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Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

370 points by gbear605 9y ago

onion2k 9y ago
The difference I see is that historically automation was used to increase productivity. I don't see that in the current wave of "AI"-based automation. There's an emphasis on speed, accuracy, and working with more unknowns, but there isn't any talk of getting more work done. That makes it scary.
- crc32 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. "Speed" is almost directly exactly analogous to "increased productivity" isn't it? Also accuracy - reducing scrap means more can be produced with less materials in less time. "working with more unknowns" - doing things that couldn't be done before. These all seem to be kinds of "getting more work done".
- abusoufiyan 9y ago
  >The difference I see is that historically automation was used to increase productivity. Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doing for less money than a human salary. I guess I also just don't see much difference. All that will happen will be again a shift away from many kinds of jobs (the easily automatible ones) to different kinds. I mean, there are all kinds of jobs now that didn't exist 50 years ago (software engineer, social media manager, influencer, etc. etc.)
  - Sukera 9y ago
    Yes, all kinds of jobs - but are there actually a substantial number of people doing those jobs compared to the number of jobs that are easy to automate away?
    - abusoufiyan 9y ago
      I don't see why it matters. In the end, there won't be massive job loss to automation. Automation right now can eliminate most farm laborers. So why are there still so many farm laborers in the world? Because a) human wages in most of the world are cheaper than expensive machinery b) There isn't a profit motive to automate away jobs that pay so little c) structure of society is such that many technologies take decades upon decades to trickle out to most people in the world (talking the whole world here, not just Euromerica). In addition, the service economy won't be automated away for a long time because human contact is valued by lots of people in that field. Service economy scales with the purchasing power of communities and AI is going to create a consolidation of purchasing power wherever it is introduced.
  - crc32 9y ago
    > didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doing for less money than a human salary. this is by definition "increasing productivity" isn't it? > All that will happen will be again a shift away from many kinds of jobs (the easily automatible ones) to different kinds. If that's true, then what will the shift be to? These are interesting questions. And how long will the shift take? Because I think there is a general feeling that current levels of inequality - the "hollowing out" of the middle class - are due to trends in automation.
    - abusoufiyan 9y ago
      If that's what increasing productivity is, then AI will surely increase productivity. I think the shift will probably be towards internet-based jobs. Content creation / software development / content curation (think social media managers) / customer service, the things that it's hard for AI to get right. It will probably take longer and definitely leave some malcontents but, so did the stocking frame.
    - petra 9y ago
      What will.the shift be to ? A few possibilities, at least short term: Some manufacturing returns to the US with help of robots. Maybe even as an exportible industry. Maybe it's possible to simplify those complex jobs that more people could do them? It's possible for the some of the new,highly automated industries to be a net job creator. For example one scenario for self-driving is that it will be partly remotely-operated ,i.e. jobs , instead of people driving themselves. Things may become cheaper and people will spend the money left on human based experiences/services ? Or even an whole economy based on human interaction because that's the one thing robots couldn't do? Or like we always did , we'll find some useless thing(like consumerism) that will create jobs and build society around it ?
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    >Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It was largely used to employ cheap labor to produce crap. The luddites produced higher value artisinal goods. The luddites weren't reactionaries intent on destroying technology any more than strikers are protesting against the concept of 'work', they were just saboteurs trying to improve their negotiating position. The whole thing about them being anti-technology is historical revisionism. Similarly, French taxi anti-uber strikers in 2013 were literally depicted by Forbes as being "anti smartphone" - the motive for the lie being the same in both cases. The reason why low wage employment and crap clothes were more economically successful at the time had more to do with the economically hemorrhaging effect of the Napoleonic wars - which led to cheaper, more desperate labor and a demand for cheaper goods. It's a bit like how McDonalds gets a sales boost during recessions while mid range restaurants take a hit.
    - abusoufiyan 9y ago
      Okay, I'm not a scholar on European history, so you're probably right. It was just an example. Still there have been automations in the past. We're all still here.
      - crc32 9y ago
        Well actually, we're not all still here! Those shifts - i.e. the industrial revolution - were enormously disruptive! Assuming that this is happening; or going to happen, how can we smooth it out a bit? And of course; that is on the basis that this is not a science fiction AI special; in which case an even more thoughtful approach might be required to minimise the damage and maximise happiness; or whatever variable you prefer.
        abusoufiyan 9y ago
        I worry that attempts to smooth it out can actually cause worse disruption. Like, let's say we know factory workers will be laid off, so we need to allocate resources to retrain them. Very likely the resources will not be enough for all the workers. So who gets them and who doesn't will become a political battle, with the left-out group resenting everyone in society and society ignoring their needs because it reminds them that they left them behind. And then you build a society where one group's triumph is based on another's suppression, and you can see where this is going...
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    >Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doing for less money than a human salary. Mechanisation of the textile industry led to vast increases in the quantity of production. Prior to the industrial revolution, most peasants would have owned only one set of clothes and replaced them only when they were entirely beyond repair. Cheap cloth created demand for wardrobes and dressers, because a lot of people were now in the peculiar position of owning more clothes than they could wear at once. The luddites were ultimately wrong because of Jevons paradox - labour efficiencies in the textile industry vastly increased the demand for their product, and with it their demand for labour. Hand-loom weavers didn't lose their livelihoods to the power loom, they just made ten times as much cloth for twice the wage. Automation and mechanisation in other manufacturing sectors likewise stimulated vastly increased consumer demand, contributing to a virtuous cycle of increasing profit, wages and living standards. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the efficiencies of mass-manufacturing gave ordinary people secure employment and access to a dizzying array of consumer goods. The more stuff we made, the more stuff we could afford to buy. I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern. A lot of tech-heavy businesses seem to be startlingly close to zero-sum. Uber has decimated the taxi industry, but it doesn't seem to have vastly increased overall ridership - the most generous figures I've seen suggest perhaps a 40% increase in some markets. Google and Facebook have become multi-billion dollar companies through advertising revenue, but the overall growth of ad spending across all media has barely outpaced inflation, with the newspaper industry being the most obvious casualty. I can't think of many major tech companies that didn't kill an industry. I'd love to be proven wrong.
    - abusoufiyan 9y ago
      >I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern. AI/ML which can mine through sports footage to create highlight reels and funny clip collections, etc will create tons of consumer goods (videos) which can all be monetized on Youtube. Just one example. How about Netflix? They use AI/ML quite a bit. It seems to have driven quite a lot more people to watch movies and tv than before. Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good last holiday season.
- landryraccoon 9y ago
  > There's an emphasis on speed, accuracy, and working with more unknowns How is this not getting more work done? It sounds exactly like more work is getting done to me.
  - onion2k 9y ago
    If you produce one report in a day, or a computer does it more accurately in 50ms and you don't need the person, the same amount of work is done.
    - landryraccoon 9y ago
      That doesn't make any sense to me. So, if a tractor digs a hole in 5 minutes that a person could dig in a day, the same work is being done because a person could have done it? If a horse carries a person 10 miles in an hour and a car does it in 10 minutes, the same work is done because the horse did the same work as the car? Does an ATM do no work because a teller could do the same thing, just slower and at higher cost? By your standard, does the industrial revolution mean that more work is being done?
      - Pyxl101 9y ago
        "Work being done" refers to the output, not the way in which that output is produced. For example, let's say that the task is to add up a list of 10,000 numbers. It might take a human a while to accomplish this accurately. A computer won't take much time at all. The computer is accomplishing the same work as the human in a much shorter amount of time. The computer could handle a vast number of such tasks per day for a lower price than any human, with better accuracy. Similarly, imagine hauling cargo across the country. A human could put the packages on their back and walk, or alternatively a human and freight train team could haul them by rail. The human and freight train team accomplishes vastly more work than the human alone, and is able to haul much larger and heavier packages at a much faster speed.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Then you make the computer do a thousand reports in a day, and get a qualitatively new (not necessarily better) ability of working with real-time data. Increased productivity is an enabler for things that previously were not possible or did not make economical sense.
crdoconnor 9y ago
