15 ms·

Are jobs obsolete?

436 points by ekm2 15y ago

commanda 15y ago
This article skips discussing one reason why jobs are in a sense ends to themselves: the feeling of being useful. Retired people often complain that they don't know what to do with themselves after leaving the workforce, so they go do things like volunteering. A friend of mine recently took 2 months off between jobs and nearing the end of that time, she started becoming very depressed and realized it was because she wasn't contributing to society or to herself. I think most people work not only to pay the bills or to acquire luxury items, but to have a sense of self-worth.
- zasz 15y ago
  It might not be "feeling useful" so much as the social stimulation. The days when I work from home and don't talk to anyone at the office are soul-crushingly lonely, sometimes, even if I'm very active over IM.
  - nickik 15y ago
    Very much agree its a social thing. "The West" looks down on people that don't work does they feel bad and usless. All these people that will not have to work for money anymore have more time and they should be encouraged do good things. Take care of your parents, look after there children, study a new field, go out and talk to people about politics ....
- jlarocco 15y ago
  There may be something to that, but it's hardly a universal feeling. I was laid off a few years ago and I took as much time off between jobs as I could afford. I got a bunch of hiking, biking and camping in; read a bunch; and generally had an excellent time. I only felt depressed when my savings started to get low and I knew I'd have to get a job. Some people connect their self worth to working, and they feel worthless when they're not working. Some people don't, and they don't have that problem.
Hyena 15y ago
Sadly, the premise going forward is that everyone should get a basic income. I don't think the monkeys will agree until it's far too late.
pnathan 15y ago
My introduction to Rushkoff was Cyberia [1]. He's much more temperate now than he was in Cyberia. He has a great point, though. Restated, it's as follows: If we have abundance, why are we working for more, instead of sending the abundance to those who need it? He seems to fall down in the mechanisms of distribution though in this article and hand-wave through it. [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyberia_(book) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyberia_(book...
- efalcao 15y ago
  Yeah, I like the premise of the article and feel that technological innovation does kill jobs (and it's not a bad thing). That being said, I feel like I got a big build up to a solution and it's like "share and make things and distribute online" uhhhh ok? Etsy is the solution? Provocative thinking though...
- patrickyeon 15y ago
  I very much like how you restated his point. I felt myself agreeing, nodding my head when he was following that thought, then I had the image of Rushkoff tripping and falling flat on his face once he tried to figure out how. I think it would've been a much stronger article had he ended with "I don't know how to make this happen, only that it needs to happen." As it stands, he's just suggesting a different job for these unemployed toll collectors to take up, as opposed to toll machine repair.
  - ddw 15y ago
    Except those people wouldn't be burdened by having a "job" because in Rushkoff's world "food and shelter are basic human rights." That's where people will get tripped up; in our current economic system we don't believe such an idea is true.
philwelch 15y ago
We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace. And, more to the point, a toll collector isn't necessarily bright enough to be a toll robot technician. Sometimes progress flows the other way; now the supermarket checker doesn't have to calculate your bill anymore or even know how to make change, so he can be completely innumerate. But for the most part, we're replacing less skilled jobs with more skilled jobs. We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them.
- randomdata 15y ago
  > We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them. Separation of concerns is our current solution to that problem. In software development, for example, good developers are hard to find, so we split the job up to add a designer role into the mix. Still finding it hard to find good people, we're now seeing the UX role come in. By giving each person less to do, the knowledge required to the job is reduced. You don't have to be a genius to be a part of the team. In agriculture, another industry I am close to, you have the same thing. One person drives the tractor, one person tends to the animals, one person repairs the equipment, etc. because it is hard to find a good farmhand that can do it all. We will eventually see the same shift for robotics as they become more and more prevalent. You'll have one person to diagnose the problem, one person to replace the part, etc. as the labour needs dictate.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    If you push separation of concerns far enough, you start finding roles that can be played by computers and robots rather than humans.
efalcao 15y ago
It's very interesting to think about cases where digital darlings have "killed jobs." Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business. After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspapers. Should we feel bad about it? Hell no. Are we marginally worse off? Maybe?
- ig1 15y ago
  The revenue didn't shift to CL - for most categories CL is still free, the users of it are the ones who got to keep the money.
  - learc83 15y ago
    Exactly, and now those users are free to use that money to buy other goods or invest, creating more jobs to fill the vacuum left by newspaper layoffs.
- ojbyrne 15y ago
  You're not considering the second order effects. Multiple competitors appear to compete with craigslist (either head to head or picking off the most attractive niches). Market grows, profits fall. Are we better off? Just look at the service. Before we had tiny little text ads in the back pages of newspapers, now we have pictures, directions, the ability to search and sort, etc... clearly the service is better. And I think once you take into account the second order effects, and the fact that there's significantly less friction around transactions, you end up with a larger total market, and probably close to a comparable number of jobs.
  - jbooth 15y ago
    There's no way that there's a comparable level of jobs. You know how many people the newspaper industry used to employ nationwide? Craigslist had substantially less than 100 last I heard (maybe they've grown a bit), pushing a way larger volume of classifieds, without any expensive correspondents or any of that news crap. As the original commentator stated, bringing their jobs back would be silly make-work now that they're obsolete, nobody's suggesting that. But it does present a problem.
rmc 15y ago
At first I thought this was going to be a conservative 'the modern world is killing everything good', but I was pleased to the argument come down to "computers are killing jobs, and this is a good thing". Though I don't believe it's accurate to say that Europe thrived under the feudal system. Many people did the same meaningless jobs all the time. The author also claims that the Industrial Age & Corporations were some massive scam to get the rich more.
- danmaz74 15y ago
  The thriving middle age Europe stuff is really misinformed. Almost all the people at that time worked in agriculture, and most of them (this varied by place, but in general) worked for somebody else: The landlord. They were usually free to organize the work, but a percentage of the produce was for the lord. And the land was his, not theirs.
joshu 15y ago
Metapoint: Headlines phrased as a question are almost always best answered "no." Try it!
- xianshou 15y ago
  Actually, I'm writing an article about it: "Are headlines phrased as questions always best answered 'No'?"
  - randallsquared 15y ago
    If only you'd said "usually"...
orenmazor 15y ago
so… the future != the past?
tjstankus 15y ago
The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance. Reminds me of this quote from Jello Biafra: Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music...or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed property owners so brain dead and stupid they won't even see that if you're too goddamn greedy to pay taxes for schools and services, they're not going to be any good any more! And that uneducated time bombs are a very poor investment as a future work force. And if you go on teaching people that life is cheap, and leave them to rot in ghettos and jails, they may one day feel justified in coming back to rob and kill you. Duh! (Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jello_Biafra http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jello_Biafra)
- bdhe 15y ago
  Excellent quote. I cannot unfortunately pull up citations but there was this great New Yorker piece on the prison system which talked about how ever since privatization of prisons began, vocational rehabilitation programs were severely cut and with the vast increase in non-violent offenders being subject to terrible living conditions it is no surprise that recidivism is so high. There is definitely something primal and emotional about a strong deterrent to crimes (violent or otherwise) but in the vast majority of cases, it is society and circumstance that turns people criminal, something that can be corrected in the long term with a healthier outlook on what it means to punish someone for a crime and reform the prison system.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- dreamdu5t 15y ago
  I think what Jello implies is wrong. People have the inherent ability to do bad things and treat eachother differently, regardless of whatever property system you have in place. Unemployment and undereducation will not be eliminated by the removal of private property. You don't have to be a property owner to be a self-absorbed dick that doesn't care about other people. If people want to make sure everybody has a living stipend (which is the logical conclusion of the goal of zero unemployment), they can pass a law creating that while still maintaining a system of property owners and private property.
protomyth 15y ago
Is there some statistics that proves there are less people worldwide doing work / employed today than say 50 years ago?
crxpandion 15y ago
Too bad what he suggests requires skills that most people don't have, at least not yet. To achieve this utopic vision we need to drastically change our education from being job-driven towards being production-driven (e.g. teaching more practical programming to younger audiences, encouraging self-motivated thinking rather than homework burn-out). This is not an easy task. I like his vision but I fail to see how it can work out. The reality is that people are lazy. While making stuff because you want to is awesome, most people would rather sit on the couch and consume. Its because they have to feed themselves and buy nice TVs that they go to work in the morning.
jneal 15y ago
As time goes on, and technological abilities improve, more and more jobs will fall to "robots" or computerized replacements for real jobs. There will always be need for creative jobs, engineers, etc, but the non-skilled labor jobs will be less and less. I don't see how anyone could disagree that there is already a problem here, and in the future, there will be an even bigger problem. The only people able to get jobs will be educated/skilled. The lower class will grow lower and lower. Aside from that, in the "old days" women stayed at home and took care of the family. "Nowadays" women are going to work, and I think that is absolutely great! However, that is more people working, therefore less jobs available. I'm sure we'll come up with a solution. Although I think the first step is admitting there is a problem. Innovation will come, it will just take time. Imagine a self-sufficient world far more advanced than ours. Imagine a world that practically runs itself and leaves us to care for each other and blossom with nature. The only problem is, this imagination world would never be allowed by multinational corporations and big business. Wealth would be more evenly distributed, they can't have that.
- mrbgty 15y ago
  more people working doesn't necessarily mean less jobs available. more people working can mean more jobs / value creation opportunities which results in more jobs overall
- maxxxxx 15y ago
  It will be interesting once there are no jobs for humans left because robots will be better at everything than humans. In theory, everybody could have a robot that provides them with everything they need.
  - billybob 15y ago
    Assuming that robots are free (gratis) but not free (libre), and that there's enough land for robots to farm, and enough water to irrigate it.
- billybob 15y ago
  'Aside from that, in the "old days" women stayed at home and took care of the family. "Nowadays" women are going to work, and I think that is absolutely great!' Another way of looking at this is, "in the old days, a household could be supported by one parent's work and the other could raise children. Now, both have to work to pay the bills, and children get less time with parents and more time in institutions."
jswinghammer 15y ago
I'm not sure the Post Office's problems are related to technology. Their union negotiated a "no layoff" provision in their contract just this year. Why would you agree to that as an employer? Then there is the problem of defined benefit pensions where you end up keeping people basically on staff long after they stop working for you. The Post Office needs to go bankrupt and clear these contracts out and move forward without a union ideally. They might need to wait for Obama to leave office before doing that. As for jobs there's always work to be done. There's an infinite amount of work in fact. In a free market involuntary unemployment should be zero because someone would always be willing to pay something for a given amount of work. I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand. I'm at home today caring for my family who are basically all sick and I'm seeing a lot of men just wandering around doing nothing. I'm going to guess that the incentive to work is absent in their life for one reason or another. Not sure libertarian means that you want people left out of the system and starving though. I am a libertarian and I've spent 90% of my time post college life running or helping to run a food pantry in my spare time. Seems silly to suggest that libertarians don't care about such things.
- entangld 15y ago
  >>I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand.<< People don't just need any job they can get. They need a job that will pay bills for a reasonable amount of time in the future. They need to save money to live on during the next job search. Temporary low paid jobs just leave the employee stressed out and barely above water before they need to search again. I don't think many people enjoy looking for work.
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    This high granularity of employment sounds like a terrible inefficiency. There are jobs that need to be done, but can't be, because they don't justify a full-time or part-time employee. There are people that need to work, but can't because much of the work that needs to be done is in chunks too small to occupy their time. Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency. We could then transition chronically unemployed but capable workers into these labor exchanges.
rcavezza 15y ago
I still think we're headed towards an era of "glocalization". I haven't heard this term since college geography courses, but we're headed back to an age where we are all local blacksmiths and silversmiths. We'll all be working for ourselves, but instead of being forced to sell to people in town, we can sell globally. Probably most of the people on this board fit into this categorization, but a much larger percent of the population will migrate towards this lifestyle over the next few years.
- 127001brewer 15y ago
  Your comment reminded me of this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/a-jobs-plan-for-the-post-cubicle-economy/244549/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/a-jobs-p...
lysol 15y ago
This was such an intriguing article until he posited that our citizens who formerly worked in manufacturing could replace their aspirations of long-term employment in a stable economy with some generic digital goods production that was never elaborated on in the article. I have to assume he meant they should all make doll clothes in Second Life.
- wushupork 15y ago
  Yeah he lost me there as well. Some of these people being displaced I feel probably won't have the motivation to be independent and produce said digital goods. That's why they are being displaced in the first place because they don't have new skills and their old skills are no longer needed.
beefman 15y ago
If we go all the way to a technological singularity in which not even "knowledge workers" are needed... we'll need a new way to distribute wealth. Between 1960 and 2009, employment in IT in the US rose by a factor of 1.6, while the population grew by a factor of 1.7 http://lumma.org/microwave/#2010.10.17 http://lumma.org/microwave/#2010.10.17 and many women entered the workforce, so the labor pool expanded by more than 1.7.
mayutana 15y ago
A similar model is being followed in Europe where the unemployed, disabled, recent mothers and the poorer people are provided some sort of basic support by the state. The higher earning people have extra cash to live more comfortably.
- serge2k 15y ago
  Unfortunately you have to support not only people who are just going through some tough times, but those who just want to leech off society. Plus those people who go out and have kids, then waste the money they are given to feed them on crap so their child is either starving or lives off a terrible diet. It's really not an easy problem to solve. Ideally everyone should be guaranteed that they get enough food and a place to live, with anything extra being their own responsibility. But this is hard to implement in practice.
  - mayutana 15y ago
    True, there are leaches too. But the goal to ensure that everyone has a basic level of living standard is in the direction of what the OP talks about. Note that this is different from the systems implemented in USSR where everyone was provided the same, regardless of their skills or efforts.
    - andreroehrig 15y ago
      It is not true that "everyone was provided the same, regardless of their skills or efforts" in actually existing socialist countries like the USSR. Some data for example on GDR(German text, but the numbers should be ok): http://doku.iab.de/mittab/1990/1990_4_mittab_stephan_wiedemann.pdf http://doku.iab.de/mittab/1990/1990_4_mittab_stephan_wiedema...
      - mayutana 15y ago
        I am talking about the model and not how it was implemented. Hypothetically speaking there is a difference between the three models: a) provide the same to all, b) Let everyone fend for themselves, and c) Provide a basic livelihood to all and allow the ones capable of earning more to do so.
