11 ms·

Robot Workers and the Universal Living Wage

74 points by ph0rque 14y ago

quasque 14y ago
Reminds me of this piece of speculative fiction, which explores the theme of robotic automation in some detail: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
- venus 14y ago
  I endorse this work of fiction and encourage everyone to read it. At the very least it is an approachable, engaging and thought-provoking "what-if" scenario.
- jgoewert 14y ago
  This is exactly where my mind was as well. Marshall Brain explored this concept very well. His Robotic Nation articles provide a good source of information on his thoughts as well. Then, you can take that right to his Concentration of Wealth blog and make a big picture.
mercuryrising 14y ago
I'm reading this like 'the singularity is upon us'. We aren't there yet, but articles like this are very good (even if they are slightly non-realistic at the moment) to throw a dart at where we, as a civilization, could end up. We have lost the ability to question where we'll go, because we move faster than our feet can take us. We are sliding down a snowy hill, holding on for dear life, hoping there's a nice landing at the bottom that won't end with us crashing. We've lost control of the sled, but it still moves forward because there's nothing to stop it. I have an anecdote from Germany, and one from Uganda that kind of flow with the idea of 'if you want to, you can, but why?'. We are talented creators, we can make awesome things. Almost anything you think of now a days can be created (and likely has). Some of these things shouldn't have been created, and if every time we want something we ask "but why?", I think it help us to realize where we're going. These are anecdotes from friends, I have no idea of their truth, but they're interesting nonetheless (if it's wrong, consider it fiction). In Germany, the buses run on time. When the buses are just a couple minutes late, people start getting mad. Ultra efficiency, where everything is perfectly meshed together like the gears on a Swiss watch. The timing is perfect, and it lets life progress with a minimum of fuss and extraneous endeavors. Get in, get out, get on your way. In Uganda, when you invite someone over to your place to get together, you can set up a time. They'll get there, but they might be eight hours late from the time you set up. They might start walking, and talk to everyone they see along the way. They'll get the scoop on everyone's life, and share the human experiences that are happening around them. This lateness would sound like insanity to most people, but once you realize that everyone's clock is adjusted to the lag time of getting somewhere, it's not a big deal. Now we, as humans, can create the most efficient complex world that we want to. But why? I think we have collectively lost a lot of modesty as our world has been progressing. We love to play games, we always need a challenge to solve. There's challenges all around us, and the money from solving the challenges is ripe for the taking. It doesn't matter what you do to get there - if you get the money, you get the prize and you won. The ripple effects are what does us in, and the ripples are the unexpected or unintentional differences that were created in our society after adopting the solution to the challenge. Some examples of technology with ripple effects are things like lead paint, leaded gasoline, clear cutting forests, asbestos insulation, etc. We might have been able to predict these things would be bad before we started if we thought a little longer. I'm sure a lot of people knew it would be bad, but it was the easier one that solved a 'problem' that we had. We're young as a civilization, and we are going to make mistakes. The mistakes we should not make though are ones that could have been prevented with a little bit of thought before jumping in head over heels (drunk driving for instance, if you don't do it, you will likely live a bit longer). It takes self restraint (from a person) and conditioning/education (from society) to reduce the number of drunk drivers. The trouble is that we have no restraint with advancing technology, and our society hasn't had the change to find the differences that are created when we advance it. We're like dogs trying to resist the urge to pounce on a piece of meat. We simply can not let something pass us by. If there's a forest to ravage, or an ocean to destroy, we will do it, and we'll do it well. Try this - the next time you think of something cool to make, DON'T MAKE IT. Think about it, see it in your head, but resist the urge to make it. It's very, very challenging. It's easy to know what you've lost after you've lost something, it's hard to predict what you're going to lose. When we do something, we have to change society, and we lose parts of society that we had before. Sometimes the changes are good, sometimes they're bad, but before changing it we should think about what we're doing.
- contingencies 14y ago
  Well put, though personally I would have extracted a sliver of troublemaking glee changing 'leaded gasoline' out for 'the automobile culture' in general. What you are getting at is what the old-school Buddhists call sati or mindfulness: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index-subject.html#sati http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index-subject.html#sati I'm sure that it goes by many other names in other philosophies, though you would probably be hard-pushed to find one that analyzed its nature as early and to such an extent as the Buddhists did.
- overgard 14y ago
