34 ms·

AI are taking jobs

184 points by bmahmood 15y ago

maeon3 15y ago
The notion of weak artificial intelligence hurting the economy by taking away jobs is a complete misunderstanding of the situation. To understand why, you need to read and understand the parable of the broken window: http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm The key lies in seeing that when humans no longer have to do mundane repetitive tasks, then they are freed up to do far more powerful and interesting things. The last job to be completely automated is the programmer, engineer and designer. And that too will one day be automated. I like to believe that humans and AI will merge so that together, a human and the machine will always be more powerful/more in control than just the AI.
- Permit 15y ago
  The problem is that there are not a lot of people capable of doing engineering/programming jobs. It is one thing to make the transition from a farmer to a factory worker, but another entirely to move from a factory worker to an engineer. The learning curve for the jobs that may be created might be too steep for those whose jobs were displaced.
  - ericd 15y ago
    True, I think creating high quality, cheap/free reeducation programs are one of the most important challenges facing us today.
    - nkassis 15y ago
      But do you believe everyone is capable of that kind of work? Even with great education some things require talent at a certain level. The higher level the job the more dependent it is on talent in my view.
      - ericd 15y ago
        Not everyone, but for every type of person I can think of, there's a different type of job that makes sense for them. If they're good with their hands, there are many things that will be hard to automate the repair of due to customization. If they're very persuasive, they can probably work in sales. If they're creative or artistic, there's a large need for good visual design. If you find a way to make the marginal cost of educating someone near 0, then many more people might discover things that they're good at that they wouldn't have had the chance to otherwise. I think this requires some socialist-style changes to what the govt. is willing to support, though, since many people can't afford to take time off. If this was bundled with unemployment benefits or welfare, though, I think it could be very powerful. As leverage increases, the wealth disparity will almost certainly grow, just because some people will be able to create much more wealth than others. Not sure how to deal with that.
  - maeon3 15y ago
    Yes, the cotton pickers will need to be forced to go to high school and learn something that hasn't been automated. To the argument that this can't be done, take away their food, they will adapt. Mercy can be used in exceptional cases. I don't like the argument: "This human has such an aversion to learning that they must be supported forever like a pet". I suppose you wait for them to die and the problem solves itself. They can learn, they just have been positively reinforced to not learn.
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    - _delirium 15y ago
      If the only reason a significant portion of society will participate in it is because they will literally die if they don't, i.e. it's a requirement for absolute minimum existence, that's a pretty sad place to have your society. That's basically "3rd-world subsistence farming" level of civilization. For some people, possibly even worse; there are some people who do badly in desk jobs who'd be perfectly capable subsistence farmers (if it were possible for them to acquire any land to farm).
    - Permit 15y ago
      >take away their food, they will adapt. Oh, undoubtedly. But they will go down the path of least resistance which will more than likely be a life of crime. It's also important to recognize that not everyone is cut out for intellectually demanding jobs. There is a wide variety of intelligence levels throughout society.
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    - forensic 15y ago
      I think the human race will reach the apex of its evolution when all the social darwinists die off.
    - bluedanieru 15y ago
- _delirium 15y ago
  The books the article mentions do know about both that parable, and the Luddite episode, and analyze extensively whether they apply to the current situation; as The Economists notes, some of the books are more optimistic than others. There's a bit of a dynamic aspect to it as well in terms of how the change happens and how human work patterns adapt in response. When people are "freed up to do far more powerful and interesting things", does this result in paid work at the same rate as the freeing-up happens? Or will there be significant lags where, say, 20-30% of the population might be unable to earn income at any given time? And how long-lasting will that be? Also, to the extent that automation running on robots and computers is what produces advances that humans could perhaps symbiotically work with, will everyone have access to the same starting point (software/hardware/etc.) so they can do so, or will there be a rich-get-richer feedback loop where the tools of automation are mainly in the hands of the better-off part of the population? I don't really have a guess myself. I think it depends pretty sensitively on some hard-to-predict parameters; change some rates 2% here and 3% there and technological transitions (and the distribution of labor/wealth that results from them) look much different.
- suivix 15y ago
  Joe the forklift driver is never going to do powerful and interesting things when he loses his job. It's completely unrealistic.
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- Tichy 15y ago
  The problem here is not productive output or capacity of the economy, it is distribution of wealth. It's as if everybody was a window manufacturer, and no windows are breaking. Not that I think we are quite at the point were machines can do everything yet...
