14 ms·

Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

110 points by smb111 7y ago

ZhuanXia 7y ago
I remember reading Average is Over and A Fairwell to Alms just when I first started working. They convinced me that labour power was going to decline precipitously. I stared saving 60+% of everything I made and putting it into index funds. Anyone making a good salary should attempt the same. Much of white collar work is extremely amenable to automation, much more than even truck driving:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox Maybe comparative advantage will save the day, but I think it is a really good idea to start accumulating capital, even at today’s valuations.
- wrong_variable 7y ago
  If a large amount of white collar workers are jobless, your SPY calls would also become worthless. It's a good idea to invest in index funds, but investing in index funds expecting a economic apocalypse is not good reasoning.
  - JPLeRouzic 7y ago
    Do you have any suggestion as to what would be a good investment? Thanks!
    - wrong_variable 7y ago
      I am not an investment expert, you should consult with your financial advisor, my personal rule of thumb is : 1 - Invest in yourself. - Health - Education - Social circle 2 - Invest in your living space. - Buy an apartment anywhere on earth where you can afford, you can take cheap flights to anywhere on earth these days. Even the remotest part of Africa can be reached within 1 day and less than 500 dollars. ( you are normally paying more than 700 dollars in rent anywhere in the developed world ). 3 - Buy high yielding government bonds, preferably multiple countries. 4 - Buy index funds. I do not prefer gold / silver, there is severe restrictions in moving them around, and high taxation in audit and transaction. government bonds are generally tax exempt. You are better off investing in guns than gold if the economy collapses.
  - jiveturkey 7y ago
    I'm sure the idea is to convert to cash before the apocalypse actually occurs. Even if one misses it by a little (ie, there is some downturn), the bulk of GP's earnings have gone to savings.
    - orpep90nxkfo 7y ago
      You’re assuming cash will hold value after a so-called economy apocalypse? If the economic credibility of the nation goes, so too does the value of its cash currency. What’s a “more white collar workers than jobs” economy look like? Personally, I’m leaning into useful life skills, like growing food, reconnecting to hunting, low level electronics, rebuilding my car, and home myself with my money now. I’d rather have deep experience in head and hands than a wheelbarrow full of dolla dolla bills y’all with the buying power of East German currency. Not that I have any way to be sure the implosion is coming any time in my remaining years. But still, if we’re talking about how to prepare for such a thing, let’s get real: investments in today’s ephemeral value stores are the worst idea for securing yourself against economic collapse
      - vidarh 7y ago
        Depends what you are preparing for. If you think automation is going to happen but that capitalism will survive, then index funds seems line a good idea. If you think capitalism will be supplanted, it depends on what you think will replace it. If we're looking at a Mad Max style dystopia, then sure, it won't help to have lots of shares. But presumably you'd see signs of that before we get there and be able to start converting your money into harder currency. If we're looking at a benign-ish revolution with redistribution it won't matter much. Personally I think the most realistic medium term risk scenario to protect against is that capitalism will hang in there, but that jobs become more scarce. An outright economic collapse or major social upheaval is likely to take more time. If you start seeing job scarcity hitting, then sure, start converting some of those index funds just in case things accelerate in the wrong direction.
        orpep90nxkfo 7y ago
  - ZhuanXia 7y ago
    My model is that as median labour power decreases capital and superstars should capture a larger percentage of future productivity increases. And automation should provide huge productivity increases. This seems compatible with index funds being a good bet. Perhaps I am wrong, but could you provide details as to why?
    - marktangotango 7y ago
      Can you talk about how superstars would capture future productivity increases, in practice?
      - koolba 7y ago
        It’s no different then the proverbially 10x programmer landing a consulting gig for literally 10x the compensation of a nobody.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      The model is incomplete in the details (as most models are). The actual effect is that capital in the companies that are taking advantage of the new globoticized future does great. FANG does great. Upwork does great. AirBnB and Stripe do great, once they go public. Labor and capital of old-line companies do terribly. This type of economic transformation doesn't just result in layoffs, it results in whole companies going out of business. Their value-networks are adopted to the cost structure of the old world; as that cost structure changes, they have no reason to exist as a firm. When you buy an index fund, you're buying both of these types of companies. You should probably do okay, because the public market is actually pricing a lot of this phenomena in already: multiples on old-line companies are severely depressed while FANG shares are soaring, and the capitalization-weighting of the index is taking this into account. But you're leaving money on the table: many of the biggest winners will be new fast-growing startups that aren't public yet.
- GoodJokes 7y ago
  Ew! Do you only care about wealth. What if you took this oerofrative and tried to increase labor rights. Techies are the least imaginative people I have ever met.
- walshemj 7y ago
  Most of the entry level white collar jobs that can be automated have been. Those that remain would require some major and I mean order of magnitudes improvements in AI. Can you give me some examples of white collar jobs that you think can be automated?
  - bastawhiz 7y ago
    I worked at a large tech company that had an enormous finance department. They did everything in Excel. Our job was to automate their work. The tools we built were routinely more accurate and faster than the finance people were. When our work was less accurate, it was because the input was bad. The input came from the finance team. The only reason they didn't disappear entirely was because they'd convinced management that there were things that the software couldn't do that only humans could futz with. The one or two percentage points their adjustments improved their results by were easily outpaced by the overall improved accuracy of the machines.
    - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
      People are already fighting back against this. I'm a SWE and my EX worked at the finance department in a huge robotics company. Their department did everything by copying and pasting stuff in excel in a painfully slow and cumbersome way. She told me their challenges, so I wrote some python scripts to automate their work. When she showed it to her boss, hoping to get a positive response, his reaction was "Put that away if you like your job here!" This is the nightmare of every middle manager. They won't be able to justify their existence if their teams get automated away so they will actively fight against it.
      - pault 7y ago
        The solution is to keep your scripts private, automate your job, and work on whatever you want while making sure you always look busy when your boss walks by.
        lowdose 7y ago
- ww520 7y ago
  Saving and investing are good in general. Having a fuckyou fund helps your career as well. You can take on more risk and be more assertive at job.
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  Being a consultant with clients in a wide range of industries I concur. Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort. They are one successful software project from losing their jobs. Lucky for them their companies are terrible at shipping software. Conversely, automating the work of a plumber would require a massive investment in AI and robotics. Also, nobody makes a robot that can be trusted to repaint the trim in my house unattended.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    "Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort." After looking at some of the business processes at my company I am not so sure about this anymore. There are a lot of jobs that are pretty mundane but when you look a little closer most of the processes have a lot of exceptions where the employee makes decisions that don't follow the process exactly. From what I have seen it's really hard to come up with a recipe that can be 100% automated because of all these exceptions. It seems to me that humans are a buffer that sometimes corrects unforeseen things and without that buffer the organization would do stupid things.
    - count 7y ago
      The key bit that companies that shift hard to software seem to figure out: How many of those corner cases are actually worth bothering with? Is the net loss associated with a corner case greater than the significant gain of dropping an FTE or FTEs? Sometimes it is (safety related things, etc.), but many times, it's not...just because you CAN handle something doesn't mean it's worth it do so.
      - maxxxxx 7y ago
        It’s something the organization needs to decide. If you automate a process it means you are setting it in stone and lose flexibility . Maybe that’s a good thing or not but something people need to be aware of and accept.
- ihm 7y ago
  > I think it is a really good idea to start accumulating capital, even at today’s valuations. This is an interesting take. The alternative to individually trying to each become capitalists, is grouping together and making sure we all have access to the proceeds of automation.
  - influx 7y ago
    Becoming a capitalist has a long history of being successful. The other way not as much.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      A couple thousand years is a blink of an eye for a species.
    - neffy 7y ago
      Becoming a capitalist is the long history of learning to group together and work on common goals. The other way just doesn't scale.
    - kingkawn 7y ago
      Gonna run out that clock when there’s no more natural world to exploit ruthlessly
      - adventured 7y ago
        That will never occur, fortunately. There is no end to the natural world. The natural resources that are most critical on Earth are infinite for all practical purposes in relation to human demands. This is especially true given the population growth curve for the next century. If we somehow exhaust the mineral deposits on Earth in the next few hundred years, we can and will mine the solar system. In the absolute worst case scenario, the rest of the natural world off of Earth is available for ruthless exploitation by our Capitalist ways for thousands and thousands of years to come. The clear bet is that it will be exploited eventually, probably by whatever we replace ourselves with.
- invalidOrTaken 7y ago
  I think saving is an essential part of it, but not the whole story. I recently took a job at a university. I had a bit of leverage (extensive clojure experience ftw), and I spent it on negotiating for 20 hrs/week. This gives me much more time to do "the other stuff" that's part of a career---networking, learning, interviewing, starting soon-to-be-aborted businesses. I've also been trying (with a group of friends) to figure out if there's any way we can make some sort of co-op work. I do think "jobs are over," at least as we know them for the middle class, but I don't think that needs to mean that the middle class is over. What form it will take, though, I'm still not sure. I suspect things will keep getting weirder.
  - Creationer 7y ago
    The problem is that jobs are over, but we are still taxed the old fashioned way - mostly to pay for the healthcare and pensions of baby boomers who had steady careers and cheap housing. Healthcare and pensions make up 66% of the US Federal Budget. Its a similiar case in most other Western countries. If we could somehow find a way to relieve ourselves of that burden, taxes on labour could be much lower and life significantly better. I think this is partly why we've seen such a huge boom in freelancing. Its much easier to optimise your taxes that way, instead of working for a company.
- iamnothere 7y ago
  Just make sure you diversify. Quality land, managed rental units, and other assets will still hold some value even if stocks and bonds take a massive hit. Regardless of the state of the economy, people still have to live somewhere.
  - astrange 7y ago
    Not if they read Henry George and realize there's no reason to assign you the land value.
    - ZhuanXia 7y ago
      I am a Georgist too! Can’t bring myself to buy land.
- woodandsteel 7y ago
  That's individually a smart move, collectively a dumb one. That strategy won't work for most people. Even the successful white collar workers, especially the ones who are married with children, are financially stressed already and can't save much. You know, if 5% of the workforce follows that strategy, but things go to hell for 50% because of these trends, then we will have rioting in the streets, maybe a revolution with a nasty government installed, that is what history shows usually happens. And then the new government will go after the successful people like you. Some problems can be dealt with only through responsible collective action.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  True but hasn't it always been a pretty obvious goal to accumulate capital?
