7 ms·

Education, Skills & Slavery… and why we’re probably screwed.

48 points by marcuspovey 15y ago

jerhewet 15y ago
> and in a few years time, not being able to code will be as big an impairment as not being able to read and write. Because, y'know, writing code is the easiest thing in the world. And, y'know, anyone can do it, y'know.
- intended 15y ago
  Forgot the exact quote, but it stated that "in the future, everyone will need to understand statistics".
- wyclif 15y ago
  The point is not that coding is easy. After all, reading and writing are difficult for the illiterate. I think what he's trying to get across is that technical skills are going to be necessary, not optional, if you wish to be employed in the future.
  - barkingtoad 15y ago
    Well, as long as coders still need to shit, plumbers will still fetch good money.
    - felipemnoa 15y ago
      Until engineers are finally able to build autonomous robots to fix your plumbing. And if they can fix your plumbing they can certainly fix a lot of other things.
      - barkingtoad 15y ago
        That level of robotics (and generation of cheap energy to run them) will lead to a world where goods are plentiful and cheap. That in turn means the poor win, or rather the definition of "poor" is re-defined, as it always is.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    How does the need for technical skills differ from the past? How many of us in the HN crowd could jump onto the factory floor, or hop into a tractor on a farm and do it successfully on day one? I've been doing the latter for most of my life and I'm still not very good at it. Programming is a different skill set, but it's not any more difficult to acquire than any other skill needed to be employed now or in the past. The need for "unskilled" labour has mostly been a function of demand. If you can't find a skilled person to drive your tractor, you have to take your chances with training someone who is not. The job has to be done regardless. The crops will whither away to nothing if you are unable to get them off the field in time. I think we'll see one of two scenarios play out: 1. Programmers will be in ever increasing demand to the point where companies will be forced to hire anyone off the street and bring them up to speed on the work, like farmers and manufacturers have had to do in the past. 2. Programmers will not be in proportionally increasing demand and only the very best of the best will be employed in the field. Just acquiring the skills will not be enough to find you a job.
hessenwolf 15y ago
Yeah, we don't need sales & marketing, art, fashion, good taste (I'd literally pay somebody to shop with me, if I didn't have a friend to help), good food, therapy, entertainment, fitness instructors... just coders. Yep. You seem to be showing a really limited understanding of the value that is provided by the current and future workforce. It will shift towards creativity, rather than production, as production becomes more automated, but how is that a thing to be worried about? Anecdotal: I know somebody who recently took a five euro stool from IKEA, and some colorful marble chips, and somehow fashioned it into this thing with a mosaic of a rose on it. I'm usually indifferent to this stuff, but I've seen it and it really is awesome. This person is considering selling these online, and I think it is not the worst idea. What the hell does this have to do with coding? Designing the unique rose and choosing the colours and having the idea in the first place were the value adding parts.
michaelochurch 15y ago
For at least 100,000 years, we've lived in a desperately poor world in which (to rip off Our Lady Peace) "every calorie's a war". We still live in one, if you take a global perspective, but we're moving out of such a state. What do I mean by "desperately poor"? (I'm making a tall assertion since there's no economic comparison, at least none that we know of, to human history.) I mean that we're biologically programmed to rapidly exceed any carrying capacity. Economic growth throughout most of human history has been so slow as to be absorbed entirely in population growth, which has been great for priests and kings but terrible for subjects. Per-capita well-being almost hadn't changed (on a global scale; there were local ups and downs) between 10,000 BC and about 1840 AD. Technological advances were absorbed entirely into the task of supporting larger populations. In a desperately poor world, you need to force everyone to work. People who aren't working are "lazy" and need to be punished. What most dictators actually want is to mechanize work: to replace these complex, difficult organisms (that sometimes break down and stop working) with mechanical ones without family ties, without belief in gods except the ones favorable to "the state", and without creativity or self-awareness or any desire for autonomy. That applies to ancient, semi-fictional dictators like Gilgamesh and it applies to modern, faceless dictatorships like 20th-century authoritarian communism. We're finally finding our way to the compromise, which is to use technology to create those mechanical workers (robots)-- because humans despise being treated as machines, and we're also really bad at the work they do well. Early computers were actually slower than human "computers", but had a lot more in the way of endurance. Now we're moving toward a rich world and we're