gojomo 15y ago
Perhaps we can build a giant firewall to keep Illegal Intelligents out.
kandu 15y ago
Imagine a world where all goods and services required for a decent life will be provided by AI and robots. Still, there will plenty of jobs for humans - those related to the humanity of humans. Life could become dedicated to enjoying art in various forms, and this art will be conceived mostly by humans. If people will have no work to do, they could hire entertainers. They could do jobs as a hobby - e.g., manually producing stuff that could as well be made by robots, but that other humans will buy just because it was hand made. They could enjoy experimenting with various lifestyles, effectively creating diverse subcultures, and these cultures will trade items that are uniquely developed within the culture. Imagine a world where people could enjoy the variety of clothing that existed in the world 300 years ago and that has been now elliminated by the hustle of modern life and by a global trade in clothes. Even if they will be produced by robots, designing these clothes will remain mostly a human job. Virtually anyone could wear designer clothes, and many people could become such designers. The same could be applied to food, music, movies, and so on. Education and corporal care would also become a large part of the economy that would hire humans and not robots. There will be plenty of niches, and people will have the time to invest in developing specialized skills, rediscovering skills long forgotten. Eliberated by the stress of modern life, life will simply become more enjoyable.
- ars 15y ago
  Sounds like a horrible world to me. "Life could become dedicated to enjoying art"?? Ugh!!!! "...could enjoy the variety of clothing..." are you kidding? That sounds horrible. There is a basic human need to be needed. People who have everything but are not needed are miserable. People who are needed, but have little are happy.
  - mietek 15y ago
    The "Culture" series of novels by Iain M. Banks explores these issues in some detail.
  - Joeri 15y ago
    Being needed and being appreciated aren't the same thing. What we want is appreciation, even if what we do is sort of pointless. That opens up all kinds of possibilities to how to spend our time. For example, if you didn't need to work to meet your basic needs, you could decide to devote your time to beating videogame records. It would be completely useless, but still lead to lots of appreciation for your skill. Doing a hobby all day long could become the norm. I have to second the culture series as good reading on this topic. It paints a believable picture of an Ai-driven post-material society where people still feel that they live full lives.
simonsarris 15y ago
I don't see this as a bad thing, except: In the 1950's people wondered what the future generations would do with all their free time. They predicted, correctly, that worker productivity would rise immensely. They also assumed that people would be just as wealthy while working much less. People are wealthier in some ways. In america, its pretty much standard issue to own at least one car (partially perhaps because a car is needed to simply get a job in most areas). But in other ways it does not seem like the average worker is as well-off as the past had predicted. I could say things about concentration of wealth and other reasons the productivity gains were not matched by gains in free time, but I'm not sure I know enough to make those arguments.
- deleted 15y ago
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- adamjernst 15y ago
  Hmm. I'd dispute that. We now have cellular phones, computers and the Internet, cars that are far safer and more efficient, 43" plasma TVs with 500 channels, iPads... You might say "well, those are all gadgets." Fine, but if you cut all of those out of your life you'll probably save more than $3000 per year. That itself is a huge boost for the average worker.
  - forensic 15y ago
    If you cut all those out of your life, you don't have a job anymore. Cell phones, cars, computers, internet... these aren't luxuries. These are mandatory investments that people have to make in their career. Investments they have to make out of their own pocket. Try getting a job without a phone. Doesn't work. If I was a retired millionaire I could cut them out.
    - chc 15y ago
      You don't need a mobile to have a phone. On the extreme side, you could take public transportation everywhere, use the Internet at the library when you needed it and just have home phone service. This is actually sufficient for most jobs in a lot of places, though it is a lot less convenient. If you want slightly more convenience, you can (for example) get a decent car that will take you from point A to point B for about $5000. In the end, you really are mostly paying for convenience.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
A lot of the argument on this topic seems to be "but this time it is really different!" Perhaps. And perhaps not. Most likely it is different, just like all those other times were different. I hate to be skeptical, but when this same pattern of people saying "it's different!" repeats over and over again without it being different, I think the onus is on those making the claim to support their argument better. If anything, I think the metrics are different, and that leads to a lot of erroneous conclusions. I see a lot of economic activity that doesn't fit into the neat little categories we have constructed. As an example, my wife is middle-aged, middle-income, and college educated. I helped her create a site about her hamburger casserole recipes. People liked the site, so she made the site into an ebook. Every day, hundreds of people either use the free site to cook dinner, or decide to buy the ebook (shameless plug: http://hamburger-casserole-recipes.com http://hamburger-casserole-recipes.com) And it's not just her. She has a friend (also middle-aged, college educated, and out of the official workforce) who collect semi-rare books and resells them. Another friend sells household goods by leveraging her social networks. The list goes on. We probably know 5 or 6 people who have some sort of unique arrangement that technology has facilitated. These are folks who do not have "jobs", yet they have income. They provide value to people. So if I had to bet, I'd say the odds are 90% that the economy is evolving, not drastically changing. I might be wrong, but I'll need to see a lot more data than this before I'm willing to change my mind.
