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Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which cou
by estearum 3mo ago
Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak.
Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years?
You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is, the plight of the printers is totally incomparable.
Question: What happens when you drive a car at 90 mph into a concrete wall?
Answer: Well, actually just this morning pulling into my parking spot, I bumped into the barrier beneath my tires. It was fine!
- fragmede 3mo agoIt's 1.9 million out of roughly 130 million jobs in the US, putting it at about 1 to 1.5 percent. Not 0.01%
- estearum 3mo agoWhat is?
- sam_lowry_ 3mo agoIT broadly speaking is ~4.5% of the workforce in the US, 5% in the EU, last time I checked.
- estearum 3mo agoDo you think IT is the only field threatened by AI? Must not spend much time talking to people in other fields.
- fragmede 3mo agoAd hominem, unfounded inference, condescension/snark, and mind-reading, all in your last 11 words. Impressive!
- estearum 3mo agoHard to respond to two assumptions stacked upon each other. First that my 40%+ figure was referring to IT (which should be self-evidently a category error), then that you were correcting that number down to 1.9 million.
- fragmede 3mo ago> which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. I was refuting your made up statistic.
- estearum 3mo agoOh I see, you're claiming that 1.9 million people in the US were engaged in printing. You're referring to a NAICS code set that includes both printing and the entire publishing apparatus around it. At printing's peak, there were 70,000 people employed in actual printing in the US. There were lots more engaged in the business around printed goods, but those jobs weren't threatened by desktop publishing. In fact there are more of those people today than there were at the peak of printing, drawing a clear empirical line between those jobs that were destroyed by printing tech improvements and those that were not. At its peak in the late 90s, printing was 0.025% of US people or 0.05% of the workforce, which (being unbelievably wealthy) would obviously be the extreme high end of print employment globally. 0.01% was obviously a complete finger in the wind estimate, but turned out to be a pretty good guess! https://whattheythink.com/articles/52978-desktop-publishings-legacy/ https://whattheythink.com/articles/52978-desktop-publishings...
- altmanaltman 3mo agoYeah + the world was much different than it is today. It trivializes the risk by saying we have seen it before and we were okay when its a fundamentally different problem in many aspects.
- Macha 3mo agoAlso fails to distinguish between “society came out of it fine” (generally true) and “individuals came out of it fine” (much more mixed of a track record)
- rayiner 3mo agoYes. And individuals largely don’t come out fine. We have this notion of “retraining” but that’s not real. It’s like how studies show it’s very hard to make friends as an adult. Most people whose jobs were shipped overseas in deindustrialization never recovers.
- lesuorac 3mo ago> We have this notion of “retraining” but that’s not real. While I haven't been "retrained" my understanding was the real issue that it's lip-service. Like the Department of Labor doesn't actually show up to a closed down factory with staff to train people in some other vocation.
- logicchains 3mo agoUniversity-educated "Knowledge workers" should be much more capable of learning new things than the average factory production line worker.
- nemo44x 3mo agoWe create 25% more new jobs that never existed before than jobs that are forever destroyed as obsolete every year. In the USA.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
- bushbaba 3mo agoI doubt unemployment can even raise to 40% before the government and billionaire class is overthrown. The French Revolution was not an isolated event
- estearum 3mo agoAnd then what? Suddenly everyone gets paid for doing nothing of added value? We ban AI and similar ultra-high leverage technologies?
- adrianN 3mo agoWell somebody is still making things and presumably selling them. So you could tax them and redistribute the money
- ryanbrunner 3mo agoIn this hypothetical, at that point, those people are going to be literal no exaggeration oligarchs (arguably they are now) - just saying they should give up what would amount to a large percentage of their wealth isn't going to go over well.
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo agoWon't go over well? I'm sure it will. Just not with them
- wongarsu 3mo agoIf for that many people there truly is no way left to provide some economic value (that is rewarded enough to pay for shelter, bread and Netflix), that might mean the end of capitalism. Even living in a slum is not free I'm not sure what would replace it. A welfare state doesn't work if the state doesn't have the money. State-run economies don't have the best track record either
- logicchains 3mo agoWhat are the unemployed going to do? South Africa has over 30% unemployment rate, nothing changes, the unemployed sometimes rob/murder farmers, and the employed live in compounds with armed guards.
- thegrim33 3mo agoThe difference is that one of those things actually happened, and the other one is your hypothetical extremist/exaggerated/worst possible case of what might happen this time.
- estearum 3mo agothe wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero reason to think about events that haven't happened yet. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
- alsetmusic 3mo agoI don't think they said that at all. I'm pretty sure they were saying that the thing to think about / discuss is the thing that happened, rather than the hypothetical.
- estearum 3mo agoMy own initial comment literally addressed the uncertainty. Here: > You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is [emphasis in source], the plight of the printers is totally incomparable. "It hasn't happened yet" is a non-sequitur at best, but obviously the goal of such a "contribution" is to chill discussion. The same "contribution" can be made to any conversation about any possible future events. So long as everyone already knows they're talking about the future, it is not helpful in any way.
- freejazz 3mo agoThe entire premise of this article is a hypothetical
- zero-sharp 3mo agoThe parent is making a point about the rate/scale at which technology replaced workers. If you think the hypothetical is too extreme, then what would a more realistic version be? Are you uncertain about the rate of disruption?
- 3mo ago
- wongarsu 3mo agoIf printing technology took centuries to eliminate the trade of printers, by the same logic computers took about 80 years to eliminate a large chunk of knowledge workers (and that's just counting until today, we might still be a couple years off)
- Animats 2mo agoIt took only about a decade. Printing was a good trade in 1975. The International Typographical Union folded in 1986, with the remaining employees (mostly mailers, not printers) moving to the Teamsters.
- Exoristos 3mo agoMost of it actually took about five years, as the manufacturing side of it was outsourced to China and the computer side to India. I was there. Management told us it was "because of 9/11." R.R. Donnelley was one of the world's largest manufacturing companies, a Fortune 50 company -- became a penny stock in a decade or so. The technologies GP mentions didn't end commercial print -- they were all heavily in use _by_ commercial print.
- Exoristos 3mo agoOh and the actual driving mechanism was vulture capitalist takeover.
- AndrewKemendo 3mo agoAll technologies are used to change or amplify existing power structures
- lumost 3mo agoI think we have unfortunately apt historical comparisons. The economic state of Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century matches a society where wealth had been completely and utterly bifurcated. The result was “seizing the means of production”
- spwa4 3mo agoYou mean it was a whole political theory resulting in a revolution "to end class society" who immediately, nearly as a first step created a new elite class, equally impossible to enter and with far bigger wealth inequality than capitalism? Judging by the reaction in discussions it is a very sore point of socialists to point out that Marx was obviously upper class, definitely part of the bourgeoisie and in his actions shows that he is entirely unwilling to give that up. The same goes for other famous socialists, from Engels to Lenin. There are even voices that claim the point of socialism was never to end inequality but rather to take far more wealth for themselves. The "halfway to robin hood" jokes, they certainly take from the wealthy, and everybody else, but they never seem to get around to giving it to the poor ...