totally unprepared for it. We have millennia-old assumptions about peoples' relationships with work (that there will always be useful work for people to do, making it fair and reasonable to structure a society where everyone who can work must) that are about to become invalid, and none of our social structures are prepared for this change even on a national scale, much less a world one. I'm starting to think we should just give stuff away. Instead of the IMF and World Bank putting these African countries into debt, let's just tax rich people a little more and pay people to build safe water systems. For free. There's plenty of infrastructural and environmental that the world needs, and if there aren't market incentives for people to do the right thing, then that's a perfect place for government to get involved: tax the rich, and pay underemployed Americans to do things that are good for the country and for the world. For the record, world poverty is a complex problem and most of what we call "aid" isn't what we need to heal the world. Giving money to poor countries just makes their elites richer. We should be giving away water, medicine, technological access, and (most importantly) education.
macavity23 15y ago
I agree with his heading the future looks pretty dire for the low skilled, but he then descends into hyperbole. As hessenwolf says, there are plenty of non-technical skills that are very much in demand. Those without such skills have always been at the bottom of the pile, but he's right in that things are going to get very much worse for them. If all you have to offer the world is your manual labour, you are not going to have a fun time of the next few decades. However, his hope that the tide of human suffering rises high enough for the murmurs of discontent from the slave castes turn to cries of revolution is mistaken. Every revolution in history has been made by the educated - sometimes in the name of the proletariat, but never actually by them. The uneducated just get Bread and Circuses, and if the modern world knows how to make anything, it's Bread and Circuses.
- nickpinkston 15y ago
  To be fair, most revolutions are started / headed by the bourgeois, but the foot solders are generally from the working class. Also, other than the American Revolution, most are about the suffering of the masses - at least plausibly.
  - Zimahl 15y ago
    Even some of the bourgeois can see inequality and act upon it. Slaves typically don't free themselves.
skatenerd 15y ago
i found an article that might be relevant en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
dageshi 15y ago
I think what always annoys me about articles like this is that the author spends the entire article telling us how everything is changing and the future is completely different but the answer is to tax the rich a bit more. The answer to everything for certain people has always been "just tax the rich a bit more" apparently in this world of ours which is changing beyond recognition, that part never changes.
- mindcruzer 15y ago
  This is the go-to "solution" for people that don't know how to solve a problem.
  - Zimahl 15y ago
    To be fair, the rich are getting exorbitantly richer. CEOs are making multiple hundreds of times what one of their workers makes. We are heading back to the age of Rockefellers and Carnegies, where wealth is taken from the many so the few can be insanely rich. And it's not like the educated aren't doing much better either. Google makes billions but doesn't pay a ton more than anywhere else. Wages and salaries have been pretty stagnant for those making less than 200k. Meanwhile, costs increase for a net loss of income. So what else is there to do, other than tax the rich? That's the reality they are building for themselves by being so greedy.
    - jtc331 15y ago
      But the poor are getting exorbitantly richer too. The so-called poor in our society pay $100+ a month for cable, have cell phones with data plans for all their 10+-year-old kids etc. And these are the people that get welfare for food and live in subsidized housing. They are not poor. The fact that the rich are richer is not a problem when the entire population is getting richer.
      - Zimahl 15y ago
        The poor have an increasing standard of living but that hardly means they are getting 'richer'. The poor may have a roof over their heads, three square meals a day, and maybe even a vehicle, but they don't have health insurance and are typically locked in jobs and locations. Meanwhile, services that help the poor generally get cut - like public transportation, education, etc. But at least we'll always fund the jails. The rich getting richer is definitely a problem when that wealth is never converted into something that benefits society and just sits around generation after generation. In the US we've completely removed the so-called 'death tax' which was actually a great thing. It forced wealth to be used instead of horded. Currently there's no incentive in the US to build a company to pass on to your kids, it's better just to keep it all in cash and hand that over. Minimal investment happens with such a system. Sure some is in stocks and bonds but generally in super-safe stuff so you just pay low capital gains and not real income tax. There's just no excuse for CEO wages currently. The new CEO of JCPenny just got $53 million in stock for 4 months work. The stock is down since he joined. How many employees could've gotten even a little better wage instead of it going to 1 man?