>The report linked above is from Ball State University, and argues that, while manufacturing has thrived, automation has reduced the need for workers so much that lots of them have been laid off: >Had we kept 2000-levels of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of production, we would have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers. Instead, we employed only 12.1 million. >The report gets summarized in a few places as “13% of job loss is due to trade, 87% is due to increasing productivity/automation”, which seems like a fair summary of some of its claims. It's a fair summary of Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara's claims, but if you take a closer look at the study's model, they conflate cost savings from offshoring with cost savings from automation, which would naturally make job losses from automation seem relatively larger. They also lobby for a reduction in corporation tax on page 7.
erikrothoff 9y ago
It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs that are more creative. I don't mean arts etc, but 50 years ago a company like Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Any digital entertainment really, could not exist because people were occupied work that was required for society to function. Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves.
- crc32 9y ago
  Maybe. On the downside; maybe those jobs won't be available to everyone because there is a skills gap or there aren't enough of them. If there are people who are left behind; what do we do about it?
  - announcerman 9y ago
    As long as it isn't profitable to help the people left behind there won't be much done. Hopefully the people left behind will start making it unprofitable for the elites to ignore them. Probably won't happen though due to the vast amount of surveillance we're subjected to along with possible robotic police force in the future.
    - crc32 9y ago
      Yes. What is being suggested by the zeitgeist is that we are in a transition period; and that the scale of the problem is going to be so large that it cannot be ignored. That is, if 75% of the population has no job in 2150 you have a huge ethical and societal problem.
      - gt_ 9y ago
        This article is about unemployment rates, but wage drops in lower paying job sectors is already a huge ethical and societal problem. It can already not be ignored. It is, nonetheless, still being ignored.
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TheLostOne 9y ago
We have three sectors, agriculture, industry and service. Technology has replaced people in agriculture, at the same time industry jobs exploded. Most people were shifted. Technology has replace people in industry, but there were services to provide - lower paying - jobs. Most people were shifted. Now technology replaces jobs in services. There is no "next" sector.
crc32 9y ago
Great article that seems to leave the question unresolved. If technological unemployment is not a large factor; but inequality within advanced economies is rising, then what other factors are at play? Are the changes necessary to deal with those causes the same changes that would be needed to deal with an all-knowing AI in 2150?
- adynatos 9y ago
  inequality is rising because some people are simply more skilled than others.
  - _delirium 9y ago
    More data supports the hypothesis that inequality is rising because some people have more money than others, and currently it's easier to earn significant returns from capital than from labor. Of course, not everyone agrees, but Piketty et al have some evidence for the hypothesis. Is there anyone with data-driven support for the claim that changes in overall inequality are primarily driven by divergence in high-skill vs. low-skill labor incomes? To be clear, I obviously know there is a difference in high-skill vs. low-skill labor incomes, but it's not clear its magnitude is enough to account for the changes seen in macro-scale indicators like the Gini index.
    - adynatos 9y ago
      and that money, where did it come from? look at fortune 500, what percentage inherited it? what percentage inherited it from someone further down the ancestral line than their parents? rich people without skill will squander their fortunes.
    - edanm 9y ago
      Interesting question. I'm not sure, but there have been a lot of economists who disagree with Piketty and written about where he goes wrong. I assume that this implicitly proves the other direction, that capital growth isn't larger than wage growth, or whatever, so it might be a good idea to look there.
TangoTrotFox 9y ago
A really surprising thing here is that their analysis is also based on an somewhat unrealistically negative datum. They're using the labor force participation rate. The labor force participation rate counts people who are happy to not work, which is not a problem - and probably to be expected as the total number of upper and rich class individuals increases over time as a share of society. A much more useful measurement is the U6 unemployment rate. The U6 counts people who are involuntary part time (want full time work but can't find it) as well as those who want to work but who are no longer actively searching as part of the number. And the really surprising thing is that even the U6 is reaching record lows [1]. If the current trends with unemployment continue we'll have the lowest 'real' unemployment rate since the U6 started being recorded, 24 years ago. The one 'zinger' I'd add here is that even the U6 does not account for underemployment. Many of the jobs created in recent years have been McJobs and if somebody has e.g. a STEM degree and is serving coffee, then they should probably count as unemployed. Perhaps it's time for a U7. On the other hand, I do not think this would meaningfully change the numbers. I still do think automation is going to be disruptive since I simply don't see how transportation automation, which is an enormous industry that offers relatively good wages, can end up otherwise. But I've also become less cynical since we've undoubtedly been sending productivity up, and even with the outsourcing of desirable jobs or bringing in workers to fill those roles domestically for lower wages, our economy seems to be doing phenomenally. And that's something I certainly would not have predicted. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/u6rate https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/u6rate
- ryandrake 9y ago
  It’s really hard to measure underemployment. I mean, I have what most would consider a pretty decent tech job, however many of my peers are Senior Director of this and VP of that, and with my background and experience I know I could be a CTO rather than what I am. Am I underemployed? I feel underemployed, but who’s to say I am or am not?
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    A commonly used measure of underemployment is 'years of education not needed for this job'. In this measure, if you'd be qualified to be a CTO but are not, this doesn't count as underemployment, neither does the difference between a junior engineer and a senior one, nor between a mcdonalds franchise manager and mcdonalds CEO. However, it does count going to a different/lower industry. A STEM grad in McDonalds; a teacher in a cleaning job, etc; where you can clearly point towards some 4 years spent on something that the current job doesn't need.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
I'm somewhat surprised by the article's conclusion, but will accept it, given that Scott is pretty thorough with his sourcing and analysis. Even though he says we're getting the worst outcome (something is happening, but it's not apocalyptic, so people won't notice in time to coordinate at scale), it shifted my internal doomsday countdown ~20 years to the future. One thing I wonder though, and it's a general concern for such analyses - just how reliable are the official statistics? Given the unreliability at every level (which I sometimes personally observed) - from people reporting bogus data, data entry people faking it to make their job easier, to bogus statistical analysis and biased reporting at the top - just how much faith we can put in all of this? I get that it's the only thing we have, but I wonder if someone tried to analyze those issues.
- guelo 9y ago
  I think the fact that the data shows gradual trends over long terms with reasonable changes at big inflection points such as recessions gives some confidence that it is capturing some real world signals.
- appearsonline 9y ago
  If I may ask, what was your internal doomsday countdown before reading the article?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    About 10-15 years before progress makes some members of my family unemployed.
    - appearsonline 9y ago
      Depending on how representative your family is of the overall population, that could mean that the doomsday scenario for most people is already here.
spyckie2 9y ago
What do I know, I am not very good at this either and I respect the author's willingness to get other people's perspectives and attempt to reach a conclusion. But I would like to critically consider the "indicative trends" mentality of the author. Entities with ML algorithms that could replace jobs enmasse do not yet exist, so past or current economic trends shouldn't indicate anything. ML algorithms did not gradually takeover Go, for instance - the transition to AI should neither be so gradual. Maybe if someone did micro-studies on Uber's effect on Taxi drivers, it would server as a proxy but even Uber isn't a self driving car company (yet). That said, I really enjoyed reading about what is causing unemployment or the loss of jobs. It's an interesting observation that disabilities is rising as the reason for unemployment in the US. But again, attribution of these trends is always difficult. Anyways, thanks to the author for doing the explorative work.
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  He touches on the idea of humans having the past laid out before them, with the future to their backs. But then, as you say, fails to get to the realization that paying attention to the present isn't going to give us any predictions for how strong-AI, or even non-routine AI is going to change the job prospects for humans. Robots are expensive, but servers aren't.
ageofwant 9y ago
I do not want to be employed. I want to do with my time what I want, and when I want. I do not want to continue living in the age of want, I want to live in the age of plenty. I think it's fair to assume this wish is pretty universal. So I do not give a rats arse about 'productivity', and neither does anybody else, what we want is to live in paradise, today. Paradise, for me, is when I can have all of the below as a matter of basic human convenience, 'free' as we call it now in the age of want: * min 4000 calories of excellent and varied nutritious food whenever I want it * 1kl of 60℃ water / day to my exclusive disposal, I will generally lie around in it * 1l of alcoholic beverage, typically high hopped beer, I'm not fussy * sex on demand with a like minded individual, I'm not fussy, hotness would be nice but I'll be happy with someone less ugly than me * I want to be able travel to any place in the solar system that humans have built homesteads, on demand, by getting on the nearest bus to Titan * I want to live as long as I please, in excellent health until life literally bores me to death and I decide to die of some ancient crippling disease as an expression of art, or some other bullshit like that. Now, if I can have the above, you may own all the AI and tech you want, no worries.