extramoose 15y ago
"We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is." This is more ground for the fact that we might not be in a bubble with major financial crash risk like the .com bubble. The fact is that engineers who are building and inventing new technologies are building a societal system (possibly unintentionally) that puts technology, rather than people, at the top of the game (especially in terms of efficiency & profitability). While we may, as the tech industry, be relatively safe in the foreseeable future, this article really makes me question what we, as engineers, designers & general tech lovers, can invent/build that will allow future society to not only take advantage of our technologies (as end-users), but also allow individuals to make money in an increasingly digital and on-demand world.
bchjam 15y ago
reminded me of RA Wilson's RICH economy http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/rawilson.html http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/rawilson.html
- pradocchia 15y ago
  You know that Wilson and Rushkoff were friends, yes?
ryandvm 15y ago
It's a fact that computers/automation are going to continue to obsolete human jobs. Nothing short of a technological apocalypse is going to reverse that. And I agree that we shouldn't really lament the reality that a trucker who used to spend 50 hours a week vacuously staring at the highway no longer has to do that. But that's a triumph. One more human mind freed up for greater accomplishments. That said, I'm dubious of his suggestion that we all turn to purely creative pursuits. At least, it will be a very, very long time before automation gets us to that point. I'm more interested in what we do in the meantime. What are we supposed to do with hordes of workers that are freed up in the coming decades as menial jobs disappear at an exceeding clip? My guess is that this is a problem the labor markets will solve on their own. That is, the solution to a disappearing amount of work is that, on average, we all simply work less. Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)? Of course, we're going to need to reduce per employee costs/benefits to make this work, but that's a good idea no matter what. Making the employer responsible for health care and retirement caused more problems than it solved anyway.
- ippisl 15y ago
  Without some regulation , why would the work week become shorter ? for many people , working a 40 hour work week barely covers their expenses. why would they want to work less ?
  - colanderman 15y ago
    I've always thought that a 30 hr work week should be regulated, forcing employees to demand higher wages in order to survive, forcing employers to raise wages, and forcing CEOs to be paid less, thus reducing the income gap.
    - pemulis 15y ago
      If that sort of thing was effective, income inequality would have dropped over the past 60 years as government regulations raised the minimum wage and shortened the work week. Instead, it dramatically increased. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distr...
chailatte 15y ago
My theory from before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906769 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906769 - In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare, supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities, cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet. - 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via service or thievery. They will be the new middle class. They can afford the sometimes luxury. - the other 5.5% will be specialized knowledge workers. They will be the one maintaining the software/hardware to make sure nothing goes wrong. They can afford lots of luxury, but will be taxed heavily, as they are the only workhorse left in the society. - 0.1% will be entertainers. They will make sure that people are entertained well enough not to riot. - and the 0.4% will rule everyone.
- silverbax88 15y ago
  I don't mean to sound condescending (although I'm sure I will), but your theory about the future has already happened, and collapsed, in other countries: USSR and China being two prominent recent examples.
  - hammock 15y ago
    If anything, those examples prove that it really could happen.
    - silverbax88 15y ago
      Not could. Did. Many times.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - akg_67 15y ago
    China didn't collapses, only USSR did. China learnt from USSR collapse and now showing the world how to grow while maintaining control. Chaillete's future seems a possibility. Provide a basic level of necessities but beyond that you will need to earn your way. Isn't that's what Chinese are doing? Whether communism or capitalisms, both extremes are bad as both results in concentration of power in the hands of a few
cchurch 15y ago
What a bunch of hippy bullshit.
- pnathan 15y ago
  You are being downvoted because your statement was not a constructive comment.
njharman 15y ago
Most people work to get money to spend on stuff people are making. Full employment 40+ hours a week is obsolete. Consumerism is obsolete. We should all be working 10hrs/week or less and have/consume 1/10 to 1/4 of what we have/consume today. That's not gonna happen easily, but it's gonna happen. Perhaps not in my lifetime. I'm making guess that space exploitation will not ramp up in time, it might though.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Are you suggesting that 3/4th - 9/10th of spending is on luxury goods?
  - _delirium 15y ago
    It really depends on what you consider a luxury good. For example, some amount of housing is a "necessity", some amount is "nice to have", and some is "luxury", but I doubt people agree on the boundaries. The bar of what people consider a necessity seems to rise with income, so people recategorize what they would've once seen as luxury as non-luxury. I was recently adding up what it would take to live in a cheap-ish place like Pittsburgh: 1) frugally; and 2) modestly but comfortably; and the numbers are absurdly low if you really stick to necessities. YMMV elsewhere.
    - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
      Job availability and wages also decrease when you do that.
    - learc83 15y ago
      Yes. My very average house today is a huge luxury compared to the very average house my grandparents bought in the 60s. I have a cable bill, an iPhone bill, an internet bill, a netflix bill, and too many various SaaS subscriptions. My grandparents had none of those. I also have a much higher power bill to pay for all my consumer electronics and air conditioning, a higher health insurance bill to pay for drastically better health care, an extra car insurance policy. That's in addition to all the extra stuff I have lying around. 2 cars, not one, both of which are vastly superior and more expensive than what my grandparents had. Superior home appliances. And 1 metric tonne of electronics. I have so much more material wealth than all but the very richest did just 50 years ago. How could I complain that I'm not better off?
ddw 15y ago
Long term, technology can lead to our society being more peaceful and enjoyable than ever before. The short term is the problem though as there are so many people without the skills to work in the future that the transition may be too painful for society to make it to the long term.
FredBrach 15y ago
Amazing. Just amazing. I like!
danmaz74 15y ago
Technology rising productivity (and so needing less people to create the same products) is at the base of our wealth. The real problem is that the pace of technology innovation (and jobs transfer overseas, and other changes) can be too fast for people to keep up with those changes. Public action to both slow down some changes, and to help in adapting, can become a necessity in those times. But right now too many people believe the ideology that the market will fix everything itself, even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. It is just too good an excuse to just mind your own business, and everyone else be damned, I guess...
tsotha 15y ago
>Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff. It's a little more complicated than that. The economy is a huge, complicated machine. The reason we have enough stuff is it mostly works to convince people go get up when the alarm goes off and go do something they'd rather not do instead of fishing or playing video games. If we start just giving people money because we can afford it we will quickly be unable to afford it.
billybob 15y ago
Great! All we have to do is convince poor people to be happy living at a subsistence level, and convince rich people to be happy supporting them! Seriously, I agree with his point that, say, building bridges in order to create jobs is backwards. But his plan seems to require changing basic human motivations.
- nyrath 15y ago
  Well, you can avoid changing basic human motivations by using an alternative solution. Jay Gould is attributed to have said "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. "
  - brohee 15y ago
    The current version is more akin to hiring half the working class to guard the other imprisoned half. It's more sustainable that way. http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/ http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/
cwp 15y ago
There is a nugget of useful discussion in there, in that corporations aren't as necessary as they used to be. Better communication technology lowers coordination costs and we don't need big organization and bureaucracy to get big things done anymore. But the whole "technology is destroying jobs" meme is just horseshit. What's destroying jobs in the US is lack of demand. Other counties (no, not all of them, but many) are doing just fine, thank you, despite technology. I wonder if this kind of thing is a result of the high and accelerating pace of technological change we're experiencing. We expect change to be so fast that we don't even try to predict the future based on the past and present, we just throw our hands up and declare everything to be a fundamental paradigm shift, rather than a cyclical or temporary phenomenon.
- jcromartie 15y ago
  You're right: Technology doesn't kill jobs. It kills demand. Who wants to send paper mail, or a landline phone, or to take out traditional classified ads? The alternatives are too appealing and the demand for the old versions is never coming back.
  - cwp 15y ago
    Ugh. No. The financial crisis killed demand.
    - jcromartie 15y ago
      The financial crisis did not make people buy mobile phones instead of landlines, Hulu and Netflix instead of cable TV, or Craigslist instead of local newspaper ads, or ebooks instead of paper books. It might have accelerated the shift, because the new technology was cheaper, but people naturally gravitate to the better product. These technologies split, reorganized, transferred, concentrated or decentralized demand. Call it what you will, but people want the new stuff over the old stuff. And if they want it, they'll buy it.
    - suivix 15y ago
      Why did the horse and buggy go away? Lack of demand, I'd say.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jganetsk 15y ago
Policy adjustments for maintaining capitalism in the post-employment era: provide a minimum guaranteed income to all citizens and abolish minimum wage. This was Milton Friedman's idea. This would create a massive market for a standard "life package": a combination of food, shelter, and healthcare for one person with cost equal to the minimum income. We could even have cities organized around the concept. Then, people can go to work in creation spaces where they get micro-paid exactly what their contribution is worth. Getting $5 for a blog post I write sounds great if I enjoy doing it and am not hungry.
- msluyter 15y ago
  This is also Marshall Brain's idea: http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm IIRC, he advocates a 25k stipend for all americans, which incidentally, given ~300M people would cost 7.5 trillion. That's approximately double the entire federal budget for 2012. Factoring in state/local spending gets you to near 6 trillion. Given that fact and our current political climate, I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that it'll be a quite a while before adopt such a solution. ;) Brain suggests lots of ways of raising the money (some rather implausible) here: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
  - jganetsk 15y ago
    A guaranteed minimum income is not the same thing as a stipend. If the guaranteed minimum income is 25k, and your personal income is over 25k, the government doesn't owe you anything. You would owe the government something.
tibbon 15y ago
In a related video that CNN linked in, it was being questioned if companies that aren't hiring are being unpatriotic. Union leader James Hoffa was saying that Apple is being unpatriotic by not hiring here in the US. But, I don't quite understand James Hoffa saying that Apple isn't hiring- they are hiring both retail and corporate jobs. http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/ http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/ Yes, they employ and sub-contract a lot of people overseas, but that's just the way things work in 2011. How many people are going to pay $10,000 for a laptop or $1,400 for an iPhone? That's probably the difference in price that it would require for Apple to make their products 100% here.
shoham 15y ago
Thanks for sharing! Great article, reminded me of a great speech I read recently that Paul Graham gave in 2005: http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html The jist is the same as Rushkoff's, and Lanier's conclusion-- that people perform better when they do something they care about enough to do it for free. The paradox with the digital age is that consumers have grown accustomed to not paying for digital goods -- and artists have grown accustomed to settling for any attention they can get, which means marketing gimmicks, and settling for the lowest common denominator far too often for authors of original content. Lanier covers this well, for sure: http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip
olliesaunders 15y ago
There’s a really good book on this topic called Creating You & Co.[1] that is all about how it’s not jobs that are important—that’s an overspecialization—but work. And work can be done in any number of ways: automation, out-sourcing, crowd-sourcing, etc. The book is quite old so it only really talks about alternative human-based work delivery but it’s still arguing for a new worldview on work and employment that is well ahead of its time. I have to remind myself every time I watch the news—particularly those interviews with “experts”—that job losses aren’t quite the gloomy picture they seem to be. And the solution isn’t necessarily to manufacture more positions for people. 1: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creating-You-Co-Learn-Career/dp/0738200328/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creating-You-Co-Learn-Career/dp/0738...
zasz 15y ago
I don't think anyone would want to pay for the art I can make. I don't want to pay for anyone else's either. Given how much music piracy there is, and the vast skill disparity between casual amateurs and dedicated professionals, and the near-zero cost of replicating the bits composed by someone better than me or any of my immediate peers, I can't believe the author thinks that trading bits is a possible outcome. Why would I want my dad to educate me when I could watch OpenCourseware? Why would I want my friend's painting when I could get something much better over deviantArt? Why would I bother getting recipes from my mom if I can get them from a 4 star Michelin chef instead?
- runjake 15y ago
  To answer all your why's: sentimentalism, that's why. Learning or receiving from people you know is often more valuable, imho.
- icebraining 15y ago
  You might not want your friend's art, but there's plenty of excellent art not on DeviantArt. Especially if you custom made: Kickstart and other escrow services can fund stuff that doesn't exist yet (and therefore can't be pirated). Similar to what's done with TV shows (a pilot is made, then if there's interest by any network, they fund the rest of the season), but with artists directly proposing their 'pilots' (a first chapter of a book, a trailer of a movie, a single song) directly to the audience and letting them fund the rest.
  - zasz 15y ago
    So if you're willing to grant the point that not everyone is going to be capable of creating good art, then what do the non-producers do? Just sit back and consume? The problem is that we use productive output as a heuristic for determining how much stuff to give back to a given member of society. If the standard changes from "making widgets" to "making art," most people are still going to starve.
Vivtek 15y ago
Oh, for Christ's sake, does everything have to be the End of History nowadays?
narrator 15y ago
All this technology should be lowering the cost of living. Instead, constant inflation in the money supply, via the money multiplier effect, quantitative easing and continuously falling interest rates, eats up all the benefits of increased technology and transfers them to the financial sector and their clients. If there wasn't this huge parasite of debt , which is getting paid to somebody, somewhere who doesn't have to work, thank you very much, it would be dirt cheap to live and people would be able to get by very easily with most of the population not having to work.
chernevik 15y ago
Mr. Rushkoff wants to "organize society around employment", but he ought to reflect that it's going to be organized around _something_. There is going to be a distribution of power, it's an inevitable feature of society. Do we wanted organized around what each of us can do for the benefit of others, as measured freely by those others? Or do we want it organized around what everyone else thinks of us? I can do a lot more about my worries about getting a job than I can about worries about the opinion of my local commissar.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
Pulling out a specific nit: "America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working." And from an old college textbook on the definition of economics - Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources. Here it the hard nut in the thesis, what mechanism, process, or theory, could manage determining who works and who doesn't in a society? We currently have a system where the wealthiest tax payers pay a grossly disproportionate share of the total tax receipts. Some fraction of those receipts are used to fund the lives of the least wealthy individuals. It doesn't seem to work as well as we would like. Consider a more communist flavored theory, if Bob's education, skills, and work ethic allow him to generate gross domestic product which would support 5 average citizens. Do we make Bob and his four comrades equal consumers of the GDP that Bob has generated? Would Bob continue to produce at that rate? Enlightened self interest is a powerful thing. But taking away the 'fruits of one's labor' to redistribute it amongst the less fortunate doesn't motivate the high performers or the low performers to higher economic output. I am always interested in systems which might replace capitalism as an organizing principle. But until we have such a system we won't be able to manage the disparity of productivity in a socially acceptable way.
