These discussions are always focused on the "robots". What about the spreadsheets, the computers, algorithms, industrial control systems, Python scripts, voice recognition systems, data pipelines, software powered gig economy, algorithmic traders? These types of automation have been in place for decades, and all of them cut costs for the owners of them and reduce the number of workers needed. Many of them can be operated with minimal training.
The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation?
We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades, and we've been completely blind to it because we're always talking about "the robots that are coming to take our jobs". We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally. In fact, we needed to years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if this explains a lot of the productivity-pay gap [1]
I’ve owned a CNC machine shop for 40 years. As we’ve added automation, so have our competitors. All gains from automation have been competed away - there are no gains going to the owners of the capital, as we are all competing. Meanwhile, the real wages for the employees have been falling for those 40 years.
Instead, I’d argue that returns are going to IP holders.
What you have discovered is known as the 'paradox of productivity'. Productivity improvements are essentially running up the down escalator.
The returns go to cheaper items, because there is less labour time going into each item as productivity improves.
If you redenominate in the 'labour hour' currency, then it all starts to make sense. As does the apparent increase in pay of a concert violin player. Ultimately a concert level violin player doing their thing still takes the same amount of time top produce as it always did, society still likes concerts, and they haven't yet become fond of AI violin players. They exchange those hours for products with less hours in them. So they appear to get a wage increase. Classically this is known as the Baumol effect.
This goes beyond 'real wages', to 'real stuff'. People are definitely getting more stuff than they did 40 years ago. My iPhone is testament to that. As is the lack of power cuts.
Underlying everything is essentially an exchange of labour hours.
As to returns to IP holders, those are often the pension fund, who then pay the pensions to pensioners who then spend it on stuff.
Since we have an ageing population there will definitely be an increase in the transfer to the elderly. It can't be any other way. Is that a fair transfer? Well that's the debate.
>People are definitely getting more stuff than they did 40 years ago. My iPhone is testament to that. As is the lack of power cuts.
Yeah, we can get much more and much cheaper stuff than before thanks to the 'Made in China' boom, but what we can't get now is affordable real-estate. Too bad we can't go live inside our iPhones. /s
It's not that deep.
During the pandemic the price of used cars started to rise. Did we attribute that to people with more money who can then get higher credit on the now more expensive cars?
No, we attributed it to a lack of supply of cars, and worked to free up the blockages so that the market would return to its correct state where cars depreciated.
It's the same problem with housing. We need to build an awful lot more, and we need to move the work to where we build the houses.
Once we cross the rubicon and house prices start to depreciate, as they should because they wear out, then we'll see a phase shift in the market and vastly more supply. It'll be like the latent heat of condensation.
It's simple really, the things that can't be offshored have gotten more expensive.
Real estate, education, healthcare...
Interest rates are lowest in the most developed countries.
The only exception is the US because it has a structural deficit.
It's actually the opposite. Countries have tried to artificially raise interest rates above liquidiry preference via inflation targeting and stimulus for the last 40 years.
>Median housing in the US has been around inflation adjusted $100/sq ft for decades.
I was talking about the European real-estate market. I don't know the US market but I heard it's much more affordable than here, at least outside of SF/NY/etc.
So my options are 3k a month for a walk in closet in SF or 3k a month for a mansion in Reno
Maybe we need more housing options
burn down much faster... https://idahonews.com/news/local/how-fast-can-new-houses-bur...
You can't import land from china, that is a problem that your local community is responsible for. Better get used to being screwed by your fellow towns people.
> As to returns to IP holders, those are often the pension fund, who then pay the pensions to pensioners who then spend it on stuff.
Pensions aren't distributed evenly across the population, it tends to be that the richer you are, the bigger the pension. That means that IP has the effect of making the rich richer, increasing inequality.
Interestingly, this is basically the marxist analysis of the economy, in terms of surplus value.
