15 ms·

Average Is Over

225 points by mjfern 15y ago

mikebracco 15y ago
Great article. This illustrates a fundamental mistake that many believe which is that just because they have a college degree they deserve a certain job, income or lifestyle.
- zoltarSpeaks 15y ago
  Yeah I completely agree with this. There is an attitude just like this in England at the moment. There aren't enough graduates using their initiative and being creative in either finding jobs or making work for themselves to fight the declining level of jobs. The assumption is, leave school, go to University, get a job. Unfortunately for them that route is failing now.
  - UK-Al05 15y ago
    You certainly have better chance at getting job by going to university; unemployment rate is higher for non-grads. Also running your own business is not as easy as it seems; especially without the connections to get the contracts. Expecting the graduates to work for themselves straight out of university is unrealistic.
  - robryan 15y ago
    In the past, when less people were attending university, this would be true as in getting a degree you were putting yourself into a fairly exclusive group. Now though, when so many are getting degrees, you need to go above and beyond them to put yourself in a group as exclusive as the degree would give you a generation ago.
    - zoltarSpeaks 15y ago
      Yeah i think you're spot on, it's that ability to shine out from the crowd that is required. Although i guess the exclusivity of being a graduate could easily return with recent hike up in fees within the last couple of years.
exit 15y ago
did you mean to link to the comment field in particular, or the entire article? in any case, it reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
- mjfern 15y ago
  Sorry, I meant to link to the article, not the comments. Can a moderator edit the link? Thanks in advance!
- dullcrisp 15y ago
  There's a comment further down linking to a series of articles which propose the same solution. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm is the relevant article. It's something that should be considered since it seems like currently there's nothing really keeping the value of human labor from going down, leaving most people destitute. However, even if it could be financed successfully, it would be a very dramatic change for our economy and society, and I don't really see any way to there from here. Our present culture is ultimately rooted on consumerism -- most people earn as much money as they're able to working a job and then spend all of it on things they need. We permit a small elite who can earn enough money to not need to work for a living to do as they see fit, but the vast majority is kept doing what society requires of them by the need to work at a job and earn a wage. In a world where people are free to do what they want, there needs to be something to encourage them to do something which is beneficial to society, to prevent stagnation. The whole system begins to sound a lot like a refinement of what communist countries hoped to achieve in the 20th century, and it feels like we're back to many of the basic arguments for and against socialism. If it isn't already clear from what I wrote, I have no real knowledge of this topic and I'm just rambling. The article I linked is a bit long but it and the FAQ it links to try to address some of these issues.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I tend to agree with that solution, though I think there are more and less sustainable vs. conflict-inducing ways of structuring it. The simplest way is just to pay out cash collected from taxes, but that's always subject to conflict around "my tax money going to support lazy bums" type stuff, and easy to cut (or fiddle with in various ways to meet other budgetary goals). More sustainable basic incomes tend to be structured as royalties imo, like Alaska's oil fund. One possibility would be to look at what might happen in a future where agriculture is mainly mechanized, so in effect food is being grown by robots. Initially what that'll mean is whoever got in place first will profit from them; whoever had the land and the capital to invest in the robots will then own the results of their production, even in a hypothetical future where they run 100% on autopilot henceforth. So it's a sort of strong-dependence-on-initial-conditions type situation, where who gets the results of the robots' labor depends basically on who was on top in the last pre-robot generation (granted, it may not be a purely black-and-white pre-robot/robot transition). I think in that case we'd have to eventually (somehow) transition towards a bunch of arable land + robots being held in trust for the population as a whole, splitting up the proceeds, or at least a portion of them, like the Alaska oil fund. Lots of details and questions around exactly how the numbers work out, but at a high level I like a solution of not intruding much into the "normal" part of the economy, like humans doing things for other humans, but operating some basic minerals/land/agriculture in some sort of trust arrangement, with proceeds distributed to everyone, as their share of the proceeds of the earth+robots (as opposed to the proceeds of other humans' labor).
eternalban 15y ago
Yet he still has a job at NYTimes.
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richardburton 15y ago
This is fascinating. I think the big (and scary) meta-trend is this: The population is increasing and the requirement for people is decreasing. This gap is made wider by increased birth-rates and better automation. More people are being born into a world where fewer are required. That is quite a scary thought. Computers and machines automate and replace people everywhere. I have some anecdotal evidence of this: At my last business we used to follow-up twice via email with all of the people who had not responded to a quote that we had sent them. We had 50-100 enquiries a day so the follow-ups soon mounted up. I tried every CRM and mail-list manager out there. I could not find one that would trigger an email from my Gmail account if a contact had not responded. I was spending 3-4 hours a day doing the follow-ups. So were my staff. It got to the point where I wanted to hire someone to do it. Eventually I learnt more about the software and read up on ruby on rails. I hired a small software house to help with the backend, built the front-end myself and a month later, a machine replaced the humans and prevented a new hire. That is just one job at a tiny 5-person company. At scale, computer-based automation creates huge efficiencies. The flip-side of that are huge deficiencies in employment. Here come the machines.
- jsankey 15y ago
  On the upside, as populations become wealthier and more educated the fertility rate drops. We're a (scarily) long way from things stabilising, though.
- edoloughlin 15y ago
  > a machine replaced the humans and prevented a new hire I think it's more the case that a machine made your small business more efficient and more likely to still be in existence a year from now. Was there really any benefit to have someone sitting at a desk performing a dull, repetitive task?
- wladimir 15y ago
  I think it's also a matter of what kind of world we want. For example: Do you choose to use software instead of employing a person because you prefer the software, or would you prefer to hire a person but choose software because it is cheaper (which helps the company survive) and kind-of can do the same job? If it's the first, there's a good reason to be scared. If it's the second, then market forces might eventually balance out and make hiring people an attractive choice again. Ideally, tools such as computers will go back to being tools, "human helpers" and not "human replacements". I do not like to think about an automated, antisocial world in which less and less humans are needed because machines have taken over. Isn't that self-defeating anyway? When did we start putting our tools above ourselves?
ilaksh 15y ago
Better education isn't going to solve the problem of technological unemployment. We actually need a completely different structure. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
nchuhoai 15y ago
I always wondered, is it actually possible for us to ever assume that we can achieve better unemployment rates or is there a practical minimum which we can never get below again. If you think about it, in a world without technology, the money we spend has to go to someone in the economy. However, since we know have artificial workforce in play, we effectively pay less, which means that we in consequence pay out less than we receive. So eitheir we all get paid less (yay communism), or some people just naturally have to be unemployed (yay income inequality).
dave_sullivan 15y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I think he's right about many things there: manufacturing jobs are leaving and not coming back. Automation is becoming more and more advanced, particularly if you factor advances in robotics and ml since 2006 or so. Things move faster and average just doesn't seem to cut it when you can manufacture excellence. Hell, lawyers and doctors will be next, how about faux ai that can write simple web apps or come up with good designs? Give generative models a few more years to advance, we'll see how far fetched that is. Some people will get very rich from all that. But that wealth will go to those who control what amounts to the means of production and they'll be able to defend those means with patents. I guess workers could strike back in the day, good luck with that now, the little guy has even less negotiating power. All this to say, I think these trends and the shift they bring are going to be the most fundamental shift in economic organization since the industrial revolution. Not sure what the answer is, but I'm concerned that those in power dont even recognize the issues (they're not "nerds", as they say.) Time will tell, but I'm not all that optimistic about the average joes out there. PS I wish the answer was everyone will start their own business, but honestly I just don't think that will be practical.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  That would lead to even greater wealth inequality, one of the most destabilizing factors in a society.
- hammerdr 15y ago
  In the case of a "everything is automated, only a small portion of people are needed to produce essentials and even advance" society, would we just be better off with a system that relied on the altruism of the few to make the lives of everyone better and everyone else could just exist? That sort of society has a slew of issues that could be better explored in futurist science fiction (things such as psychologic issues for the non-producers, the sustainability of altruism, etc.). But it is a consideration that I have thought about. Capitalism isn't going to be subverted that quickly, though. The system will right itself and any revolution of that caliber will be long and hard fought. The world superpower will be a capitalist system in 2050 and probably 2100.
WalterBright 15y ago
The flip side is that all this automation makes stuff cheaper, and a better lifestyle is available for less money.
- dclaysmith 15y ago
  I think that should be the flip side but aside from 2009-2010 (the bulk of the recession), inflation has remained constant over the last ten years. Inflation adjusted wages have continued to decline to record numbers. The jobs that are returning in the current recovery have been primarily low paying ones (clearly IT is exempt from this). What has been going up is corporate profits. Apple's latest figures are mind boggling. A billion dollars in profit a WEEK. Someone up higher in the comments wrote that we are at peak-capitalism and headed towards Marxism/Socialism. While I doubt that's going to happen (Wall St too strong, progressive politicians too weak) I think America needs to go that way. As Elizabeth Warren said 'There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own'. I feel that corporations (they are people right) and "The 1%" need to pay as much or more of their income in taxes to repay society for their success. This money should be used to address the problems in this article. The US needs to make higher education and retraining free/affordable, make health care free, and provide better social safety nets. With these things in place, Americans will be able to start getting competitive again.
  - danieldk 15y ago
    I think that should be the flip side but aside from 2009-2010 (the bulk of the recession), inflation has remained constant over the last ten years. While this may be true, technology has definitely become cheaper and more accessible. Eg. in my country, which is a Western economy, few people could afford computers in the 80ies, except maybe for the very low end (C64, MSX). Now many families have multiple laptops, smartphones, and maybe even a tablet. Also, fixed Internet connections used to be expensive, pay per minute. Nowadays, for 20 Euros per month you get an internet connection without data limits and plenty of bandwidth. Technology did become more accessible for the average family. And the impact is real: snail mail is almost killed, records stores have mostly disappeared, and next up are book stores. The price of e-mail is near-zero, iTunes music purchases are often cheaper than new physical albums (especially if you have to pay S&H fees), and Kindle ebooks are often cheaper than paper equivalents.