- Retric 15y ago
  A major nitpick as a middle American a disproportionate percentage of MY salary is used to support the poor relative to rich people. The vast majority of wealth redistribution in this country is though SS which the wealthy get to opt out from. When you consider that I pay more in SS as a percentage of my income than Warren Buffet's entire tax bill there is something wrong with this picture. (In theory I might see some of that money back but even I nothing changes and I live to see 120 I would still be far worse off with SS than without.) PS: Some people think of corporate taxes as double taxation on the wealthy but nothing in the US tax code says you need to invest in US companies and if you actually look at taxes paid by large companies it's vary low relative to the stated tax rate.
  - Domenic_S 15y ago
    > a disproportionate percentage of MY salary is used to support the poor relative to rich people. The operative word there is "salary". Buffet had such a low (as a %) tax bill because most of his income isn't salary but cap gains. Let's raise cap gains tax to 50% you say? Sounds great until you sell your house in a few years.
gills 15y ago
We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful. So...nobody creates value (or performs work, for that matter) growing the food or building the shelters, right? Riiiiight... Magical thinking at it's best.
- piguy314 15y ago
  No you tax productive activity to pay farmers to grow food (see SNAP/food stamp program).
libraryatnight 15y ago
Strikes and gutters, ups and downs.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
Let me see if I understand this reasoning correctly. Old, fragile and stiff huge organizations like the Post Office cannot provide the numbers of jobs they used to. The economy is changing. Therefore -- some hand-waving here -- the very idea of jobs is out-of-date. Ouch. But it gets better. We should pay folks not to work. After all, there's no jobs for them, so why should we expect them to do things that are impossible? This is very reminiscent to me of all the hare-brained articles about capitalism being dead that came out right around the banking crisis. Yes, things are way screwed up, but capitalism remains. You could make any kind of wide-spread social change you wanted and capitalism would still remain. People like to trade stuff. The crazy thing here is, like most of this tripe, there's a nugget of something useful in there. We cannot predict how the labor force will evolve. To do so is folly. The answer to this is not to announce the death of jobs, it's to create systems where new job roles which are unforeseen by us are created. To promote flexible adaptation in our businesses and governments. What's dead is our big boxes of generic labels to stick on things -- all those labels and boxes have been stretched so far they don't work any more. Trying to continue to create policies around those labels and boxes is idiotic. We all need to adapt -- not in a lets-bring-some-academics-on-tv-to-talk-about-the-knowledge-economy sense, but in a real, live policy sense. If your terms and generalizations are bad, your conclusions and policies will never work. I understand that's frustrating and that you are out of ideas -- but a mental model with a huge impedance mismatch the reason, not that we've suddenly been thrust into a 27th century scarcity-free economy. Take a look at the comments on this thread. Everybody gets out their favorite political pinata and beats on it. Is this a very productive type of article for this site?
- Helianthus 15y ago
  I think you're missing the overall stab. As you say "Trying to continue to create policies around those labels and boxes is idiotic"--because those labels and boxes are out of date. Which is to say, 'job' might just be one of those labels. This is _about_ redefining terms and generalizations.
  - potatolicious 15y ago
    But how are jobs out of date? What we're going through is not substantially different from what happened during the industrial revolution, or the invention of the loom. We're talking about the complete obsolescence of an entire group of skilled tradespeople due to automation. People will continue to work for other people, doing certain things - which is pretty much the definition of "job". In time - possibly not in time for this current generation of unemployed - society will find new jobs for people to do. But jobs they will be.
fuzionmonkey 15y ago
Ridiculous. If we had our priorities straight, there would be low unemployment. Our infrastructure is crumbling beneath us, yet we won't spend any money to fix it. Instead we're fighting a handful of wars abroad that doesn't help us at all. We need better roads, public transportation, and faster internet.
orblivion 15y ago
I only heard about self-driving cars last month. They're not putting taxi drivers out of business any time soon. It's a concept I've considered as well, jobs are actually bad, it means that there's something someone wants that isn't done. This guy is just a bit early, try back in 50 years.
deleted 15y ago
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ctdonath 15y ago
"I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? ... on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working." This belies a gross misunderstanding of how national socio-economies work. Yes, we could. One of my blogs is "A Buck A Plate" http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com featuring sufficient meals for $1/person/meal. A favorite study is "tiny homes" http://tinyhouseblog.com http://tinyhouseblog.com where nice cozy accomodations can be had for $10,000/person. Beyond that, I've figured one "could probably shelter, feed, educate and even provide health care for its entire population" for just $10/day. Are you ready to live on $10/day? is anybody? Long story short, it would take about $1T/yr to pay everyone in the USA a "living income" of a paltry $10/day. Note that current federal revenue is about $2T ($4.5T including state revenues), with federal spending about twice that. Of a culture where the vast majority decide to vote themselves monies from the treasury, John Adams wrote "The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence." Enjoying the comforts of a culture wallowing in the height of luxury, Rushkoff opines in effect that the source of that comfort be eliminated on the absurd theory that enough will be produced when there is no carrot nor stick incentiveizing people to work. No, Mr. Rushkoff, people need not work when confiscating the hard-earned wealth of others is enough. Problem is, those who produce will not be appreciated, but reviled, and their incentive to produce taken away. Despite the symbolic official $1 salary of its CEO, Apple was driven by _profit_, and its products available only to those who in turn sought _profit_ in other endeavors. Take away the profit motive by confiscating incomes to supply the idle, and few of the idle will use the opportunity for lofty endeavors; nay, most will cultivate dissatisfaction and demand more be confiscated for their gain. As an ancient writer opined, "if any would not work, neither should he eat."
Spyro7 15y ago
Why is this being upvoted? This article begins with a questionable premise and then descends straight into misinformation. The problems in the USPS did not begin with email. They began with a highly questionable requirement that the USPS fund a plan to fully cover the estimated future health care costs of all current employees. They are the only government institution required to do this, and it has crippled their ability to remain profitable: * http://www.plansponsor.com/Post_Office_Says_PreFunding_Retiree_Health_Care_is_Reason_for_Loss.aspx http://www.plansponsor.com/Post_Office_Says_PreFunding_Retir... * Read First Few Pages Here -> http://www.uspsoig.gov/foia_files/RARC-WP-10-001.pdf http://www.uspsoig.gov/foia_files/RARC-WP-10-001.pdf * http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/us/23postal.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/us/23postal.html They have overpaid this fund by billions of dollars, but they are not able to use this money to address their current financial shortcomings. Somehow the author of this piece is able to extrapolate from the fiscal problems of the USPS to the overall job market. The extrapolation is misguided at best. There are so many things wrong in this article that I will not take the time to address them all. (Most of Europe was thriving in the Middle Ages? Really? The author needs to define the word thrive.) I just want to say that I find it interesting that there is so much hand-wringing in these comments about jobs being displaced by technology. In economics, we like to call this creative destruction. Old jobs go away and new jobs take their place. This is a natural process, and their is nothing so magically different about the technological revolution that it will somehow "make jobs obsolete". Just as The Luddites protested against the loss of jobs brought on by the technological progress of the Industrial Revolution, now some individuals protest against the loss of jobs brought on by the technological progress of the "Technological Revolution". Then, as now, it was all hand-wringing and nail-biting with no serious economic analysis. The critics say this time is different, this time there will be no new jobs, and we should urge people to find something other to do than working. The critics are wrong. Don't worry people. Employment is here to stay. Side Note: The author engages in some navel gazing when he says America has all that it needs. I'm not sure if the author has noticed it or not, but there is a such thing as globalization and the global needs for goods and services will increase as developing countries close the ground with developed nations. This global recession is just another business cycle, eventually the world will have another upswing, and then we will revert to mean again. There is no magic here, just the march of time. I would not put too much stock into those who believe that a single recession merits the reevaluation of the entire modern economic system. Edit: Trying to trim the size. Eventually, I will learn the art of not making posts into walls of text.
DirtyCalvinist 15y ago
Britain, the Low Countries, France and the German States all went through this process in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Historians call it pauperization. The only good solution seems to be keeping people from starving to death (the above named societies often did not, incidentally) and wait for/encourage the economy to find a way to suck up the surplus labor.
duairc 15y ago
Oh fuck all of you capitalist scum. I really hate how much of this community is based on this really fucked up reappropriation of the hacker ethos into some sort of pro-capitalist thing. Capitalism is an inherently authoritarian economic system. (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/The_Anarchist_FAQ_Editorial_Collective__An_Anarchist_FAQ__07_17_.html http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/The_Anarchist_FAQ_Editor...) And don't give me this bullshit about communism being authoritarian and then pointing to the USSR - the USSR had nothing to do with communism, and communism is not the only alternative to capitalism nor are they even the opposite of each other.
brianobush 15y ago
how are jobs obsolete when 91% of the working-aged population (in the US) have one?
- brohee 15y ago
  The last number I heard was more like 56% for the US (can't find the source back, percentage of adults working is a surprisingly hard to find number). Working people number ain't number of working age people minus number of job seeking people. It's number of working age people minus (job seeking people, people on disabilities and not looking for a job, people in jail, stay at home parents, people who retired early...)
tomlin 15y ago
So let's start picking apart this article. And the other article that talks about the end of capitalism. And then the next 50, 100, 1000 articles that prey on our confused notion that capitalism is the end-game for eternity. Watch as self-driving vehicles takeover all modes of goods transport. And robotics and information systems remove 90% of the health care workforce. And construction. And education. Keep telling yourself that your vision of capitalism is exact and free from evolution. Eventually, a grounded theory that revolutionizes capitalism will emerge. Do we know what the evolution will be or how it will work? I certainly don't. But I do believe in evolution and evolution in markets. Defending capitalism like it dragged you out of a flaming building is self-serving, not logical. Capitalism is an ideology. It can and will change, with or without consent.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
littlegiantcap 15y ago
Jobs becoming obsolete? Yes surely just as we have never recovered from the loss of shoe cobbling jobs or manual labor farming jobs due to the industrial revolution the internet and technology will be the death of us all!
peterwwillis 15y ago
Next on CNN: Food: Why you probably don't need it Exercise: Less of it could mean more healthcare jobs Transportation: Could rising oil prices make it impossible to go anywhere? Safety: Could banning non-Christians from entering the country make us safer? 9/11: What about the bright side? Culture: Is Lil Wayne the music genius of the decade?
- trop 15y ago
  Right on about food. Isn't that another fear, global food scarcities, green revolution not keeping up, fields poisoned by industrial fertilizers... Let's get used to having less, unless we get back on the farm.
crizCraig 15y ago
I think he has a great point that the value a person creates is not easily compensated in an information economy. Right now the information economy makes up less than 5% of the total in the U.S. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9632169/EconomicCensus2007.html http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9632169/EconomicCensus2007.html from http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFEconFacts?_event=&geo_id=01000US&_geoContext=01000US&_street=&_county=&_cityTown=&_state=&_zip=&_lang=en&_sse=on&ActiveGeoDiv=&_useEV=&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&_submenuId=business_1&ds_name=&_ci_nbr=&qr_name=&reg=&_keyword=&_industry= http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFEconFacts?_event=&#... So advertising for the other sectors in the economy works well to support most of the information sector right now. What happens as those other sectors become more automated though? The smaller and smaller amount of people in charge of those sectors will become disproportionately compensated for the value they create. This is already happening in Wall Street for example. So we're going to need to find some way to compensate people for their digital contributions to things like open source, online communities like this, and other informational public goods or we'll be left relying on the government and/or super rich to distribute the abundance of wealth. Neither of which sound very appealing to me.
wbienek 15y ago
Don't have much mercy when I read these kinds of stories. I went to a job interview back in 2000 for a 28,000 a year job. Knew 6 computer languages and significantly more than the interviewee and all this colleges employees. (in my opinion) this was a small college in Michigan. They never called me back. A few weeks later I started a small company. Today I make upwards of 250k a year. No college education. They (college people) can all go starving on the street like they would have left me and my two new born twins. No help from the "establishment" for me no matter how smart I was. Let em all lose their jib and starve.. Let em be in college debt. I smirk at the barrages who would have let me go homeless every time I read stories like this. No quarter wad given to me. Now that theyre expected to oroduce. Now thier college means diddle it is my turn to watch from the sidelines. I know that if I don't make money MYSELF nobody ----especially "college" people will help.. Posted from an iPad I never would have had if I let the establishment guide my life..
awolf 15y ago
> We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful. This is a nice thought but it seems impossible to move forward until food and shelter are givens for everyone world wide - not just givens for those in the USA.
nicklovescode 15y ago
They are great Chairmen
drstrangevibes 15y ago
money is no longer necessary, our current economic systems dont work and do not reflect the abundance we create. I propose that everything is made free instead, everyone just take as much as they need.
tomlin 15y ago
I am going to get downvoted for criticizing an ideology - especially capitalism, which I would consider HN the best place for. We'll see. These technological evolutions are not lightyears away. They are around the corner and they are coming fast. Also, remember that with each branch of technological evolution comes a whole subset of mashup-ability. There are countless jobs to be had by these innovations. Of all communities, you'd think HN would be the highest order witness to the fall of capitalism since many of the startups and weekend projects seek to automate, or otherwise kill off manual intervention (read: jobs). Take a few of your favorite properties, YC or otherwise, then take a look back 20 years and compare the industry they represent today. What if Airbnb became a household name, do you think that will increase the employment at Best Western? Or an open MLS system. Increase real estate agents? Internet businesses, in general, seek to destroy inconvenience and under the best intentions. Just as I am sure capitalism works under the best intentions, despite child labour and deforestation. 50 years is not so ridiculous to plan for. We're giving our parents and grandparents flack for not taking care of our planet - "Where was your foresight!", we say. And here we are doing no better. We've already rolled into the same comfy cognitive dissonance.
grammaton 15y ago
"As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products." This right here is my favorite piece of unintentional irony out of the whole article.
rohitkumar 15y ago
I highly agree that the conventional 'job' is becoming obsolete. Technology is enabling us to live in a bottom-up world where we can add value individually. We don't have to to work for a company to add value. Imagine all the commerce that could be happening in a 5 mile radius from where you live - all the needs you could address to add value. And when you add value, you are rewarded financially. There is no recession.