lionhearted 15y ago
Safe intelligence augmentation is a "when," not an "if." Hell, Piracetam is extremely safe and seems to be worth around 10 IQ points. There's going to be lots more innovation on that frontier. We're already making anti-degenerative-diseases progress and hopefully figuring out nutrition for real, as well as cracking DNA and various personalized medicines. Intelligence augmentation will be bitterly debated and fought against when it comes online, but it's a hell of a lot better than some of the alternatives.
- rnernento 15y ago
  Tell me more about Piracetam? I want 10IQ points :)
  - clawrencewenham 15y ago
    http://www.thinkinginanutshell.com/nootropics http://www.thinkinginanutshell.com/nootropics But saying it's worth "10 IQ points" is a bit of a stretch. There's no drug that's like the one in _Limitless_. Piracetam and most other nootropics are either stimulants, like caffeine, or agents that protect against/repair damage.
  - WalterSear 15y ago
    The poster above is full of hyperbole. Piracetam improves memory, not IQ, has greater effect in those with a deficit, and has a subtle effect at best, particularly after habituation sets in.
Lazare 15y ago
Hmm. So let me see if I understand the article. To paraphrase: We in the west are becoming ever richer as a society; material wealth beyond the dreams of our ancestors lies at our feet. The low skilled have a quality of life that the kings and queens of France would have killed for. Where once 90% of us had to till the soil in order for us to eat, now only a tiny fraction of society truly "needs" to work in order for us all to achieve unprecedented material wealth. Where once the poorest among us starved, now they have iPhones. ...and this is terrible. Look, this may be right, but that's an awfully big jump that needs some explaining. And while we're at it, maybe a little more attention on why it would be possible or desirable for everyone to have a computer science degree would be nice. A lot of people would suggest that we're already in the middle of a massive education bubble, and that with the possible exception of some STEM fields, we have too many people going to university. But the biggest problem is that there is a fundamental disconnect between "we're getting richer and more productive" and "the poor are going to starve to death". The "managed decline" section of the post seems particular confused; it can't seem to decide if we're all getting richer or not. If we can't afford welfare, then we clearly aren't - but it was the process of getting richer that was meant to lead to an employment crisis. The implicit model behind this post appears wildly inconsistent, to put it mildly.
- zeteo 15y ago
  This is not about materials needs of the low skilled, but about the philosophical needs of the author. It's difficult to be a Marxist when, as you say, minimum wage routinely affords material comforts old royalty could only dream of. But, with a bit of effort, every Don Quixote finds his windmills.
  - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
    Who affords comforts on minimum wage? I don't know anyone making that little who can even afford to move away from their parents.
    - zeteo 15y ago
      You know what? I've worked for minimum wage, not so long ago. I could still afford running water, Internet, TV, electric lighting, refrigeration, my own automobile (second-hand ofc), and even a cross-country flight once. Weren't these unbelievable luxuries for the first 5000 years of civilization? What king or queen could have afforded half of them in 3000BC, 2000BC, 1000BC, 1AD, 1000AD, or even in Marx's time?
tsotha 15y ago
>A smart and socially responsible government would be ploughing every penny they can into education and welfare. Education to bring the technical competence of the population up to a level where they stand a chance of competing for the few ultra high skilled jobs the economy of the future has... This makes no sense. If there are such a small number of ultra high skilled jobs the money you spend on education already will be enough to fill them. There's no point in spending buckets of money training people for jobs that aren't there. There are already a bunch of countries around the world where people with advanced degrees are selling trinkets to tourists because there aren't any jobs. >His candour shocked me, and I asked what he suggested as a recommended course of action; “Leave.”, was his reply, “Before it gets really bad.” And go where? If the situation really is as you've described, there isn't going to be anywhere to go.
Tycho 15y ago
In the latter example, a single member of staff can now do the job of a row of checkout clerks, supported by maybe a trained engineer to fix faults in all the stores in a given region. Soon, maybe these too will become redundant (perhaps replaced by RFID scanners to scan your bags and bill your credit card automatically when leaving the store). One for PG's 'startup ideas so disruptive they're scary' list
UK-AL 15y ago
I believe low skilled jobs will become few. The ones that will survive will be localised, but many more people will trying to get into them. So that will still be a problem. The only way to solve this is in education. There is always something to discover or invent, but there is only so much plumbing work.

