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Confessions of A Job Destroyer

• trippy_biscuits 14y ago
  Why is making a job obsolete destroying a job? I see it as progress. It frees up a human resource to find a more rewarding opportunity. Any worker(s) made redundant certainly don't feel that way at the time of impact because they get the opportunity to evolve by trial. One observation I've made regarding replacing people with technology is the inherent brain drain: all the details get abstracted away into the new technology or system and no one remembers or thinks about them anymore. When something goes wrong, those details matter. That creates a different demand and the cycle continues.
• vincie 14y ago
  I'm in the midst of destroying the jobs of 1, maybe 2 workers right now. I am replacing a poor quality document generating system based on MS RTF templates with wrappers that build tex files and then calling pdflatex on them.
• seivan 14y ago
  Those jobs should be destroyed. It's well deserved.
• Kequc 14y ago
  The comments on that article make me feel all :smith:. As if oh yea we can keep this going, raw capitalism will totally work forever.
  • smsm42 14y ago
    Where you saw "raw capitalism" in the US? Do you know how many thousands of pages federal regulations, state regulations, regional regulations and local regulations are? How many new ones are created every year?
    • eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      The means of production are privately-owned, operated for-profit, using wage labor. Also, firms' entry and exit to/from the markets is basically unrestricted. It's capitalism, red in tooth and claw. Doesn't have to be unregulated to be "real" capitalism.
      • smsm42 14y ago
        >>>> Also, firms' entry and exit to/from the markets is basically unrestricted You must be kidding me. Try entering banking or insurance market, you'd quickly learn how "unrestricted" they are. Or, even simpler, try entering a job market without joining a union that controls that particular market in a particular place. >>>> Doesn't have to be unregulated to be "real" capitalism. The world "real" apparently has a very wide meaning for you. I guess everything that allows people to make transactions without asking written permission of the district market supervisor from the government in advance is "raw capitalism" for you. No amount of restrictive regulation, no amount of government involvement, no amount of market distortion will ever make it not raw.
        • eli_gottlieb 14y ago
          The amount of regulation doesn't actually matter if the basic conditions for the capitalist mode of production are satisfied. The market interprets regulation as damage and routes around it.
          • EliRivers 14y ago
            Where for "market" presumably we read "criminals breaking the law", ultimately to disastrous effect.
      • hnal943 14y ago
        I suppose if you divorce the concepts of "Captialism" and "Free Markets" this is true, but they are typically thought of togther.
• largesse 14y ago
  You know, I love these posts calling for high taxation by relatively young people who are just starting their careers. Wait until you have kids about to go to college or, if you are unlucky, alimony and child-support obligations. Or major medical not covered by insurance. We'll see what much higher taxation looks like to you then. It's not that more income equality isn't a good goal, but there are plenty of people with their backs against the wall. I'm a strong open source advocate, but when I saw Richard Stallman years ago talk about how all software should be free, my first thought was "Easy for him to say. He doesn't have any dependents." I do consulting work and my rates are high. Believe me, it's not because I'm greedy it's because I'm trying to get by.
  • tyw 14y ago
    the article is calling for 91% marginal rate on the top income bracket. quite different than paying 91% of your income in taxes.
    • rlanday 14y ago
      It’s not really, if nearly all of your income is in the top income bracket getting taxed at that rate. And if most of your income isn’t in the top bracket, why earn that income at all if at least 91% is going to be stolen from you and the marginal return is so low?
  • ori_b 14y ago
    You do realize the reason they're calling for high taxation is to reduce the costs of kids going to college, child support, and the elimination of major medical not covered by insurance? Edit: Sorry, child support should be removed from that list; I was thinking of the costs of raising a child, not what you pay after a divorce.
    • largesse 14y ago
      If the cost of those and impact of taxation varied at the same time and the same degree that would be no problem. But that has never happened. Given the state of our governmental problem-solving ability in the US all those numbers can do is diverge.
• tarr11 14y ago
  I do not understand the dig against c# being less "efficient" than Ruby or Clojure.
  • largesse 14y ago
    He's talking about programmer productivity per line of code, not machine efficiency.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • tarr11 14y ago
      {programming language argument goes here}
  • Kequc 14y ago
    C was used to build modern languages which in turn replaced the jobs a lot of would be c developers could have had. It is the same kind of thing, progress means fewer people need to work.
• aoetr 14y ago
  What REALLY needs to be done is fully automating farming, construction, mining, transport and power plants. Then we can live for free since no work will be required to provide an house, food and electricity.
• darrenrogan 14y ago
  This posting just spoke to me on so many levels. I've personally had a beer thrown in my face by someone who's job I destroyed. I really believe we are have started to eat our own tails. Approximately 70% of the current jobs can (and will) be automated but what does that mean for my grandkids. How will we as a society cope with >20% unemployment never mind > 40%.
  • rtpg 14y ago
    A big thing people has said is simply to make people work less. Sure it's "less efficient", but if that's what it takes to at least allow people the chance to work, so be it. Who cares about efficiency if we have people starving in the streets anyways.
    • btrask 14y ago
      Raising the cost to employers will just encourage them to adopt even more automation.
  • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    Isn't the answer to reduce population? I'm not suggesting mass genocide. If family planning is right for a family then surely it's right for a nation and for nations together? If we keep increasing the population at this rate it seems that it won't end well.