crazygringo 7y ago
> Q: Several studies show technology will disrupt jobs, but they also argue that almost as many jobs will be created. > A: There’s a mismatch of job displacement and job creation. Job displacement is being driven at the speed of digital technology, which is explosive at this moment. And displacement is the business model for the AI geniuses and all those companies. All of them are hoping to get rich by displacing workers, not by creating jobs. Creating jobs is much slower. So, at least in the next few years, the displacement will outstrip the creation. But it’s not the direction of travel which is wrong. It’s just a mismatch of speed. Citation needed. There's zero evidence that "creating jobs is slower." People have been saying this every year for well over a century, and yet unemployment is quite low right now in the US. It's one of those things that seems logical -- but all evidence is to the contrary. And it's probably because it's a lot easier for the human brain to spot a huge loss of jobs in one industry, than a small increase across many industries that adds up to the same size. Also, the jobs can already exist but just not be filled. We don't necessarily need to wait for them to be "created".
- nosianu 7y ago
  Okay... so now also include in your statement the quality of those new jobs. Not how many electronic gadgets people can buy compared to 50 years ago, but how stressed they are and how they fit into greater society. Also include how useful many jobs feel to those working in them - reference to "Dilbert jobs" (or Wally jobs, if you like and how common the feeling seems to be that ones job is useless (I myself certainly had quite a few high-paying (IT) freelancer jobs - the ones where you would expect more rigour before the position is created - where I had clear evidence that the job was completely useless, but it's hard to decline 6-figure income for half a year when society punishes you if you do that). I don't see the point in making an argument when it's only based on "there is a(ny) job". Here where I live now the bureaucrats can trim the number of jobless by putting them into temporary and mostly useless training programs. Useless according not to me but to any analysis ever published in (the major) news media in my country. Also, the number of people working for worker-lease companies instead of being "direct employees" has increased may times over the last two decades. Part of making the workforce "more flexible". Now they have less pay, are sent around the country much more often and can't establish themselves in one place (or have a family life where they are away all week and have stressful weekend travel to and from the places of work) - but sure, "flexibility" is up. It does not matter if the families those people create will have much less happy kids - as long as the total numbers still look alright. Right?If you "migrate" a job from a stable decades-long factory job to being an Uber driver, 1 == 1 so it's all the same on the bottom line?
hugh4life 7y ago
The next phase of globalization is the devaluation of fossil fuels and agriculture commodities making whole countries economies untenable leading towards mass migration far more extreme than the recent past...
turk73 7y ago
Not buying it, sorry. Maybe some jobs, but all this nonsense about automation taking over everything is purely to sow FUD and for no other reason. Oh, automatic trucks, yeah, probably not. That's going to be really hard to pull off because the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously. Same with drones--the first one that crashes into a house and causes a fire that kills a whole family is going to force them to reconsider their idiotic plans. It doesn't matter how you design the things because the tech isn't what is important. As far as replacing the software engineering work I do with "freelancers" is a sure way to put my whole company out of business. If there were any freelancers out there who could assist us we would have already hired them. We don't want "freelancers" we want people who will be around to build up institutional knowledge and perform because they know our company and our data. As it is, our office in India is about 30% as efficient as the one on the US, and that whole experiment has already been running for almost two decades. It's not just the timezones, it's just the whole nature of the job. We have people with 15-20 years of experience working with us. It's just too naive a picture to say "globotics" which is just a made up word--even says so in the article. If you want good outcomes in a corporation, it would be wise to hire good people and not just stock up on human cattle.
- HillaryBriss 7y ago
  > the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously Human driven trucks kill people now and have done so for decades. IMHO, the liability comparison that will matter, the one that regulators, insurance companies, the courts and the market will eventually embrace will instead be: are automatic trucks as safe or just a little bit safer than human driven trucks?
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    It's not that easy. The whole legal system is based on finding the party to blame. With human drivers it's the driver or maybe the company but if something with an automated truck happens who do you blame? I am sure companies would love to be able to hide behind an automated system.
jessriedel 7y ago
Given that the global poor gaining jobs are statistically much worse off than those losing them, I'd say it's inhumanely slow...
- crazygringo 7y ago
  That's just factually untrue. First-world workers aren't losing jobs in aggregate at all. They're not statistically worse off at all. (Unfortunately median income hasn't been improving, but it certainly hasn't been getting meaningfully worse.) While the global poor are experiencing massive benefits lifting them out of poverty. I fail to see what is inhumane here.
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    You misinterpret. I'm not claiming that the effect of globalization is making the global poor worse off than they were before, or the first-world workers better off than they were before. I am saying the global poor are starting much worse off and, even after benefiting from globalization, remaining worse off than first-world workers.
  - thrwayxyz 7y ago
    Yes thank you communism. Yet again lifting billions out of poverty.
    - dang 7y ago
      Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we don't have to ban you again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dfilppi 7y ago
