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The problem with jobs being replaced by machines is that historically, there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were stil

The problem with jobs being replaced by machines is that historically, there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling or failing that, (b) at least the next generation could switch into. However, we have never tested the "limiting case" of this phenomenon, where there is a machine (AI) that is so good that it could take over most jobs. Are we there yet? No, but we are not far off either. Now, I'm not saying this is inevitable, but we have to ask the question: what if we CAN get to the limiting case where the only jobs left are a few coveted technical jobs or manual labor? Is there even a remote possibility that this could happen? I believe it's likely, and if it is, then what are we going to do? The best-case scenario is some sort of UBI scheme where most people don't work, but if you think about it, that's actually a horrible thing because most people need some kind of purpose in life, and very few people can find their purpose independently from a system which allows them to trade their comparitive advantages for those of others. Concluding, IBM's CEO is despicable of the highest order. He might be right in that AI taking your job is good for the economy, but if we unpack that statement, it basically means that AI is good as a mechanism to make our system more efficient for concentrating wealth into his pocket at the cost of long-term stability.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling That may have been the case till post-WW2 economy where if the refrigerator factory you used to work at got moved to China, you could take those skills to the car factory next door, but most of the industry jobs left in the west today, that haven't been offshored or automated away, are highly specialized ones that require years of training or higher education and don't have many transferable skills between them, and there's no way you can simply switch to those jobs without that specialized training the employers with those jobs are expecting you to have. It's a lot easier these days to find yourself obsolete and unemployable.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Barbers do require months (though not years) of training, but obviously there is no reason for that to be the case.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Barbers aren't an industry job nor a job you can offshore. Neither are doctors, teachers, policemen, garbagemen, plumbers ... you get the point. Vital service jobs will always be safe, especially unionized ones at government or city level. But I was talking about industry jobs in the private sector, like my coding job and my friend's job at the local car factory which on the other hand ... well, we're not too safe from automation or offshoring if our companies don't stay bleeding edge, competitive and highly profitable for them to decide it's worth investing in us metatags further.
jonathankoren 4y ago
UBI will never come because we’ll always have jobs. Sure the jobs won’t pay as well, but the idea that there won’t be jobs and masses of people will be forced into the street is laughably implausible. Why? Because the oligarchs won’t allow that to happen. They’ll invent jobs for everyone. Low paying jobs without benefits for sure, but they’ll make sure you have a job. Simply because of the fear of a populace that has enough time and energy to be fed up with their lot. Jobs make people busy and tired. And busy and tired people don’t rock the boat. Now they’ll say something about the luxury of human touch, or some other clap trap. But then they’ll also talk about, needing to learn the dignity of work, or giving people something to do keep people off the street. Or saying how making people work for the bare necessities in life makes them appreciate it more. It’s the same moralizing bullshit they always say about poor people. It’s why productivity has gone up, but wages and working hours have stayed constant. They FEAR a population that’s screwed over and has the time to organize.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  What you're describing is what we had in communist times in Eastern Europe. Absolutely everyone had a job since not having a job was illegal. It might not have been a useful one, or a well paid one, or the job of your dreams, but everyone was given a job to do, regardless of how pointless it was, even if you didn't pursue any higher education or vocational training. You were always given something to do for the state, no matter your situation. That's why automation was so shit compared to the west in the '80s. Why invest in advanced automation to make goods faster and cheaper when you already have endless cheap labor you need to keep busy so they don't revolt, and you don't have much consumer demand for goods since everyone is more or less equally poor? Granted, most people weren't terribly bothered by this back then, as most jobs, even the shitty ones, came with free housing from the government and free schooling for your kids. So as long as you kept your mouth shut, your head down, showed up to your useless busy-work job, and didn't rock the boat, you'd could have a pretty easy life regardless of your lack of skills or education.