- crpatino 9y ago
  Gee, I guess you never had the talk with your parents. The one about Santa Claus? 1. Calories do grow on trees, but they have to be harvested, and the trees tended for. Whatever being that does the harvesting/tending (either bio or mecha) consumes calories on its own. What have you done for them to earn the right to have that many calories forked to you? 2. Even if water does fall from the sky, clouds are under no contractual obligation to deliver rain wherever you whish. Clean water is valuable because it must be harvested and transported from wherever it lays to wherever it's needed. What have you done for the being (bio or mecha) doing the harvesting/transporting to earn the right of expending time and effort in delivering that to you? 3. Alcohol comes, in principle, from the same calory pool of #1, but to transform it into beer it must be tranformed by some intelligent being under precise conditions. What have you done for him to earn the right for booze? 4. Sex on demand, oh my, this is my favorite one!!! What have you done to your potential partners so you earn the right to have sex with them regardless of their mood? Also, for any sufficiently sexy utopia to be realized, someone, somewhere must fuck the ugliest sometimes. 5. You'd probably die of hypothermia if you tried to settle a homestead in a National Park. What have you done for the potetial interstellar pioneers to have them carry your dead weight all over the solar system? 6. And this is because you failed the other five. Because after ages and ages of being a fucking poocher, you decided to kill yourself whenever you got bored??? What about giving back a little bit of the multiple gifts you received over your existence? I don't think we will ever get the kind of AIs you dream about, but even if we did, I would not be surprised if they decided to terminate your sorry process for a lack of ROI.
tobyjsullivan 9y ago
Warning: the following is conjecture which I have not researched. Because who has the time? My main question while reading this article was why is the author so stuck on "manufacturing" jobs being automated away? He does address this very briefly in section III but I cannot help but feel his foundational research is highly skewed. Sure, robotics are growing in popularity and that technology, specifically, will likely impact manufacturing. Comparatively speaking, however, industrial robots are very expensive. Only the larger manufacturers are going to be upgrading plants with multi-million dollar (or very, very recently hundreds of thousands) equipment to replace a few hundred workers each (if that?). Fun fact: ~90% of the 5.7 million companies in the US had fewer than 20 employees in 2012. 50% of working Americans were employed by companies of fewer than 500 (source of questionable quality: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-employment-by-firm-size-has-a-fat-tailed-distribution-2015-6?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-employment-by-firm-siz...). Compare all that to search results for "images of 1950s offices". You get photos of rows and rows of desks of identical configurations - people with paper pads, typewriters or tabulation machines. Look at what all these people are doing. They are accounting departments calculating statements and balance sheets by hand. They are typists writing out form letters one at a time. These are the job categories that have been wiped out in their entirety by spreadsheets and word processors that you can get literally for free. The CEO can do the work of that 1950s accounting department by herself in an hour. Where did those jobs go? I don't know how many there were to start but it looks significant. Yes, modern offices have the same configurations but it is fundamentally different. The companies I work in can have an entire business unit (or company!) working out of an office that size. One person at one desk is an entire marketing department, the next person is HR (including payroll/accounts/bookkeeping). The only rows of homogeneous roles you see these days are the grunts building the technology. In conclusion, I get the feeling a lot of people wondering if jobs are disappearing seem to be suffering from a bit of "out of sight, out of mind". Most of the automated jobs are already gone. Just my thoughts.
- tjoff 9y ago
  > Only the larger manufacturers are going to be upgrading plants [...] Well, one consequence of this might be that only larger manufacturers survive. The new robots are increasingly general purpose and an army of those could quickly switch tasks based on current needs.
bsbechtel 9y ago
Employment is only a result of an individual wanting someone else to do something for them, because they don't have the time or skill to do it themselves. In exchange for someone doing this thing for them, they compensate them with something of value, normally payment in the form of currency. When you consider employment from this angle, I find it extremely hard to believe that a day will come where the majority of humans on this planet won't want help from other humans to accomplish their goals as they go about their daily lives. Yes, employment in the form of large corporations giving out biweekly paychecks may not exist anymore, but employment as a way to help your fellow human will never cease to exist.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- fastball 9y ago
  I don't know, eventually all unskilled labor will be replaced by machines, and in order to give someone else value you'll need skill.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Sure. This kind of "employment" - or, rather, trade - is fundamental to humans as a socializing species. This can't go away without fundamentally changing what it means to be a human. But this is not the kind of "employment" people usually talk about. What can, and should go away, is the need for employment to survive. I think we can also imagine the times in which employment isn't necessary in order not to suffer (crappy food, cold in winter, lack of healthcare), and to keep upward mobility open. The optimistic view of eliminating jobs is all about eliminating being forced to work to live a happy life, not about eliminating the entire possibility of work and trade.
- lmm 9y ago
  > I find it extremely hard to believe that a day will come where the majority of humans on this planet won't want help from other humans to accomplish their goals as they go about their daily lives. If robots are better at helping people accomplish those goals then why would people ask other humans for help rather than robots? I already choose to book my holidays with machine rather than human assistance, pay for my groceries via machine rather than human.... For the moment I pay humans to do some things (cleaning, food preparation, art production, ...), but it seems entirely conceivable that machines could get better at all of those as well.
paulpauper 9y ago
Regarding the horse example, there US horse population is 9 million. The demand for horses never went away despite automation and has remained steady. If one tried to extrapolate the early 20th century horse population trend to the future, there should presently be no horses alive. Although the labor force participation rate is falling, the total labor force size has not (although it has flattened in recent years). Rather than the total elimination of jobs, a more probable concern is the bifurcation of the labor force by IQ, with those with an IQ below a certain threshold barely getting by, stuck with low-paying jobs that barely pay ends meet. Due to economic and technological factors, this IQ threshold will likely gradually keep rising. http://greyenlightenment.com/two-nations-within-a-nation/ http://greyenlightenment.com/two-nations-within-a-nation/ This is why the decline of manufacturing jobs has not hurt the overall labor market size, because such semi-skilled, medium-IQ jobs are being replaced by service sector jobs. However, the pay for these jobs is not as good. Often what happens is the new technology will coexist with the older one, as the bank teller example shows. Other times the implementation is so slow that it is not a concern. I remember in 2007 McDonald's, Jack in the Box, and other fast-food chains began to install self-order machines, but the adoption was really slow, the machines were often broken, and the machines didn't replace the role of the cooks and cashiers. People needed help using the machines, necessitating staff. Same for those food store self-checkout machines. Rather than the machines eliminating the cashiers, they coexist. Some people like machines, but others don't. Machines break and someone has to supervise the machines in case someone needs help or tries to fool the machine by imputing the incorrect weight or item. Overall, I am not too worried but I can see some cause for concern. Regarding post-scarcity and UBI, entitlement spending has been on an unstoppable rise for the past 50 years. We're already headed in that direction. SNAP, medicaid, disability, and section 8 housing is pretty close to a UBI and post-scarcity. The future is one where the government assumes a greater paternal role in helping those who are unable to keep up with an increasingly competitive economy.
- SilasX 9y ago
  Right: like with horses[1], the problem isn't that humans will die out entirely, but that only a tiny subset of them will "earn a keep" beyond subsistence -- i.e. be able to sell labor whose market value is more than the amount needed to keep them alive. The only horses that stayed around were the ones that could perform a novelty (racing/entertainment) or low-demand-niche role (short trips on rugged terrain). [1] A really, really underappreciated and overdismissed analogy.
ThomPete 9y ago
One of the problems is that most jobs (95%) created from 2005 up until now are temporary jobs[1]. That is in itself not necessarily a problem as it could mean that people just become freelancers. But for the US it opens up for two major issues. 1) Freelancers have to pay their healthcare themselves. 2) Most jobs created are forced freelance contracts i.e. even if you work at an accounting company they will try and put you on a freelance contract. My personal belief is that while globalization is still growing we will not see the underlying changes until it' too late. That's why I think all governments should assume that most of their population will be without a job sooner or later and plan accordingly. [1] https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created-since-2005-are-temporary/ https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created...