436 points by ekm2 15y ago

This article skips discussing one reason why jobs are in a sense ends to themselves: the feeling of being useful. Retired people often complain that they don't know what to do with themselves after leaving the workforce, so they go do things like volunteering. A friend of mine recently took 2 months off between jobs and nearing the end of that time, she started becoming very depressed and realized it was because she wasn't contributing to society or to herself. I think most people work not only to pay the bills or to acquire luxury items, but to have a sense of self-worth.

zasz 15y ago
It might not be "feeling useful" so much as the social stimulation. The days when I work from home and don't talk to anyone at the office are soul-crushingly lonely, sometimes, even if I'm very active over IM.
- nickik 15y ago
  Very much agree its a social thing. "The West" looks down on people that don't work does they feel bad and usless. All these people that will not have to work for money anymore have more time and they should be encouraged do good things. Take care of your parents, look after there children, study a new field, go out and talk to people about politics ....
jlarocco 15y ago
There may be something to that, but it's hardly a universal feeling. I was laid off a few years ago and I took as much time off between jobs as I could afford. I got a bunch of hiking, biking and camping in; read a bunch; and generally had an excellent time. I only felt depressed when my savings started to get low and I knew I'd have to get a job. Some people connect their self worth to working, and they feel worthless when they're not working. Some people don't, and they don't have that problem.