  So here's the thing: the idea that we should "think more" doesn't do much for me. You won't find many people that disagree with the idea that we should "think harder", because the opposite stance ("we should think less!") is absurd, but, just because something sounds reasonable doesn't mean it's useful. "Think more" sounds a lot like "raise awareness" to me, which might as well be rephrased as "feel good about ourselves for recognizing reality without actually having to do anything" The thing about society-changing events like this is that the result of "think more" generally ends up being "well, it's inevitable, but it's going to suck for a lot of people". Kudos for your awareness, but that extra "think about it" step doesn't do a lot, does it?
- dimva 14y ago
  Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick Germany. You can say technology has its drawbacks, but people overwhelmingly choose more technology and greater riches over any alternative. And more importantly, if you don't choose technology and someone else does, they can easily conquer you (militarily or economically) and destroy your livelihood.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick Germany I'd pick Uganda. And when a had a similar choice to make in real life, I picked the poorer country. Screw efficiency and screw societies where people live like robots and survive on weekend alcoholic binges, while f*ing poorer countries over to maintain their wealth and superiority (sometimes literally: from colonialism and interventions to Nazi Germany and the extermination of the "undesirables").
dmix 14y ago
I fail to see in this article where the author backs up this claim: > automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for humans to do that computers can't. It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers. At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them. Let's not try to solve problems we don't yet have. The claim of replacing physical labor is legitimate. But if you look at china or the US, the amount of kids getting educated in universities, whose parents worked as labours has exploded. The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them. Which is something universities have been failing to promote accurately compared to the demands of the market.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  "It will be a very long time until computer automation can replace knowledge workers." It will also be a very long time before computer automation replaces skilled trades. Imagine a robot that drives to your house and fixes a leaky pipe under your sink. Imagine a robot that can upgrade the electrical wiring in an old building. Imagine a robot that could do all the jobs that a landscaping crew does: mow a lawn, trim bushes, prune trees, plant flowers, etc. Imagine a robot that can come to your house and hook up your cable TV connection. Imagine a robot that could make even the simplest repair to your car, like replacing a fan belt. Imagine a robot that could style your hair the way you actually wanted it to look. I just don't see any of that happening in the near future.
  - Cushman 14y ago
    You don't need to replace the plumber; if the sink can autonomously diagnose the leak, anyone can be a plumber. You don't need to replace the barber; if a machine can cut hair exactly the same way every time, one person can style a hundred thousand heads at once. Yeah, we aren't going to see a robot mailman walking around, but mainly because we won't use mail. Fundamental changes are coming.
    - greenyoda 14y ago
zeteo 14y ago
>There will still be a need for computer programmers, but a lot of programming can already be automated [...] We could [...] flat-out ban certain types of robots and automated software. I write software for a living and have no idea what this means. It's either horribly misinformed, or a call to ban compilers.
- sologoub 14y ago
  WARNING: Sarcasm is present in this statement :) It seems, according to this article anyways, that the answer to developer unemployment is to rid us of efficient IDEs, compliers and other non-sense, and and get back to good old Assembly!
  - mjmahone17 14y ago
    Yes, actually: if we wanted to ensure developers stay employed, we should make writing code less efficient. Yes, you're being sarcastic, but that doesn't mean your point isn't spot on: this is in fact what unions have been doing all along, and states like New Jersey don't allow you to pump your own gas, specifically to create inefficiencies in the market that promote employment. If the option is between requiring people to work meaningless jobs, or paying everyone a living wage, which really makes more sense?
    - sologoub 14y ago
      Well... The very basis of my understanding of self causes me to say that there has to be a 3rd option... That said, a living wage would be less wasteful. As for unions, I believe this is pretty much what killed the Twinkie manufacturer - they were not able to even optimize routes.
    - qu4z-2 14y ago
      It does seem like unemployment is not a problem of too little work, but rather the uneven distribution of it.
  - gaius 14y ago
    Eclipse has done more to create jobs than any other software, except maybe SAP.
sologoub 14y ago
It seems that similar concerns have been voiced with every advance in technology that replaced works with machines. The argument generally assumes that the amount of "work" needed will remain relatively the same. So, if society today requires 100 works to make one widget, and we can make the same widget with 1 worker and assorted machines, then 99 works will be left unemployed. In reality, what seems to happen is that because the products of that work become cheaper, society starts to consume a lot more. In the end, something like 80 works end up supervising the machines, while 9 works maintain them and the other work is designing the machines. I can't foresee what will happen if all basic service jobs are automated, but then again it will not happen overnight. The biggest question in my mind, is how well will the society repare the future generations with the skills they will need to remain relevant. Education is everything... and it will remain everything. (Not formal education mind you, but more so knowledge/training.)
