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Modern societies are going to have a very real problem to grapple with as this replacement goes from newsworthy to the norm. This could result in significant wo

Modern societies are going to have a very real problem to grapple with as this replacement goes from newsworthy to the norm. This could result in significant worker displacement with massive bottom-line ROI for companies in the next decade or two, particularly as minimum wages rise. I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Even if they do, it is unlikely those new positions will employ the same degree of skilled worker. Assuming a net unskilled job reduction due to automation in a couple of decades, what happens as this becomes pervasive in a society?

sharkweek 8y ago
The lower class gets bigger and bigger, and is either kept just happy enough to not revolt or... At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force.
- frlnBorg 8y ago
  That is a foolish thing to say
  - CPLX 8y ago
    Why? That's pretty much a summary of how social change has worked for the last 2000 years or so.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force Not necessarily. The same robotic technology that decouples low-skill labour inputs and outputs is decoupling populations from force projection capabilities. Less cynically, there are organic ways for the situation to positively evolve (e.g. higher across-board labour productivity) without overt wealth redistribution.
  - mikepurvis 8y ago
    Can you expand on this? I don't understand which populations you're referring to as having become decoupled from force projection? In the US at least, there's 1+ gun for every man, woman, and child. Even if the elite class is backed by the entire US military, there's something to be said for overwhelming force of numbers.
    - endtime 8y ago
      The gun owners are typically on the other side of the aisle from those who support redistribution of wealth. Not saying that couldn't change or that desperation can't trump principle, of course.
      - setr 8y ago
        I don’t know if thats true: I think everyone wants a “fair” distribution of wealth. The question is in the definition of fair, and means to achieve it. Conservatives believe that distribution achieved by tax and regulation will hurt the total economic production of the US, and lead to everyone being worse off, though more equal (in the extreme: everyone is equally poor), and they also consider it fair that the distribution is unequal (as do liberals). Its just a matter of how unequal. But at least part of their definition of includes that they have the chance to increase their position, which is incompatible with tax/regulation at the extreme: if everyone has their incomes set in stone by the government, there is no chance to change in status. But losing all low-level jobs to robots, notably, removes that chance. For different reasons than the liberal (who dislikes it for the centralization of wealth/power, and the extreme polarization of wealth distribution), conservatives would intuitively be against it for the denial of opportunity across the board Tldr: everyone hates being poor/homeless, and too many people being homeless will cause a revolt regardless of their individual political leanings.
        PeterisP 8y ago
        One aspect of UBI (when/if we can afford to implement it) is that it presents some solution the problem you describe if it's unconditional. If everyone has an set-in-stone income provided by the society because the robots are doing all the low-level jobs and the society doesn't need their labor, then they still have sufficient free time and ability to do something extra to increase their position. There are many useful things that aren't (or won't be) viable as jobs because they pay too little or too sporadically to sustain yourself, however, they do provide enough to increase your revenue and status, and give a feeling of opportunity - if you'd have the basics provided in some other way.
- saas_sam 8y ago
  What if the lower class is getting simultaneously bigger and also better off? Do you think the bottom 10% is living as bad as they were in 1940? 1980? Things that used to be luxuries are now normal across all income brackets... That's a good thing. :-)
  - hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
    People don't compare themselves to how people lived 80 years ago. They compare themselves to other people, today. So saying "Look poor people, who cares if you can't afford decent housing, or health care, or quality food - you've got a cell phone!" will not quiet the social unrest that a growing underclass will cause.
    - tathougies 8y ago
      Overall though, more people have healthcare, more people have housing, and more people have food than ever before. No one is arguing, 'cellphone, hence no poverty'. People are merely arguing that the lowest 10% are no longer destitute.
      - hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
        Yes, I agree the lowest 10% are no longer as destitute, but my point is the dangerous social unrest that is likely to be caused (some would argue already has been caused) by widening inequality is not something that absolute measures of living standards will have much bearing on.
        tathougies 8y ago
        You attacked a very poor interpretation of the parent comment then. Claiming ' they may have iphones, but they don't have food ' is patently ridiculous.
        manigandham 8y ago
        That remains to be seen. There's clearly a certain level of "comfort" where the majority of people become satisfied enough, and the quality of life at the bottom is rapidly increasing as technology and the world matures. The rise of the middle class in China and India seems to be the biggest indicator of this approaching steady state.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force. There's also the dystopian possibility that automated forms of social control are developed neuter the ability of any kind of popular political movement from challenging the elites. That automation could be anything from systems of censorship, surveillance, and propaganda to police androids. I think it makes some sense to deliberately cultivate and preserve IRL communities and networks that aren't very tech-mediated. By no means are they a panacea, but I think they have fewer vulnerabilities to tech-based automated control.
