be so pessimistic as to expect it to take 1000 (what kind of prediction can you make that far out anyway?). We see news all the time on sites like this about incremental progress on that front.
cema 16y ago
people who would have gone into something like economics instead went into computer science Even if that is so (why then?) I do not see how it is related to "technology replac[ing] skilled labor positions". Could you please elaborate?
- TomOfTTB 16y ago
  Because people have different capacities. People with the capacity for what we consider "skilled" positions can be directed towards technology based positions. But there are people out there who, no matter how hard they try, lack the mental capacity to do what we consider skilled labor. I don't say this as an insult. I went to school with a guy who is still one of my best friends and he's just one of these people. He worked as hard as he could, studied for hours, and he still only got Cs in school. He doesn't have the capacity for that kind of thought. So when robotics gets to the point where it can do his job as a laborer on the docks he won't be able to be repositioned in the same way people with the capacity to take IT positions have been in the past

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Nope. I understand you, and my point still holds. At each step in modernization people wondered what was going to happen. What you are saying has been said dozens of times before. Maybe thousands. The average unskilled laborer in the U.S. works at a much higher level of abstraction than he did a couple of generations ago. Nothing is simple any more, and computers are everywhere. The day laborer that does the gardening down the street has a pickup, a cell phone, a notebook computer and a bookkeeping system, a GPS, etc. If he is competitive he might do analysis of the soil, use special tools, pick up knowledge at the local college, etc. And it's going to a long, long way from robots among us to really cheap multi-purpose robots everywhere. Market dynamics will have a lot of say in the meantime. You may be right. it's just guessing on both of our parts. The future will tell. But I seriously doubt it. Claims of uniqueness need better proof than hand-waving about talking about robots. EDIT: You also may be right -- but in a thousand-year timeframe. And as Keynes famously said, in the long run, we are all dead.

TomOfTTB 16y ago
With all due respect you're guessing, I'm not. You're basically saying "it's worked itself out in the past so it will surely do so in the future." But that's not a logical conclusion. Things do change. What I'm saying is the fact that we won't have enough jobs for everyone is inevitable just by extrapolating on current trends. The welfare state being discussed exists because people have been able to retire much earlier without negatively impacting society. That in itself shows a trend towards the amount of human labor our society needs growing smaller. My original point is that we need to start innovating in how we govern to deal with the eventuality of that trend reaching the point where there aren't enough jobs for younger people. We shouldn't destroy the infrastructure we already have and then try to solve that problem when it becomes a real crisis.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I would like to continue this thread because I believe I am wrong -- the question is of degree. I also believe you are wrong, and much more wrong than I am (smile) Plus I believe we are being civil, and I enjoy a civil conversation that makes me think. Using past examples as indicators of future performance is called induction. Great thing. Not bulletproof by any means, but the more examples that exist the more comfortable I am with drawing conclusions. Think of it this way: given your logic, the vast majority of people will become intellectually disabled in the future, unable to find productive work or work the complex machines required to live. Sort of an Idiocracy. The problem here is that you can't take a number like "jobs" and extrapolate it, because of the very problem you're stepping into: it's an aggregate, not a metric. They don't make buggy whips any more, car manufacturing isn't done the way it used to be done in Detroit. The average guy who used to just sit behind the back-end of a horse on the farm all day somehow has managed to make it into the 21st century just fine, however. Markets are funny things. I am not one of those that thinks the free market can do everything -- but I also have a healthy respect for the unpredictable, unmanageable nature or a market. They continuously show the ability for groups of people acting creatively to come up with all kinds of ideas that I cannot forecast. If you are asking me to forecast the total number of fast-food employees over the next hundred years I have no doubt the line heads towards zero. But there's a long way from that to saying that all jobs for average people are disappearing. A long, long way. I don't know about what to do about this, although I am sure lots of folks have ideas. I think if we couldn't afford the welfare state and promises we had at the beginning of the century, I seriously doubt we're suddenly going to be able to afford it in the next 20 years. My guess is that 2012-2020 will see a huge Charlie Foxtrot with the welfare state worldwide (more than currently exists). That probably means that right now is a good time to talk about these things, because as politicized as they are now, I think they're only going to get worse.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  You're basically saying "it's worked itself out in the past so it will surely do so in the future." But that's not a logical conclusion. It certainly can be. Daniel is basically arguing for the outside view, and the outside view is often the best predictor of outcomes. Now, it may be that this time is different, but when you have a long history of specific failed predictions based on the details of a transition, it's certainly worth paying attention to the trend as a guide to this instance.
rsheridan6 16y ago
Technology really did eliminate jobs and they never came back - the jobs of horses. There nothing a horse can do, outside of hobbyist niches that a motorized machine can't do. When motorized machines took over jobs traditionally done by horses, they were not freed to pursue niches where they had a comparative advantage. They were simply replaced. Right now, there are still a lot of things that the dumbest human worker can do that give robots a hard time, mostly having to do with visual recognition - being able to find a berry on a bush to pluck, or find the corners of a crumpled shirt to fold. There's been enough of that kind of work to employ an essentially unlimited number of unskilled workers, no matter how much work that requires little or no pattern recognition has been automated. But if somebody can figure out how to get a computer to "see," it's all over for unskilled workers. I'm no expert in AI, but I would consider it fairly likely that we'll live to see that happen, and I don't see any reason to be so pessimistic as to expect it to take 1000 (what kind of prediction can you make that far out anyway?). We see news all the time on sites like this about incremental progress on that front.

cema 16y ago

people who would have gone into something like economics instead went into computer science Even if that is so (why then?) I do not see how it is related to "technology replac[ing] skilled labor positions". Could you please elaborate?

TomOfTTB 16y ago
Because people have different capacities. People with the capacity for what we consider "skilled" positions can be directed towards technology based positions. But there are people out there who, no matter how hard they try, lack the mental capacity to do what we consider skilled labor. I don't say this as an insult. I went to school with a guy who is still one of my best friends and he's just one of these people. He worked as hard as he could, studied for hours, and he still only got Cs in school. He doesn't have the capacity for that kind of thought. So when robotics gets to the point where it can do his job as a laborer on the docks he won't be able to be repositioned in the same way people with the capacity to take IT positions have been in the past