- rayiner 14y ago
  The counterargument assumes that there aren't external limits on consumption.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    It also overlooks the generalization issue. Machines as a class have been becoming more and more general in their capabilities. Meaning that there are more and more things machines do better than humans. Humans can't keep racing ahead of that curve forever, at some point the machines catch up and can do anything humans can do. At that point, there is no next level for human work to move up the value chain. The value chain will be entirely subsumed by machines. That endpoint is some time off in the future, but that doesn't mean that the inflection point of the curve is. We might be a lot closer to the inflection point than we think. I don't think this is a bad thing, but it's something we're going to need to address as a society.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/ The fact that machines have been gaining a lot of capabilities doesn't mean they'll catch up to us, much less any time soon. While I hope for the "singularity" much more than I fear it, we might remain in an intermediate state for a long time.
mark_l_watson 14y ago
I mostly worry about this scenario of not enough work for everyone because too many people in my country (USA) will probably be unwilling to support a universal living wage. A social safety net improves the lives of everyone because of lower crime and a generally more civil society. The trick will be to provide life long educational and vocational resources. Hopefully almost everyone would want to produce extra value for society and improve their own material life style. There would still be room for very capable people to be "rich" and generally rewarded for skills and hard work. So, a pure meritocracy with rewards layered on top of a minimal universal ling wage sounds good to me.
- kunai 14y ago
  I don't know, it sounds too communistic-utopian. While communism is not a bad thing, and utopias are theoretically a great idea, humans thrive on opportunity and individualism. The world isn't a fair place by nature. Attempting to equalize everyone's talents and source of income, and not allowing them to be rewarded for whatever they pursue seems to cause less incentive for education. Give the average Joe two choices: He can sit at home, make a decent $70,000 every year while he can comfortably watch TV, golf, and do many things that require little mental facility. Give him another option, where he gets the same income, but he has to study, become skilled at a craft, progress intellectually, and be an accomplished man. ~90% of people would choose the former.
  - scarecrowbob 14y ago
    If humans only need enough productive labor to engage 10% of the population, who cares if only the 10% (to use your number) that are engaged by "being productive" are productive?
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    That's likely true. But is it a bad thing? For most of my life I would have answered yes. For society in general, it would have been. But we're approaching a point that I'm not so sure anymore. Would society truly suffer if that's the way things work out in a few decades? It doesn't seem like it would have to.
thomaslangston 14y ago
While I'm sure the universal living wage will become reality in a few countries, I'd expect a shorter work week and more vacation time to be more politically solvent solutions to systemic unemployment in the US.
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
I am basing my startup mostly on this discussion / meme - so I am happy to see it on HN. However the stage I think has been missed by the article (in the rush to say 2120!) is a transition away from commuting and into massive remote working, probably in the next ten years. The costs of commuting and office space is enormous compared to it's benefits for most jobs so we shall see a sea change in how jobs are measured and managed, leading to the path to remote working being freed up. Oddly in software continuous integration / delivery is that sea change. In marketing? It's AB testing. In everything else? We shall see.
- ph0rque 14y ago
  Can you direct us to your startup's website, or provide a brief description of it here?
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Brief idea: Continuous Integration is a step function in how software teams can function. By enabling CI or CD one can remove the major impediment to remote working - managers cannot see what you have done in a day. If folks remote work in the software department, pretty soon others want to. The company needs to have the same confidence that people are working and things progressing daily. So let's say marketing moves to the technicalmarketing beloved of patio11 - you can have Market department run tests on it's changes, measure customer behaviour etc. And they don't need to do it in the office. Apply the same to every business process. Business people need to interact so we are not going to abandon cities - but the most valuable interactions are inter-company not intra-company. So from little acorns of CI we can see the world of the Race against the Machine coming to pass - White collar workers automated or their jobs changed out of recognition. So my startup, yeah that. I see my one person consultancy not as a lifestyle business but as a forever company - where I and I hope others will work, but more importantly experience many new modes of future work - and teach others and produce products that fill niches we ourselves need or are very well placed to understand. To be brutal, I want to turn a one person consultancy into a dispersed products company, solving the big work ideas of the next twenty years. First three are the CI consultancy, a data warehouse scm driver and videos of bug fixes. Please don't judge the book by the website - www.mikadosoftware.com. Ps - I think the auto farm is fantastic - keep it up I have never met any of my coworkers - they are in various parts of the States and I in Kent. The world has changed, it's just not evenly distributed - I want to be part of that change - the view is best right out on the edge. Big long dreams.
