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Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity, a (rough) measure of the technological contribution to economic production, is growing considerably more slowly than it was during the early 2000s, and much more slowly than during the 1930s, when the Second Industrial Revolution really came for the masses (and helped catalyze a huge labor shift away from agricultural work—but didn’t put all former farmers out of jobs).
- tempsy 7y agoWhether it’s automation or something else doesn’t really matter. I think it’s hard to argue that there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc. People in those jobs are the ones that could be most helped by UBI. Of course you need to think about how to replace shitty jobs with better ones over time, but UBI smooths out societal issues created during those transition times.
- goatinaboat 7y agothose shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc Most of those jobs will be the hardest to automate because Moravec’s Paradox. Automation will wipe out lawyers and accountants long before it reaches sewer maintenance and refuse collection.
- harimau777 7y agoI'm not an expert, so I may be mistaken. However, my understanding is that, as it applies to motor skills, Moravec's Paradox applies to skills that require either fine sensing (e.g. manipulating something delicate) or adapting to a complex environment (e.g. navigating a room or painting). It seems to me, that the success of robots in manufacturing demonstrates that this does not apply to many (but not all) unskilled labor jobs. It also seems to me that in many cases it may be possible to modify the job to fit the capabilities of a robot rather than the other way around. For example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl or give the robot a pipe-style brush that it big enough to clean any bowl.
- goatinaboat 7y agoFor example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl Sure, this is an argument often made by self-driving car enthusiasts, let’s just remake all the roads, ban all pedestrians and non-self-driving vehicles and so on. But it’s another instance of the same paradox, instead of radically underestimating the computation involved in actions that nature has given us dedicated hardware for, underestimating the vast cost of doing so. In this case not only would you need to standardise the toilet bowl, but the route through the house to get to the bathroom and what to do about any unexpected obstacles... The paradox in general applies to everything that humans take for granted that we can do without fully appreciating that it took us a billion years of evolution to get here.
- maxerickson 7y agoMy town went from, I believe, 3 trucks with 3 people each to 2 trucks with 1 person each for garbage collection. The last step will take a long time, but the amount of labor has already been dramatically shrunk.
- nopriorarrests 7y ago>there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc Shitty jobs are not must vulnerable, quite opposite in fact. Automating some 400K/year quant job at hedge fund makes morse sense than automatng MCjob that pays 40K/year. More to that, shitty jobs are hardest to automate (we are nowhere close to good janitor robot, for example). Also, you can not outsource cleaning toilets or hairdessers, but you can software development or building trading models.
- jrs235 7y agoThere are "1000's" more 40k/yr jobs than 400k/yr ones. Automating a 40k/yr job that 1000 people do makes more sense than 10 400k ones. In aggregate, there is more money to be saved automating the 40k jobs. Also, typically lower paying jobs are physical labor jobs, trading time for money, not "thinking" jobs that deal with exceptions to the rules. Robotics are suppose to automate lower labor physical positions, AI is suppose to replace our thinking and mental positions.
- didgeoridoo 7y agoAre there a significant number of physical labor jobs (in high-income countries at least) that do not require 1) intelligent human interaction or 2) detailed visual inspection and fine motor control? There appears to be a huge hump in difficulty of robotic “automatability” caused by the fact that humans are just so much better at these two tasks than machines are. “Thinking” jobs that essentially entail transformation of one type of data into another seem no more difficult to automate (if not perhaps even easier) than most manual labor that has not already been automated. My uninformed guess is that we will automate low- and mid-level “thinking” jobs and the remainder of physical jobs at around the same time, because both require near-human perceiving, communicating, and manipulating capabilities.
- maxerickson 7y agoYes, McDonald's automates tasks across a massive labor force, they aren't trying to automate everything that a given employee might do.
- tells 7y agoI think your facts are debatable https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1184499999406776326 https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1184499999406776326
- mrfusion 7y agoI think we should be looking at it at the micro level. Every time automation is introduced at the employee level the employee is going to find (or make up) other work to do because otherwise they lose their job. So we just aren’t going to see the effects of automation. But I bet if you tracked percent of work time used for internet surfing you’d see it going up 5-10% per year.
- hacknat 7y agoLabor productivity is a very simple calculation. It’s real GDP divided by total labor hours. Do you see the problem already? Let’s leave aside for a second that even the creator of GDP thought that, as a top level economic metric, it was useless (yes, useless). But, yeah...have the benefits of GDP been spread around evenly in our society? Of course it hasn’t. Our national GDP has probably been, mostly, generated by a small number of people. It’s impossible to tell how, but income inequality is probably a good proxy (though not an extrapolation) of how uneven GDP generation has been. It is impossible to know. GDP is a team effort, but if you think through some of the examples in tech I think you will realize that the labor productivity metric is lying to us. A lot of paid labor going on in the US right now is probably not actually all that important to the overall economy, or unevenly important. Ironically, a lot of the unpaid or highly under compensated labor in our society (teachers, social workers, stay at home parents) are probably adding economic value. One of Yang’s main points is that we need to start valuing this labor.
- intuitionist 7y agoOK, John Galt.
- grecy 7y agoEven if automation isn't coming for people's job, isn't it time we moved away from this idea that every single person has to work for 40 hours a week for 50 years of their life just to survive? What about spending time with family, or learning a new language or just enjoying one's time? When do we reach that magical future where we actually have leisure time and can enjoy the fact we're more advanced than we were a hundred years ago when everyone worked hard? I'd like to get there now.
- douglaswlance 7y agoYou can have that. Acquire more assets.
- dwiel 7y agoyeah, and if you are lucky, you'll only have to work 40 hours a week for 50 years to acquire them.
- hanniabu 7y agoWhich brings up his quality of life stance. It honestly feels like we're paid slaves waiting until we have enough to buy ourselves from our owners.
- grzm 7y agoI find this perspective problematic. I understand it feels like a lack of freedom—indeed you are constrained from doing whatever you want. As an example, imagine you are on your own, completely outside of society, out of contact with others. You’d need to build and maintain shelter. You’d need to forage or grow food. You’re not free to do whatever you want, until you have accumulated enough resources to not need to do the work to provide what you need for everyday survival. I don’t think we’d call this slavery, yet it has the same shape as what you describe. Slavery implies coercion or violence limiting freedom, which certainly still exists in the world, but isn’t an apt description of what you describe.
- commandlinefan 7y agoYeah - the only thing I can think of worse than not having a plan in place for a future world where all work is automated is implementing that plan before all work is actually automated.
- buboard 7y agoYeah but I think Yang knows that , and he uses UBI as a symbolic image of the fact that good jobs are going to become increasingly hard to find and that makes most people anxious. It's sort of how trump used "the wall" to appeal to the anxieties of people with insecure jobs. It's a good focus point though, that appeals to reasonable people more than "just tax the rich" (which is shortsighted anyway; what 's the plan when the rich are no more?). My current bet (as a non-american) is that if the democrats manage to select Yang, he will win, otherwise it's going to be a much worse trump 2nd term
- Reedx 7y agoEven if that is the case, jobs now change at much more rapid pace than in the past. It used to be that if you trained and worked as a blacksmith (or whatever), you could die a blacksmith. It was their kids that would have to do something else. Which isn't too much of a shock to the system. This is no longer the case. Now someone within a single lifetime can go through multiple job creation and destruction cycles. So it'd be helpful to have a floor to help deal with the transitions and provide a buffer.