  - core-questions 8y ago
    Do you have a license for this post?
  - amoshi 8y ago
    I think this will happen. Brings to mind Google's secret project The Selfish Ledger, especially how it can be used for "Behavioural Sequencing"... [0] As tech gets better it'll become easier to analyse the masses and make good predictions - how much can the masses put up with? How much further can we push them before the boiling point is reached? [0] https://youtu.be/QDVVo14A_fo?t=439 https://youtu.be/QDVVo14A_fo?t=439
  - whycombinater 8y ago
    "And just before the nuke hit, he reflected on what a great life he had. Under his watch, Skynet raised the percentage of female programmers to an even 50%." Of course, some would see that that's actually a DYStopia, I mean, where are the trans?!
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >automated forms of social control are developed Legalisation of drugs fits in here IMO, it's a salve for the people to keep them from mounting rebellions. Making hard drugs cheap and widely available probably is a relatively effective way of killing off a proportion of your poorest citizens without raising too great an alarm. Things like VR could placate the people too, give them a fake "luxury existence" and they're less likely to rebel.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  An alternative, which I advocate for, is that the lower class form productive collectives, stop contributing to the ultra wealthy, and generate their own real wealth. Much of the worlds wealth exists in wealth-generating infrastructure and information that is accessible to all of us. If we simply divest from the ultra wealthy and build a new economy based on cooperation, we can construct a system that inherently lifts us all. Automation will increase our productivity. In the end, the question is simply how we share the result of that gain. Normal capitalist corporations are designed to funnel wealth to a few board members, but cooperatives could succeed here too, where the wealth they generate is more naturally shared amongst all the workers. It’s not a silver bullet, but I feel as though it would represent a real improvement. We have to do something about how we distribute the creation of new wealth, and I don’t think we should wait for someone else to make this change for us - we must take action to realize the potential here! EDIT: I also think some billionaires are sympathetic to these issues and would be willing to contribute. But if we form large economic collectives, we can amass enough power to force the wealthy to notice when we divest.
  - tathougies 8y ago
    One concrete step can be getting rid of the capital requirements (by regulation) to invest. The idea of 'qualified investors' is literally a way to keep poor people poor, and rich people rich, by cutting off poor or middle class people from the major vehicles of wealth creation. It is ridiculous that I cannot invest in the IPO of a company in my local neighborhood because, while I have enough money to satisfy the business, I don't have enough money to satisfy uncle sam's onerous requirements. But yes, cooperatives like Mondragon are good examples, and also incredibly traditional.
    - mschuster91 8y ago
      These capital requirements are regulations that have been introduced as a response to companies fleecing the poor-ish, the uneducated and those who had a bit of cash, but decided to put it into one (fraudulent) investment. Drop them and you'll see what already is happening in the cryptocoin scene: people getting exploited left and right. Point is, no sofa investor will be a shark and get rich, contrary to the ICO promises.
- bachbach 8y ago
  Everybody who thinks this believes in some replay of the 19th-20th centuries - personally I do not buy it because I think computation is qualitatively different to mechanization. Moravec's Paradox strongly implies that the middle class is automated before the working class is. I think anybody who doesn't understand that isn't worth listening to since it's the most concrete result in A.I for half a century. It's not about the bottom - it's about the middle and underclasses - that is different to the past.
ed_balls 8y ago
state-backed jobs with negative income tax/UBI/wealthfare. This is what gonna happen in Japan. USA? no idea, some kind of revolution. The biggest problem will be in countries like Bangladesh.
- apazzolini 8y ago
  The second (third?) most recent Sam Harris podcast episode with Yuval Noah Harari discusses this. We normally talk about UBI in the context of one country, but like you said, third world countries will suffer the most. Automation killing basic factory jobs will have a much larger effect outside of first world countries, and unfortunately there's no real way to address that disparity from the context of policy in any one country.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Realistically, we know how the First World countries are going to solve it, because many of them are already in the process of implementing that solution. They'll dump some token amount of humanitarian aid to relieve their conscience, and meanwhile set up electrified razor wire fences with automated turrets and drones at their borders. They're not going to share as much as would be necessary to implement something like UBI worldwide, even at local levels of "subsistence wage".
krupan 8y ago
We've been replacing jobs with automation for a century. It already is the norm. Why are you so worried? EDIT: more thoughts I just finished reading an Asimov novel written in 1955. There were computers in this book. They were people. Computer was a job title. Now we have machines that do that job, and we have an entire new industry employing lots and lots of people that didn't exist before that one job, Computer, was automated.
- core-questions 8y ago
  It's a good sentiment, but the replacement of fast-food workers with robots won't really open up a whole new field in the same sense. Robotics and AI are wonderful and interesting fields, but honestly, let's not kid ourselves, most people who are flipping burgers probably aren't going to go on to work in the field of building their own replacements.
  - krupan 8y ago
    "the replacement of fast-food workers with robots won't really open up a whole new field in the same sense" No, it won't look exactly like moving from human computers to machine computers. It won't look exactly like moving from manual farming to tractors and combines. It's hard to imagine what it will look like, but it seems overly pessimistic to just assume that this time automation is going to turn out terribly.