jwr 14y ago
For those interested in thinking about issues of a future society where most humans do not work, I'd highly recommend reading "Limes Inferior" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_inferior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_inferior), a thought-provoking book where many of these issues are raised. The idea of paying people a basic wage even if they do not perform any useful work is not a new one.
- hosh 14y ago
  It could go the other way: being able to live and be human without wages.
  - jwr 14y ago
    That's basically what Zajdel describes in his dystopian vision: the basic "red" points that you get allow for a basic existence (e.g. food and shelter) without performing any work at all. So one might say it isn't really a wage.
    - hosh 14y ago
      Not what I mean at all. I mean, reduce the basic living cost. For example, a homestead that ran on its own power (solar, wind, etc.), can manufacture many basic needs products through microfabs, and grow enough food. Reducing costs doesn't do away with capital expenditure. But once acquired, the ongoing cost of living approaches zero. If you give everyone a universal income, you are still making people beholden to the grid of some sort. The red points are still a wage, because ultimately, you have to rely on someone outside your family group to redeem your needs. Reduce the cost and make that available en mass, and each household would be reasonably resource independent. Luxuries, of course, won't go away. Wants are endless.
desas 14y ago
Robert Heinleins For Us, The Living describes this kind of society. Everyone gets a "dividend" which is enough to live on and people do what would be a low wage/non-job such as being an artist for part time fun and high wages.
scotty79 14y ago
How much jobs we are loosing is not readily apparent. For example you should add almost all inmates and jailors and possibly half of the laweyrs and some of the goverment clerks (especialy the ones hired in branches created over last 20 years) to the unemployed to get the real numbers. Our societies have a lot of pathological mechanisms for coping with inflow of people of diverse levels of education that have nothing to do. I sincerely hope that people will be humane enough to create universal wage sooner than later.
JulianMorrison 14y ago
The answer is quite simply, we are going to have to STOP having an economy that contains employment or money, at all. As I've put it before, either we all retire, or we're all sacked. The economy, what little of it still requires humans, is going to have to run on vocations. And the part that does not, is going to have to run on allocation.
- gaius 14y ago
  You still need some sort of unit to track resource consumption, maybe that's the Joule instead of the Dollar, but as long as there needs to be decisions made of the form, which is better/should we do, X or Y, then you need a quantitative way to think about it. Von Mises called this "economic calculation".
  - JulianMorrison 14y ago
    I'd consider the primary problems of early-Soviet style allocation economics to be (1) informational (2) computational. Money provides a quantitative (if not nice) solution to these because private economic decisions are intrinsically local, infinitely parallel and they self-aggregate. Happily, look what happened in the intervening decades: mass connectivity and big data, plus the normalization of data mining over petabytes of raw information. I think, in other words, that we have reached the point where we can batter down the economic calculation problem with brute force.
    - gaius 14y ago
      Even if you are correct, all that computation still needs to be done in some sort of unit. Money is good because it is abstracted from actual stuff. Joules are actually a bad unit, because how do you value an information product in terms of the energy of the computation it does? Hmm.
      - JulianMorrison 14y ago
        You use the natural units of the activity. Tonnes of ore or raw material. Hours of factory time. Joules of energy consumption. Production line machinery MTBF. So on and so forth. It's a lot of data, but nowadays we have tools to work with a lot of data.
cpursley 14y ago
97% percent of us used to be farmers. Did the machines and processes that replaced us render us irrelevant and without other pursuits? No, it unlocked massive amounts of intelectual capacity that led to unprecedented scientific and economic growth. I don't understand why people don't understand this basic economic principle. When you free up peoples time from monotonous tasks, we all benefit. These calls for a universal minimum wages are odd.
thenomad 14y ago
One interesting anecdata point on the "everyone would just sit around and watch TV" front - my girlfriend and I just went through all of our reasonably close friends, and could only think of one person who might, possibly, not start or continue doing something challenging and interesting, given a "living wage" situation - and to be fair, we don't know that person very well. The "everyone would just sit around" theory seems to be predicated on the belief that there are millions of people out there whom we don't personally know, but we somehow know well enough to believe they have no other interests that might blossom.
Tycho 14y ago
Can everyone be a knowledge worker?

