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This is a good thing. I disagree with your grim outlook about jobs in intellectual capital being a zero sum game though. Innovation begets more innovation. The

This is a good thing. I disagree with your grim outlook about jobs in intellectual capital being a zero sum game though. Innovation begets more innovation. The more well-educated people around the globe that are innovating in ways that increase productivity, the more capital that is freed up to invest in more intellectually-intensive research and development. Hopefully the allocation of intellectual capital into non-productive activity the financial services sector has caused will be short-lived.

cageface 16y ago
It may not be a zero sum game but there is a limit to the number of people that can be employed doing purely intellectual work. I expect that eventually we'll see more and more manual jobs displaced by automation and that the population as a whole will drop because the demand for labor isn't there. Either that or we'll see increasingly large slum classes like in Brazil. The efficiency of global markets will push the value of unskilled labor to rock bottom. I agree that a more even distribution of wealth around the world is a good thing, although we may also look back at this era of US hegemony as a kind of Pax Romana.
- rbranson 16y ago
  How is this true? 100 years ago there was virtually nobody employed doing purely intellectual work, yet this has grown to be a huge labor market. Your ideas here kind of trail off to be "The Bell Curve"-ish. Many of these "unskilled laborers" will instead find work in service industries and the arts. For an HN-geared example: look at what Ruby on Rails, Django, etc has done for web development. It allows web developers to significantly increase output without extra cost or significant externalities, lowering production costs and freeing capital to be spent more efficiently. The market for developers hasn't crashed through the floor though. If anything, it's increased, because of reduced overheads, the value that can be delivered has increased.
  - cageface 16y ago
    There may be a net gain of IP jobs in the future but are we going to find anywhere close to 5 billion of them? Service jobs will decline over time too as more and more of them are automated out of existence. When was the last time you actually went into a bank? The number of people making a real living in the arts will remain very small. The optimistic scenario is that world population self-regulates down over time as more manual work is automated and a larger fraction of the population moves into intellectual work. The more pessimistic scenario is that the underclass population explodes into poverty and anarchy and eventually brings the affluent elites down with it.
    - rbranson 16y ago
      I remain optimistic about the prospect for more IP jobs. We don't need five billion of them though. I think there's a limit on what types of things will make economic sense to be automated. People often far underestimate the efficiency of humans at service tasks and overestimate the cheapness and ease at which robots and computers can do things that humans find simple. History has shown us that computers and robots are often good at things humans suck at, but are often very very bad at things we find simple. Also, I think as the world becomes less and less "human," demand for personalized and human services will surge. Your bank example is an interesting one. Have banks decreased the number of tellers due to ATMs and online banking? Not really. The tellers can also process more transactions per unit of time because of computer automation. Banking services have just become more convenient and available to a larger audience through reduction of costs. When was the last time you paid for a checking account? There are some excellent signs that the world population will self-regulate. The more a country develops, the more reproduction falls. The elite have the most to lose in any anarchy scenario, and control the vast majority of resources that can be used to prevent it. The real future threat is resource exhaustion, not lack of jobs, lack of capital, or robots.
    - dasil003 16y ago
      It's entirely possible that we could move to entirely IP jobs. Why not? If all our physical needs are taken care of, we could became gainfully employed in the metaverse, or maybe just end up as a bunch of WALL-E-style couch potatoes. It's probably ultimately a more likely direction than an unending escalation in widget production. There's also the question of what percentage of the population would be suited to these IP jobs, but geeks are getting more action than ever before, so I think the population will shift in that direction as well.

cageface 16y ago

It may not be a zero sum game but there is a limit to the number of people that can be employed doing purely intellectual work. I expect that eventually we'll see more and more manual jobs displaced by automation and that the population as a whole will drop because the demand for labor isn't there. Either that or we'll see increasingly large slum classes like in Brazil. The efficiency of global markets will push the value of unskilled labor to rock bottom. I agree that a more even distribution of wealth around the world is a good thing, although we may also look back at this era of US hegemony as a kind of Pax Romana.

rbranson 16y ago
How is this true? 100 years ago there was virtually nobody employed doing purely intellectual work, yet this has grown to be a huge labor market. Your ideas here kind of trail off to be "The Bell Curve"-ish. Many of these "unskilled laborers" will instead find work in service industries and the arts. For an HN-geared example: look at what Ruby on Rails, Django, etc has done for web development. It allows web developers to significantly increase output without extra cost or significant externalities, lowering production costs and freeing capital to be spent more efficiently. The market for developers hasn't crashed through the floor though. If anything, it's increased, because of reduced overheads, the value that can be delivered has increased.
- cageface 16y ago
  There may be a net gain of IP jobs in the future but are we going to find anywhere close to 5 billion of them? Service jobs will decline over time too as more and more of them are automated out of existence. When was the last time you actually went into a bank? The number of people making a real living in the arts will remain very small. The optimistic scenario is that world population self-regulates down over time as more manual work is automated and a larger fraction of the population moves into intellectual work. The more pessimistic scenario is that the underclass population explodes into poverty and anarchy and eventually brings the affluent elites down with it.
  - rbranson 16y ago
    I remain optimistic about the prospect for more IP jobs. We don't need five billion of them though. I think there's a limit on what types of things will make economic sense to be automated. People often far underestimate the efficiency of humans at service tasks and overestimate the cheapness and ease at which robots and computers can do things that humans find simple. History has shown us that computers and robots are often good at things humans suck at, but are often very very bad at things we find simple. Also, I think as the world becomes less and less "human," demand for personalized and human services will surge. Your bank example is an interesting one. Have banks decreased the number of tellers due to ATMs and online banking? Not really. The tellers can also process more transactions per unit of time because of computer automation. Banking services have just become more convenient and available to a larger audience through reduction of costs. When was the last time you paid for a checking account? There are some excellent signs that the world population will self-regulate. The more a country develops, the more reproduction falls. The elite have the most to lose in any anarchy scenario, and control the vast majority of resources that can be used to prevent it. The real future threat is resource exhaustion, not lack of jobs, lack of capital, or robots.
  - dasil003 16y ago
    It's entirely possible that we could move to entirely IP jobs. Why not? If all our physical needs are taken care of, we could became gainfully employed in the metaverse, or maybe just end up as a bunch of WALL-E-style couch potatoes. It's probably ultimately a more likely direction than an unending escalation in widget production. There's also the question of what percentage of the population would be suited to these IP jobs, but geeks are getting more action than ever before, so I think the population will shift in that direction as well.