14 ms·

AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

141 points by eplanit 12y ago

atemerev 12y ago
Of course, there will be less and less "jobs" in the future. But that's OK. The population growth is already stopping. Productivity will rise to the new heights. Society will adapt — first, by introducing, say, 4-hour work days, then by totally eliminating the concept of a "job" — everyone will be either a temp staffer, or a business founder (or an artisan — arts and crafts will be more valuable than ever). We are moving to post-scarcity, and the future is bright. No more office jobs, though.
- randallsquared 12y ago
  Ah, 1950's future.
- clarebear 12y ago
  I'd like to believe this, but I don't see the corresponding changes in societal structure. If we really are post-scarcity, it would be nice if some sort of average person could have a family if they choose, or at least have access to health care, housing and things to make a reasonable life. Truly part time work with a decent wage almost does not exist in most fields. The people I know trying to make a living doing artisan things would certainly not agree that arts and crafts are more (monetarily) valuable than ever.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- robertfw 12y ago
  Rising productivity has just put more money in precious few pockets. While I truly believe that this vision of the future is technically possible, I have little faith that it will be the future we end up with.
  - protonfish 12y ago
    When has technology ever resulted in the improvement of wages and working hours of the average person? The only things that have ever had a clear, direct affect in quality of life of the masses (both positive and negative) are political.
    - atemerev 12y ago
      > When has technology ever resulted in the improvement of wages and working hours of the average person? Like, every time? Compare the average worker of today with average worker of 100 years ago.
      - Ygg2 12y ago
        > Like, every time? A chicken sees man coming to feed it, so it jumps out in front of him awaiting food. Then one day, man comes with an axe, and chicken still jumps in front of him expecting food. The end. I.e. Correlation doesn't imply causation etc. Imagine having at your disposal perfectly amoral and lethal robotics force. One that only exists to protect you and exterminate any threat to you. What stops the future rich man from treating a fellow man like a dog? Right now, the police might rebel against you if you go too far. I'd be interested to look at average worker today and future where inequality is super rampant. In that society, I think a worker from 100 years ago would compare similarly to a worker from 100 years in such future.
      - sharemywin 12y ago
        world wide or just US. since alot of the work from 100 years ago got outsourced with the polution to parts of the world that don't regulated it as much.
      - Chinjut 12y ago
        Alright, I'd like to. Do you know where I can find statistics on wages and working hours over history (in particular, I'm curious not just about 100 years ago, but also 200, 300, and 400 years ago, to get a fuller sense of the impact of the Industrial Revolution).
      - 12y ago
- Joeri 12y ago
  I doubt we're going post-scarcity any time soon though. We don't have any of the technologies that form the foundation of a post-scarcity society: abundant renewable energy, fully automated just-in-time production of nearly all goods and materials, extremely low cost delivery of goods to the home and/or business, and the intelligent software that ties it all together. Some of those things are close, others, not so much. Aside from a "magic" solution, like the singularity, I do not expect in my life-time to see a post-scarcity society arise. I do agree that the automation of jobs is not a serious cause of concern, though obviously for those whose jobs are displaced it will be. People can't stand to sit around and do nothing for any great stretch of time (although everyone claims otherwise). They will find ways to be busy, and if you automate away one part of activity, other forms will take up its place. Someone will figure out how to monetize it and presto, a new job category. Selling software was once a crazy idea. Selling virtual characters was crazy just a few years ago, and is becoming normal. We will gradually become ever more refined in the sort of virtual goods and services we create through human labor that can be sold online.
  - atemerev 12y ago
    > abundant renewable energy We have enough uranium and thorium for millions of years with breeder cycle. Even if not renewable, who cares? And it's quite ecological, compared to burning oil products. The rest is quite close.
    - afterburner 12y ago
      Renewables are basically already viable, despite what its opponents have been trying to say. It's already more competitive than natural gas in some places, and the next 5 years will be crossing many other such thresholds.
      - jbattle 12y ago
        Is that true even if you normalize subsidies between the different forms of production/transportation/use?
      - 12y ago
- kornork 12y ago
  I've thought in the past that our pursuits might be more oriented towards art, but watching the video above reminded me that machines are getting more and more capable of creating art. Maybe it will depend on whether we're using art to drive an economy, in which case creative robots will win, or we're using art to create meaning in our lives. In the second case, we'll still have to compete with entertainment (created by AIs) fully capable of filling our waking hours.