74 points by ph0rque 14y ago

Reminds me of this piece of speculative fiction, which explores the theme of robotic automation in some detail: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

venus 14y ago
I endorse this work of fiction and encourage everyone to read it. At the very least it is an approachable, engaging and thought-provoking "what-if" scenario.
jgoewert 14y ago
This is exactly where my mind was as well. Marshall Brain explored this concept very well. His Robotic Nation articles provide a good source of information on his thoughts as well. Then, you can take that right to his Concentration of Wealth blog and make a big picture.

mercuryrising 14y ago

I'm reading this like 'the singularity is upon us'. We aren't there yet, but articles like this are very good (even if they are slightly non-realistic at the moment) to throw a dart at where we, as a civilization, could end up. We have lost the ability to question where we'll go, because we move faster than our feet can take us. We are sliding down a snowy hill, holding on for dear life, hoping there's a nice landing at the bottom that won't end with us crashing. We've lost control of the sled, but it still moves forward because there's nothing to stop it. I have an anecdote from Germany, and one from Uganda that kind of flow with the idea of 'if you want to, you can, but why?'. We are talented creators, we can make awesome things. Almost anything you think of now a days can be created (and likely has). Some of these things shouldn't have been created, and if every time we want something we ask "but why?", I think it help us to realize where we're going. These are anecdotes from friends, I have no idea of their truth, but they're interesting nonetheless (if it's wrong, consider it fiction). In Germany, the buses run on time. When the buses are just a couple minutes late, people start getting mad. Ultra efficiency, where everything is perfectly meshed together like the gears on a Swiss watch. The timing is perfect, and it lets life progress with a minimum of fuss and extraneous endeavors. Get in, get out, get on your way. In Uganda, when you invite someone over to your place to get together, you can set up a time. They'll get there, but they might be eight hours late from the time you set up. They might start walking, and talk to everyone they see along the way. They'll get the scoop on everyone's life, and share the human experiences that are happening around them. This lateness would sound like insanity to most people, but once you realize that everyone's clock is adjusted to the lag time of getting somewhere, it's not a big deal. Now we, as humans, can create the most efficient complex world that we want to. But why? I think we have collectively lost a lot of modesty as our world has been progressing. We love to play games, we always need a challenge to solve. There's challenges all around us, and the money from solving the challenges is ripe for the taking. It doesn't matter what you do to get there - if you get the money, you get the prize and you won. The ripple effects are what does us in, and the ripples are the unexpected or unintentional differences that were created in our society after adopting the solution to the challenge. Some examples of technology with ripple effects are things like lead paint, leaded gasoline, clear cutting forests, asbestos insulation, etc. We might have been able to predict these things would be bad before we started if we thought a little longer. I'm sure a lot of people knew it would be bad, but it was the easier one that solved a 'problem' that we had. We're young as a civilization, and we are going to make mistakes. The mistakes we should not make though are ones that could have been prevented with a little bit of thought before jumping in head over heels (drunk driving for instance, if you don't do it, you will likely live a bit longer). It takes self restraint (from a person) and conditioning/education (from society) to reduce the number of drunk drivers. The trouble is that we have no restraint with advancing technology, and our society hasn't had the change to find the differences that are created when we advance it. We're like dogs trying to resist the urge to pounce on a piece of meat. We simply can not let something pass us by. If there's a forest to ravage, or an ocean to destroy, we will do it, and we'll do it well. Try this - the next time you think of something cool to make, DON'T MAKE IT. Think about it, see it in your head, but resist the urge to make it. It's very, very challenging. It's easy to know what you've lost after you've lost something, it's hard to predict what you're going to lose. When we do something, we have to change society, and we lose parts of society that we had before. Sometimes the changes are good, sometimes they're bad, but before changing it we should think about what we're doing.

