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“Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.” Overall, I

“Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.” Overall, I have to disagree. Letting machines do all the mind-numbingly boring work leaves the rest for human beings. And we pay a lot less for the final products, leaving resources for new jobs, which will also have the boring parts automated. Disagree? Hire a hundred people to do all your drudgery. Then pretend you're paying them hardly anything. I submit your life will suck less.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago
Yes, I didn't see why such a job - combing through thousands of printed pages to find possibly relevant material - should be preserved, either.
ippisl 16y ago
"Over the long run we find things for people to do." The problem with such a prediction is that we have so very little data to base it on. if computers are to replace most of man's intellectual activities, that change compares to the industrial revolution , but it's not a very good comparison , because we will have machines and robots to replace physical labor. It's basicly a prediction by an economist , and we all know how accurate are those.
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  All we have is history to go on and the fact that new jobs have always replaced old ones. Whenever something is automated, the money no longer spent on salaries are spent on other things, things which people must be paid to provide. Which is why farm automation put 80% of the people out of work and there are still lots of jobs. Except, of course, when bad policy gums up the works.
  - ippisl 16y ago
    Never in history was a time when machines were capable of doing everything a human could do and do it more cheaply. We might be approaching that time , and that makes predictions difficult.
    - stretchwithme 16y ago
      Which is why we should let life unfold as its going to unfold. Living in this time is what we should be doing.
  - gwern 16y ago
    > All we have is history to go on and the fact that new jobs have always replaced old ones. I've always been a little skeptical of this. We all know that the official unemployment rate is a bit misleading as it only counts those actively looking for work, but I suspect historical comparisons show that it's even more misleading than we think. Let's go back to the 1800s, when technology hadn't yet, according to the Luddite hypothesis, put tons of people out of work. Back then, retirement didn't exist. So bam, now we've got one segment of the population who are employed. Schooling went to high school at most and higher education was only a tiny fraction of the population. So there's another large segment of the population employed, all those who would be stuck in school now. Basically everyone who is now in undergraduate or graduate school would have been out working a job. And of course, child labor was legal, so that implies an awful lot of jobs there too. And what about all those people with Downs syndrome or other forms of retardation or mental illness? They were all down on the farm helping with the baling or something. (Just counting the kids in special ed, and not all the adults, there's like 6 million of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_education_in_the_United_States#Classification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_education_in_the_United... ) Now surely some of all of that is necessary to keeping a modern economy running rather than an 1800s one. But how much of that is just killing time or keeping people out of the employment market? Thought experiment: if a fairy suddenly granted all the kids and students and retirees an education and credentials to match (all 20 or 50 million or whatever of them), how many years would it take the market to absorb them and match them up with jobs? Would it ever?
  - Unseelie 16y ago
    Farm automation also put draft horses out of work. My case is brittian in the early 1800s, which had a population of about 40 million people and 4 million draft horses. A draft horse did the manual labor of about four men, making them worth about 16 million agrarian jobs, and they were also put out of work. Horses, of course, aren't horribly adaptive and don't revolt when you keep them from reproducing, and so over the century they virtually disappeared with the jobs they lost. Furthermore, if you consider the move in the early 1900s from a six day to a five day work week, that's a lot more human jobs that have never been replaced.
hackinthebochs 16y ago
You're assuming most human beings are capable of doing knowledge-based work. I don't think this is true. The reason knowledge based workers make so much is precisely because the skills necessary to perform it are rarer than manual labor. Fully automating manual labor means a large class of people (possibly a majority) will not have any marketable skills from which to make a living. Furthermore, there are much fewer knowledge based jobs necessary to run an economy. At the end of the day, most knowledge work is a one-off thing. Once the program is written, it can be duplicated at no cost. Once the drug is discovered, that knowledge is spread for no cost. Of course there are many exceptions to this, but this is a trend. There is necessarily orders of magnitude fewer knowledge based jobs necessary to run an economy than labor jobs. When the automation revolution comes we're going to need a new basis for the economy because the current one just doesn't fit in that world.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  There are more knowledge-based jobs all the time. And more and more jobs all the time involve working with knowledge. It seems you assume that the economy cannot continue to evolve. I see no reason to conclude that. People will solve problems as they arise. Just because a program or drug has large IP costs and low marginal cost to produce doesn't mean its a fundamentally different thing. An oil well takes a lot of knowledge to find but not very much to profit from once you have. McDonald's franchise system took a lot of intellectual work to perfect, but making copies of restaurants is cheaper with more likely success than starting your own. A lot of things have a lot of IP involved and that's nothing new.
  - hackinthebochs 16y ago
    Sure there is a lot of knowledge work associated with what you mentioned, and with most products out there. But there is a many-orders-of-magnitude difference between the manual labor aspect and the IP aspect of bringing a product to market. (I know I'm taking a leap here, but) I believe this scale difference is a necessary part of the equation. There has been a growth in knowledge based jobs precisely because of growth in population plus growth in productivity in the output of manual labor jobs. In a world where production costs are near zero because its fully automated, there is still the built-in costs of the materials themselves. This puts a cap at how cheap a product can become. Unfortunately, 60% of the population now has no money to speak of so even a fully "optimized" price is too much. There will potentially be many dirt cheap products but not nearly enough customers to buy them.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago

