5 ms·

Get Ready To Lose Your Job

62 points by ohadfrankfurt 14y ago

johngalt 14y ago
Get ready to have the same old arguments about Marxism. Only instead of 'means of production' it will be 'means of technology'. The article isn't looking for truth its looking to push an agenda about class with technology as a proxy. Technology invariably leads to an overall increase in jobs and wealth. The computer calculating amortization tables may put a banker out of work, but it also allows thousands of unskilled workers to perform a task that would require calculating one. A job they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- clarkmoody 14y ago
  Agree. The author seems to be blaming technology for the malaise in the economy. If so, we should have been hearing sob stories from the buggy whip makers' guild about how automobiles have destroyed its members' livelihood. As with most things, I blame overactive, overreaching government that is spending our economy into oblivion.
- darushimo 14y ago
  I'm not surprised that tech crunch would post a polemic article with an assumed left-leaning consequence. I'm not surprised a HNer with the user name John Galt (hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged) would call the article "agenda pushing." But I would be bummed if this above stayed the top comment, as it seems to be agenda pushing in its own right. Maybe these sorts of articles bring out the worst of HN.
  - EvilTerran 14y ago
    I do find it kinda amusing that someone taking the name of a Rand hero would cry "oh noes teh Marxism!" in response to an article with "If left-versus-right is the only lens through which you can view the world, then you really need to start thinking outside the box in which you have jailed yourself" in its closing paragraph.
  - johngalt 14y ago
    Ouch, the worst of HN? HN should pay attention to the narrative given to the tech community. Specially when it is routinely co-opted by people seeking to make some kind of point about economic inequality or gender. I identified this article as something seeking to make a political point rather than looking for any semblance of analysis. Perhaps I should pick a new username to avoid it undercutting my comments. It's obviously enough by itself to be polarizing. I'm not here to prothelytize.
- gee_totes 14y ago
  What does 'means of technology' mean? edit: Full disclosure, I'm totally trolling because I think the parent's definition of 'means of technology' will fall into the definition of means of production.
- cgag 14y ago
  That invariable seems absurd to me. It seems much more inevitable to me that we eventually will be able to eliminate the majority of jobs. Is that not the goal? A transitory period where unemployment slowly increases is going to happen and needs to be addressed.
  - molsongolden 14y ago
    I hope we can take advantage of this and make unemployment a measure of efficiency rather than a doomsday indicator.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Desires are numberless. People will always have wants. Other people will always find a way to satisfy those wants. When I have been consulting, I've ended up taking stretches of time off to recover from brutal projects. It seems great initially, but I get restless. Eventually I miss doing useful things. You'll see that writ large in the lives of the rich. Like Bill Gates, a lot of them go from doing paid work to doing charity work. Warren Buffett said, "I want to give my kids enough so that they could feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing." I think that's because he recognizes that having nothing to do is bad for the soul.
  - johngalt 14y ago
    The jobs being done today perhaps. In practice you see that as automation increases, it just makes the surface area of the market larger. It's hard to see this going forward, but easy to see if you play technology in reverse. Lets play it in reverse and create jobs by eliminating technology. Lets make vaccuum cleaners illegal. Now more people will be needed to clean carpets in all the office buildings etc... What effects would this have? 1. All the people manufacturing vaccum cleaners would be out of work (minus a small number of jobs) 2. Tons of low skilled labor would now be employed as carpet cleaners (plus a large number of jobs temporarily) So we declare victory right? Wooo More jobs! Except for... 3. People and business who can't afford to employ large numbers of carpet cleaners just rip out the carpets. Over time it becomes the norm just to not have carpets. Only the wealthy have carpets as a status symbol. (minus carpet installers jobs, and carpet cleaning jobs over the long term) So at the end of this experiment we end up roughly a wash in total job numbers, and we have to walk on cold floors. It's similar to the parable of the broken window.
- marknutter 14y ago
  The problem is that no matter how good people have it, they will always see people who have it a little better and cry foul. There are some people who will never be happy until everyone has been cut down or raised up to the same size.
  - RestlessMind 14y ago
    Thats actually a very important observation about human nature. Bottom quintile population in OECD countries, when observed in context of rest of the contemporary society, appears to be "deprived". But when same set of people are observed in the context of entire societies a few hundred years back (pre-industrial revolution?), they seem to be living a very decent life.
acabal 14y ago
I was having a discussion about this topic with an economist friend of mine. His theory was that if one took automization to its complete and logical conclusion, the only people left employed would be "soft" creators like artists and clergy, plus creators of hand-made goods which in that world would fetch an enormous premium. We'd also see a boom for experience-seekers, like tourism and sports. Ultimately I think we're inexorably heading towards that kind of reality. The question is how long will it take, and will it be a peaceful conversion or a violent one. Personally I think innate human greed, pettiness, jealousy, and tribalism is going to make that shift unpleasant for the generation stuck with it. I hope I'm proved wrong.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  But surely if handmade goods fetched a premium then the now unemployed masses would use their time learning how to make and making the desirable handmade things thus driving the price down?
- woodchuck64 14y ago