contingencies 14y ago
Well put, though personally I would have extracted a sliver of troublemaking glee changing 'leaded gasoline' out for 'the automobile culture' in general. What you are getting at is what the old-school Buddhists call sati or mindfulness: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index-subject.html#sati http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index-subject.html#sati I'm sure that it goes by many other names in other philosophies, though you would probably be hard-pushed to find one that analyzed its nature as early and to such an extent as the Buddhists did.
overgard 14y ago
So here's the thing: the idea that we should "think more" doesn't do much for me. You won't find many people that disagree with the idea that we should "think harder", because the opposite stance ("we should think less!") is absurd, but, just because something sounds reasonable doesn't mean it's useful. "Think more" sounds a lot like "raise awareness" to me, which might as well be rephrased as "feel good about ourselves for recognizing reality without actually having to do anything" The thing about society-changing events like this is that the result of "think more" generally ends up being "well, it's inevitable, but it's going to suck for a lot of people". Kudos for your awareness, but that extra "think about it" step doesn't do a lot, does it?
dimva 14y ago
Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick Germany. You can say technology has its drawbacks, but people overwhelmingly choose more technology and greater riches over any alternative. And more importantly, if you don't choose technology and someone else does, they can easily conquer you (militarily or economically) and destroy your livelihood.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick Germany I'd pick Uganda. And when a had a similar choice to make in real life, I picked the poorer country. Screw efficiency and screw societies where people live like robots and survive on weekend alcoholic binges, while f*ing poorer countries over to maintain their wealth and superiority (sometimes literally: from colonialism and interventions to Nazi Germany and the extermination of the "undesirables").

dmix 14y ago

I fail to see in this article where the author backs up this claim: > automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for humans to do that computers can't. It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers. At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them. Let's not try to solve problems we don't yet have. The claim of replacing physical labor is legitimate. But if you look at china or the US, the amount of kids getting educated in universities, whose parents worked as labours has exploded. The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them. Which is something universities have been failing to promote accurately compared to the demands of the market.

greenyoda 14y ago
"It will be a very long time until computer automation can replace knowledge workers." It will also be a very long time before computer automation replaces skilled trades. Imagine a robot that drives to your house and fixes a leaky pipe under your sink. Imagine a robot that can upgrade the electrical wiring in an old building. Imagine a robot that could do all the jobs that a landscaping crew does: mow a lawn, trim bushes, prune trees, plant flowers, etc. Imagine a robot that can come to your house and hook up your cable TV connection. Imagine a robot that could make even the simplest repair to your car, like replacing a fan belt. Imagine a robot that could style your hair the way you actually wanted it to look. I just don't see any of that happening in the near future.
- Cushman 14y ago
  You don't need to replace the plumber; if the sink can autonomously diagnose the leak, anyone can be a plumber. You don't need to replace the barber; if a machine can cut hair exactly the same way every time, one person can style a hundred thousand heads at once. Yeah, we aren't going to see a robot mailman walking around, but mainly because we won't use mail. Fundamental changes are coming.
  - greenyoda 14y ago

zeteo 14y ago

>There will still be a need for computer programmers, but a lot of programming can already be automated [...] We could [...] flat-out ban certain types of robots and automated software. I write software for a living and have no idea what this means. It's either horribly misinformed, or a call to ban compilers.

sologoub 14y ago
WARNING: Sarcasm is present in this statement :) It seems, according to this article anyways, that the answer to developer unemployment is to rid us of efficient IDEs, compliers and other non-sense, and and get back to good old Assembly!
- mjmahone17 14y ago
  Yes, actually: if we wanted to ensure developers stay employed, we should make writing code less efficient. Yes, you're being sarcastic, but that doesn't mean your point isn't spot on: this is in fact what unions have been doing all along, and states like New Jersey don't allow you to pump your own gas, specifically to create inefficiencies in the market that promote employment. If the option is between requiring people to work meaningless jobs, or paying everyone a living wage, which really makes more sense?
  - sologoub 14y ago
    Well... The very basis of my understanding of self causes me to say that there has to be a 3rd option... That said, a living wage would be less wasteful. As for unions, I believe this is pretty much what killed the Twinkie manufacturer - they were not able to even optimize routes.
  - qu4z-2 14y ago
    It does seem like unemployment is not a problem of too little work, but rather the uneven distribution of it.
- gaius 14y ago
  Eclipse has done more to create jobs than any other software, except maybe SAP.

sologoub 14y ago

It seems that similar concerns have been voiced with every advance in technology that replaced works with machines. The argument generally assumes that the amount of "work" needed will remain relatively the same. So, if society today requires 100 works to make one widget, and we can make the same widget with 1 worker and assorted machines, then 99 works will be left unemployed. In reality, what seems to happen is that because the products of that work become cheaper, society starts to consume a lot more. In the end, something like 80 works end up supervising the machines, while 9 works maintain them and the other work is designing the machines. I can't foresee what will happen if all basic service jobs are automated, but then again it will not happen overnight. The biggest question in my mind, is how well will the society repare the future generations with the skills they will need to remain relevant. Education is everything... and it will remain everything. (Not formal education mind you, but more so knowledge/training.)

