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Mechanization 'destroyed' millions of jobs, when people were replaced by mechanized equipment replaced farm workers, horse breeders/tenders, folks in the transp

Mechanization 'destroyed' millions of jobs, when people were replaced by mechanized equipment replaced farm workers, horse breeders/tenders, folks in the transportation business, etc. Electronic computers 'destroyed' jobs when they replaced human computers. Motorized street sweepers 'destroyed' jobs when they replaced people with brooms sweeping debris off of streets (except in Beijing where, as of 2015, this is still a thing). Firearms 'destroyed' jobs when bowers no longer had any reason to mass produce bows and arrows. People will find a way to stay busy. The past is literally filled with examples of a new technology replacing people, and those people eventually found other things to do. It's not hard to see, in hindsight, how many of my silly (but real) examples above translated into entirely new industries. Pardon the harshness here, I feel like the only people this is truly a surprise to is either folks that ignore the past, or are incapable of understanding the past.

headsoup 9y ago
> People will find a way to stay busy Yes let's just dismiss all the concerns because 'things always work out in the end.' I suppose there's always room for more managers...
- austenallred 9y ago
  My job didn’t exist 20 years ago. Did yours?
  - headsoup 9y ago
    Yes Were you in the workforce 20 years ago?
    - austenallred 9y ago
      I was barely born 20 years ago
  - dvtv75 9y ago
    Mine did. It has existed for about 90 years, maybe even longer. Without going into specifics, I can imagine that it could be automated as is right now, as it's not particularly complicated, and the whole role could be designed around so that it's not required anyway. (I believe I'll be out-of-work within a few months because of implications from the latter statement.)
smnrchrds 9y ago
> People will find a way to stay busy You are implying that this will happen automagically, and there is no cause for concern. I disagree. People will find other things to do, but if we want there to be jobs in 20 years for people who have lost their jobs to AI, we need to get to work now. To use an example to illustrate my point, people have always found new sources of energy. We have never ran out of energy, nor faced extreme shortages as old resources dried up. Does that mean we should ignore any calls to action for investing in alternative and renewable energy sources? After all, why should we worry about and waste resources to prevent a thing that has never happened? Humans have always found a way, I'm sure in time, when oil and gas and coal dries up, we will find something else. Right? Things work out in the end because we make them work out. Waiting until the disaster hits and then starting to think about possible solutions is not a reasonable approach. If we want to have alternative energy resources by the time we run out of fossil fuels, we need to start working towards it now. Same if we want to have alternative jobs by the time the current ones become obsolete by AI.
- vram22 9y ago
  >Things work out in the end because we make them work out. Waiting until the disaster hits and then starting to think about possible solutions is not a reasonable approach. Nor is it a sensible approach. Excellent points. Whenever thing have been solved, it is because humans did something about it. Not because we sat around waiting for random chance or historical precedents to solve things.
vram22 9y ago
People saying "it will be different this time" turned out to be false about bubbles. Saying not (of) "it will be different this time", i.e. "it will be the same this time", i.e. your claim, can also turn out to be false. >bowers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer >Pardon the harshness here, I feel like the only people this is truly a surprise to is either folks that ignore the past, or are incapable of understanding the past. No need to ask for pardon. But what happened in the past is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. See Black Swan etc.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  We're dealing with a different kind of mechanization this time, previous mechanizations were largely manual labors. We've been retreating further and further into the one thing we haven't been able to automate away, our creative intelligence and problem solving, what happens when we figure out how to write something that can do that? It's like being a horse at the turn of the last century saying well we've always had horse jobs throughout various advancements in horse-labor tech, this internal combustion engine should be no big deal we'll find horse jobs. We all know how that turned out for horses, now we're pushing closer and closer to the precipice of being the horses at the turn of the last century. Sure it'll be impossible to tell whats going to be the straw that breaks the camels back but we should be ready for each straw to break the camels back, and not assume it won't.
  - rcfox 9y ago
    It's not really the same as for horses. Horses in society lost control of their own reproductive rights. Horses existed to fill jobs because people bred them to meet a demand. As demand for horses declined, fewer horses were bred. We have the opposite situation with humans. Individual humans retain their reproductive rights. Most of them don't decide to reduce the supply to meet a reduced demand. For a time, China did impose a restriction on reproduction, but that just resulted in many (mostly female) babies being killed or abandoned.
    - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
igorkraw 9y ago
In Germany we still learn the poem of the 'Schlesian Weber', the weavers that lost their jobs to the mechanical looms. The misery comes through very strongly. All of your examples caused the same misery, then lots of people died,some adapted like you said . Nobody is arguing to become Luddites, but I do see the need to acknowledge we need to handle the transition ( if you believe in solidarity, Christian or other religious values or in general care about humans ) or be honest when we do not care about peoples misery and death.
jacquesm 9y ago