Hyena 15y ago

Sadly, the premise going forward is that everyone should get a basic income. I don't think the monkeys will agree until it's far too late.

pnathan 15y ago

My introduction to Rushkoff was Cyberia [1]. He's much more temperate now than he was in Cyberia. He has a great point, though. Restated, it's as follows: If we have abundance, why are we working for more, instead of sending the abundance to those who need it? He seems to fall down in the mechanisms of distribution though in this article and hand-wave through it. [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyberia_(book) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyberia_(book...

efalcao 15y ago
Yeah, I like the premise of the article and feel that technological innovation does kill jobs (and it's not a bad thing). That being said, I feel like I got a big build up to a solution and it's like "share and make things and distribute online" uhhhh ok? Etsy is the solution? Provocative thinking though...
patrickyeon 15y ago
I very much like how you restated his point. I felt myself agreeing, nodding my head when he was following that thought, then I had the image of Rushkoff tripping and falling flat on his face once he tried to figure out how. I think it would've been a much stronger article had he ended with "I don't know how to make this happen, only that it needs to happen." As it stands, he's just suggesting a different job for these unemployed toll collectors to take up, as opposed to toll machine repair.
- ddw 15y ago
  Except those people wouldn't be burdened by having a "job" because in Rushkoff's world "food and shelter are basic human rights." That's where people will get tripped up; in our current economic system we don't believe such an idea is true.

philwelch 15y ago

We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace. And, more to the point, a toll collector isn't necessarily bright enough to be a toll robot technician. Sometimes progress flows the other way; now the supermarket checker doesn't have to calculate your bill anymore or even know how to make change, so he can be completely innumerate. But for the most part, we're replacing less skilled jobs with more skilled jobs. We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them.

randomdata 15y ago
> We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them. Separation of concerns is our current solution to that problem. In software development, for example, good developers are hard to find, so we split the job up to add a designer role into the mix. Still finding it hard to find good people, we're now seeing the UX role come in. By giving each person less to do, the knowledge required to the job is reduced. You don't have to be a genius to be a part of the team. In agriculture, another industry I am close to, you have the same thing. One person drives the tractor, one person tends to the animals, one person repairs the equipment, etc. because it is hard to find a good farmhand that can do it all. We will eventually see the same shift for robotics as they become more and more prevalent. You'll have one person to diagnose the problem, one person to replace the part, etc. as the labour needs dictate.
- philwelch 15y ago
  If you push separation of concerns far enough, you start finding roles that can be played by computers and robots rather than humans.

efalcao 15y ago

It's very interesting to think about cases where digital darlings have "killed jobs." Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business. After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspapers. Should we feel bad about it? Hell no. Are we marginally worse off? Maybe?

ig1 15y ago
The revenue didn't shift to CL - for most categories CL is still free, the users of it are the ones who got to keep the money.
- learc83 15y ago
  Exactly, and now those users are free to use that money to buy other goods or invest, creating more jobs to fill the vacuum left by newspaper layoffs.
ojbyrne 15y ago
You're not considering the second order effects. Multiple competitors appear to compete with craigslist (either head to head or picking off the most attractive niches). Market grows, profits fall. Are we better off? Just look at the service. Before we had tiny little text ads in the back pages of newspapers, now we have pictures, directions, the ability to search and sort, etc... clearly the service is better. And I think once you take into account the second order effects, and the fact that there's significantly less friction around transactions, you end up with a larger total market, and probably close to a comparable number of jobs.
- jbooth 15y ago
  There's no way that there's a comparable level of jobs. You know how many people the newspaper industry used to employ nationwide? Craigslist had substantially less than 100 last I heard (maybe they've grown a bit), pushing a way larger volume of classifieds, without any expensive correspondents or any of that news crap. As the original commentator stated, bringing their jobs back would be silly make-work now that they're obsolete, nobody's suggesting that. But it does present a problem.

rmc 15y ago

At first I thought this was going to be a conservative 'the modern world is killing everything good', but I was pleased to the argument come down to "computers are killing jobs, and this is a good thing". Though I don't believe it's accurate to say that Europe thrived under the feudal system. Many people did the same meaningless jobs all the time. The author also claims that the Industrial Age & Corporations were some massive scam to get the rich more.

danmaz74 15y ago
The thriving middle age Europe stuff is really misinformed. Almost all the people at that time worked in agriculture, and most of them (this varied by place, but in general) worked for somebody else: The landlord. They were usually free to organize the work, but a percentage of the produce was for the lord. And the land was his, not theirs.

joshu 15y ago

Metapoint: Headlines phrased as a question are almost always best answered "no." Try it!

xianshou 15y ago
Actually, I'm writing an article about it: "Are headlines phrased as questions always best answered 'No'?"
- randallsquared 15y ago
  If only you'd said "usually"...

orenmazor 15y ago

so… the future != the past?

tjstankus 15y ago

The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance. Reminds me of this quote from Jello Biafra: Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music...or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed property owners so brain dead and stupid they won't even see that if you're too goddamn greedy to pay taxes for schools and services, they're not going to be any good any more! And that uneducated time bombs are a very poor investment as a future work force. And if you go on teaching people that life is cheap, and leave them to rot in ghettos and jails, they may one day feel justified in coming back to rob and kill you. Duh! (Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jello_Biafra http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jello_Biafra)

bdhe 15y ago
Excellent quote. I cannot unfortunately pull up citations but there was this great New Yorker piece on the prison system which talked about how ever since privatization of prisons began, vocational rehabilitation programs were severely cut and with the vast increase in non-violent offenders being subject to terrible living conditions it is no surprise that recidivism is so high. There is definitely something primal and emotional about a strong deterrent to crimes (violent or otherwise) but in the vast majority of cases, it is society and circumstance that turns people criminal, something that can be corrected in the long term with a healthier outlook on what it means to punish someone for a crime and reform the prison system.
deleted 15y ago
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dreamdu5t 15y ago
I think what Jello implies is wrong. People have the inherent ability to do bad things and treat eachother differently, regardless of whatever property system you have in place. Unemployment and undereducation will not be eliminated by the removal of private property. You don't have to be a property owner to be a self-absorbed dick that doesn't care about other people. If people want to make sure everybody has a living stipend (which is the logical conclusion of the goal of zero unemployment), they can pass a law creating that while still maintaining a system of property owners and private property.

protomyth 15y ago

Is there some statistics that proves there are less people worldwide doing work / employed today than say 50 years ago?

crxpandion 15y ago

Too bad what he suggests requires skills that most people don't have, at least not yet. To achieve this utopic vision we need to drastically change our education from being job-driven towards being production-driven (e.g. teaching more practical programming to younger audiences, encouraging self-motivated thinking rather than homework burn-out). This is not an easy task. I like his vision but I fail to see how it can work out. The reality is that people are lazy. While making stuff because you want to is awesome, most people would rather sit on the couch and consume. Its because they have to feed themselves and buy nice TVs that they go to work in the morning.

jneal 15y ago

As time goes on, and technological abilities improve, more and more jobs will fall to "robots" or computerized replacements for real jobs. There will always be need for creative jobs, engineers, etc, but the non-skilled labor jobs will be less and less. I don't see how anyone could disagree that there is already a problem here, and in the future, there will be an even bigger problem. The only people able to get jobs will be educated/skilled. The lower class will grow lower and lower. Aside from that, in the "old days" women stayed at home and took care of the family. "Nowadays" women are going to work, and I think that is absolutely great! However, that is more people working, therefore less jobs available. I'm sure we'll come up with a solution. Although I think the first step is admitting there is a problem. Innovation will come, it will just take time. Imagine a self-sufficient world far more advanced than ours. Imagine a world that practically runs itself and leaves us to care for each other and blossom with nature. The only problem is, this imagination world would never be allowed by multinational corporations and big business. Wealth would be more evenly distributed, they can't have that.

mrbgty 15y ago
more people working doesn't necessarily mean less jobs available. more people working can mean more jobs / value creation opportunities which results in more jobs overall
maxxxxx 15y ago
It will be interesting once there are no jobs for humans left because robots will be better at everything than humans. In theory, everybody could have a robot that provides them with everything they need.
- billybob 15y ago
  Assuming that robots are free (gratis) but not free (libre), and that there's enough land for robots to farm, and enough water to irrigate it.
billybob 15y ago
'Aside from that, in the "old days" women stayed at home and took care of the family. "Nowadays" women are going to work, and I think that is absolutely great!' Another way of looking at this is, "in the old days, a household could be supported by one parent's work and the other could raise children. Now, both have to work to pay the bills, and children get less time with parents and more time in institutions."

jswinghammer 15y ago

I'm not sure the Post Office's problems are related to technology. Their union negotiated a "no layoff" provision in their contract just this year. Why would you agree to that as an employer? Then there is the problem of defined benefit pensions where you end up keeping people basically on staff long after they stop working for you. The Post Office needs to go bankrupt and clear these contracts out and move forward without a union ideally. They might need to wait for Obama to leave office before doing that. As for jobs there's always work to be done. There's an infinite amount of work in fact. In a free market involuntary unemployment should be zero because someone would always be willing to pay something for a given amount of work. I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand. I'm at home today caring for my family who are basically all sick and I'm seeing a lot of men just wandering around doing nothing. I'm going to guess that the incentive to work is absent in their life for one reason or another. Not sure libertarian means that you want people left out of the system and starving though. I am a libertarian and I've spent 90% of my time post college life running or helping to run a food pantry in my spare time. Seems silly to suggest that libertarians don't care about such things.

entangld 15y ago
>>I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand.<< People don't just need any job they can get. They need a job that will pay bills for a reasonable amount of time in the future. They need to save money to live on during the next job search. Temporary low paid jobs just leave the employee stressed out and barely above water before they need to search again. I don't think many people enjoy looking for work.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  This high granularity of employment sounds like a terrible inefficiency. There are jobs that need to be done, but can't be, because they don't justify a full-time or part-time employee. There are people that need to work, but can't because much of the work that needs to be done is in chunks too small to occupy their time. Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency. We could then transition chronically unemployed but capable workers into these labor exchanges.

rcavezza 15y ago

I still think we're headed towards an era of "glocalization". I haven't heard this term since college geography courses, but we're headed back to an age where we are all local blacksmiths and silversmiths. We'll all be working for ourselves, but instead of being forced to sell to people in town, we can sell globally. Probably most of the people on this board fit into this categorization, but a much larger percent of the population will migrate towards this lifestyle over the next few years.