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      Just because its been terrible before? The industrial revolution was a time of starvation and death for the families of the displaced. The issue isn't how to keep people busy. That's not a very worthy goal. In the '50s we dreamed of a society where robots took the yoke from our shoulders and let us live better lives. Now that it's happening, all we can talk about is how to get people back to work!
- cgag 8y ago
  Do you honestly believe this isn't going to be a problem?
justfor1comment 8y ago
Most likely two outcomes. Either everyone will be given a basic income for meeting their needs or the robot revolution will make goods so cheap that very little money/effort will be needed purchase things. Most of the jobs may move to the entertainment and healthcare industry.
- core-questions 8y ago
  What if we're not satisfied with mincome and soma, and we want something more? With no framework to provide for useful productivity, what will young people end up doing? A lazy population with no way to differentiate and striate financially will find other ways of anteing up over each other, including criminal acts...
  - matz1 8y ago
    Meh, if anything think vr, internet, video games will keep most people occuppaid. Lazy population will be too lazy to bother each other.
- int_19h 8y ago
  > or the robot revolution will make goods so cheap that very little money/effort will be needed Any such robot revolution would drive the cost of labor down faster than it'd drive the cost of goods. It might just not be immediately visible from every vantage point in society, because economic sectors will be taken out one by one - so today you live like a king because of all that cheap stuff, and tomorrow you can't afford it because you have no job, and hence no paycheck. So some form of basic income would still be needed for many.
petra 8y ago
high skill jobs are at risk too. It's reasonable to assume, given recent tech developments(AI, low code for software, generative design for graphic design/engineering and architecture, blockchain for professions working on trust in transaction like accounting, some automation in the legal field, automation in insurance) that many high-skill professions will suffer unemployment too. And can someone with high-skill job always shift to another high-skill job? pretty hard, many high skill jobs have very high barriers to entry. And could they aim for the low skill burger flipping job ? Who will get the job, some spoiled engineer, or someone who is used to working hard doing hard labor for low pay and may be younger ? So why is everybody under the assumption that high skill jobs are safe ?
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  I don’t think a single one of your examples have resulted in the loss of jobs from those areas. If anything it’s the opposite.
- lgessler 8y ago
  Software engineering seems safe, if that is what you are primarily thinking of in your question. Developing software at the same level of a skilled engineer is a problem we'd only be able to solve with general AI. Even if program synthesizers (things that take declarative high level requirements and produce code) worked (and they don't at the level required for an non-technical user to use), most engineers today must be involved in the design process, and finding requirements and formulating solutions is a skill that requires humanistic and non-technical intuition.
  - gpm 8y ago
    It's not at all clear that software engineering is safe. Sure there will probably always be a few programmers, but as tools (and soon I expect AI) gets better those programmers can do more and more of the work. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find the number of software engineers decreasing in the not too distant future. The only reason it hasn't already is that we've managed to grow the number of things software developers are doing at the same rate as the increase in number of software developers * the increase in efficiency per software developer. And in some parts of software development (e.g. games) it has.
nerdponx 8y ago
The source of the problem is simple. Real societal value is generated through this activity, but it is reaped entirely by Uniqlo and its stakeholders. Yes, consumers are also a stakeholder, but your typical consumer will receive very little or no direct benefit from this change. Eventually, yes, the profits will be reinvested, but the impact will be so diluted as to be a noticeable. Some small fraction of it will probably also go to tax evasion, being expatriated or sequestered by wealthy upper management. Meanwhile, a whole lot of people are suddenly out of work, imposing significant negative externalities on them and their families. This could conceivably ruin a marriage, or turn a good parent into a raging alcoholic. It may well be that the negative gain to society (in the form of laying off so many employees) has severe follow-on effects, and in terms of net welfare this could do more harm than good. The effects of leaving the workers out of the profit-sharing is more than just a matter of equity. Without redistribution of the welfare created by automation, it's perfectly conceivable that the net welfare gain is negative due to the negative second-order effects outweighing the positive second-order effects. This is the stuff they don't teach you in Econ 101, but it's how things really work.
- ColanR 8y ago
  The other thing they don't teach you in Econ 101 is that treating corporations as obligated to keep and preserve jobs prevents them from creating societal value, and treating workers as entitled to a job disincentivises the invention of new methods of creating societal value. It causes stagnation of the economy.
  - knieveltech 8y ago
    And what is Econ 201's solution to pervasive unemployment, or lack of spending power due to underemployment? Is that also classified as "societal value"?
    - stale2002 8y ago
      I'm not sure if you have noticed, but unemployment is at a multi decade low. We are not seeing pervasive unemployment, we are seeing the opposite. A situation where there are too many jobs, and not enough workers to fill them So econ 201 would say that there isn't any societial problem right now.