- shasta 15y ago
  As wealth accumulates among the masters of technology, asking what jobs might provide value to your peers is the wrong question. What value can your friends provide to big corporations?
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Bertrand Gille (60s/70s historian of technology) had an interesting hypothesis, that as technical systems, and coupled technical-economic systems (e.g. large corporations built on technical advances) get complex, interdependent, and rapidly changing, at some point it becomes too difficult for humans to fully understand and control their workings and evolution, and the dependencies make even choosing which technologies you "want" to use highly constrained, all of which leads to somewhat of an inversion of control. Rather than technology being a tool, of which humans ask, "what do I want to use this tool for?", instead there is this evolving technical-economic system that you have no choice but to interact with, and what you need to ask of yourself is, "how can I make myself useful to this system?" I.e., given the technical-economic system of your present moment, which you only understand a part of, where do you fit yourself in so you can be a tool that that system finds useful to employ towards its ends (whatever those might be)? Alternately, he hoped there was a way to re-invert the inversion of control, but no word on success on that front...
gameshot911 15y ago
For those who are interested in what a world where (intelligent) robots are the source of production, and humans are the content creators, I highly recommend this short story: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Sounds like Heaven on Earth to me. Now to make it happen during our lifetimes!
conorgdaly 15y ago
I really love the photo. :) The digital robot interfacing with the laptop through it's keyboard; seemingly the only permitted I/O in the future. Trust issues between different hardware vendors must have hit an all time low after the various standards authorities fell apart!
inkaudio 15y ago
The author does not fully understand the totality of the work these professional do. From the two example listed. "Radiologists, who can earn over $300,000 a year in America, after 13 years of college education and internship, are among the first to feel the heat. It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost. The real threat is that the latest automated pattern-recognition software can do much of the work for less than a hundredth of it." a very naive understanding of radiologists. This only one of the many task a radiologists must handle, including interaction with patient, which is the most important task. We are far away from replace that service with Ai. Software handling one task won't eliminate the need for radiologists. "Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage." Case discovery is only one of the many task a Lawyer must perform, case discovery alone won't replace lawyers. It will only allow them to be more productive. Lawyers still responsible for many other task, they have to broker deals, consult clients and in the case of trial attorneys, win trials. more thoughts at: http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technology http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technolog...
- _delirium 15y ago
  I agree it doesn't cover everything they do, but covering just some of the more routine activities can be enough for significant disruption. For example, dermatologists are fairly worried that "upload a photo and we'll diagnose your mole", either via software or outsourcing, will cut out a significant percentage of their business. It's not by any means the hardest work a dermatologist does, but it's common, steady work that produces reliable revenue, so it hurts to lose it. It may be that we won't need as many dermatologists only to handle the actually-hard stuff. (Though for medicine in particular, I think a mixture of "you can always do more" and humans' seemingly infinite hypochondria means that medical spending will continue to eat up as much money as we're willing to throw at it.)
  - 15y ago
patio11 15y ago
If you actually dig into the statistics, the 9% of America with persistent unemployment problems are mostly not e.g. bank underwriters who got creamed by FICO scores making them totally obsolete. That makes for a great newspaper piece, because well-educated people are not supposed to end up unemployable, but it bears little relationship to reality. Unemployment is dominated by sectors directly connected to the real estate/financial boom (construction, real estate, finance) which are no longer booming and could not sustain historically high employment levels. We're simply seeing reversion to the mean plus a wee bit extra, which only looks cataclysmic when your recorded history began at the top of the market.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  Actually, it's a slightly weird situation. Unemployment is fairly level across the economy. Job losses are concentrated in construction and manufacturing, however. Also, finance didn't suffer so much - only about a 9% job loss. I suspect finance fared better than other bubble-related fields mainly because of their highly flexible wages. (I.e., construction or manufacturing has layoffs, finance just cuts bonuses.) I graphed the figures a while back: http://crazybear.posterous.com/structural-shift-in-the-economy http://crazybear.posterous.com/structural-shift-in-the-econo...
