11 ms·

Unemployed = 21st century draft horse?

78 points by ph0rque 16y ago

patrickgzill 16y ago
In previous times, there was a liquidation event such as war which then made humans in whatever capacity scarce again.
- DenisM 16y ago
  I don't think you can call them "previous" just yet. It's entirely possible for the world to erupt into a ww3, simply due to hundreds of millions of seriously unemployed people. Arguably that was the reason for ww1 as well as huge number of people were made redundant in agriculture. It's frightening to think about that.
  - fmora 16y ago
    It was also the reason for WW2. Germany put all those unemployed people to work on many national projects. Projects which were aimed at world domination.
    - nir 16y ago
      All this was before unemployed people could spend 12 hours a day killing people in Call Of Duty 4, though. I think the availability of cheap distraction (interactive distraction at that) might have some effect here.
      - zavulon 16y ago
        In most third world countries, unemployed don't have that one, or any other cheap distractions for that matter.
mcantelon 16y ago
>Or we can rephrase the entire posting as “How comfortable would you feel working at your present job alongside someone whom you would rate as among the least competent 25 percent from your high school?” Middle management are also part of the mass of unemployed.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
We live in a time where the workforce is going to have to be retrained 3 or 4 times in their lifetimes. That means that 4-year universities wouldn't work even if they were functioning correctly, which they aren't. There's a larger question of whether this workforce can be trained that many times or not. I don't think we have a choice, so I'd rather just go out and fix the problem instead of ruminating over it. We have a very nasty tendency to ruminate and self-flagellate over structural problems instead of just going out and fixing them. I do know that we can't use the same institutions, programs, and policies that got us into this to get us out, and I know that there is a huge population that is going to resist the necessary change. (and btw, "fixing the problem" may not involve retraining. Hell, we might end up personally outsourcing each of our lives to several generations of folks in developing countries and picking up a profit on the difference in standards of living over the next 50 years while the average skill level in the world equalizes. Lots of possible solutions, and I'm not sure I would define the problem as simply as an obsolete workforce)
- kiba 16y ago
  I would hardly be able to imagine programming being obsolete until we approach near technological singularity. I take it for granted that there are problems for us programmers to solve.
  - robryan 16y ago
    On the other side of the coin programming, especially web programming, probably moves forward faster than most other professions. You may not need formal training again as the underlying concepts are usually the same but the vast majority would have to learn new methods and languages over their career. I can see this happening in the near future with concurrency in programming, there is going to be a shift more and more towards concurrent programming where most popular languages and methods now will struggle and we will have to move towards programming in ways that the compiler can help us a lot more with concurrency as languages like Haskell have been designed to do.
  - ericabiz 16y ago
    Probably, but at what price? I stopped programming PHP when one of my clients asked me what I offered that somebody from India that he could hire for $3/hr didn't. While I was standing in his office, face-to-face. There's nothing wrong with hiring $3/hr workers (I now do it myself, though not for programming.) But, as time goes forward and we develop more ways for the rest of the world to get online, we're going to have to realize that many programmers won't make it, either, especially if they expect to be paid San Francisco wages for India work.
astrofinch 16y ago
Time to embrace genetic engineering in humans.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  What do you mean by that, exactly?
  - parfe 16y ago
    Eugenics with a better name. With `modified' humans comes new prejudice. The movie Gattaca has it nailed.
    - zoomzoom 16y ago
      Honestly, how can we pretend that we have a choice in the matter at this point? It is a matter of how we deal with the responsibility that technology forces on us. Even if the US could outlaw reproductive manipulation, some significant percent of humans will explore the problem. We shouldnt't just say that it is eugenics, because that just means we are calling it genocide with a better name.
- kiba 16y ago
  We could merge ourselves with machines.
- nradov 16y ago