Jobs are an undesirable side effect of a business, not the goal. With or without globalism, that is and always will be true.
- magpi3 7y ago
  Maybe to the business. But jobs are a very desirable side effect for the nation state that makes the laws that make a business possible.
ww520 7y ago
Haven't Mechanical Turks been there for a while? I wonder how much impact it has had on the white collar work force.
- jotm 7y ago
  I used it for a while... Found it really sad what some people in the US will do for 50 cents (~20min of work)...
hnnnnnnngggggg 7y ago
I think what many authors/technologists like Mr. Baldwin overlook are the impacts of Data Privacy and Locality laws will have on automation efforts described in this article.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
By trying to be more flexible with work, you thought you were getting control of your life. You could come home and take care of the kids while handling a few emails. But you actually arranged it so you ended up out of work because a telemigrant took your job for much less. I keep thinking about the age-old discussion about why the tech industry doesn't just move away from Silicon Valley to a location with a low cost of living. And the answer usually involves the existence of a critical mass of highly effective potential employees, of a cluster economy. There really are some jobs whose pay rates do not matter. But not all that many. All the rest will sooner or later be vulnerable to global outsourcing/telemigration.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Animats 7y ago
This guy is straining to get his new words to become memes. "Globotics". "Telemigration". Please. Companies have been outsourcing call centers to India for decades now. That trend seems to have peaked; outside of telemarketing, the lower cost isn't worth the lower performance.
duality 7y ago
I stopped reading when he said IBM Watson was somehow key in this "globotics" revolution. Even IBM seems to have stopped advertising Watson.
- orev 7y ago
  Given where Watson is now, the fact that systems mostly only get better, and all the other advances in AI, I think it’s safe to say that it will get better. He could also be using Waston as a general example of AI that might be relevant to a wider audience.
  - Balgair 7y ago
    Watson is, essentially, just the code name for their consulting services.
  - notfromhere 7y ago
    Watson isn't a thing, it's just fancy words for their army of low-paid consultants. I worked for a competitor and everyone largely decided Watson wasn't anything to worry about.
balt_s 7y ago
> Globalization always means more opportunities for the nation’s most competitive citizens, but more competition for the least competitive citizens. The trouble is that in the services sector there are a lot of uncompetitive people. This will end well.
TACIXAT 7y ago
I'm curious how long the world will take to normalize all nations. China cannot be the world's factory forever. China seems to be setting Africa up for a similar position as it rises. What happens when we run out of poorer countries to make stuff? Do we bring that home? Prices will surely need to go up in the case of domestic labor. I'm super curious how this will unfold.
thrwayxyz 7y ago
The people most worried about AI are the ones not working on it. We don't know how to initialise a simple feed forward neural network yet let alone train it efficiently. It will be centuries before the theory catches up with the proctice. Until then we might as well be monks cross pollinating plants worried about genetic modification.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Likely gross pessimism. We went from clockwork to million-transitor computers in the last 100 years (most of that in the last 25). How long before we hit a billion? A trillion? How long before we hit on the same trick nature blindly hit upon, to initialize her neural networks?
  - thrwayxyz 7y ago
    It doesn't matter how deep a hole you did. You won't strike oil if you're digging at the wrong place.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    We hit a billion transistors in a CPU in about 2010, ten billion in 2015, and now some pass twenty-three billion. In GPUs, a billion transistors in 2009, twenty-one billion in 2017. In FGPAs, a billion in 2004 and fifty billion in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
roca 7y ago
My problem with this take is that people --- including me! --- have been predicting this for decades because the logic just seems so clear, yet unemployment is still low and long-term real wages have not declined, in fact around the world and in most wealth bands they have risen dramatically. I don't think there's some benevolent cosmic law that ensures job creation will always match job destruction, so I can't assume these dire predictions will never come true. But after so many years crying wolf it's hard to take them seriously until macroeconomic indicators show they're happening.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  We're getting some signs of sigmoid in both USA and Norway, already there in Japan. The grand total is being pumped by China, India, Eastern Europe playing catch up, with places like South Korea having almost reached it.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  People usually underestimate the capacity of the population to adapt. The changes described here have been operating for decades. Motivated, mentally-healthy people with strong community support can usually enter a new career in 2-4 years. You get a recession and lots of angsting as people mentally accept the new reality, and then they get jobs within that new reality (which just gets destroyed again in another 10-15 years). When people haven't been able to adapt, results are every bit as tragic as people predicted. Think of the large swaths of Appalachia or the Midwest that are still smarting from our transition away from a coal & steel economy.
Ericson2314 7y ago
It's looking more like work is becoming pointless but society still makes us do it. I would hope UBI speeds up automation. In particular AI sucks, but virtually integrated expert systems don't. Too bad they have a hard time emerging under capitalism. Because your supply chain is always insanely stupid mega rent seekers. Maybe some aquiponics megaco-op can ensure its automation engineers don't starve, which will be to socialism what the loom was to industrial capitalism. Get on it Mondragon.
m0llusk 7y ago
Jobs are essentially slavery and ditching them should be good for everyone. All we need to do is build a society that meets the basic needs of the population. We already have some tools and ideas to experiment with. Mourning the old order won't bring it back or delay change, only complicate this transition.