- ddeklotz 12y ago
  Robert Owen thought the same thing at the beginning of the industrial revolution some 200 years ago. Skyrocketing productivity was supposed to lead to a new age where a society could produce all it needed with little effort, and much time would be left over for leisure and pursuit of the arts. Instead, there were mass populations of over-urbanized, overworked, impoverished people. Turns out that when the means of production are owned by the few elite, innovations in productivity are more likely to marginalize the rest.
- Homunculiheaded 12y ago
  "post-scarcity" is an illusion presented to people living at the very top of the economic pyramid. I'm sure most HNers are in the top 90th percentile of US household income on their own, living in a world mostly surrounded by other affluent individuals working in a similar field, all in jobs with increasingly flexible work hours, better benefits and nearly unlimited job prospects. The world only looks like it's moving towards post-scarcity because the resources consumed and waste produced have been nearly completely outsourced away, and the pangs of the labor issues created by automation are happening somewhere else. Post-scarcity is not an issue of 'productivity' but of resource use. As Jevons paradox [0] points out the more efficiently we use resources the more of them we tend to use. Looking merely at productivity and efficiency without looking at resource use and waste production gives a wildly incomplete picture of "post-scarcity". What I see is that the world is increasingly separating into a small sub-population that is presented the illusion of post-scarcity and a another, growing, subset that is feeling the effects of scarcity required to maintain that illusion. When I see data to support the argument that resource use and waste production are plummeting, then I'll believe in narratives about post-scarcity. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
    There's a lot of delusion about the developing energy picture. The arithmetic shows we will not be running millions of robot slaves and self driving electric cars on solar and wind power. We will be walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines. We are running out of fossil fuel energy and still no viable replacements have been identified.
    - phaemon 12y ago
      I like how you identify "walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines" as signs of the collapse of civilisation. To most people, those are normal things.
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    If labor is effectively free (because robots don't get paid) then I don't think that the products of that labor would be particularly scarce. Even material costs are primarily the labor cost to extract or recycle a material.
- twobits 12y ago
  "We are moving to post-scarcity, and the future is bright." If you are the king, why do you need to keep those billions of loud, dirty, polluting, dangerous, depleting the natural resources, and now UNNEEDED serfs around? When you could gain by exploiting them, great. Someone had to do the hard work. But now / soon, they have nothing to offer, besides problems. Problems, are to be ..exterminated. Imo, the (near) future, is either paradise, or total hell. Nothing in between. And history isn't offering reasons to be optimistic. (PS: Yes, I totally understand that the above stands on the pov that there are some "kings", and we are the "serfs". It's a pov that's easy to dismiss. Personally, I don't.)
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    > Problems, are to be ..exterminated. > Imo, the (near) future, is either paradise, or total hell. Nothing in between. And history isn't offering reasons to be optimistic. I doubt it is either of those. People can't go against billions, not without significant casualties, and not any time soon. I fear what the solution might be... If you are rich you might be more interested in culling number of those unneeded serfs by simply neutering them and providing them enough distractions unhealthy food and poor medicine that they just slowly keel over. Otoh, intelligence isn't hereditary, so killing off those 'serfs' might also reduce the numbers of intelligent people.
    - Chronic29 12y ago
      Why not? The Chinese government exterminates Muslims in China (the problem) and do a fantastic job not telling the world about it.
    - loup-vaillant 12y ago
      > Otoh, intelligence isn't hereditary How do you know that?
e0m 12y ago
CGP Grey recently put out a video along very similar lines. Worth 15 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&list=UU2C_jShtL725hvbm1arSV9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&list=UU2C_jShtL7...
- robertfw 12y ago
  I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technology that we have in development NOW is going to impact our economy. I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the decisions that need to be made.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    I really hope we dont let the bottom half of our economy fall before we strive for the restructuring we will need. Because when we let stuff fail, billions or trillions in value will vanish with it.
  - furyofantares 12y ago