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I wonder if that creates more volatility in the economy, business is much more likely to reduce or end a freelancers hours than a full time employee in a downturn.
Eridrus 9y ago
So, one issue I had with this is that a big part of the argument is that "when I see shocks to employment, I don't see shocks to LFPR", but we do definitely see shocks in unemployment rates, and I don't think it's crazy to think that these shocks to employment may transfer to LFPR over long periods of time as different people face different levels of success finding adequate work. I think the strongest argument we can make is that whatever is going on with LFPR has been going on for 50 years, and it does seem to indicate a more difficult job market where people are finding that the jobs available are not better than the alternative.
tinokid 9y ago
>"Increasingly, banks recognized the value of tellers enabled by information technology, not primarily as checkout clerks, but as salespersons, forging relationships with customers and introducing them to additional bank services like credit cards, loans, and investment products." Was this written before the Wells Fargo scandal came to light? Hard to be optimistic when the "silver lining" is that people who were once employed to do necessary work have since been reassigned to trawl for opportunities to make easy money at the expense of the gullible and vulnerable. Sadly this appears to be yet another theme in technological advancement--the proliferation of scams. Just look at how much social media advertising comes from multi-level marketing schemes.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  Turn the competition knob to 0, everyone slacks, turn it to 11, everyone cheats. In a slowly evaporating pool of jobs, it will head to 11 very quickly.
- EnFinlay 9y ago
  That behaviour describes my biggest pet peeve with banks. I don't want product offers from you. You take my money, make money with it, and pay me interest (a whole < 1%). That's our relationship, fuck off with your "credit card protection free trial period".
  - danaliv 9y ago
    That "credit card protection free trial period" is how they're making money.
    - tensor_rank_0 9y ago
      originally they made money by the margin between the profit they make on wise investments and the amount they pay in interest for the privilege of investing money for them. those days are long gone.
- coryfklein 9y ago
  The Wells Fargo scandal does not represent the banking industry as a whole. Believe it or not, but the products sold by the banking industry in general have an investment return greater than 0%. Investing human capital in providing those products results in a net increase in overall human productivity.
IshKebab 9y ago
Did he really show a graph of increasing employment in women, decreasing in men, and then say "Let's ignore the women. Why on earth could male employment be going down?" Erm.... maybe because... women were taking their jobs?
- geodel 9y ago
  I guess someone in comments mentioned that it is something more like more capable women replacing less capable men. It is more reasonable in itself. But as I see it leads more inequality as more capable people get together, raise families and generate better income and lifestyle for them. At the same time situation for less capable people further deteriorates. I think there would be studies about the impact of increasing professional double income couples on rising income inequalities in society at large.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  Because in the period of interest (2005+) the female job participation rate was declining as well; female employment reached the peak at around 2000.
nwah1 9y ago
Production just requires land and labor. Capital is output from previous production used as input again, and it is nice to have but not strictly necessary for employment of labor. Labor can be applied whenever labor has access to land. So the question is why can't people just go to work? Grow their own food to feed themselves, if need be? The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal, and not because they all forgot how to farm. It is simply that farm labor couldn't pay the rent of land anymore. The mechanisms by which the unimproved value of land rises and falls is the key mechanism that we must understand in order to understand wages and the rate of unemployment. Real wages are not a number. They are the lifestyle you can obtain. They are what is left over after you've paid your taxes and your right to exist in a particular location. (Increasingly, healthcare and education are prerequisites to getting by in the same way.) Simply giving people money, irrespective of the financing method, as most advocates of the "technological unemployment" thesis argue for, ignores the nature of rent. When there's no rent-free land, rents rise and fall based on the ability to pay. People getting free money have more ability to pay, and landlords will definitely notice. Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. Higher demand doesn't just stimulate supply. The supply curve is vertical.
- Chris_Jay 9y ago
  Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B9EHSqWgFV7LNUxEVXk0S0ZiMlk/preview https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...
  - trs80 9y ago
    403 forbidden.
    - Chris_Jay 9y ago
      My bad. https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projects/the-rural-incubator https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projec...
paulsutter 9y ago
He may be misreading stagnant productivity growth. Manufacturing productivity is measured in dollars[2], and prices of manufactured goods have been going down[1] (largely from China competition): [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-in-consumer-goods-and-services-in-the-usa-1997-2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-in-consumer... [2] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/faqs.htm#P03 https://www.bls.gov/lpc/faqs.htm#P03
lukeschlather 9y ago
This reminds me of the old joke that GDP goes down when a man marries his maid. But this article manages to not only make that error, but ignore how clearly the data suggest that there are a fair number of men who are housekeepers and are going off the labor market for similar reasons.
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jeffreyrogers 9y ago
The idea that rising disability is a cause of declining labor force participation is interesting, and fits in with anecdotal data from what family members in medicine have told me. They basically phrase it as: If you're uneducated and poor, why would you work a low paying job with little hope of advancement when you could go on disability and collect a similar amount of money without working?
- mywittyname 9y ago
  To be fair, many of these people are actually disabled. It's just that previously they could work. Like the article says, their managers cared about them and and had the capacity to let them take lower-impact positions that they were capable of doing. We don't appreciate how difficult it can be to employ these marginally capable workers. Keeping these people on staff at a small company raises health and operational insurance costs pretty dramatically, so it can be hard to justify keeping them on staff, even if you wanted to. Disability is also pretty difficult to get, despite how the news makes it out to be easy. My father had multiple heart attacks and cancer, and he's still fighting to get on disability. And when he does, it will take years to come into full-effect.
  - jeffreyrogers 9y ago
    I agree partly, but from what my family members have told me it seems that some people are gaming the system for their own benefit. They've also told me that people who truly would benefit from being on disability (like your father) often have a hard time getting on it.
  - dvtv75 9y ago
    (Not in the US.) My partner worked a factory job for many years. They used to have a "specials" group (unofficial name for them), who would be taken on and they would be trained to do just one job, but they would learn it and perform it to a very high standard, day in and day out for many years. They would become very fast at it, and were paid quite well with regard to the average wage in the area. Unfortunately, they were also the first laid off when automation was installed, and afterwards they were competing for few jobs at the same (regional) low wages with "normal" people.
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neilwilson 9y ago
Come back when the retirement age drops below 50. At the moment it is going the other way.
habosa 9y ago
[warning: unfinished thoughts] On the far end of the "technological unemployment" worry spectrum are those who really believe that AI techniques will yield robots that can do essentially all human work better/faster/cheaper than a human could. When discussing that possibility, I wonder if our current statistics and vocabulary are really sufficient? After all when you talk about employment, wages, productivity, etc we're thinking about governments and corporations. We cannot forget that governments and corporations are human power structures and one of the biggest forces pushing them forward is the desire of the rich and powerful to become richer and more powerful. If AI really begins to threaten the supremacy of its human masters, don't you think those same masters will suppress the AI and try to keep the status quo? After all a CEO with a billion dollars in the bank doesn't come to work just to collect his/her paycheck, they come to work to be the boss. Modern humans have been shown to be strongly, and possibly entirely, motivated by relative wealth and power. The millionaire among billionaires feels poor, the wage earner among the unemployed feels rich. So maybe, however inefficient, we will continue to employ each other only because it feels good for the employer to retain power over the employee? Maybe we will reject a super-efficient robot-produced future because we don't know how to form a society unless it's founded on a human power structure. Maybe we'll find things for each other to do just so that we can make each other do them. I agree that if you enumerate all of my current material desires it's possible that a future robot will be able to fulfill them. But I cannot anticipate the societal evolution of desires and how much power over other people plays into that.
- vostrocity 9y ago
  I don't think many managers and executives enjoy their jobs because of the power they have in the organization. I think they enjoy their jobs by being proficient at their work and getting rewarded for it, like the rest of us.