rayiner 14y ago
The counterargument assumes that there aren't external limits on consumption.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  It also overlooks the generalization issue. Machines as a class have been becoming more and more general in their capabilities. Meaning that there are more and more things machines do better than humans. Humans can't keep racing ahead of that curve forever, at some point the machines catch up and can do anything humans can do. At that point, there is no next level for human work to move up the value chain. The value chain will be entirely subsumed by machines. That endpoint is some time off in the future, but that doesn't mean that the inflection point of the curve is. We might be a lot closer to the inflection point than we think. I don't think this is a bad thing, but it's something we're going to need to address as a society.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/ The fact that machines have been gaining a lot of capabilities doesn't mean they'll catch up to us, much less any time soon. While I hope for the "singularity" much more than I fear it, we might remain in an intermediate state for a long time.

mark_l_watson 14y ago

I mostly worry about this scenario of not enough work for everyone because too many people in my country (USA) will probably be unwilling to support a universal living wage. A social safety net improves the lives of everyone because of lower crime and a generally more civil society. The trick will be to provide life long educational and vocational resources. Hopefully almost everyone would want to produce extra value for society and improve their own material life style. There would still be room for very capable people to be "rich" and generally rewarded for skills and hard work. So, a pure meritocracy with rewards layered on top of a minimal universal ling wage sounds good to me.

kunai 14y ago
I don't know, it sounds too communistic-utopian. While communism is not a bad thing, and utopias are theoretically a great idea, humans thrive on opportunity and individualism. The world isn't a fair place by nature. Attempting to equalize everyone's talents and source of income, and not allowing them to be rewarded for whatever they pursue seems to cause less incentive for education. Give the average Joe two choices: He can sit at home, make a decent $70,000 every year while he can comfortably watch TV, golf, and do many things that require little mental facility. Give him another option, where he gets the same income, but he has to study, become skilled at a craft, progress intellectually, and be an accomplished man. ~90% of people would choose the former.
- scarecrowbob 14y ago
  If humans only need enough productive labor to engage 10% of the population, who cares if only the 10% (to use your number) that are engaged by "being productive" are productive?
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  That's likely true. But is it a bad thing? For most of my life I would have answered yes. For society in general, it would have been. But we're approaching a point that I'm not so sure anymore. Would society truly suffer if that's the way things work out in a few decades? It doesn't seem like it would have to.

thomaslangston 14y ago

While I'm sure the universal living wage will become reality in a few countries, I'd expect a shorter work week and more vacation time to be more politically solvent solutions to systemic unemployment in the US.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

I am basing my startup mostly on this discussion / meme - so I am happy to see it on HN. However the stage I think has been missed by the article (in the rush to say 2120!) is a transition away from commuting and into massive remote working, probably in the next ten years. The costs of commuting and office space is enormous compared to it's benefits for most jobs so we shall see a sea change in how jobs are measured and managed, leading to the path to remote working being freed up. Oddly in software continuous integration / delivery is that sea change. In marketing? It's AB testing. In everything else? We shall see.

ph0rque 14y ago
Can you direct us to your startup's website, or provide a brief description of it here?
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  Brief idea: Continuous Integration is a step function in how software teams can function. By enabling CI or CD one can remove the major impediment to remote working - managers cannot see what you have done in a day. If folks remote work in the software department, pretty soon others want to. The company needs to have the same confidence that people are working and things progressing daily. So let's say marketing moves to the technicalmarketing beloved of patio11 - you can have Market department run tests on it's changes, measure customer behaviour etc. And they don't need to do it in the office. Apply the same to every business process. Business people need to interact so we are not going to abandon cities - but the most valuable interactions are inter-company not intra-company. So from little acorns of CI we can see the world of the Race against the Machine coming to pass - White collar workers automated or their jobs changed out of recognition. So my startup, yeah that. I see my one person consultancy not as a lifestyle business but as a forever company - where I and I hope others will work, but more importantly experience many new modes of future work - and teach others and produce products that fill niches we ourselves need or are very well placed to understand. To be brutal, I want to turn a one person consultancy into a dispersed products company, solving the big work ideas of the next twenty years. First three are the CI consultancy, a data warehouse scm driver and videos of bug fixes. Please don't judge the book by the website - www.mikadosoftware.com. Ps - I think the auto farm is fantastic - keep it up I have never met any of my coworkers - they are in various parts of the States and I in Kent. The world has changed, it's just not evenly distributed - I want to be part of that change - the view is best right out on the edge. Big long dreams.