    I don't understand why the video goes through the history of technology reducing the need for types of labor and doesn't acknowledge that we keep thinking of new things to do. The closest he comes to making an argument that we won't keep making new jobs is that we didn't keep making new jobs _for horses_ which seems to me like arguing that we didn't keep making new jobs for spears and hammers and pencils. I have concerns about this myself, but I don't find that video remotely convincing.
    - Afforess 12y ago
      CGP Grey went through the analogy of horses and the history of technology to emphasize the line of thinking that the invention of new technology will lead to the creation of new jobs is a fallacy and false. In the past, new technological changes lead to the demise of horses. There were no "new" jobs that horses could fulfill. So it will be with humans.
elleferrer 12y ago
There will be a bright future for our growing aging population.
- pacala 12y ago
  There will be a bright future for our capital owning population. There is a weak correlation between old people and capital ownership and easy to mistake the two if inferring from the age axis, e.g. person X owns more capital at 50 than at 25. However, this doesn't generalize well when doing a cross section at a given age, see for example the average savings for a 50 year old, which is a meager $43,797 http://www.statisticbrain.com/retirement-statistics http://www.statisticbrain.com/retirement-statistics.
  - atemerev 12y ago
    Under capitalism, it's good to own capital, naturally. You can start by saving a $100.
    - rthomas6 12y ago
      No, you can start by investing $100.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    That's why we need to move away capitalism before it's too late, if we want to have part in that bright future.
    - grondilu 12y ago
      This part in that future is actually made of shares in the stock market. If you want some, you have to buy it. Fortunately anyone can : it's a free market and you can enter with as little as a few hundreds bucks.
      - josephagoss 12y ago
        But isn't it easier to do away with capitalism altogether so that we can all be equal, no matter the effort we put in? This future of no capitalism people want scares the heck out of me, almost makes everything I've worked for pointless.
JeremyReimer 12y ago
If a panel of experts are evenly split on their opinions about the future of jobs, it seems to me that nobody really knows what is going to happen. It's one thing to point to how historically new technology created new jobs to replace those it displaced, but I get the feeling that this time it might be very different. All the rules go out the window when technological acceleration reaches a certain point. I'm not saying that we'll hit the Singularity and upload our brains into computers, but we might hit a sort of "economic singularity" where it no longer becomes economically viable to create new jobs. What happens then is very much up to our society to decide.
- hvs 12y ago
  Peoples' wants and desires are infinite. As long as there are things to desire, there will be jobs to do.
  - atemerev 12y ago
    True!
  - clusterfoo 12y ago
    So long as machines are not far more effective at building (and possibly some day even engineering) those things we desire...
    - seanflyon 12y ago
      If machines can make everything we want for so cheap that we can't possibly compete that mean that everything we want is incredibly cheap.
      - jjoonathan 12y ago
        Nope. "Incredibly cheap" is not a relevant metric. The relevant quantity is price/income. If income drops by 50% and price drops by 10%, the good has still effectively become almost twice as expensive.
digitalengineer 12y ago
"Race against the Machine" is actually a good book about the topic: "In Race Against the Machine, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show that there's been no stagnation in technology -- in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating. "...digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie." http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-...
QuantumChaos 12y ago
From the point of view of classical economics, AI increases the productiveness of capital, and certain specialized kinds of labor (e.g. creating and improving AI). While this increases the total output of society, it also increases inequality. We already have in place mechanisms to deal with inequality, namely income tax and welfare. As the total output of society grows, we will be able to afford more generous kinds of welfare, until eventually we probably settle on a negative income tax scheme. Note that a correctly designed welfare system wouldn't result in lots of people living on welfare, but rather everyone working fewer hours. So I imagine that the future could be quite good, as long as our methods for redistributing wealth are able to keep pace with technological change (and there are some great examples to follow in the Western world, e.g. Scandinavia, Australia and NZ)
- ztko 12y ago
  Why do you say that AI will automatically increase inequality? Not necessarily disagreeing but interested to hear your thoughts. I'm also wary of the impact that AI and robotics may have but am cautiously optimistic. While I do think that many jobs will be displaced by automation, I wonder if we'll also see a labor revolution or rather emergence of a new sector/type of jobs. E.F. Schumacher talked a lot about the dehumanizing nature of many jobs, and I think in a perfect world automation and robotics could take over the repetitive or dangerous jobs, freeing those workers to take on more fulfilling and important jobs.