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- narag 15y ago
  Unemployment is dominated by sectors directly connected to the real estate/financial boom (construction, real estate, finance) which are no longer booming... This is the thing that makes me skeptic about all the "distribute available work", "create subsidies for displaced workers" proposals. People still need houses, food, all that. It's the demand that starts the economic cycles. Real state, at least in some countries, has been the "engine" that fuels the economy at large. But if it's stalled, some other area must become the lead.
humanfromearth 15y ago
Thay took our jobs! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik
6ren 15y ago
Ancient Rome had slaves - with actual intelligence. What can we learn from how they handled it? Our civilization already seems more similar to their's than any other.
- politician 15y ago
  They descended into an anarchy of self-indulgence ("bread and circus") just as they reached the escape velocity for their technology level. Eventually, their society collapsed from internal pressure to "make work" -- aka political drama.
nazgulnarsil 15y ago
"The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product." yeah, it's not like increases in productivity could simply create a surplus that is then directed into other sectors. I write for the economist and cannot into economics hurrdurr. This is like saying that a machine that lets me do laundry faster is bad because I don't need to do 20 loads of laundry per day.
HarrietTubgirl 15y ago
Thankfully we're nowhere near where intelligence itself is being displaced, only small subsets of work that were previously the domain of highly specialized experts [sidenote: Mathematica has been doing this for a while]. Nor will advances in statistical machine learning and computing hardware get us there. "AI" is a field we still have to make any real progress in. I think what the current trend means though is that we're going to have to teach people to learn and re-work education to maximize the ability to adapt. I feel a little sorry for the radiologist whose effective supply is apparently rapidly expanding, but there is still a long way to fall from a $350,000 annual income. :) I'm scared that as we optimize test-prep and narrowly focus on passing children through school, we're potentially decreasing the likelihood that people learn on their own. We're decreasing the amount of effort it takes for a kid to learn some [probably useless] skill, like drawing force diagrams on pulley systems, where the point of the exercise [imo] in the first place was to stretch the mind and force the kid to fill in the gaps and think for himself. That same kind of stretching that might come in handy when he finds himself displaced for whatever reason, be it technology or something else.
brianobush 15y ago
So if you work in AI, you are safe?
- nickik 15y ago
  Well at first but I wouldn't work to hard. In the End you will programm something that replaces yourself. At least the people who work in AI are the last to go and then we are at Singularity and nobody knows what happens then.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  The last commit you ever make will be the AI that takes over your job when all the other jobs have been fixed. It will also be the commit which brings about the singularity (which should happen at about the time when you get out of your car on the way home) so there is really no reason to fear that.
stretchwithme 15y ago
Every time you create a tool or process or system that lets you do more with less effort you are supposedly "taking jobs". So stop whatever it is you are doing and instead destroy these things instead. Then stand back and watch the ground swell of prosperity that sweeps the globe.
EGreg 15y ago
Let me put it this way: GOOD THINGS: * automation leading to increasing wealth and less employment in redundant jobs * social safety nets freeing people up to do work they LIKE to do because it gives them satisfaction * guaranteed housing, food, and sexbots for all (basic maslow's needs) with ability to get more expensive things through capitalism BAD THINGS: * speculation by abusing resources and cornering free markets * government monopolies (patents, etc) restricting freedom of production in fast moving industries * increased risk of terrorism leading to significant culture changes around security/freedom issues these are the long term trends just my point of view.
bambax 15y ago
The article starts by predicting that the Dilberts of the world will start losing their job in droves without being able to find another one, and then mentions as examples... radiologists and lawyers making over $300K/year. Radiologists are no Dilberts.
troels 15y ago
In which alternative world is increased productivity a problem? I don't get the logic behind that. I just don't.
- atomicdog 15y ago
  I suppose it depends what the cost of said productivity is. Slave societies were pretty productive.
  - Thrymr 15y ago
    That is very wrong. Slave labor is extremely unproductive, that has been known by economists since Adam Smith. It turns out that forcing people to work against their will, with no hope of advancement or independence, is not a strong motivator to productivity. Fear of punishment is a stronger inducement to escape and rebellion than actual productivity, and slave societies need to spend significant resources to enforce the system in favor of the slaveowners. See, for example, Charles Mann, 1493, on sugar plantations in Africa and the Americas.
kokey 15y ago
I found Eli Dourado's take on 'Race Against The Machine' quite an interesting analysis and somewhat related to this article http://elidourado.com/blog/technologies-of-control-and-resistance/ http://elidourado.com/blog/technologies-of-control-and-resis... It's mainly how points of control incentivize some of these factors to move faster, or out of step with the other factors.