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jmtame 15y ago
It was only a few centuries ago that we paid this exclusive, elite upper class in society called scribes to write and transcribe things for us, because we weren't literate enough to do it ourselves. The parallels are pretty surprising today: we're paying an exclusive, elite class called programmers to write in the languages understood by computers. Software is eating the world, jobs are being displaced, and the demand for technical talent is as high as its ever been.
- Dybbuk 15y ago
  There is also a defect in this comparison in that the journalists weren't helping displace average joe's jobs, but programmers are.
- mtts 15y ago
  Scribes were reasonably well off, sure, but to call them an "exclusive, elite upper class" goes beyond stretching it. Scribes were decently paid clerks that worked for scheming, sword wielding thugs who only gradually became literate themselves. I don't think we're an elite, upper class now either. We're decently paid clerks that perform an essential task for our scheming, private jet flying, yes, thuggish overlords that for now at least haven't become computer literate themselves. Yet. But the day will come that they will have, or at least will have become computer literate enough to operate the software that has displaced us. If that day comes after I've died, I don't mind. Otherwise it'll be a problem.
- bad_user 15y ago
  Everybody can talk, but few people can be successful salesmen. Anyone could learn to play a musical instrument, but few people are actually doing it and even fewer people are good at it. Related to scribes, even if mostly everyone knows how to read or write, that doesn't mean that book authors are obsolete. Writing novels and technical books is an endeavor that requires much more than simply being capable to read and write. So I don't really get why this analogy is being made. Well, actually I do. It's for the same reason why recruiters are doing keyword matching on resumes.
- rythie 15y ago
  Is programming that elite though? wages seemed to have hardly changed in the U.K. in the last 10 years (accounting for inflation). Also programming pays a similar amount to other jobs requiring a degree and is certainly a lot less than jobs like accountancy, finance, law and medical doctors. For example, average programmer salary in 2004 was about £31k and in £38k http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/programmer.do http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/programmer.do and if you calculate £31k in today's money you get £38,440 [http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/His...]
wavephorm 15y ago
Welcome to Peak Capitalism. This is the peak of our current socio-economic system, and I'm fairly certain that everyone in the White House is now well-aware and convinced of what's likely going to happen over the course of the next 10 years. I hope they're preparing for it right now. I believe the coming collapse of the capitalistic-democractic system is imminent, and America needs to very seriously start planning for a conversion to Socialism/Marxism because the current system is not going to work for very long.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  How about searching for new economic models. Are 200 year old models really relevant anymore?
  - _delirium 15y ago
    At the very least an update is probably in order. To really over-simplify (somewhat unfairly), my read of the "socialist alternative's" theorizing is that it's gone in waves roughly like this: 1) extensive analysis of 19th-century economic systems, especially factory production (Marx et al) and agriculture (Kropotkin, the kibbutz movement, etc.); followed by a period of 2) focus on culture/ideology/hegemony as the place the "real battle" is fought (Gramsci, neo-Gramscians, post-structuralist Marxism); but not really followed by 3) extensive analysis of 21st-century economic and technological systems. I think even for people who disagree with them, it'd be healthier for there to be a Left that paid close, scientific/analytical attention to present-day material conditions, rather than focusing mainly on culture/ideology like the neo-Gramscians, or tying themselves too strongly to 19th-century analyses of 19th-century conditions. Or, for that matter, just taking an amorphous "against the greedy bankers" line like the populist left does, which is probably good politics, but not a deep analysis.
  - wladimir 15y ago
    In a way, they are. People haven't changed that much since then. However, economic models need spring into existence from the ground up. They are emergent. The world is too complex for them to be designed by theorists. This is why base capitalism (not the complex beast it has become) works, as even without any pressure people start trading. USSR communism collapsed because it needs to be enforced from the top, and you can only keep up a lie for so long. The same is true for our current zombie-capitalism. We do need to give new systems some room to form and grow, though... and not label it as EVIL communism/capitalism/someotherism too soon, as that will cause typical path lock-in.
mtts 15y ago
Ridiculous. The solution to average people becoming less relevant in the economy (which I don't dispute, btw) can of course never be to make everyone above average as that is by definition impossible. It's a feel good message for average folk that papers over the truth, which is that average folk that used to make a decent living doing average work will become poor. All of them, eventually. How poor exactly? Well, you could do worse than to look at Chinese factory workers for an indication of where things will end. Of course it's more complicated than that: if the average man has become as poor as a Chinese factory worker, he will no longer be able to afford expensive gadgets and value added services, so it'll be in the interest of at least some sectors of the economy (think Apple and Google) to keep the impoverishment of the middle class down to a minimum. On the other hand there are other sectors of the economy (think McDonalds and Walmart) that will do just fine even if everyone is poor, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But, like I said, this article is ridiculous. Giving everyone a PhD won't solve a thing.
- joelrunyon 15y ago
  I didn't read anything about giving anyone a PhD? I could be wrong, but he's talking less about "shifting" average to include a PhD, to shifting how average people are going to have to fend for themselves - which is to fight to be above average. As another commenter pointed out, this is impossible (if everyone's special, no one is), but it's also good to mention that you get to choose whether or not you want to be average. Sure, you can rely on being a cog in a machine, but if you do that, you just jumped into a super-competitive market dominated by machines and cheap overseas labor. So, you can either relegate yourself to that fate or choose something different. I believe his point was that there's a shift in the past could escape with being average because it was localized and there was less overall competition for jobs because of geographic limitations. The math is that the market for average has been commoditized over 7 billion people + machines, rather than the 300 million people we used to. That brings the level of average much, much lower for certain types of works. So, the solution isn't to try and raise your qualifications level in a pool of average people, but rather jump in a different pool altogether, where your value as a worker is not so easily commoditized (knowledge workers, developing fields & emerging tech). For anyone familiar with Seth Godin, this talk isn't very new at all - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/no_to_average.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/no_to_averag...
goatslacker 15y ago
Post high school education is overrated. In fact the American school system won't really prepare you to face the reality. Yes it seems like the need for these "average" jobs are decreasing but in the end it will all balance itself out and there will be new areas that would need to be filled.
- ericd 15y ago
  It absolutely isn't overrated for many fields. Software is something of an exception, but I also think even coders usually benefit from formal training, which they're not really going to get in high school.
- Jach 15y ago
  What's overrated is the "pick a degree, any degree, you get to call yourself 'educated' in four years!" mantra. The difference between the US and (what I hear of (so probably stereotypical)) Germany is that in the US you're told from a very young age to go to college to "get an education". In Germany you're told to go to college to "become a competent engineer". I really disagree with you that it will balance out, that everything will be alright, and that the 40-hour work week will keep on going. I'll defer to the other comments on this page for reasons why.
  - goatslacker 15y ago
    I believe new opportunities will open up. Change will come. There are plenty of needs that will surface somewhere and it's up to the "average" to adapt to fill those needs. Those that don't adapt or resist the change will be the ones that suffer the most. This is a pattern with many things in life.
jharding 15y ago
This article reminds me of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano It's a pretty good read. It has an interesting take on a future where machines do the majority of the work. With the way things are headed, I'd say a society like the one described in Player Piano might not be to far off. I'm still undecided whether that's a good thing or not.
beatpanda 15y ago
So we're currently building an economy that the "average person" doesn't have the skills to participate in. OK. So who are we building this economy for, and why?
- UK-Al05 15y ago
  Consumers. The economy serves the consumers.
  - justincormack 15y ago
    But as Henry Ford realized, if the consumer has too low an income he or she cannot afford to conume, so your fctory will be unprifitable.
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  "We" are not "building" the economy in the sense that factory workers build a car. It is more like evolution. You start with some little molecules floating the ocean, you let the simulation run, and eventually you get a complex equilibrium that includes ants, giraffes, and those parasites that mind-control mice into getting eaten by cats. You start with self-sufficient peasant farmers that don't want barbarians to take their stuff, you let the simulation run, you eventually get towns, feudalism, enough surplus food to feed a few scientists, the industrial revolution, world wars, the military-industrial complex, the internet, high frequency trading. There is not someone designing this progression. It is a system of particles that in each time step apply an update rule. If we want to stop it, we need to figure out what force we can apply to the system to make it settle into a different equilibrium. That's not even the hard part, since the system is not very stable, and can collapse into new equilibria very quickly, just like natural ecosystems can when you introduce new species. What's hard is understanding the dynamics of the system well enough that you can steer it into a state that you want, and make it stay there. Otherwise it is like introducing kudzu for erosion control. Well, it sure controlled erosion! I am not a fatalist or a nihilist. I don't believe that there is some universal predetermined order (I think giraffes are arbitrary) and I think that when we can understand a small corner of the system, targeted intervention can work. But it is not a question of finding the right "evil person" to beat up, or finding the right political dogma. It is a question of studying the system with the same intellectual modesty as an ecologist, and finding a few levers that we can responsibly use - and, yes, gathering enough force in one place that we can protect the levers from people that would rather they be set in different positions.
rushabh 15y ago
Siri has changed the discussion about voice recognition and semantic search. Hard to imagine what will happen to all the call-centers in India if the use of this technology becomes more widespread. How many years are we away from this?
- jpadkins 15y ago
  Speech recognition has been displacing Indian call centers for 10+ years. Tellme Networks and Nuance have been leading this space... Siri has done nothing in the call center sector.
revorad 15y ago
Or more accurately, the average has changed.
joelrunyon 15y ago
Better titled Average is looking less attractive than it did 10 years ago There will always be a place for average. However, I don't think it's going to be as attractive of a place to be as it has been. It's going to be much more costly to try and coast through life.
- joelrunyon 15y ago
  It's also worth noting that it's never been as affordable or easy to escape "average" as it has been today - interestingly enough, thanks to technology.
  - wladimir 15y ago