  Automation/technology seems to drive down prices. My parent's generation had to work an average of 4 hours a day to afford the day's food while my generation averages less than 2 hours. Thus, we can expect the price of necessities to continue to drop until work's primary purpose is to make money to afford luxury items. So that seems less like a violent conversion.
  - s_baby 14y ago
    The problem is buying power isn't increasing across all domains of needs. Even though a 3rd world individual can now afford a smart phone and nice clothes my healthcare costs are only going up. Who cares if you can buy "luxury" items for pennies if these formerly middle class people can't secure something as fundamental as their health?
    - woodchuck64 14y ago
      Healthcare is definitely something technology and automation can address. We should expect that healthcare in coming decades will be much cheaper and more effective than that today.
jere 14y ago
>Not everyone can become a computer programmer, genetic counselor, or startup CEO; a whole lot of Mead’s “ordinary people” will be stripped of their jobs and left behind in debt, poverty, and despair. So basically if you're reading HN, the title probably doesn't apply to you.
- eCa 14y ago
  > So basically if you're reading HN, the title probably doesn't apply to you. Maybe not directly, but a large chunk of todays employees suddenly doing unnecessary work will cause troubles for all.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  You aren't totally safe as a programmer either. As software improves, each piece of software can take care of a wider number of people's needs. For example in ~2001 setting up an ecommerce website probably involved hiring a web developer, setting up an email system for business probably meant hiring an IT consultant. Now shopify and google apps etc greatly reduce these sorts of needs. You also have ever expanding and improving open source solutions devouring categories of software.
api 14y ago
A big, unmentioned one: virtually all middlemen who do not add significant value are obsolete. This includes salesmen, sales representatives, dealers, warehousers (replaced by on-demand everything), many types of brokers, etc. This is a huge chunk of the economy. In the old industrial economy there were layers and layers of bureaucracy and markups between the producer and the customer. Now there will be at most one. The customer and the producer will deal directly. Everyone else is cut out. That one layer -- an Amazon type thing -- will be heavily monopolized by a few big players (Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc.) and will be very low margin / high-volume.
- cglace 14y ago
  How are salesman obsolete? Will a person that wants to pay 50k-500k a year for software+services really not want to talk to someone?
  - epoxy 14y ago
    They'll talk to lots of people. It just won't be a salesman. Its more-likely to be existing or previous customers.
    - cookiecaper 14y ago
      It depends on your meaning by "salesmen", but in many cases in the modern enterprise ("account executives"), they're basically glorified customer support positions that get paid for retaining the customer and the ability to upsell. Same thing you get when you call the support line, except an account executive has a handful of customers to whom he is dedicated. If you're talking about sales that functions primarily as new customer intake and has no long-lasting relationship with the clients, like door-to-door sales, I can see a better argument for that going obsolete.
  - brownbat 14y ago
    Yeah, the most mainstream predictions I've seen show sales adding around two million jobs over the next decade. People forget that a lot of services are easily adaptable to new conditions. It sucked if all you knew how to do was to manufacture the perfect buggy whip. If you know how to sell something, it doesn't matter if it's cars or cattle or houses or industrial robots. Yeah, you have to learn about your product, but the basic skill set is quickly transferable.
ErikAugust 14y ago
Been meaning to start reading Race Against The Machine: http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005... As a guy who studied Economics in college and now programs, it's something I think a lot about.
graeme 14y ago
I'm committing the sin of commenting on the headline, not the article (I did read the article) Too few people in steady jobs follow this advice. They live at or above their means, and aren't prepared for even 1-3 months of unemployment. Many opportunities require things to get a bit worse before they get a lot better. Keeping a buffer gives you the freedom to take those opportunities. If you've got a job in tech, you probably have the luxury of earning more than you need. So if you aren't doing it, an excellent policy is to scale back expenses until you have at least 2-6 month's wages in short term savings. Having a side project that gives some recurring revenue isn't a bad idea either.
- marknutter 14y ago
  But that's what unemployment benefits are for! Let someone else save my money for me ;)
jrogers65 14y ago
I've always seen this as a social problem - why, when we automate things, does the demand that people have jobs persist? Surely if there's less work to do then everyone should be working less, not finding new things to do. There's an implicit assumption in our society that everyone must work, even when there is nothing to be done. Productivity is put on a pedestal when it is just a means to an end - undesirable means, at that. I strongly believe that putting people out of work and allowing them to continue living comfortably will bring hidden benefits. There will be more time to think, reconcile and determine the best path to take as opposed to mindlessly doing as much as possible just to earn enough for bread and shelter. Bertrand Russell wrote a good essay on this - In Praise Of Idleness: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html As a software developer, someone who will stay employed in the coming years, I'm willing to give up some of my salary so that the newly unemployed can continue to survive and do what they want with their free time. They pay people in our profession more than enough to live well. Unfortunately, I haven't found a decent mechanism to make such a contribution, aside from helping family and friends. There really ought to be one - a voluntary communism, so to say.
- BSousa 14y ago