    • danpat 14y ago
      Some forecasts predict a decline in the total population within the next 100 years. Birth rates in many countries (not just industrial, first world) have dropped below replacement rates for long enough that we'll likely see a plateau in total population, and possibly a drop, as there won't be enough young people having babies to replace the big bubble of old people that all start to die off together. Interesting presentation on it here: http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/aug/13/the-depopulation-problem/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/aug/13/the-depopulation-pr... by this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Longman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Longman
• wsc981 14y ago
  I wouldn't worry too much about destroying jobs - at least as far as the tech market is concerned. For every tech job that's destroyed, is seems at the very least 1 new job is created. Engineers should be flexible to take advantage of these new job opportunities. For example once the mobile market started booming, lots of people wanted apps for their devices, ergo lots of jobs were (and still are) "created" to build those apps. Eventually the mobile platform as we know it will whither and some other platform will take it's place, requiring many new applications build with different technology and techniques (computer languages, design paradigms, etc...).
  • shurcooL 14y ago
    Pretty much this. After all, if you're creating value, I don't think you can go wrong in the grand scheme of things. Destroyed (usually more tedious) jobs means people as a whole are now free to do more interesting and creative tasks. I'd happily destroy my job of doing the dishes with a dishwasher (one that fills and empties itself too) by automating it, etc.
    • malandrew 14y ago
      The problem is that the nature of the new problems we create that necessitate new jobs are fundamentally more challenging for humans to solve than the problems that have been automated away. There will always be jobs to be performed. The problem is if there will be enough humans capable enough to perform the jobs that still need doing. We like to think that the industrial and agricultural revolutions created as many jobs as it destroyed. However, while it did do that for humans, the horses were not quite as lucky. Many hundreds of thousands of horses were put out of work permanently between the end of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century. What makes people think that humans are too special to avoid the fate of horses?
      • shurcooL 14y ago
        A well presented point, I didn't think of it that way. You're probably right. Even so, at this time I want the human race to progress forward (to be more advanced, better capable at surviving even if a meteor is headed towards Earth or from rogue destructive humans, etc.), even if that means the people with less skills will suffer. Like it or not, life is about competition. Personally, I strive to improve myself and get better every day. I prefer to solve more challenging problems rather than keep doing tedious work. I wouldn't want the human race to stagnate its progress just because of fear that least-skilled members of our race cannot keep up. Besides, if enough things become automated, perhaps we will have less work to do in order to maintain comfortable lifestyles. Maybe that won't happen, I'm not sure. Anyway, that's my current view off the top of my head.
• Maven911 14y ago
  I still think that we are a long way from a heavy technical society Why is it that in a 100 person company, you only have 5 IT ppl and the other 95 seem to have secured jobs? It may happen one day, but we'll still need plenty of accoutants, pilots, truck drivers (googles driverless car is probably 40 years away from being legalized)
  • scotty79 14y ago
    I we may do better than 40 years. Other countries develop their own solutions. There might be as little as 10 years to pretty widespread adoption. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIX6u6qHTK4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIX6u6qHTK4 http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/automated-cars-succesfully-tested-on-roads-in-the-uk http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/automated-cars-succesfully-test...
  • EliRivers 14y ago
    "Why is it that in a 100 person company, you only have 5 IT ppl and the other 95 seem to have secured jobs?" Isn't that what we expect to happen? As jobs become automated, humans stop doing them and you get more humans doing the jobs that cannot be currently automated.
• contingencies 14y ago
  Laudable for its social concern. A call for basic income, dare-I-say it... a socialist ideal. Will socialism emerge from our globally, militarily exported democratocapitalismywayorthehighway technocracy? Perhaps, but decentralization of political and mass-media control needs to be won back first. Where does the western world want to go today? The government surveillance dyastopia and endless drone-wars of Assange's Cypherpunks introduction (http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm) or some kind of free education, basic income guaranteed, relative socialist utopia? A false dichotomy, for sure, but extremely worrisome in its validity nonetheless. In short, it is fantastic and timely (as always) to see programmers thinking about social impact of their actions. More of this!
  • jboynyc 14y ago
    > More of this! Then you'll want to read "Four Futures."[1] It isn't by a programmer, but it has sci-fi references and the author talks about 3d printing. It's so brilliant I can never recommend it enough. [1]: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/
  • somlor 14y ago
    Another interesting and relevant read: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
• shurcooL 14y ago
  My dream is to outsource implementation details to computer algorithms. Programmers should be designers. Just describe what you want (not necessarily always using a programming language), and it runs.
• columbo 14y ago
  The first job I automated out of existence was by incorporating a "print all" button into an existing application. We had to hire someone, full time, to open each document and print it. I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like in thirty years. All we know is the genie is out of the bottle and nobody is going to put it back in. Maybe we're headed for a dystopic corporatist future where everything is monitored, calculated and automated to such a degree that people are simply told what to buy at regular intervals. Mass acceptance will lead to computers dictating through goal posting, achievements and leaderboards the vast majority of each individual's lives. Maybe we'll simply have 80% unemployment; towering concrete skyscrapers that would rival the soviet era Paneláks with automated trains sending food in and taking waste out. Like a human powered coal plant. The vast numbers of unemployed will churn daily riots and huge sections of the country will be under military control. There will be an unspoken but utterly clear separation between the decision makers and those in the bread lines. Maybe we'll come up with entirely new sectors in biology, space and automation which will usher in the real space-age of humanity. My hope: We'll make some breakthroughs in science, mathematics, medicine and technology. New sectors will be created that nobody ever thought of, a few new billionaires will be added to the pile, our quality of life will improve and the threat of our complete and utter demise will have been greatly exaggerated.