    What is this "average"? Obviously, it is a statistical measure. But what does it mean in terms of people? In those terms, "the average" is just a narrative of what the average person would be like. Which seems to be breaking down. Sure - you can make a list of specific things that every person needs or desires, as there is a lot of commonality between people. Aside from that commonality, we do different things, which are specific to persons or groups. You cannot really speak of a mathematical average there, as those are qualitative differences not quantitative differences (and the groups also overlap...). How do you "escape the average"? How is it to be "average"? How will you and other people escaping, affect that average? Will the average catch up with you? I think the term is losing meaning, more than anything else, due to the specialization inherent in our technological society, and due to non-geographical clustering of people made possible by faster means of communication.
    - joelrunyon 15y ago
      Er by "escape" I meant "opt-out." A while ago, if you were average, there were too many barriers to not being average to let you to escape the middle and it was easy to just "be." Now, with the internet, the barrier to escape has been lowered to a laptop + an internet connection.
    - joelrunyon 15y ago
      And "average" now, is what you can expect as the default, if you make all the "safe" choices.
mbesto 15y ago
Same exact article written by Business Insider: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-19/strategy/30642154_1_recession-millennials-change http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-19/strategy/3064...
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invalidOrTaken 15y ago
One question I've had for...a while now. If a) corporate profits are up b) hiring isn't happening, or is seeing a skills mismatch then where exactly are all these profits going? If they're going to capital goods for the company, that just moves the question on down the line. If they're going to shareholders, then what are those shareholders buying? And if it's just sitting in the bank, where is the bank lending it out?
- sskates 15y ago
  A lot of companies are just sitting on the cash (most likely in a bank account). Interest rates are very low right now, so there's not much incentive to lend the money out.
  - robryan 15y ago
    The bank would be lending it out though.
    - dgit 15y ago
      What makes you think so? Interest offered by borrowers is generally low these days and risks are high. So lending isn't happening.
      - Nick_C 15y ago
        If that was the case, we would see M2 and M3 go up, and we aren't. Depending on how you want to measure it, you could even argue they are contracting slightly.
        dgit 15y ago
        Looks like 'up' to me for M2: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/ http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/ M3 not being tracked. That said, I'm not entirely sure about the definition of M2 and how that's related to 'money sitting in the bank'. M2 includes 'savings and time deposits' according to Wikipedia, but it doesn't seem to differentiate whether banks in turn lend out that deposited money or it just sits there.
MengYuanLong 15y ago
The majority of comments seem to praise the programming/IT community or question the state of our government/economic system but I have a different question. What future skill set should people be retooling to have? What can our economy use more of?
- pgeorgi 15y ago
  Taking care of children/elders/family/friends/neighbors. With everything else automated, people will still be in need for social interaction with real humans. Currently the issue is that there's no simple economic value to put on these tasks. Given their importance, I'd claim the bug lies in the economic model, not in social interactions. This all assumes that automation is put to its full potential: What will society look like when harvesting energy, food generation and processing, transportation and home building ("basic needs") were fully automated and available for more-or-less free? (home building is the odd one out in this list, as the others are for nearly instant consumtion, while most people live under the same roof for a while)
spinchange 15y ago
I can't believe those Presto touchscreens at restaurants are $100 per month. I love gadgets and technology, but much prefer dealing with a server and think most people do. My kids like the games and nag incessantly to play the "pay" ones, but I hardly think this is the end of waitresses and waiters. (I hope)
- barefoot 15y ago
  Agreed, I think replacing waitresses with touchscreens removes an important part of the whole dining out experience. A touchscreen waiter seems very cold and utilitarian. It reminds me of the cheap LCD displays that have replaced gas station attendants. Almost all of the gas stations that I've used recently have them, and they all have very poorly worded prompts that show no regard for the time that I spend interacting with it. I can't help but feel that we're headed the same route with eating food: WELCOME. PLEASE SWIPE CARD. SELECT FOOD. THANK YOU. DISPENSING FOOD. PRESS ENTER DESERT? COME AGAIN. SPC. 2 MEAL LOBSTER FRIDAY. That's not the experience I'm looking for when I want to go out on a friday night. I want a real person to show up at the table and all of the imperfections that comes bundled along with it. Is that just because it's what I'm used to? Will our kids grow up in a world without waiters and not even care?
  - xanados 15y ago
    My desire to interact with a waiter varies depending on the nature of the restaurant. Clearly this system isn't going to be installed at a 4 star restaurant any time soon, but if I go to a restaurant just to eat it would be useful. It would also be useful in a crowded pub where the service is generally slow and terrible and the social aspect is more about hanging out with your buddies than being waited on with a date/wife/kids. People could enter their food and drink orders and they would at least know they are in process. In San Francisco there is a sandwich shop called Specialty's that has installed iPad kiosks patrons can order from, which allows them to handle the lunch time rush with essentially no line and two cashiers. You are also assured that your order is correct because you can see all the ingredients on the sandwiches and make additions and subtractions. It's really quite great, although I have thought it is the sort of thing that is much more likely to be successful in a technology hub than in most cities.
phatbyte 15y ago
" Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. " - This is true in the actual times, since China (no matter how they want you to forget it) is living under very harsh communist regime, but that will change when chinese workers start demanding better working conditions, more time for family, better salaries, etc..as far as I know, it's China who's living in a bubble.
adamgravitis 15y ago
The author's sudden and poorly supported conclusion doesn't really fit. Because people with bachelor's degrees have the least unemployment, it is imperative we pass a GI Bill to ensure everyone gets a bachelor's degree?! He's getting the causality wrong. It's not because they have bachelor's degrees that they're getting jobs. They're getting jobs because they're (minimally) bright and (minimally) ambitious. Printing 100 million bachelor's diplomas "solves" the unemployment problem in much the same way that printing 100 trillion dollars solves our financial problems: not at all.
- orky56 15y ago
  Although your argument is perfectly valid, one should not underestimate the value of the Bachelor's degree as just a piece of paper. I'm not trying to be facetious but a lot of employers filter, and sometimes hire, applicants based on their education level. In these cases, some employers assume these people have the skills. The important point here is that skills can be acquired in post-secondary education or on your own. However if done on your own, you face a hurdle of not having the college degree.
  - jpadkins 15y ago
    if 95% of the population have a BS/BA, then it no longer serves as a filter... Business will find a new filter. Also if 95% have a BS/BA, then you no longer have negotiating power for your higher wages... Giving everyone 4 more years of education will certainly benefit society, but it doesn't solve the inequality problem.
wisty 15y ago
As a corollary, nobody average is busy.
lcargill99 15y ago
Tom Friedman's Lake Woebegone bias is showing. Again.
denzil_correa 15y ago
On the contrary, I feel average is the new skill. There are many a time where you need just average skilled workers. High skilled workers may find such tasks mundane while for average skilled workers the same mundane tasks may be challenging. IMHO, I would love to have a good mix of high skilled and average skilled workers.
nluqo 15y ago
This seems strangely familiar: http://www.businessinsider.com/if-youre-an-average-worker-in-this-forever-recession-youre-going-straight-to-the-bottom-2012-1#ixzz1k0tZFvyn http://www.businessinsider.com/if-youre-an-average-worker-in...
MaggieL 15y ago
When a liberal talks about how somebody "should have access to" something, hang on to your wallet. Because you will pay for it.
- geogra4 15y ago
  Some people don't have problems lifting up those who never had the advantages that they had. It's a collective action problem that takes a whole society to fix.
  - gyardley 15y ago
    And some people do have a problem with this. I'm always curious about this -- to what extent do you think you can compel Maggie, me, and others who don't share your values to solve a collective action problem we don't particularly think is a problem? And what side effects do you think that will have on society? Edit: yeah, yeah, downvote because I don't share your values, fine by me -- but my questions weren't rhetorical. I'm really interested in your answer.
    - geogra4 15y ago
      (preface: I'm an American speaking from an American POV, not sure where you're located so this may not be 100% relevant if you're aussie or swedish or canadian or something) I think that everyone in a society as wealthy as our own deserves the chance at a life free from fear. Freedom from the fear of hunger, from the fear of a parent losing their job and being plunged into destitution. Freedom from the fear of medical bankruptcy and dying of curable disease or injury. Freedom from the fear of walking down your own street or going to your public school. I don't think anyone is brazen enough to believe that these are not real problems in America. The solutions from the right are not solutions at all, they're just the status quo. More tax cuts, more deregulation, more gutting of municipal funding for libraries, police, public transit, and schools. I am of the belief that wealth is not created by individuals in a vacuum. Every entrepreneur and employee stands on the shoulders of giants. They had a business environment and consumer base already here, ready made. Additionally, would Gates have dropped out of Harvard if his father wasn't a partner at a major law firm(Preston Gates)? Would Romney have formed his own company if his father wasn't the CEO of American Motors? If you come from wealth you can afford to take more risks, as you always have an out if things go poorly. 99% of america doesn't have that out. This is why I am of the belief that assets accrued by the wealthy are not just theirs alone to hoard. Not only is it better for the economy if more people have a fall-back and can take risks without the fear of financial ruin, it is better for society. I guess the bottom line is that I would prefer that a majority of Americans agree with me in the sense that we can do better for those that haven't really benefited from the vast improvements in technology we've seen in the past few decades. I want to move beyond the 'culture war' rhetoric of the previous generations and I believe we can find practical solutions to these real problems that can benefit the vast majority of Americans. I don't really know what to say to someone who doesn't think we have problems, I guess we have to agree to disagree.
mhb 15y ago
A more optimistic counterpoint: http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/22/predictions_about_the_death_of_american_hegemony_may_have_been_greatly_exaggerated http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/22/prediction...
- redschell 15y ago
  I think the numbers from Harvard B-school grads isn't really that shocking or terrifying. Of course the US is losing ground to the BRIC countries. They were bound to make progress eventually. Also, the 21% that felt America is "falling behind" probably didn't mean to suggest that the country is finished. They're reacting to events of the past year, such as the demotion of our credit rating, which, as that particular snippet states, reflect a negative trend worthy of greater public attention. Nice article overall though, especially the point about the country successfully deleveraging.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
> Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra This is Tom Friedman's socioeconomic policy in a nutshell: America as Lake Wobegon. Heaven help us.
narrow 15y ago
Interesting. In addition to post-high school education access, it's important that we also re-think our education system by creating environments that inculcates learning around our individual passion/talent. Above average performers are known to love their craft, and in a hyper-competitive economy that requires one to learn, unlearn and relearn, passion would matter a whole lot.
steder 15y ago
“Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ” Ah yes, at midnight I'll just go walk over to my "dormitories" on my "plantation" and wake my "employees" and tell them to get to work harvesting cotton. In exchange for their 12 hour work day (and a comfy dormitory in which to live) I'll give them tea and a biscuit! I don't understand why the "Average" American won't come work for me given these perks.