  The main problem is then you have people that work and envy the ones that don't. Let's be honest, wouldn't you prefer for someone to just pay you and you could do whatever you wanted? Go skiing, hiking, learn Ember or Haskell? Bu in this scenario, you are working on another CRUD application that will make a few more data entry people redundant which will go skiing, hiking, learn the guitar, and you will be stuck at the office in Java land cursing Hibernate (or whatever framework you hate). We as people are quite jealous of each other, promoting a society where this would happen as standard either grind it to a halt (those that can work would refuse).
  - ErikAugust 14y ago
    The disparity between what is paid out for "guaranteed income" (welfare) and what one would get for having any paid position should rise. Also, if everyone under a certain earnings gets $30000 a year - having a part-time job or a job making $30000 more - makes perfect sense. They are making more than those who don't work and their employers can use them and pay them accordingly. The real problem right now is that it's a half way system... Minimum wage positions can be a worse deal than going on disability or accepting a generous state's full benefits. On the other side, employers are supposed to provide a form of welfare to part of their workforce.
knowtheory 14y ago
This guy sounds like a sociopath, and his characterization that massive unemployment is ultimately "a good thing" is mystifying. Even in a hypothetical post-scarcity world, there are things to do, and objectives to pursue. The question is just whether your survival and well-being are dependent on your pursuits. Transitioning the world to a place where one's job is not a major part of one's identity would be a massive, and probably misguided effort. Also, it's also pretty clear that this guy doesn't understand the graph he has posted here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/26/america-has-hit-peak-jobs/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/26/america-has-hit-peak-jobs/ That's a static snapshot. It's not like there is a fixed group that is always in the top 2%. In fact, one would hope in a meritocracy, there is a healthy flow in and out of the 2% that keeps people striving and attempting new things. A world where there's a permanent fixed elite is a world of stagnation.
- eric_bullington 14y ago
  If you're referring the the US (that's the subject of the article in question), then recent studies suggest that there may not be a health flow in and out of the 2% [0, 1]. In fact, there seems to be significantly less social mobility in the US then in other developed countries, such as those in Europe. 0. http://ftp.iza.org/dp1938.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp1938.pdf 1. http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-328061 http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-...
  - bearmf 14y ago
    If you look at the data in article [0] carefully, it becomes clear that the problem in US is not movement in/out of the highest quintile, but movement in/out of the lowest quintile. Middle quintiles to highest quintile and vice versa mobility in US looks similar to other countries. Btw, they do not have much data for US or UK, only around 2000 parent-offspring pairs. And the conclusion that UK is on the same mobility level as Nordic countries is highly doubtful. UK mobility level is usually considered to be about the same as US mobility level.
brownbat 14y ago
Here's a more banal prediction: construction will add about two million new jobs between now and 2020, health services will add five million, other services about 13 million, mining another 25,000. There will be declines in manufacturing and agriculture, but only in the tens of thousands, because honestly, we've already gutted those industries. (Meanwhile, there will be proportionate gains in those industries in other cheap labor countries, indicating this isn't a tech thing.) If anything, post some magic moment where general purpose robotification (google "PR2") is super cheap, manufacturing will flood to... dunno... whatever country is best at keeping the lights on. Maybe Japan? (Excluding weather events, they have about 1/1000th of the grid disturbances we have in the US, it's freakish - but then maybe it's unfair to exclude weather). Basically, trends will continue exactly as they have, and as exactly as almost every trade theorist predicted at the outset of globalization. We're getting out of manufacturing. We're doubling down on services. It has very little to do with technology. PS: If you have a high school diploma or less, you are fucked. Your best move was to start advocating for trade assistance or aggressively progressive taxation ten years ago.
ryguytilidie 14y ago
Haven't people basically been saying this since computers were invented? Hey lets try it again, probably right the 300th time!
- marknutter 14y ago
  Do you think, maybe, the transition will take some time to happen?
dclowd9901 14y ago
Like the author, I too am concerned people aren't taking this seriously. Not to say that anything can be done about it, but just to face it (as you would your own mortality): If you aren't developing software, your job will likely become obsolete someday. And, indeed, if you are developing software, and not keeping up with advances, yours will too. This is not fiction, this is truth and it's inevitable. I'm curious how society will adapt to the fact that the finite resources of the world will actually start to constrain them. Almost certainly birth rates will decline. Households will probably return to a single income earner (who is now making what both earners used to make combined). The world will be different, but people keep trying to hold onto this notion of 6% unemployment like it's sacred. It's a relic of days where we needed the human brain and body because it worked faster than a computer and robot. Such is no longer the case. That is the paradigm shift, and that's why things will be different.
- gph 14y ago
  >If you aren't developing software, your job will likely become obsolete someday. And, indeed, if you are developing software, and not keeping up with advances, yours will too. Even if you do keep up with advances, I don't doubt at some point Programming compliers/interpreters will evolve to a point where a five-year old can describe something to them in plain English and they will create/program it. That might be the furthest into the future, but programmers will eventually obsolete themselves if they do their jobs right.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    Programmers will be among the last to reach obsolescence, because once programmers are obsolete the rest will happen very, very quickly.