  • ptvan 14y ago
    for those contemplating a dystopian future, it's good to remember that great comic from http://www.recombinantrecords.net/2009/05/24/amusing-ourselves-to-death/ http://www.recombinantrecords.net/2009/05/24/amusing-ourselv... unfortunately, they had to take it down, but here's the punchline: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kt5pgoInM81qaoem1o1_r1_500.jpg http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kt5pgoInM81qaoem1o1_r1_500... I think in the west, we're mainly controlled by entertainment, not violence. (I guess you could call it intellectual/emotional violence.) http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kt5pgoInM81qaoem1o1_r1_500.jpg http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kt5pgoInM81qaoem1o1_r1_500...
    • ptvan 14y ago
      I found the full version of the comic http://fatpita.net/?i=1952 http://fatpita.net/?i=1952
• canweriotnow 14y ago
  Wow, I wrote this post and it's gotten more points than my cumulative HN karma. But it's also gotten better discussion than anything I've ever posted to HN, so I'm totally okay with that. Thanks, guise, this is fun.
  • ar4s 14y ago
    Hi Jason, I've been reading a few of these articles lately, and I really enjoyed your first person perspective on what is otherwise being dubbed "Technological Unemployment". I'm wondering if you think that a re-localized economy, namely one created around the local production of food through urban farms could be a viable way to offset the growing problem of unemployment.
• smartician 14y ago
  Instead of job destruction, you could say we're just becoming more efficient at doing things. This is nothing new, it's a trend that started with division of labor in the Stone Age. Then we invented currency to distribute the fruits of this divided labor somewhat evenly among the participants. Now we're seeing that the value and income gap between professions is becoming wider and wider, and it's developing into a real problem. Some proposed fixes like raising the minimum wage will only work temporarily, as it increases the pressure to become more efficient. A basic income might indeed be a better approach, but the problem is that we'll have a lower class of bored, but somewhat poor people. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I think Europe's "social market economies" with high taxes and high benefits are in a better position to handle this than the US's gung-ho capitalism. And to say that higher-level languages and open source products are making software engineers obsolete is a bit short sighted. Sure, languages and frameworks have become more powerful, but the problems to solve have become orders of magnitude harder, and new problems have arisen. You still need people proficient in lower level languages to build those high level tools and frameworks.
• deleted 14y ago
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• simonsarris 14y ago
  In the idle moments of any day my brainpower eventually leads to these sort of questions that we will have to ask ourselves about the future of societies. (this CS + Philosophy degree I "purchased" has been a very expensive anti-sleep aid...) The anthropological world has gone through several ages as far as I can see it, from an Agricultural to Industrial to Mechanized (post WWII) to Digital (post 1990). I made up the names, but I'm sure the paradigms are obvious. I want to make it clear that this "crisis of abundance" is not exactly a new question. Even moving to agrarian living had growing pains. The best example philosophically detailing this, I think, is the work by Thomas Paine called Agrarian Justice. (that's the same Paine as Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Age of Reason) Agrarian Justice is a short pamphlet that I think everyone should read. It details in simple terms how civilized society is different from those who live off the land (such as some Native Americans of the time). Civilization clearly makes some people much better off, but others in civilization seem to be much worse off, condemned to lives of destitution, pollution, etc. Land ownership and development is a clear plus, but in agrarian societies people "lose" their natural inheritance of the land because of this ownership, and land taxes should be levied to make up for the loss of a natural inheritance. In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society. Nothing was done in 1795, and little to the same effect is being done today, though ownership has become a lot more pronounced (we are no longer largely farmers after all). Unfortunately, I think society today would think the idea far more radical than those of Paine's generation, not least of which we owe to certain political elements. A copy of the pamphlet is hosted on - where else - the official US Social Security website. I really do recommend you give it a read, it isn't long! http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html (If we want to discuss the pamplet itself in depth, we might want to do so on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5360056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5360056)
  • _delirium 14y ago
    Bertrand Russell is another person who's written on that subject. His question was more or less: if we reach the point where our basic needs can be taken care of by robots, will that mean everyone starts with their basic needs taken care of... or will it instead mean that whoever owns the robots, and claims their labor, will be in a very strong position?
• deleted 14y ago
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• minimax 14y ago
  This is a facile take on the economics of technology. Productivity increased steadily throughout the 20th century and while in the short term that may have eliminated certain (mostly unskilled) functions, it didn't lead to widespread unemployment. Improvements in technology move the world forward, there's no reason to feel guilty about it.
  • aaron695 14y ago
    The concept we can keep consuming to keep ourselves out of trouble is naive. We can not sustain the growth required to replace lost jobs, it's just not mathematically possible, the world is finite. Concepts around consumption composing of the arts(Attempting to loophole limited resources) are also misplaced, already we are seeing computer generated actors and artists.
