5 ms·

In anticipation of someone bringing up the Luddite Fallacy: [1] It's true that we're still below 50% unemployment, despite tremendous increases in productivity

by jarrett 13y ago

In anticipation of someone bringing up the Luddite Fallacy: [1] It's true that we're still below 50% unemployment, despite tremendous increases in productivity and automation over the preceding centuries. The standard explanation for this phenomenon is that technology eliminates certain jobs, but also creates new jobs that couldn't have existed before. That pattern has indeed held true (in the long run) since the Industrial Revolution began. But crucially, we can't be sure the pattern will hold true forever. There is no proof that it constitutes an inviolable law of economics. It could very well be that technology can result in a major, permanent, net loss of employment, but just hasn't yet. So what could change? What might break the pattern that has held true thus far? Here's one hypothesis. There is an inflection point--a threshold where automation has become sufficiently advanced. Beyond this threshold, our capacity to automate processes is faster than the expansion of demand for those processes. Whereas, before that threshold, new demand could only be satisfied by human labor, owing to society's inability to immediately automate the requisite processes. If this hypothesis is true, then once we cross the threshold, we should see a long-term decline in employment. That's not to say no new jobs will ever be created after reaching the threshold. No doubt they will. Even so, more jobs would be lost than created, resulting in a net decline. If we take this idea to its logical extreme, we can envision a world in which every process and occupation can be trivially automated. If we assume such automation always costs less than subsistence wages[2], then presumably any given firm will choose to automate all of its processes rather than employ people. The result being 0% employment. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment [2] This is a big assumption. There could be a dynamic equilibrium where market forces balance the cost of automation against the cost of living. Thus the TCO of a robot would in many cases be very close to the cost of a human employee. Processes would then be divided amongst humans and robots in accordance with the relative costs of automating each process.

