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How Technology Is Destroying Jobs
- peterjancelis 13y agoCheap interest rates are destroying jobs. Artificially low interest rates == artificially high amount to spend on machine replacing labor == labor earnings go down as percentage of the economy.
- jjaredsimpson 13y agocertain jobs.
- noloqy 13y agoWhat's the problem exactly? Job growth has been stagnant for 5 years? Productivity is the ratio of units of output per unit of input, where you can abstract input as being either capital or labor. Indeed, productivity continues to grow as a consequence of technological advances. When mankind started using oxes to plough fields, landworkers' productivity rose significantly. As we develop more tools to aid us in daily tasks, less labor - and sometimes even less capital - is required to perform those tasks. During the relatively prosperous past decades, organizations have grown heavy, and were able to do so because of a continuously rising product demand. People started over-working and over-consuming. Then there was an external shock, media started talking about a financial crisis, people started being more considerate of their consumption in the face of job insecurity, and businesses that grew too heavy needed to get back into shape. This is a process that has significant feedback effects. The process of business getting back into shape means the cutting non-contributing jobs (think of excess layers of management), which by itself causes a growth in productivity. In this sense, employment growth and productivity growth can be negatively correlated, and it is not necessarily "technological advances" that drive productivity growth. Telling us that technology is destroying our jobs is the same as telling us that China is stealing our jobs, though they may affect different industries (I don't see Chinese laborers replacing our butchers.) The thing is that the working population is very flexible, and despite offshoring certain jobs the average American still works over 50 hours a week. Population growth hasn't justified job growth in the US for the past 40 years, so perhaps a stagnant job growth is a good thing in that it draws things back to "normality".
- hannibal5 13y agoThe problem is that jobs will be worth less and less compensation and the balance between work and capital is turning towards capital. There will be new jobs, but fewer and fewer people qualify. Network effect and superstar economy mean that the distribution of workforce compensation will change dramatically. Majority of workers will be worth less. More of them will drop below the point where it's not worth to hire them.
- ronaldx 13y agoOne problem is that we have trained people to do (and are still training people to do) jobs which are being replaced by computers and technologists who can do the same job more productively. This is beginning to have a significant impact upon all industries. The economy is doing great, productivity is doing great, but there are increasing numbers of people with obsolete skills who can't find work and are struggling to survive this improving economy, through no fault of their own. A small number of people are taking all the benefits of the new economy - entrenching inequality. The problem is with people, not with the economy.
- victoriap 13y agoThe replacement of muscle by automation was 20th century. In the current wave, we see a replacement of office workers with a mix of more productive office workers outsourced, online or in house.
- ronaldx 13y agoI think we are seeing a restructure of skilled work generally as technology becomes able to do portions of skilled work. For example, look at education. Interestingly, muscle jobs are more-or-less immune as they have already been automated as much as is reasonable.
- wffurr 13y agoThe problem is the very real human suffering caused by these economic dislocations. It is totally unnecessary and a failure of politics and morals. Our social "safety net" is anemic at best. We could use some of the profits from increased automation and efficiency to improve the social safety net, but instead we have allowed the vast majority of it to flow to the already wealthy owners of capital.
- raspasov 13y agoThe only way to stay ahead of the curve is by constant self-improvement. I feel in todays world many people are slow to realize that they need to get more technical. It's not like there isn't "jobs" or "work" that needs to be done, it's just smarter, more technical work, with no clear-cut answers due to the ever increasing amounts of data we can collect and process. Think about it like this: "Programming skills in 2010s are the Excel skills of the 1990s".
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoIn other words, people of average and below-average intelligence are screwed.
- raspasov 13y agoEveryone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education which is becoming more and more widely accessible due to cheap technology and Internet access. Viewing people as "below average" or "above average" is a very pre-deterministic way of evaluating any person's potential :).
- 6d0debc071 13y ago> Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education. You are aware you've just posited free will? I think that's such a significant claim that it needs some sort of support. Because things like family education level and income seem highly determining for lifetime outcomes - in a way that would seem to support the idea that free will doesn't exist.
- thenerdfiles 13y agoYou said "determining" not "determined," but then you conclude with some absolute ontological statement about something-such not existing. A: "Are you going to school tomorrow?" B: "Well, statisticians tell me crime rates are incredibly high; so I probably won't make it to school. Why go, it might as well not exist?" The point of A is lost — get an education. It's not all teet-sucking techno-commerce; those statistics say nothing about how peoples came to build those systems in the first place of which those [EDIT:] quantificational terms like "income level" describe. Moreover, a revolution does not require that anyone die off, but that a system, or status quo, ends.