    • deleted 14y ago
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    • chatmasta 14y ago
      Sincerely, Adam Smith
  • rattray 14y ago
    There is no reason the 30th century will repeat the same patterns as the 20th. It's certainly true that raw employment numbers in the US haven't dipped significantly since the dawn of industrialization, and they've gotten better around the globe as a whole. But that doesn't mean we'll continue to be able to come up with jobs for people to do as fast as we can come up with ways to make them obsolete. Technological improvement tends to be geometric if I'm not mistaken, and I doubt the same can be said for the creation of meatware-only, service-industry duties. It's also important to keep in mind that real wages for the majority of American workers hasn't risen in the past 40-odd years [citation needed]. Of course, they can buy cooler shit now than they could in the 70's, but that doesn't mean there's no cause for pause when we look at the benefits of technological improvement.
    • deleted 14y ago
• InclinedPlane 14y ago
  This meme has become an ego stroking impulse of knowledge workers but it evinces a gross misunderstanding of economics on a fundamental level. More than that it represents a disturbingly insulting implicit characterization of "unskilled workers" who are incapable of adapting to a changing economy. The economy is not static, and it has never been static. Indeed, it's actually far less dynamic today than it has been many times in the past. And no, you and your software are not going to change the world so drastically that suddenly people won't be able to find work. People will still work, they'll do different jobs than they did before. Supply and demand. Today many processes and systems are more efficient, by orders of magnitude, than they've ever been before. And yet at the same time a much larger percentage of the population is active in the work force than before (since many more women work today than in the past, among other factors). Is this a deep paradox or just simple economics?
  • wvenable 14y ago
    > People will still work, they'll do different jobs than they did before. Supply and demand. The unaddressed issue is the real possibility that the majority of human effort is merely not cost effective anymore. In other words, human effort isn't worth paying a living wage. You say we have more population active in the work force ever than before but the total earnings have decreased steadily. I'm currently working a project to eliminating a few good office jobs. They had a choice, hire more staff or build software to improve efficiency enough that the staff isn't necessary. The company chose to build the software. So I can easily see where software has eliminated jobs, I haven't seen these "different jobs" that people are supposedly doing.
  • mjmahone17 14y ago
    It seems that far fewer women work now (as a percentage of all women) than did in 1810. Sure, the rich women whose husbands could afford slaves didn't work. But that might have been 10% of the population. Tops, 20% of the female population did not have to work. Most women (especially peasant women) either worked the land/animals, or were seamstresses, or prostitutes, or did various household tasks to bring in extra income (or to free up their husband and children so that they could earn extra income). And women generally couldn't retire like they do now, especially as most didn't live beyond middle age.
• CurtMonash 14y ago
  Let's start by pulling this discussion apart into three questions: 1. What effect will technology-based efficiency gains have on total wealth? 2. What effect will technology-based efficiency gains have on the distribution of total wealth? 3. What should we do about #1 and #2, especially #2? The answer to #1, IMO, remains very favorable. And I think that's obvious so long as you measure wealth by the value and owner-/consumer-perceived quality of what is owned and consumed, rather than by market prices. As for #2 -- a rising tide is clearly lifting a lot of boats worldwide. In the richer countries, that's more debatable -- but I think it's still true. Dollar incomes may be flat, inflation-adjusted, but electronic entertainment (for example) is a lot better than it used to be. But it's hard to deny that income disparities are on the rise. And it's reasonable to think about those income disparities in part by counting numbers of "good" jobs (probably down) and (of which there are fewer) "great" jobs (probably up). Historically, "good" jobs have arisen to more than make up for those lost, perhaps after an uncomfortable transition period. If that's what's going on again, we can muddle through without great answers to #3. But if This Time It's Different -- and it well may be -- then we need to reorganize our economy, our work practices, and everything else, rebalancing work/leisure in the way some people (often socialists) were already (and falsely) arguing was necessary decades ago. -------------------------------------------- And finally -- at a minimum, we're causing problems that society needs to deal with in terms of general job loss. We're also causing other problems, such as privacy threats. So it's our duty, as very fortunate individuals, to also put some effort into alleviating them, or in some other ways of improving the world. I, of course, have put some effort into the privacy issue. (http://www.dbms2.com/category/liberty-privacy/page/2/ http://www.dbms2.com/category/liberty-privacy/page/2/ -- more coming soon). Others may look at general economics (e.g. the OP here), or censorship, or the need for better STEM teaching, or in unquestionably beneficial applications of technology, or whatever. But we all should be thinking of what, personally, we can do to try to help.
  • aspensmonster 14y ago
    I think you've already highlighted an interesting signal that This Time It's Different: in the U.S., productivity has increased while wage gains have flat-lined. Workers aren't sharing in the additional created wealth. Sure, the aggregate amount of wealth to the poor has increased over time. I'd think that's a given. If that hasn't happened something has gone horribly wrong. But its value relative to other wealthier groups has steadily declined. That's a bad spot to be in. The workers' increasing productivity is earning themselves a smaller return over time. Indeed a shrinking return. The nastiest consequence of this in my observation has been political; when a large majority of the population has relatively little wealth to toss around (even taken as a whole) it's easy for their political representatives to become unresponsive. Now, whether It's Different This Time because of characteristics inherent to a steadily improving economic system, or simply because of self-destructive tendencies that wealth-hoarding tends to exhibit, is a question I'd love an answer to. But I'm sure there will be others to tell me that this time is just like all the others too. Maybe I'll hear a decent explanation that allays my concerns.