The rosy side of the equation happens when we look at the price of useful products that can be automated, like fridges or computers, where labourers are much richer in such products than they were 100 years ago. However, the ugly side is visible when looking at the price of products that can't be automated, like land, where labourers are much poorer then they were 100 years ago. The difference is often made up of useless products that could be automated, like cheap fashion or fast food, which marketing keeps pushing as hard as possible.
Not quite. It avoids the thorny question of "what is value" that Marxists disappear up their own fundament with.
Here the Labour hour is valued only in terms of its exchange rate to the denomination that the area pays tax in.
Haven’t many of the gains gone to the customers who are buying CNC parts? That competition and reduction in labor cost per part means that some people can now afford CNC parts who couldn’t have afforded manually crafted parts previously.
> Haven’t many of the gains gone to the customers who are buying CNC parts?
Potentially yes, as long as the competition doesn't destroy the manufacturing landscape, e.g. by emergence of lowest-common-denominator or monopoly suppliers.
Yep. Nearly everyone but equity owners is either hurting or not going anywhere while delivering more for the same or less. Graph after graph Robert Reich has put out there shows the dismalness of the situation. Another infographic video about the distribution of wealth in reality vs. perceived reality vs. desired: https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
Somehow there is also a systematic economic double-standard that works for some but not others: "free markets" of dog-eat-dog inputs (i.e., suppliers), but less free markets on outputs (i.e., monopolies, mega corporations, patents, proprietary-ness, closed-source). Unregulated greed fixes all problems by the "invisible hand", right?
Well, and to the people buying your products, presumably
Who may also have margin competed away.
And to the overall economy - more stuff with less resources is growth. But that's all going to capital, look at the s&p500 vs wages over the same time period.
Saying a CNC shop is comparable to a an S&P500 company because they're both capital is like saying a retail clerk is comparable to an NFL player because they're both labour. While true, it's not really relevant to this discussion.
I agree the parent comment should be more specific, but his point stands: gains are going to a few companies that automate everyone else's processes or benefit from the huge economies of scale that automation provides.
Or to your customers who are getting cheaper products?
On the macro scale, this results in deflation, which the central bank attempts to cancel out by implementing interest rate cuts, which pulls money into stock market valuations and mortgages, so ultimately the beneficiary of CNC mills are real estate and stock owners.
My preferred policy would be to have central banks adjust rates to maintain inflation at 2% average, and more gradually have governments adjust UBI to maintain a central bank interest rate average at 5%.
(You can certainly have the input to one feedback loop be the output of another).
Then structural deflationary forces would manifest as UBI increases instead of interest rate decreases.
I think the positive real interest rates would ensure the UBI isn't all captured by rent increases, although it's hard to be certain unless it's tested.
Yes you can, and it is pretty easy. Build.
Every single, new building puts downward pressure on the average price. The moment supply outstrips demand, prices goes down, housing market stops being reasonable asset, money outflows causing further collapse of the market and houses are dirt cheap.
You can introduce negative interest rates to pay off debt and reduce the money supply. Do the same to land via a land value tax.
A lot of equity derives its value from real estate so the obvious escape into stocks won't work in practice.
Land value tax
Why do you say this? Most economists I've read do consider technology, automation and demographics as the primary underlying deflationary forces, beyond the to-and-fro of business and financial cycles. I could come up with a lot of citations if you'd like.
Productivity will be up considerably and variance will be down. But for the most part you now have machine operators hired rather than machinists and those are to different professions entirely, which rightly have different real wages.
Someone who is capable of cleaning a machine and loading materials and tools as well as unloading product is valued different than someone who actually knows how to make any kind of object that is within reason to be fabricated with lathes, mills and other shoptools, which is what a master machinist is. Those people are rare, they always were rare and historically they were valued as much in the past as they are today. Using them to operate a CNC machine is a complete waste of their skills. Typically those people are making one-offs that CNC jockeys would not be able to due to the difficulty of setting things up and/or the need to get it right the first time because the part is irreplaceable.