  - no_more_death 14y ago
    I find that really doubtful. I used to believe it, but it seems like you still need operators to run things. Programming tools may become much more powerful, but when it goes wrong, you will need an incredibly intelligent person to sort out what just happened. A five-year-old won't be of much help then. I doubt that we can make computer which simply never go wrong. For example, if a 5yo requests a PB&J sandwich, a powerful machine might accidentally inject something undesirable. How would he know? Or if a kid requests the computer to invent a new skateboard, what if there's some flaw in the material that he can't see that suddenly pops up when he least expects it? A clever machine is only a tool to help with original design -- it really needs an even more clever human being to operate it.
makmanalp 14y ago
The point about the cars reminds me of Rush - Red Barchetta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/108819/ http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/108819/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta About a person who finds an old red sportscar in his Uncle's countryside house, after the passage of a "motor law".
robotjosh 14y ago
Get ready to lose your job- unless you have the skills to automate peoples' jobs.
wpietri 14y ago
Techcrunch plus a trolling title means I'm not reading it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seven thousand times and maybe I'll start to learn a lesson.
onemorepassword 14y ago
This may sound very Euro-chauvinist, but I wonder if politically and culturally Europe isn't much better equipped to deal with this. After all, social security solutions like a base income for everyone, employed or not, are things that can (and have been) seriously considered in most European countries. I'm not saying that guarantees anything, but it seems to me that the social and political culture of the US prevents it from even considering alternatives until it is very, very late.
Qantourisc 14y ago
It's rather "simple" after you get over the social issues. Socialism/Communism: in this case there is a LOT of mone.. eu resources to give away ! Or work very little :) The biggest problem are going to be the 1% who will be screaming ... and reaping the benefits before revolution? <cruel mode>Then again we would only need to kill 1% of the population.</cruel>
tgrass 14y ago
Two points. 1. GDP growth is a historical anomaly. Many post industrial peoples base today'financing decisions on tomorrow's expected income gains. In a world of low to no growth, you must save early and significantly for retirement, and retirement will still require working. 2. Technological advances will shift the jobs to those that can add value. That is precisely marketing and sales.
no_more_death 14y ago
Two possibilities: continuation of existing trends, leading to a hyper focus on education, or a sudden reversal, where we live in a post-technological world. Some are speculating about needing to work less or not at all. I would argue that we WILL work less, only because we will have to spend more time in education. It seems like however much society & science advances, we still need people to sort things out and run the whole huge machine of society. For example, machines can't parse Mochizuki's conjectured proof of the ABC conjecture. That requires clever humans to wade through hundreds of pages of analysis, carefully inspecting for holes. It takes more clever humans to program clever machines. The little work that we do becomes incredibly powerful, but most of our time is spent learning. We will learn as teams instead of as individuals, where each person takes a tiny wedge of the pie and learns to master it and learns to master the tools necessary to deal with the wedge. This already happens with scientific papers. New scientific papers are published by teams of old people, but almost never by young people. This pattern is going to spread from the hard sciences into every line of work, until everything operates like science. Construction, engineering, marketing design -- everything will be huge dollops of education to a small speck of actual application, but that speck will be incredibly powerful. Now, if we eventually unlock a new frontier, like exploring other planets or underwater / underground cities, then we'll probably have a place for people who simply thirst for adventure. (So far information technology has been basically a place for adventure-seekers -- an immature discipline where you can get by without following the dictates of some elite, because even the elites do not fully understand this discipline yet.) The conditions those societies will experience will be extremely new and different, and may require new tools and new ways of making things happen. But for the most part, I see the (comfortable) person of the future on the one hand being a great generalist, able to switch directions when a position becomes unnecessary, and on the other hand a great specialist, learning everything there is to know about less and less, and that's what he actually lives off of. What if there's a reversal? The whole thing may come crashing down, and we might have to start over. We would live in a bizarre world where life is about recycling all the astonishing things synthesized in a previous culture, instead of being about making new things at a blistering pace. We make more and more things that are better and better, and we're just throwing away astonishing amounts of stuff. Rummaging through garbage cans and land fills might be the work of the future, if the higher class (1%) were to collapse permanently. If there's no one to spearhead the increasingly difficult march to technology, it may become cheaper to reuse previous things instead of inventing new ones.
Aron 14y ago
CurtWelch's comments in that article are fantastic.
malandrew 14y ago
TBH, I really hope we stop calling the current era the information age and instead start calling it the automation age. It's more accurate. Information is now no longer being used by humans but by computers. In many cases now, we simply generate too much informations for humans to comprehend, parse or analyze without computers doing more and more of the heavy lifting. The information is instead being parsed, analyzed and comprehended by computers who then act upon the understanding that has been programmed into them.