• jkonowitch 14y ago
  150 years ago the agricultural sector employed roughly 80% of American workers. Today, it employs less than 3%. It may be hard to imagine looking forward rather than back, but dynamic economies are capable of experiencing such dramatic shifts AND of absorbing and reallocating the labor towards more productive uses. They key thing to understand is that once certain modes of production become less efficient relative to alternatives, often because of technological advances, it frees our resources and productive energies to engage in new enterprises. It's true that employment dislocations that occur from rapid technological advancement can cause great transitional distress; that is why it's important as a society that we find humane and efficient ways of supporting people through these changes. However, the net result of progress is that we are all better off. No one can say exactly what the baristas or the project managers of today will become, no more than anyone could have predicted what would have become of the farmworkers who were displaced in the great migration towards a service economy. But, the last 150 years have seen a veritable explosion in the specialization and profusion of occupations which were previously economically unviable. I see no reason why we should not expect the same kind of evolution going forward.
  • wvenable 14y ago
    What happens when machines are stronger, have greater endurance, and are cheaper than humans? What happens when machines are smarter, faster, make less mistakes, and are cheaper than humans? The "same kind of evolution" is no longer ours -- it belongs to the machines. How does your optimism work when most human effort is simply obsolete?
• deleted 14y ago
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  • natrius 14y ago
    It is fallacious to argue that since similar arguments in the past were wrong, then current ones must be as well. We could be entering a world where machines can do all of the work that a segment of the population is capable of doing. The most useful part of these discussions isn't figuring out which side is right. To me, it's figuring out what we'd do if this time actually is different.
    • calhoun137 14y ago
      A statement is right or wrong based on reasons. The same argument is wrong for the same reasons it always has been. I'm curious why you think this time is different? In any case, if you find that kind of discussion useful I would say this: The point of life should be to work on a job that you find fulfilling. If the boring things are all automated, then everyone can have a job they enjoy, and sitting around all day doing nothing gets boring really fast.
      • natrius 14y ago
        The argument has been true in the past because technology lowered prices, and people used their new disposable income to pay people to do work they used to do themselves, which grew into the huge service industry we have today. There were also jobs created that involved building and repairing the new technologies, but far fewer than the jobs that were lost. If service industry jobs are automated away, will we always have more service industry jobs to create? I think this is unlikely. "If the boring things are all automated, then everyone can have a job they enjoy, and sitting around all day doing nothing gets boring really fast." But how will these people doing jobs they enjoy pay their bills?
        • calhoun137 14y ago
          With the money from their jobs of course! Lets think about it with this example: if it takes a worker 2 hours to make product X, but then a new technology comes along which makes it only take 1 hour to make product X, then the value of labor has doubled. Then the owner has a choice, he can either double all the salaries of his employees and have the same income for himself, or else fire half his employees and double his profit. This example shows that unemployment is not a result of new technology, but of choices made by people who have the most power in a society.
• lolfallacy 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
• mleach 14y ago
  Agricultural age, industrial age, information age... Cannibalizing our past has always been the path to creating more wealth.
• scotty79 14y ago
  When a labor saving innovation occurs people get fired, but after some time they get rehired by new markets that develop thanks to this innovation. But as labor saving innovations occur more and more often newly developed markets get automated before they can soak up unemployed generated by previous innovation.
• 001sky 14y ago
  Great post, up to ending. Economics =/= politics. & Politics is the supreme art.
• andyl 14y ago
  "What one or two lone hackers can readily achieve today, once could only have been accomplished by a team of engineers, business analysts, project managers, and QA testers, with tools purchased from vendors that employed legions more engineers, analysts, project managers, and QA testers" This is true, and is the reason why I left general management to become a developer. People don't realize just how powerful the new tools have become. I can do by myself what once took a large team. There is a lot that could be said about the potential industry-wide ramifications of this power-shift. I know one thing for sure: team meetings just got a whole lot more efficient.
• beatpanda 14y ago
  I want to zoom in from the big picture and look at something more local. Let's say you're like me and you're a well-paid knowledge worker in, say, San Francisco, and lets further suppose that your industry is creating an incredible stratification of wealth in a very small, volatile space. And let's say you're like the OP, and you're feeling a little bit guilty that you're putting people out of work, and making it harder for people to meet their own basic needs in other ways. Instead of arguing that we should all pay more taxes, tax yourself. Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent. It's called Noblesse Oblige. It used to be a thing. It ought to be again.
  • nazgulnarsil 14y ago
    why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth? It gets worse when you take the marginal utility of money into account. Capitalism has this wonderful feature where industry goes and sets up shop wherever people have it worst off because their labor is the cheapest. This infrastructure improves the crappy areas until it is no longer the worst, repeat. The world has thus been ratcheting itself out of extreme poverty since the industrial revolution.
    • pigou 14y ago
      > why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth? This seems to be the implicit assumption whenever certain segments of the political class bemoan jobs being "shipped overseas". On a local/national scale, inequality does increase as unskilled workers face international competition. But on a global scale, inequality actually decreases as those living in the world's poorest countries see their incomes go up. In this case at least, a likely explanation for why geographically proximate workers are deemed more worthy is that they are part of the relevant political constituency and the foreign workers are not.
      • jiggy2011 14y ago
        The idea of politics at a local level, rather than having a single top down international government is that assuming everyone has good government then everyone's needs are advocated for equally. So it's not so much that other workers are less worthy, it is that they should have their own representative to argue for them. If my representative is spending his/her time advocating for someone else then I am getting an unfair deal. This is apparent in Britain over the EU debate as many believe that membership of the EU is preventing British politicians from considering the best interests of Britain whilst others advocate that EU membership is necessary for Britain to have any say at all.