  It is the height of hubris to presume that genetic engineering can produce better results than billions of years of evolution. Tweak our genes to improve our abilities in one area and you'll end up with unintended problems in another area. Hypothetically, would you take a 20% improvement in intelligence if it came with a 50% risk of schizophrenia? Almost all of the genetic engineering done so far has been targeted toward a single goal: improving the productivity of domesticated plants and animals for agriculture. And while it has been successful in increasing food production, it has also produced breeds / strains that that are incapable of surviving without humans. There is no free lunch in genetic engineering.
1053r 16y ago
Let us assume, for a moment, that Ray Kurzweil's thesis of accelerating returns is correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change#Kurzweil_and_The_Law_of_Accelerating_Returns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change#Kurzweil_an... It therefore follows that as the pace of change increases, the length of time before an education becomes out of date or stale decreases. There is some percentage of the population today who would rather be poor than retrain. It stands to reason that as the rate of change increases, that percentage of the population will also increase. Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let people be poor. 2) Pay for them to live like human beings not because they deserve it, but because they are alive. This is the crux of the choice. Will the haves (people with relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?
- kiba 16y ago
  By the time the technological singularity approach, the human beings who are living might as well be kings to us. So it become less urgent for the have to give to the have-not.
  - TheEzEzz 16y ago
    The have-nots of today might as well be kings to those living 1000 years ago. Still, having a strong middle class is good for everyone, regardless of moral imperatives to help others.
  - rsheridan6 16y ago
    Why is that? Even if there was enough wealth around to make everyone a king by today's standards, if someone had no marketable skills or capital, why would anyone give anything to him? It would be up to the haves whether they wanted to play Mr Nice Guy or not, and I don't think the choice is obvious.
    - Unseelie 16y ago
      Everyone in the middle class is a king by the standards of the 1950s. I have, as a starving student, more wealth than any emperor of Rome. The assumption that we're not already upstream in the singularity is just bias of perspective
robak 16y ago
"Suppose that a company hires a low-skill not-very-alert office worker for $10/hour. This person accepts an email invitation to follow a hyperlink. One click later and the company’s network is infected with a virus. Best case: IT department spends $50,000 cleaning up; worst case: customer lists, customer credit cards, and other private data are compromised, costing millions of dollars." Yep, and the dumb idiot running the Company (CEO) will still insist on paying 10usd/hr. Who is here to blame? Being cheap just means that you will pay twice as much in the long run (at least twice that is...)
TheEzEzz 16y ago
I'm 'work-vacationing' in Brazil right now, and for some reason this is very much on my mind. Labor is very cheap here. Restaurants are heavily overstaffed by American standards, as are grocery stores and even hair parlors. I can't help but wonder what would happen here if cheap robotics existed. For most of the lower class here "retraining" probably isn't a possibility.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Why wouldn't retraining be a possibility in Brazil but be possible in the US.
  - TheEzEzz 16y ago
    The difference in education level between poor Brazilians and poor Americans is very large. Retraining requires a base to start with, and most poor Brazilians simply don't have that base. I'm skeptical to some degree about the potential for retraining of Americans too, but I at least have some optimism there.
dublinclontarf 16y ago
From the tone of the article it sounds like the government has made it too risky and expensive to hire unskilled employees(combination of lawsuits, expenses, higher minimum wage and taxes). Isn't this the group of people that the government is supposed to be protecting?
- lsc 16y ago
  the interesting bit here is that most of those things are really only risky for entities who have money; larger entities. You are going to have a pretty difficult time getting a lawyer to bring an employment lawsuit against, say, me- the problem is that I don't have enough money to make it worth the lawyer time. (I mean, yeah, if you really have it in for me, you could pay the lawyer yourself, or try to make it a criminal matter (usually a /much/ higher bar) and take me down... but few self-interested lawyers would take the case for a cut of the winnings, simply because the winnings would be so small.) and the problem of expensive mistakes is also mitigated; you can't make a mistake at a company that does worse than bankrupting the company and the owner personally; And, uh, I don't consider myself a low-skilled worker, but working for other people? I've made at least one mistake expensive enough to bankrupt my company and myself personally, had my company been liable. (the thing was, I didn't get fired... in fact, my review that year at that job was mildly positive and included a 4% raise. That was, apparently, a relatively minor mistake at that company? I mean, I felt pretty horrible about it, and took steps to prevent it from happening again, but there weren't the heavy consequences from above you'd expect from blowing many years of your salary.)