48 points by marcuspovey 15y ago

> and in a few years time, not being able to code will be as big an impairment as not being able to read and write. Because, y'know, writing code is the easiest thing in the world. And, y'know, anyone can do it, y'know.

intended 15y ago
Forgot the exact quote, but it stated that "in the future, everyone will need to understand statistics".
wyclif 15y ago
The point is not that coding is easy. After all, reading and writing are difficult for the illiterate. I think what he's trying to get across is that technical skills are going to be necessary, not optional, if you wish to be employed in the future.
- barkingtoad 15y ago
  Well, as long as coders still need to shit, plumbers will still fetch good money.
  - felipemnoa 15y ago
    Until engineers are finally able to build autonomous robots to fix your plumbing. And if they can fix your plumbing they can certainly fix a lot of other things.
    - barkingtoad 15y ago
      That level of robotics (and generation of cheap energy to run them) will lead to a world where goods are plentiful and cheap. That in turn means the poor win, or rather the definition of "poor" is re-defined, as it always is.
- randomdata 15y ago
  How does the need for technical skills differ from the past? How many of us in the HN crowd could jump onto the factory floor, or hop into a tractor on a farm and do it successfully on day one? I've been doing the latter for most of my life and I'm still not very good at it. Programming is a different skill set, but it's not any more difficult to acquire than any other skill needed to be employed now or in the past. The need for "unskilled" labour has mostly been a function of demand. If you can't find a skilled person to drive your tractor, you have to take your chances with training someone who is not. The job has to be done regardless. The crops will whither away to nothing if you are unable to get them off the field in time. I think we'll see one of two scenarios play out: 1. Programmers will be in ever increasing demand to the point where companies will be forced to hire anyone off the street and bring them up to speed on the work, like farmers and manufacturers have had to do in the past. 2. Programmers will not be in proportionally increasing demand and only the very best of the best will be employed in the field. Just acquiring the skills will not be enough to find you a job.

hessenwolf 15y ago

Yeah, we don't need sales & marketing, art, fashion, good taste (I'd literally pay somebody to shop with me, if I didn't have a friend to help), good food, therapy, entertainment, fitness instructors... just coders. Yep. You seem to be showing a really limited understanding of the value that is provided by the current and future workforce. It will shift towards creativity, rather than production, as production becomes more automated, but how is that a thing to be worried about? Anecdotal: I know somebody who recently took a five euro stool from IKEA, and some colorful marble chips, and somehow fashioned it into this thing with a mosaic of a rose on it. I'm usually indifferent to this stuff, but I've seen it and it really is awesome. This person is considering selling these online, and I think it is not the worst idea. What the hell does this have to do with coding? Designing the unique rose and choosing the colours and having the idea in the first place were the value adding parts.

michaelochurch 15y ago

For at least 100,000 years, we've lived in a desperately poor world in which (to rip off Our Lady Peace) "every calorie's a war". We still live in one, if you take a global perspective, but we're moving out of such a state. What do I mean by "desperately poor"? (I'm making a tall assertion since there's no economic comparison, at least none that we know of, to human history.) I mean that we're biologically programmed to rapidly exceed any carrying capacity. Economic growth throughout most of human history has been so slow as to be absorbed entirely in population growth, which has been great for priests and kings but terrible for subjects. Per-capita well-being almost hadn't changed (on a global scale; there were local ups and downs) between 10,000 BC and about 1840 AD. Technological advances were absorbed entirely into the task of supporting larger populations. In a desperately poor world, you need to force everyone to work. People who aren't working are "lazy" and need to be punished. What most dictators actually want is to mechanize work: to replace these complex, difficult organisms (that sometimes break down and stop working) with mechanical ones without family ties, without belief in gods except the ones favorable to "the state", and without creativity or self-awareness or any desire for autonomy. That applies to ancient, semi-fictional dictators like Gilgamesh and it applies to modern, faceless dictatorships like 20th-century authoritarian communism. We're finally finding our way to the compromise, which is to use technology to create those mechanical workers (robots)-- because humans despise being treated as machines, and we're also really bad at the work they do well. Early computers were actually slower than human "computers", but had a lot more in the way of endurance. Now we're moving toward a rich world and we're totally unprepared for it. We have millennia-old assumptions about peoples' relationships with work (that there will always be useful work for people to do, making it fair and reasonable to structure a society where everyone who can work must) that are about to become invalid, and none of our social structures are prepared for this change even on a national scale, much less a world one. I'm starting to think we should just give stuff away. Instead of the IMF and World Bank putting these African countries into debt, let's just tax rich people a little more and pay people to build safe water systems. For free. There's plenty of infrastructural and environmental that the world needs, and if there aren't market incentives for people to do the right thing, then that's a perfect place for government to get involved: tax the rich, and pay underemployed Americans to do things that are good for the country and for the world. For the record, world poverty is a complex problem and most of what we call "aid" isn't what we need to heal the world. Giving money to poor countries just makes their elites richer. We should be giving away water, medicine, technological access, and (most importantly) education.