- hello_moto 15y ago
  I'd like to see the author in the shoes of those workers :)
pnathan 15y ago
What's usually missed is the value of being a skilled tradesman. Who fixes your robot? Who builds your house? Not everyone is cut out for college, actually, most people aren't.
- quandrum 15y ago
  > who fixes your robot? Who fixes humans? Robots will do this eventually. > Who builds your house? Robots here too. Just because they can't do it today doesn't mean you shouldn't plan on them being able to do it.
  - ams6110 15y ago
    The question is, will a robot that is autonomous enough and sophisticated enough to build a house be cheaper to operate than a human worker? As complexity of machines increases, the number of ways they can break down increases exponentially. Humans bodies are self-repairing for the most part except in cases of severe traumatic injury and disease.
    - rsheridan6 15y ago
      The complexity of a robot is mostly in the software. Input (cameras and microphones) and output (robotic arms, etc) have been around for decades, but robots have not been able to interpret a picture of the world effectively. That's a software problem. The thing about software is that you write it once and then it's free to copy. The first general-purpose robot workers will probably run expensive proprietary software, but 10 years later there will be usable open source versions. The physical robot itself will become cheaper, if anything, due to economies of scale.
- randomdata 15y ago
  Not everyone is cut out for college, actually, most people aren't. That is me. Once upon a time, I applied to take CS at a number of institutions. I was rejected from them all. Not that it really stopped me, I just had to learn it all by myself. Now I get to play "lead engineer" on some pretty significant projects and have CS grads coming to me for help. But the meme I see often on HN and elsewhere is that you need to go to college. What they fail to account for is that college is a protected class where most people do not have the choice of going, even if they wanted to. I certainly didn't have the opportunity – though in hindsight, it was probably a blessing.
noonespecial 15y ago
I think he meant "ordinary" not "average". Average has a specific meaning and as many have pointed out, you can't make everyone above average. What we've got to figure out is how to keep the large mass of ordinaries from being made into Eloi by a combination of welfare states, machine productivity, and wealth disparity. Or, failing that, find a way to prevent the Morlocks from eating the Eloi when it suits them.
- ScottBurson 15y ago
  you can't make everyone above average Yes, you can, because there's an infinity of dimensions and each person only has to be above average on one of them. I'm really surprised how many people here aren't getting this.
  - billybob 15y ago
    Infinity of dimensions, sure. But we're only talking about one of them: number of dollars of economic value you can create. Whether you're an above-average Scrabble player is irrelevant to a discussion about work and wages. Unless there's something of economic value that you can do better and more cheaply than a robot, there is no reason for anyone to pay you.
    - kokey 15y ago
      I think a better way to describe it would be to say that in order to make sure you earn an average salary, you have to be above average at something, and more so than in the previous century.
DamnYuppie 15y ago
One point of the article that rankled me was his concept of a G.I. Bill so that everyone had access to higher education. That seems very misguided in my opinion. Instead of focusing on "higher education" should we not attempt to remake our primary education system such that we provide people with more relevant knowledge and skills?
virmundi 15y ago
I think that we're taking the concept of "average" too literally. Picture two lines: average worker competency and need/requirement for the company to be competitive. The author states that historically those two lines have been so close as to be equivalent in management's eyes. Now the second line has moved up. So according to this definition, the average line is no longer acceptable. As a result we need to move it up to realign with the need line. Under this definition the author is not as problematic as before.
- jpadkins 15y ago
  I like how you explained it much clearer than the professional author did... I think NY Times needs to realign their columnists talent level...
grego 15y ago
I suppose the original author is worried about U.S. average falling with respect to world average.
- userulluipeste 15y ago
  That's only the globalization. The other thing affecting the (now global) average is automation, which is faster than before.
n_time 15y ago
tl;dr america in decline. getting a job hard? try school.
joezydeco 15y ago
Go listen to Davidson's interview with a factory worker over the increasing amount of automation and required technical knowledge that will eventually shove her out of a job if she doesn't acquire the skills to keep up: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/13/145039131/the-transformation-of-american-factory-jobs-in-one-company http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/13/145039131/the-tran... It's sobering. It makes me eternally grateful I have skills, well at least some skills, that won't be replaced by a robot and CNC mill overnight.
n_time 15y ago
Maybe added economic value is the wrong way for society to decide the quality of someone's life?
deleted 15y ago
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draggnar 15y ago
I believe that the solutions will be found in a change in our value system. Things that we really appreciate, things that are uniquely human, will be valued more. See thisismadebyhand.com Obviously solving big problems and being "not average" will be important, but I believe that many people will be able to find niches doing things that add value to life in ways that a machine can't.
unfocused 15y ago
In the future, people will need more than a degree. They will need a few. That's what our children will have to deal with. There's nothing ridiculous about this. More and more and people are getting access to education.
hammock 15y ago
Folks are harping on the meaning of "average," but it's clear to me that in the article, "average" here is a euphemism for "unskilled." When you've been working as an semi-skilled laborer in a textile mill for 20 years, and suddenly your job is made redundant in favor of automation- your mill training becomes worthless. You don't need to become "above average," you just need to learn a different semi-skilled trade. Like pushing around excel spreadsheets.
cust_support 15y ago
I think we're all missing the point; namely, the assumption of Mr. Friedman’s rank. Suppose that Mr. Friedman is above average, then the suggestions in this opinion piece are plausible and should demand our sincere consideration. Now suppose that Mr. Friedman is below average. In this case, his suggestions are most certainly suspect and quite possibly invaluable; you should disregard everything that has been mentioned here today. But all of that is irrelevant, because the truly significant aspect of human ranking is that someone outside the system must perform this activity. The only viable assessment of a human’s averageness must come from an unbiased source whose own averageness can never be in question. This outside, unbiased source must first assess Mr. Friedman’s averageness before any intelligent discussion can commence.
arank 15y ago
He mentions most of the points in article in this video - http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Friedman http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Friedman
mcantelon 15y ago
This is pretty obvious stuff.
- deleted 15y ago
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kokey 15y ago
I have been thinking about solutions to this, to get a feeling for how things will work out in the future by itself. Technology allows us to replace manual labour with machines, but it also can create jobs for other things we have been struggling to automate since it's naturally resistant to being industrialised. These are human things, which tends to be the service economy. To work on real examples: There are tasks around the house that I don't enjoy doing or don't do reliably. Things like laundry, taking the rubbish out, cleaning, paying the bills, going shopping for food or new underwear. I wouldn't mind laundry people coming into my house once a week to pick the laundry up, doing it somewhere else, and bringing it back. I also wouldn't mind if someone would fold and pack my laundry for me nicely. Also, if my underwear or socks get old, drop me an e-mail allowing me to replace it with a provider of my choice. A cleaner is also very handy. It would be nice if someone would note when my handwash soap or toilet paper is running low, and order it for me. It would be nice if the delivery and placing of those things in the correct place was done for me. Now all of these things I mention can already be done right now by employing serving staff, but this has a few issues. The main is cost, second to that is trust and personal space, and third to that it's perceived as a demeaning job. Technology allows us to solve a lot of these things. From making sure that the right people can enter the property at the right time, e.g. when you are out, and that they do only what they are supposed to do (e.g. track their time, and movement around the house). It can also give anyone easy instructions on what to do when they enter the house (e.g. a mobile device with a checklist to check on things that need replacement, and even to guide them around the house to where these things are, and knowing what stuff has been delivered and needs unpacking) Other things can be -done better off site with modern industrial methods, e.g. your laundry. Also when replacement shopping has been ordered, it can be brought into your home along with the laundry, instead of you having to wait for a delivery. I can see this stuff potentially becoming a lot cheaper while creating a lot of low skilled jobs, perhaps jobs people can do while studying other things. In the long run a lot of these things will probably also be automated, making these jobs go away again. That in itself is a good thing, since all of us want these jobs to go away. Then humans will just be left to making choices about what they want to consume, or be creative if they want to be creative. We won't be happy but that's a different issue.
ojbyrne 15y ago
I find Thomas Friedman, as a columnist, to be decidedly below average. Why does he still have a job?
smattiso 15y ago
There is no "solution" per se. As I see it it's like this. Most people are paid with how much labor they provide. $X amount of hours worked equals $Y amount of money. Call these people Group A. Some are paid using a different scale in line with the value of their creations. E.g. inventing a better battery, opening a well positioned McDonalds, etc. Call these people Group B. Technology is reducing the amount of hours of labor from Group A the world actually can use. Similarly most of Group A won't be able to create something that actually adds value to the economy and transition into Group B. So what are we going to do with all these people from Group A that are not adding "value" to the economy? The only reasonable solution is to subsidize these people in a way we deem socially acceptable. Social Darwinism isn't acceptable, so the trick is finding a way to do this without causing side effects and hopefully that adds benefit to society. Note these people won't generate benefit to the economy in any meaningful way.
rdouble 15y ago
More bachelor's degrees won't increase the number of exceptional people, it will just mean more average people with bachelor's degrees. A side effect of this will be that the number of jobs for average people with bachelor's degrees will increase. Some of the most stable and best paying jobs are in education, law enforcement, state and local government, school and health care administration and so forth. Basically anything that is full or partially funded by tax dollars. In many places there is already an attitude of why would you be so dumb to subject yourself to the logan's run of working in private enterprise when you can get an easy job with a pension by simply working directly or indirectly for the state.
specialist 15y ago
I feel like I was just rick rolled. Please prefix the pundit's name to these links. As for this particular pundit, he lost me at "invade Iraq". After claiming the earth is flat, you'd think people would have learned to ignore this asshat.
Nick_C 15y ago
His arguments, and many here, are moot because of the political ramifications of disenfranching such a huge number of voters. The average worker, by definition, commands by far the biggest voting block. When their minds are concentrated on this one problem, irrespective of their normal voting choice, they will vote for whoever offers them a way out. It will end in tears as almost all wall-papering does, but not for a decade or two. FWIW, I think this is the beginning of the China-induced global economic realignment. But we won't begin to see the real ramifications for a couple of decades because of the above.

