You are essentially making the luddite case. The counterargument usually goes like this: yes, people would be fired and there will be serious pain in the short run; however the machines will drastically improve productivity, therefore reduce prices, so real wages will go up along with demand and the extra income not spent on, say, buying feed stock for your horse, will go in creating other jobs and economic sectors that will make use of the available labor. The government can and should ease the transition by offering skill-training and incentives.
While economically sound, I'm skeptical this process can go on forever. The human biology and mind is clearly limited, while the progress of machines does not seem to be. So eventually you will hit a fundamental limit where larger and larger chunks of the workforce will simply be too old, uneducated or simply too human to keep up.
How close we are to this fundamental limit it's anyone's guess, but I would venture to say we are closer than most think. At the point where a serious part of the population is unable to participate in the labor market, this ceases to be an appropriate system to distribute the fruits of economic activity and some form of basic income is required to maintain social order.
I'm not, I'm just countering some "don't worry, everything will be fine" idealism.
I don't think we should halt progress, but I do think we should be more intentional about how we go about it. There is not currently a solution on the table to address mass un/under-employment caused by near-term automation. Basic income is thrown around, but even if enacted, does not change the fact that our culture views work ethic ~= value. People want to be valued.
Choosing not to address it in the next couple of years results in a large number of mostly young, angry, disillusioned people with lots of free time. If you've got a history book handy, you can read plenty about what happens after that.
Completely agree. Can't help myself from thinking that the "continuous economic growth" supported by an ever growing population size is a broken paradigm. The more automation the less people will have an intrinsic value to society unless extremely highly educated/specialised.
"Normal" people simply won't be needed and according to liberal capitalism, they'll quickly be marginalised.
The solution I'd like to see: Enact basic income AND change the fact that our culture views work ethic (narrowly defined in terms of market income) ~= value.
When has that ever worked? I can't think of a single example.
Things people may raise like racism and sexism, in so far as they are changed, weren't changed per se, but merged with pre-existing values (liberty, fairness, equality) and morphed into a (usually) more consistent new definition. "We can all vote but not women" is more caveats than the new reality. Sexist ideas and elements weren't so much changed, they were contrasted with other values, and the inconsistency removed. Women vote, we can't pay less based on religion/race/gender etc. Same values, inconsistency removed.
So rather than change the view, I think the question is what can we contrast "work ~= value" with so that the inconsistency is clear? Maybe a sense of "money isn't everything"? That's all I've got, but then all the "77c on the dollar" talk puts money front and centre in almost every debate, making the "money is not everything" hard to sell as a deep cultural concept.
I dunno, the protestant work ethic is deeply, deeply ingrained in the west - not sure we really can change it, or what it can be merged with that we believe as strongly.
>> Maybe a sense of "money isn't everything"? That's all I've got, but then all the "77c on the dollar" talk puts money front and centre in almost every debate, making the "money is not everything" hard to sell as a deep cultural concept.
If we can get rid of the consumerism then I guess, we'd able to rein in many ill effects of "money is everything".
But again with all these criminally deceptive advertisements targeting the most fundamental animal instincts in us and thus turning us into mindless consumers and thus in turn transforming us into beings which are slaves to their money. Frankly, short of putting ban on the overt and covert advertisement and full implementation of public education in this regard, I don't see any way out of this dire situation. Public education beginning right from the primary school w.r.t. awareness of the ill-effects of advertisements, must be implemented with full gusto.
I don't think work ethic = value is ever going to go away to be honest. People will always value hard workers, and rightly so, because hard workers get things done and problem solved.
However, I don't necessarily think that work ethic needs to equal basic income. That homelessness is even a thing is a symptom of this world view; we are in a society that is more than capable of dealing with some problems in the most poverty stricken parts of the world, and yet we don't, because we say these people have no work ethic, and therefore they don't deserve to be clean, to be fed, to have access to sanitary facilities.
However we end up at a solution to this problem, I'm open to explore. I'm sick of us criminalizing the lazy, because the consequence is to also criminalize the disabled, the elderly, the mentally disabled, and occasionally the perfectly great, strong individuals who roll a poor lot in life and can't escape the system.
Laziness should mean a lack of respect, a lack of advancement, maybe a lack of entertainment and privilege. But the primary reason we have so many low wage jobs is because there is an incredibly huge incentive for people to work them; they have no other choice. If you don't work in this country, that's it. You're "worthless."