62 points by ohadfrankfurt 14y ago

Get ready to have the same old arguments about Marxism. Only instead of 'means of production' it will be 'means of technology'. The article isn't looking for truth its looking to push an agenda about class with technology as a proxy. Technology invariably leads to an overall increase in jobs and wealth. The computer calculating amortization tables may put a banker out of work, but it also allows thousands of unskilled workers to perform a task that would require calculating one. A job they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
clarkmoody 14y ago
Agree. The author seems to be blaming technology for the malaise in the economy. If so, we should have been hearing sob stories from the buggy whip makers' guild about how automobiles have destroyed its members' livelihood. As with most things, I blame overactive, overreaching government that is spending our economy into oblivion.
darushimo 14y ago
I'm not surprised that tech crunch would post a polemic article with an assumed left-leaning consequence. I'm not surprised a HNer with the user name John Galt (hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged) would call the article "agenda pushing." But I would be bummed if this above stayed the top comment, as it seems to be agenda pushing in its own right. Maybe these sorts of articles bring out the worst of HN.
- EvilTerran 14y ago
  I do find it kinda amusing that someone taking the name of a Rand hero would cry "oh noes teh Marxism!" in response to an article with "If left-versus-right is the only lens through which you can view the world, then you really need to start thinking outside the box in which you have jailed yourself" in its closing paragraph.
- johngalt 14y ago
  Ouch, the worst of HN? HN should pay attention to the narrative given to the tech community. Specially when it is routinely co-opted by people seeking to make some kind of point about economic inequality or gender. I identified this article as something seeking to make a political point rather than looking for any semblance of analysis. Perhaps I should pick a new username to avoid it undercutting my comments. It's obviously enough by itself to be polarizing. I'm not here to prothelytize.
gee_totes 14y ago
What does 'means of technology' mean? edit: Full disclosure, I'm totally trolling because I think the parent's definition of 'means of technology' will fall into the definition of means of production.
cgag 14y ago
That invariable seems absurd to me. It seems much more inevitable to me that we eventually will be able to eliminate the majority of jobs. Is that not the goal? A transitory period where unemployment slowly increases is going to happen and needs to be addressed.
- molsongolden 14y ago
  I hope we can take advantage of this and make unemployment a measure of efficiency rather than a doomsday indicator.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Desires are numberless. People will always have wants. Other people will always find a way to satisfy those wants. When I have been consulting, I've ended up taking stretches of time off to recover from brutal projects. It seems great initially, but I get restless. Eventually I miss doing useful things. You'll see that writ large in the lives of the rich. Like Bill Gates, a lot of them go from doing paid work to doing charity work. Warren Buffett said, "I want to give my kids enough so that they could feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing." I think that's because he recognizes that having nothing to do is bad for the soul.
- johngalt 14y ago
  The jobs being done today perhaps. In practice you see that as automation increases, it just makes the surface area of the market larger. It's hard to see this going forward, but easy to see if you play technology in reverse. Lets play it in reverse and create jobs by eliminating technology. Lets make vaccuum cleaners illegal. Now more people will be needed to clean carpets in all the office buildings etc... What effects would this have? 1. All the people manufacturing vaccum cleaners would be out of work (minus a small number of jobs) 2. Tons of low skilled labor would now be employed as carpet cleaners (plus a large number of jobs temporarily) So we declare victory right? Wooo More jobs! Except for... 3. People and business who can't afford to employ large numbers of carpet cleaners just rip out the carpets. Over time it becomes the norm just to not have carpets. Only the wealthy have carpets as a status symbol. (minus carpet installers jobs, and carpet cleaning jobs over the long term) So at the end of this experiment we end up roughly a wash in total job numbers, and we have to walk on cold floors. It's similar to the parable of the broken window.
marknutter 14y ago
The problem is that no matter how good people have it, they will always see people who have it a little better and cry foul. There are some people who will never be happy until everyone has been cut down or raised up to the same size.
- RestlessMind 14y ago
  Thats actually a very important observation about human nature. Bottom quintile population in OECD countries, when observed in context of rest of the contemporary society, appears to be "deprived". But when same set of people are observed in the context of entire societies a few hundred years back (pre-industrial revolution?), they seem to be living a very decent life.

acabal 14y ago

I was having a discussion about this topic with an economist friend of mine. His theory was that if one took automization to its complete and logical conclusion, the only people left employed would be "soft" creators like artists and clergy, plus creators of hand-made goods which in that world would fetch an enormous premium. We'd also see a boom for experience-seekers, like tourism and sports. Ultimately I think we're inexorably heading towards that kind of reality. The question is how long will it take, and will it be a peaceful conversion or a violent one. Personally I think innate human greed, pettiness, jealousy, and tribalism is going to make that shift unpleasant for the generation stuck with it. I hope I'm proved wrong.