225 points by mjfern 15y ago

Great article. This illustrates a fundamental mistake that many believe which is that just because they have a college degree they deserve a certain job, income or lifestyle.

zoltarSpeaks 15y ago
Yeah I completely agree with this. There is an attitude just like this in England at the moment. There aren't enough graduates using their initiative and being creative in either finding jobs or making work for themselves to fight the declining level of jobs. The assumption is, leave school, go to University, get a job. Unfortunately for them that route is failing now.
- UK-Al05 15y ago
  You certainly have better chance at getting job by going to university; unemployment rate is higher for non-grads. Also running your own business is not as easy as it seems; especially without the connections to get the contracts. Expecting the graduates to work for themselves straight out of university is unrealistic.
- robryan 15y ago
  In the past, when less people were attending university, this would be true as in getting a degree you were putting yourself into a fairly exclusive group. Now though, when so many are getting degrees, you need to go above and beyond them to put yourself in a group as exclusive as the degree would give you a generation ago.
  - zoltarSpeaks 15y ago
    Yeah i think you're spot on, it's that ability to shine out from the crowd that is required. Although i guess the exclusivity of being a graduate could easily return with recent hike up in fees within the last couple of years.

exit 15y ago

did you mean to link to the comment field in particular, or the entire article? in any case, it reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

mjfern 15y ago
Sorry, I meant to link to the article, not the comments. Can a moderator edit the link? Thanks in advance!
dullcrisp 15y ago
There's a comment further down linking to a series of articles which propose the same solution. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm is the relevant article. It's something that should be considered since it seems like currently there's nothing really keeping the value of human labor from going down, leaving most people destitute. However, even if it could be financed successfully, it would be a very dramatic change for our economy and society, and I don't really see any way to there from here. Our present culture is ultimately rooted on consumerism -- most people earn as much money as they're able to working a job and then spend all of it on things they need. We permit a small elite who can earn enough money to not need to work for a living to do as they see fit, but the vast majority is kept doing what society requires of them by the need to work at a job and earn a wage. In a world where people are free to do what they want, there needs to be something to encourage them to do something which is beneficial to society, to prevent stagnation. The whole system begins to sound a lot like a refinement of what communist countries hoped to achieve in the 20th century, and it feels like we're back to many of the basic arguments for and against socialism. If it isn't already clear from what I wrote, I have no real knowledge of this topic and I'm just rambling. The article I linked is a bit long but it and the FAQ it links to try to address some of these issues.
_delirium 15y ago
I tend to agree with that solution, though I think there are more and less sustainable vs. conflict-inducing ways of structuring it. The simplest way is just to pay out cash collected from taxes, but that's always subject to conflict around "my tax money going to support lazy bums" type stuff, and easy to cut (or fiddle with in various ways to meet other budgetary goals). More sustainable basic incomes tend to be structured as royalties imo, like Alaska's oil fund. One possibility would be to look at what might happen in a future where agriculture is mainly mechanized, so in effect food is being grown by robots. Initially what that'll mean is whoever got in place first will profit from them; whoever had the land and the capital to invest in the robots will then own the results of their production, even in a hypothetical future where they run 100% on autopilot henceforth. So it's a sort of strong-dependence-on-initial-conditions type situation, where who gets the results of the robots' labor depends basically on who was on top in the last pre-robot generation (granted, it may not be a purely black-and-white pre-robot/robot transition). I think in that case we'd have to eventually (somehow) transition towards a bunch of arable land + robots being held in trust for the population as a whole, splitting up the proceeds, or at least a portion of them, like the Alaska oil fund. Lots of details and questions around exactly how the numbers work out, but at a high level I like a solution of not intruding much into the "normal" part of the economy, like humans doing things for other humans, but operating some basic minerals/land/agriculture in some sort of trust arrangement, with proceeds distributed to everyone, as their share of the proceeds of the earth+robots (as opposed to the proceeds of other humans' labor).

eternalban 15y ago

Yet he still has a job at NYTimes.

deleted 15y ago

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richardburton 15y ago

This is fascinating. I think the big (and scary) meta-trend is this: The population is increasing and the requirement for people is decreasing. This gap is made wider by increased birth-rates and better automation. More people are being born into a world where fewer are required. That is quite a scary thought. Computers and machines automate and replace people everywhere. I have some anecdotal evidence of this: At my last business we used to follow-up twice via email with all of the people who had not responded to a quote that we had sent them. We had 50-100 enquiries a day so the follow-ups soon mounted up. I tried every CRM and mail-list manager out there. I could not find one that would trigger an email from my Gmail account if a contact had not responded. I was spending 3-4 hours a day doing the follow-ups. So were my staff. It got to the point where I wanted to hire someone to do it. Eventually I learnt more about the software and read up on ruby on rails. I hired a small software house to help with the backend, built the front-end myself and a month later, a machine replaced the humans and prevented a new hire. That is just one job at a tiny 5-person company. At scale, computer-based automation creates huge efficiencies. The flip-side of that are huge deficiencies in employment. Here come the machines.

jsankey 15y ago
On the upside, as populations become wealthier and more educated the fertility rate drops. We're a (scarily) long way from things stabilising, though.
edoloughlin 15y ago
> a machine replaced the humans and prevented a new hire I think it's more the case that a machine made your small business more efficient and more likely to still be in existence a year from now. Was there really any benefit to have someone sitting at a desk performing a dull, repetitive task?
wladimir 15y ago
I think it's also a matter of what kind of world we want. For example: Do you choose to use software instead of employing a person because you prefer the software, or would you prefer to hire a person but choose software because it is cheaper (which helps the company survive) and kind-of can do the same job? If it's the first, there's a good reason to be scared. If it's the second, then market forces might eventually balance out and make hiring people an attractive choice again. Ideally, tools such as computers will go back to being tools, "human helpers" and not "human replacements". I do not like to think about an automated, antisocial world in which less and less humans are needed because machines have taken over. Isn't that self-defeating anyway? When did we start putting our tools above ourselves?

ilaksh 15y ago

Better education isn't going to solve the problem of technological unemployment. We actually need a completely different structure. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

nchuhoai 15y ago

I always wondered, is it actually possible for us to ever assume that we can achieve better unemployment rates or is there a practical minimum which we can never get below again. If you think about it, in a world without technology, the money we spend has to go to someone in the economy. However, since we know have artificial workforce in play, we effectively pay less, which means that we in consequence pay out less than we receive. So eitheir we all get paid less (yay communism), or some people just naturally have to be unemployed (yay income inequality).

dave_sullivan 15y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I think he's right about many things there: manufacturing jobs are leaving and not coming back. Automation is becoming more and more advanced, particularly if you factor advances in robotics and ml since 2006 or so. Things move faster and average just doesn't seem to cut it when you can manufacture excellence. Hell, lawyers and doctors will be next, how about faux ai that can write simple web apps or come up with good designs? Give generative models a few more years to advance, we'll see how far fetched that is. Some people will get very rich from all that. But that wealth will go to those who control what amounts to the means of production and they'll be able to defend those means with patents. I guess workers could strike back in the day, good luck with that now, the little guy has even less negotiating power. All this to say, I think these trends and the shift they bring are going to be the most fundamental shift in economic organization since the industrial revolution. Not sure what the answer is, but I'm concerned that those in power dont even recognize the issues (they're not "nerds", as they say.) Time will tell, but I'm not all that optimistic about the average joes out there. PS I wish the answer was everyone will start their own business, but honestly I just don't think that will be practical.

zerostar07 15y ago
That would lead to even greater wealth inequality, one of the most destabilizing factors in a society.
hammerdr 15y ago
In the case of a "everything is automated, only a small portion of people are needed to produce essentials and even advance" society, would we just be better off with a system that relied on the altruism of the few to make the lives of everyone better and everyone else could just exist? That sort of society has a slew of issues that could be better explored in futurist science fiction (things such as psychologic issues for the non-producers, the sustainability of altruism, etc.). But it is a consideration that I have thought about. Capitalism isn't going to be subverted that quickly, though. The system will right itself and any revolution of that caliber will be long and hard fought. The world superpower will be a capitalist system in 2050 and probably 2100.

WalterBright 15y ago

The flip side is that all this automation makes stuff cheaper, and a better lifestyle is available for less money.

dclaysmith 15y ago
I think that should be the flip side but aside from 2009-2010 (the bulk of the recession), inflation has remained constant over the last ten years. Inflation adjusted wages have continued to decline to record numbers. The jobs that are returning in the current recovery have been primarily low paying ones (clearly IT is exempt from this). What has been going up is corporate profits. Apple's latest figures are mind boggling. A billion dollars in profit a WEEK. Someone up higher in the comments wrote that we are at peak-capitalism and headed towards Marxism/Socialism. While I doubt that's going to happen (Wall St too strong, progressive politicians too weak) I think America needs to go that way. As Elizabeth Warren said 'There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own'. I feel that corporations (they are people right) and "The 1%" need to pay as much or more of their income in taxes to repay society for their success. This money should be used to address the problems in this article. The US needs to make higher education and retraining free/affordable, make health care free, and provide better social safety nets. With these things in place, Americans will be able to start getting competitive again.
- danieldk 15y ago
  I think that should be the flip side but aside from 2009-2010 (the bulk of the recession), inflation has remained constant over the last ten years. While this may be true, technology has definitely become cheaper and more accessible. Eg. in my country, which is a Western economy, few people could afford computers in the 80ies, except maybe for the very low end (C64, MSX). Now many families have multiple laptops, smartphones, and maybe even a tablet. Also, fixed Internet connections used to be expensive, pay per minute. Nowadays, for 20 Euros per month you get an internet connection without data limits and plenty of bandwidth. Technology did become more accessible for the average family. And the impact is real: snail mail is almost killed, records stores have mostly disappeared, and next up are book stores. The price of e-mail is near-zero, iTunes music purchases are often cheaper than new physical albums (especially if you have to pay S&H fees), and Kindle ebooks are often cheaper than paper equivalents.

