7 ms·

This thread is plagued by a rather insidious idea that has bubbled up in recent history: the idea of "human capital" in terms of the "greater good". Sentiments

by all2 8y ago

This thread is plagued by a rather insidious idea that has bubbled up in recent history: the idea of "human capital" in terms of the "greater good". Sentiments like "people shouldn't be doing jobs that can be automated" or "machines should do the work instead, we need more useful jobs for those people" stink of the ideas that 1) people must serve some societal purpose, 2) that they are not fit to decide their own purpose, and 3) they are not fit to determine what has value to them. These values are actually now embedded in U.S.A. policies and major non-profits, like "No Child Left Behind", and the Gates Foundation, or "School to Work". (A tangent: we aren't enabling people to learn and to think, we are teaching them to follow directions. Curiosity seems to be a waning capability of many kids and we seem to be slipping towards a Soviet style of teaching in public schools - which discourages self-generated thought and questions.) I'm not bringing this up because I'm a Luddite. I rather like the idea of automating things, actually. I don't think our current, popular, justifications are healthy. Rather, on an interpersonal level, I think some of the justifications in this thread are codependent, controlling, and uncaring.

iscrewyou 8y ago
As I’ve grown older and started focusing more on politics and the state of the nation, I started realizing that reconciliation is not abundant in the US politics and minds of people. Your comment is one of example. There are comments about increasing automation and policies of that effect but no policy or recognition how job losses will be coped with. Apparently it’s ok to permanently remove jobs but universal basic income is non-negotiable. Another example is cutting of taxes, but then increasing expenditures. Or not increasing taxes as expenditures go up. Somehow things just don’t reconcile. Maybe that’s just how politics is. But if there was reconciliation of things, we would be in a better place (or an even better place?) Edit: spelling loses to losses.
- all2 8y ago
  > Apparently it’s ok to permanently remove jobs but universal basic income is non-negotiable. Are you generalizing across all "young people"? Or are you assuming what I mean? I was not trying to argue that we as a society, and especially as individuals, shouldn't help the displaced. What I have a problem with is the essentially Communist rhetoric we are using to justify removal from and placement in jobs. > Or not increasing taxes as expenditures go up. Somehow things just don’t reconcile. Maybe that’s just how politics is. A frequent conversation between a close friend of mine and myself is one that highlights these inconsistencies. I think the core issue is a fundamental lack of understanding on the part of the politician/person. We call it "bumper sticker" politics. Everyone wants a drop-the-mic moment, the feel vindicated, to feel justified, to feel right. It is a scary thing to be wrong, even about trivial things. If a person possesses functional introspective capabilities, being wrong about something can shake a person's sense of identity. Generally, I think that fear is the cause of 1) lack of introspection, which leads to 2) "yelling" meaningless phrases in an attempt to articulate a political opinion they don't understand.
  - iscrewyou 8y ago
    >Are you generalizing across all "young people"? Or are you assuming what I mean? I was not trying to argue that we as a society, and especially as individuals, shouldn't help the displaced. What I have a problem with is the essentially Communist rhetoric we are using to justify removal from and placement in jobs. I think we are on the same page. I was just saying that if we are moving towards automation and the corporations are going to push for it, policies should be in place beforehand to help those displaced. Specifically from the profits of that automation. Not even the tax payers. Then as the whole industry shifts, the social services can be used to compensate whole populations. I am not writing policies and I am definitely not an expert. But the conversation of automation and job removal should include compensation for those displaced. >I think the core issue is a fundamental lack of understanding on the part of the politician/person. Yes, I agree. And the rush to prove the other side wrong. Which is usually accompanied by extreme examples and unfounded rhetoric.
- Kalium 8y ago
  > There are comments about increasing automation and policies of that effect but no policy or recognition how job losses will be coped with. Apparently it’s ok to permanently remove jobs but universal basic income is non-negotiable. You're right! This is a huge, glaring, obvious contradiction. I've always found it useful to extend the principle of charity in situations like the you so wisely point to. Perhaps people have some reason to expect that some other outcome could result from permanently removing jobs other than a permanent reduction in the number and type of jobs available? Do you think this is possible? Maybe these people might opine that our economy is not a fixed-size lump of labor. Again, you very correctly point to a absolutely critical point. Might perhaps there be something else to consider here? If I'm wrong, and the world is indeed a fixed lump of labor, can you help me understand why these people are wrong?