127001brewer 15y ago
Your comment reminded me of this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/a-jobs-plan-for-the-post-cubicle-economy/244549/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/a-jobs-p...

lysol 15y ago

This was such an intriguing article until he posited that our citizens who formerly worked in manufacturing could replace their aspirations of long-term employment in a stable economy with some generic digital goods production that was never elaborated on in the article. I have to assume he meant they should all make doll clothes in Second Life.

wushupork 15y ago
Yeah he lost me there as well. Some of these people being displaced I feel probably won't have the motivation to be independent and produce said digital goods. That's why they are being displaced in the first place because they don't have new skills and their old skills are no longer needed.

beefman 15y ago

If we go all the way to a technological singularity in which not even "knowledge workers" are needed... we'll need a new way to distribute wealth. Between 1960 and 2009, employment in IT in the US rose by a factor of 1.6, while the population grew by a factor of 1.7 http://lumma.org/microwave/#2010.10.17 http://lumma.org/microwave/#2010.10.17 and many women entered the workforce, so the labor pool expanded by more than 1.7.

mayutana 15y ago

A similar model is being followed in Europe where the unemployed, disabled, recent mothers and the poorer people are provided some sort of basic support by the state. The higher earning people have extra cash to live more comfortably.

serge2k 15y ago
Unfortunately you have to support not only people who are just going through some tough times, but those who just want to leech off society. Plus those people who go out and have kids, then waste the money they are given to feed them on crap so their child is either starving or lives off a terrible diet. It's really not an easy problem to solve. Ideally everyone should be guaranteed that they get enough food and a place to live, with anything extra being their own responsibility. But this is hard to implement in practice.
- mayutana 15y ago
  True, there are leaches too. But the goal to ensure that everyone has a basic level of living standard is in the direction of what the OP talks about. Note that this is different from the systems implemented in USSR where everyone was provided the same, regardless of their skills or efforts.
  - andreroehrig 15y ago
    It is not true that "everyone was provided the same, regardless of their skills or efforts" in actually existing socialist countries like the USSR. Some data for example on GDR(German text, but the numbers should be ok): http://doku.iab.de/mittab/1990/1990_4_mittab_stephan_wiedemann.pdf http://doku.iab.de/mittab/1990/1990_4_mittab_stephan_wiedema...
    - mayutana 15y ago
      I am talking about the model and not how it was implemented. Hypothetically speaking there is a difference between the three models: a) provide the same to all, b) Let everyone fend for themselves, and c) Provide a basic livelihood to all and allow the ones capable of earning more to do so.

extramoose 15y ago

"We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is." This is more ground for the fact that we might not be in a bubble with major financial crash risk like the .com bubble. The fact is that engineers who are building and inventing new technologies are building a societal system (possibly unintentionally) that puts technology, rather than people, at the top of the game (especially in terms of efficiency & profitability). While we may, as the tech industry, be relatively safe in the foreseeable future, this article really makes me question what we, as engineers, designers & general tech lovers, can invent/build that will allow future society to not only take advantage of our technologies (as end-users), but also allow individuals to make money in an increasingly digital and on-demand world.

bchjam 15y ago

reminded me of RA Wilson's RICH economy http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/rawilson.html http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/rawilson.html

pradocchia 15y ago
You know that Wilson and Rushkoff were friends, yes?

ryandvm 15y ago

It's a fact that computers/automation are going to continue to obsolete human jobs. Nothing short of a technological apocalypse is going to reverse that. And I agree that we shouldn't really lament the reality that a trucker who used to spend 50 hours a week vacuously staring at the highway no longer has to do that. But that's a triumph. One more human mind freed up for greater accomplishments. That said, I'm dubious of his suggestion that we all turn to purely creative pursuits. At least, it will be a very, very long time before automation gets us to that point. I'm more interested in what we do in the meantime. What are we supposed to do with hordes of workers that are freed up in the coming decades as menial jobs disappear at an exceeding clip? My guess is that this is a problem the labor markets will solve on their own. That is, the solution to a disappearing amount of work is that, on average, we all simply work less. Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)? Of course, we're going to need to reduce per employee costs/benefits to make this work, but that's a good idea no matter what. Making the employer responsible for health care and retirement caused more problems than it solved anyway.

ippisl 15y ago
Without some regulation , why would the work week become shorter ? for many people , working a 40 hour work week barely covers their expenses. why would they want to work less ?
- colanderman 15y ago
  I've always thought that a 30 hr work week should be regulated, forcing employees to demand higher wages in order to survive, forcing employers to raise wages, and forcing CEOs to be paid less, thus reducing the income gap.
  - pemulis 15y ago
    If that sort of thing was effective, income inequality would have dropped over the past 60 years as government regulations raised the minimum wage and shortened the work week. Instead, it dramatically increased. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distr...

chailatte 15y ago

My theory from before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906769 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906769 - In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare, supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities, cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet. - 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via service or thievery. They will be the new middle class. They can afford the sometimes luxury. - the other 5.5% will be specialized knowledge workers. They will be the one maintaining the software/hardware to make sure nothing goes wrong. They can afford lots of luxury, but will be taxed heavily, as they are the only workhorse left in the society. - 0.1% will be entertainers. They will make sure that people are entertained well enough not to riot. - and the 0.4% will rule everyone.

silverbax88 15y ago
I don't mean to sound condescending (although I'm sure I will), but your theory about the future has already happened, and collapsed, in other countries: USSR and China being two prominent recent examples.
- hammock 15y ago
  If anything, those examples prove that it really could happen.
  - silverbax88 15y ago
    Not could. Did. Many times.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- akg_67 15y ago
  China didn't collapses, only USSR did. China learnt from USSR collapse and now showing the world how to grow while maintaining control. Chaillete's future seems a possibility. Provide a basic level of necessities but beyond that you will need to earn your way. Isn't that's what Chinese are doing? Whether communism or capitalisms, both extremes are bad as both results in concentration of power in the hands of a few

cchurch 15y ago

What a bunch of hippy bullshit.

pnathan 15y ago
You are being downvoted because your statement was not a constructive comment.

njharman 15y ago

Most people work to get money to spend on stuff people are making. Full employment 40+ hours a week is obsolete. Consumerism is obsolete. We should all be working 10hrs/week or less and have/consume 1/10 to 1/4 of what we have/consume today. That's not gonna happen easily, but it's gonna happen. Perhaps not in my lifetime. I'm making guess that space exploitation will not ramp up in time, it might though.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Are you suggesting that 3/4th - 9/10th of spending is on luxury goods?
- _delirium 15y ago
  It really depends on what you consider a luxury good. For example, some amount of housing is a "necessity", some amount is "nice to have", and some is "luxury", but I doubt people agree on the boundaries. The bar of what people consider a necessity seems to rise with income, so people recategorize what they would've once seen as luxury as non-luxury. I was recently adding up what it would take to live in a cheap-ish place like Pittsburgh: 1) frugally; and 2) modestly but comfortably; and the numbers are absurdly low if you really stick to necessities. YMMV elsewhere.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    Job availability and wages also decrease when you do that.
  - learc83 15y ago
    Yes. My very average house today is a huge luxury compared to the very average house my grandparents bought in the 60s. I have a cable bill, an iPhone bill, an internet bill, a netflix bill, and too many various SaaS subscriptions. My grandparents had none of those. I also have a much higher power bill to pay for all my consumer electronics and air conditioning, a higher health insurance bill to pay for drastically better health care, an extra car insurance policy. That's in addition to all the extra stuff I have lying around. 2 cars, not one, both of which are vastly superior and more expensive than what my grandparents had. Superior home appliances. And 1 metric tonne of electronics. I have so much more material wealth than all but the very richest did just 50 years ago. How could I complain that I'm not better off?

ddw 15y ago

Long term, technology can lead to our society being more peaceful and enjoyable than ever before. The short term is the problem though as there are so many people without the skills to work in the future that the transition may be too painful for society to make it to the long term.

FredBrach 15y ago

Amazing. Just amazing. I like!

danmaz74 15y ago

Technology rising productivity (and so needing less people to create the same products) is at the base of our wealth. The real problem is that the pace of technology innovation (and jobs transfer overseas, and other changes) can be too fast for people to keep up with those changes. Public action to both slow down some changes, and to help in adapting, can become a necessity in those times. But right now too many people believe the ideology that the market will fix everything itself, even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. It is just too good an excuse to just mind your own business, and everyone else be damned, I guess...

tsotha 15y ago

>Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff. It's a little more complicated than that. The economy is a huge, complicated machine. The reason we have enough stuff is it mostly works to convince people go get up when the alarm goes off and go do something they'd rather not do instead of fishing or playing video games. If we start just giving people money because we can afford it we will quickly be unable to afford it.

billybob 15y ago

Great! All we have to do is convince poor people to be happy living at a subsistence level, and convince rich people to be happy supporting them! Seriously, I agree with his point that, say, building bridges in order to create jobs is backwards. But his plan seems to require changing basic human motivations.

nyrath 15y ago
Well, you can avoid changing basic human motivations by using an alternative solution. Jay Gould is attributed to have said "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. "
- brohee 15y ago
  The current version is more akin to hiring half the working class to guard the other imprisoned half. It's more sustainable that way. http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/ http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/

cwp 15y ago

There is a nugget of useful discussion in there, in that corporations aren't as necessary as they used to be. Better communication technology lowers coordination costs and we don't need big organization and bureaucracy to get big things done anymore. But the whole "technology is destroying jobs" meme is just horseshit. What's destroying jobs in the US is lack of demand. Other counties (no, not all of them, but many) are doing just fine, thank you, despite technology. I wonder if this kind of thing is a result of the high and accelerating pace of technological change we're experiencing. We expect change to be so fast that we don't even try to predict the future based on the past and present, we just throw our hands up and declare everything to be a fundamental paradigm shift, rather than a cyclical or temporary phenomenon.

