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It's not so impossible to believe. The objection I often hear (and I recall that this is PG's stance as well) is that as old jobs disappear new ones will take

• kamaal 15y ago
  Before this thread descends to saying the 'The Matrix' is inevitable. If the levels automation rise to crazy levels, and there are cheaper and greener sources to energy to drive them. Then Food, Clothing and Shelter won't be much of a problem. We will get those three things without much effort. In other words, you can survive without doing anything. But you will still pay for Opera, a concert, you will pay to visit a art gallery. You will still pay for quality entertainment. You will continue to pay for a costly vacation in a foreign country. You will pay to find out the deepest secrets of the universe and traveling to get there. Somebody might invent an organic fruit which might taste nothing like before, and you might have to pay just to taste it. There might be narcotic drugs that take you heaven without killing you, and you might pay for it etc etc. .Our goals as a society will be different. But we will still have to work to meet them. There will be reasons for humans to exist, but those will be very different reasons.
  • itmag 15y ago
    We don't have to speculate. There are plenty of people who have solved all of their survival needs, yet continue to fill their days with enthusiasm and activity. I don't see a Branson or a Sivers resting on their laurels just because they don't have to work for a living.
• jerrya 15y ago
  I agree. In the Star Trek economy (afaik), the inwention of the replicator was key to the end of money and the end of a scarcity based economy. Well, we already have a replicator for much of the economy $ cp And it looks as though soon we'll have some very advanced robots that will be able to automate most mundane jobs. So maybe this is good and we can all become Platos, relaxing, philosophizing, self-actualizing at the top of Maslow's pyramid. If so, it should be reasonable to convince everyone to go the Star Trek way and jettison money. What will be dangerous, is dangerous, is the transition periods like now, where jobs that are lost, never come back, not just because they have been automated away, but also because the owners would rather pay more for automation and less human involvement because they find humans to be a big pain. At that point (which is sort of like now) it is hard to convince others that it is reasonable to distribute resources to the masses. I would certainly like to see a single payer, universal health care system implemented that separates health care from monolithic employers. That, and I'd love to see actual real encouragement and incentivization of small business entrepreneurship. Remove the barriers that big companies have on us. Make it easy and rewarding for people to create their own jobs, form their own companies, on a semi-permanent or even ad-hoc way. Oh well, pie in the sky.
  • hpvic03 15y ago
    You make a good point about the transition period. I'm a fan of Kurzweil and am convinced that many of his predictions will come true. However, he paints a rosy picture of the future and glosses over any potential conflict in the transition between between now and when he predicts that humans will merge with machines, which he pegs at 2099. There is definitely going to be conflict as we move to a post-scarcity world.
    • loup-vaillant 15y ago
      Oh, but there already is conflict. While information basically got out of scarcity, the copyright overlords are still clinging to their old ways.
  • itmag 15y ago
    I would certainly like to see a single payer, universal health care system implemented that separates health care from monolithic employers. That, and I'd love to see actual real encouragement and incentivization of small business entrepreneurship. Yes! Society as the kernel/API, entrepreneurs as userland tools / third-party services, with free reins to innovate and build on top of the base. I'm neither right- or left-wing. I'm up-wing. I want the best of all alternatives. Too bad that the mainstream is stuck in the XOR mentality...
• rsheridan6 15y ago
  > For example, as the article mentioned, the former toll booth operator could now repair the automated toll booth system. If the toll collector had the skills, or the ability or inclination to acquire the skills to do something like fixing automated toll booth systems, they probably wouldn't have taken a job as a toll collector.
  • andyking 15y ago
    And perhaps this is stating the obvious - but one ex-toll collector could efficiently repair and maintain 10, 50 or 100 toll machines. Just like those self-scanner checkouts at the supermarket, where you've got one guy supervising five or ten checkouts, where previously he would have had five or ten colleagues working.
    • Drbble 15y ago
      Or you can open 50 checkout lanes and generate the same profit on the same staff a manual checkout, and have happier customers who have more time to exercise and increase caloric needs and thus buy more food, or have more time to earn money to spend on fancier food...