Pardon the harshness, but it is ridiculous to extrapolate from a small series of events to one that arguably will affect the job market like nothing that has ever happened before. We are not talking about a transfer of jobs from one phase of tech to another, we are talking about the wholesale disappearance of jobs with nothing to replace them. If you just take the first step - self driving cars - and remove all the jobs that currently have a driving license as a marketable skill away from people that only have that particular marketable skill (and that's quite a few of them) then 100's of millions of people the world over will instantly be unemployable. And that's just one step. That does not translate into 'they'll go and do something else', quite a few of them will end up in poverty, commit suicide or worse because they've been ingrained with a mentality that tells them that if they are not able to contribute that they are a drain on society, and that's for those societies that actually have a safety net. For societies that do not a life of crime or begging is pretty much their only option. For all the smarts that the HN crowd possesses quite a few of us are categorically incapable to see the world through the eyes of the people whose lives are affected in a very harsh and direct way by our creations. Just stating that 'people will find a way to stay busy' is easy for someone who never has enough time in a day to read all the books they want to read, build all the stuff they still want to build and who probably scores in the top 5% income wise. Which makes it very well possible that you'll end up in the bucket of the haves rather than the have nots. The rest of the world will likely not be that lucky. And as one of the haves it should worry you. See also: the French Revolution.
- T2_t2 9y ago
  Your advice from your first sentence holds true, and extrapolating too wildly is unwise. MAYBE driverless cars become a reality and quickly at that. MAYBE that makes drivers in the west redundant just as fast. But worldwide? I think people underestimate how inexpensive labour is in places like Bali, let alone Kenya. No one knows what will happen, or what new industries will be formed as a result of these changes, and the warnings are all good and well, but there is much doubt in all directions, and crazy policy implemented to avert a disaster may be just as bad as doing nothing. That's why this whole new level of automation is so scary: no body has any clear idea what will happen, and the policy shift is really, really unclear.
wavegeek 9y ago
Two problems with this post. 1. You are assuming that what happened in the past will continue to happen in the future. Maybe it will, or maybe this time things are different. There are reasonable arguments that make the case that this time is different. The difference is that computers are encroaching on the one point of difference that man has always had on machines - his brain. 2. You are ignoring transition costs and times. Even with past mechanizations, there was immense pain and suffering and disruption that went on for decades. For neoclassical economists it will be OK in the long run, in equilibrium, when there will again be full employment and fairies will dance gaily on colorful toadstools. Back in the real world people suffer and die.
sago 9y ago
> The past is literally filled with examples of a new technology replacing people, and those people eventually found other things to do. For a comment so seemingly proud of its historical knowledge, this seems a very bizarre claim. People as a whole could be said to have adapted, but the affected individuals very often didn't. The suffering was immense. Modern social safety net and the welfare state are directly related to the abject poverty resulting from the dramatic and often cataclysmic urbanisation of the industrial revolution. So yes, humanity will survive and adapt. It won't be the end of the world. But avoiding analogous problems to the concomitant evils of the industrial revolution is exactly why we need this discussion. Shrugging one's shoulders at the problems of history, because a new equilibrium arose, seems to me to betray the real lack of historical understanding.
Joeri 9y ago
It will take time for the new jobs to appear and people to be retrained, just as it did during those past instances of great change. Meanwhile people will be unemployed.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  Yes, they will. Do you have a proposal for how to simultaneously provide for efficient progress and smooth transitions? I mostly see people either lamenting the suffering that big changes often cause, or brushing it aside as inevitable. It'd be interesting to see ideas for how we could have disruptive developments without so much disruption.
icantdrive55 9y ago
"People will find a way to stay busy." Ugh? Yes--finding a place to sleep without breaking any laws will keep them on their toes. Non-profits will keep them from starving to death--maybe? They will become adept at sign making? And, they will say they hate it, but are secretly relieved when they end up in jail. Hay--this is now? The wealthy will always be fine. They are always fine. They have the world to sell their stuff. They have the money to buy political influence. The cameras will record any act of malfeasance. The wealthy communities will have surveillance (Tiburon Ca.), aggressive police tactics. All designed to keep them away from the zombies. They won't have to look at the eye sores. God I hate that phrase. It's always cones out of the ugliest peoples mouths? We will get used to seeing people dying on the streets. We will get used to the smell of sewage on the sidewalks. We will get used to looking the other way. Hay--this is happening today. California has one patch of land that people can go to die/live for nothing. They can pitch a tent. Drink the water they brought. Eat the food they brought. It's in the desert of California, ownded by a Teacher's Union? It's a piece of land the wealthy would let their dogs poop on. It's hell. Federal land? No--the rangers will monitor you like a melanoma. There's just nowhere to go when you don't fit in. Yes--people will busy. Busy just barely surviving. So many of us are just barely surviving, but taught to not complain. This is America? It's the land of opportunity? A country that helps those need with well funded Safety Nets. A country that made too many laws--laws that stomp on the poor, and unemployed. Ugh. Some days?