tomp 13y ago
The simplest counterargument to the Luddite Fallacy I have heard is: Animals (e.g. horses), the lowest-skilled "workers", have been completely replaced by machines.
- beat 13y ago
  Interestingly, skilled animal workers haven't been replaced by machines. Example: service dogs (also, hunting and herding dogs). When the animal's advantage over humans is sheer strength and endurance, machines usually work better. But when their advantages are senses and intelligence, they still outperform machines.
- stonemetal 13y ago
  I rather see that as a point in favor of the Luddite Fallacy not a counterargument. The US horse population has crashed from 21 million in 1900 to 3 million in 1960.(PDF warning) (http://www.americanequestrian.com/pdf/US-Equine-Demographics.pdf http://www.americanequestrian.com/pdf/US-Equine-Demographics...) If the human population fell to 15% of its current level because of unemployment, it would probably be pretty unpleasnt for a while.
pygy_ 13y ago
> The result being 0% employment. If the robots don't take over in the meantime.
- jarrett 13y ago
  It's certainly an interesting line of inquiry. Replacement of 100% of human labor would seem to imply a very sophisticated artificial intelligence. We don't yet know what properties that AI would have. Would it be sentient? Would it have ambitions and desires? Are these factors even in our control, or are sentience, ambition, and desire strictly necessary for any AI capable of replacing all human labor? Would there be ethical implications if we put an advanced AI to work? Would the AIs deserve and/or demand full citizenship? Et cetera.
saosebastiao 13y ago
Sure, in the long term, employment may drop to zero. But humans have an almost infinite ability to create, and they definitely have an infinite ability to want. If computers and robots do all the grunt work, and humans have sufficiently advanced economic systems to be able to benefit as a society, what is the harm in 0% employment? People will create when they want to create, and consume when they want to consume. Then, humans will do what they do best: enjoy life.
- normloman 13y ago
  You said it yourself. Do we have sufficiently advanced economic systems to handle this thing? Ideally, everyone would benefit from robotic efficiency. But the way things are going, only the rich will enjoy the benefits. The poor will be at their mercy.
  - saosebastiao 13y ago
    I think it will be like this for a while, with only token changes. But change in that direction isn't impossible...in fact, at some point it will be inevitable. The problem with those types of changes right now is that the world is still highly meritocratic. I know a lot of people would scoff at that idea, but they end up riding the bus to work in the morning thinking that the bus driver might be worth a comfortable living wage but definitely doesn't deserve their college-educated salary because they worked harder for it. And they think that they are better at their job than Joe CubicleMate, and they think they can run the company better than Director Jim, and they think that their friend's step son is a worthless piece of garbage that shouldn't be allowed to collect welfare unless he checks himself into rehab first. And as such, the people who fight for reduced inequality may have a point about billionaires and such, but they don't want so much equality that they can't think they are better than their neighbor. If they want sweeping change, they have to change themselves. Until then, the only meaningful change can be targeted at the extremes.
    - ScottBurson 13y ago
      All your hypothetical example people are male.
jgon 13y ago
I would say that the pattern does not take into account the actual details of the types of automation that have been occurring and further, it takes a myopic view of "unemployment" to prove itself correct. In fact, automation has caused massive unemployment through history if you broaden your view of what "employment" means. The first stage of automation/industrialization used crude technology in the simplest way, for the brute force it could provide. At first you needed your factory to be close to a river so you could use a water wheel for power, and you needed a team of oxen to plow your field. In both of these cases all you needed was linear power greater than a human could provide. Once we figured out steam power and the ability to create simple linear motion in a piston, we didn't have to build our factories on rivers anymore, and thus rivers became "unemployed" in the sense that we no longer had to "employ" them to create things. Same with animals such as oxen that just provided simple brute force pulling/pushing something. Think about the relative ubiquity of the term "ox" in literature from the past and then think about the last time you actually saw an ox. Clearly animals have been dealing with rampant unemployment for quite a while. The second stage of industrialization moved up the food chain and focused on automating things that were repetitive but required more complicated movements and dexterity. The sort of thing that we used to rely on assembly lines to do and such. At the previous level we replaced providers of brute labor with no dexterity. At this level we replaced providers of fine but repetitive labor, and still unemployment wasn't that bad because people could still move up the value chain and do finer labor that required decision making. The third stage of industrialization focused on replacing fine labor that required decision making, where now you have a giant robotic arm that handles all of the spot welding, painting, and assembly of a car for example. If you don't think that this has resulted in a rise in unemployment then you haven't travelled through the American mid-west recently. Because at this third stage we are starting to replace people who are then unable to move up the value chain into labor based solely on analysis and reasoning, both because there are fewer of these jobs and because not everyone can do them. We are now in the fourth stage of industrialization and it is here that we are really going to come to grips with massive automation induced unemployment, because automation has moved sufficiently up the value chain, from brute force, to fine but repetitive labor, to labor requiring limited decision making, and finally to labor requiring reasoning as its primary component. Look outside your window, look at all of the cabs driving down the street and realize that once a computer can drive a car, and it will be able to in a decade or less, all of those jobs will be obsolete. And if a computer can drive a car it can probably analyze an x-ray or mri, it can translate a document via ocr, it can cook your fast food, it can write a sports recap, and it can balance the books. Once this level of the value chain is displaced where do these people go? Into jobs requiring creative work? Jobs requiring design or analytical work? How many of those will there be, and is that a realistic alternative for everyone? No, the Luddite Fallacy is just a convenient way to avoid thinking about the implications of the technology we build and what is happening to people as we work our way higher and higher up the value chain, crowding those at the bottom either up into the next level or out of the employment market. As as we start to reach levels which are practically the limit for larger and larger amounts of people we can expect to see greater and greater unemployment unless we figure out a way to grapple with these repercussions.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Wrong way of looking at things. We never reach "ultra-high" levels of unemployment, but the definition of unemployment and the full-employment rate keep being changed. There was a time when 2% of the old U3 was full employment. Then there was 4% of the new U3 being full employment, but women were working so the total labor-force participation was higher. Now the USA (for which I'm aware of the numbers) has ~6.7% new new U3 unemployment with the lowest total labor-force participation in decades. You also need to look at total work hours (ie: mean work hours multiplied by size of the active labor force), which have universally gone down with the advance of technology. When you look at things this way, technology has already been "destroying jobs" for centuries. That's why we don't have women and children spending 60 hours/week in coal mines! It's why we now consider it normal for the elderly to retire at 65 instead of working until they die, and for children to complete 12 years of compulsory education (with the middle classes putting in another 4 years of economically compelled education at college/trade school/university). Technology does destroy jobs, and that's a great thing. It is the means by which we have afforded humans the time and means to be human.
- jarrett 13y ago
  True, but I was using "unemployment" to refer to a condition in which a person is unable to find employment offering subsistence wages. This is an important distinction. So far, technology has not made it impossible for most members of society to earn subsistence wages. But what if that changed? That, to me, is the fascinating question.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
We could have been much closer to automation already, but we still have clerks and call center attendants, which are trivial to automate. Why? I believe it just doesn't happen because, although automation can increase productivity and lower costs long-term, it has a high initial investment compared to human labor for many non-critical tasks and the pressure everywhere is for profits now. Plus, human labor is cheap, and will keep being cheap as long as population is increasing, so this is a force that will push more and more against automation the more we automate. The critical threshold between human labor -> automation will happen only once (and if) human population growth turns negative, turning wages up.
- jarrett 13y ago
  I don't think they're trivial to automate, actually. Take the Home Depot self-checkout counters. They're already present in most (all?) Home Depot locations that I've visited. But Home Depot hasn't gotten rid of clerks entirely. This is probably in part because the self-checkout counters don't always work properly. Furthermore, there are things Home Depot sells which the self-checkout machines can't process. Based on that example, it seems that automating clerks well enough to eliminate clerks altogether is actually a hard problem. As for call centers, they already are heavily automated, and have been for some time. Every touchtone menu you're forced to deal with is evidence of this fact. Nonetheless, there comes a point when touchtone menus can't solve the customer's problem. (I for one only call a company if I'm facing an unusual situation, so the touchtone menu never solves my problem.) Because artificial intelligence cannot yet listen to a person's problems and devise a solution, human operators are still needed.