184 points by bmahmood 15y ago

The notion of weak artificial intelligence hurting the economy by taking away jobs is a complete misunderstanding of the situation. To understand why, you need to read and understand the parable of the broken window: http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm The key lies in seeing that when humans no longer have to do mundane repetitive tasks, then they are freed up to do far more powerful and interesting things. The last job to be completely automated is the programmer, engineer and designer. And that too will one day be automated. I like to believe that humans and AI will merge so that together, a human and the machine will always be more powerful/more in control than just the AI.

Permit 15y ago
The problem is that there are not a lot of people capable of doing engineering/programming jobs. It is one thing to make the transition from a farmer to a factory worker, but another entirely to move from a factory worker to an engineer. The learning curve for the jobs that may be created might be too steep for those whose jobs were displaced.
- ericd 15y ago
  True, I think creating high quality, cheap/free reeducation programs are one of the most important challenges facing us today.
  - nkassis 15y ago
    But do you believe everyone is capable of that kind of work? Even with great education some things require talent at a certain level. The higher level the job the more dependent it is on talent in my view.
    - ericd 15y ago
      Not everyone, but for every type of person I can think of, there's a different type of job that makes sense for them. If they're good with their hands, there are many things that will be hard to automate the repair of due to customization. If they're very persuasive, they can probably work in sales. If they're creative or artistic, there's a large need for good visual design. If you find a way to make the marginal cost of educating someone near 0, then many more people might discover things that they're good at that they wouldn't have had the chance to otherwise. I think this requires some socialist-style changes to what the govt. is willing to support, though, since many people can't afford to take time off. If this was bundled with unemployment benefits or welfare, though, I think it could be very powerful. As leverage increases, the wealth disparity will almost certainly grow, just because some people will be able to create much more wealth than others. Not sure how to deal with that.
- maeon3 15y ago
  Yes, the cotton pickers will need to be forced to go to high school and learn something that hasn't been automated. To the argument that this can't be done, take away their food, they will adapt. Mercy can be used in exceptional cases. I don't like the argument: "This human has such an aversion to learning that they must be supported forever like a pet". I suppose you wait for them to die and the problem solves itself. They can learn, they just have been positively reinforced to not learn.
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  - _delirium 15y ago
    If the only reason a significant portion of society will participate in it is because they will literally die if they don't, i.e. it's a requirement for absolute minimum existence, that's a pretty sad place to have your society. That's basically "3rd-world subsistence farming" level of civilization. For some people, possibly even worse; there are some people who do badly in desk jobs who'd be perfectly capable subsistence farmers (if it were possible for them to acquire any land to farm).
  - Permit 15y ago
    >take away their food, they will adapt. Oh, undoubtedly. But they will go down the path of least resistance which will more than likely be a life of crime. It's also important to recognize that not everyone is cut out for intellectually demanding jobs. There is a wide variety of intelligence levels throughout society.
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  - forensic 15y ago
    I think the human race will reach the apex of its evolution when all the social darwinists die off.
  - bluedanieru 15y ago
_delirium 15y ago
The books the article mentions do know about both that parable, and the Luddite episode, and analyze extensively whether they apply to the current situation; as The Economists notes, some of the books are more optimistic than others. There's a bit of a dynamic aspect to it as well in terms of how the change happens and how human work patterns adapt in response. When people are "freed up to do far more powerful and interesting things", does this result in paid work at the same rate as the freeing-up happens? Or will there be significant lags where, say, 20-30% of the population might be unable to earn income at any given time? And how long-lasting will that be? Also, to the extent that automation running on robots and computers is what produces advances that humans could perhaps symbiotically work with, will everyone have access to the same starting point (software/hardware/etc.) so they can do so, or will there be a rich-get-richer feedback loop where the tools of automation are mainly in the hands of the better-off part of the population? I don't really have a guess myself. I think it depends pretty sensitively on some hard-to-predict parameters; change some rates 2% here and 3% there and technological transitions (and the distribution of labor/wealth that results from them) look much different.
suivix 15y ago
Joe the forklift driver is never going to do powerful and interesting things when he loses his job. It's completely unrealistic.
- deleted 15y ago
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Tichy 15y ago
The problem here is not productive output or capacity of the economy, it is distribution of wealth. It's as if everybody was a window manufacturer, and no windows are breaking. Not that I think we are quite at the point were machines can do everything yet...

gojomo 15y ago

Perhaps we can build a giant firewall to keep Illegal Intelligents out.