macavity23 15y ago

I agree with his heading the future looks pretty dire for the low skilled, but he then descends into hyperbole. As hessenwolf says, there are plenty of non-technical skills that are very much in demand. Those without such skills have always been at the bottom of the pile, but he's right in that things are going to get very much worse for them. If all you have to offer the world is your manual labour, you are not going to have a fun time of the next few decades. However, his hope that the tide of human suffering rises high enough for the murmurs of discontent from the slave castes turn to cries of revolution is mistaken. Every revolution in history has been made by the educated - sometimes in the name of the proletariat, but never actually by them. The uneducated just get Bread and Circuses, and if the modern world knows how to make anything, it's Bread and Circuses.

nickpinkston 15y ago
To be fair, most revolutions are started / headed by the bourgeois, but the foot solders are generally from the working class. Also, other than the American Revolution, most are about the suffering of the masses - at least plausibly.
- Zimahl 15y ago
  Even some of the bourgeois can see inequality and act upon it. Slaves typically don't free themselves.

skatenerd 15y ago

i found an article that might be relevant en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

dageshi 15y ago

I think what always annoys me about articles like this is that the author spends the entire article telling us how everything is changing and the future is completely different but the answer is to tax the rich a bit more. The answer to everything for certain people has always been "just tax the rich a bit more" apparently in this world of ours which is changing beyond recognition, that part never changes.

mindcruzer 15y ago
This is the go-to "solution" for people that don't know how to solve a problem.
- Zimahl 15y ago
  To be fair, the rich are getting exorbitantly richer. CEOs are making multiple hundreds of times what one of their workers makes. We are heading back to the age of Rockefellers and Carnegies, where wealth is taken from the many so the few can be insanely rich. And it's not like the educated aren't doing much better either. Google makes billions but doesn't pay a ton more than anywhere else. Wages and salaries have been pretty stagnant for those making less than 200k. Meanwhile, costs increase for a net loss of income. So what else is there to do, other than tax the rich? That's the reality they are building for themselves by being so greedy.
  - jtc331 15y ago
    But the poor are getting exorbitantly richer too. The so-called poor in our society pay $100+ a month for cable, have cell phones with data plans for all their 10+-year-old kids etc. And these are the people that get welfare for food and live in subsidized housing. They are not poor. The fact that the rich are richer is not a problem when the entire population is getting richer.
    - Zimahl 15y ago
      The poor have an increasing standard of living but that hardly means they are getting 'richer'. The poor may have a roof over their heads, three square meals a day, and maybe even a vehicle, but they don't have health insurance and are typically locked in jobs and locations. Meanwhile, services that help the poor generally get cut - like public transportation, education, etc. But at least we'll always fund the jails. The rich getting richer is definitely a problem when that wealth is never converted into something that benefits society and just sits around generation after generation. In the US we've completely removed the so-called 'death tax' which was actually a great thing. It forced wealth to be used instead of horded. Currently there's no incentive in the US to build a company to pass on to your kids, it's better just to keep it all in cash and hand that over. Minimal investment happens with such a system. Sure some is in stocks and bonds but generally in super-safe stuff so you just pay low capital gains and not real income tax. There's just no excuse for CEO wages currently. The new CEO of JCPenny just got $53 million in stock for 4 months work. The stock is down since he joined. How many employees could've gotten even a little better wage instead of it going to 1 man?