  - iscrewyou 8y ago
    >Might perhaps there be something else to consider here? If I'm wrong, and the world is indeed a fixed lump of labor, can you help me understand why these people are wrong? I don’t think the world is a fixed lump of labor. Eventually there will be enough automation that people won’t have any work to do. Not everybody has the capacity to be a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer. We are just not wired that way, the brain simply works in unique ways. So how do we take away labor intensive work and still expect people to live happily while not providing them with means of living. I think there are two ways: (i) provide people with social services so they live above the standard of poverty. (ii) split automation so only so much work will be automated. This is a good compromise as we find out what automation does to our economy as years go on. For example(don’t shoot me, these are just examples), Mc Donald’s must have people working for the same amount of automatic kiosks in their restaurant. Or half of amazon warehouse must be people and half must be robots. Half of automatic Ubers must be driven by real people. There are ways to do automation and still take care of people. I just don’t see that conversation and it’s bothersome because soon it will too late.
    - Kalium 8y ago
      That's very intersting! Thank you very much for sharing. You might think about pausing to consider that you have described what economists call the lump of labor. This is the idea that there's a finite amount of work to go around, and it can only be distributed among various people or machines. Some might opine that there could be something to be gained by investigating writings and studies on this exact subject from the past century or more. Wikipedia can be a great starting point - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy I have had a very different experience. I see the conversation you call for going on constantly. I see it among dozens of people I know personally, of many different ages and races and education levels and careers. This is enough to lead me to think that your idea is so good and so wise that it's already been adopted en masse!
Aloha 8y ago
I'm basically with you here. There is a reality that no one wants to admit - for some sizable percentage of the population, a 'job easily replaced by automation' is the best they can hope for in life - they're either not smart enough, not driven enough, or have some other issue preventing them from being a rocket scientist - beyond that, there is a limited societal need for highly educated workers - but we have lots of jobs that need just need doing, and are every bit as important, both for societal cohesion and for the fact that they need done - we need to pay those people a fair and living wage. It comes down to a question - are we as a society willing to pay people to not work - not just starvation - but pay them a fair and reasonable wage for doing nothing - or do we as a society expect to try to get as close to a fair and living wage as possible for everyone no matter how much value they add - provided they are doing some sort of reasonable amount of work - this is the real question posited by automation.
- all2 8y ago
  > but pay them a fair and reasonable wage for doing nothing I subscribe to some limited belief that prices rise (where possible) to meet demand. See San Francisco housing prices, or Madison, WI housing prices as companies attract and pay their employees quite a lot. So, just paying people a "living wage" isn't enough. If that's a route we go in (and I sincerely hope we don't) we need to handle every aspect of living; housing, food, medicine, etc. Just dolling out dollars/euros isn't enough. > or do we as a society expect to try to get as close to a fair and living wage as possible for everyone no matter how much value they add Paying regardless of performance will destroy productivity. People tend to do a "gradient descent" algorithm in work, finding some local minima of effort for their pay. I understand not all people are like this. I'm only saying I think that enough people do, that paying some fixed minimum for all no-matter-the-value will destroy economic growth.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    If you paid people a wage that didn't tie them to a place, or if they could get that 20 bucks an hour no matter where they lived, they'd likely relocate to someplace cheaper. What do we do with all the people who's jobs are automated out of existence? Do we prevent the automation from happening, or do we just pay people for doing nothing? That's the question I'm positing.
Tyrek 8y ago