by jarrett 13y ago

tomp 13y ago

The simplest counterargument to the Luddite Fallacy I have heard is: Animals (e.g. horses), the lowest-skilled "workers", have been completely replaced by machines.

beat 13y ago
Interestingly, skilled animal workers haven't been replaced by machines. Example: service dogs (also, hunting and herding dogs). When the animal's advantage over humans is sheer strength and endurance, machines usually work better. But when their advantages are senses and intelligence, they still outperform machines.
stonemetal 13y ago
I rather see that as a point in favor of the Luddite Fallacy not a counterargument. The US horse population has crashed from 21 million in 1900 to 3 million in 1960.(PDF warning) (http://www.americanequestrian.com/pdf/US-Equine-Demographics.pdf http://www.americanequestrian.com/pdf/US-Equine-Demographics...) If the human population fell to 15% of its current level because of unemployment, it would probably be pretty unpleasnt for a while.

pygy_ 13y ago

> The result being 0% employment. If the robots don't take over in the meantime.

jarrett 13y ago
It's certainly an interesting line of inquiry. Replacement of 100% of human labor would seem to imply a very sophisticated artificial intelligence. We don't yet know what properties that AI would have. Would it be sentient? Would it have ambitions and desires? Are these factors even in our control, or are sentience, ambition, and desire strictly necessary for any AI capable of replacing all human labor? Would there be ethical implications if we put an advanced AI to work? Would the AIs deserve and/or demand full citizenship? Et cetera.

saosebastiao 13y ago

Sure, in the long term, employment may drop to zero. But humans have an almost infinite ability to create, and they definitely have an infinite ability to want. If computers and robots do all the grunt work, and humans have sufficiently advanced economic systems to be able to benefit as a society, what is the harm in 0% employment? People will create when they want to create, and consume when they want to consume. Then, humans will do what they do best: enjoy life.

normloman 13y ago
You said it yourself. Do we have sufficiently advanced economic systems to handle this thing? Ideally, everyone would benefit from robotic efficiency. But the way things are going, only the rich will enjoy the benefits. The poor will be at their mercy.
- saosebastiao 13y ago
  I think it will be like this for a while, with only token changes. But change in that direction isn't impossible...in fact, at some point it will be inevitable. The problem with those types of changes right now is that the world is still highly meritocratic. I know a lot of people would scoff at that idea, but they end up riding the bus to work in the morning thinking that the bus driver might be worth a comfortable living wage but definitely doesn't deserve their college-educated salary because they worked harder for it. And they think that they are better at their job than Joe CubicleMate, and they think they can run the company better than Director Jim, and they think that their friend's step son is a worthless piece of garbage that shouldn't be allowed to collect welfare unless he checks himself into rehab first. And as such, the people who fight for reduced inequality may have a point about billionaires and such, but they don't want so much equality that they can't think they are better than their neighbor. If they want sweeping change, they have to change themselves. Until then, the only meaningful change can be targeted at the extremes.
  - ScottBurson 13y ago
    All your hypothetical example people are male.