fixermark 8y ago
In the US, the biggest plurality employment sector by a long shot is long-haul transportation. It's going to be an interesting next 25-or-so years as self-driving vehicle technology moves to Level 4 or 5 readiness and the people with a significant vested interest in long-term investment in driving down transportation cost displace a major chunk of America's workforce.
brycehamrick 8y ago
The "job" as a foundation of modern life is the result of the industrialized revolution and, while it served its purposed, is something we need to abandon as quickly as possible. Corporations don't have a monopoly on economic value creation. We should be, as a government and society, encouraging independent tradesmen/women, entrepreneurship, and artisanry. If we can manage that, job loss due to automation is no longer an issue.
- DrNuke 8y ago
  Jobs are a way to exert social control, though. The dystopian solution is to reopen gulags and labor camps to re-educate people. Oh, wait...
- cycrutchfield 8y ago
  You realize that "cottage industry" is not necessarily an aspirational concept, right?
- nerdponx 8y ago
  We can't manage it until we remove employment as the sole condition for access to basic services like healthcare. We also need to ensure that people are able to retrain themselves if/when their job becomes obsolete.
  - Schwolop 8y ago
    The rest of the world _has_ worked this first point out. The US is close enough to the only developed country that ties healthcare to employment. The second point is a given in the more socialised parts of Europe, and is a core tenet of most support programs for the involuntarily unemployed elsewhere. Which is to say; I don't get your point. Sounds like everywhere but the US could do this right now.
  - grecy 8y ago
    > We can't manage it until we remove employment as the sole condition for access to basic services like healthcare Many countries don't have that limitation.
golemiprague 8y ago
It is not a problem, it is a blessing, it means countries will not have to keep sustaining the pyramid scheme of population growth and will not need massive immigration which only cause problems in the long run. This is how Japan can keep its culture and healthy society while not increasing its population, actually reducing it which is also good for the environment.
forkLding 8y ago
Theres already a lot of automation at car factories and places which heavily rely on machinery to produce goods. I remember seeing that the only people needed is people to repair the machinery if it broke down and the whole manufacturing process being automated with self-driving carts moving around the materials. Note this was a Toyota factory, so it could be skewed.
nirelBRACIT0S 8y ago
As Steve Jobs used to say: “if you can’t buy an iPhone you deserve nothing”
mc32 8y ago
Doesn’t that depend on the characteristics of the work robots are replacing in modern economies? Let’s take Japan, ftom the article. They are replacing warehouse workers. Demographically, Japan is experiencing a shrinking workforce. So, the issue isn’t exactly whether ribots replace workers, but whether the pace of replacement is in sync with the reduction in the aging workforce.
keerthiko 8y ago
Modern societies need to figure out distribution of economic power that isn't based on employment. Of all the things corporations should be held responsible for, directly propping up low-skill labor employment opportunities shouldn't be one of them. Employment and jobs should stop being used as fundamental economic indicators. The naive approach would be to just increase overall corporate taxes, reduce payroll taxes (so companies are mildly incentivized to pay humans) and more effectively redistribute tax income to society. The problem with this is the geographic inflexibility of this approach, as Amazon could be sucking up tons of resources from Florida and no amount of taxation on Amazon really pays back to Florida. Surely we can eventually come up with a better system to let companies optimize their business practices (net value++) and redistributing those improvements across society?
TYPE_FASTER 8y ago
The US already sent most of these jobs offshore a few decades ago. Automation has been improving efficiency, and slowly decreasing the physical labor market, since then (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/welcoming-our-new-robot-overlords https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/welcoming-our-...), but the majority of the physical world jobs being displaced by automation will be in China.
MisterOctober 8y ago
Truly. Minimum [to say nothing of market!] wages are climbing fast in my state, and I have heard real chatter from business owners about implementing [robot] automation on the production line / warehouse sooner rather than later. Another industry I have knowledge of, orcharding, is moving toward harvest automation at an astonishing rate, driven mainly by the rapidly-escalating cost of labor [having to pay for H2B visa costs, the disappearance of harvest-following migrant worker bands in favor of more professionalized workers who demand pay greater than the prevailing minimum wage, regulations that require orchardists provide quality housing [at a cost upwards of $10k/worker/year] and pay for rest periods, rising liability / workers' comp insurance costs, etc. Adoption of automation in the orcharding sector is increasing as cost of equipment falls -- for example, two years ago, a typical apple harvest machine [which replaces a crew of, say, ~20 humans] cost in the neighborhood of $500k, whereas today viable models are available at half that. My understanding is that the vineyard industry is even further along in implementing automation, owing to the relative simplicity of their harvest process.
__s 8y ago
I'd suggest reading The Driver, by Garet Garrett
Bombthecat 8y ago
I like the movie elysium.
unicornporn 8y ago
≥ I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Increasing productivity is kind of the point with automation. So unless demand drastically increases, it seems highly unlikely.
grey-area 8y ago
I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Historically people do shift to other tasks and society adapts, but this takes a generation and we can expect massive disruption, suffering and unrest in the coming decades across the world as manual labour (drivers, pickers, sorters, assemblers) are replaced by machines.