jcromartie 15y ago
You're right: Technology doesn't kill jobs. It kills demand. Who wants to send paper mail, or a landline phone, or to take out traditional classified ads? The alternatives are too appealing and the demand for the old versions is never coming back.
- cwp 15y ago
  Ugh. No. The financial crisis killed demand.
  - jcromartie 15y ago
    The financial crisis did not make people buy mobile phones instead of landlines, Hulu and Netflix instead of cable TV, or Craigslist instead of local newspaper ads, or ebooks instead of paper books. It might have accelerated the shift, because the new technology was cheaper, but people naturally gravitate to the better product. These technologies split, reorganized, transferred, concentrated or decentralized demand. Call it what you will, but people want the new stuff over the old stuff. And if they want it, they'll buy it.
  - suivix 15y ago
    Why did the horse and buggy go away? Lack of demand, I'd say.

deleted 15y ago

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jganetsk 15y ago

Policy adjustments for maintaining capitalism in the post-employment era: provide a minimum guaranteed income to all citizens and abolish minimum wage. This was Milton Friedman's idea. This would create a massive market for a standard "life package": a combination of food, shelter, and healthcare for one person with cost equal to the minimum income. We could even have cities organized around the concept. Then, people can go to work in creation spaces where they get micro-paid exactly what their contribution is worth. Getting $5 for a blog post I write sounds great if I enjoy doing it and am not hungry.

msluyter 15y ago
This is also Marshall Brain's idea: http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm IIRC, he advocates a 25k stipend for all americans, which incidentally, given ~300M people would cost 7.5 trillion. That's approximately double the entire federal budget for 2012. Factoring in state/local spending gets you to near 6 trillion. Given that fact and our current political climate, I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that it'll be a quite a while before adopt such a solution. ;) Brain suggests lots of ways of raising the money (some rather implausible) here: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
- jganetsk 15y ago
  A guaranteed minimum income is not the same thing as a stipend. If the guaranteed minimum income is 25k, and your personal income is over 25k, the government doesn't owe you anything. You would owe the government something.

tibbon 15y ago

In a related video that CNN linked in, it was being questioned if companies that aren't hiring are being unpatriotic. Union leader James Hoffa was saying that Apple is being unpatriotic by not hiring here in the US. But, I don't quite understand James Hoffa saying that Apple isn't hiring- they are hiring both retail and corporate jobs. http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/ http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/ Yes, they employ and sub-contract a lot of people overseas, but that's just the way things work in 2011. How many people are going to pay $10,000 for a laptop or $1,400 for an iPhone? That's probably the difference in price that it would require for Apple to make their products 100% here.

shoham 15y ago

Thanks for sharing! Great article, reminded me of a great speech I read recently that Paul Graham gave in 2005: http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html The jist is the same as Rushkoff's, and Lanier's conclusion-- that people perform better when they do something they care about enough to do it for free. The paradox with the digital age is that consumers have grown accustomed to not paying for digital goods -- and artists have grown accustomed to settling for any attention they can get, which means marketing gimmicks, and settling for the lowest common denominator far too often for authors of original content. Lanier covers this well, for sure: http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip

olliesaunders 15y ago

There’s a really good book on this topic called Creating You & Co.[1] that is all about how it’s not jobs that are important—that’s an overspecialization—but work. And work can be done in any number of ways: automation, out-sourcing, crowd-sourcing, etc. The book is quite old so it only really talks about alternative human-based work delivery but it’s still arguing for a new worldview on work and employment that is well ahead of its time. I have to remind myself every time I watch the news—particularly those interviews with “experts”—that job losses aren’t quite the gloomy picture they seem to be. And the solution isn’t necessarily to manufacture more positions for people. 1: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creating-You-Co-Learn-Career/dp/0738200328/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creating-You-Co-Learn-Career/dp/0738...

zasz 15y ago

I don't think anyone would want to pay for the art I can make. I don't want to pay for anyone else's either. Given how much music piracy there is, and the vast skill disparity between casual amateurs and dedicated professionals, and the near-zero cost of replicating the bits composed by someone better than me or any of my immediate peers, I can't believe the author thinks that trading bits is a possible outcome. Why would I want my dad to educate me when I could watch OpenCourseware? Why would I want my friend's painting when I could get something much better over deviantArt? Why would I bother getting recipes from my mom if I can get them from a 4 star Michelin chef instead?

runjake 15y ago
To answer all your why's: sentimentalism, that's why. Learning or receiving from people you know is often more valuable, imho.
icebraining 15y ago
You might not want your friend's art, but there's plenty of excellent art not on DeviantArt. Especially if you custom made: Kickstart and other escrow services can fund stuff that doesn't exist yet (and therefore can't be pirated). Similar to what's done with TV shows (a pilot is made, then if there's interest by any network, they fund the rest of the season), but with artists directly proposing their 'pilots' (a first chapter of a book, a trailer of a movie, a single song) directly to the audience and letting them fund the rest.
- zasz 15y ago
  So if you're willing to grant the point that not everyone is going to be capable of creating good art, then what do the non-producers do? Just sit back and consume? The problem is that we use productive output as a heuristic for determining how much stuff to give back to a given member of society. If the standard changes from "making widgets" to "making art," most people are still going to starve.

Vivtek 15y ago

Oh, for Christ's sake, does everything have to be the End of History nowadays?

narrator 15y ago

All this technology should be lowering the cost of living. Instead, constant inflation in the money supply, via the money multiplier effect, quantitative easing and continuously falling interest rates, eats up all the benefits of increased technology and transfers them to the financial sector and their clients. If there wasn't this huge parasite of debt , which is getting paid to somebody, somewhere who doesn't have to work, thank you very much, it would be dirt cheap to live and people would be able to get by very easily with most of the population not having to work.

chernevik 15y ago

Mr. Rushkoff wants to "organize society around employment", but he ought to reflect that it's going to be organized around _something_. There is going to be a distribution of power, it's an inevitable feature of society. Do we wanted organized around what each of us can do for the benefit of others, as measured freely by those others? Or do we want it organized around what everyone else thinks of us? I can do a lot more about my worries about getting a job than I can about worries about the opinion of my local commissar.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Pulling out a specific nit: "America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working." And from an old college textbook on the definition of economics - Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources. Here it the hard nut in the thesis, what mechanism, process, or theory, could manage determining who works and who doesn't in a society? We currently have a system where the wealthiest tax payers pay a grossly disproportionate share of the total tax receipts. Some fraction of those receipts are used to fund the lives of the least wealthy individuals. It doesn't seem to work as well as we would like. Consider a more communist flavored theory, if Bob's education, skills, and work ethic allow him to generate gross domestic product which would support 5 average citizens. Do we make Bob and his four comrades equal consumers of the GDP that Bob has generated? Would Bob continue to produce at that rate? Enlightened self interest is a powerful thing. But taking away the 'fruits of one's labor' to redistribute it amongst the less fortunate doesn't motivate the high performers or the low performers to higher economic output. I am always interested in systems which might replace capitalism as an organizing principle. But until we have such a system we won't be able to manage the disparity of productivity in a socially acceptable way.

Retric 15y ago
A major nitpick as a middle American a disproportionate percentage of MY salary is used to support the poor relative to rich people. The vast majority of wealth redistribution in this country is though SS which the wealthy get to opt out from. When you consider that I pay more in SS as a percentage of my income than Warren Buffet's entire tax bill there is something wrong with this picture. (In theory I might see some of that money back but even I nothing changes and I live to see 120 I would still be far worse off with SS than without.) PS: Some people think of corporate taxes as double taxation on the wealthy but nothing in the US tax code says you need to invest in US companies and if you actually look at taxes paid by large companies it's vary low relative to the stated tax rate.
- Domenic_S 15y ago
  > a disproportionate percentage of MY salary is used to support the poor relative to rich people. The operative word there is "salary". Buffet had such a low (as a %) tax bill because most of his income isn't salary but cap gains. Let's raise cap gains tax to 50% you say? Sounds great until you sell your house in a few years.

gills 15y ago

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful. So...nobody creates value (or performs work, for that matter) growing the food or building the shelters, right? Riiiiight... Magical thinking at it's best.

piguy314 15y ago
No you tax productive activity to pay farmers to grow food (see SNAP/food stamp program).

libraryatnight 15y ago

Strikes and gutters, ups and downs.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

Let me see if I understand this reasoning correctly. Old, fragile and stiff huge organizations like the Post Office cannot provide the numbers of jobs they used to. The economy is changing. Therefore -- some hand-waving here -- the very idea of jobs is out-of-date. Ouch. But it gets better. We should pay folks not to work. After all, there's no jobs for them, so why should we expect them to do things that are impossible? This is very reminiscent to me of all the hare-brained articles about capitalism being dead that came out right around the banking crisis. Yes, things are way screwed up, but capitalism remains. You could make any kind of wide-spread social change you wanted and capitalism would still remain. People like to trade stuff. The crazy thing here is, like most of this tripe, there's a nugget of something useful in there. We cannot predict how the labor force will evolve. To do so is folly. The answer to this is not to announce the death of jobs, it's to create systems where new job roles which are unforeseen by us are created. To promote flexible adaptation in our businesses and governments. What's dead is our big boxes of generic labels to stick on things -- all those labels and boxes have been stretched so far they don't work any more. Trying to continue to create policies around those labels and boxes is idiotic. We all need to adapt -- not in a lets-bring-some-academics-on-tv-to-talk-about-the-knowledge-economy sense, but in a real, live policy sense. If your terms and generalizations are bad, your conclusions and policies will never work. I understand that's frustrating and that you are out of ideas -- but a mental model with a huge impedance mismatch the reason, not that we've suddenly been thrust into a 27th century scarcity-free economy. Take a look at the comments on this thread. Everybody gets out their favorite political pinata and beats on it. Is this a very productive type of article for this site?