kandu 15y ago

Imagine a world where all goods and services required for a decent life will be provided by AI and robots. Still, there will plenty of jobs for humans - those related to the humanity of humans. Life could become dedicated to enjoying art in various forms, and this art will be conceived mostly by humans. If people will have no work to do, they could hire entertainers. They could do jobs as a hobby - e.g., manually producing stuff that could as well be made by robots, but that other humans will buy just because it was hand made. They could enjoy experimenting with various lifestyles, effectively creating diverse subcultures, and these cultures will trade items that are uniquely developed within the culture. Imagine a world where people could enjoy the variety of clothing that existed in the world 300 years ago and that has been now elliminated by the hustle of modern life and by a global trade in clothes. Even if they will be produced by robots, designing these clothes will remain mostly a human job. Virtually anyone could wear designer clothes, and many people could become such designers. The same could be applied to food, music, movies, and so on. Education and corporal care would also become a large part of the economy that would hire humans and not robots. There will be plenty of niches, and people will have the time to invest in developing specialized skills, rediscovering skills long forgotten. Eliberated by the stress of modern life, life will simply become more enjoyable.

ars 15y ago
Sounds like a horrible world to me. "Life could become dedicated to enjoying art"?? Ugh!!!! "...could enjoy the variety of clothing..." are you kidding? That sounds horrible. There is a basic human need to be needed. People who have everything but are not needed are miserable. People who are needed, but have little are happy.
- mietek 15y ago
  The "Culture" series of novels by Iain M. Banks explores these issues in some detail.
- Joeri 15y ago
  Being needed and being appreciated aren't the same thing. What we want is appreciation, even if what we do is sort of pointless. That opens up all kinds of possibilities to how to spend our time. For example, if you didn't need to work to meet your basic needs, you could decide to devote your time to beating videogame records. It would be completely useless, but still lead to lots of appreciation for your skill. Doing a hobby all day long could become the norm. I have to second the culture series as good reading on this topic. It paints a believable picture of an Ai-driven post-material society where people still feel that they live full lives.

simonsarris 15y ago

I don't see this as a bad thing, except: In the 1950's people wondered what the future generations would do with all their free time. They predicted, correctly, that worker productivity would rise immensely. They also assumed that people would be just as wealthy while working much less. People are wealthier in some ways. In america, its pretty much standard issue to own at least one car (partially perhaps because a car is needed to simply get a job in most areas). But in other ways it does not seem like the average worker is as well-off as the past had predicted. I could say things about concentration of wealth and other reasons the productivity gains were not matched by gains in free time, but I'm not sure I know enough to make those arguments.

deleted 15y ago
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adamjernst 15y ago
Hmm. I'd dispute that. We now have cellular phones, computers and the Internet, cars that are far safer and more efficient, 43" plasma TVs with 500 channels, iPads... You might say "well, those are all gadgets." Fine, but if you cut all of those out of your life you'll probably save more than $3000 per year. That itself is a huge boost for the average worker.
- forensic 15y ago
  If you cut all those out of your life, you don't have a job anymore. Cell phones, cars, computers, internet... these aren't luxuries. These are mandatory investments that people have to make in their career. Investments they have to make out of their own pocket. Try getting a job without a phone. Doesn't work. If I was a retired millionaire I could cut them out.
  - chc 15y ago
    You don't need a mobile to have a phone. On the extreme side, you could take public transportation everywhere, use the Internet at the library when you needed it and just have home phone service. This is actually sufficient for most jobs in a lot of places, though it is a lot less convenient. If you want slightly more convenience, you can (for example) get a decent car that will take you from point A to point B for about $5000. In the end, you really are mostly paying for convenience.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

A lot of the argument on this topic seems to be "but this time it is really different!" Perhaps. And perhaps not. Most likely it is different, just like all those other times were different. I hate to be skeptical, but when this same pattern of people saying "it's different!" repeats over and over again without it being different, I think the onus is on those making the claim to support their argument better. If anything, I think the metrics are different, and that leads to a lot of erroneous conclusions. I see a lot of economic activity that doesn't fit into the neat little categories we have constructed. As an example, my wife is middle-aged, middle-income, and college educated. I helped her create a site about her hamburger casserole recipes. People liked the site, so she made the site into an ebook. Every day, hundreds of people either use the free site to cook dinner, or decide to buy the ebook (shameless plug: http://hamburger-casserole-recipes.com http://hamburger-casserole-recipes.com) And it's not just her. She has a friend (also middle-aged, college educated, and out of the official workforce) who collect semi-rare books and resells them. Another friend sells household goods by leveraging her social networks. The list goes on. We probably know 5 or 6 people who have some sort of unique arrangement that technology has facilitated. These are folks who do not have "jobs", yet they have income. They provide value to people. So if I had to bet, I'd say the odds are 90% that the economy is evolving, not drastically changing. I might be wrong, but I'll need to see a lot more data than this before I'm willing to change my mind.