muhfuhkuh 16y ago
I think the future of work, then, has to be creation. It just can't get any more singular and essential than that. It's the work of ideation - a terrible biz-buzzword that means "creating ideas". Not the type of namby-pamby aleatoric nonsense that people boozily tell you is a million-dollar idea that they thought of like "I thought of eBay before it was around" or the Hollywood pitch-type ideas like "it's a cross between Facebook and tumblr... wait for it... for book lovers." I'm talking about, everyone basically becomes an entrepreneur, or at least is the equivalent of the starving artist, essentially singing for their meal. If necessity is the mother of invention, well then that's a relief because we're headed for some Needful Times. Of course, _ALL_ of this is assuming that China or some developing country will always have an abundance of cheap labor, which is more quickly evaporating than we want to see. There is a reason why China's middle class just recently eclipsed the US in size, and it's not only because they have 5x the people. They are starting to take care of their own, and realizing their own labor's affordability. The rich here in America may not need us in the short-term, but Comparative Advantage doesn't work when the formerly disadvantaged country suddenly holds all the chips.
- zavulon 16y ago
  That is assuming we can't figure out how to make computers create on their own (which right now, does sound almost impossible). If at some point we figure it out, all humans become obsolete.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    True - and what a fantastic boom to humanity that would be. Create a world in which we don't have scarcity but true abundance? Count me in.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
konad 16y ago
While I agree with the premise and have often tried to discuss the need to look at the distribution of leisure that the technological revolution has brought upon us, the comparison to the horse is apt because : > Best case: IT department spends $50,000 cleaning up; worst case: customer lists, customer credit cards, and other private data are compromised, costing millions of dollars. Those millions of dollars are after the damn thing bolted and it's your own negligent fault for not doing a risk assessment and cutting corners on your IT system. As a no-doubt highly paid suit it's your responsibility to think of these things before they happen. It's not like it never happened to anyone else before.
Ardit20 16y ago
Interesting article, but populist, not quite what would you expect from an article on Harvard. As another person mentioned, people are not horses. A horse is a slave, people always have options, in the most drastic case, crime. It pays well for those with the intelligence I think but the risks are astronomical compared to a 9 to five job. I think our society if it wishes to become more prosperous needs to realise two things. First, everyone has the potential to be smart at least at the level of the skills needed for many of today's jobs. Thus if someone does not have the skills of this century but that of the last century it is almost everyone's fault, that is the society, the institutions, the culture, but him. Unless of course he or she is biologically mentally inferior in which case it is just and decent to pay taxes to support them. The second thing is that the Industrial Revolution has moved on to china. It no longer is here. We produce things, but things like software development, biotech, nanotech, high physics, a lot of research, innovative and new products. Not, TVs and cars and that sort of thing. We are so prosperous because we keep making things better and inventing things and finding things and of course because of trade. Once so it is, the automated reproduction, after a certain time shifts to the Industrial Countries. So, in this economy, you need to use your brain a lot and be taught so since early childhood. It is no good that someone can just fail in school or get Ds, because that someone will probably be tomorrow's unemployed, well conventionally unemployed. Events might be so lucky for him as to stumble upon creating a business, or not so lucky as to stumble upon crime. I think therefore that if we want to move forward in the most prosperous way it is advisable to not leave anyone behind especially when we have the ability to take everyone with us.
scotty79 16y ago
Workers are replaced in industry by machines and computers http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1157018 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1157018 and they move to services. Services are funny things. If I clean up your place for 1 mln dollars and you cut my hair for 1 mln dollars then we raised GDP by 2 mln. As technology progresses economy becomes more and more detached from reality. People manufacture insanely advanced items almost for free and produce most complex intellectual property literally for free and money more and more represents just back-rubbing and gambling.

