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Yeah. > Self-driving cars, for example, could potentially put 5 million people involved in transportation jobs out of work. And creating 5 million new jobs for

by bambax 10y ago

Yeah. > Self-driving cars, for example, could potentially put 5 million people involved in transportation jobs out of work. And creating 5 million new jobs for them seems impossible with net monthly job gains typically in the hundreds of thousands. “Five million jobs seem like a lot of jobs. It is a lot,” Andreessen says. But looking at the big picture shows that “every year in the U.S. on average about 21 million jobs are destroyed and about 24.5 million are created,” Andreessen says. “So the real answer to how do you replace 5 million jobs is, we already replace that in less than a quarter [of a year] today.” This is disingenuous, bordering on stupid. If a McDonald's closes and another one opens, 20 jobs are destroyed and 20 new ones are created, but they're the same! What we are talking about with self-driving cars is an entire category of jobs being destroyed, and 5 million people doing the same thing, becoming unemployed at the exact same time (a time when their job doesn't exist anymore). Very different from the normal life of the economy.

petra 10y ago
And actually, 5 million jobs are just a tip of the iceberg, some estimates talk about 40% of jobs being automated - and even that may be a low-ball estimate, since it doesn't include jobs that would be indirectly replaced with something more efficient(meat -> plant based meat, cars that don't need maintenance , i.e electric vehicles, etc), and jobs that we don't know how the tech will look in 10 years(creative jobs, natural language, etc).
- moojah 10y ago
  In developed countries 40% of the jobs from 40 years ago are almost certainly automated at this point. And we're richer than ever before if you look at absolute richness (not in relatives, but that's an entirely different discussion).
moojah 10y ago
Not really. The effect of self driving cars may be larger than "normal tech evolutions", but we have been continually re-inventing ourselves at a pace that is not particularly different from what it has been over the last 200 years. 200 years ago 95+% of all people worked in agriculture. In developed countries, now barely 1-2% do so. 100 years ago the vast majority worked in manual labour jobs. Now people are moving on to service jobs. Macro-economically speaking, those were much larger and more rapid changes than what we're seeing right now. This is not new. It's normal economic development. Nothing unusual at all. People have to stop portraying this negatively, and Marc is correct in seeing this as a positive to humanity. His argument is that we need to manage this shift as a society. Some countries pro-actively do so (European social security comes to mind), others do not (USA). I tend to agree with him that it does need to be managed.
- bambax 10y ago
  You're right that the Industrial Revolution was incredibly violent and cruel, but that's not the point "Marc" was trying to make. He was trying to say we're destroying and creating jobs all the time, so nothing to see here. What we're doing, now, is destroying whole sectors of the job market. It has happened before, yes! -- but it was horrible then, and it will be horrible now (and now we have youtube, which they didn't have in the UK or India in the 19th century).
BurningFrog 10y ago
These 5 million transportation jobs will not disappear on the same day. It will probably take a decade or so. This has happened many, many times over the 250 years since the Industrial Revolution. Each time, the old jobs have been replaced by newer and better jobs, and each time people have worried about mass unemployment and misery that did not happen.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  I really think this time will be different. I agree it will take a decade, but those jobs aren't coming back. One trend to consider: each "mega successful company" for the past 100 years or so (maybe longer?) has been extraordinary because of how few people were required to start the company, and how much profit per employee they generate. The unspoken side effect is "we need fewer people" (and they're hard to find AKA "90% of the people we talk to can't do the job"). As companies focus on these types of efficiencies, they're creating more value while providing fewer jobs. I think this is OK, but that's what's happening. So take this to its logical limit and you have mass unemployment. Now add A.I. as an accelerator to that and you have what will actually happen. This is a very accessible video with a similar argument and much better examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU We're just going to have to start thinking about a society where 50% of the "eligible workers" are out of work at any given time. The way we're setup now, it'd be chaos. But there's a lot that can be done ahead of time to prepare, like expanding welfare until it looked more like a basic income and was socially acceptable. In such a world, most people will have to be on the dole at some point in their life, and that will be OK. As opposed to now where our society thinks that's very much not ok and will punish you in various ways for it. Most people are simply not going to be economically useful and no amount of forcing them to be re-educated is going to change that.
  - stagbeetle 10y ago
    > In such a world, most people will have to be on the dole at some point in their life, and that will be OK. I don't think so. If "most people are simply not going to be economically useful" for what reason, besides an appeal to utopianism, is it a good idea to strain the country's resources in chase of an ideal? Basic income will pave the way to cementing this feudalistic class-inequality we possess today. Extremely simplified: Those who believe in virtue through "self-fulfillment" (leisure) will intermingle and breed with the same, and so will those who believe in virtue through industry. The first will mimic the lower classes (maybe even the proletariat) and be "left behind," degenerating over the years into nothing more but grazing animals. The second will mimic the higher classes and continue to consolidate power and seize freedoms for themselves. Basic income is an idealistic idea, both impractical and separated from human nature.
jhoechtl 10y ago
What is overseen most of the time is that mere job counting statistics are worthless. If 20 million jobs were destroyed where people could make a decent living, to create 24 million jobs where people have to work endless hours, live in vans and get no security, it's a net loss for the society.