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jmtame 15y ago

It was only a few centuries ago that we paid this exclusive, elite upper class in society called scribes to write and transcribe things for us, because we weren't literate enough to do it ourselves. The parallels are pretty surprising today: we're paying an exclusive, elite class called programmers to write in the languages understood by computers. Software is eating the world, jobs are being displaced, and the demand for technical talent is as high as its ever been.

Dybbuk 15y ago
There is also a defect in this comparison in that the journalists weren't helping displace average joe's jobs, but programmers are.
mtts 15y ago
Scribes were reasonably well off, sure, but to call them an "exclusive, elite upper class" goes beyond stretching it. Scribes were decently paid clerks that worked for scheming, sword wielding thugs who only gradually became literate themselves. I don't think we're an elite, upper class now either. We're decently paid clerks that perform an essential task for our scheming, private jet flying, yes, thuggish overlords that for now at least haven't become computer literate themselves. Yet. But the day will come that they will have, or at least will have become computer literate enough to operate the software that has displaced us. If that day comes after I've died, I don't mind. Otherwise it'll be a problem.
bad_user 15y ago
Everybody can talk, but few people can be successful salesmen. Anyone could learn to play a musical instrument, but few people are actually doing it and even fewer people are good at it. Related to scribes, even if mostly everyone knows how to read or write, that doesn't mean that book authors are obsolete. Writing novels and technical books is an endeavor that requires much more than simply being capable to read and write. So I don't really get why this analogy is being made. Well, actually I do. It's for the same reason why recruiters are doing keyword matching on resumes.
rythie 15y ago
Is programming that elite though? wages seemed to have hardly changed in the U.K. in the last 10 years (accounting for inflation). Also programming pays a similar amount to other jobs requiring a degree and is certainly a lot less than jobs like accountancy, finance, law and medical doctors. For example, average programmer salary in 2004 was about £31k and in £38k http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/programmer.do http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/programmer.do and if you calculate £31k in today's money you get £38,440 [http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/His...]

wavephorm 15y ago

Welcome to Peak Capitalism. This is the peak of our current socio-economic system, and I'm fairly certain that everyone in the White House is now well-aware and convinced of what's likely going to happen over the course of the next 10 years. I hope they're preparing for it right now. I believe the coming collapse of the capitalistic-democractic system is imminent, and America needs to very seriously start planning for a conversion to Socialism/Marxism because the current system is not going to work for very long.

zerostar07 15y ago
How about searching for new economic models. Are 200 year old models really relevant anymore?
- _delirium 15y ago
  At the very least an update is probably in order. To really over-simplify (somewhat unfairly), my read of the "socialist alternative's" theorizing is that it's gone in waves roughly like this: 1) extensive analysis of 19th-century economic systems, especially factory production (Marx et al) and agriculture (Kropotkin, the kibbutz movement, etc.); followed by a period of 2) focus on culture/ideology/hegemony as the place the "real battle" is fought (Gramsci, neo-Gramscians, post-structuralist Marxism); but not really followed by 3) extensive analysis of 21st-century economic and technological systems. I think even for people who disagree with them, it'd be healthier for there to be a Left that paid close, scientific/analytical attention to present-day material conditions, rather than focusing mainly on culture/ideology like the neo-Gramscians, or tying themselves too strongly to 19th-century analyses of 19th-century conditions. Or, for that matter, just taking an amorphous "against the greedy bankers" line like the populist left does, which is probably good politics, but not a deep analysis.
- wladimir 15y ago
  In a way, they are. People haven't changed that much since then. However, economic models need spring into existence from the ground up. They are emergent. The world is too complex for them to be designed by theorists. This is why base capitalism (not the complex beast it has become) works, as even without any pressure people start trading. USSR communism collapsed because it needs to be enforced from the top, and you can only keep up a lie for so long. The same is true for our current zombie-capitalism. We do need to give new systems some room to form and grow, though... and not label it as EVIL communism/capitalism/someotherism too soon, as that will cause typical path lock-in.

mtts 15y ago

Ridiculous. The solution to average people becoming less relevant in the economy (which I don't dispute, btw) can of course never be to make everyone above average as that is by definition impossible. It's a feel good message for average folk that papers over the truth, which is that average folk that used to make a decent living doing average work will become poor. All of them, eventually. How poor exactly? Well, you could do worse than to look at Chinese factory workers for an indication of where things will end. Of course it's more complicated than that: if the average man has become as poor as a Chinese factory worker, he will no longer be able to afford expensive gadgets and value added services, so it'll be in the interest of at least some sectors of the economy (think Apple and Google) to keep the impoverishment of the middle class down to a minimum. On the other hand there are other sectors of the economy (think McDonalds and Walmart) that will do just fine even if everyone is poor, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But, like I said, this article is ridiculous. Giving everyone a PhD won't solve a thing.

joelrunyon 15y ago
I didn't read anything about giving anyone a PhD? I could be wrong, but he's talking less about "shifting" average to include a PhD, to shifting how average people are going to have to fend for themselves - which is to fight to be above average. As another commenter pointed out, this is impossible (if everyone's special, no one is), but it's also good to mention that you get to choose whether or not you want to be average. Sure, you can rely on being a cog in a machine, but if you do that, you just jumped into a super-competitive market dominated by machines and cheap overseas labor. So, you can either relegate yourself to that fate or choose something different. I believe his point was that there's a shift in the past could escape with being average because it was localized and there was less overall competition for jobs because of geographic limitations. The math is that the market for average has been commoditized over 7 billion people + machines, rather than the 300 million people we used to. That brings the level of average much, much lower for certain types of works. So, the solution isn't to try and raise your qualifications level in a pool of average people, but rather jump in a different pool altogether, where your value as a worker is not so easily commoditized (knowledge workers, developing fields & emerging tech). For anyone familiar with Seth Godin, this talk isn't very new at all - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/no_to_average.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/no_to_averag...

goatslacker 15y ago

Post high school education is overrated. In fact the American school system won't really prepare you to face the reality. Yes it seems like the need for these "average" jobs are decreasing but in the end it will all balance itself out and there will be new areas that would need to be filled.

ericd 15y ago
It absolutely isn't overrated for many fields. Software is something of an exception, but I also think even coders usually benefit from formal training, which they're not really going to get in high school.
Jach 15y ago
What's overrated is the "pick a degree, any degree, you get to call yourself 'educated' in four years!" mantra. The difference between the US and (what I hear of (so probably stereotypical)) Germany is that in the US you're told from a very young age to go to college to "get an education". In Germany you're told to go to college to "become a competent engineer". I really disagree with you that it will balance out, that everything will be alright, and that the 40-hour work week will keep on going. I'll defer to the other comments on this page for reasons why.
- goatslacker 15y ago
  I believe new opportunities will open up. Change will come. There are plenty of needs that will surface somewhere and it's up to the "average" to adapt to fill those needs. Those that don't adapt or resist the change will be the ones that suffer the most. This is a pattern with many things in life.

jharding 15y ago

This article reminds me of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano It's a pretty good read. It has an interesting take on a future where machines do the majority of the work. With the way things are headed, I'd say a society like the one described in Player Piano might not be to far off. I'm still undecided whether that's a good thing or not.

beatpanda 15y ago

So we're currently building an economy that the "average person" doesn't have the skills to participate in. OK. So who are we building this economy for, and why?

UK-Al05 15y ago
Consumers. The economy serves the consumers.
- justincormack 15y ago
  But as Henry Ford realized, if the consumer has too low an income he or she cannot afford to conume, so your fctory will be unprifitable.
geoffschmidt 15y ago
"We" are not "building" the economy in the sense that factory workers build a car. It is more like evolution. You start with some little molecules floating the ocean, you let the simulation run, and eventually you get a complex equilibrium that includes ants, giraffes, and those parasites that mind-control mice into getting eaten by cats. You start with self-sufficient peasant farmers that don't want barbarians to take their stuff, you let the simulation run, you eventually get towns, feudalism, enough surplus food to feed a few scientists, the industrial revolution, world wars, the military-industrial complex, the internet, high frequency trading. There is not someone designing this progression. It is a system of particles that in each time step apply an update rule. If we want to stop it, we need to figure out what force we can apply to the system to make it settle into a different equilibrium. That's not even the hard part, since the system is not very stable, and can collapse into new equilibria very quickly, just like natural ecosystems can when you introduce new species. What's hard is understanding the dynamics of the system well enough that you can steer it into a state that you want, and make it stay there. Otherwise it is like introducing kudzu for erosion control. Well, it sure controlled erosion! I am not a fatalist or a nihilist. I don't believe that there is some universal predetermined order (I think giraffes are arbitrary) and I think that when we can understand a small corner of the system, targeted intervention can work. But it is not a question of finding the right "evil person" to beat up, or finding the right political dogma. It is a question of studying the system with the same intellectual modesty as an ecologist, and finding a few levers that we can responsibly use - and, yes, gathering enough force in one place that we can protect the levers from people that would rather they be set in different positions.

rushabh 15y ago

Siri has changed the discussion about voice recognition and semantic search. Hard to imagine what will happen to all the call-centers in India if the use of this technology becomes more widespread. How many years are we away from this?

jpadkins 15y ago
Speech recognition has been displacing Indian call centers for 10+ years. Tellme Networks and Nuance have been leading this space... Siri has done nothing in the call center sector.

revorad 15y ago

Or more accurately, the average has changed.

joelrunyon 15y ago

Better titled Average is looking less attractive than it did 10 years ago There will always be a place for average. However, I don't think it's going to be as attractive of a place to be as it has been. It's going to be much more costly to try and coast through life.

joelrunyon 15y ago
It's also worth noting that it's never been as affordable or easy to escape "average" as it has been today - interestingly enough, thanks to technology.
- wladimir 15y ago
  What is this "average"? Obviously, it is a statistical measure. But what does it mean in terms of people? In those terms, "the average" is just a narrative of what the average person would be like. Which seems to be breaking down. Sure - you can make a list of specific things that every person needs or desires, as there is a lot of commonality between people. Aside from that commonality, we do different things, which are specific to persons or groups. You cannot really speak of a mathematical average there, as those are qualitative differences not quantitative differences (and the groups also overlap...). How do you "escape the average"? How is it to be "average"? How will you and other people escaping, affect that average? Will the average catch up with you? I think the term is losing meaning, more than anything else, due to the specialization inherent in our technological society, and due to non-geographical clustering of people made possible by faster means of communication.
  - joelrunyon 15y ago
    Er by "escape" I meant "opt-out." A while ago, if you were average, there were too many barriers to not being average to let you to escape the middle and it was easy to just "be." Now, with the internet, the barrier to escape has been lowered to a laptop + an internet connection.
  - joelrunyon 15y ago
    And "average" now, is what you can expect as the default, if you make all the "safe" choices.

mbesto 15y ago

Same exact article written by Business Insider: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-19/strategy/30642154_1_recession-millennials-change http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-19/strategy/3064...