jwr 14y ago

For those interested in thinking about issues of a future society where most humans do not work, I'd highly recommend reading "Limes Inferior" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_inferior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_inferior), a thought-provoking book where many of these issues are raised. The idea of paying people a basic wage even if they do not perform any useful work is not a new one.

hosh 14y ago
It could go the other way: being able to live and be human without wages.
- jwr 14y ago
  That's basically what Zajdel describes in his dystopian vision: the basic "red" points that you get allow for a basic existence (e.g. food and shelter) without performing any work at all. So one might say it isn't really a wage.
  - hosh 14y ago
    Not what I mean at all. I mean, reduce the basic living cost. For example, a homestead that ran on its own power (solar, wind, etc.), can manufacture many basic needs products through microfabs, and grow enough food. Reducing costs doesn't do away with capital expenditure. But once acquired, the ongoing cost of living approaches zero. If you give everyone a universal income, you are still making people beholden to the grid of some sort. The red points are still a wage, because ultimately, you have to rely on someone outside your family group to redeem your needs. Reduce the cost and make that available en mass, and each household would be reasonably resource independent. Luxuries, of course, won't go away. Wants are endless.

desas 14y ago

Robert Heinleins For Us, The Living describes this kind of society. Everyone gets a "dividend" which is enough to live on and people do what would be a low wage/non-job such as being an artist for part time fun and high wages.

scotty79 14y ago

How much jobs we are loosing is not readily apparent. For example you should add almost all inmates and jailors and possibly half of the laweyrs and some of the goverment clerks (especialy the ones hired in branches created over last 20 years) to the unemployed to get the real numbers. Our societies have a lot of pathological mechanisms for coping with inflow of people of diverse levels of education that have nothing to do. I sincerely hope that people will be humane enough to create universal wage sooner than later.

JulianMorrison 14y ago

The answer is quite simply, we are going to have to STOP having an economy that contains employment or money, at all. As I've put it before, either we all retire, or we're all sacked. The economy, what little of it still requires humans, is going to have to run on vocations. And the part that does not, is going to have to run on allocation.

gaius 14y ago
You still need some sort of unit to track resource consumption, maybe that's the Joule instead of the Dollar, but as long as there needs to be decisions made of the form, which is better/should we do, X or Y, then you need a quantitative way to think about it. Von Mises called this "economic calculation".
- JulianMorrison 14y ago
  I'd consider the primary problems of early-Soviet style allocation economics to be (1) informational (2) computational. Money provides a quantitative (if not nice) solution to these because private economic decisions are intrinsically local, infinitely parallel and they self-aggregate. Happily, look what happened in the intervening decades: mass connectivity and big data, plus the normalization of data mining over petabytes of raw information. I think, in other words, that we have reached the point where we can batter down the economic calculation problem with brute force.
  - gaius 14y ago
    Even if you are correct, all that computation still needs to be done in some sort of unit. Money is good because it is abstracted from actual stuff. Joules are actually a bad unit, because how do you value an information product in terms of the energy of the computation it does? Hmm.
    - JulianMorrison 14y ago
      You use the natural units of the activity. Tonnes of ore or raw material. Hours of factory time. Joules of energy consumption. Production line machinery MTBF. So on and so forth. It's a lot of data, but nowadays we have tools to work with a lot of data.

cpursley 14y ago

97% percent of us used to be farmers. Did the machines and processes that replaced us render us irrelevant and without other pursuits? No, it unlocked massive amounts of intelectual capacity that led to unprecedented scientific and economic growth. I don't understand why people don't understand this basic economic principle. When you free up peoples time from monotonous tasks, we all benefit. These calls for a universal minimum wages are odd.

thenomad 14y ago

One interesting anecdata point on the "everyone would just sit around and watch TV" front - my girlfriend and I just went through all of our reasonably close friends, and could only think of one person who might, possibly, not start or continue doing something challenging and interesting, given a "living wage" situation - and to be fair, we don't know that person very well. The "everyone would just sit around" theory seems to be predicated on the belief that there are millions of people out there whom we don't personally know, but we somehow know well enough to believe they have no other interests that might blossom.

Tycho 14y ago

Can everyone be a knowledge worker?