lionhearted 15y ago

Safe intelligence augmentation is a "when," not an "if." Hell, Piracetam is extremely safe and seems to be worth around 10 IQ points. There's going to be lots more innovation on that frontier. We're already making anti-degenerative-diseases progress and hopefully figuring out nutrition for real, as well as cracking DNA and various personalized medicines. Intelligence augmentation will be bitterly debated and fought against when it comes online, but it's a hell of a lot better than some of the alternatives.

rnernento 15y ago
Tell me more about Piracetam? I want 10IQ points :)
- clawrencewenham 15y ago
  http://www.thinkinginanutshell.com/nootropics http://www.thinkinginanutshell.com/nootropics But saying it's worth "10 IQ points" is a bit of a stretch. There's no drug that's like the one in _Limitless_. Piracetam and most other nootropics are either stimulants, like caffeine, or agents that protect against/repair damage.
- WalterSear 15y ago
  The poster above is full of hyperbole. Piracetam improves memory, not IQ, has greater effect in those with a deficit, and has a subtle effect at best, particularly after habituation sets in.

Lazare 15y ago

Hmm. So let me see if I understand the article. To paraphrase: We in the west are becoming ever richer as a society; material wealth beyond the dreams of our ancestors lies at our feet. The low skilled have a quality of life that the kings and queens of France would have killed for. Where once 90% of us had to till the soil in order for us to eat, now only a tiny fraction of society truly "needs" to work in order for us all to achieve unprecedented material wealth. Where once the poorest among us starved, now they have iPhones. ...and this is terrible. Look, this may be right, but that's an awfully big jump that needs some explaining. And while we're at it, maybe a little more attention on why it would be possible or desirable for everyone to have a computer science degree would be nice. A lot of people would suggest that we're already in the middle of a massive education bubble, and that with the possible exception of some STEM fields, we have too many people going to university. But the biggest problem is that there is a fundamental disconnect between "we're getting richer and more productive" and "the poor are going to starve to death". The "managed decline" section of the post seems particular confused; it can't seem to decide if we're all getting richer or not. If we can't afford welfare, then we clearly aren't - but it was the process of getting richer that was meant to lead to an employment crisis. The implicit model behind this post appears wildly inconsistent, to put it mildly.

zeteo 15y ago
This is not about materials needs of the low skilled, but about the philosophical needs of the author. It's difficult to be a Marxist when, as you say, minimum wage routinely affords material comforts old royalty could only dream of. But, with a bit of effort, every Don Quixote finds his windmills.
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  Who affords comforts on minimum wage? I don't know anyone making that little who can even afford to move away from their parents.
  - zeteo 15y ago
    You know what? I've worked for minimum wage, not so long ago. I could still afford running water, Internet, TV, electric lighting, refrigeration, my own automobile (second-hand ofc), and even a cross-country flight once. Weren't these unbelievable luxuries for the first 5000 years of civilization? What king or queen could have afforded half of them in 3000BC, 2000BC, 1000BC, 1AD, 1000AD, or even in Marx's time?

tsotha 15y ago

>A smart and socially responsible government would be ploughing every penny they can into education and welfare. Education to bring the technical competence of the population up to a level where they stand a chance of competing for the few ultra high skilled jobs the economy of the future has... This makes no sense. If there are such a small number of ultra high skilled jobs the money you spend on education already will be enough to fill them. There's no point in spending buckets of money training people for jobs that aren't there. There are already a bunch of countries around the world where people with advanced degrees are selling trinkets to tourists because there aren't any jobs. >His candour shocked me, and I asked what he suggested as a recommended course of action; “Leave.”, was his reply, “Before it gets really bad.” And go where? If the situation really is as you've described, there isn't going to be anywhere to go.

Tycho 15y ago

In the latter example, a single member of staff can now do the job of a row of checkout clerks, supported by maybe a trained engineer to fix faults in all the stores in a given region. Soon, maybe these too will become redundant (perhaps replaced by RFID scanners to scan your bags and bill your credit card automatically when leaving the store). One for PG's 'startup ideas so disruptive they're scary' list

UK-AL 15y ago

I believe low skilled jobs will become few. The ones that will survive will be localised, but many more people will trying to get into them. So that will still be a problem. The only way to solve this is in education. There is always something to discover or invent, but there is only so much plumbing work.