• scotty79 14y ago
  Societies deal currently with job destruction and unemployment in very pathological ways. USA criminalized, what unemployed often do, locked significant amount of them up and hired other people to watch them. USA unemployment could be as much as 2% higher in total if they didn't.
  • Tsagadai 14y ago
    Imagine if we could outsource prison guard duties (especially the dangerous, interpersonal stuff) to robots. And if those robots could also ensure the prisoners work efficiently in their prison jobs.
    • scotty79 14y ago
      That's one of the reasons why putting people from highly unemployed groups in jails is not the right long term solution. Eventually you won't even have jobs for jailers as a side benefit. You might always imagine that eventually all people end up in jail that will get pretty relaxed till then and robot jailers will become just become security beneficial mostly to prisoners since there won't be much people outside only industry and ai-s that will have to be reasonably protected from descendants of monkeys in mutual interest of all involved. That would be cool idea for dystopian/utopian short story or novel.
• 100k 14y ago
  I will always remember my first project at my first job out of school. The project manager sat down the team to explain the goals of the project. My company made digital asset management software, and it had sold a license to a major client. It was pitched to the team like this: "The client has already announced to shareholders that this project is going to lay off 20 people, so we need to get it done by such-and-such date." I felt really awesome about those poor smucks who got unemployed partially due to my work. As programmers at our best can create whole new industries, but most of what we do is automate repetitive tasks. That's good for productivity, but might not be an unvarnished good for society if the gains are not distributed in a fair manner. Paul Krugman has written a lot lately about "capital-biased technological progress" and potential remedies. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robo... http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/capital-biased-technological-progress-an-example-wonkish/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/capital-biased-t... http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/policy-implications-of-capital-biased-technology-opening-remarks/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/policy-implicati...
• smsm42 14y ago
  Fixed lump of labor fallacy detected. Counterfactual statements about politics (many republicans signed "no tax raise" pledge - which of course includes everybody's - including author's - taxes) detected. Calling unbased hypothesis "common sense" because the author couldn't find any proof - detected. Unbased assumption about how drastically raising taxes would generate tons of new income - instead of widespread evasion - detected. New and useful ideas - not detected.
  • scotty79 14y ago
    Lump of labor of course grows as economy develops but it doesn't have to always grow faster than automation reduces it. Given that we automate things faster and faster and economy needs time to grow to increase lump of labor there might be time where lump of labor starts shrinking. Lots of currently held jobs are pretty much useless already but can't be removed in business as usual mode due to various social agreements. US economy used crisis as an excuse to shake off lots of them. Output regrew fast after crisis but jobs didn't come back.
    • smsm42 14y ago
      Automation does not reduce available labor - it reduces only the number of specific workplaces available, but since it frees the resources by doing it and produces more value, this value can - and will - be turned into buying work of somebody else. Maybe instead of buying services of a clerk, the owner of the company would buy services of a Ford dealer and Ford workers by buying a new car. So what? I have no reasons to prefer clerk's job for Ford dealer's job - the only difference is that people apparently need the latter but not the former. Transition can be painful for the individual, but beneficial for the economy as a whole.
      • scotty79 14y ago
        > it frees the resources by doing it and produces more value, this value can - and will - be turned into buying work of somebody else. Or maybe the owner of the company will just buy more automation for the money he saved that will cause further savings? After all he's business owner and increasing productivity of his company even further is his priority. You might argue that eventually he'll buy all the automation for his company that is available on the market, and then he'll spent all of his freed resources on something labor intensive, but new, cheaper to use, automation is developed as he upgrades his company so it's possible that he will never be able to buy all automation. Besides labor intensive things he would spend his money on might get much less labor intensive until then due to their own automation.
• jvm 14y ago
  My thinking about this is that people are both sellers of a product (their labor) and human beings. I think this is what got way too mixed up in the Marxist framing of socialism and needs to be unwound. I don't think people should have rights qua producers. Acer doesn't have the right to have people buy their products, their purpose in our society to produce a good value proposition for computers. If nobody wants what's on offer, they can and should go out of business. Otherwise they're wasting resources that could have gone to their superior competitors. The same goes for a redundant worker. But qua humans, I think people should have tons of rights! I think people should have equal opportunities (I'm thinking especially of children and how unfair life is to those with poor parents), and in addition, I honestly don't think someone should have to go hungry or homeless no matter what they do. A basic income serves not to replace capitalism with socialism (in the Marxist sense) but to work in concert with capitalism to make sure nobody is ever dehumanized by a process that makes us all richer.
• hkmurakami 14y ago
  Sure, we can’t destroy all the non-Job Destroyer jobs… yet. Burger King and Starbucks still need human subjects employees to make Whoppers and skinny lattes, but how long before these jobs are deskilled to the point they can be done by machines — i.e., by software? Interestingly, there is a robotics company in SF (Momentum Machines) that is trying to automate fast food (burger) assembly. http://www.businessinsider.com/burger-robot-could-revolutionize-fast-food-industry-2012-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/burger-robot-could-revolution...
• curt 14y ago
  Why do people keep asking for the old days with the 91% tax rate? Do they realize that today the effective tax rate is nearly the same as it was then. Not only that but today the 'rich' carry a far larger percentage of the overall tax burden.