• s_kilk 15y ago
  >> We may be reaching a discontinuous point on the economic timeline. I tend to agree. Up until about a year ago I was working as a cinema projectionist for a very successful UK cinema chain. It was a decent job, right up until the point where the company announced a plan to completely replace all 35mm projectors with new digital machines. Now, up until this point we had maybe 3 Digital projectors already installed and we had become quite fond of them, they had a lot of problems and were much less reliable than the 35mm machines but hey, progress is progress. The real problem was that the company intended to make every single one of us redundant in the same move, as they had some crack-pot idea that the digital projectors would "practically run themselve" (which we knew from experience would never work). This is when I realised that the old myth of "as old jobs disappear new ones will take their place" wasn't true. The company had no intention of generating new work, each cinema site would simply shift the work of running the new projection suite onto the existing (overworked and underpaid) management staff, and the work of maintaining the macines would shift to the existing (overworked and underpaid) technical crew, who were already zipping up and down the country 364 days per year. The company could have generated some new work to replace the jobs that were lost, but ultimately they don't _want_ to do that. It's much more in the companys interests to jettison as much of their workforce as possible. Fortunately for myself, I had already decided to go back to school and get a degree in software development. Better to be at the devils right hand than in his path. :) It's not technology that's really killing the labour-force, it's companies who jump at the opportunity to get rid of thousands of employees and essentially delete their productivity from the economy.
  • brazzy 15y ago
    Nonsense. Companies can want to eliminate jobs till the cows come home and write it on their Santa wishlist - whether they actually can eliminate jobs is determined mostly by technology. In your example, either the company bought new, more technologically advanced digital projectors that actually do need much less supervision and maintenance, or their plan simply failed and they had to re-hire people to run and repair the projectors after they had some expensive downtime and/or management and technical staff burnt out or quit.
  • tatsuke95 15y ago
• jonnathanson 15y ago
  In theory, gains in productivity from computerized resources would replace the need for human work. (Voicemail and word processors made secretaries obsolete in many organizations, for instance). But in practice, work has simply grown more complex and more voluminous to accommodate the productivity gains. Consider the humble spreadsheet, arguably the most powerful business innovation of the last 50 years. Now that people can calculate complex models in hours, not weeks, have the fields of corporate finance and forecasting gone away? Hardly. If anything, more work gets packed into each day to fill the vacuum left by not having to crunch numbers on paper for days on end. And the level of sophistication going into deal analysis has increased, allowing people to spend more time planning and less time bean-counting. Sure, some jobs have been in outright decline since the rise of technology. Secretaries, human computers (sorry, Frank Herbert!), many factory workers, and so forth. But the net amount of work to be done hasn't decreased. If anything, it's increased dramatically. It's just shifted to the knowledge-worker side. And knowledge workers' workloads have skyrocketed. All of this technology has actually made us busier and more productive, because it has allowed us to do more each day. The theory that technology replaces the need for X or Y work is based on the flawed assumption that the total need for X or Y work remains static over time. In the knowledge worker's domain, it does not. It turns out that meeting the need for X and Y actually increases the need for, or at least the expectation of, more X and Y. In this sense, I tend to agree with PG's argument (and the arguments of those like him).
  • loup-vaillant 15y ago
    Consider 2 variables: Productivity is the "quantity" of "stuff" produced by man-hour (on average). Wealth is the "quantity" of stuff consumed by man-day (on average). So, on average, hours-of-work-per-day = wealth ÷ productivity The question is, can wealth absorb all the productivity gains? If so, no problem. If not, then mechanically, there will be less and less hours worked per day, on average. In a world where we all want a "full time" job, that means unemployment. Looking at the current trends, I'd say wealth absorbs only a (big) fraction of the productivity gains. Which means unemployment.
• datasage 15y ago
  I agree with this. We have been able to absorb displaced workers because the economy had been growing at a rate higher than natural growth (population/inflation). But the us economy has matured, it is no longer growing dramatically as it once was. While some technological advancements can create new markets and growth for the economy; Many technologies are designed to address inefficiencies in the market or business processes which will ultimately result in a net decrease in employment. Also, technology is also a poor business decision if it costs more than existing methods taking into account increases in productivity.
• ctdonath 15y ago
  Notice the current USA administration's insistence on population reduction. No need to address the unemployed if they don't come into existence.