- scotty79 13y agoSemirelated: http://www.sjbaker.org/humor/pythagoras_costs_jobs.html http://www.sjbaker.org/humor/pythagoras_costs_jobs.html
- forgottenpaswrd 13y agoThe problem is not technology. The problem is that technology is being centralized by a few owners. A computer in every pocket, 3d printers and CNC machines are very near to us. Companies grow bigger and bigger, not because they are more efficient, on the contrary, but because they could black mail society to sustain it. Too big too fail became the motto of the new era, banks and industry companies so inefficient with huge losses that nobody could touch it without breaking society itself. Those companies had done well, who needs to make cars when you can take $50 billion by the government to speculate in the stock market? A stock market that is fueled by printing dollars by a central bank(inflating and raising taxes of millions people). Don't make me started with software patents in order for a few to own all ideas. Society is collapsing to sustain unproductive parasites. It will have to get worse before it gets better.
- nickthemagicman 13y agoTechnology could be making EVERYONE's lives better and decrease all of our work hours, however the average American's work hours are not decreased because instead of using technology to make everyone's work easier, the rich guy uses tech to replace workers and pockets the profits from that.
- thenerdfiles 13y ago«In our own time, the development of technology and the growth of cities has brought man's alienation from nature to a breaking point. Western man finds himself confined to a largely synthetic urban enviroment, far removed physically from the land, his relationship to the natural world mediated by machines. Not only does he lack familiarity with how most of his goods are produced, but his foods bear only the faintest resemblence to the animals and plants from which they were derived. Boxed into a sanitized urban milieu (almost institutional in form and appearance), modern man is denied even a spectatorial role in the agricultural and industrial systems that satisfy his material needs. He is a pure consumer, an insensate receptacle. It would be cruel to say that he is disrespectful toward his natural; the fact is that he scarcely knows what ecology means or what his enviroment requires to remain in balance.» — "Towards a Liberatory Technology", Lewis Herber [Murray Bookchin]
- thenerdfiles 13y agoFollow-up: «Unfortunately, the singularity may not be what you’re hoping for. By default the singularity (intelligence explosion) will go very badly for humans, because what humans want is a very, very specific set of things in the vast space of possible motivations, and it’s very hard to translate what we want into sufficiently precise math, so by default superhuman AIs will end up optimizing the world around us for something other than what we want, and using up all our resources to do so.» — http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y9lm0/i_am_luke_muehlhauser_ceo_of_the_singularity/c5tm6fu http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y9lm0/i_am_luke_...
- porter 13y agoThe answer to a complex system like the economy is never so simple. Technology, the shift from a productive to a finance, insurance and real estate economy, artificial interest rates, stock bubble, housing bubble, credit crises.... There are a lot of factors that contribute to fewer jobs. When it comes to technology, yes, technology destroys jobs. But never on a net bases. 100 years ago 40% of our economy worked in agriculture. Today it's less than 2%. Yet people aren't longing for the days of farming. Technology alone is not the culprit.
- wffurr 13y agoThat technology destroys more jobs than it creates can only be news to economists. Any one of us has put far more than one other person out of work by automating their data entry or analysis jobs. This essay on four possible futures along the axes of scarcity and equality is highly relevant. http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/ http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/ Does a post-scarcity economy, the sort implied by democratizing production via 3D printers and cheap energy, necessarily imply a more equal society or can the rentier class find a way to extract profits via patents and intellectual property? Conversely, if we end up constrained by natural resources — energy, feedstocks, labor, etc. — is it even possible to move to a more equal society?
- sjwright 13y agoTechnology has destroyed jobs for hundreds of years. It means we as a species are continually releasing human labour resources to tackle newer, more exciting challenges. The difficulty is transitioning these labour resources from tasks now mechanized, to new endeavours that society is interested in solving.
- dllthomas 13y agoLong term, there's potentially a point where we can repurpose mechanization faster than we can repurpose people. I certainly don't make the claim that we're there yet, though. Short to medium term, one angle is figuring out how to actually get people paid for the new stuff - there is a lot that creates value that is difficult to capture.
- _random_ 13y agoWell, who is the nerd now?
- Zigurd 13y agoWhile you cannot view technology as some kind of force of nature, immune to ethics, blaming the misery of joblessness on technology is beside the point. When is the last time the minimum wage was raised? The last time the work week shortened? Those laws are in place because of technology eliminating human labor. Those legal changes were the solution to a problem technology created. But they have not been updated while technology is galloping away. We blithely crush low-skill, entry level jobs because they are easy to crush. Technologists have a responsibility to mitigate the impact of technology. But the answer isn't to restrain technology. The answer is to deliver benefits to society as a whole, and that comes from restructuring our economy to benefit workers.