  • Kliment 14y ago
    [citation needed]
    • chaz 14y ago
      The contention is that 1950s tax law enabled tax shelters which allowed wealthy filers to heavily reduce their income tax bill. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324705104578151601554982808.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732470510457815...
  • paulhauggis 14y ago
    Even if the rich paid 100% in taxes, there will still be people complaining...
  • phaemon 14y ago
    That's very odd, putting 'rich' in quotes like that. It's as though you're trying to imply they're not really rich. But that would mean that it's not the rich who're carrying a larger percentage of the tax burden after all. Which negates the very point you were trying to make! You seem a little conflicted on this issue ;-)
• kevinskii 14y ago
  By this logic, anyone who improves anything is a job destroyer. One small team of factory workers can ruin thousands of blacksmith careers. One good therapist may wipe out an entire local industry for divorce lawyers. A single medical research scientist could prevent countless would-be morticians and undertakers from ever discovering their true calling. The solution to joblessness seems simple: We just need to ensure that no one ever does anything important.
• rumcajz 14y ago
  We need a lot more educators. We need people to take care of elderly. We need more people to work on preserving the environment. We need much better public services. The amount of work needed is astounding. The fallacy of putting equals sign between work and production of commodities is what causes this dim view of our economic future.
• zanny 14y ago
  There seems to be a good bit of "if you are in the unemployment camp, you aren't contributing to society and are effectively worthless" that I get from some comments in this thread. I know for a fact if a basic income surfaced I would jump immediately into solving a long-run "big problem" like learning robotics, brain-computer interfaces, etc. Without the burden of having to seek someone to pay me for my time to eat, I'd go tackle what I cared about more than what people with money to feed me cared about. I think that would have pervasive implications on everyone, and with a necessary cultural shift away from consumption towards conceptualization and self actualization, we might be able to get a majority of people taking up creative endeavors to improve the world in ways our current economic engine doesn't come close to promoting.
• greggman 14y ago
  Maybe in some future world where we invent AI (could be right around the corner for all I know) But, right now. No, programmers are job creators. Guess how many programmers in the world create browsers? Probably less than 10k. Guess how many jobs browsers have created? Millions. Guess you many programmers+engineers made networking stacks? Guess how many jobs networking has created? How many programmers made the top illustration or photo editing packages? Now compare that to the number of jobs of artists created using those packages. That tide might turn someday but right now programmers are job creators not job destroyers.
• DanielBMarkham 14y ago
  Sigh. "...We (programmers) all are, on some level or another; we’re taking mundane repetitive tasks and automating them with code..." Yes, and no. I have been programming or improving things all my life. That means, if you don't look too deeply, yes, I am a jobs destroyer. But if you're not going to look too deeply, just don't bother looking at all. We programmers take inefficient things and make them efficient. Old, bloated code gets streamlined. What used to take a person an hour takes five minutes. You'd think -- if you kind of squinted your eyes the right way -- that eventually we'd just make the entire universe efficient and there would be no more jobs. You'd think something and it would come into existence. Many people are able to think this far ahead, and it scares them. Along, presumably, with many other things. The problem is that such simple-minded projections of the future never pan out that way. Over and over again we make something more efficient, take away entire categories of jobs, and still people have more to do than ever. Why? There's a book in that response, but let's just say in deference to Jurassic Park, "jobs find a way". An economy is a complex system where people are always wanting something -- even when they're fed, clothed, housed, and taken care of -- and other people are always providing it. They trade, and it's this species-programmed pattern of trading that led us out of the Savannah and onto the moon. This is the nth article along the same lines -- the future is devoid of jobs. I'm very sorry that our educational system in many western countries is ill-preparing many for work, and they face long periods of unemployment made worse by debt. It's a travesty and a scandal and we need to fix it. But don't extrapolate current unfortunate structural unemployment with the end of life, the universe, and everything. Don't flatter yourself. You are not a jobs destroyer. You're just some schmuck doing his job like the rest of us.
  • yairchu 14y ago
    That's because we haven't yet produced a general-purpose quality AI which can do everything humans can do and more cost effectively than they do it. But when this happens, pretty much everything, even creative work like graphical design - everything will be cloudsourced.
    • DanielBMarkham 14y ago
      You are confusing things with value. Most commenters seem to confuse needs with value. They think that once we are all fed and housed there will be no more jobs. At least you've taken it to the next step -- tangible things. Congrats. You need to ask yourself a question: why do rich people create things for each other? A millionaire grandmother may make a scarf for her grandchild. A middle-aged man may take time to create a scrapbook for a friend that is retiring. A billionaire may go to yard sales and haggle over the price of a toaster. It's not about needs, and it's not about things. It's about trade, creation, giving, social interaction. These things are not going anywhere, no matter how many AIs there are. In another 100 years we're just all going to be the equivalent of today's billionaires. That means having purpose and creating things, ie, continuing in some form of semi-structured creation and trade process. Look at it this way. Describe the life of an early 21st century person to somebody from 1000BC. They will have no idea why you work. Guaranteed meals every now and then? Communicate with anybody on the planet? Water, sewage, and light for the dark -- all without effort? We live in an incredible far-fetched place beyond dreams. There's no point in working. From their perspective. But that's not the way things panned out.