Rather than eliminate work = value, introduce no value = don't work. The problem is not going to be laziness on the unemployed, it is going to be unemployability. We are going to point at gross overhead in business and every sector of the economy in how we have grown tumorous bureaucracy on everything that saps human labor without producing marginally useful value. Just consider the advertising industry - billions of dollars to just change who people give their money to through psychological manipulation. Absolutely zero value ad to the whole economy, it only gives value to the company who can persuade people to buy from them by taking value from whomever that sale was taken from.
How do you enact basic income when a majority of your population doesn't have an income and thus can't pay the taxes that finance that exact basic income?
These people would never have enough money especially since the companies they control will have a much smaller consumer base due to higher and higher unemployment rates, a consequence of automation.
The opposite side of idealism is cynicism. Further more if there's one thing humanity has proven itself bad at, it's the ability to make economic predictions.
I'm not saying your comment isn't a valuable counter-weight, just that we have a ways to go in this discussion still.
People should want to be valued, and people should be motivated to provide value to others via the market. Basic income is a good thing because it preserves this, while at the same time recognizing and mitigating the harms arising from the fact that automation and fluid market conditions make it increasingly likely that success in providing marketable value will both require periodic adjustments and be intermittent for many individuals.
Q. Did prices go down? A. Yes! Scanners reduced prices of groceries by about 1.4% in their first decade. (p<1%)
Q. What happened to those workers? A. We don't know, but scanning stores reduced their wage bills by about 4.5%. (p<1%) Revenue didn't change. Data is insufficient to answer whether payroll reduction was achieved by reducing cashiers or deskilling cashiers.
I bet consumers didn't notice any benefits but did receive benefits. I bet wait times stayed the same because fewer lines were open. I bet prices did go down.
When I go to the supermarket I go through a self-serve scanner to pay for my items. It's much faster than waiting in line. So yes, some consumers get benefits.
Grocery stores operate on very low profit margins already. Also, agriculture/husbandry and mass transport is heavily subsidized and regulated (in thr USA at least). It's a good suggestion, but I don't think cashiers are a major labor cost, and suspect the lessons to be gleaned from that industry will have limited predictive power.
And you are essentially repeating the "wealth inequality does not exist" mantra. But it does not matter how many times people repeat, it does not become real.
Inequality exists. Those people fired will be out of places to go. Yes, overall people will become richer, those people are an exception.
That's not a given either. The working masses are many many times more than the business owners in count.
So, while a few business owners can get cheaper with being able to fire part of their employees, those employees will be a bigger number that the business owners who benefited.
As for customers, they'll hardly see any difference (except negative, if they're also part, or their spouse/parents are part, of those workers being fired).
Everybody becoming an entrepreneur is not gonna help either -- there's only so much entrepreneurs a market needs or can support. (It's like everybody becoming an artist with easy access to self-releases on the internet: the end result is not everybody getting into the top of the charts, but, if anything, even those getting there having much fewer listeners that stars did in the past).
> however the machines will drastically improve productivity, therefore reduce prices
Except why would that ever happen? If you were a business owner selling widget X, and it suddenly cost you half as much to make that due to automation, you don't pass those savings on to your customers, you celebrate how much better your margins have gotten and how much more profit you're making.
Competition is one reason. Increased sales volume is a second. Social pressure is a third. It's why we get clean tap water for less money than it would cost someone to bring it by bucket. It's why a gallon of gasoline costs less than the bale of hay equivalent. Regardless of the mechanism, the world is full of examples of technology lowering costs.
Certainly you're correct that not all of the cost savings will be passed on to consumers, but as long as the market is not a zero-price-elasticity monopoly immune to social pressure and government regulation, some savings ought to be passed on.
Now suppose the automation technology is thoroughly patented and the inventor effectively has a government-granted monopoly on the right to use it or anything similar to it.
Because of this little thing called "competition". There will always be new businesses who can live with lower profit margins and drive you out of the market for good.
Less and less industries today have any remaining barriers of entry.
Some still remain, though. Race and gender issues being the most obvious (I find it shameful and outrageous that this is still a problem in 2016, but evidently it is). Another fantastically blatant example is having a non-US non-European citizenship and being unable to relocate to San Francisco Bay Area, wherever this magic wonderland filled with ponies and unicorns is.