Consider an alternative angle - Companies, as rational actors, will eliminate automatable positions. Unless you're suggesting some sort of deliberate intervention to save these jobs, they're gone. The next question is how do we assist those displaced by automation. There are multiple proposals including UBI and its ilk, but the most palatable bipartisan idea is to find them new jobs. The idea of finding 'better' jobs with more agency, etc. is not immensely new - it draws from organization research on employee fulfillment and productivity. Overall, no one is saying that any specifically displaced individual needs to take up <new job> in some sort of imagined totalitarian state - they're perfectly free to choose a new job from the market. The only question is one of skills and motivation.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tracker1 8y ago
  I'd suggest people learn how to do plumbing and electrical work. It's not work that can be easily automated, and plumbers are often charging more than lawyers. The fact is, there is a LOT of room for people to work and grow. The typical factory job is significantly waning, and will continue to do so. Local service oriented jobs are far less likely to be outsourced at all. "Dirty jobs" in particular tend to pay well, and are pretty damned safe from outsourcing. The bigger issues are more societal and likely to worsen with roughly 2/3 of those in higher education being women, and over 70% of women unwilling to date/marry those of a lower social/education status, even with matching income. The highest satisfactions in life, generally speaking, come from earned work:income and family engagement.
  - njepa 8y ago
    > I'd suggest people learn how to do plumbing and electrical work. It's not work that can be easily automated, and plumbers are often charging more than lawyers. It mostly just that people don't understand what automation is, and especially not many of the self-proclaimed experts. You automate things like electrical work like you "automate" Uber, by making it unskilled. You put all the logic in the terminal, if not the cables, so almost anyone can do it. In a longer time span you might just change the whole wiring to something else, like lower powered dc. That said there is no need to go crazy. We are undergoing a second industrial revolution with information instead of energy, but overall the same rules apply. If we just make things better for people we will be alright.
nrb 8y ago
To me it's not the matter that "people shouldn't be doing jobs that can be automated" or "machines should do the work instead," it's that in a capitalist system, these changes are inevitable. As soon as these jobs start to be automated out of perfectly sound capitalist motivations, the dollar value of a human performing that task is going to fall precipitously, to near-zero. Clearly we need to figure out how to keep those people compensated enough to survive, possibly through changing to work that our economy values sufficiently, through subsidizing them from those same gains in efficiency through automation, or via some means not yet discussed.
tracker1 8y ago
Everyone I've known out of a Soviet era education seems to feel it was quite a bit better than US education. Early bucketing by ability, allowing those who can to succeed and those slower learners to work with others at a more comfortable pace. As long as people are able to move in/out of grouping based on skill and effort, I'm not sure it sounds so bad.
- all2 8y ago
  > I'm not sure it sounds so bad. You speak primarily about administrative organization. I'm speaking about content and focus of material.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    I'm not sure the U.S. changes in education since the 80's especially in K-12 have been productive, both administratively and structure. I was talking about letting those that can learn more math, or better language/communication skills being able to do so at a younger age, and not holding them back to keep everyone the same (lowest common standard) on a larger scale, not just for the wealthy.
skybrian 8y ago
You say "codependent" like it's a bad thing. What's so great about individualist thinking? When finding meaningful work, why shouldn't we consider what other people want? And why should people have to figure it all out on their own?
- tlb 8y ago
  "Codependent" has a specific meaning in psychology, it doesn't just mean people who depend on each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codependency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codependency
  - skybrian 8y ago
    I know but I worded that badly. "Codependent" seems to be used metaphorically and I'm not sure it's justified.
hnaccy 8y ago
If they're not doing something with some societal value and they're not homesteading how do they provide for themselves?
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  Maybe they work as an app or web dev?
- all2 8y ago
  I think you are confusing "societal value" with "things people are willing to pay for". Like a coffee shop. Another coffee shop doesn't hurt society, nor does it benefit society at large. Even on the scale of a small town, a coffee shop adds nothing of intrinsic societal value. But people still want their caffeinated milk shakes and misnamed espresso sugar drinks, and they will pay a premium for their fix.
  - hnaccy 8y ago
    Why is providing people with a good they desire not benefiting society?