370 points by gbear605 9y ago

The difference I see is that historically automation was used to increase productivity. I don't see that in the current wave of "AI"-based automation. There's an emphasis on speed, accuracy, and working with more unknowns, but there isn't any talk of getting more work done. That makes it scary.

crc32 9y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. "Speed" is almost directly exactly analogous to "increased productivity" isn't it? Also accuracy - reducing scrap means more can be produced with less materials in less time. "working with more unknowns" - doing things that couldn't be done before. These all seem to be kinds of "getting more work done".
abusoufiyan 9y ago
>The difference I see is that historically automation was used to increase productivity. Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doing for less money than a human salary. I guess I also just don't see much difference. All that will happen will be again a shift away from many kinds of jobs (the easily automatible ones) to different kinds. I mean, there are all kinds of jobs now that didn't exist 50 years ago (software engineer, social media manager, influencer, etc. etc.)
- Sukera 9y ago
  Yes, all kinds of jobs - but are there actually a substantial number of people doing those jobs compared to the number of jobs that are easy to automate away?
  - abusoufiyan 9y ago
    I don't see why it matters. In the end, there won't be massive job loss to automation. Automation right now can eliminate most farm laborers. So why are there still so many farm laborers in the world? Because a) human wages in most of the world are cheaper than expensive machinery b) There isn't a profit motive to automate away jobs that pay so little c) structure of society is such that many technologies take decades upon decades to trickle out to most people in the world (talking the whole world here, not just Euromerica). In addition, the service economy won't be automated away for a long time because human contact is valued by lots of people in that field. Service economy scales with the purchasing power of communities and AI is going to create a consolidation of purchasing power wherever it is introduced.
- crc32 9y ago
  > didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doing for less money than a human salary. this is by definition "increasing productivity" isn't it? > All that will happen will be again a shift away from many kinds of jobs (the easily automatible ones) to different kinds. If that's true, then what will the shift be to? These are interesting questions. And how long will the shift take? Because I think there is a general feeling that current levels of inequality - the "hollowing out" of the middle class - are due to trends in automation.
  - abusoufiyan 9y ago
    If that's what increasing productivity is, then AI will surely increase productivity. I think the shift will probably be towards internet-based jobs. Content creation / software development / content curation (think social media managers) / customer service, the things that it's hard for AI to get right. It will probably take longer and definitely leave some malcontents but, so did the stocking frame.
  - petra 9y ago
    What will.the shift be to ? A few possibilities, at least short term: Some manufacturing returns to the US with help of robots. Maybe even as an exportible industry. Maybe it's possible to simplify those complex jobs that more people could do them? It's possible for the some of the new,highly automated industries to be a net job creator. For example one scenario for self-driving is that it will be partly remotely-operated ,i.e. jobs , instead of people driving themselves. Things may become cheaper and people will spend the money left on human based experiences/services ? Or even an whole economy based on human interaction because that's the one thing robots couldn't do? Or like we always did , we'll find some useless thing(like consumerism) that will create jobs and build society around it ?
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It was largely used to employ cheap labor to produce crap. The luddites produced higher value artisinal goods. The luddites weren't reactionaries intent on destroying technology any more than strikers are protesting against the concept of 'work', they were just saboteurs trying to improve their negotiating position. The whole thing about them being anti-technology is historical revisionism. Similarly, French taxi anti-uber strikers in 2013 were literally depicted by Forbes as being "anti smartphone" - the motive for the lie being the same in both cases. The reason why low wage employment and crap clothes were more economically successful at the time had more to do with the economically hemorrhaging effect of the Napoleonic wars - which led to cheaper, more desperate labor and a demand for cheaper goods. It's a bit like how McDonalds gets a sales boost during recessions while mid range restaurants take a hit.
  - abusoufiyan 9y ago
    Okay, I'm not a scholar on European history, so you're probably right. It was just an example. Still there have been automations in the past. We're all still here.
    - crc32 9y ago
      Well actually, we're not all still here! Those shifts - i.e. the industrial revolution - were enormously disruptive! Assuming that this is happening; or going to happen, how can we smooth it out a bit? And of course; that is on the basis that this is not a science fiction AI special; in which case an even more thoughtful approach might be required to minimise the damage and maximise happiness; or whatever variable you prefer.
      - abusoufiyan 9y ago
        I worry that attempts to smooth it out can actually cause worse disruption. Like, let's say we know factory workers will be laid off, so we need to allocate resources to retrain them. Very likely the resources will not be enough for all the workers. So who gets them and who doesn't will become a political battle, with the left-out group resenting everyone in society and society ignoring their needs because it reminds them that they left them behind. And then you build a society where one group's triumph is based on another's suppression, and you can see where this is going...
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doing for less money than a human salary. Mechanisation of the textile industry led to vast increases in the quantity of production. Prior to the industrial revolution, most peasants would have owned only one set of clothes and replaced them only when they were entirely beyond repair. Cheap cloth created demand for wardrobes and dressers, because a lot of people were now in the peculiar position of owning more clothes than they could wear at once. The luddites were ultimately wrong because of Jevons paradox - labour efficiencies in the textile industry vastly increased the demand for their product, and with it their demand for labour. Hand-loom weavers didn't lose their livelihoods to the power loom, they just made ten times as much cloth for twice the wage. Automation and mechanisation in other manufacturing sectors likewise stimulated vastly increased consumer demand, contributing to a virtuous cycle of increasing profit, wages and living standards. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the efficiencies of mass-manufacturing gave ordinary people secure employment and access to a dizzying array of consumer goods. The more stuff we made, the more stuff we could afford to buy. I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern. A lot of tech-heavy businesses seem to be startlingly close to zero-sum. Uber has decimated the taxi industry, but it doesn't seem to have vastly increased overall ridership - the most generous figures I've seen suggest perhaps a 40% increase in some markets. Google and Facebook have become multi-billion dollar companies through advertising revenue, but the overall growth of ad spending across all media has barely outpaced inflation, with the newspaper industry being the most obvious casualty. I can't think of many major tech companies that didn't kill an industry. I'd love to be proven wrong.
  - abusoufiyan 9y ago
    >I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern. AI/ML which can mine through sports footage to create highlight reels and funny clip collections, etc will create tons of consumer goods (videos) which can all be monetized on Youtube. Just one example. How about Netflix? They use AI/ML quite a bit. It seems to have driven quite a lot more people to watch movies and tv than before. Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good last holiday season.
landryraccoon 9y ago
> There's an emphasis on speed, accuracy, and working with more unknowns How is this not getting more work done? It sounds exactly like more work is getting done to me.
- onion2k 9y ago
  If you produce one report in a day, or a computer does it more accurately in 50ms and you don't need the person, the same amount of work is done.
  - landryraccoon 9y ago
    That doesn't make any sense to me. So, if a tractor digs a hole in 5 minutes that a person could dig in a day, the same work is being done because a person could have done it? If a horse carries a person 10 miles in an hour and a car does it in 10 minutes, the same work is done because the horse did the same work as the car? Does an ATM do no work because a teller could do the same thing, just slower and at higher cost? By your standard, does the industrial revolution mean that more work is being done?
    - Pyxl101 9y ago
      "Work being done" refers to the output, not the way in which that output is produced. For example, let's say that the task is to add up a list of 10,000 numbers. It might take a human a while to accomplish this accurately. A computer won't take much time at all. The computer is accomplishing the same work as the human in a much shorter amount of time. The computer could handle a vast number of such tasks per day for a lower price than any human, with better accuracy. Similarly, imagine hauling cargo across the country. A human could put the packages on their back and walk, or alternatively a human and freight train team could haul them by rail. The human and freight train team accomplishes vastly more work than the human alone, and is able to haul much larger and heavier packages at a much faster speed.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Then you make the computer do a thousand reports in a day, and get a qualitatively new (not necessarily better) ability of working with real-time data. Increased productivity is an enabler for things that previously were not possible or did not make economical sense.