  - altcognito 12y ago
    I hope as you do but.... Small scale tools for small groups and individuals might be more flexible but will absoltuely be less prodigious/efficient than large scale factories and therefore margins and pricing will always put the little guys on the edges of the economy, thereby exacerbating inequality.
  - lilsunnybee 12y ago
    Automation increases the benefits of owning capital over providing labor, in ever growing proportions. The less people are needed to provide labor, and have any resources distributed to them at all, the more fruits accrue solely to capital-holders.
nabla9 12y ago
There was only two economists discussing the future of jobs :( Robotics and automation are changing business from labor intensive to capital intensive. Wage share (share of wages from the GDP) has been going down since early 70's in all OECD countries. Automation will continue to increase that trend together with more competition from third world. The job loss should be considered as one issue in downward pressure for wages caused by automation. Workers can compete with with automation by earning less. People from developing world will be able to compete against automation longer. Removing cashiers and logistic workers with automation and more sophisticated vending machines might generate bigger dent to the jobs than self driving cars (They have vending machine in Italy that makes fresh pizza starting from the flour).
- electromagnetic 12y ago
  My local grocery store has a fresh food department, that basically sells the cooked version of the stores prepared foods (so the pizza they sell is their pizza dough, their marinara sauce, their carton of cheese and their packs of pepperoni, all of which you can grab and make the same pizza right at home) and the store brand foods. The thing I find amazing is that they have a couple of kids working barely above minimum wage essentially doing the task of a vending machine. Their most labour intensive task is rolling out the ball of pizza dough. I won't be surprised to see grocery stores rapidly change to near full automation. We already have automated shipping warehouses, stocking store shelves is essentially the reverse process and with proper inventory monitoring a shelf would never be empty. Checkouts are already becoming self-serve in many places as it allows more "cashiers" to be open thus reducing lines. Every job in a grocery store is shockingly automatable, from assembling the loads at the distribution warehouses, we're already talking automated tractor trailers for freight, automated fork lifts to load and unload, automated shelf stackers and self-serve cashes. Whose going to be working? Security, at least until we automate that. I work construction, and its honestly a matter of time before I'm automated out of a job. I'm blessed by the fact that rough terrain is the main limiting factor, that I might actually stay employed longer than most. The reason I see automation taking over is because we're approaching onsite manufacture of a lot of materials. It used to be just eavestrough, but now every form of steel roofing can be made on site. It's only a matter of time before someone starts mounting them on boom lifts and running them out in place for workers to just screw down. From there its only going to be a short time until the machine makes and screws the piece. We're starting to see vinyl products that can be bent to make fascia, which means a machine can easily produce vinyl siding and accessories on site. So how long until they get mounted on a scissor lift and parked at one end of the wall and you can have a 50ft wall of seamless siding.
dqdo 12y ago
As a society, we need to ask ourselves two questions: (1) what is the purpose of work? and (2) what do people find valuable? The premise of question 1 is that we should not work just for the sake of saying that we are working. Rather we should work because we are creating something of value for others and ourselves. I think that automation will have a profound impact on the economy by making certain types of work economically infeasible. But this is not necessarily a problem as long as people realize it and move on to work on more highly value areas. I believe that as individuals our desires are limitless and there will always be a demand for something. We just need to figure out what that demand is and work in that domain. Overall automation will free us from many manual labor jobs and allow us to produce more art, poetry, mathematics, and science.
- ewzimm 12y ago
  I think we also have to consider conservatives who believe that there is inherent value in certain lifestyles that is independent of the products of those lifestyles. Automated labor will also free us to compete in whatever inefficient way we want. Just as garment technology has not stopped people from knitting, automated labor will still allow people to choose to be Amish. Personally, I think we can find better things to do than work most jobs that exist today. We need to be open to the idea of perpetual changes in what we can and should do with our time.
- __Joker 12y ago
  One of intended or unintended consequence of the work is distribution of wealth. And the effects of the growing robotics and automation will be breaking this distribution. Per se, this should not negative, unless we are prepared for this.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