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invalidOrTaken 15y ago

One question I've had for...a while now. If a) corporate profits are up b) hiring isn't happening, or is seeing a skills mismatch then where exactly are all these profits going? If they're going to capital goods for the company, that just moves the question on down the line. If they're going to shareholders, then what are those shareholders buying? And if it's just sitting in the bank, where is the bank lending it out?

sskates 15y ago
A lot of companies are just sitting on the cash (most likely in a bank account). Interest rates are very low right now, so there's not much incentive to lend the money out.
- robryan 15y ago
  The bank would be lending it out though.
  - dgit 15y ago
    What makes you think so? Interest offered by borrowers is generally low these days and risks are high. So lending isn't happening.
    - Nick_C 15y ago
      If that was the case, we would see M2 and M3 go up, and we aren't. Depending on how you want to measure it, you could even argue they are contracting slightly.
      - dgit 15y ago
        Looks like 'up' to me for M2: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/ http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/ M3 not being tracked. That said, I'm not entirely sure about the definition of M2 and how that's related to 'money sitting in the bank'. M2 includes 'savings and time deposits' according to Wikipedia, but it doesn't seem to differentiate whether banks in turn lend out that deposited money or it just sits there.

MengYuanLong 15y ago

The majority of comments seem to praise the programming/IT community or question the state of our government/economic system but I have a different question. What future skill set should people be retooling to have? What can our economy use more of?

pgeorgi 15y ago
Taking care of children/elders/family/friends/neighbors. With everything else automated, people will still be in need for social interaction with real humans. Currently the issue is that there's no simple economic value to put on these tasks. Given their importance, I'd claim the bug lies in the economic model, not in social interactions. This all assumes that automation is put to its full potential: What will society look like when harvesting energy, food generation and processing, transportation and home building ("basic needs") were fully automated and available for more-or-less free? (home building is the odd one out in this list, as the others are for nearly instant consumtion, while most people live under the same roof for a while)

spinchange 15y ago

I can't believe those Presto touchscreens at restaurants are $100 per month. I love gadgets and technology, but much prefer dealing with a server and think most people do. My kids like the games and nag incessantly to play the "pay" ones, but I hardly think this is the end of waitresses and waiters. (I hope)

barefoot 15y ago
Agreed, I think replacing waitresses with touchscreens removes an important part of the whole dining out experience. A touchscreen waiter seems very cold and utilitarian. It reminds me of the cheap LCD displays that have replaced gas station attendants. Almost all of the gas stations that I've used recently have them, and they all have very poorly worded prompts that show no regard for the time that I spend interacting with it. I can't help but feel that we're headed the same route with eating food: WELCOME. PLEASE SWIPE CARD. SELECT FOOD. THANK YOU. DISPENSING FOOD. PRESS ENTER DESERT? COME AGAIN. SPC. 2 MEAL LOBSTER FRIDAY. That's not the experience I'm looking for when I want to go out on a friday night. I want a real person to show up at the table and all of the imperfections that comes bundled along with it. Is that just because it's what I'm used to? Will our kids grow up in a world without waiters and not even care?
- xanados 15y ago
  My desire to interact with a waiter varies depending on the nature of the restaurant. Clearly this system isn't going to be installed at a 4 star restaurant any time soon, but if I go to a restaurant just to eat it would be useful. It would also be useful in a crowded pub where the service is generally slow and terrible and the social aspect is more about hanging out with your buddies than being waited on with a date/wife/kids. People could enter their food and drink orders and they would at least know they are in process. In San Francisco there is a sandwich shop called Specialty's that has installed iPad kiosks patrons can order from, which allows them to handle the lunch time rush with essentially no line and two cashiers. You are also assured that your order is correct because you can see all the ingredients on the sandwiches and make additions and subtractions. It's really quite great, although I have thought it is the sort of thing that is much more likely to be successful in a technology hub than in most cities.

phatbyte 15y ago

" Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. " - This is true in the actual times, since China (no matter how they want you to forget it) is living under very harsh communist regime, but that will change when chinese workers start demanding better working conditions, more time for family, better salaries, etc..as far as I know, it's China who's living in a bubble.

adamgravitis 15y ago

The author's sudden and poorly supported conclusion doesn't really fit. Because people with bachelor's degrees have the least unemployment, it is imperative we pass a GI Bill to ensure everyone gets a bachelor's degree?! He's getting the causality wrong. It's not because they have bachelor's degrees that they're getting jobs. They're getting jobs because they're (minimally) bright and (minimally) ambitious. Printing 100 million bachelor's diplomas "solves" the unemployment problem in much the same way that printing 100 trillion dollars solves our financial problems: not at all.

orky56 15y ago
Although your argument is perfectly valid, one should not underestimate the value of the Bachelor's degree as just a piece of paper. I'm not trying to be facetious but a lot of employers filter, and sometimes hire, applicants based on their education level. In these cases, some employers assume these people have the skills. The important point here is that skills can be acquired in post-secondary education or on your own. However if done on your own, you face a hurdle of not having the college degree.
- jpadkins 15y ago
  if 95% of the population have a BS/BA, then it no longer serves as a filter... Business will find a new filter. Also if 95% have a BS/BA, then you no longer have negotiating power for your higher wages... Giving everyone 4 more years of education will certainly benefit society, but it doesn't solve the inequality problem.

wisty 15y ago

As a corollary, nobody average is busy.

lcargill99 15y ago

Tom Friedman's Lake Woebegone bias is showing. Again.

denzil_correa 15y ago

On the contrary, I feel average is the new skill. There are many a time where you need just average skilled workers. High skilled workers may find such tasks mundane while for average skilled workers the same mundane tasks may be challenging. IMHO, I would love to have a good mix of high skilled and average skilled workers.

nluqo 15y ago

This seems strangely familiar: http://www.businessinsider.com/if-youre-an-average-worker-in-this-forever-recession-youre-going-straight-to-the-bottom-2012-1#ixzz1k0tZFvyn http://www.businessinsider.com/if-youre-an-average-worker-in...

MaggieL 15y ago

When a liberal talks about how somebody "should have access to" something, hang on to your wallet. Because you will pay for it.

geogra4 15y ago
Some people don't have problems lifting up those who never had the advantages that they had. It's a collective action problem that takes a whole society to fix.
- gyardley 15y ago
  And some people do have a problem with this. I'm always curious about this -- to what extent do you think you can compel Maggie, me, and others who don't share your values to solve a collective action problem we don't particularly think is a problem? And what side effects do you think that will have on society? Edit: yeah, yeah, downvote because I don't share your values, fine by me -- but my questions weren't rhetorical. I'm really interested in your answer.
  - geogra4 15y ago
    (preface: I'm an American speaking from an American POV, not sure where you're located so this may not be 100% relevant if you're aussie or swedish or canadian or something) I think that everyone in a society as wealthy as our own deserves the chance at a life free from fear. Freedom from the fear of hunger, from the fear of a parent losing their job and being plunged into destitution. Freedom from the fear of medical bankruptcy and dying of curable disease or injury. Freedom from the fear of walking down your own street or going to your public school. I don't think anyone is brazen enough to believe that these are not real problems in America. The solutions from the right are not solutions at all, they're just the status quo. More tax cuts, more deregulation, more gutting of municipal funding for libraries, police, public transit, and schools. I am of the belief that wealth is not created by individuals in a vacuum. Every entrepreneur and employee stands on the shoulders of giants. They had a business environment and consumer base already here, ready made. Additionally, would Gates have dropped out of Harvard if his father wasn't a partner at a major law firm(Preston Gates)? Would Romney have formed his own company if his father wasn't the CEO of American Motors? If you come from wealth you can afford to take more risks, as you always have an out if things go poorly. 99% of america doesn't have that out. This is why I am of the belief that assets accrued by the wealthy are not just theirs alone to hoard. Not only is it better for the economy if more people have a fall-back and can take risks without the fear of financial ruin, it is better for society. I guess the bottom line is that I would prefer that a majority of Americans agree with me in the sense that we can do better for those that haven't really benefited from the vast improvements in technology we've seen in the past few decades. I want to move beyond the 'culture war' rhetoric of the previous generations and I believe we can find practical solutions to these real problems that can benefit the vast majority of Americans. I don't really know what to say to someone who doesn't think we have problems, I guess we have to agree to disagree.

mhb 15y ago

A more optimistic counterpoint: http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/22/predictions_about_the_death_of_american_hegemony_may_have_been_greatly_exaggerated http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/22/prediction...

redschell 15y ago
I think the numbers from Harvard B-school grads isn't really that shocking or terrifying. Of course the US is losing ground to the BRIC countries. They were bound to make progress eventually. Also, the 21% that felt America is "falling behind" probably didn't mean to suggest that the country is finished. They're reacting to events of the past year, such as the demotion of our credit rating, which, as that particular snippet states, reflect a negative trend worthy of greater public attention. Nice article overall though, especially the point about the country successfully deleveraging.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

> Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra This is Tom Friedman's socioeconomic policy in a nutshell: America as Lake Wobegon. Heaven help us.

narrow 15y ago

Interesting. In addition to post-high school education access, it's important that we also re-think our education system by creating environments that inculcates learning around our individual passion/talent. Above average performers are known to love their craft, and in a hyper-competitive economy that requires one to learn, unlearn and relearn, passion would matter a whole lot.

