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Will robots steal our jobs? The humble loom suggests not
- hobs 13y agoOne of the arguments of this article is that as technology stabilizes we will be able to demand higher pay. Technology will likely not stabilize.
- slurry 13y agoOverall, technology hasn't really "stabilized" since the loom, either. It has, however, stabilized locally for periods of time in one area of industry or another. And it is likely to do similar things again.
- marcosdumay 13y agoWell, it must, some day. But I'm not betting on any specific millennium. I just love those articles that state that "we have no problem" because "everything just settles out at the end", while forgetting that one of the mechanisms for everything to settle up is a huge share of the population dying. It's survival bias acting at slaughter time.
- WalterBright 13y agoI don't know about England in the 1700's, but during the industrialization of the US, 1800-1900, the life expectancy and just about every other measure of health got dramatically better throughout that century. Another way to look at it as go visit Fort Williams in New York, they have a display of 18th century clothing. Look how tiny it was. It's a dramatic illustration of how hard life was in pre-industrial America. Next visit some Civil War museums and look at the uniforms on display. They're about halfway between colonial sizes and modern sizes.
- snowwrestler 13y agoInternet technology has stabilized already: we're still using HTML, HTTP, javascript, etc. The Space Jam website from 1996 still loads in a browser. Most servers and clients still use IPv4. Etc.
- hobs 13y agoUsing the article's analogies, they talk specifically about web designers. Would a web designer from 1996 have a job in today's market? In the same vein, it would be like saying the autoloom would still work today, obviously it would, but no one would use it to produce goods to sell commercially.
- dllthomas 13y agohttp://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
- mhb 13y agoRichard Posner's view: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2014/01/secular-stagnationposner.html http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2014/01/secular-stagnation...
- tomp 13y agoTL;DR: > It is difficult to imagine productive activities that cannot be automated—mining, construction, many medical services, house cleaning: the list goes on and on. > A decline in the demand for labor, caused by automation, will result in lower wages, without necessarily producing an increase in employment (work effort will not grow if there is no work), let alone an increase in national income. However, as he also states, "with no truck drivers to pay, the cost of truck transportation will fall, and price will follow". In my view, this will further reduce the main necessities of living (food, hygiene products, energy) which will in turn allow people to live with much less money. Therefore, the poverty levels should fall, as well. It is not hard to imagine the government paying enough social welfare so that everyone can afford basic stuff. Actually, government could also just buy enough robots and produce all the necessities itself.
- GFischer 13y agoAs long as population stays manageable, which sounds feasible in developed economies, and the owners of capital accept being taxed to fund that, or go the Bill Gates way.
- tomp 13y ago> the owners of capital accept being taxed to fund that Given that the alternative seems to be riots and potentially a revolution, I think they will see that it is in their benefit to keep the population living reasonably well.
- yarrel 13y agoInvestment in riot control gear and militarization of police in first world countries doesn't suggest that this realization is going to come any time soon.
- hrishirc 13y agowhy would anyone want to job in the first place...? If you're in a place where you need to mindlessly execute duties, it's not a good place.
- vshade 13y agoIf you have some kind of basic income then what you said makes sense. If not, people still need food and shelter.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- scotty79 13y agoI thought humble loom is a name of some weird startup.
- chrisdevereux 13y agoOn the other hand, the mechanization of agriculture had devastating social consequences when introduced to the UK in the 1700s, leading to mass unemployment, crimewaves and the introduction of the death penalty for stealing food. The industrial revolution eventualy created replacements but things got very ugly for a few generations. There's no reason to assume that replacement forms of employment will automatically appear when needed.
- YokoZar 13y agoThe loom was an example of a technology that actually had a more egalitarian effect on wealth distribution: expensive skilled labor was replaced with greater numbers of cheap unskilled labor. Given the right prices, this sort of technology can make sense even if it doesn't actually "save" labor at all -- replacing one efficient skilled person with two inefficient unskilled ones for the same output makes business sense if the skilled labor is more than double the price. Today's market has a lot of disparity in labor prices like this, especially when you look at it globablly. So it's entirely possible for new tech that doesn't actually save labor in terms of output per worker to find a niche. At the same time, it's also possible for tech to do the inverse, and replace three expensive unskilled workers with one skilled one who commands double the wage. So in terms of income inequality, at least, it's not entirely clear where technology will take us.
- al2o3cr 13y ago"In the 19th century, the maturation and standardization of weaving technology finally brought long-overdue raises to textile workers." Wow. Way to completely write out of the story the PEOPLE who fought tooth-and-nail to get those raises, WaPo.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls Of course, acknowledging the real struggle might seriously impact the whole "things will get better by themselves, just keep sleeping" argument of the piece...