- rondon 13y agoIf you raise the US Minimum wage to $20 an hour you will immediately see people move their companies to Mexico,China,etc.. So that will only make the problem worse. Instead of making $10 an hour those employees will be making $0.
- fiesycal 13y agoHonest question which companies? Which companies that currently pay workers minimum wage are able to move overseas? Mcdonalds, Walmart etc cannot move their service jobs overseas.
- executor14 13y agoWon't the result just be a further investment in technology that leads from two people making $10 an hour to 1 person making $20.
- jiggy2011 13y agoIt might incentivise those companies to find ways of doing business with less human labour. For example computer checkout /ordering systems or more emphasis on doing business online.
- melling 13y ago
- unono 13y agoHackers can solve this problem - cloud labor, mechanical turk style. Hackers need to turn the tasks done in businesses into small bite size chunks that can be done by masses of unskilled workers. This is purely a software task that hackers relish. - training workers cheaply and effectively, khan academy/udacity/coursera style.The business model for this should not be charging students (an evil practice carried out by colleges) but instead charging businesses for access to those workers. - decentralizing production. Making what is produced by large factories produceable in the home. 3d printers, home robots, and so on. These are also mostly software problems of controlling mechanical parts. That there is joblessness is mostly because hackers are not thinking creatively and working hard enough. Help will not come from other segments of society, they are incapable of doing so because they lack the key skill of which we hackers are famous for - inventiveness.
- jiggy2011 13y agoServices like Mechanical Turk/TaskRabbit/eLance etc emphasize workers as commodities leading to a race to the bottom in prices and the most profit for the platform vendor. Looking at the average earnings on these sorts of platforms it would seem like a challenge to eek out even a meagre existence in a first world country.
- unono 13y agoThe reason for that is because there's far too little work being placed in them. These types of places need to scale 1000x and you'll see wages rise to middle class level. This is also a much bigger opportunity for startups than traditional eyeballs model. A startup that can pull it off could easily be worth a -trillion- dollars. Apple, Microsoft, Google grew large just by taking $100-200 a year from a billion users. Imagine a mechanical turk that grew to a billion users - it could be taking $500 a month from users while paying them $5000 a month. Truly immense potential.
- jiggy2011 13y agoNot sure, these sorts of marketplaces exist largely to commoditize labour. This is especially true if there is more supply than demand. Any buyer can expect to receive competing bids and is likely to choose the cheapest that will get the work done. Higher skilled sellers who can demand higher prices will want to avoid these platform for that reason. They don't want to have the platform owner taking a cut when they are capable of finding customers on their own. This leads to a sort of lemon market where the buyers who are willing to pay the highest rates for the best workers will tend to avoid these places altogether.
- hardwaresofton 13y agoWhile I didn't quite read this article (I skimmed), I talk (read argue) about this subject very often with some friends. I think in the end, the inventor of a technology is somewhat responsible for figuring out what the people he/she will displace can do. For example, if I'm about to put a whole industry out of work ('disrupt'ing it), I think it would be reasonably responsible for me to offer training or some kind of conversion for the workers of that industry (so they can use /license the tool I have made).
- loup-vaillant 13y agoYou're assuming that displaced people should, or need to, work. Also, that they can work. I'd say, not necessarily. Think about the impending disappearance of professional driving. Automation may not be total, but it will probably reach a point where a single human for 50+ trucks is enough (just have the truck communicate with its command centre). So basically, the professional driving profession will likely shrink by a factor of 10 to 100. Now, what's a ex-driver to do? I doubt Google could, nor should, have an answer. Anyway, the reduction of necessary labour, which technology permits, should be good news. If it's not, that's probably because our societies are ill-equipped to deal with such progress.
- hardwaresofton 13y agoRight, but an engineer/creator of such a service that realizes the impact of that technological advancement should at least give forethought to what will come about as a result. If you're going to make an atomic bomb, you should consider the devastation it might cost. While this ISN'T an atomic bomb, if you're going to so heavily disrupt a field such that many people will find themselves out of work, at least giving those people some thought seems to be the responsible choice. On your last point, societies are always ill-equipped to deal with rapid progress. In fact most of it is dismissed until it can't be ignored. However, the problem of introducing change in a way that will not hurt/severely degrade the life quality of large parts of society is worth tackling -- I don't think people should just throw care to the wind and disrupt areas in which displaced employees are unlikely to be able to bounce back. Not that you shouldn't release the technology, just that some thought should be given to the effects of your innovation.