sharkweek 8y ago

The lower class gets bigger and bigger, and is either kept just happy enough to not revolt or... At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force.

frlnBorg 8y ago
That is a foolish thing to say
- CPLX 8y ago
  Why? That's pretty much a summary of how social change has worked for the last 2000 years or so.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force Not necessarily. The same robotic technology that decouples low-skill labour inputs and outputs is decoupling populations from force projection capabilities. Less cynically, there are organic ways for the situation to positively evolve (e.g. higher across-board labour productivity) without overt wealth redistribution.
- mikepurvis 8y ago
  Can you expand on this? I don't understand which populations you're referring to as having become decoupled from force projection? In the US at least, there's 1+ gun for every man, woman, and child. Even if the elite class is backed by the entire US military, there's something to be said for overwhelming force of numbers.
  - endtime 8y ago
    The gun owners are typically on the other side of the aisle from those who support redistribution of wealth. Not saying that couldn't change or that desperation can't trump principle, of course.
    - setr 8y ago
      I don’t know if thats true: I think everyone wants a “fair” distribution of wealth. The question is in the definition of fair, and means to achieve it. Conservatives believe that distribution achieved by tax and regulation will hurt the total economic production of the US, and lead to everyone being worse off, though more equal (in the extreme: everyone is equally poor), and they also consider it fair that the distribution is unequal (as do liberals). Its just a matter of how unequal. But at least part of their definition of includes that they have the chance to increase their position, which is incompatible with tax/regulation at the extreme: if everyone has their incomes set in stone by the government, there is no chance to change in status. But losing all low-level jobs to robots, notably, removes that chance. For different reasons than the liberal (who dislikes it for the centralization of wealth/power, and the extreme polarization of wealth distribution), conservatives would intuitively be against it for the denial of opportunity across the board Tldr: everyone hates being poor/homeless, and too many people being homeless will cause a revolt regardless of their individual political leanings.
      - PeterisP 8y ago
        One aspect of UBI (when/if we can afford to implement it) is that it presents some solution the problem you describe if it's unconditional. If everyone has an set-in-stone income provided by the society because the robots are doing all the low-level jobs and the society doesn't need their labor, then they still have sufficient free time and ability to do something extra to increase their position. There are many useful things that aren't (or won't be) viable as jobs because they pay too little or too sporadically to sustain yourself, however, they do provide enough to increase your revenue and status, and give a feeling of opportunity - if you'd have the basics provided in some other way.
saas_sam 8y ago
What if the lower class is getting simultaneously bigger and also better off? Do you think the bottom 10% is living as bad as they were in 1940? 1980? Things that used to be luxuries are now normal across all income brackets... That's a good thing. :-)
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  People don't compare themselves to how people lived 80 years ago. They compare themselves to other people, today. So saying "Look poor people, who cares if you can't afford decent housing, or health care, or quality food - you've got a cell phone!" will not quiet the social unrest that a growing underclass will cause.
  - tathougies 8y ago
    Overall though, more people have healthcare, more people have housing, and more people have food than ever before. No one is arguing, 'cellphone, hence no poverty'. People are merely arguing that the lowest 10% are no longer destitute.
    - hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
      Yes, I agree the lowest 10% are no longer as destitute, but my point is the dangerous social unrest that is likely to be caused (some would argue already has been caused) by widening inequality is not something that absolute measures of living standards will have much bearing on.
      - tathougies 8y ago
        You attacked a very poor interpretation of the parent comment then. Claiming ' they may have iphones, but they don't have food ' is patently ridiculous.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        That remains to be seen. There's clearly a certain level of "comfort" where the majority of people become satisfied enough, and the quality of life at the bottom is rapidly increasing as technology and the world matures. The rise of the middle class in China and India seems to be the biggest indicator of this approaching steady state.
ardy42 8y ago
> At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force. There's also the dystopian possibility that automated forms of social control are developed neuter the ability of any kind of popular political movement from challenging the elites. That automation could be anything from systems of censorship, surveillance, and propaganda to police androids. I think it makes some sense to deliberately cultivate and preserve IRL communities and networks that aren't very tech-mediated. By no means are they a panacea, but I think they have fewer vulnerabilities to tech-based automated control.
- core-questions 8y ago
  Do you have a license for this post?
- amoshi 8y ago
  I think this will happen. Brings to mind Google's secret project The Selfish Ledger, especially how it can be used for "Behavioural Sequencing"... [0] As tech gets better it'll become easier to analyse the masses and make good predictions - how much can the masses put up with? How much further can we push them before the boiling point is reached? [0] https://youtu.be/QDVVo14A_fo?t=439 https://youtu.be/QDVVo14A_fo?t=439
- whycombinater 8y ago
  "And just before the nuke hit, he reflected on what a great life he had. Under his watch, Skynet raised the percentage of female programmers to an even 50%." Of course, some would see that that's actually a DYStopia, I mean, where are the trans?!
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >automated forms of social control are developed Legalisation of drugs fits in here IMO, it's a salve for the people to keep them from mounting rebellions. Making hard drugs cheap and widely available probably is a relatively effective way of killing off a proportion of your poorest citizens without raising too great an alarm. Things like VR could placate the people too, give them a fake "luxury existence" and they're less likely to rebel.
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
An alternative, which I advocate for, is that the lower class form productive collectives, stop contributing to the ultra wealthy, and generate their own real wealth. Much of the worlds wealth exists in wealth-generating infrastructure and information that is accessible to all of us. If we simply divest from the ultra wealthy and build a new economy based on cooperation, we can construct a system that inherently lifts us all. Automation will increase our productivity. In the end, the question is simply how we share the result of that gain. Normal capitalist corporations are designed to funnel wealth to a few board members, but cooperatives could succeed here too, where the wealth they generate is more naturally shared amongst all the workers. It’s not a silver bullet, but I feel as though it would represent a real improvement. We have to do something about how we distribute the creation of new wealth, and I don’t think we should wait for someone else to make this change for us - we must take action to realize the potential here! EDIT: I also think some billionaires are sympathetic to these issues and would be willing to contribute. But if we form large economic collectives, we can amass enough power to force the wealthy to notice when we divest.
- tathougies 8y ago
  One concrete step can be getting rid of the capital requirements (by regulation) to invest. The idea of 'qualified investors' is literally a way to keep poor people poor, and rich people rich, by cutting off poor or middle class people from the major vehicles of wealth creation. It is ridiculous that I cannot invest in the IPO of a company in my local neighborhood because, while I have enough money to satisfy the business, I don't have enough money to satisfy uncle sam's onerous requirements. But yes, cooperatives like Mondragon are good examples, and also incredibly traditional.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    These capital requirements are regulations that have been introduced as a response to companies fleecing the poor-ish, the uneducated and those who had a bit of cash, but decided to put it into one (fraudulent) investment. Drop them and you'll see what already is happening in the cryptocoin scene: people getting exploited left and right. Point is, no sofa investor will be a shark and get rich, contrary to the ICO promises.
bachbach 8y ago
Everybody who thinks this believes in some replay of the 19th-20th centuries - personally I do not buy it because I think computation is qualitatively different to mechanization. Moravec's Paradox strongly implies that the middle class is automated before the working class is. I think anybody who doesn't understand that isn't worth listening to since it's the most concrete result in A.I for half a century. It's not about the bottom - it's about the middle and underclasses - that is different to the past.