crdoconnor 9y ago

>The report linked above is from Ball State University, and argues that, while manufacturing has thrived, automation has reduced the need for workers so much that lots of them have been laid off: >Had we kept 2000-levels of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of production, we would have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers. Instead, we employed only 12.1 million. >The report gets summarized in a few places as “13% of job loss is due to trade, 87% is due to increasing productivity/automation”, which seems like a fair summary of some of its claims. It's a fair summary of Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara's claims, but if you take a closer look at the study's model, they conflate cost savings from offshoring with cost savings from automation, which would naturally make job losses from automation seem relatively larger. They also lobby for a reduction in corporation tax on page 7.

erikrothoff 9y ago

It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs that are more creative. I don't mean arts etc, but 50 years ago a company like Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Any digital entertainment really, could not exist because people were occupied work that was required for society to function. Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves.

crc32 9y ago
Maybe. On the downside; maybe those jobs won't be available to everyone because there is a skills gap or there aren't enough of them. If there are people who are left behind; what do we do about it?
- announcerman 9y ago
  As long as it isn't profitable to help the people left behind there won't be much done. Hopefully the people left behind will start making it unprofitable for the elites to ignore them. Probably won't happen though due to the vast amount of surveillance we're subjected to along with possible robotic police force in the future.
  - crc32 9y ago
    Yes. What is being suggested by the zeitgeist is that we are in a transition period; and that the scale of the problem is going to be so large that it cannot be ignored. That is, if 75% of the population has no job in 2150 you have a huge ethical and societal problem.
    - gt_ 9y ago
      This article is about unemployment rates, but wage drops in lower paying job sectors is already a huge ethical and societal problem. It can already not be ignored. It is, nonetheless, still being ignored.
- 9y ago

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TheLostOne 9y ago

We have three sectors, agriculture, industry and service. Technology has replaced people in agriculture, at the same time industry jobs exploded. Most people were shifted. Technology has replace people in industry, but there were services to provide - lower paying - jobs. Most people were shifted. Now technology replaces jobs in services. There is no "next" sector.

crc32 9y ago

Great article that seems to leave the question unresolved. If technological unemployment is not a large factor; but inequality within advanced economies is rising, then what other factors are at play? Are the changes necessary to deal with those causes the same changes that would be needed to deal with an all-knowing AI in 2150?

adynatos 9y ago
inequality is rising because some people are simply more skilled than others.
- _delirium 9y ago
  More data supports the hypothesis that inequality is rising because some people have more money than others, and currently it's easier to earn significant returns from capital than from labor. Of course, not everyone agrees, but Piketty et al have some evidence for the hypothesis. Is there anyone with data-driven support for the claim that changes in overall inequality are primarily driven by divergence in high-skill vs. low-skill labor incomes? To be clear, I obviously know there is a difference in high-skill vs. low-skill labor incomes, but it's not clear its magnitude is enough to account for the changes seen in macro-scale indicators like the Gini index.
  - adynatos 9y ago
    and that money, where did it come from? look at fortune 500, what percentage inherited it? what percentage inherited it from someone further down the ancestral line than their parents? rich people without skill will squander their fortunes.
  - edanm 9y ago
    Interesting question. I'm not sure, but there have been a lot of economists who disagree with Piketty and written about where he goes wrong. I assume that this implicitly proves the other direction, that capital growth isn't larger than wage growth, or whatever, so it might be a good idea to look there.

TangoTrotFox 9y ago

A really surprising thing here is that their analysis is also based on an somewhat unrealistically negative datum. They're using the labor force participation rate. The labor force participation rate counts people who are happy to not work, which is not a problem - and probably to be expected as the total number of upper and rich class individuals increases over time as a share of society. A much more useful measurement is the U6 unemployment rate. The U6 counts people who are involuntary part time (want full time work but can't find it) as well as those who want to work but who are no longer actively searching as part of the number. And the really surprising thing is that even the U6 is reaching record lows [1]. If the current trends with unemployment continue we'll have the lowest 'real' unemployment rate since the U6 started being recorded, 24 years ago. The one 'zinger' I'd add here is that even the U6 does not account for underemployment. Many of the jobs created in recent years have been McJobs and if somebody has e.g. a STEM degree and is serving coffee, then they should probably count as unemployed. Perhaps it's time for a U7. On the other hand, I do not think this would meaningfully change the numbers. I still do think automation is going to be disruptive since I simply don't see how transportation automation, which is an enormous industry that offers relatively good wages, can end up otherwise. But I've also become less cynical since we've undoubtedly been sending productivity up, and even with the outsourcing of desirable jobs or bringing in workers to fill those roles domestically for lower wages, our economy seems to be doing phenomenally. And that's something I certainly would not have predicted. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/u6rate https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/u6rate

ryandrake 9y ago
It’s really hard to measure underemployment. I mean, I have what most would consider a pretty decent tech job, however many of my peers are Senior Director of this and VP of that, and with my background and experience I know I could be a CTO rather than what I am. Am I underemployed? I feel underemployed, but who’s to say I am or am not?
- PeterisP 9y ago
  A commonly used measure of underemployment is 'years of education not needed for this job'. In this measure, if you'd be qualified to be a CTO but are not, this doesn't count as underemployment, neither does the difference between a junior engineer and a senior one, nor between a mcdonalds franchise manager and mcdonalds CEO. However, it does count going to a different/lower industry. A STEM grad in McDonalds; a teacher in a cleaning job, etc; where you can clearly point towards some 4 years spent on something that the current job doesn't need.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

I'm somewhat surprised by the article's conclusion, but will accept it, given that Scott is pretty thorough with his sourcing and analysis. Even though he says we're getting the worst outcome (something is happening, but it's not apocalyptic, so people won't notice in time to coordinate at scale), it shifted my internal doomsday countdown ~20 years to the future. One thing I wonder though, and it's a general concern for such analyses - just how reliable are the official statistics? Given the unreliability at every level (which I sometimes personally observed) - from people reporting bogus data, data entry people faking it to make their job easier, to bogus statistical analysis and biased reporting at the top - just how much faith we can put in all of this? I get that it's the only thing we have, but I wonder if someone tried to analyze those issues.

guelo 9y ago
I think the fact that the data shows gradual trends over long terms with reasonable changes at big inflection points such as recessions gives some confidence that it is capturing some real world signals.
appearsonline 9y ago
If I may ask, what was your internal doomsday countdown before reading the article?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  About 10-15 years before progress makes some members of my family unemployed.
  - appearsonline 9y ago
    Depending on how representative your family is of the overall population, that could mean that the doomsday scenario for most people is already here.

spyckie2 9y ago

What do I know, I am not very good at this either and I respect the author's willingness to get other people's perspectives and attempt to reach a conclusion. But I would like to critically consider the "indicative trends" mentality of the author. Entities with ML algorithms that could replace jobs enmasse do not yet exist, so past or current economic trends shouldn't indicate anything. ML algorithms did not gradually takeover Go, for instance - the transition to AI should neither be so gradual. Maybe if someone did micro-studies on Uber's effect on Taxi drivers, it would server as a proxy but even Uber isn't a self driving car company (yet). That said, I really enjoyed reading about what is causing unemployment or the loss of jobs. It's an interesting observation that disabilities is rising as the reason for unemployment in the US. But again, attribution of these trends is always difficult. Anyways, thanks to the author for doing the explorative work.

lowbloodsugar 9y ago
He touches on the idea of humans having the past laid out before them, with the future to their backs. But then, as you say, fails to get to the realization that paying attention to the present isn't going to give us any predictions for how strong-AI, or even non-routine AI is going to change the job prospects for humans. Robots are expensive, but servers aren't.

ageofwant 9y ago

I do not want to be employed. I want to do with my time what I want, and when I want. I do not want to continue living in the age of want, I want to live in the age of plenty. I think it's fair to assume this wish is pretty universal. So I do not give a rats arse about 'productivity', and neither does anybody else, what we want is to live in paradise, today. Paradise, for me, is when I can have all of the below as a matter of basic human convenience, 'free' as we call it now in the age of want: * min 4000 calories of excellent and varied nutritious food whenever I want it * 1kl of 60℃ water / day to my exclusive disposal, I will generally lie around in it * 1l of alcoholic beverage, typically high hopped beer, I'm not fussy * sex on demand with a like minded individual, I'm not fussy, hotness would be nice but I'll be happy with someone less ugly than me * I want to be able travel to any place in the solar system that humans have built homesteads, on demand, by getting on the nearest bus to Titan * I want to live as long as I please, in excellent health until life literally bores me to death and I decide to die of some ancient crippling disease as an expression of art, or some other bullshit like that. Now, if I can have the above, you may own all the AI and tech you want, no worries.