shasta 15y ago
As wealth accumulates among the masters of technology, asking what jobs might provide value to your peers is the wrong question. What value can your friends provide to big corporations?
- _delirium 15y ago
  Bertrand Gille (60s/70s historian of technology) had an interesting hypothesis, that as technical systems, and coupled technical-economic systems (e.g. large corporations built on technical advances) get complex, interdependent, and rapidly changing, at some point it becomes too difficult for humans to fully understand and control their workings and evolution, and the dependencies make even choosing which technologies you "want" to use highly constrained, all of which leads to somewhat of an inversion of control. Rather than technology being a tool, of which humans ask, "what do I want to use this tool for?", instead there is this evolving technical-economic system that you have no choice but to interact with, and what you need to ask of yourself is, "how can I make myself useful to this system?" I.e., given the technical-economic system of your present moment, which you only understand a part of, where do you fit yourself in so you can be a tool that that system finds useful to employ towards its ends (whatever those might be)? Alternately, he hoped there was a way to re-invert the inversion of control, but no word on success on that front...

gameshot911 15y ago

For those who are interested in what a world where (intelligent) robots are the source of production, and humans are the content creators, I highly recommend this short story: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Sounds like Heaven on Earth to me. Now to make it happen during our lifetimes!

conorgdaly 15y ago

I really love the photo. :) The digital robot interfacing with the laptop through it's keyboard; seemingly the only permitted I/O in the future. Trust issues between different hardware vendors must have hit an all time low after the various standards authorities fell apart!

inkaudio 15y ago

The author does not fully understand the totality of the work these professional do. From the two example listed. "Radiologists, who can earn over $300,000 a year in America, after 13 years of college education and internship, are among the first to feel the heat. It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost. The real threat is that the latest automated pattern-recognition software can do much of the work for less than a hundredth of it." a very naive understanding of radiologists. This only one of the many task a radiologists must handle, including interaction with patient, which is the most important task. We are far away from replace that service with Ai. Software handling one task won't eliminate the need for radiologists. "Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage." Case discovery is only one of the many task a Lawyer must perform, case discovery alone won't replace lawyers. It will only allow them to be more productive. Lawyers still responsible for many other task, they have to broker deals, consult clients and in the case of trial attorneys, win trials. more thoughts at: http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technology http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technolog...

_delirium 15y ago
I agree it doesn't cover everything they do, but covering just some of the more routine activities can be enough for significant disruption. For example, dermatologists are fairly worried that "upload a photo and we'll diagnose your mole", either via software or outsourcing, will cut out a significant percentage of their business. It's not by any means the hardest work a dermatologist does, but it's common, steady work that produces reliable revenue, so it hurts to lose it. It may be that we won't need as many dermatologists only to handle the actually-hard stuff. (Though for medicine in particular, I think a mixture of "you can always do more" and humans' seemingly infinite hypochondria means that medical spending will continue to eat up as much money as we're willing to throw at it.)
- 15y ago

patio11 15y ago

If you actually dig into the statistics, the 9% of America with persistent unemployment problems are mostly not e.g. bank underwriters who got creamed by FICO scores making them totally obsolete. That makes for a great newspaper piece, because well-educated people are not supposed to end up unemployable, but it bears little relationship to reality. Unemployment is dominated by sectors directly connected to the real estate/financial boom (construction, real estate, finance) which are no longer booming and could not sustain historically high employment levels. We're simply seeing reversion to the mean plus a wee bit extra, which only looks cataclysmic when your recorded history began at the top of the market.

yummyfajitas 15y ago
Actually, it's a slightly weird situation. Unemployment is fairly level across the economy. Job losses are concentrated in construction and manufacturing, however. Also, finance didn't suffer so much - only about a 9% job loss. I suspect finance fared better than other bubble-related fields mainly because of their highly flexible wages. (I.e., construction or manufacturing has layoffs, finance just cuts bonuses.) I graphed the figures a while back: http://crazybear.posterous.com/structural-shift-in-the-economy http://crazybear.posterous.com/structural-shift-in-the-econo...
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narag 15y ago
Unemployment is dominated by sectors directly connected to the real estate/financial boom (construction, real estate, finance) which are no longer booming... This is the thing that makes me skeptic about all the "distribute available work", "create subsidies for displaced workers" proposals. People still need houses, food, all that. It's the demand that starts the economic cycles. Real state, at least in some countries, has been the "engine" that fuels the economy at large. But if it's stalled, some other area must become the lead.