by all2 8y ago

iscrewyou 8y ago

As I’ve grown older and started focusing more on politics and the state of the nation, I started realizing that reconciliation is not abundant in the US politics and minds of people. Your comment is one of example. There are comments about increasing automation and policies of that effect but no policy or recognition how job losses will be coped with. Apparently it’s ok to permanently remove jobs but universal basic income is non-negotiable. Another example is cutting of taxes, but then increasing expenditures. Or not increasing taxes as expenditures go up. Somehow things just don’t reconcile. Maybe that’s just how politics is. But if there was reconciliation of things, we would be in a better place (or an even better place?) Edit: spelling loses to losses.

all2 8y ago
> Apparently it’s ok to permanently remove jobs but universal basic income is non-negotiable. Are you generalizing across all "young people"? Or are you assuming what I mean? I was not trying to argue that we as a society, and especially as individuals, shouldn't help the displaced. What I have a problem with is the essentially Communist rhetoric we are using to justify removal from and placement in jobs. > Or not increasing taxes as expenditures go up. Somehow things just don’t reconcile. Maybe that’s just how politics is. A frequent conversation between a close friend of mine and myself is one that highlights these inconsistencies. I think the core issue is a fundamental lack of understanding on the part of the politician/person. We call it "bumper sticker" politics. Everyone wants a drop-the-mic moment, the feel vindicated, to feel justified, to feel right. It is a scary thing to be wrong, even about trivial things. If a person possesses functional introspective capabilities, being wrong about something can shake a person's sense of identity. Generally, I think that fear is the cause of 1) lack of introspection, which leads to 2) "yelling" meaningless phrases in an attempt to articulate a political opinion they don't understand.
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  >Are you generalizing across all "young people"? Or are you assuming what I mean? I was not trying to argue that we as a society, and especially as individuals, shouldn't help the displaced. What I have a problem with is the essentially Communist rhetoric we are using to justify removal from and placement in jobs. I think we are on the same page. I was just saying that if we are moving towards automation and the corporations are going to push for it, policies should be in place beforehand to help those displaced. Specifically from the profits of that automation. Not even the tax payers. Then as the whole industry shifts, the social services can be used to compensate whole populations. I am not writing policies and I am definitely not an expert. But the conversation of automation and job removal should include compensation for those displaced. >I think the core issue is a fundamental lack of understanding on the part of the politician/person. Yes, I agree. And the rush to prove the other side wrong. Which is usually accompanied by extreme examples and unfounded rhetoric.
Kalium 8y ago
> There are comments about increasing automation and policies of that effect but no policy or recognition how job losses will be coped with. Apparently it’s ok to permanently remove jobs but universal basic income is non-negotiable. You're right! This is a huge, glaring, obvious contradiction. I've always found it useful to extend the principle of charity in situations like the you so wisely point to. Perhaps people have some reason to expect that some other outcome could result from permanently removing jobs other than a permanent reduction in the number and type of jobs available? Do you think this is possible? Maybe these people might opine that our economy is not a fixed-size lump of labor. Again, you very correctly point to a absolutely critical point. Might perhaps there be something else to consider here? If I'm wrong, and the world is indeed a fixed lump of labor, can you help me understand why these people are wrong?
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  >Might perhaps there be something else to consider here? If I'm wrong, and the world is indeed a fixed lump of labor, can you help me understand why these people are wrong? I don’t think the world is a fixed lump of labor. Eventually there will be enough automation that people won’t have any work to do. Not everybody has the capacity to be a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer. We are just not wired that way, the brain simply works in unique ways. So how do we take away labor intensive work and still expect people to live happily while not providing them with means of living. I think there are two ways: (i) provide people with social services so they live above the standard of poverty. (ii) split automation so only so much work will be automated. This is a good compromise as we find out what automation does to our economy as years go on. For example(don’t shoot me, these are just examples), Mc Donald’s must have people working for the same amount of automatic kiosks in their restaurant. Or half of amazon warehouse must be people and half must be robots. Half of automatic Ubers must be driven by real people. There are ways to do automation and still take care of people. I just don’t see that conversation and it’s bothersome because soon it will too late.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    That's very intersting! Thank you very much for sharing. You might think about pausing to consider that you have described what economists call the lump of labor. This is the idea that there's a finite amount of work to go around, and it can only be distributed among various people or machines. Some might opine that there could be something to be gained by investigating writings and studies on this exact subject from the past century or more. Wikipedia can be a great starting point - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy I have had a very different experience. I see the conversation you call for going on constantly. I see it among dozens of people I know personally, of many different ages and races and education levels and careers. This is enough to lead me to think that your idea is so good and so wise that it's already been adopted en masse!

Aloha 8y ago

I'm basically with you here. There is a reality that no one wants to admit - for some sizable percentage of the population, a 'job easily replaced by automation' is the best they can hope for in life - they're either not smart enough, not driven enough, or have some other issue preventing them from being a rocket scientist - beyond that, there is a limited societal need for highly educated workers - but we have lots of jobs that need just need doing, and are every bit as important, both for societal cohesion and for the fact that they need done - we need to pay those people a fair and living wage. It comes down to a question - are we as a society willing to pay people to not work - not just starvation - but pay them a fair and reasonable wage for doing nothing - or do we as a society expect to try to get as close to a fair and living wage as possible for everyone no matter how much value they add - provided they are doing some sort of reasonable amount of work - this is the real question posited by automation.

all2 8y ago
> but pay them a fair and reasonable wage for doing nothing I subscribe to some limited belief that prices rise (where possible) to meet demand. See San Francisco housing prices, or Madison, WI housing prices as companies attract and pay their employees quite a lot. So, just paying people a "living wage" isn't enough. If that's a route we go in (and I sincerely hope we don't) we need to handle every aspect of living; housing, food, medicine, etc. Just dolling out dollars/euros isn't enough. > or do we as a society expect to try to get as close to a fair and living wage as possible for everyone no matter how much value they add Paying regardless of performance will destroy productivity. People tend to do a "gradient descent" algorithm in work, finding some local minima of effort for their pay. I understand not all people are like this. I'm only saying I think that enough people do, that paying some fixed minimum for all no-matter-the-value will destroy economic growth.
- Aloha 8y ago
  If you paid people a wage that didn't tie them to a place, or if they could get that 20 bucks an hour no matter where they lived, they'd likely relocate to someplace cheaper. What do we do with all the people who's jobs are automated out of existence? Do we prevent the automation from happening, or do we just pay people for doing nothing? That's the question I'm positing.