78 points by ph0rque 16y ago

patrickgzill 16y ago

In previous times, there was a liquidation event such as war which then made humans in whatever capacity scarce again.

DenisM 16y ago
I don't think you can call them "previous" just yet. It's entirely possible for the world to erupt into a ww3, simply due to hundreds of millions of seriously unemployed people. Arguably that was the reason for ww1 as well as huge number of people were made redundant in agriculture. It's frightening to think about that.
- fmora 16y ago
  It was also the reason for WW2. Germany put all those unemployed people to work on many national projects. Projects which were aimed at world domination.
  - nir 16y ago
    All this was before unemployed people could spend 12 hours a day killing people in Call Of Duty 4, though. I think the availability of cheap distraction (interactive distraction at that) might have some effect here.
    - zavulon 16y ago
      In most third world countries, unemployed don't have that one, or any other cheap distractions for that matter.

mcantelon 16y ago

>Or we can rephrase the entire posting as “How comfortable would you feel working at your present job alongside someone whom you would rate as among the least competent 25 percent from your high school?” Middle management are also part of the mass of unemployed.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

We live in a time where the workforce is going to have to be retrained 3 or 4 times in their lifetimes. That means that 4-year universities wouldn't work even if they were functioning correctly, which they aren't. There's a larger question of whether this workforce can be trained that many times or not. I don't think we have a choice, so I'd rather just go out and fix the problem instead of ruminating over it. We have a very nasty tendency to ruminate and self-flagellate over structural problems instead of just going out and fixing them. I do know that we can't use the same institutions, programs, and policies that got us into this to get us out, and I know that there is a huge population that is going to resist the necessary change. (and btw, "fixing the problem" may not involve retraining. Hell, we might end up personally outsourcing each of our lives to several generations of folks in developing countries and picking up a profit on the difference in standards of living over the next 50 years while the average skill level in the world equalizes. Lots of possible solutions, and I'm not sure I would define the problem as simply as an obsolete workforce)

kiba 16y ago
I would hardly be able to imagine programming being obsolete until we approach near technological singularity. I take it for granted that there are problems for us programmers to solve.
- robryan 16y ago
  On the other side of the coin programming, especially web programming, probably moves forward faster than most other professions. You may not need formal training again as the underlying concepts are usually the same but the vast majority would have to learn new methods and languages over their career. I can see this happening in the near future with concurrency in programming, there is going to be a shift more and more towards concurrent programming where most popular languages and methods now will struggle and we will have to move towards programming in ways that the compiler can help us a lot more with concurrency as languages like Haskell have been designed to do.
- ericabiz 16y ago
  Probably, but at what price? I stopped programming PHP when one of my clients asked me what I offered that somebody from India that he could hire for $3/hr didn't. While I was standing in his office, face-to-face. There's nothing wrong with hiring $3/hr workers (I now do it myself, though not for programming.) But, as time goes forward and we develop more ways for the rest of the world to get online, we're going to have to realize that many programmers won't make it, either, especially if they expect to be paid San Francisco wages for India work.

astrofinch 16y ago

Time to embrace genetic engineering in humans.

tokenadult 16y ago
What do you mean by that, exactly?
- parfe 16y ago
  Eugenics with a better name. With `modified' humans comes new prejudice. The movie Gattaca has it nailed.
  - zoomzoom 16y ago
    Honestly, how can we pretend that we have a choice in the matter at this point? It is a matter of how we deal with the responsibility that technology forces on us. Even if the US could outlaw reproductive manipulation, some significant percent of humans will explore the problem. We shouldnt't just say that it is eugenics, because that just means we are calling it genocide with a better name.
kiba 16y ago
We could merge ourselves with machines.
nradov 16y ago
It is the height of hubris to presume that genetic engineering can produce better results than billions of years of evolution. Tweak our genes to improve our abilities in one area and you'll end up with unintended problems in another area. Hypothetically, would you take a 20% improvement in intelligence if it came with a 50% risk of schizophrenia? Almost all of the genetic engineering done so far has been targeted toward a single goal: improving the productivity of domesticated plants and animals for agriculture. And while it has been successful in increasing food production, it has also produced breeds / strains that that are incapable of surviving without humans. There is no free lunch in genetic engineering.