steder 15y ago

“Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ” Ah yes, at midnight I'll just go walk over to my "dormitories" on my "plantation" and wake my "employees" and tell them to get to work harvesting cotton. In exchange for their 12 hour work day (and a comfy dormitory in which to live) I'll give them tea and a biscuit! I don't understand why the "Average" American won't come work for me given these perks.

hello_moto 15y ago
I'd like to see the author in the shoes of those workers :)

pnathan 15y ago

What's usually missed is the value of being a skilled tradesman. Who fixes your robot? Who builds your house? Not everyone is cut out for college, actually, most people aren't.

quandrum 15y ago
> who fixes your robot? Who fixes humans? Robots will do this eventually. > Who builds your house? Robots here too. Just because they can't do it today doesn't mean you shouldn't plan on them being able to do it.
- ams6110 15y ago
  The question is, will a robot that is autonomous enough and sophisticated enough to build a house be cheaper to operate than a human worker? As complexity of machines increases, the number of ways they can break down increases exponentially. Humans bodies are self-repairing for the most part except in cases of severe traumatic injury and disease.
  - rsheridan6 15y ago
    The complexity of a robot is mostly in the software. Input (cameras and microphones) and output (robotic arms, etc) have been around for decades, but robots have not been able to interpret a picture of the world effectively. That's a software problem. The thing about software is that you write it once and then it's free to copy. The first general-purpose robot workers will probably run expensive proprietary software, but 10 years later there will be usable open source versions. The physical robot itself will become cheaper, if anything, due to economies of scale.
randomdata 15y ago
Not everyone is cut out for college, actually, most people aren't. That is me. Once upon a time, I applied to take CS at a number of institutions. I was rejected from them all. Not that it really stopped me, I just had to learn it all by myself. Now I get to play "lead engineer" on some pretty significant projects and have CS grads coming to me for help. But the meme I see often on HN and elsewhere is that you need to go to college. What they fail to account for is that college is a protected class where most people do not have the choice of going, even if they wanted to. I certainly didn't have the opportunity – though in hindsight, it was probably a blessing.

noonespecial 15y ago

I think he meant "ordinary" not "average". Average has a specific meaning and as many have pointed out, you can't make everyone above average. What we've got to figure out is how to keep the large mass of ordinaries from being made into Eloi by a combination of welfare states, machine productivity, and wealth disparity. Or, failing that, find a way to prevent the Morlocks from eating the Eloi when it suits them.

ScottBurson 15y ago
you can't make everyone above average Yes, you can, because there's an infinity of dimensions and each person only has to be above average on one of them. I'm really surprised how many people here aren't getting this.
- billybob 15y ago
  Infinity of dimensions, sure. But we're only talking about one of them: number of dollars of economic value you can create. Whether you're an above-average Scrabble player is irrelevant to a discussion about work and wages. Unless there's something of economic value that you can do better and more cheaply than a robot, there is no reason for anyone to pay you.
  - kokey 15y ago
    I think a better way to describe it would be to say that in order to make sure you earn an average salary, you have to be above average at something, and more so than in the previous century.

DamnYuppie 15y ago

One point of the article that rankled me was his concept of a G.I. Bill so that everyone had access to higher education. That seems very misguided in my opinion. Instead of focusing on "higher education" should we not attempt to remake our primary education system such that we provide people with more relevant knowledge and skills?

virmundi 15y ago

I think that we're taking the concept of "average" too literally. Picture two lines: average worker competency and need/requirement for the company to be competitive. The author states that historically those two lines have been so close as to be equivalent in management's eyes. Now the second line has moved up. So according to this definition, the average line is no longer acceptable. As a result we need to move it up to realign with the need line. Under this definition the author is not as problematic as before.

jpadkins 15y ago
I like how you explained it much clearer than the professional author did... I think NY Times needs to realign their columnists talent level...

grego 15y ago

I suppose the original author is worried about U.S. average falling with respect to world average.

userulluipeste 15y ago
That's only the globalization. The other thing affecting the (now global) average is automation, which is faster than before.

n_time 15y ago

tl;dr america in decline. getting a job hard? try school.

joezydeco 15y ago

Go listen to Davidson's interview with a factory worker over the increasing amount of automation and required technical knowledge that will eventually shove her out of a job if she doesn't acquire the skills to keep up: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/13/145039131/the-transformation-of-american-factory-jobs-in-one-company http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/13/145039131/the-tran... It's sobering. It makes me eternally grateful I have skills, well at least some skills, that won't be replaced by a robot and CNC mill overnight.

n_time 15y ago

Maybe added economic value is the wrong way for society to decide the quality of someone's life?

deleted 15y ago

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draggnar 15y ago

I believe that the solutions will be found in a change in our value system. Things that we really appreciate, things that are uniquely human, will be valued more. See thisismadebyhand.com Obviously solving big problems and being "not average" will be important, but I believe that many people will be able to find niches doing things that add value to life in ways that a machine can't.

unfocused 15y ago

In the future, people will need more than a degree. They will need a few. That's what our children will have to deal with. There's nothing ridiculous about this. More and more and people are getting access to education.

hammock 15y ago

Folks are harping on the meaning of "average," but it's clear to me that in the article, "average" here is a euphemism for "unskilled." When you've been working as an semi-skilled laborer in a textile mill for 20 years, and suddenly your job is made redundant in favor of automation- your mill training becomes worthless. You don't need to become "above average," you just need to learn a different semi-skilled trade. Like pushing around excel spreadsheets.

cust_support 15y ago

I think we're all missing the point; namely, the assumption of Mr. Friedman’s rank. Suppose that Mr. Friedman is above average, then the suggestions in this opinion piece are plausible and should demand our sincere consideration. Now suppose that Mr. Friedman is below average. In this case, his suggestions are most certainly suspect and quite possibly invaluable; you should disregard everything that has been mentioned here today. But all of that is irrelevant, because the truly significant aspect of human ranking is that someone outside the system must perform this activity. The only viable assessment of a human’s averageness must come from an unbiased source whose own averageness can never be in question. This outside, unbiased source must first assess Mr. Friedman’s averageness before any intelligent discussion can commence.

arank 15y ago

He mentions most of the points in article in this video - http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Friedman http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Friedman

mcantelon 15y ago

This is pretty obvious stuff.

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kokey 15y ago

I have been thinking about solutions to this, to get a feeling for how things will work out in the future by itself. Technology allows us to replace manual labour with machines, but it also can create jobs for other things we have been struggling to automate since it's naturally resistant to being industrialised. These are human things, which tends to be the service economy. To work on real examples: There are tasks around the house that I don't enjoy doing or don't do reliably. Things like laundry, taking the rubbish out, cleaning, paying the bills, going shopping for food or new underwear. I wouldn't mind laundry people coming into my house once a week to pick the laundry up, doing it somewhere else, and bringing it back. I also wouldn't mind if someone would fold and pack my laundry for me nicely. Also, if my underwear or socks get old, drop me an e-mail allowing me to replace it with a provider of my choice. A cleaner is also very handy. It would be nice if someone would note when my handwash soap or toilet paper is running low, and order it for me. It would be nice if the delivery and placing of those things in the correct place was done for me. Now all of these things I mention can already be done right now by employing serving staff, but this has a few issues. The main is cost, second to that is trust and personal space, and third to that it's perceived as a demeaning job. Technology allows us to solve a lot of these things. From making sure that the right people can enter the property at the right time, e.g. when you are out, and that they do only what they are supposed to do (e.g. track their time, and movement around the house). It can also give anyone easy instructions on what to do when they enter the house (e.g. a mobile device with a checklist to check on things that need replacement, and even to guide them around the house to where these things are, and knowing what stuff has been delivered and needs unpacking) Other things can be -done better off site with modern industrial methods, e.g. your laundry. Also when replacement shopping has been ordered, it can be brought into your home along with the laundry, instead of you having to wait for a delivery. I can see this stuff potentially becoming a lot cheaper while creating a lot of low skilled jobs, perhaps jobs people can do while studying other things. In the long run a lot of these things will probably also be automated, making these jobs go away again. That in itself is a good thing, since all of us want these jobs to go away. Then humans will just be left to making choices about what they want to consume, or be creative if they want to be creative. We won't be happy but that's a different issue.

ojbyrne 15y ago

I find Thomas Friedman, as a columnist, to be decidedly below average. Why does he still have a job?

smattiso 15y ago

There is no "solution" per se. As I see it it's like this. Most people are paid with how much labor they provide. $X amount of hours worked equals $Y amount of money. Call these people Group A. Some are paid using a different scale in line with the value of their creations. E.g. inventing a better battery, opening a well positioned McDonalds, etc. Call these people Group B. Technology is reducing the amount of hours of labor from Group A the world actually can use. Similarly most of Group A won't be able to create something that actually adds value to the economy and transition into Group B. So what are we going to do with all these people from Group A that are not adding "value" to the economy? The only reasonable solution is to subsidize these people in a way we deem socially acceptable. Social Darwinism isn't acceptable, so the trick is finding a way to do this without causing side effects and hopefully that adds benefit to society. Note these people won't generate benefit to the economy in any meaningful way.

rdouble 15y ago

More bachelor's degrees won't increase the number of exceptional people, it will just mean more average people with bachelor's degrees. A side effect of this will be that the number of jobs for average people with bachelor's degrees will increase. Some of the most stable and best paying jobs are in education, law enforcement, state and local government, school and health care administration and so forth. Basically anything that is full or partially funded by tax dollars. In many places there is already an attitude of why would you be so dumb to subject yourself to the logan's run of working in private enterprise when you can get an easy job with a pension by simply working directly or indirectly for the state.

specialist 15y ago

I feel like I was just rick rolled. Please prefix the pundit's name to these links. As for this particular pundit, he lost me at "invade Iraq". After claiming the earth is flat, you'd think people would have learned to ignore this asshat.

Nick_C 15y ago

His arguments, and many here, are moot because of the political ramifications of disenfranching such a huge number of voters. The average worker, by definition, commands by far the biggest voting block. When their minds are concentrated on this one problem, irrespective of their normal voting choice, they will vote for whoever offers them a way out. It will end in tears as almost all wall-papering does, but not for a decade or two. FWIW, I think this is the beginning of the China-induced global economic realignment. But we won't begin to see the real ramifications for a couple of decades because of the above.