• deleted 14y ago
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• cousin_it 14y ago
  When AIs or uploaded humans can do everything that flesh-and-blood humans can do, more cheaply, then there will be more reason to pay flesh-and-blood humans for anything. And they won't have any spare land or resources to return to past ways of living, because technologically advanced corporations will be able to extract more value from that land or resources, so flesh-and-blood humans will be outbid, and subsequently perish. Basic econ 101. (Programming seems like a task that's especially suited for AIs or uploaded humans, because it doesn't involve any physical manipulation of mass. So programmers should be the first, not the last, to worry. And don't kid yourself that you'll be an uploaded programmer earning a living wage. That honor will go to the the most productive and undemanding uploaded programmer in the world, who will get copied a billion times. See Robin Hanson's "Crack of a future dawn".) One possible answer is transhumanism, making humans smarter so they can stay competitive. But even so, the majority could still get left behind.
• yaddayadda 14y ago
  "Sure, we can’t destroy all the non-Job Destroyer jobs… yet. Burger King and Starbucks still need human subjects employees to make Whoppers and skinny lattes, but how long before these jobs are deskilled to the point they can be done by machines — i.e., by software?" Actually it's already being done http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/22/robot-serves-up-340-hamburgers-per-hour/ http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/22/robot-serves-up-340-ham...
• naner 14y ago
  Some coffee shops still have manual espresso machines, which require training, skill and finesse to operate. I worked at two different Starbucks a decade ago and have used the manual machines. They require a tiny bit of manual labor and attention but not really an special amount of skill and finesse. Anyone that can learn to make a scrambled egg can do it. I was in high school at the time. Let's not romanticize this crap. Most of these jobs we are destroying aren't that special. And people will be forced to focus on learning more useful skills. I think there needs to be a revolution on training people for work and careers. There are a lot of jobs in the US currently that cannot be filled, we don't have enough skilled workers. It seems like displaced workers should have the option of getting into some kind of fast-track training to enter these roles, at no cost to them and while keeping their family fed. The countries that figure out how to do this fairly, effectively, and without crazy costs will be unstoppable. Also I think moderate mental health issues are a massive economic problem that nobody seems to notice but I don't know how to fix that.
  • canweriotnow 14y ago
    Yeah, I exaggerated the amount of skill needed to operate manual espresso machine. But I don't think it diminishes the point about de-skilling. The point I think most people missed reading TFA (due to my so very highly nuanced brand of snark) is that I don't really have a problem with jobs disappearing... I have a problem with the political rhetoric that we should be creating more jobs. I want less work to do, or at least less _boring_ work, dammit!
• protomyth 14y ago
  There is an amazing and unjustified arrogance on the part of the author on what "software" can do. Add to that the author missing whole areas of our labor force (creative, vocational non-factory, farming). I would say the labor force makeup is changing and our schools have done a piss poor job of picking the right trends, but we still haven't got to the point a robot can do construction, in the field building / maintenance, or what's left of farming and ranching. I don't see robots getting there for a great while. I haven't seen the robot who can do even basic creative jobs. The way forward is still humans. If you want to really help the workforce, get micro-transactions that work. That will change everything.
• jlebowski 14y ago
  some jobs will never be destroyed, i.e. prostitution i still jerk off manually
  • TheCoelacanth 14y ago
    Two words: sex robots.
• npsimons 14y ago
  By using the most efficient possible languages (Ruby and Clojure, in my case, rather than Java or C#) and relying on free and open source software (Postgres rather than Oracle, for instance), I’m potentially destroying jobs in my own sector! And that's where I stopped reading. Anyone who doesn't understand the economics of OSS is probably not going to be writing very insightfully on economics in general (hint: the large majority of OSS is produced by paid programmers).
• ludflu 14y ago
  > the amount of socially necessary labor decreases with each passing year. Isn't this Lump of Labor fallacy? There is not a fixed amount of work available because human desire is limitless. (and therefore so is human suffering, but that's a different discussion!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
• fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
  I honestly believe that many decades from now, 20 to 50 years, at least one industrialized country will have something like a Basic income guarantee. It happened to Rome. When all of their work was done by slaves, the free Romans got bread and circuses on the government's dime. I think we will reach a point where unemployment will just grow despite a growing economy. And it will steadily grow for months, then years, and over the years we'll go through a long and painful political process which I think will eventually result in a a Basic income guarantee. At that point a staggering percentage of our economy will be 100% automated.
  • hnal943 14y ago
    Of course, "Bread and Circuses" is a pejorative describing the fall of Rome: ...Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses
• paulhauggis 14y ago
  Open source developers have also been killing developer jobs for at least 5 years now. As a business owner, why would I want to hire a software engineer when I can hire a software mechanic? Most of what I want is already given out for free and the hard parts are already engineered. I'm not talking about things like PHP, Mysql, or Apache. I just need someone to make changes to this code..and you really don't need to find someone with that much experience to do it properly (IE: they are cheaper). As business owners get more and more tech savvy, I predict that this will be the norm.
• norswap 14y ago
  I think programmers do in fact create some jobs. Programmers are really self-replicating entities. Think about it, every time you start a project you create a burden of maintenance. For yourself, which means you can't tackle as much work as you could before, work which will go the way of another programmer; or for the lucky dude who will end up maintaining your work. Of course, the project can end up abandonned, but in that case nothing is destroyed either. The more we create complex systems, the more we need people to grease the cogs at all levels, people to oversee them, people which have non-local view (or even a global view, as far as it is possible) of the system, etc...