jiggy2011 14y ago
But surely if handmade goods fetched a premium then the now unemployed masses would use their time learning how to make and making the desirable handmade things thus driving the price down?
woodchuck64 14y ago
Automation/technology seems to drive down prices. My parent's generation had to work an average of 4 hours a day to afford the day's food while my generation averages less than 2 hours. Thus, we can expect the price of necessities to continue to drop until work's primary purpose is to make money to afford luxury items. So that seems less like a violent conversion.
- s_baby 14y ago
  The problem is buying power isn't increasing across all domains of needs. Even though a 3rd world individual can now afford a smart phone and nice clothes my healthcare costs are only going up. Who cares if you can buy "luxury" items for pennies if these formerly middle class people can't secure something as fundamental as their health?
  - woodchuck64 14y ago
    Healthcare is definitely something technology and automation can address. We should expect that healthcare in coming decades will be much cheaper and more effective than that today.

jere 14y ago

>Not everyone can become a computer programmer, genetic counselor, or startup CEO; a whole lot of Mead’s “ordinary people” will be stripped of their jobs and left behind in debt, poverty, and despair. So basically if you're reading HN, the title probably doesn't apply to you.

eCa 14y ago
> So basically if you're reading HN, the title probably doesn't apply to you. Maybe not directly, but a large chunk of todays employees suddenly doing unnecessary work will cause troubles for all.
jiggy2011 14y ago
You aren't totally safe as a programmer either. As software improves, each piece of software can take care of a wider number of people's needs. For example in ~2001 setting up an ecommerce website probably involved hiring a web developer, setting up an email system for business probably meant hiring an IT consultant. Now shopify and google apps etc greatly reduce these sorts of needs. You also have ever expanding and improving open source solutions devouring categories of software.

api 14y ago

A big, unmentioned one: virtually all middlemen who do not add significant value are obsolete. This includes salesmen, sales representatives, dealers, warehousers (replaced by on-demand everything), many types of brokers, etc. This is a huge chunk of the economy. In the old industrial economy there were layers and layers of bureaucracy and markups between the producer and the customer. Now there will be at most one. The customer and the producer will deal directly. Everyone else is cut out. That one layer -- an Amazon type thing -- will be heavily monopolized by a few big players (Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc.) and will be very low margin / high-volume.

cglace 14y ago
How are salesman obsolete? Will a person that wants to pay 50k-500k a year for software+services really not want to talk to someone?
- epoxy 14y ago
  They'll talk to lots of people. It just won't be a salesman. Its more-likely to be existing or previous customers.
  - cookiecaper 14y ago
    It depends on your meaning by "salesmen", but in many cases in the modern enterprise ("account executives"), they're basically glorified customer support positions that get paid for retaining the customer and the ability to upsell. Same thing you get when you call the support line, except an account executive has a handful of customers to whom he is dedicated. If you're talking about sales that functions primarily as new customer intake and has no long-lasting relationship with the clients, like door-to-door sales, I can see a better argument for that going obsolete.
- brownbat 14y ago
  Yeah, the most mainstream predictions I've seen show sales adding around two million jobs over the next decade. People forget that a lot of services are easily adaptable to new conditions. It sucked if all you knew how to do was to manufacture the perfect buggy whip. If you know how to sell something, it doesn't matter if it's cars or cattle or houses or industrial robots. Yeah, you have to learn about your product, but the basic skill set is quickly transferable.

ErikAugust 14y ago

Been meaning to start reading Race Against The Machine: http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005... As a guy who studied Economics in college and now programs, it's something I think a lot about.

graeme 14y ago

I'm committing the sin of commenting on the headline, not the article (I did read the article) Too few people in steady jobs follow this advice. They live at or above their means, and aren't prepared for even 1-3 months of unemployment. Many opportunities require things to get a bit worse before they get a lot better. Keeping a buffer gives you the freedom to take those opportunities. If you've got a job in tech, you probably have the luxury of earning more than you need. So if you aren't doing it, an excellent policy is to scale back expenses until you have at least 2-6 month's wages in short term savings. Having a side project that gives some recurring revenue isn't a bad idea either.

marknutter 14y ago
But that's what unemployment benefits are for! Let someone else save my money for me ;)

jrogers65 14y ago

I've always seen this as a social problem - why, when we automate things, does the demand that people have jobs persist? Surely if there's less work to do then everyone should be working less, not finding new things to do. There's an implicit assumption in our society that everyone must work, even when there is nothing to be done. Productivity is put on a pedestal when it is just a means to an end - undesirable means, at that. I strongly believe that putting people out of work and allowing them to continue living comfortably will bring hidden benefits. There will be more time to think, reconcile and determine the best path to take as opposed to mindlessly doing as much as possible just to earn enough for bread and shelter. Bertrand Russell wrote a good essay on this - In Praise Of Idleness: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html As a software developer, someone who will stay employed in the coming years, I'm willing to give up some of my salary so that the newly unemployed can continue to survive and do what they want with their free time. They pay people in our profession more than enough to live well. Unfortunately, I haven't found a decent mechanism to make such a contribution, aside from helping family and friends. There really ought to be one - a voluntary communism, so to say.