  - quantified 4y ago
    That's not how capitalism works. Owners will hire the minimum number of workers for as close to minimum wage as possible. Any attempt to have government-created jobs will encounter major fights, even though the USA could use a WPA to fix infrastructure and do the inspirational public works that we can't bring ourselves to otherwise. Masses of starving people are just fine with the owning class.
pixelfarmer 4y ago
Actually, automation is bad for the economy. Imagine something like Star Trek replicators, maybe a bit different of sorts, how would you still do economy with something like that around (and is able to replicate itself so you can make more of these)? Automation kills economy, because economy means humans have to spend time to do the work and split work to fulfill their needs -- which is why economy exists in the first place: You make weapon, I go hunting with that for us both, this kinda stuff. If all that is done by machines, there is no need for any of that anymore: Economy = dead. What the IBM CEO is on about is the boomers dropping like flies out of the workforce now and the generations following are much less in numbers (demographics and all that). Which means this will put more pressure on automation of various things. But it will also put more pressure on how to do taxes and other such things, because a lot of that isn't prepared for "inverted" population pyramids, automation, and related issues.
- Oxidation 4y ago
  There's a lot more "economy" you can do with automation, though. Automatic switched-packet routing has enabled a lot of value-add over fully-manual postal systems, for example. There's a reason there was a big knee in the global GDP graph in the mid 1800s: industrialisation, which is too say, automation of previously manual processes. It's far from obvious to me that 100% automation that obviates any need for humans is anywhere in the foreseeable future. What it does mean is that under the current system, capital will continue to tend to concentrate in the machine-owners hands, which might result in not having enough people to sell their goods to, if the rate of wealth concentration exceeds the rate of wealth generation.
flandish 4y ago
(making the (safe?) assumption there will NEVER be a social safety net or UBI..) I think things will “bounce” between: - AI providing shareholder ROI and “releasing” labor back into the labor pool. Making people either choose to be homeless or accept the lowest paying jobs that are not yet done by AI. - Making then the cheap labor pool cheaper than the AI. Giving the AI time to catch up and overtake the next “caste” of labor up… Corporations only EVER and always do things in the name of profit and to see a corp take so fast to something means someone has done the math.. before you have.
- nine_k 4y ago
  There's no point in making most of the population poor. The population, and especially the "first world" population, are the customers of all these businesses. If nobody buys stuff, there's no way to turn a profit, and no point to run a business. One can imagine a classic dystopian landscape of haves surrounded by robots that serve them, without much need for human labor, and have-nots who are stuck in the previous step and live in a dirtier, poorer still-industrial society with lots of human labor, and with an intense envy to the haves. I don't really believe this dystopian view because the AI technology already seems accessible to the modern industrial societies; it's not something unobtainable, and with science mostly being done in the open, not something completely secret. So more and more of the have-nots will graduate to haves, if they can handle the social order that allows to accumulate enough resources to kickstart the AI + robots transformation, and can handle a social order after that. The question then remains: what the humans are going to do when putting food on the table stops being a major concern? (For an endgame, see the Culture series by Ian M. Banks.) BTW obviously AI needs learning about the world, and maybe humans are still better than it at discovering things, and at "teaching".
  - flandish 4y ago
    > nobody buys Exactly why the “bounce” along the bottom, in my opinion. The corps will charge as much and pay as little - and I think they’re all doing what they are designed to do. Profit over people. :/