141 points by eplanit 12y ago

Of course, there will be less and less "jobs" in the future. But that's OK. The population growth is already stopping. Productivity will rise to the new heights. Society will adapt — first, by introducing, say, 4-hour work days, then by totally eliminating the concept of a "job" — everyone will be either a temp staffer, or a business founder (or an artisan — arts and crafts will be more valuable than ever). We are moving to post-scarcity, and the future is bright. No more office jobs, though.

randallsquared 12y ago
Ah, 1950's future.
clarebear 12y ago
I'd like to believe this, but I don't see the corresponding changes in societal structure. If we really are post-scarcity, it would be nice if some sort of average person could have a family if they choose, or at least have access to health care, housing and things to make a reasonable life. Truly part time work with a decent wage almost does not exist in most fields. The people I know trying to make a living doing artisan things would certainly not agree that arts and crafts are more (monetarily) valuable than ever.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
robertfw 12y ago
Rising productivity has just put more money in precious few pockets. While I truly believe that this vision of the future is technically possible, I have little faith that it will be the future we end up with.
- protonfish 12y ago
  When has technology ever resulted in the improvement of wages and working hours of the average person? The only things that have ever had a clear, direct affect in quality of life of the masses (both positive and negative) are political.
  - atemerev 12y ago
    > When has technology ever resulted in the improvement of wages and working hours of the average person? Like, every time? Compare the average worker of today with average worker of 100 years ago.
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      > Like, every time? A chicken sees man coming to feed it, so it jumps out in front of him awaiting food. Then one day, man comes with an axe, and chicken still jumps in front of him expecting food. The end. I.e. Correlation doesn't imply causation etc. Imagine having at your disposal perfectly amoral and lethal robotics force. One that only exists to protect you and exterminate any threat to you. What stops the future rich man from treating a fellow man like a dog? Right now, the police might rebel against you if you go too far. I'd be interested to look at average worker today and future where inequality is super rampant. In that society, I think a worker from 100 years ago would compare similarly to a worker from 100 years in such future.
    - sharemywin 12y ago
      world wide or just US. since alot of the work from 100 years ago got outsourced with the polution to parts of the world that don't regulated it as much.
    - Chinjut 12y ago
      Alright, I'd like to. Do you know where I can find statistics on wages and working hours over history (in particular, I'm curious not just about 100 years ago, but also 200, 300, and 400 years ago, to get a fuller sense of the impact of the Industrial Revolution).
    - 12y ago
Joeri 12y ago
I doubt we're going post-scarcity any time soon though. We don't have any of the technologies that form the foundation of a post-scarcity society: abundant renewable energy, fully automated just-in-time production of nearly all goods and materials, extremely low cost delivery of goods to the home and/or business, and the intelligent software that ties it all together. Some of those things are close, others, not so much. Aside from a "magic" solution, like the singularity, I do not expect in my life-time to see a post-scarcity society arise. I do agree that the automation of jobs is not a serious cause of concern, though obviously for those whose jobs are displaced it will be. People can't stand to sit around and do nothing for any great stretch of time (although everyone claims otherwise). They will find ways to be busy, and if you automate away one part of activity, other forms will take up its place. Someone will figure out how to monetize it and presto, a new job category. Selling software was once a crazy idea. Selling virtual characters was crazy just a few years ago, and is becoming normal. We will gradually become ever more refined in the sort of virtual goods and services we create through human labor that can be sold online.
- atemerev 12y ago
  > abundant renewable energy We have enough uranium and thorium for millions of years with breeder cycle. Even if not renewable, who cares? And it's quite ecological, compared to burning oil products. The rest is quite close.
  - afterburner 12y ago
    Renewables are basically already viable, despite what its opponents have been trying to say. It's already more competitive than natural gas in some places, and the next 5 years will be crossing many other such thresholds.
    - jbattle 12y ago