110 points by smb111 7y ago

I remember reading Average is Over and A Fairwell to Alms just when I first started working. They convinced me that labour power was going to decline precipitously. I stared saving 60+% of everything I made and putting it into index funds. Anyone making a good salary should attempt the same. Much of white collar work is extremely amenable to automation, much more than even truck driving:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox Maybe comparative advantage will save the day, but I think it is a really good idea to start accumulating capital, even at today’s valuations.

wrong_variable 7y ago
If a large amount of white collar workers are jobless, your SPY calls would also become worthless. It's a good idea to invest in index funds, but investing in index funds expecting a economic apocalypse is not good reasoning.
- JPLeRouzic 7y ago
  Do you have any suggestion as to what would be a good investment? Thanks!
  - wrong_variable 7y ago
    I am not an investment expert, you should consult with your financial advisor, my personal rule of thumb is : 1 - Invest in yourself. - Health - Education - Social circle 2 - Invest in your living space. - Buy an apartment anywhere on earth where you can afford, you can take cheap flights to anywhere on earth these days. Even the remotest part of Africa can be reached within 1 day and less than 500 dollars. ( you are normally paying more than 700 dollars in rent anywhere in the developed world ). 3 - Buy high yielding government bonds, preferably multiple countries. 4 - Buy index funds. I do not prefer gold / silver, there is severe restrictions in moving them around, and high taxation in audit and transaction. government bonds are generally tax exempt. You are better off investing in guns than gold if the economy collapses.
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  I'm sure the idea is to convert to cash before the apocalypse actually occurs. Even if one misses it by a little (ie, there is some downturn), the bulk of GP's earnings have gone to savings.
  - orpep90nxkfo 7y ago
    You’re assuming cash will hold value after a so-called economy apocalypse? If the economic credibility of the nation goes, so too does the value of its cash currency. What’s a “more white collar workers than jobs” economy look like? Personally, I’m leaning into useful life skills, like growing food, reconnecting to hunting, low level electronics, rebuilding my car, and home myself with my money now. I’d rather have deep experience in head and hands than a wheelbarrow full of dolla dolla bills y’all with the buying power of East German currency. Not that I have any way to be sure the implosion is coming any time in my remaining years. But still, if we’re talking about how to prepare for such a thing, let’s get real: investments in today’s ephemeral value stores are the worst idea for securing yourself against economic collapse
    - vidarh 7y ago
      Depends what you are preparing for. If you think automation is going to happen but that capitalism will survive, then index funds seems line a good idea. If you think capitalism will be supplanted, it depends on what you think will replace it. If we're looking at a Mad Max style dystopia, then sure, it won't help to have lots of shares. But presumably you'd see signs of that before we get there and be able to start converting your money into harder currency. If we're looking at a benign-ish revolution with redistribution it won't matter much. Personally I think the most realistic medium term risk scenario to protect against is that capitalism will hang in there, but that jobs become more scarce. An outright economic collapse or major social upheaval is likely to take more time. If you start seeing job scarcity hitting, then sure, start converting some of those index funds just in case things accelerate in the wrong direction.
      - orpep90nxkfo 7y ago
- ZhuanXia 7y ago
  My model is that as median labour power decreases capital and superstars should capture a larger percentage of future productivity increases. And automation should provide huge productivity increases. This seems compatible with index funds being a good bet. Perhaps I am wrong, but could you provide details as to why?
  - marktangotango 7y ago
    Can you talk about how superstars would capture future productivity increases, in practice?
    - koolba 7y ago
      It’s no different then the proverbially 10x programmer landing a consulting gig for literally 10x the compensation of a nobody.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    The model is incomplete in the details (as most models are). The actual effect is that capital in the companies that are taking advantage of the new globoticized future does great. FANG does great. Upwork does great. AirBnB and Stripe do great, once they go public. Labor and capital of old-line companies do terribly. This type of economic transformation doesn't just result in layoffs, it results in whole companies going out of business. Their value-networks are adopted to the cost structure of the old world; as that cost structure changes, they have no reason to exist as a firm. When you buy an index fund, you're buying both of these types of companies. You should probably do okay, because the public market is actually pricing a lot of this phenomena in already: multiples on old-line companies are severely depressed while FANG shares are soaring, and the capitalization-weighting of the index is taking this into account. But you're leaving money on the table: many of the biggest winners will be new fast-growing startups that aren't public yet.
GoodJokes 7y ago
Ew! Do you only care about wealth. What if you took this oerofrative and tried to increase labor rights. Techies are the least imaginative people I have ever met.
walshemj 7y ago
Most of the entry level white collar jobs that can be automated have been. Those that remain would require some major and I mean order of magnitudes improvements in AI. Can you give me some examples of white collar jobs that you think can be automated?
- bastawhiz 7y ago
  I worked at a large tech company that had an enormous finance department. They did everything in Excel. Our job was to automate their work. The tools we built were routinely more accurate and faster than the finance people were. When our work was less accurate, it was because the input was bad. The input came from the finance team. The only reason they didn't disappear entirely was because they'd convinced management that there were things that the software couldn't do that only humans could futz with. The one or two percentage points their adjustments improved their results by were easily outpaced by the overall improved accuracy of the machines.
  - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