ed_balls 8y ago

state-backed jobs with negative income tax/UBI/wealthfare. This is what gonna happen in Japan. USA? no idea, some kind of revolution. The biggest problem will be in countries like Bangladesh.

apazzolini 8y ago
The second (third?) most recent Sam Harris podcast episode with Yuval Noah Harari discusses this. We normally talk about UBI in the context of one country, but like you said, third world countries will suffer the most. Automation killing basic factory jobs will have a much larger effect outside of first world countries, and unfortunately there's no real way to address that disparity from the context of policy in any one country.
- int_19h 8y ago
  Realistically, we know how the First World countries are going to solve it, because many of them are already in the process of implementing that solution. They'll dump some token amount of humanitarian aid to relieve their conscience, and meanwhile set up electrified razor wire fences with automated turrets and drones at their borders. They're not going to share as much as would be necessary to implement something like UBI worldwide, even at local levels of "subsistence wage".

krupan 8y ago

We've been replacing jobs with automation for a century. It already is the norm. Why are you so worried? EDIT: more thoughts I just finished reading an Asimov novel written in 1955. There were computers in this book. They were people. Computer was a job title. Now we have machines that do that job, and we have an entire new industry employing lots and lots of people that didn't exist before that one job, Computer, was automated.

core-questions 8y ago
It's a good sentiment, but the replacement of fast-food workers with robots won't really open up a whole new field in the same sense. Robotics and AI are wonderful and interesting fields, but honestly, let's not kid ourselves, most people who are flipping burgers probably aren't going to go on to work in the field of building their own replacements.
- krupan 8y ago
  "the replacement of fast-food workers with robots won't really open up a whole new field in the same sense" No, it won't look exactly like moving from human computers to machine computers. It won't look exactly like moving from manual farming to tractors and combines. It's hard to imagine what it will look like, but it seems overly pessimistic to just assume that this time automation is going to turn out terribly.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Just because its been terrible before? The industrial revolution was a time of starvation and death for the families of the displaced. The issue isn't how to keep people busy. That's not a very worthy goal. In the '50s we dreamed of a society where robots took the yoke from our shoulders and let us live better lives. Now that it's happening, all we can talk about is how to get people back to work!
cgag 8y ago
Do you honestly believe this isn't going to be a problem?