      Is that true even if you normalize subsidies between the different forms of production/transportation/use?
    - 12y ago
kornork 12y ago
I've thought in the past that our pursuits might be more oriented towards art, but watching the video above reminded me that machines are getting more and more capable of creating art. Maybe it will depend on whether we're using art to drive an economy, in which case creative robots will win, or we're using art to create meaning in our lives. In the second case, we'll still have to compete with entertainment (created by AIs) fully capable of filling our waking hours.
ddeklotz 12y ago
Robert Owen thought the same thing at the beginning of the industrial revolution some 200 years ago. Skyrocketing productivity was supposed to lead to a new age where a society could produce all it needed with little effort, and much time would be left over for leisure and pursuit of the arts. Instead, there were mass populations of over-urbanized, overworked, impoverished people. Turns out that when the means of production are owned by the few elite, innovations in productivity are more likely to marginalize the rest.
Homunculiheaded 12y ago
"post-scarcity" is an illusion presented to people living at the very top of the economic pyramid. I'm sure most HNers are in the top 90th percentile of US household income on their own, living in a world mostly surrounded by other affluent individuals working in a similar field, all in jobs with increasingly flexible work hours, better benefits and nearly unlimited job prospects. The world only looks like it's moving towards post-scarcity because the resources consumed and waste produced have been nearly completely outsourced away, and the pangs of the labor issues created by automation are happening somewhere else. Post-scarcity is not an issue of 'productivity' but of resource use. As Jevons paradox [0] points out the more efficiently we use resources the more of them we tend to use. Looking merely at productivity and efficiency without looking at resource use and waste production gives a wildly incomplete picture of "post-scarcity". What I see is that the world is increasingly separating into a small sub-population that is presented the illusion of post-scarcity and a another, growing, subset that is feeling the effects of scarcity required to maintain that illusion. When I see data to support the argument that resource use and waste production are plummeting, then I'll believe in narratives about post-scarcity. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  There's a lot of delusion about the developing energy picture. The arithmetic shows we will not be running millions of robot slaves and self driving electric cars on solar and wind power. We will be walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines. We are running out of fossil fuel energy and still no viable replacements have been identified.
  - phaemon 12y ago
    I like how you identify "walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines" as signs of the collapse of civilisation. To most people, those are normal things.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  If labor is effectively free (because robots don't get paid) then I don't think that the products of that labor would be particularly scarce. Even material costs are primarily the labor cost to extract or recycle a material.
twobits 12y ago
"We are moving to post-scarcity, and the future is bright." If you are the king, why do you need to keep those billions of loud, dirty, polluting, dangerous, depleting the natural resources, and now UNNEEDED serfs around? When you could gain by exploiting them, great. Someone had to do the hard work. But now / soon, they have nothing to offer, besides problems. Problems, are to be ..exterminated. Imo, the (near) future, is either paradise, or total hell. Nothing in between. And history isn't offering reasons to be optimistic. (PS: Yes, I totally understand that the above stands on the pov that there are some "kings", and we are the "serfs". It's a pov that's easy to dismiss. Personally, I don't.)
- Ygg2 12y ago
  > Problems, are to be ..exterminated. > Imo, the (near) future, is either paradise, or total hell. Nothing in between. And history isn't offering reasons to be optimistic. I doubt it is either of those. People can't go against billions, not without significant casualties, and not any time soon. I fear what the solution might be... If you are rich you might be more interested in culling number of those unneeded serfs by simply neutering them and providing them enough distractions unhealthy food and poor medicine that they just slowly keel over. Otoh, intelligence isn't hereditary, so killing off those 'serfs' might also reduce the numbers of intelligent people.
  - Chronic29 12y ago
    Why not? The Chinese government exterminates Muslims in China (the problem) and do a fantastic job not telling the world about it.
  - loup-vaillant 12y ago
    > Otoh, intelligence isn't hereditary How do you know that?