Most of the benefits of that sort of automation are actually going to customers. Aggregated across all such automation in an economy, that means we all benefit.
I wonder if there have been any serious studies to determine whether there is truth behind Marx’s claims of an automation arms race leading to a declining rate of profit.
Profit must go down to zero because of structural reasons.
Profit isn't a reward, it is a reallocation of capital to a new sector. At some point growth stops and there are no new sectors meaning there is nothing to reallocate existing capital to.
How complex is your automation?
> These types of automation have been in place for decades, and all of them cut costs for the owners of them and reduce the number of workers needed.
They reduce the number of workers needed to produce the same amount of output. What is slightly counterintuitive is that having done so, they may actually increase the demand for workers, because they now can produce far more output in the same amount of time.
Modern languages and tools have made programming much more productive, and now there are lots more programmers and they get paid more.
> What is slightly counterintuitive is that having done so, they may actually increase the demand for workers, because they now can produce far more output in the same amount of time.
They may do that.
Too many people take it for a guarantee that technology by itself must do that, and can never result in a situation that a human hand is needed to steer us away from.
> Modern languages and tools have made programming much more productive, and now there are lots more programmers and they get paid more.
Well not really. Computer industry pay is increasingly becoming bi-modal at least for a decade. The highly paid programmer is just a US phenomenon and that too in few major IT hubs.
There are lot of programers/IT admins who would make pretty decent money in late 90s to 2000s. And they make less than they were 20 years ago and yes all hadoop/big data training did not really make any better paid.
Inflation adjusted IT salaries have gone down in lot of places in the world. Of course 1 percenters of IT in FAANG+ make it sound like IT salaries are going up heavily for everyone.
> The highly paid programmer is just a US phenomenon and that too in few major IT hubs.
That's simply not true. Programmers around the EU are among the best paid professionals in their local markets, even more so for young people (out of college/school/university). The salaries are far away from Silicon Valley levels, but are still very high locally.
>I'd say it depends on the EU markets. I have the feeling that IT professionals from Eastern Europe (I'm from there) are a lot better paid, comparatively speaking, to IT professionals from many other Western countries (with the focus on "comparatively").
It's true. Unless you work for a FAANG, or some Fin-Tech or a unicorn flush with cash, dev wages in Western EU are not higher than Eastern EU anymore.
I know devs in Poland and Romania making way more than me and some friends do in Austria/France/Belgium.
It's because of huge amount of outsourcing from US companies moving directly to Eastern EU, pushing the wages higher than what Western EU based companies can offer locally, coupled with the higher taxes in the Western countries, meaning devs in the West taking home lower wages than their counterparts in the East.
Someone here said it well, but I don't have the original post to quote anymore: {a cleaner in Sweden makes way more than a cleaner in Poland, but a dev in Poland can end up making as much or more than a dev in Sweden}. That's whack but that's the reality of supply and demand caused by the bleed from the US tech boom to certain regions.
I wouldn't be able to rent - or buy - in Amsterdam either even though I was born there and lived there for half my life. The prices there are simply insane. It's ok with me because I wouldn't want to either but between AirBNB, businesses using residential real estate as fancy offices (half the inner circle of the canals is like that now), the crime and the tourists you probably would have to pay me to live in Amsterdam.
> Programmers around the EU are among the best paid professionals in their local markets,
That's not really true. I live in Austria and many more skilled professions earn better than most devs here as the local SW industry sucks, almost no product-based companies and a market overabundant with talent.
I'm sure in hot markets with plenty of product based companies like London, Berlin, Amsterdam or Eastern Europe the situation is better.
According to some sources online, the average salary for a junior developer in Italy is around 24k[0]. Indeed that isn't a lot, however it's not that much below the average salary in most regions [1]. Furthermore, in a per type of job, IT and tech are the highest paid bar "management" and "top management"[2].
0 - https://www.payscale.com/research/IT/Job=Junior_Software_Eng...