justfor1comment 8y ago

Most likely two outcomes. Either everyone will be given a basic income for meeting their needs or the robot revolution will make goods so cheap that very little money/effort will be needed purchase things. Most of the jobs may move to the entertainment and healthcare industry.

core-questions 8y ago
What if we're not satisfied with mincome and soma, and we want something more? With no framework to provide for useful productivity, what will young people end up doing? A lazy population with no way to differentiate and striate financially will find other ways of anteing up over each other, including criminal acts...
- matz1 8y ago
  Meh, if anything think vr, internet, video games will keep most people occuppaid. Lazy population will be too lazy to bother each other.
int_19h 8y ago
> or the robot revolution will make goods so cheap that very little money/effort will be needed Any such robot revolution would drive the cost of labor down faster than it'd drive the cost of goods. It might just not be immediately visible from every vantage point in society, because economic sectors will be taken out one by one - so today you live like a king because of all that cheap stuff, and tomorrow you can't afford it because you have no job, and hence no paycheck. So some form of basic income would still be needed for many.

petra 8y ago

high skill jobs are at risk too. It's reasonable to assume, given recent tech developments(AI, low code for software, generative design for graphic design/engineering and architecture, blockchain for professions working on trust in transaction like accounting, some automation in the legal field, automation in insurance) that many high-skill professions will suffer unemployment too. And can someone with high-skill job always shift to another high-skill job? pretty hard, many high skill jobs have very high barriers to entry. And could they aim for the low skill burger flipping job ? Who will get the job, some spoiled engineer, or someone who is used to working hard doing hard labor for low pay and may be younger ? So why is everybody under the assumption that high skill jobs are safe ?

albertgoeswoof 8y ago
I don’t think a single one of your examples have resulted in the loss of jobs from those areas. If anything it’s the opposite.
lgessler 8y ago
Software engineering seems safe, if that is what you are primarily thinking of in your question. Developing software at the same level of a skilled engineer is a problem we'd only be able to solve with general AI. Even if program synthesizers (things that take declarative high level requirements and produce code) worked (and they don't at the level required for an non-technical user to use), most engineers today must be involved in the design process, and finding requirements and formulating solutions is a skill that requires humanistic and non-technical intuition.
- gpm 8y ago
  It's not at all clear that software engineering is safe. Sure there will probably always be a few programmers, but as tools (and soon I expect AI) gets better those programmers can do more and more of the work. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find the number of software engineers decreasing in the not too distant future. The only reason it hasn't already is that we've managed to grow the number of things software developers are doing at the same rate as the increase in number of software developers * the increase in efficiency per software developer. And in some parts of software development (e.g. games) it has.

nerdponx 8y ago

The source of the problem is simple. Real societal value is generated through this activity, but it is reaped entirely by Uniqlo and its stakeholders. Yes, consumers are also a stakeholder, but your typical consumer will receive very little or no direct benefit from this change. Eventually, yes, the profits will be reinvested, but the impact will be so diluted as to be a noticeable. Some small fraction of it will probably also go to tax evasion, being expatriated or sequestered by wealthy upper management. Meanwhile, a whole lot of people are suddenly out of work, imposing significant negative externalities on them and their families. This could conceivably ruin a marriage, or turn a good parent into a raging alcoholic. It may well be that the negative gain to society (in the form of laying off so many employees) has severe follow-on effects, and in terms of net welfare this could do more harm than good. The effects of leaving the workers out of the profit-sharing is more than just a matter of equity. Without redistribution of the welfare created by automation, it's perfectly conceivable that the net welfare gain is negative due to the negative second-order effects outweighing the positive second-order effects. This is the stuff they don't teach you in Econ 101, but it's how things really work.

ColanR 8y ago
The other thing they don't teach you in Econ 101 is that treating corporations as obligated to keep and preserve jobs prevents them from creating societal value, and treating workers as entitled to a job disincentivises the invention of new methods of creating societal value. It causes stagnation of the economy.
- knieveltech 8y ago
  And what is Econ 201's solution to pervasive unemployment, or lack of spending power due to underemployment? Is that also classified as "societal value"?
  - stale2002 8y ago
    I'm not sure if you have noticed, but unemployment is at a multi decade low. We are not seeing pervasive unemployment, we are seeing the opposite. A situation where there are too many jobs, and not enough workers to fill them So econ 201 would say that there isn't any societial problem right now.

fixermark 8y ago

In the US, the biggest plurality employment sector by a long shot is long-haul transportation. It's going to be an interesting next 25-or-so years as self-driving vehicle technology moves to Level 4 or 5 readiness and the people with a significant vested interest in long-term investment in driving down transportation cost displace a major chunk of America's workforce.

brycehamrick 8y ago

The "job" as a foundation of modern life is the result of the industrialized revolution and, while it served its purposed, is something we need to abandon as quickly as possible. Corporations don't have a monopoly on economic value creation. We should be, as a government and society, encouraging independent tradesmen/women, entrepreneurship, and artisanry. If we can manage that, job loss due to automation is no longer an issue.