headsoup 9y ago

> People will find a way to stay busy Yes let's just dismiss all the concerns because 'things always work out in the end.' I suppose there's always room for more managers...

austenallred 9y ago
My job didn’t exist 20 years ago. Did yours?
- headsoup 9y ago
  Yes Were you in the workforce 20 years ago?
  - austenallred 9y ago
    I was barely born 20 years ago
- dvtv75 9y ago
  Mine did. It has existed for about 90 years, maybe even longer. Without going into specifics, I can imagine that it could be automated as is right now, as it's not particularly complicated, and the whole role could be designed around so that it's not required anyway. (I believe I'll be out-of-work within a few months because of implications from the latter statement.)

smnrchrds 9y ago

> People will find a way to stay busy You are implying that this will happen automagically, and there is no cause for concern. I disagree. People will find other things to do, but if we want there to be jobs in 20 years for people who have lost their jobs to AI, we need to get to work now. To use an example to illustrate my point, people have always found new sources of energy. We have never ran out of energy, nor faced extreme shortages as old resources dried up. Does that mean we should ignore any calls to action for investing in alternative and renewable energy sources? After all, why should we worry about and waste resources to prevent a thing that has never happened? Humans have always found a way, I'm sure in time, when oil and gas and coal dries up, we will find something else. Right? Things work out in the end because we make them work out. Waiting until the disaster hits and then starting to think about possible solutions is not a reasonable approach. If we want to have alternative energy resources by the time we run out of fossil fuels, we need to start working towards it now. Same if we want to have alternative jobs by the time the current ones become obsolete by AI.

vram22 9y ago
>Things work out in the end because we make them work out. Waiting until the disaster hits and then starting to think about possible solutions is not a reasonable approach. Nor is it a sensible approach. Excellent points. Whenever thing have been solved, it is because humans did something about it. Not because we sat around waiting for random chance or historical precedents to solve things.

vram22 9y ago

People saying "it will be different this time" turned out to be false about bubbles. Saying not (of) "it will be different this time", i.e. "it will be the same this time", i.e. your claim, can also turn out to be false. >bowers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer >Pardon the harshness here, I feel like the only people this is truly a surprise to is either folks that ignore the past, or are incapable of understanding the past. No need to ask for pardon. But what happened in the past is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. See Black Swan etc.

SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
We're dealing with a different kind of mechanization this time, previous mechanizations were largely manual labors. We've been retreating further and further into the one thing we haven't been able to automate away, our creative intelligence and problem solving, what happens when we figure out how to write something that can do that? It's like being a horse at the turn of the last century saying well we've always had horse jobs throughout various advancements in horse-labor tech, this internal combustion engine should be no big deal we'll find horse jobs. We all know how that turned out for horses, now we're pushing closer and closer to the precipice of being the horses at the turn of the last century. Sure it'll be impossible to tell whats going to be the straw that breaks the camels back but we should be ready for each straw to break the camels back, and not assume it won't.
- rcfox 9y ago
  It's not really the same as for horses. Horses in society lost control of their own reproductive rights. Horses existed to fill jobs because people bred them to meet a demand. As demand for horses declined, fewer horses were bred. We have the opposite situation with humans. Individual humans retain their reproductive rights. Most of them don't decide to reduce the supply to meet a reduced demand. For a time, China did impose a restriction on reproduction, but that just resulted in many (mostly female) babies being killed or abandoned.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago

igorkraw 9y ago

In Germany we still learn the poem of the 'Schlesian Weber', the weavers that lost their jobs to the mechanical looms. The misery comes through very strongly. All of your examples caused the same misery, then lots of people died,some adapted like you said . Nobody is arguing to become Luddites, but I do see the need to acknowledge we need to handle the transition ( if you believe in solidarity, Christian or other religious values or in general care about humans ) or be honest when we do not care about peoples misery and death.