e0m 12y ago

CGP Grey recently put out a video along very similar lines. Worth 15 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&list=UU2C_jShtL725hvbm1arSV9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&list=UU2C_jShtL7...

robertfw 12y ago
I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technology that we have in development NOW is going to impact our economy. I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the decisions that need to be made.
- sitkack 12y ago
  I really hope we dont let the bottom half of our economy fall before we strive for the restructuring we will need. Because when we let stuff fail, billions or trillions in value will vanish with it.
- furyofantares 12y ago
  I don't understand why the video goes through the history of technology reducing the need for types of labor and doesn't acknowledge that we keep thinking of new things to do. The closest he comes to making an argument that we won't keep making new jobs is that we didn't keep making new jobs _for horses_ which seems to me like arguing that we didn't keep making new jobs for spears and hammers and pencils. I have concerns about this myself, but I don't find that video remotely convincing.
  - Afforess 12y ago
    CGP Grey went through the analogy of horses and the history of technology to emphasize the line of thinking that the invention of new technology will lead to the creation of new jobs is a fallacy and false. In the past, new technological changes lead to the demise of horses. There were no "new" jobs that horses could fulfill. So it will be with humans.

elleferrer 12y ago

There will be a bright future for our growing aging population.

pacala 12y ago
There will be a bright future for our capital owning population. There is a weak correlation between old people and capital ownership and easy to mistake the two if inferring from the age axis, e.g. person X owns more capital at 50 than at 25. However, this doesn't generalize well when doing a cross section at a given age, see for example the average savings for a 50 year old, which is a meager $43,797 http://www.statisticbrain.com/retirement-statistics http://www.statisticbrain.com/retirement-statistics.
- atemerev 12y ago
  Under capitalism, it's good to own capital, naturally. You can start by saving a $100.
  - rthomas6 12y ago
    No, you can start by investing $100.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  That's why we need to move away capitalism before it's too late, if we want to have part in that bright future.
  - grondilu 12y ago
    This part in that future is actually made of shares in the stock market. If you want some, you have to buy it. Fortunately anyone can : it's a free market and you can enter with as little as a few hundreds bucks.
    - josephagoss 12y ago
      But isn't it easier to do away with capitalism altogether so that we can all be equal, no matter the effort we put in? This future of no capitalism people want scares the heck out of me, almost makes everything I've worked for pointless.

JeremyReimer 12y ago

If a panel of experts are evenly split on their opinions about the future of jobs, it seems to me that nobody really knows what is going to happen. It's one thing to point to how historically new technology created new jobs to replace those it displaced, but I get the feeling that this time it might be very different. All the rules go out the window when technological acceleration reaches a certain point. I'm not saying that we'll hit the Singularity and upload our brains into computers, but we might hit a sort of "economic singularity" where it no longer becomes economically viable to create new jobs. What happens then is very much up to our society to decide.

hvs 12y ago
Peoples' wants and desires are infinite. As long as there are things to desire, there will be jobs to do.
- atemerev 12y ago
  True!
- clusterfoo 12y ago
  So long as machines are not far more effective at building (and possibly some day even engineering) those things we desire...
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    If machines can make everything we want for so cheap that we can't possibly compete that mean that everything we want is incredibly cheap.
    - jjoonathan 12y ago
      Nope. "Incredibly cheap" is not a relevant metric. The relevant quantity is price/income. If income drops by 50% and price drops by 10%, the good has still effectively become almost twice as expensive.

digitalengineer 12y ago

"Race against the Machine" is actually a good book about the topic: "In Race Against the Machine, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show that there's been no stagnation in technology -- in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating. "...digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie." http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-...

QuantumChaos 12y ago

From the point of view of classical economics, AI increases the productiveness of capital, and certain specialized kinds of labor (e.g. creating and improving AI). While this increases the total output of society, it also increases inequality. We already have in place mechanisms to deal with inequality, namely income tax and welfare. As the total output of society grows, we will be able to afford more generous kinds of welfare, until eventually we probably settle on a negative income tax scheme. Note that a correctly designed welfare system wouldn't result in lots of people living on welfare, but rather everyone working fewer hours. So I imagine that the future could be quite good, as long as our methods for redistributing wealth are able to keep pace with technological change (and there are some great examples to follow in the Western world, e.g. Scandinavia, Australia and NZ)