    People are already fighting back against this. I'm a SWE and my EX worked at the finance department in a huge robotics company. Their department did everything by copying and pasting stuff in excel in a painfully slow and cumbersome way. She told me their challenges, so I wrote some python scripts to automate their work. When she showed it to her boss, hoping to get a positive response, his reaction was "Put that away if you like your job here!" This is the nightmare of every middle manager. They won't be able to justify their existence if their teams get automated away so they will actively fight against it.
    - pault 7y ago
      The solution is to keep your scripts private, automate your job, and work on whatever you want while making sure you always look busy when your boss walks by.
      - lowdose 7y ago
ww520 7y ago
Saving and investing are good in general. Having a fuckyou fund helps your career as well. You can take on more risk and be more assertive at job.
ryanmarsh 7y ago
Being a consultant with clients in a wide range of industries I concur. Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort. They are one successful software project from losing their jobs. Lucky for them their companies are terrible at shipping software. Conversely, automating the work of a plumber would require a massive investment in AI and robotics. Also, nobody makes a robot that can be trusted to repaint the trim in my house unattended.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  "Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort." After looking at some of the business processes at my company I am not so sure about this anymore. There are a lot of jobs that are pretty mundane but when you look a little closer most of the processes have a lot of exceptions where the employee makes decisions that don't follow the process exactly. From what I have seen it's really hard to come up with a recipe that can be 100% automated because of all these exceptions. It seems to me that humans are a buffer that sometimes corrects unforeseen things and without that buffer the organization would do stupid things.
  - count 7y ago
    The key bit that companies that shift hard to software seem to figure out: How many of those corner cases are actually worth bothering with? Is the net loss associated with a corner case greater than the significant gain of dropping an FTE or FTEs? Sometimes it is (safety related things, etc.), but many times, it's not...just because you CAN handle something doesn't mean it's worth it do so.
    - maxxxxx 7y ago
      It’s something the organization needs to decide. If you automate a process it means you are setting it in stone and lose flexibility . Maybe that’s a good thing or not but something people need to be aware of and accept.
ihm 7y ago
> I think it is a really good idea to start accumulating capital, even at today’s valuations. This is an interesting take. The alternative to individually trying to each become capitalists, is grouping together and making sure we all have access to the proceeds of automation.
- influx 7y ago
  Becoming a capitalist has a long history of being successful. The other way not as much.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    A couple thousand years is a blink of an eye for a species.
  - neffy 7y ago
    Becoming a capitalist is the long history of learning to group together and work on common goals. The other way just doesn't scale.
  - kingkawn 7y ago
    Gonna run out that clock when there’s no more natural world to exploit ruthlessly
    - adventured 7y ago
      That will never occur, fortunately. There is no end to the natural world. The natural resources that are most critical on Earth are infinite for all practical purposes in relation to human demands. This is especially true given the population growth curve for the next century. If we somehow exhaust the mineral deposits on Earth in the next few hundred years, we can and will mine the solar system. In the absolute worst case scenario, the rest of the natural world off of Earth is available for ruthless exploitation by our Capitalist ways for thousands and thousands of years to come. The clear bet is that it will be exploited eventually, probably by whatever we replace ourselves with.
invalidOrTaken 7y ago
I think saving is an essential part of it, but not the whole story. I recently took a job at a university. I had a bit of leverage (extensive clojure experience ftw), and I spent it on negotiating for 20 hrs/week. This gives me much more time to do "the other stuff" that's part of a career---networking, learning, interviewing, starting soon-to-be-aborted businesses. I've also been trying (with a group of friends) to figure out if there's any way we can make some sort of co-op work. I do think "jobs are over," at least as we know them for the middle class, but I don't think that needs to mean that the middle class is over. What form it will take, though, I'm still not sure. I suspect things will keep getting weirder.
- Creationer 7y ago
  The problem is that jobs are over, but we are still taxed the old fashioned way - mostly to pay for the healthcare and pensions of baby boomers who had steady careers and cheap housing. Healthcare and pensions make up 66% of the US Federal Budget. Its a similiar case in most other Western countries. If we could somehow find a way to relieve ourselves of that burden, taxes on labour could be much lower and life significantly better. I think this is partly why we've seen such a huge boom in freelancing. Its much easier to optimise your taxes that way, instead of working for a company.
iamnothere 7y ago
Just make sure you diversify. Quality land, managed rental units, and other assets will still hold some value even if stocks and bonds take a massive hit. Regardless of the state of the economy, people still have to live somewhere.
- astrange 7y ago
  Not if they read Henry George and realize there's no reason to assign you the land value.
  - ZhuanXia 7y ago
    I am a Georgist too! Can’t bring myself to buy land.
woodandsteel 7y ago
That's individually a smart move, collectively a dumb one. That strategy won't work for most people. Even the successful white collar workers, especially the ones who are married with children, are financially stressed already and can't save much. You know, if 5% of the workforce follows that strategy, but things go to hell for 50% because of these trends, then we will have rioting in the streets, maybe a revolution with a nasty government installed, that is what history shows usually happens. And then the new government will go after the successful people like you. Some problems can be dealt with only through responsible collective action.
ilaksh 7y ago
True but hasn't it always been a pretty obvious goal to accumulate capital?