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling That may have been the case till post-WW2 economy where if the refrigerator factory you used to work at got moved to China, you could take those skills to the car factory next door, but most of the industry jobs left in the west today, that haven't been offshored or automated away, are highly specialized ones that require years of training or higher education and don't have many transferable skills between them, and there's no way you can simply switch to those jobs without that specialized training the employers with those jobs are expecting you to have. It's a lot easier these days to find yourself obsolete and unemployable.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
Barbers do require months (though not years) of training, but obviously there is no reason for that to be the case.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Barbers aren't an industry job nor a job you can offshore. Neither are doctors, teachers, policemen, garbagemen, plumbers ... you get the point. Vital service jobs will always be safe, especially unionized ones at government or city level. But I was talking about industry jobs in the private sector, like my coding job and my friend's job at the local car factory which on the other hand ... well, we're not too safe from automation or offshoring if our companies don't stay bleeding edge, competitive and highly profitable for them to decide it's worth investing in us metatags further.

jonathankoren 4y ago

UBI will never come because we’ll always have jobs. Sure the jobs won’t pay as well, but the idea that there won’t be jobs and masses of people will be forced into the street is laughably implausible. Why? Because the oligarchs won’t allow that to happen. They’ll invent jobs for everyone. Low paying jobs without benefits for sure, but they’ll make sure you have a job. Simply because of the fear of a populace that has enough time and energy to be fed up with their lot. Jobs make people busy and tired. And busy and tired people don’t rock the boat. Now they’ll say something about the luxury of human touch, or some other clap trap. But then they’ll also talk about, needing to learn the dignity of work, or giving people something to do keep people off the street. Or saying how making people work for the bare necessities in life makes them appreciate it more. It’s the same moralizing bullshit they always say about poor people. It’s why productivity has gone up, but wages and working hours have stayed constant. They FEAR a population that’s screwed over and has the time to organize.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
What you're describing is what we had in communist times in Eastern Europe. Absolutely everyone had a job since not having a job was illegal. It might not have been a useful one, or a well paid one, or the job of your dreams, but everyone was given a job to do, regardless of how pointless it was, even if you didn't pursue any higher education or vocational training. You were always given something to do for the state, no matter your situation. That's why automation was so shit compared to the west in the '80s. Why invest in advanced automation to make goods faster and cheaper when you already have endless cheap labor you need to keep busy so they don't revolt, and you don't have much consumer demand for goods since everyone is more or less equally poor? Granted, most people weren't terribly bothered by this back then, as most jobs, even the shitty ones, came with free housing from the government and free schooling for your kids. So as long as you kept your mouth shut, your head down, showed up to your useless busy-work job, and didn't rock the boat, you'd could have a pretty easy life regardless of your lack of skills or education.
- quantified 4y ago
  That's not how capitalism works. Owners will hire the minimum number of workers for as close to minimum wage as possible. Any attempt to have government-created jobs will encounter major fights, even though the USA could use a WPA to fix infrastructure and do the inspirational public works that we can't bring ourselves to otherwise. Masses of starving people are just fine with the owning class.

pixelfarmer 4y ago

Actually, automation is bad for the economy. Imagine something like Star Trek replicators, maybe a bit different of sorts, how would you still do economy with something like that around (and is able to replicate itself so you can make more of these)? Automation kills economy, because economy means humans have to spend time to do the work and split work to fulfill their needs -- which is why economy exists in the first place: You make weapon, I go hunting with that for us both, this kinda stuff. If all that is done by machines, there is no need for any of that anymore: Economy = dead. What the IBM CEO is on about is the boomers dropping like flies out of the workforce now and the generations following are much less in numbers (demographics and all that). Which means this will put more pressure on automation of various things. But it will also put more pressure on how to do taxes and other such things, because a lot of that isn't prepared for "inverted" population pyramids, automation, and related issues.

Oxidation 4y ago
There's a lot more "economy" you can do with automation, though. Automatic switched-packet routing has enabled a lot of value-add over fully-manual postal systems, for example. There's a reason there was a big knee in the global GDP graph in the mid 1800s: industrialisation, which is too say, automation of previously manual processes. It's far from obvious to me that 100% automation that obviates any need for humans is anywhere in the foreseeable future. What it does mean is that under the current system, capital will continue to tend to concentrate in the machine-owners hands, which might result in not having enough people to sell their goods to, if the rate of wealth concentration exceeds the rate of wealth generation.

flandish 4y ago

(making the (safe?) assumption there will NEVER be a social safety net or UBI..) I think things will “bounce” between: - AI providing shareholder ROI and “releasing” labor back into the labor pool. Making people either choose to be homeless or accept the lowest paying jobs that are not yet done by AI. - Making then the cheap labor pool cheaper than the AI. Giving the AI time to catch up and overtake the next “caste” of labor up… Corporations only EVER and always do things in the name of profit and to see a corp take so fast to something means someone has done the math.. before you have.

nine_k 4y ago
There's no point in making most of the population poor. The population, and especially the "first world" population, are the customers of all these businesses. If nobody buys stuff, there's no way to turn a profit, and no point to run a business. One can imagine a classic dystopian landscape of haves surrounded by robots that serve them, without much need for human labor, and have-nots who are stuck in the previous step and live in a dirtier, poorer still-industrial society with lots of human labor, and with an intense envy to the haves. I don't really believe this dystopian view because the AI technology already seems accessible to the modern industrial societies; it's not something unobtainable, and with science mostly being done in the open, not something completely secret. So more and more of the have-nots will graduate to haves, if they can handle the social order that allows to accumulate enough resources to kickstart the AI + robots transformation, and can handle a social order after that. The question then remains: what the humans are going to do when putting food on the table stops being a major concern? (For an endgame, see the Culture series by Ian M. Banks.) BTW obviously AI needs learning about the world, and maybe humans are still better than it at discovering things, and at "teaching".
- flandish 4y ago
  > nobody buys Exactly why the “bounce” along the bottom, in my opinion. The corps will charge as much and pay as little - and I think they’re all doing what they are designed to do. Profit over people. :/