1053r 16y ago

Let us assume, for a moment, that Ray Kurzweil's thesis of accelerating returns is correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change#Kurzweil_and_The_Law_of_Accelerating_Returns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change#Kurzweil_an... It therefore follows that as the pace of change increases, the length of time before an education becomes out of date or stale decreases. There is some percentage of the population today who would rather be poor than retrain. It stands to reason that as the rate of change increases, that percentage of the population will also increase. Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let people be poor. 2) Pay for them to live like human beings not because they deserve it, but because they are alive. This is the crux of the choice. Will the haves (people with relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?

kiba 16y ago
By the time the technological singularity approach, the human beings who are living might as well be kings to us. So it become less urgent for the have to give to the have-not.
- TheEzEzz 16y ago
  The have-nots of today might as well be kings to those living 1000 years ago. Still, having a strong middle class is good for everyone, regardless of moral imperatives to help others.
- rsheridan6 16y ago
  Why is that? Even if there was enough wealth around to make everyone a king by today's standards, if someone had no marketable skills or capital, why would anyone give anything to him? It would be up to the haves whether they wanted to play Mr Nice Guy or not, and I don't think the choice is obvious.
  - Unseelie 16y ago
    Everyone in the middle class is a king by the standards of the 1950s. I have, as a starving student, more wealth than any emperor of Rome. The assumption that we're not already upstream in the singularity is just bias of perspective

robak 16y ago

"Suppose that a company hires a low-skill not-very-alert office worker for $10/hour. This person accepts an email invitation to follow a hyperlink. One click later and the company’s network is infected with a virus. Best case: IT department spends $50,000 cleaning up; worst case: customer lists, customer credit cards, and other private data are compromised, costing millions of dollars." Yep, and the dumb idiot running the Company (CEO) will still insist on paying 10usd/hr. Who is here to blame? Being cheap just means that you will pay twice as much in the long run (at least twice that is...)

TheEzEzz 16y ago

I'm 'work-vacationing' in Brazil right now, and for some reason this is very much on my mind. Labor is very cheap here. Restaurants are heavily overstaffed by American standards, as are grocery stores and even hair parlors. I can't help but wonder what would happen here if cheap robotics existed. For most of the lower class here "retraining" probably isn't a possibility.

tomjen3 16y ago
Why wouldn't retraining be a possibility in Brazil but be possible in the US.
- TheEzEzz 16y ago
  The difference in education level between poor Brazilians and poor Americans is very large. Retraining requires a base to start with, and most poor Brazilians simply don't have that base. I'm skeptical to some degree about the potential for retraining of Americans too, but I at least have some optimism there.

dublinclontarf 16y ago

From the tone of the article it sounds like the government has made it too risky and expensive to hire unskilled employees(combination of lawsuits, expenses, higher minimum wage and taxes). Isn't this the group of people that the government is supposed to be protecting?

lsc 16y ago
the interesting bit here is that most of those things are really only risky for entities who have money; larger entities. You are going to have a pretty difficult time getting a lawyer to bring an employment lawsuit against, say, me- the problem is that I don't have enough money to make it worth the lawyer time. (I mean, yeah, if you really have it in for me, you could pay the lawyer yourself, or try to make it a criminal matter (usually a /much/ higher bar) and take me down... but few self-interested lawyers would take the case for a cut of the winnings, simply because the winnings would be so small.) and the problem of expensive mistakes is also mitigated; you can't make a mistake at a company that does worse than bankrupting the company and the owner personally; And, uh, I don't consider myself a low-skilled worker, but working for other people? I've made at least one mistake expensive enough to bankrupt my company and myself personally, had my company been liable. (the thing was, I didn't get fired... in fact, my review that year at that job was mildly positive and included a 4% raise. That was, apparently, a relatively minor mistake at that company? I mean, I felt pretty horrible about it, and took steps to prevent it from happening again, but there weren't the heavy consequences from above you'd expect from blowing many years of your salary.)