by bambax 10y ago

petra 10y ago

And actually, 5 million jobs are just a tip of the iceberg, some estimates talk about 40% of jobs being automated - and even that may be a low-ball estimate, since it doesn't include jobs that would be indirectly replaced with something more efficient(meat -> plant based meat, cars that don't need maintenance , i.e electric vehicles, etc), and jobs that we don't know how the tech will look in 10 years(creative jobs, natural language, etc).

moojah 10y ago
In developed countries 40% of the jobs from 40 years ago are almost certainly automated at this point. And we're richer than ever before if you look at absolute richness (not in relatives, but that's an entirely different discussion).

moojah 10y ago

Not really. The effect of self driving cars may be larger than "normal tech evolutions", but we have been continually re-inventing ourselves at a pace that is not particularly different from what it has been over the last 200 years. 200 years ago 95+% of all people worked in agriculture. In developed countries, now barely 1-2% do so. 100 years ago the vast majority worked in manual labour jobs. Now people are moving on to service jobs. Macro-economically speaking, those were much larger and more rapid changes than what we're seeing right now. This is not new. It's normal economic development. Nothing unusual at all. People have to stop portraying this negatively, and Marc is correct in seeing this as a positive to humanity. His argument is that we need to manage this shift as a society. Some countries pro-actively do so (European social security comes to mind), others do not (USA). I tend to agree with him that it does need to be managed.

bambax 10y ago
You're right that the Industrial Revolution was incredibly violent and cruel, but that's not the point "Marc" was trying to make. He was trying to say we're destroying and creating jobs all the time, so nothing to see here. What we're doing, now, is destroying whole sectors of the job market. It has happened before, yes! -- but it was horrible then, and it will be horrible now (and now we have youtube, which they didn't have in the UK or India in the 19th century).

BurningFrog 10y ago

These 5 million transportation jobs will not disappear on the same day. It will probably take a decade or so. This has happened many, many times over the 250 years since the Industrial Revolution. Each time, the old jobs have been replaced by newer and better jobs, and each time people have worried about mass unemployment and misery that did not happen.

dave_sullivan 10y ago
I really think this time will be different. I agree it will take a decade, but those jobs aren't coming back. One trend to consider: each "mega successful company" for the past 100 years or so (maybe longer?) has been extraordinary because of how few people were required to start the company, and how much profit per employee they generate. The unspoken side effect is "we need fewer people" (and they're hard to find AKA "90% of the people we talk to can't do the job"). As companies focus on these types of efficiencies, they're creating more value while providing fewer jobs. I think this is OK, but that's what's happening. So take this to its logical limit and you have mass unemployment. Now add A.I. as an accelerator to that and you have what will actually happen. This is a very accessible video with a similar argument and much better examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU We're just going to have to start thinking about a society where 50% of the "eligible workers" are out of work at any given time. The way we're setup now, it'd be chaos. But there's a lot that can be done ahead of time to prepare, like expanding welfare until it looked more like a basic income and was socially acceptable. In such a world, most people will have to be on the dole at some point in their life, and that will be OK. As opposed to now where our society thinks that's very much not ok and will punish you in various ways for it. Most people are simply not going to be economically useful and no amount of forcing them to be re-educated is going to change that.
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  > In such a world, most people will have to be on the dole at some point in their life, and that will be OK. I don't think so. If "most people are simply not going to be economically useful" for what reason, besides an appeal to utopianism, is it a good idea to strain the country's resources in chase of an ideal? Basic income will pave the way to cementing this feudalistic class-inequality we possess today. Extremely simplified: Those who believe in virtue through "self-fulfillment" (leisure) will intermingle and breed with the same, and so will those who believe in virtue through industry. The first will mimic the lower classes (maybe even the proletariat) and be "left behind," degenerating over the years into nothing more but grazing animals. The second will mimic the higher classes and continue to consolidate power and seize freedoms for themselves. Basic income is an idealistic idea, both impractical and separated from human nature.

jhoechtl 10y ago

What is overseen most of the time is that mere job counting statistics are worthless. If 20 million jobs were destroyed where people could make a decent living, to create 24 million jobs where people have to work endless hours, live in vans and get no security, it's a net loss for the society.