ztko 12y ago
Why do you say that AI will automatically increase inequality? Not necessarily disagreeing but interested to hear your thoughts. I'm also wary of the impact that AI and robotics may have but am cautiously optimistic. While I do think that many jobs will be displaced by automation, I wonder if we'll also see a labor revolution or rather emergence of a new sector/type of jobs. E.F. Schumacher talked a lot about the dehumanizing nature of many jobs, and I think in a perfect world automation and robotics could take over the repetitive or dangerous jobs, freeing those workers to take on more fulfilling and important jobs.
- altcognito 12y ago
  I hope as you do but.... Small scale tools for small groups and individuals might be more flexible but will absoltuely be less prodigious/efficient than large scale factories and therefore margins and pricing will always put the little guys on the edges of the economy, thereby exacerbating inequality.
- lilsunnybee 12y ago
  Automation increases the benefits of owning capital over providing labor, in ever growing proportions. The less people are needed to provide labor, and have any resources distributed to them at all, the more fruits accrue solely to capital-holders.

nabla9 12y ago

There was only two economists discussing the future of jobs :( Robotics and automation are changing business from labor intensive to capital intensive. Wage share (share of wages from the GDP) has been going down since early 70's in all OECD countries. Automation will continue to increase that trend together with more competition from third world. The job loss should be considered as one issue in downward pressure for wages caused by automation. Workers can compete with with automation by earning less. People from developing world will be able to compete against automation longer. Removing cashiers and logistic workers with automation and more sophisticated vending machines might generate bigger dent to the jobs than self driving cars (They have vending machine in Italy that makes fresh pizza starting from the flour).

electromagnetic 12y ago
My local grocery store has a fresh food department, that basically sells the cooked version of the stores prepared foods (so the pizza they sell is their pizza dough, their marinara sauce, their carton of cheese and their packs of pepperoni, all of which you can grab and make the same pizza right at home) and the store brand foods. The thing I find amazing is that they have a couple of kids working barely above minimum wage essentially doing the task of a vending machine. Their most labour intensive task is rolling out the ball of pizza dough. I won't be surprised to see grocery stores rapidly change to near full automation. We already have automated shipping warehouses, stocking store shelves is essentially the reverse process and with proper inventory monitoring a shelf would never be empty. Checkouts are already becoming self-serve in many places as it allows more "cashiers" to be open thus reducing lines. Every job in a grocery store is shockingly automatable, from assembling the loads at the distribution warehouses, we're already talking automated tractor trailers for freight, automated fork lifts to load and unload, automated shelf stackers and self-serve cashes. Whose going to be working? Security, at least until we automate that. I work construction, and its honestly a matter of time before I'm automated out of a job. I'm blessed by the fact that rough terrain is the main limiting factor, that I might actually stay employed longer than most. The reason I see automation taking over is because we're approaching onsite manufacture of a lot of materials. It used to be just eavestrough, but now every form of steel roofing can be made on site. It's only a matter of time before someone starts mounting them on boom lifts and running them out in place for workers to just screw down. From there its only going to be a short time until the machine makes and screws the piece. We're starting to see vinyl products that can be bent to make fascia, which means a machine can easily produce vinyl siding and accessories on site. So how long until they get mounted on a scissor lift and parked at one end of the wall and you can have a 50ft wall of seamless siding.

dqdo 12y ago

As a society, we need to ask ourselves two questions: (1) what is the purpose of work? and (2) what do people find valuable? The premise of question 1 is that we should not work just for the sake of saying that we are working. Rather we should work because we are creating something of value for others and ourselves. I think that automation will have a profound impact on the economy by making certain types of work economically infeasible. But this is not necessarily a problem as long as people realize it and move on to work on more highly value areas. I believe that as individuals our desires are limitless and there will always be a demand for something. We just need to figure out what that demand is and work in that domain. Overall automation will free us from many manual labor jobs and allow us to produce more art, poetry, mathematics, and science.

ewzimm 12y ago
I think we also have to consider conservatives who believe that there is inherent value in certain lifestyles that is independent of the products of those lifestyles. Automated labor will also free us to compete in whatever inefficient way we want. Just as garment technology has not stopped people from knitting, automated labor will still allow people to choose to be Amish. Personally, I think we can find better things to do than work most jobs that exist today. We need to be open to the idea of perpetual changes in what we can and should do with our time.
__Joker 12y ago
One of intended or unintended consequence of the work is distribution of wealth. And the effects of the growing robotics and automation will be breaking this distribution. Per se, this should not negative, unless we are prepared for this.

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