BSousa 14y ago
The main problem is then you have people that work and envy the ones that don't. Let's be honest, wouldn't you prefer for someone to just pay you and you could do whatever you wanted? Go skiing, hiking, learn Ember or Haskell? Bu in this scenario, you are working on another CRUD application that will make a few more data entry people redundant which will go skiing, hiking, learn the guitar, and you will be stuck at the office in Java land cursing Hibernate (or whatever framework you hate). We as people are quite jealous of each other, promoting a society where this would happen as standard either grind it to a halt (those that can work would refuse).
- ErikAugust 14y ago
  The disparity between what is paid out for "guaranteed income" (welfare) and what one would get for having any paid position should rise. Also, if everyone under a certain earnings gets $30000 a year - having a part-time job or a job making $30000 more - makes perfect sense. They are making more than those who don't work and their employers can use them and pay them accordingly. The real problem right now is that it's a half way system... Minimum wage positions can be a worse deal than going on disability or accepting a generous state's full benefits. On the other side, employers are supposed to provide a form of welfare to part of their workforce.

knowtheory 14y ago

This guy sounds like a sociopath, and his characterization that massive unemployment is ultimately "a good thing" is mystifying. Even in a hypothetical post-scarcity world, there are things to do, and objectives to pursue. The question is just whether your survival and well-being are dependent on your pursuits. Transitioning the world to a place where one's job is not a major part of one's identity would be a massive, and probably misguided effort. Also, it's also pretty clear that this guy doesn't understand the graph he has posted here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/26/america-has-hit-peak-jobs/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/26/america-has-hit-peak-jobs/ That's a static snapshot. It's not like there is a fixed group that is always in the top 2%. In fact, one would hope in a meritocracy, there is a healthy flow in and out of the 2% that keeps people striving and attempting new things. A world where there's a permanent fixed elite is a world of stagnation.

eric_bullington 14y ago
If you're referring the the US (that's the subject of the article in question), then recent studies suggest that there may not be a health flow in and out of the 2% [0, 1]. In fact, there seems to be significantly less social mobility in the US then in other developed countries, such as those in Europe. 0. http://ftp.iza.org/dp1938.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp1938.pdf 1. http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-328061 http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-...
- bearmf 14y ago
  If you look at the data in article [0] carefully, it becomes clear that the problem in US is not movement in/out of the highest quintile, but movement in/out of the lowest quintile. Middle quintiles to highest quintile and vice versa mobility in US looks similar to other countries. Btw, they do not have much data for US or UK, only around 2000 parent-offspring pairs. And the conclusion that UK is on the same mobility level as Nordic countries is highly doubtful. UK mobility level is usually considered to be about the same as US mobility level.

brownbat 14y ago

Here's a more banal prediction: construction will add about two million new jobs between now and 2020, health services will add five million, other services about 13 million, mining another 25,000. There will be declines in manufacturing and agriculture, but only in the tens of thousands, because honestly, we've already gutted those industries. (Meanwhile, there will be proportionate gains in those industries in other cheap labor countries, indicating this isn't a tech thing.) If anything, post some magic moment where general purpose robotification (google "PR2") is super cheap, manufacturing will flood to... dunno... whatever country is best at keeping the lights on. Maybe Japan? (Excluding weather events, they have about 1/1000th of the grid disturbances we have in the US, it's freakish - but then maybe it's unfair to exclude weather). Basically, trends will continue exactly as they have, and as exactly as almost every trade theorist predicted at the outset of globalization. We're getting out of manufacturing. We're doubling down on services. It has very little to do with technology. PS: If you have a high school diploma or less, you are fucked. Your best move was to start advocating for trade assistance or aggressively progressive taxation ten years ago.

ryguytilidie 14y ago

Haven't people basically been saying this since computers were invented? Hey lets try it again, probably right the 300th time!

marknutter 14y ago
Do you think, maybe, the transition will take some time to happen?

dclowd9901 14y ago

Like the author, I too am concerned people aren't taking this seriously. Not to say that anything can be done about it, but just to face it (as you would your own mortality): If you aren't developing software, your job will likely become obsolete someday. And, indeed, if you are developing software, and not keeping up with advances, yours will too. This is not fiction, this is truth and it's inevitable. I'm curious how society will adapt to the fact that the finite resources of the world will actually start to constrain them. Almost certainly birth rates will decline. Households will probably return to a single income earner (who is now making what both earners used to make combined). The world will be different, but people keep trying to hold onto this notion of 6% unemployment like it's sacred. It's a relic of days where we needed the human brain and body because it worked faster than a computer and robot. Such is no longer the case. That is the paradigm shift, and that's why things will be different.