jacquesm 9y ago

Pardon the harshness, but it is ridiculous to extrapolate from a small series of events to one that arguably will affect the job market like nothing that has ever happened before. We are not talking about a transfer of jobs from one phase of tech to another, we are talking about the wholesale disappearance of jobs with nothing to replace them. If you just take the first step - self driving cars - and remove all the jobs that currently have a driving license as a marketable skill away from people that only have that particular marketable skill (and that's quite a few of them) then 100's of millions of people the world over will instantly be unemployable. And that's just one step. That does not translate into 'they'll go and do something else', quite a few of them will end up in poverty, commit suicide or worse because they've been ingrained with a mentality that tells them that if they are not able to contribute that they are a drain on society, and that's for those societies that actually have a safety net. For societies that do not a life of crime or begging is pretty much their only option. For all the smarts that the HN crowd possesses quite a few of us are categorically incapable to see the world through the eyes of the people whose lives are affected in a very harsh and direct way by our creations. Just stating that 'people will find a way to stay busy' is easy for someone who never has enough time in a day to read all the books they want to read, build all the stuff they still want to build and who probably scores in the top 5% income wise. Which makes it very well possible that you'll end up in the bucket of the haves rather than the have nots. The rest of the world will likely not be that lucky. And as one of the haves it should worry you. See also: the French Revolution.

T2_t2 9y ago
Your advice from your first sentence holds true, and extrapolating too wildly is unwise. MAYBE driverless cars become a reality and quickly at that. MAYBE that makes drivers in the west redundant just as fast. But worldwide? I think people underestimate how inexpensive labour is in places like Bali, let alone Kenya. No one knows what will happen, or what new industries will be formed as a result of these changes, and the warnings are all good and well, but there is much doubt in all directions, and crazy policy implemented to avert a disaster may be just as bad as doing nothing. That's why this whole new level of automation is so scary: no body has any clear idea what will happen, and the policy shift is really, really unclear.

wavegeek 9y ago

Two problems with this post. 1. You are assuming that what happened in the past will continue to happen in the future. Maybe it will, or maybe this time things are different. There are reasonable arguments that make the case that this time is different. The difference is that computers are encroaching on the one point of difference that man has always had on machines - his brain. 2. You are ignoring transition costs and times. Even with past mechanizations, there was immense pain and suffering and disruption that went on for decades. For neoclassical economists it will be OK in the long run, in equilibrium, when there will again be full employment and fairies will dance gaily on colorful toadstools. Back in the real world people suffer and die.

sago 9y ago

> The past is literally filled with examples of a new technology replacing people, and those people eventually found other things to do. For a comment so seemingly proud of its historical knowledge, this seems a very bizarre claim. People as a whole could be said to have adapted, but the affected individuals very often didn't. The suffering was immense. Modern social safety net and the welfare state are directly related to the abject poverty resulting from the dramatic and often cataclysmic urbanisation of the industrial revolution. So yes, humanity will survive and adapt. It won't be the end of the world. But avoiding analogous problems to the concomitant evils of the industrial revolution is exactly why we need this discussion. Shrugging one's shoulders at the problems of history, because a new equilibrium arose, seems to me to betray the real lack of historical understanding.

Joeri 9y ago

It will take time for the new jobs to appear and people to be retrained, just as it did during those past instances of great change. Meanwhile people will be unemployed.

khedoros1 9y ago
Yes, they will. Do you have a proposal for how to simultaneously provide for efficient progress and smooth transitions? I mostly see people either lamenting the suffering that big changes often cause, or brushing it aside as inevitable. It'd be interesting to see ideas for how we could have disruptive developments without so much disruption.

icantdrive55 9y ago

"People will find a way to stay busy." Ugh? Yes--finding a place to sleep without breaking any laws will keep them on their toes. Non-profits will keep them from starving to death--maybe? They will become adept at sign making? And, they will say they hate it, but are secretly relieved when they end up in jail. Hay--this is now? The wealthy will always be fine. They are always fine. They have the world to sell their stuff. They have the money to buy political influence. The cameras will record any act of malfeasance. The wealthy communities will have surveillance (Tiburon Ca.), aggressive police tactics. All designed to keep them away from the zombies. They won't have to look at the eye sores. God I hate that phrase. It's always cones out of the ugliest peoples mouths? We will get used to seeing people dying on the streets. We will get used to the smell of sewage on the sidewalks. We will get used to looking the other way. Hay--this is happening today. California has one patch of land that people can go to die/live for nothing. They can pitch a tent. Drink the water they brought. Eat the food they brought. It's in the desert of California, ownded by a Teacher's Union? It's a piece of land the wealthy would let their dogs poop on. It's hell. Federal land? No--the rangers will monitor you like a melanoma. There's just nowhere to go when you don't fit in. Yes--people will busy. Busy just barely surviving. So many of us are just barely surviving, but taught to not complain. This is America? It's the land of opportunity? A country that helps those need with well funded Safety Nets. A country that made too many laws--laws that stomp on the poor, and unemployed. Ugh. Some days?