muhfuhkuh 16y ago

I think the future of work, then, has to be creation. It just can't get any more singular and essential than that. It's the work of ideation - a terrible biz-buzzword that means "creating ideas". Not the type of namby-pamby aleatoric nonsense that people boozily tell you is a million-dollar idea that they thought of like "I thought of eBay before it was around" or the Hollywood pitch-type ideas like "it's a cross between Facebook and tumblr... wait for it... for book lovers." I'm talking about, everyone basically becomes an entrepreneur, or at least is the equivalent of the starving artist, essentially singing for their meal. If necessity is the mother of invention, well then that's a relief because we're headed for some Needful Times. Of course, _ALL_ of this is assuming that China or some developing country will always have an abundance of cheap labor, which is more quickly evaporating than we want to see. There is a reason why China's middle class just recently eclipsed the US in size, and it's not only because they have 5x the people. They are starting to take care of their own, and realizing their own labor's affordability. The rich here in America may not need us in the short-term, but Comparative Advantage doesn't work when the formerly disadvantaged country suddenly holds all the chips.

zavulon 16y ago
That is assuming we can't figure out how to make computers create on their own (which right now, does sound almost impossible). If at some point we figure it out, all humans become obsolete.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  True - and what a fantastic boom to humanity that would be. Create a world in which we don't have scarcity but true abundance? Count me in.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

konad 16y ago

While I agree with the premise and have often tried to discuss the need to look at the distribution of leisure that the technological revolution has brought upon us, the comparison to the horse is apt because : > Best case: IT department spends $50,000 cleaning up; worst case: customer lists, customer credit cards, and other private data are compromised, costing millions of dollars. Those millions of dollars are after the damn thing bolted and it's your own negligent fault for not doing a risk assessment and cutting corners on your IT system. As a no-doubt highly paid suit it's your responsibility to think of these things before they happen. It's not like it never happened to anyone else before.

Ardit20 16y ago

Interesting article, but populist, not quite what would you expect from an article on Harvard. As another person mentioned, people are not horses. A horse is a slave, people always have options, in the most drastic case, crime. It pays well for those with the intelligence I think but the risks are astronomical compared to a 9 to five job. I think our society if it wishes to become more prosperous needs to realise two things. First, everyone has the potential to be smart at least at the level of the skills needed for many of today's jobs. Thus if someone does not have the skills of this century but that of the last century it is almost everyone's fault, that is the society, the institutions, the culture, but him. Unless of course he or she is biologically mentally inferior in which case it is just and decent to pay taxes to support them. The second thing is that the Industrial Revolution has moved on to china. It no longer is here. We produce things, but things like software development, biotech, nanotech, high physics, a lot of research, innovative and new products. Not, TVs and cars and that sort of thing. We are so prosperous because we keep making things better and inventing things and finding things and of course because of trade. Once so it is, the automated reproduction, after a certain time shifts to the Industrial Countries. So, in this economy, you need to use your brain a lot and be taught so since early childhood. It is no good that someone can just fail in school or get Ds, because that someone will probably be tomorrow's unemployed, well conventionally unemployed. Events might be so lucky for him as to stumble upon creating a business, or not so lucky as to stumble upon crime. I think therefore that if we want to move forward in the most prosperous way it is advisable to not leave anyone behind especially when we have the ability to take everyone with us.

scotty79 16y ago

Workers are replaced in industry by machines and computers http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1157018 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1157018 and they move to services. Services are funny things. If I clean up your place for 1 mln dollars and you cut my hair for 1 mln dollars then we raised GDP by 2 mln. As technology progresses economy becomes more and more detached from reality. People manufacture insanely advanced items almost for free and produce most complex intellectual property literally for free and money more and more represents just back-rubbing and gambling.