crazygringo 7y ago

> Q: Several studies show technology will disrupt jobs, but they also argue that almost as many jobs will be created. > A: There’s a mismatch of job displacement and job creation. Job displacement is being driven at the speed of digital technology, which is explosive at this moment. And displacement is the business model for the AI geniuses and all those companies. All of them are hoping to get rich by displacing workers, not by creating jobs. Creating jobs is much slower. So, at least in the next few years, the displacement will outstrip the creation. But it’s not the direction of travel which is wrong. It’s just a mismatch of speed. Citation needed. There's zero evidence that "creating jobs is slower." People have been saying this every year for well over a century, and yet unemployment is quite low right now in the US. It's one of those things that seems logical -- but all evidence is to the contrary. And it's probably because it's a lot easier for the human brain to spot a huge loss of jobs in one industry, than a small increase across many industries that adds up to the same size. Also, the jobs can already exist but just not be filled. We don't necessarily need to wait for them to be "created".

nosianu 7y ago
Okay... so now also include in your statement the quality of those new jobs. Not how many electronic gadgets people can buy compared to 50 years ago, but how stressed they are and how they fit into greater society. Also include how useful many jobs feel to those working in them - reference to "Dilbert jobs" (or Wally jobs, if you like and how common the feeling seems to be that ones job is useless (I myself certainly had quite a few high-paying (IT) freelancer jobs - the ones where you would expect more rigour before the position is created - where I had clear evidence that the job was completely useless, but it's hard to decline 6-figure income for half a year when society punishes you if you do that). I don't see the point in making an argument when it's only based on "there is a(ny) job". Here where I live now the bureaucrats can trim the number of jobless by putting them into temporary and mostly useless training programs. Useless according not to me but to any analysis ever published in (the major) news media in my country. Also, the number of people working for worker-lease companies instead of being "direct employees" has increased may times over the last two decades. Part of making the workforce "more flexible". Now they have less pay, are sent around the country much more often and can't establish themselves in one place (or have a family life where they are away all week and have stressful weekend travel to and from the places of work) - but sure, "flexibility" is up. It does not matter if the families those people create will have much less happy kids - as long as the total numbers still look alright. Right?If you "migrate" a job from a stable decades-long factory job to being an Uber driver, 1 == 1 so it's all the same on the bottom line?

hugh4life 7y ago

The next phase of globalization is the devaluation of fossil fuels and agriculture commodities making whole countries economies untenable leading towards mass migration far more extreme than the recent past...

turk73 7y ago

Not buying it, sorry. Maybe some jobs, but all this nonsense about automation taking over everything is purely to sow FUD and for no other reason. Oh, automatic trucks, yeah, probably not. That's going to be really hard to pull off because the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously. Same with drones--the first one that crashes into a house and causes a fire that kills a whole family is going to force them to reconsider their idiotic plans. It doesn't matter how you design the things because the tech isn't what is important. As far as replacing the software engineering work I do with "freelancers" is a sure way to put my whole company out of business. If there were any freelancers out there who could assist us we would have already hired them. We don't want "freelancers" we want people who will be around to build up institutional knowledge and perform because they know our company and our data. As it is, our office in India is about 30% as efficient as the one on the US, and that whole experiment has already been running for almost two decades. It's not just the timezones, it's just the whole nature of the job. We have people with 15-20 years of experience working with us. It's just too naive a picture to say "globotics" which is just a made up word--even says so in the article. If you want good outcomes in a corporation, it would be wise to hire good people and not just stock up on human cattle.

HillaryBriss 7y ago
> the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously Human driven trucks kill people now and have done so for decades. IMHO, the liability comparison that will matter, the one that regulators, insurance companies, the courts and the market will eventually embrace will instead be: are automatic trucks as safe or just a little bit safer than human driven trucks?
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  It's not that easy. The whole legal system is based on finding the party to blame. With human drivers it's the driver or maybe the company but if something with an automated truck happens who do you blame? I am sure companies would love to be able to hide behind an automated system.

jessriedel 7y ago

Given that the global poor gaining jobs are statistically much worse off than those losing them, I'd say it's inhumanely slow...

crazygringo 7y ago
That's just factually untrue. First-world workers aren't losing jobs in aggregate at all. They're not statistically worse off at all. (Unfortunately median income hasn't been improving, but it certainly hasn't been getting meaningfully worse.) While the global poor are experiencing massive benefits lifting them out of poverty. I fail to see what is inhumane here.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  You misinterpret. I'm not claiming that the effect of globalization is making the global poor worse off than they were before, or the first-world workers better off than they were before. I am saying the global poor are starting much worse off and, even after benefiting from globalization, remaining worse off than first-world workers.
- thrwayxyz 7y ago
  Yes thank you communism. Yet again lifting billions out of poverty.
  - dang 7y ago
    Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we don't have to ban you again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dfilppi 7y ago

Jobs are an undesirable side effect of a business, not the goal. With or without globalism, that is and always will be true.