crpatino 9y ago
Gee, I guess you never had the talk with your parents. The one about Santa Claus? 1. Calories do grow on trees, but they have to be harvested, and the trees tended for. Whatever being that does the harvesting/tending (either bio or mecha) consumes calories on its own. What have you done for them to earn the right to have that many calories forked to you? 2. Even if water does fall from the sky, clouds are under no contractual obligation to deliver rain wherever you whish. Clean water is valuable because it must be harvested and transported from wherever it lays to wherever it's needed. What have you done for the being (bio or mecha) doing the harvesting/transporting to earn the right of expending time and effort in delivering that to you? 3. Alcohol comes, in principle, from the same calory pool of #1, but to transform it into beer it must be tranformed by some intelligent being under precise conditions. What have you done for him to earn the right for booze? 4. Sex on demand, oh my, this is my favorite one!!! What have you done to your potential partners so you earn the right to have sex with them regardless of their mood? Also, for any sufficiently sexy utopia to be realized, someone, somewhere must fuck the ugliest sometimes. 5. You'd probably die of hypothermia if you tried to settle a homestead in a National Park. What have you done for the potetial interstellar pioneers to have them carry your dead weight all over the solar system? 6. And this is because you failed the other five. Because after ages and ages of being a fucking poocher, you decided to kill yourself whenever you got bored??? What about giving back a little bit of the multiple gifts you received over your existence? I don't think we will ever get the kind of AIs you dream about, but even if we did, I would not be surprised if they decided to terminate your sorry process for a lack of ROI.

tobyjsullivan 9y ago

Warning: the following is conjecture which I have not researched. Because who has the time? My main question while reading this article was why is the author so stuck on "manufacturing" jobs being automated away? He does address this very briefly in section III but I cannot help but feel his foundational research is highly skewed. Sure, robotics are growing in popularity and that technology, specifically, will likely impact manufacturing. Comparatively speaking, however, industrial robots are very expensive. Only the larger manufacturers are going to be upgrading plants with multi-million dollar (or very, very recently hundreds of thousands) equipment to replace a few hundred workers each (if that?). Fun fact: ~90% of the 5.7 million companies in the US had fewer than 20 employees in 2012. 50% of working Americans were employed by companies of fewer than 500 (source of questionable quality: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-employment-by-firm-size-has-a-fat-tailed-distribution-2015-6?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-employment-by-firm-siz...). Compare all that to search results for "images of 1950s offices". You get photos of rows and rows of desks of identical configurations - people with paper pads, typewriters or tabulation machines. Look at what all these people are doing. They are accounting departments calculating statements and balance sheets by hand. They are typists writing out form letters one at a time. These are the job categories that have been wiped out in their entirety by spreadsheets and word processors that you can get literally for free. The CEO can do the work of that 1950s accounting department by herself in an hour. Where did those jobs go? I don't know how many there were to start but it looks significant. Yes, modern offices have the same configurations but it is fundamentally different. The companies I work in can have an entire business unit (or company!) working out of an office that size. One person at one desk is an entire marketing department, the next person is HR (including payroll/accounts/bookkeeping). The only rows of homogeneous roles you see these days are the grunts building the technology. In conclusion, I get the feeling a lot of people wondering if jobs are disappearing seem to be suffering from a bit of "out of sight, out of mind". Most of the automated jobs are already gone. Just my thoughts.

tjoff 9y ago
> Only the larger manufacturers are going to be upgrading plants [...] Well, one consequence of this might be that only larger manufacturers survive. The new robots are increasingly general purpose and an army of those could quickly switch tasks based on current needs.

bsbechtel 9y ago

Employment is only a result of an individual wanting someone else to do something for them, because they don't have the time or skill to do it themselves. In exchange for someone doing this thing for them, they compensate them with something of value, normally payment in the form of currency. When you consider employment from this angle, I find it extremely hard to believe that a day will come where the majority of humans on this planet won't want help from other humans to accomplish their goals as they go about their daily lives. Yes, employment in the form of large corporations giving out biweekly paychecks may not exist anymore, but employment as a way to help your fellow human will never cease to exist.

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fastball 9y ago
I don't know, eventually all unskilled labor will be replaced by machines, and in order to give someone else value you'll need skill.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Sure. This kind of "employment" - or, rather, trade - is fundamental to humans as a socializing species. This can't go away without fundamentally changing what it means to be a human. But this is not the kind of "employment" people usually talk about. What can, and should go away, is the need for employment to survive. I think we can also imagine the times in which employment isn't necessary in order not to suffer (crappy food, cold in winter, lack of healthcare), and to keep upward mobility open. The optimistic view of eliminating jobs is all about eliminating being forced to work to live a happy life, not about eliminating the entire possibility of work and trade.
lmm 9y ago
> I find it extremely hard to believe that a day will come where the majority of humans on this planet won't want help from other humans to accomplish their goals as they go about their daily lives. If robots are better at helping people accomplish those goals then why would people ask other humans for help rather than robots? I already choose to book my holidays with machine rather than human assistance, pay for my groceries via machine rather than human.... For the moment I pay humans to do some things (cleaning, food preparation, art production, ...), but it seems entirely conceivable that machines could get better at all of those as well.

paulpauper 9y ago

Regarding the horse example, there US horse population is 9 million. The demand for horses never went away despite automation and has remained steady. If one tried to extrapolate the early 20th century horse population trend to the future, there should presently be no horses alive. Although the labor force participation rate is falling, the total labor force size has not (although it has flattened in recent years). Rather than the total elimination of jobs, a more probable concern is the bifurcation of the labor force by IQ, with those with an IQ below a certain threshold barely getting by, stuck with low-paying jobs that barely pay ends meet. Due to economic and technological factors, this IQ threshold will likely gradually keep rising. http://greyenlightenment.com/two-nations-within-a-nation/ http://greyenlightenment.com/two-nations-within-a-nation/ This is why the decline of manufacturing jobs has not hurt the overall labor market size, because such semi-skilled, medium-IQ jobs are being replaced by service sector jobs. However, the pay for these jobs is not as good. Often what happens is the new technology will coexist with the older one, as the bank teller example shows. Other times the implementation is so slow that it is not a concern. I remember in 2007 McDonald's, Jack in the Box, and other fast-food chains began to install self-order machines, but the adoption was really slow, the machines were often broken, and the machines didn't replace the role of the cooks and cashiers. People needed help using the machines, necessitating staff. Same for those food store self-checkout machines. Rather than the machines eliminating the cashiers, they coexist. Some people like machines, but others don't. Machines break and someone has to supervise the machines in case someone needs help or tries to fool the machine by imputing the incorrect weight or item. Overall, I am not too worried but I can see some cause for concern. Regarding post-scarcity and UBI, entitlement spending has been on an unstoppable rise for the past 50 years. We're already headed in that direction. SNAP, medicaid, disability, and section 8 housing is pretty close to a UBI and post-scarcity. The future is one where the government assumes a greater paternal role in helping those who are unable to keep up with an increasingly competitive economy.

SilasX 9y ago
Right: like with horses[1], the problem isn't that humans will die out entirely, but that only a tiny subset of them will "earn a keep" beyond subsistence -- i.e. be able to sell labor whose market value is more than the amount needed to keep them alive. The only horses that stayed around were the ones that could perform a novelty (racing/entertainment) or low-demand-niche role (short trips on rugged terrain). [1] A really, really underappreciated and overdismissed analogy.