- FD3SA 13y agoKeep in mind that The Washington Post was recently acquired by Jeff Bezos. This article makes much more sense when viewed in the light of Amazon's current PR problems due to their treatment of poorly paid warehouse workers. They are desperately trying to automate as fast as possible, and this piece tries its best to spin it as a win-win for everyone.
- TDL 13y agoYou of course have evidence that Bezos is interfering in the editorial operations of the Post, right?
- sliverstorm 13y agoIt's happened enough with other figures & papers that some people take it as good practice to assume, proof or no, and simply disregard the paper on suspect topics. Certainly nothing you can take anyone to court over, but perhaps prudent.
- minouye 13y agoThe idea that Bezos has already turned the WaPo into Amazon's personal PR factory seems highly unlikely. Esp. when you see articles like this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/16/amazon-is-a-hornets-nest-of-malware/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/16...
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- georgeoliver 13y agoTo write an entire article using historical textile production as an example and not mention the impacts of contemporary globalization on the same industry is confusing at best and hopelessly optimistic at worst.
- dredmorbius 13y agoThe point of the article isn't what is happening presently in terms of textiles and globalization, but how technological innovation affected the industry in 18th and 19th century Massachusetts. That said, there are some omissions. The American Colonies / Early United States were labor-constrained. The economy was growing rapidly, and there simply weren't enough warm bodies to meet demand (discussed in Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter VII). Wages were high, supplies of finished goods were limited, and the benefits of industrialization were high. This contrasted with England in which factories drew masses of labor from the countryside, city populations exploded (Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham grew from small towns of 4,000 - 6,000 in 1685 to major cities of 393,000 - 552,000 by 1881, see Arnold Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution), and working conditions in general were abysmal. Which suggests other reasons why picking the Lowell factories as the analysis point is somewhat misguided. Toynbee's Lectures paint a markedly different picture of how industrialization proceeded in the UK. The challenge now is that virtually all basic needs of survival ... and then some ... are satisfied. Does this mean that there's no additional demand or demand growth possible? No. But ... the situation's markedly different from the late 18th century. Too: the dawn of the Industrial Revolution was a period in which there were vast untapped natural resources -- virgin land (or, if you prefer, newly cleared land by way of the aboriginal genocide and pandemics) in the Americas, forests, untilled prairies, and of course, untold gigatons of coal, oil, and gas in the ground. William Stanley Jevons noted that increased efficiencies tended to increase consumption of resources by increasing their marginal utility (the so-called Jevons Paradox) We're looking at a constrained resource environment going out, which may well invert the logic of Jevons Paradox and see fewer resources consumed with increasing efficiency. Which would mean that automation would idle, not employ, hands.
- snowwrestler 13y agoCould the inventors of the loom, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, have imagined the types of jobs most of have today, in the morning of the Information Revolution? I doubt it. There will be industries and jobs enabled by today's technologies, that we can't picture today. My bet is on biotechnology. We know only a very small amount about the systems of life.
- sixbrx 13y agoYeah there may be new jobs, but why would you have a human doing them, when a robot could? We can't pretend that a new tool for humans to use is equivalent to a fully autonomous robot which can think for itself beyond any human capacity. Those two things are fundamentally un-alike.
- lhgaghl 13y ago> Will robots steal our jobs? It's not stealing if I don't want it.
- aridiculous 13y agoThis is conveniently forgetting that demand (which eventually ends in consumer demand) isn't necessarily infinite. We have this thing called a planet we live on, that needs to remain intact (or Elon Musk needs to get a move on getting us to other planets :)
- ealloc 13y ago> as the market for cotton cloth matured in the mid-20th century, further automation no longer generated such increases in demand and new technology slowly eliminated jobs in the textile industry. This seems to be a counterpoint to his thesis: Technology does indeed create unemployment if all demand has already been satisfied. His point should thus be stated with a caveat: Technology does not destroy jobs as long as demand increases along with the increased supply. In order to know whether robots will steal our jobs, we have to first determine whether human demands are already being met or not, and it seems plausible to me that they nearly are today (though the inverse also seems plausible).
- YokoZar 13y ago"Demand" can be a bit of a fuzzy thing. For instance, all those people who were now had "enough" clothes and were saving money from the lower prices were instead buying other things, creating increased demand for some other sector of the economy. Which, presumably, would eventually lead to more jobs elsewhere. I think a better moral for the story is to expect technology to have significant local effects on employment in particular industries (either up or down), but the evidence for the economy as a whole seems to be much more neutral.