magpi3 7y ago
Maybe to the business. But jobs are a very desirable side effect for the nation state that makes the laws that make a business possible.

ww520 7y ago

Haven't Mechanical Turks been there for a while? I wonder how much impact it has had on the white collar work force.

jotm 7y ago
I used it for a while... Found it really sad what some people in the US will do for 50 cents (~20min of work)...

hnnnnnnngggggg 7y ago

I think what many authors/technologists like Mr. Baldwin overlook are the impacts of Data Privacy and Locality laws will have on automation efforts described in this article.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

By trying to be more flexible with work, you thought you were getting control of your life. You could come home and take care of the kids while handling a few emails. But you actually arranged it so you ended up out of work because a telemigrant took your job for much less. I keep thinking about the age-old discussion about why the tech industry doesn't just move away from Silicon Valley to a location with a low cost of living. And the answer usually involves the existence of a critical mass of highly effective potential employees, of a cluster economy. There really are some jobs whose pay rates do not matter. But not all that many. All the rest will sooner or later be vulnerable to global outsourcing/telemigration.

deleted 7y ago

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Animats 7y ago

This guy is straining to get his new words to become memes. "Globotics". "Telemigration". Please. Companies have been outsourcing call centers to India for decades now. That trend seems to have peaked; outside of telemarketing, the lower cost isn't worth the lower performance.

duality 7y ago

I stopped reading when he said IBM Watson was somehow key in this "globotics" revolution. Even IBM seems to have stopped advertising Watson.

orev 7y ago
Given where Watson is now, the fact that systems mostly only get better, and all the other advances in AI, I think it’s safe to say that it will get better. He could also be using Waston as a general example of AI that might be relevant to a wider audience.
- Balgair 7y ago
  Watson is, essentially, just the code name for their consulting services.
- notfromhere 7y ago
  Watson isn't a thing, it's just fancy words for their army of low-paid consultants. I worked for a competitor and everyone largely decided Watson wasn't anything to worry about.

balt_s 7y ago

> Globalization always means more opportunities for the nation’s most competitive citizens, but more competition for the least competitive citizens. The trouble is that in the services sector there are a lot of uncompetitive people. This will end well.

TACIXAT 7y ago

I'm curious how long the world will take to normalize all nations. China cannot be the world's factory forever. China seems to be setting Africa up for a similar position as it rises. What happens when we run out of poorer countries to make stuff? Do we bring that home? Prices will surely need to go up in the case of domestic labor. I'm super curious how this will unfold.

thrwayxyz 7y ago

The people most worried about AI are the ones not working on it. We don't know how to initialise a simple feed forward neural network yet let alone train it efficiently. It will be centuries before the theory catches up with the proctice. Until then we might as well be monks cross pollinating plants worried about genetic modification.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Likely gross pessimism. We went from clockwork to million-transitor computers in the last 100 years (most of that in the last 25). How long before we hit a billion? A trillion? How long before we hit on the same trick nature blindly hit upon, to initialize her neural networks?
- thrwayxyz 7y ago
  It doesn't matter how deep a hole you did. You won't strike oil if you're digging at the wrong place.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  We hit a billion transistors in a CPU in about 2010, ten billion in 2015, and now some pass twenty-three billion. In GPUs, a billion transistors in 2009, twenty-one billion in 2017. In FGPAs, a billion in 2004 and fifty billion in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

roca 7y ago

My problem with this take is that people --- including me! --- have been predicting this for decades because the logic just seems so clear, yet unemployment is still low and long-term real wages have not declined, in fact around the world and in most wealth bands they have risen dramatically. I don't think there's some benevolent cosmic law that ensures job creation will always match job destruction, so I can't assume these dire predictions will never come true. But after so many years crying wolf it's hard to take them seriously until macroeconomic indicators show they're happening.

AstralStorm 7y ago
We're getting some signs of sigmoid in both USA and Norway, already there in Japan. The grand total is being pumped by China, India, Eastern Europe playing catch up, with places like South Korea having almost reached it.
nostrademons 7y ago
People usually underestimate the capacity of the population to adapt. The changes described here have been operating for decades. Motivated, mentally-healthy people with strong community support can usually enter a new career in 2-4 years. You get a recession and lots of angsting as people mentally accept the new reality, and then they get jobs within that new reality (which just gets destroyed again in another 10-15 years). When people haven't been able to adapt, results are every bit as tragic as people predicted. Think of the large swaths of Appalachia or the Midwest that are still smarting from our transition away from a coal & steel economy.

Ericson2314 7y ago

It's looking more like work is becoming pointless but society still makes us do it. I would hope UBI speeds up automation. In particular AI sucks, but virtually integrated expert systems don't. Too bad they have a hard time emerging under capitalism. Because your supply chain is always insanely stupid mega rent seekers. Maybe some aquiponics megaco-op can ensure its automation engineers don't starve, which will be to socialism what the loom was to industrial capitalism. Get on it Mondragon.

m0llusk 7y ago

Jobs are essentially slavery and ditching them should be good for everyone. All we need to do is build a society that meets the basic needs of the population. We already have some tools and ideas to experiment with. Mourning the old order won't bring it back or delay change, only complicate this transition.