humanfromearth 15y ago

Thay took our jobs! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik

6ren 15y ago

Ancient Rome had slaves - with actual intelligence. What can we learn from how they handled it? Our civilization already seems more similar to their's than any other.

politician 15y ago
They descended into an anarchy of self-indulgence ("bread and circus") just as they reached the escape velocity for their technology level. Eventually, their society collapsed from internal pressure to "make work" -- aka political drama.

nazgulnarsil 15y ago

"The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product." yeah, it's not like increases in productivity could simply create a surplus that is then directed into other sectors. I write for the economist and cannot into economics hurrdurr. This is like saying that a machine that lets me do laundry faster is bad because I don't need to do 20 loads of laundry per day.

HarrietTubgirl 15y ago

Thankfully we're nowhere near where intelligence itself is being displaced, only small subsets of work that were previously the domain of highly specialized experts [sidenote: Mathematica has been doing this for a while]. Nor will advances in statistical machine learning and computing hardware get us there. "AI" is a field we still have to make any real progress in. I think what the current trend means though is that we're going to have to teach people to learn and re-work education to maximize the ability to adapt. I feel a little sorry for the radiologist whose effective supply is apparently rapidly expanding, but there is still a long way to fall from a $350,000 annual income. :) I'm scared that as we optimize test-prep and narrowly focus on passing children through school, we're potentially decreasing the likelihood that people learn on their own. We're decreasing the amount of effort it takes for a kid to learn some [probably useless] skill, like drawing force diagrams on pulley systems, where the point of the exercise [imo] in the first place was to stretch the mind and force the kid to fill in the gaps and think for himself. That same kind of stretching that might come in handy when he finds himself displaced for whatever reason, be it technology or something else.

brianobush 15y ago

So if you work in AI, you are safe?

nickik 15y ago
Well at first but I wouldn't work to hard. In the End you will programm something that replaces yourself. At least the people who work in AI are the last to go and then we are at Singularity and nobody knows what happens then.
tomjen3 15y ago
The last commit you ever make will be the AI that takes over your job when all the other jobs have been fixed. It will also be the commit which brings about the singularity (which should happen at about the time when you get out of your car on the way home) so there is really no reason to fear that.

stretchwithme 15y ago

Every time you create a tool or process or system that lets you do more with less effort you are supposedly "taking jobs". So stop whatever it is you are doing and instead destroy these things instead. Then stand back and watch the ground swell of prosperity that sweeps the globe.

EGreg 15y ago

Let me put it this way: GOOD THINGS: * automation leading to increasing wealth and less employment in redundant jobs * social safety nets freeing people up to do work they LIKE to do because it gives them satisfaction * guaranteed housing, food, and sexbots for all (basic maslow's needs) with ability to get more expensive things through capitalism BAD THINGS: * speculation by abusing resources and cornering free markets * government monopolies (patents, etc) restricting freedom of production in fast moving industries * increased risk of terrorism leading to significant culture changes around security/freedom issues these are the long term trends just my point of view.

bambax 15y ago

The article starts by predicting that the Dilberts of the world will start losing their job in droves without being able to find another one, and then mentions as examples... radiologists and lawyers making over $300K/year. Radiologists are no Dilberts.

troels 15y ago

In which alternative world is increased productivity a problem? I don't get the logic behind that. I just don't.

atomicdog 15y ago
I suppose it depends what the cost of said productivity is. Slave societies were pretty productive.
- Thrymr 15y ago
  That is very wrong. Slave labor is extremely unproductive, that has been known by economists since Adam Smith. It turns out that forcing people to work against their will, with no hope of advancement or independence, is not a strong motivator to productivity. Fear of punishment is a stronger inducement to escape and rebellion than actual productivity, and slave societies need to spend significant resources to enforce the system in favor of the slaveowners. See, for example, Charles Mann, 1493, on sugar plantations in Africa and the Americas.

kokey 15y ago

I found Eli Dourado's take on 'Race Against The Machine' quite an interesting analysis and somewhat related to this article http://elidourado.com/blog/technologies-of-control-and-resistance/ http://elidourado.com/blog/technologies-of-control-and-resis... It's mainly how points of control incentivize some of these factors to move faster, or out of step with the other factors.