ThomPete 9y ago

One of the problems is that most jobs (95%) created from 2005 up until now are temporary jobs[1]. That is in itself not necessarily a problem as it could mean that people just become freelancers. But for the US it opens up for two major issues. 1) Freelancers have to pay their healthcare themselves. 2) Most jobs created are forced freelance contracts i.e. even if you work at an accounting company they will try and put you on a freelance contract. My personal belief is that while globalization is still growing we will not see the underlying changes until it' too late. That's why I think all governments should assume that most of their population will be without a job sooner or later and plan accordingly. [1] https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created-since-2005-are-temporary/ https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created...

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
I wonder if that creates more volatility in the economy, business is much more likely to reduce or end a freelancers hours than a full time employee in a downturn.

Eridrus 9y ago

So, one issue I had with this is that a big part of the argument is that "when I see shocks to employment, I don't see shocks to LFPR", but we do definitely see shocks in unemployment rates, and I don't think it's crazy to think that these shocks to employment may transfer to LFPR over long periods of time as different people face different levels of success finding adequate work. I think the strongest argument we can make is that whatever is going on with LFPR has been going on for 50 years, and it does seem to indicate a more difficult job market where people are finding that the jobs available are not better than the alternative.

tinokid 9y ago

>"Increasingly, banks recognized the value of tellers enabled by information technology, not primarily as checkout clerks, but as salespersons, forging relationships with customers and introducing them to additional bank services like credit cards, loans, and investment products." Was this written before the Wells Fargo scandal came to light? Hard to be optimistic when the "silver lining" is that people who were once employed to do necessary work have since been reassigned to trawl for opportunities to make easy money at the expense of the gullible and vulnerable. Sadly this appears to be yet another theme in technological advancement--the proliferation of scams. Just look at how much social media advertising comes from multi-level marketing schemes.

jjoonathan 9y ago
Turn the competition knob to 0, everyone slacks, turn it to 11, everyone cheats. In a slowly evaporating pool of jobs, it will head to 11 very quickly.
EnFinlay 9y ago
That behaviour describes my biggest pet peeve with banks. I don't want product offers from you. You take my money, make money with it, and pay me interest (a whole < 1%). That's our relationship, fuck off with your "credit card protection free trial period".
- danaliv 9y ago
  That "credit card protection free trial period" is how they're making money.
  - tensor_rank_0 9y ago
    originally they made money by the margin between the profit they make on wise investments and the amount they pay in interest for the privilege of investing money for them. those days are long gone.
coryfklein 9y ago
The Wells Fargo scandal does not represent the banking industry as a whole. Believe it or not, but the products sold by the banking industry in general have an investment return greater than 0%. Investing human capital in providing those products results in a net increase in overall human productivity.

IshKebab 9y ago

Did he really show a graph of increasing employment in women, decreasing in men, and then say "Let's ignore the women. Why on earth could male employment be going down?" Erm.... maybe because... women were taking their jobs?

geodel 9y ago
I guess someone in comments mentioned that it is something more like more capable women replacing less capable men. It is more reasonable in itself. But as I see it leads more inequality as more capable people get together, raise families and generate better income and lifestyle for them. At the same time situation for less capable people further deteriorates. I think there would be studies about the impact of increasing professional double income couples on rising income inequalities in society at large.
PeterisP 9y ago
Because in the period of interest (2005+) the female job participation rate was declining as well; female employment reached the peak at around 2000.

nwah1 9y ago

Production just requires land and labor. Capital is output from previous production used as input again, and it is nice to have but not strictly necessary for employment of labor. Labor can be applied whenever labor has access to land. So the question is why can't people just go to work? Grow their own food to feed themselves, if need be? The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal, and not because they all forgot how to farm. It is simply that farm labor couldn't pay the rent of land anymore. The mechanisms by which the unimproved value of land rises and falls is the key mechanism that we must understand in order to understand wages and the rate of unemployment. Real wages are not a number. They are the lifestyle you can obtain. They are what is left over after you've paid your taxes and your right to exist in a particular location. (Increasingly, healthcare and education are prerequisites to getting by in the same way.) Simply giving people money, irrespective of the financing method, as most advocates of the "technological unemployment" thesis argue for, ignores the nature of rent. When there's no rent-free land, rents rise and fall based on the ability to pay. People getting free money have more ability to pay, and landlords will definitely notice. Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. Higher demand doesn't just stimulate supply. The supply curve is vertical.

Chris_Jay 9y ago
Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B9EHSqWgFV7LNUxEVXk0S0ZiMlk/preview https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...
- trs80 9y ago
  403 forbidden.
  - Chris_Jay 9y ago
    My bad. https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projects/the-rural-incubator https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projec...

paulsutter 9y ago

He may be misreading stagnant productivity growth. Manufacturing productivity is measured in dollars[2], and prices of manufactured goods have been going down[1] (largely from China competition): [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-in-consumer-goods-and-services-in-the-usa-1997-2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-in-consumer... [2] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/faqs.htm#P03 https://www.bls.gov/lpc/faqs.htm#P03

lukeschlather 9y ago

This reminds me of the old joke that GDP goes down when a man marries his maid. But this article manages to not only make that error, but ignore how clearly the data suggest that there are a fair number of men who are housekeepers and are going off the labor market for similar reasons.

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jeffreyrogers 9y ago

The idea that rising disability is a cause of declining labor force participation is interesting, and fits in with anecdotal data from what family members in medicine have told me. They basically phrase it as: If you're uneducated and poor, why would you work a low paying job with little hope of advancement when you could go on disability and collect a similar amount of money without working?

mywittyname 9y ago
To be fair, many of these people are actually disabled. It's just that previously they could work. Like the article says, their managers cared about them and and had the capacity to let them take lower-impact positions that they were capable of doing. We don't appreciate how difficult it can be to employ these marginally capable workers. Keeping these people on staff at a small company raises health and operational insurance costs pretty dramatically, so it can be hard to justify keeping them on staff, even if you wanted to. Disability is also pretty difficult to get, despite how the news makes it out to be easy. My father had multiple heart attacks and cancer, and he's still fighting to get on disability. And when he does, it will take years to come into full-effect.
- jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  I agree partly, but from what my family members have told me it seems that some people are gaming the system for their own benefit. They've also told me that people who truly would benefit from being on disability (like your father) often have a hard time getting on it.
- dvtv75 9y ago
  (Not in the US.) My partner worked a factory job for many years. They used to have a "specials" group (unofficial name for them), who would be taken on and they would be trained to do just one job, but they would learn it and perform it to a very high standard, day in and day out for many years. They would become very fast at it, and were paid quite well with regard to the average wage in the area. Unfortunately, they were also the first laid off when automation was installed, and afterwards they were competing for few jobs at the same (regional) low wages with "normal" people.

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neilwilson 9y ago

Come back when the retirement age drops below 50. At the moment it is going the other way.

habosa 9y ago

[warning: unfinished thoughts] On the far end of the "technological unemployment" worry spectrum are those who really believe that AI techniques will yield robots that can do essentially all human work better/faster/cheaper than a human could. When discussing that possibility, I wonder if our current statistics and vocabulary are really sufficient? After all when you talk about employment, wages, productivity, etc we're thinking about governments and corporations. We cannot forget that governments and corporations are human power structures and one of the biggest forces pushing them forward is the desire of the rich and powerful to become richer and more powerful. If AI really begins to threaten the supremacy of its human masters, don't you think those same masters will suppress the AI and try to keep the status quo? After all a CEO with a billion dollars in the bank doesn't come to work just to collect his/her paycheck, they come to work to be the boss. Modern humans have been shown to be strongly, and possibly entirely, motivated by relative wealth and power. The millionaire among billionaires feels poor, the wage earner among the unemployed feels rich. So maybe, however inefficient, we will continue to employ each other only because it feels good for the employer to retain power over the employee? Maybe we will reject a super-efficient robot-produced future because we don't know how to form a society unless it's founded on a human power structure. Maybe we'll find things for each other to do just so that we can make each other do them. I agree that if you enumerate all of my current material desires it's possible that a future robot will be able to fulfill them. But I cannot anticipate the societal evolution of desires and how much power over other people plays into that.

vostrocity 9y ago
I don't think many managers and executives enjoy their jobs because of the power they have in the organization. I think they enjoy their jobs by being proficient at their work and getting rewarded for it, like the rest of us.