Others, like access to education, are disappearing very fast, despite all resistance of the education mafia. Thank you, Wikipedia, I owe you so much.
You're missing a key component of economics. You are saying suddenly widgets can be made for less then previously by automation. If there was a monopoly seller of widgets, your argument makes sense but if there is competition, prices will be driven down, or some other effect will occur.
I read somewhere that the amount of people employed in the transportation industry is roughly equal to the tech industry. If 75% or more become redundant, where will they go? Certainly not the restaurant industry...
One theory I have about all of the coding "boot camps" popping up is that they are preparing for an exodus of people from the next job sector to be automated/eliminated (auto-lated?).
No, coding boot camps are just capitalizing on the idea that there is a shortcut to the high wages some people earn in the tech industry. It's not "preparing for" anything, it's trying to exploit a present market opportunity.
I teach CS classes at a community college when I have the time. Our CC has a 2 year program; having taught classes in the 1st semester and the 4th semester, I have noticed that the 1st semester classes are larger than the 4th semester classes, much larger. This school offers eight sections of the intro programming class, and not more than one section of any top level class (Java, .net, and C++). The top level class sizes are also smaller, and not offered every semester (the intro class is). Net, I'd say that around 3/4 of the students fail out, quit, or change majors.
I've seen students bust their asses to get it. Spend time with tutors, countless hours with the book, with study groups, and other students and still not get it. I've also seen students sleep through most of their classes and pound out not only the lab, but also their entire three week assignment during the lab time.
Anyway, my point is that trying to get a tech degree is far from a sure thing, and for many people, something that they may not be able to finish. It takes a certain kind of thought process to write good software, and while some of it can be taught, I firmly believe that innate ability is equally important. Just like you couldn't teach me to be a good salesman if you had to, some people can't be taught to do tech jobs.
I think access to CS concepts for all ages in schools is a good thing because 1) technology is increasing a part of the fabric of life and 2) it is good have a way to identify early those whose inate abilities could do technology jobs. The same could be said of people that want to become engineers. Some can and some can't.
I think any activity in school or out of school at an early age that exposures students to a set of possible tasks for them to do and to learn from helps people learn about and grow their inate strengths. I am experienced in FIRST Robitcs as one of those out of school programs that does just that. For years I have witnessed students learn what they are good at and get better. Yes some of that is CS, CAD design, fabrication and trouble shooting but for some it is marketing, business planning, fund raising and presentation skills.
I have witinessed this first hand as a mentor and parent of middle school and high school students.
> The human biology and mind is clearly limited, while the progress of machines does not seem to be.
Can you explain what you mean by that? That's not an intuitive idea to me, animals/AIs just seem like two different kinds of machines to me with different computational characteristics, neither of which can fully simulate the other.
Not op, but i will try. There's no distinction of biological computation and machine computation, there's just computation. What our brain is doing is computation, we may not fully understand how it does what it does yet, but what we know is that our brain is a very powerful computational machine, that's why it is so hard to emulate its processes. But as man-made machines are still getting more powerful, it will someday be able to do everything our brains do (from playing chess, go, understanding images, walking, driving to understanding language, creating a self-model a reality model and having self awareness).
But as man-made machines are not constrained to a skull and body, and other physical limitations, it will eventually surpass our processing power. There will be some limit for it though, just nowhere close to our wetware.
>There's no distinction of biological computation and machine computation, there's just computation. What our brain is doing is computation, we may not fully understand how it does what it does yet,
Doesn't the second part cast doubt on the first part?
Only if you fundamentally believe there's something "magical" going on in the brain; scientifically there's no reason to believe that (given current understanding).
We understand individual neurons and how they can lead to computation, we also understand (the existence of) emergent behavior in general.
While economically sound, I'm skeptical this process can go on forever. The human biology and mind is clearly limited, while the progress of machines does not seem to be. So eventually you will hit a fundamental limit where larger and larger chunks of the workforce will simply be too old, uneducated or simply too human to keep up.
How close we are to this fundamental limit it's anyone's guess, but I would venture to say we are closer than most think. At the point where a serious part of the population is unable to participate in the labor market, this ceases to be an appropriate system to distribute the fruits of economic activity and some form of basic income is required to maintain social order.