Helianthus 15y ago
I think you're missing the overall stab. As you say "Trying to continue to create policies around those labels and boxes is idiotic"--because those labels and boxes are out of date. Which is to say, 'job' might just be one of those labels. This is _about_ redefining terms and generalizations.
- potatolicious 15y ago
  But how are jobs out of date? What we're going through is not substantially different from what happened during the industrial revolution, or the invention of the loom. We're talking about the complete obsolescence of an entire group of skilled tradespeople due to automation. People will continue to work for other people, doing certain things - which is pretty much the definition of "job". In time - possibly not in time for this current generation of unemployed - society will find new jobs for people to do. But jobs they will be.

fuzionmonkey 15y ago

Ridiculous. If we had our priorities straight, there would be low unemployment. Our infrastructure is crumbling beneath us, yet we won't spend any money to fix it. Instead we're fighting a handful of wars abroad that doesn't help us at all. We need better roads, public transportation, and faster internet.

orblivion 15y ago

I only heard about self-driving cars last month. They're not putting taxi drivers out of business any time soon. It's a concept I've considered as well, jobs are actually bad, it means that there's something someone wants that isn't done. This guy is just a bit early, try back in 50 years.

deleted 15y ago

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ctdonath 15y ago

"I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? ... on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working." This belies a gross misunderstanding of how national socio-economies work. Yes, we could. One of my blogs is "A Buck A Plate" http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com featuring sufficient meals for $1/person/meal. A favorite study is "tiny homes" http://tinyhouseblog.com http://tinyhouseblog.com where nice cozy accomodations can be had for $10,000/person. Beyond that, I've figured one "could probably shelter, feed, educate and even provide health care for its entire population" for just $10/day. Are you ready to live on $10/day? is anybody? Long story short, it would take about $1T/yr to pay everyone in the USA a "living income" of a paltry $10/day. Note that current federal revenue is about $2T ($4.5T including state revenues), with federal spending about twice that. Of a culture where the vast majority decide to vote themselves monies from the treasury, John Adams wrote "The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence." Enjoying the comforts of a culture wallowing in the height of luxury, Rushkoff opines in effect that the source of that comfort be eliminated on the absurd theory that enough will be produced when there is no carrot nor stick incentiveizing people to work. No, Mr. Rushkoff, people need not work when confiscating the hard-earned wealth of others is enough. Problem is, those who produce will not be appreciated, but reviled, and their incentive to produce taken away. Despite the symbolic official $1 salary of its CEO, Apple was driven by _profit_, and its products available only to those who in turn sought _profit_ in other endeavors. Take away the profit motive by confiscating incomes to supply the idle, and few of the idle will use the opportunity for lofty endeavors; nay, most will cultivate dissatisfaction and demand more be confiscated for their gain. As an ancient writer opined, "if any would not work, neither should he eat."

Spyro7 15y ago

Why is this being upvoted? This article begins with a questionable premise and then descends straight into misinformation. The problems in the USPS did not begin with email. They began with a highly questionable requirement that the USPS fund a plan to fully cover the estimated future health care costs of all current employees. They are the only government institution required to do this, and it has crippled their ability to remain profitable: * http://www.plansponsor.com/Post_Office_Says_PreFunding_Retiree_Health_Care_is_Reason_for_Loss.aspx http://www.plansponsor.com/Post_Office_Says_PreFunding_Retir... * Read First Few Pages Here -> http://www.uspsoig.gov/foia_files/RARC-WP-10-001.pdf http://www.uspsoig.gov/foia_files/RARC-WP-10-001.pdf * http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/us/23postal.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/us/23postal.html They have overpaid this fund by billions of dollars, but they are not able to use this money to address their current financial shortcomings. Somehow the author of this piece is able to extrapolate from the fiscal problems of the USPS to the overall job market. The extrapolation is misguided at best. There are so many things wrong in this article that I will not take the time to address them all. (Most of Europe was thriving in the Middle Ages? Really? The author needs to define the word thrive.) I just want to say that I find it interesting that there is so much hand-wringing in these comments about jobs being displaced by technology. In economics, we like to call this creative destruction. Old jobs go away and new jobs take their place. This is a natural process, and their is nothing so magically different about the technological revolution that it will somehow "make jobs obsolete". Just as The Luddites protested against the loss of jobs brought on by the technological progress of the Industrial Revolution, now some individuals protest against the loss of jobs brought on by the technological progress of the "Technological Revolution". Then, as now, it was all hand-wringing and nail-biting with no serious economic analysis. The critics say this time is different, this time there will be no new jobs, and we should urge people to find something other to do than working. The critics are wrong. Don't worry people. Employment is here to stay. Side Note: The author engages in some navel gazing when he says America has all that it needs. I'm not sure if the author has noticed it or not, but there is a such thing as globalization and the global needs for goods and services will increase as developing countries close the ground with developed nations. This global recession is just another business cycle, eventually the world will have another upswing, and then we will revert to mean again. There is no magic here, just the march of time. I would not put too much stock into those who believe that a single recession merits the reevaluation of the entire modern economic system. Edit: Trying to trim the size. Eventually, I will learn the art of not making posts into walls of text.

DirtyCalvinist 15y ago

Britain, the Low Countries, France and the German States all went through this process in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Historians call it pauperization. The only good solution seems to be keeping people from starving to death (the above named societies often did not, incidentally) and wait for/encourage the economy to find a way to suck up the surplus labor.

duairc 15y ago

Oh fuck all of you capitalist scum. I really hate how much of this community is based on this really fucked up reappropriation of the hacker ethos into some sort of pro-capitalist thing. Capitalism is an inherently authoritarian economic system. (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/The_Anarchist_FAQ_Editorial_Collective__An_Anarchist_FAQ__07_17_.html http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/The_Anarchist_FAQ_Editor...) And don't give me this bullshit about communism being authoritarian and then pointing to the USSR - the USSR had nothing to do with communism, and communism is not the only alternative to capitalism nor are they even the opposite of each other.

brianobush 15y ago

how are jobs obsolete when 91% of the working-aged population (in the US) have one?

brohee 15y ago
The last number I heard was more like 56% for the US (can't find the source back, percentage of adults working is a surprisingly hard to find number). Working people number ain't number of working age people minus number of job seeking people. It's number of working age people minus (job seeking people, people on disabilities and not looking for a job, people in jail, stay at home parents, people who retired early...)

tomlin 15y ago

So let's start picking apart this article. And the other article that talks about the end of capitalism. And then the next 50, 100, 1000 articles that prey on our confused notion that capitalism is the end-game for eternity. Watch as self-driving vehicles takeover all modes of goods transport. And robotics and information systems remove 90% of the health care workforce. And construction. And education. Keep telling yourself that your vision of capitalism is exact and free from evolution. Eventually, a grounded theory that revolutionizes capitalism will emerge. Do we know what the evolution will be or how it will work? I certainly don't. But I do believe in evolution and evolution in markets. Defending capitalism like it dragged you out of a flaming building is self-serving, not logical. Capitalism is an ideology. It can and will change, with or without consent.

deleted 15y ago
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littlegiantcap 15y ago

Jobs becoming obsolete? Yes surely just as we have never recovered from the loss of shoe cobbling jobs or manual labor farming jobs due to the industrial revolution the internet and technology will be the death of us all!

peterwwillis 15y ago

Next on CNN: Food: Why you probably don't need it Exercise: Less of it could mean more healthcare jobs Transportation: Could rising oil prices make it impossible to go anywhere? Safety: Could banning non-Christians from entering the country make us safer? 9/11: What about the bright side? Culture: Is Lil Wayne the music genius of the decade?

trop 15y ago
Right on about food. Isn't that another fear, global food scarcities, green revolution not keeping up, fields poisoned by industrial fertilizers... Let's get used to having less, unless we get back on the farm.

crizCraig 15y ago

I think he has a great point that the value a person creates is not easily compensated in an information economy. Right now the information economy makes up less than 5% of the total in the U.S. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9632169/EconomicCensus2007.html http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9632169/EconomicCensus2007.html from http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFEconFacts?_event=&geo_id=01000US&_geoContext=01000US&_street=&_county=&_cityTown=&_state=&_zip=&_lang=en&_sse=on&ActiveGeoDiv=&_useEV=&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&_submenuId=business_1&ds_name=&_ci_nbr=&qr_name=&reg=&_keyword=&_industry= http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFEconFacts?_event=&#... So advertising for the other sectors in the economy works well to support most of the information sector right now. What happens as those other sectors become more automated though? The smaller and smaller amount of people in charge of those sectors will become disproportionately compensated for the value they create. This is already happening in Wall Street for example. So we're going to need to find some way to compensate people for their digital contributions to things like open source, online communities like this, and other informational public goods or we'll be left relying on the government and/or super rich to distribute the abundance of wealth. Neither of which sound very appealing to me.

wbienek 15y ago

Don't have much mercy when I read these kinds of stories. I went to a job interview back in 2000 for a 28,000 a year job. Knew 6 computer languages and significantly more than the interviewee and all this colleges employees. (in my opinion) this was a small college in Michigan. They never called me back. A few weeks later I started a small company. Today I make upwards of 250k a year. No college education. They (college people) can all go starving on the street like they would have left me and my two new born twins. No help from the "establishment" for me no matter how smart I was. Let em all lose their jib and starve.. Let em be in college debt. I smirk at the barrages who would have let me go homeless every time I read stories like this. No quarter wad given to me. Now that theyre expected to oroduce. Now thier college means diddle it is my turn to watch from the sidelines. I know that if I don't make money MYSELF nobody ----especially "college" people will help.. Posted from an iPad I never would have had if I let the establishment guide my life..

awolf 15y ago

> We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful. This is a nice thought but it seems impossible to move forward until food and shelter are givens for everyone world wide - not just givens for those in the USA.

nicklovescode 15y ago

They are great Chairmen

drstrangevibes 15y ago

money is no longer necessary, our current economic systems dont work and do not reflect the abundance we create. I propose that everything is made free instead, everyone just take as much as they need.

tomlin 15y ago

I am going to get downvoted for criticizing an ideology - especially capitalism, which I would consider HN the best place for. We'll see. These technological evolutions are not lightyears away. They are around the corner and they are coming fast. Also, remember that with each branch of technological evolution comes a whole subset of mashup-ability. There are countless jobs to be had by these innovations. Of all communities, you'd think HN would be the highest order witness to the fall of capitalism since many of the startups and weekend projects seek to automate, or otherwise kill off manual intervention (read: jobs). Take a few of your favorite properties, YC or otherwise, then take a look back 20 years and compare the industry they represent today. What if Airbnb became a household name, do you think that will increase the employment at Best Western? Or an open MLS system. Increase real estate agents? Internet businesses, in general, seek to destroy inconvenience and under the best intentions. Just as I am sure capitalism works under the best intentions, despite child labour and deforestation. 50 years is not so ridiculous to plan for. We're giving our parents and grandparents flack for not taking care of our planet - "Where was your foresight!", we say. And here we are doing no better. We've already rolled into the same comfy cognitive dissonance.

grammaton 15y ago

"As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products." This right here is my favorite piece of unintentional irony out of the whole article.

rohitkumar 15y ago

I highly agree that the conventional 'job' is becoming obsolete. Technology is enabling us to live in a bottom-up world where we can add value individually. We don't have to to work for a company to add value. Imagine all the commerce that could be happening in a 5 mile radius from where you live - all the needs you could address to add value. And when you add value, you are rewarded financially. There is no recession.