jgon 13y ago

I would say that the pattern does not take into account the actual details of the types of automation that have been occurring and further, it takes a myopic view of "unemployment" to prove itself correct. In fact, automation has caused massive unemployment through history if you broaden your view of what "employment" means. The first stage of automation/industrialization used crude technology in the simplest way, for the brute force it could provide. At first you needed your factory to be close to a river so you could use a water wheel for power, and you needed a team of oxen to plow your field. In both of these cases all you needed was linear power greater than a human could provide. Once we figured out steam power and the ability to create simple linear motion in a piston, we didn't have to build our factories on rivers anymore, and thus rivers became "unemployed" in the sense that we no longer had to "employ" them to create things. Same with animals such as oxen that just provided simple brute force pulling/pushing something. Think about the relative ubiquity of the term "ox" in literature from the past and then think about the last time you actually saw an ox. Clearly animals have been dealing with rampant unemployment for quite a while. The second stage of industrialization moved up the food chain and focused on automating things that were repetitive but required more complicated movements and dexterity. The sort of thing that we used to rely on assembly lines to do and such. At the previous level we replaced providers of brute labor with no dexterity. At this level we replaced providers of fine but repetitive labor, and still unemployment wasn't that bad because people could still move up the value chain and do finer labor that required decision making. The third stage of industrialization focused on replacing fine labor that required decision making, where now you have a giant robotic arm that handles all of the spot welding, painting, and assembly of a car for example. If you don't think that this has resulted in a rise in unemployment then you haven't travelled through the American mid-west recently. Because at this third stage we are starting to replace people who are then unable to move up the value chain into labor based solely on analysis and reasoning, both because there are fewer of these jobs and because not everyone can do them. We are now in the fourth stage of industrialization and it is here that we are really going to come to grips with massive automation induced unemployment, because automation has moved sufficiently up the value chain, from brute force, to fine but repetitive labor, to labor requiring limited decision making, and finally to labor requiring reasoning as its primary component. Look outside your window, look at all of the cabs driving down the street and realize that once a computer can drive a car, and it will be able to in a decade or less, all of those jobs will be obsolete. And if a computer can drive a car it can probably analyze an x-ray or mri, it can translate a document via ocr, it can cook your fast food, it can write a sports recap, and it can balance the books. Once this level of the value chain is displaced where do these people go? Into jobs requiring creative work? Jobs requiring design or analytical work? How many of those will there be, and is that a realistic alternative for everyone? No, the Luddite Fallacy is just a convenient way to avoid thinking about the implications of the technology we build and what is happening to people as we work our way higher and higher up the value chain, crowding those at the bottom either up into the next level or out of the employment market. As as we start to reach levels which are practically the limit for larger and larger amounts of people we can expect to see greater and greater unemployment unless we figure out a way to grapple with these repercussions.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

Wrong way of looking at things. We never reach "ultra-high" levels of unemployment, but the definition of unemployment and the full-employment rate keep being changed. There was a time when 2% of the old U3 was full employment. Then there was 4% of the new U3 being full employment, but women were working so the total labor-force participation was higher. Now the USA (for which I'm aware of the numbers) has ~6.7% new new U3 unemployment with the lowest total labor-force participation in decades. You also need to look at total work hours (ie: mean work hours multiplied by size of the active labor force), which have universally gone down with the advance of technology. When you look at things this way, technology has already been "destroying jobs" for centuries. That's why we don't have women and children spending 60 hours/week in coal mines! It's why we now consider it normal for the elderly to retire at 65 instead of working until they die, and for children to complete 12 years of compulsory education (with the middle classes putting in another 4 years of economically compelled education at college/trade school/university). Technology does destroy jobs, and that's a great thing. It is the means by which we have afforded humans the time and means to be human.

jarrett 13y ago
True, but I was using "unemployment" to refer to a condition in which a person is unable to find employment offering subsistence wages. This is an important distinction. So far, technology has not made it impossible for most members of society to earn subsistence wages. But what if that changed? That, to me, is the fascinating question.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

We could have been much closer to automation already, but we still have clerks and call center attendants, which are trivial to automate. Why? I believe it just doesn't happen because, although automation can increase productivity and lower costs long-term, it has a high initial investment compared to human labor for many non-critical tasks and the pressure everywhere is for profits now. Plus, human labor is cheap, and will keep being cheap as long as population is increasing, so this is a force that will push more and more against automation the more we automate. The critical threshold between human labor -> automation will happen only once (and if) human population growth turns negative, turning wages up.

jarrett 13y ago
I don't think they're trivial to automate, actually. Take the Home Depot self-checkout counters. They're already present in most (all?) Home Depot locations that I've visited. But Home Depot hasn't gotten rid of clerks entirely. This is probably in part because the self-checkout counters don't always work properly. Furthermore, there are things Home Depot sells which the self-checkout machines can't process. Based on that example, it seems that automating clerks well enough to eliminate clerks altogether is actually a hard problem. As for call centers, they already are heavily automated, and have been for some time. Every touchtone menu you're forced to deal with is evidence of this fact. Nonetheless, there comes a point when touchtone menus can't solve the customer's problem. (I for one only call a company if I'm facing an unusual situation, so the touchtone menu never solves my problem.) Because artificial intelligence cannot yet listen to a person's problems and devise a solution, human operators are still needed.