DrNuke 8y ago
Jobs are a way to exert social control, though. The dystopian solution is to reopen gulags and labor camps to re-educate people. Oh, wait...
cycrutchfield 8y ago
You realize that "cottage industry" is not necessarily an aspirational concept, right?
nerdponx 8y ago
We can't manage it until we remove employment as the sole condition for access to basic services like healthcare. We also need to ensure that people are able to retrain themselves if/when their job becomes obsolete.
- Schwolop 8y ago
  The rest of the world _has_ worked this first point out. The US is close enough to the only developed country that ties healthcare to employment. The second point is a given in the more socialised parts of Europe, and is a core tenet of most support programs for the involuntarily unemployed elsewhere. Which is to say; I don't get your point. Sounds like everywhere but the US could do this right now.
- grecy 8y ago
  > We can't manage it until we remove employment as the sole condition for access to basic services like healthcare Many countries don't have that limitation.

golemiprague 8y ago

It is not a problem, it is a blessing, it means countries will not have to keep sustaining the pyramid scheme of population growth and will not need massive immigration which only cause problems in the long run. This is how Japan can keep its culture and healthy society while not increasing its population, actually reducing it which is also good for the environment.

forkLding 8y ago

Theres already a lot of automation at car factories and places which heavily rely on machinery to produce goods. I remember seeing that the only people needed is people to repair the machinery if it broke down and the whole manufacturing process being automated with self-driving carts moving around the materials. Note this was a Toyota factory, so it could be skewed.

nirelBRACIT0S 8y ago

As Steve Jobs used to say: “if you can’t buy an iPhone you deserve nothing”

mc32 8y ago

Doesn’t that depend on the characteristics of the work robots are replacing in modern economies? Let’s take Japan, ftom the article. They are replacing warehouse workers. Demographically, Japan is experiencing a shrinking workforce. So, the issue isn’t exactly whether ribots replace workers, but whether the pace of replacement is in sync with the reduction in the aging workforce.

keerthiko 8y ago

Modern societies need to figure out distribution of economic power that isn't based on employment. Of all the things corporations should be held responsible for, directly propping up low-skill labor employment opportunities shouldn't be one of them. Employment and jobs should stop being used as fundamental economic indicators. The naive approach would be to just increase overall corporate taxes, reduce payroll taxes (so companies are mildly incentivized to pay humans) and more effectively redistribute tax income to society. The problem with this is the geographic inflexibility of this approach, as Amazon could be sucking up tons of resources from Florida and no amount of taxation on Amazon really pays back to Florida. Surely we can eventually come up with a better system to let companies optimize their business practices (net value++) and redistributing those improvements across society?

TYPE_FASTER 8y ago

The US already sent most of these jobs offshore a few decades ago. Automation has been improving efficiency, and slowly decreasing the physical labor market, since then (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/welcoming-our-new-robot-overlords https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/welcoming-our-...), but the majority of the physical world jobs being displaced by automation will be in China.

MisterOctober 8y ago

Truly. Minimum [to say nothing of market!] wages are climbing fast in my state, and I have heard real chatter from business owners about implementing [robot] automation on the production line / warehouse sooner rather than later. Another industry I have knowledge of, orcharding, is moving toward harvest automation at an astonishing rate, driven mainly by the rapidly-escalating cost of labor [having to pay for H2B visa costs, the disappearance of harvest-following migrant worker bands in favor of more professionalized workers who demand pay greater than the prevailing minimum wage, regulations that require orchardists provide quality housing [at a cost upwards of $10k/worker/year] and pay for rest periods, rising liability / workers' comp insurance costs, etc. Adoption of automation in the orcharding sector is increasing as cost of equipment falls -- for example, two years ago, a typical apple harvest machine [which replaces a crew of, say, ~20 humans] cost in the neighborhood of $500k, whereas today viable models are available at half that. My understanding is that the vineyard industry is even further along in implementing automation, owing to the relative simplicity of their harvest process.

__s 8y ago

I'd suggest reading The Driver, by Garet Garrett

Bombthecat 8y ago

I like the movie elysium.

unicornporn 8y ago

≥ I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Increasing productivity is kind of the point with automation. So unless demand drastically increases, it seems highly unlikely.

grey-area 8y ago

I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Historically people do shift to other tasks and society adapts, but this takes a generation and we can expect massive disruption, suffering and unrest in the coming decades across the world as manual labour (drivers, pickers, sorters, assemblers) are replaced by machines.