Tyrek 8y ago

Consider an alternative angle - Companies, as rational actors, will eliminate automatable positions. Unless you're suggesting some sort of deliberate intervention to save these jobs, they're gone. The next question is how do we assist those displaced by automation. There are multiple proposals including UBI and its ilk, but the most palatable bipartisan idea is to find them new jobs. The idea of finding 'better' jobs with more agency, etc. is not immensely new - it draws from organization research on employee fulfillment and productivity. Overall, no one is saying that any specifically displaced individual needs to take up <new job> in some sort of imagined totalitarian state - they're perfectly free to choose a new job from the market. The only question is one of skills and motivation.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tracker1 8y ago
I'd suggest people learn how to do plumbing and electrical work. It's not work that can be easily automated, and plumbers are often charging more than lawyers. The fact is, there is a LOT of room for people to work and grow. The typical factory job is significantly waning, and will continue to do so. Local service oriented jobs are far less likely to be outsourced at all. "Dirty jobs" in particular tend to pay well, and are pretty damned safe from outsourcing. The bigger issues are more societal and likely to worsen with roughly 2/3 of those in higher education being women, and over 70% of women unwilling to date/marry those of a lower social/education status, even with matching income. The highest satisfactions in life, generally speaking, come from earned work:income and family engagement.
- njepa 8y ago
  > I'd suggest people learn how to do plumbing and electrical work. It's not work that can be easily automated, and plumbers are often charging more than lawyers. It mostly just that people don't understand what automation is, and especially not many of the self-proclaimed experts. You automate things like electrical work like you "automate" Uber, by making it unskilled. You put all the logic in the terminal, if not the cables, so almost anyone can do it. In a longer time span you might just change the whole wiring to something else, like lower powered dc. That said there is no need to go crazy. We are undergoing a second industrial revolution with information instead of energy, but overall the same rules apply. If we just make things better for people we will be alright.

nrb 8y ago

To me it's not the matter that "people shouldn't be doing jobs that can be automated" or "machines should do the work instead," it's that in a capitalist system, these changes are inevitable. As soon as these jobs start to be automated out of perfectly sound capitalist motivations, the dollar value of a human performing that task is going to fall precipitously, to near-zero. Clearly we need to figure out how to keep those people compensated enough to survive, possibly through changing to work that our economy values sufficiently, through subsidizing them from those same gains in efficiency through automation, or via some means not yet discussed.

tracker1 8y ago

Everyone I've known out of a Soviet era education seems to feel it was quite a bit better than US education. Early bucketing by ability, allowing those who can to succeed and those slower learners to work with others at a more comfortable pace. As long as people are able to move in/out of grouping based on skill and effort, I'm not sure it sounds so bad.

all2 8y ago
> I'm not sure it sounds so bad. You speak primarily about administrative organization. I'm speaking about content and focus of material.
- tracker1 8y ago
  I'm not sure the U.S. changes in education since the 80's especially in K-12 have been productive, both administratively and structure. I was talking about letting those that can learn more math, or better language/communication skills being able to do so at a younger age, and not holding them back to keep everyone the same (lowest common standard) on a larger scale, not just for the wealthy.

skybrian 8y ago

You say "codependent" like it's a bad thing. What's so great about individualist thinking? When finding meaningful work, why shouldn't we consider what other people want? And why should people have to figure it all out on their own?

tlb 8y ago
"Codependent" has a specific meaning in psychology, it doesn't just mean people who depend on each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codependency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codependency
- skybrian 8y ago
  I know but I worded that badly. "Codependent" seems to be used metaphorically and I'm not sure it's justified.

hnaccy 8y ago

If they're not doing something with some societal value and they're not homesteading how do they provide for themselves?

Pharmakon 8y ago
Maybe they work as an app or web dev?
all2 8y ago
I think you are confusing "societal value" with "things people are willing to pay for". Like a coffee shop. Another coffee shop doesn't hurt society, nor does it benefit society at large. Even on the scale of a small town, a coffee shop adds nothing of intrinsic societal value. But people still want their caffeinated milk shakes and misnamed espresso sugar drinks, and they will pay a premium for their fix.
- hnaccy 8y ago
  Why is providing people with a good they desire not benefiting society?