Yes, I didn't see why such a job - combing through thousands of printed pages to find possibly relevant material - should be preserved, either.

ippisl 16y ago

"Over the long run we find things for people to do." The problem with such a prediction is that we have so very little data to base it on. if computers are to replace most of man's intellectual activities, that change compares to the industrial revolution , but it's not a very good comparison , because we will have machines and robots to replace physical labor. It's basicly a prediction by an economist , and we all know how accurate are those.

stretchwithme 16y ago
All we have is history to go on and the fact that new jobs have always replaced old ones. Whenever something is automated, the money no longer spent on salaries are spent on other things, things which people must be paid to provide. Which is why farm automation put 80% of the people out of work and there are still lots of jobs. Except, of course, when bad policy gums up the works.
- ippisl 16y ago
  Never in history was a time when machines were capable of doing everything a human could do and do it more cheaply. We might be approaching that time , and that makes predictions difficult.
  - stretchwithme 16y ago
    Which is why we should let life unfold as its going to unfold. Living in this time is what we should be doing.
- gwern 16y ago
  > All we have is history to go on and the fact that new jobs have always replaced old ones. I've always been a little skeptical of this. We all know that the official unemployment rate is a bit misleading as it only counts those actively looking for work, but I suspect historical comparisons show that it's even more misleading than we think. Let's go back to the 1800s, when technology hadn't yet, according to the Luddite hypothesis, put tons of people out of work. Back then, retirement didn't exist. So bam, now we've got one segment of the population who are employed. Schooling went to high school at most and higher education was only a tiny fraction of the population. So there's another large segment of the population employed, all those who would be stuck in school now. Basically everyone who is now in undergraduate or graduate school would have been out working a job. And of course, child labor was legal, so that implies an awful lot of jobs there too. And what about all those people with Downs syndrome or other forms of retardation or mental illness? They were all down on the farm helping with the baling or something. (Just counting the kids in special ed, and not all the adults, there's like 6 million of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_education_in_the_United_States#Classification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_education_in_the_United... ) Now surely some of all of that is necessary to keeping a modern economy running rather than an 1800s one. But how much of that is just killing time or keeping people out of the employment market? Thought experiment: if a fairy suddenly granted all the kids and students and retirees an education and credentials to match (all 20 or 50 million or whatever of them), how many years would it take the market to absorb them and match them up with jobs? Would it ever?
- Unseelie 16y ago
  Farm automation also put draft horses out of work. My case is brittian in the early 1800s, which had a population of about 40 million people and 4 million draft horses. A draft horse did the manual labor of about four men, making them worth about 16 million agrarian jobs, and they were also put out of work. Horses, of course, aren't horribly adaptive and don't revolt when you keep them from reproducing, and so over the century they virtually disappeared with the jobs they lost. Furthermore, if you consider the move in the early 1900s from a six day to a five day work week, that's a lot more human jobs that have never been replaced.

hackinthebochs 16y ago

You're assuming most human beings are capable of doing knowledge-based work. I don't think this is true. The reason knowledge based workers make so much is precisely because the skills necessary to perform it are rarer than manual labor. Fully automating manual labor means a large class of people (possibly a majority) will not have any marketable skills from which to make a living. Furthermore, there are much fewer knowledge based jobs necessary to run an economy. At the end of the day, most knowledge work is a one-off thing. Once the program is written, it can be duplicated at no cost. Once the drug is discovered, that knowledge is spread for no cost. Of course there are many exceptions to this, but this is a trend. There is necessarily orders of magnitude fewer knowledge based jobs necessary to run an economy than labor jobs. When the automation revolution comes we're going to need a new basis for the economy because the current one just doesn't fit in that world.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
stretchwithme 16y ago
There are more knowledge-based jobs all the time. And more and more jobs all the time involve working with knowledge. It seems you assume that the economy cannot continue to evolve. I see no reason to conclude that. People will solve problems as they arise. Just because a program or drug has large IP costs and low marginal cost to produce doesn't mean its a fundamentally different thing. An oil well takes a lot of knowledge to find but not very much to profit from once you have. McDonald's franchise system took a lot of intellectual work to perfect, but making copies of restaurants is cheaper with more likely success than starting your own. A lot of things have a lot of IP involved and that's nothing new.
- hackinthebochs 16y ago
  Sure there is a lot of knowledge work associated with what you mentioned, and with most products out there. But there is a many-orders-of-magnitude difference between the manual labor aspect and the IP aspect of bringing a product to market. (I know I'm taking a leap here, but) I believe this scale difference is a necessary part of the equation. There has been a growth in knowledge based jobs precisely because of growth in population plus growth in productivity in the output of manual labor jobs. In a world where production costs are near zero because its fully automated, there is still the built-in costs of the materials themselves. This puts a cap at how cheap a product can become. Unfortunately, 60% of the population now has no money to speak of so even a fully "optimized" price is too much. There will potentially be many dirt cheap products but not nearly enough customers to buy them.