gph 14y ago
>If you aren't developing software, your job will likely become obsolete someday. And, indeed, if you are developing software, and not keeping up with advances, yours will too. Even if you do keep up with advances, I don't doubt at some point Programming compliers/interpreters will evolve to a point where a five-year old can describe something to them in plain English and they will create/program it. That might be the furthest into the future, but programmers will eventually obsolete themselves if they do their jobs right.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Programmers will be among the last to reach obsolescence, because once programmers are obsolete the rest will happen very, very quickly.
- no_more_death 14y ago
  I find that really doubtful. I used to believe it, but it seems like you still need operators to run things. Programming tools may become much more powerful, but when it goes wrong, you will need an incredibly intelligent person to sort out what just happened. A five-year-old won't be of much help then. I doubt that we can make computer which simply never go wrong. For example, if a 5yo requests a PB&J sandwich, a powerful machine might accidentally inject something undesirable. How would he know? Or if a kid requests the computer to invent a new skateboard, what if there's some flaw in the material that he can't see that suddenly pops up when he least expects it? A clever machine is only a tool to help with original design -- it really needs an even more clever human being to operate it.

makmanalp 14y ago

The point about the cars reminds me of Rush - Red Barchetta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/108819/ http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/108819/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta About a person who finds an old red sportscar in his Uncle's countryside house, after the passage of a "motor law".

robotjosh 14y ago

Get ready to lose your job- unless you have the skills to automate peoples' jobs.

wpietri 14y ago

Techcrunch plus a trolling title means I'm not reading it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seven thousand times and maybe I'll start to learn a lesson.

onemorepassword 14y ago

This may sound very Euro-chauvinist, but I wonder if politically and culturally Europe isn't much better equipped to deal with this. After all, social security solutions like a base income for everyone, employed or not, are things that can (and have been) seriously considered in most European countries. I'm not saying that guarantees anything, but it seems to me that the social and political culture of the US prevents it from even considering alternatives until it is very, very late.

Qantourisc 14y ago

It's rather "simple" after you get over the social issues. Socialism/Communism: in this case there is a LOT of mone.. eu resources to give away ! Or work very little :) The biggest problem are going to be the 1% who will be screaming ... and reaping the benefits before revolution? <cruel mode>Then again we would only need to kill 1% of the population.</cruel>

tgrass 14y ago

Two points. 1. GDP growth is a historical anomaly. Many post industrial peoples base today'financing decisions on tomorrow's expected income gains. In a world of low to no growth, you must save early and significantly for retirement, and retirement will still require working. 2. Technological advances will shift the jobs to those that can add value. That is precisely marketing and sales.

no_more_death 14y ago

Two possibilities: continuation of existing trends, leading to a hyper focus on education, or a sudden reversal, where we live in a post-technological world. Some are speculating about needing to work less or not at all. I would argue that we WILL work less, only because we will have to spend more time in education. It seems like however much society & science advances, we still need people to sort things out and run the whole huge machine of society. For example, machines can't parse Mochizuki's conjectured proof of the ABC conjecture. That requires clever humans to wade through hundreds of pages of analysis, carefully inspecting for holes. It takes more clever humans to program clever machines. The little work that we do becomes incredibly powerful, but most of our time is spent learning. We will learn as teams instead of as individuals, where each person takes a tiny wedge of the pie and learns to master it and learns to master the tools necessary to deal with the wedge. This already happens with scientific papers. New scientific papers are published by teams of old people, but almost never by young people. This pattern is going to spread from the hard sciences into every line of work, until everything operates like science. Construction, engineering, marketing design -- everything will be huge dollops of education to a small speck of actual application, but that speck will be incredibly powerful. Now, if we eventually unlock a new frontier, like exploring other planets or underwater / underground cities, then we'll probably have a place for people who simply thirst for adventure. (So far information technology has been basically a place for adventure-seekers -- an immature discipline where you can get by without following the dictates of some elite, because even the elites do not fully understand this discipline yet.) The conditions those societies will experience will be extremely new and different, and may require new tools and new ways of making things happen. But for the most part, I see the (comfortable) person of the future on the one hand being a great generalist, able to switch directions when a position becomes unnecessary, and on the other hand a great specialist, learning everything there is to know about less and less, and that's what he actually lives off of. What if there's a reversal? The whole thing may come crashing down, and we might have to start over. We would live in a bizarre world where life is about recycling all the astonishing things synthesized in a previous culture, instead of being about making new things at a blistering pace. We make more and more things that are better and better, and we're just throwing away astonishing amounts of stuff. Rummaging through garbage cans and land fills might be the work of the future, if the higher class (1%) were to collapse permanently. If there's no one to spearhead the increasingly difficult march to technology, it may become cheaper to reuse previous things instead of inventing new ones.

Aron 14y ago

CurtWelch's comments in that article are fantastic.

malandrew 14y ago

TBH, I really hope we stop calling the current era the information age and instead start calling it the automation age. It's more accurate. Information is now no longer being used by humans but by computers. In many cases now, we simply generate too much informations for humans to comprehend, parse or analyze without computers doing more and more of the heavy lifting. The information is instead being parsed, analyzed and comprehended by computers who then act upon the understanding that has been programmed into them.