1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/708972/average-annual-no...
Yeah, and that's why lots of IT jobs are outsourced to Eastern Europe; why pay 70k€ per year for people doing devops in the Nordics, Germany or the Benelux countries, when you can get a Romanian to do it for 20k€?.
The situation in the EU is the same as in the US, and outside the local hubs, wages are lower.
I really doubt this. Programming doesn’t have the kind of cartel dynamics mixed with prestige obsession that resulted in dualists labor markets. It doesn’t have licensing based on credentials that have no effect on how well you do your job like K12 teaching, nor is it remotely as prestige obsessed as law firms.
Any evidence?
> Computer industry pay is increasingly becoming bi-modal at least for a decade.
Source?
Theoretically yes, but in practice the given industry as a whole often does not need much more output even if the per unit cost of the output declines. Like, you don't need significantly more accounting just because you can use spreadsheets now.
And not all automation increases worker productivity, lots of it just eliminates workers from certain jobs altogether, e.g. self driving cars / trucks.
This can indeed cut both ways. Instead of needing huge numbers of manual workers to harvest the wheat, one guy can sit in an air-conditioned combine harvester cab for a few hours listening to tunes, and we get the same food. Humans can (and do) eat slightly more food given it's cheap and readily available, but there's a limit. So, the percentage of workers engaged in agricultural work fell.
On the other hand, turns out that once a shirt is cheap humans will buy not just one extra so there's one to wear and one to wash, but a dozen, or hundreds. And they'll throw it away when it's a little worn not when it falls apart. So while industrialisation of fabric and clothing production made clothes cheap, the result wasn't that fewer people were employed in that work but that we just all bought more clothes.
> A change in the sound it's making is often the first warning that your $500,000 piece of machinery is about to self destruct.
Whose machine?
I see it all the time, from combines to snowplows.
Anything that's got risk of becoming expensive will give you tactile or olfactory feedback.
More likely some warning light will illuminate on the dash first.
Well, yes you do, because the spreadsheets make it easier for the regulators to add more regulation.
Think: there used to be a theoretical limit to how much regulation could exist, because the regs had to be known by a person (otherwise how are they enforced?).
Now we have regtech. A whole industry built on automating compliance.
How long before each individual needs a regtech software program (or two!) just to function in society? I'm not talking about tax filing, that's just the start.
I’m not very familiar with accountancy, but there seems to have been a lot of growth in internet-based tax prep for individuals who would previously have done their own. I couldn’t find historical data, but forecasts I found all agreed the number of accountants needed would rise over the coming years.
We don’t even have self-driving cars yet, how can you know what effect they have?
This only works to an extent. US manufacturing output is higher than before outsourcing manufacturing became a thing, but US manufacturing jobs are far fewer, because the total demand for a whole lot of products can be met with far fewer people.
When there's an inequality in productivity, more productive firma will see an increase in labour, bit that doesn't mean the whole sector does.
In theory people work because they want something from someone else (says law). So in theory there can never be unemployment.
In practice some people want money itself, which is an empirical contradiction of says law. There are also people who hoard jobs because they like them, which is bad for people who want the money to actually spend it.
Blue collar work vs. white collar work is actually the issue.
The assumption is that blue collar work is the stuff that gets automated away. The reality is that blue collar workers are getting more productive instead but are still essential. And we already have vastly less of them than we used to due to the industrial revolution and the wave of automation in the last centuries. Meanwhile a lot of white collar work is melting away or increasingly of the "bullshit job" variety where the added value is dubious. So, a strange side effect of automation is that we've created a lot of bullshit jobs instead of creating mass unemployment.
An even stranger side effect is that a lot of people with college degrees are now doing artisanal stuff instead of committing to a life long of a meaning-less and soul crushing office dwelling existence. So, they're choosing to become blue collar workers. And artisanal here of course means "choosing to do things by hand" instead of maximizing quantity and revenue through industrialized processes. Artisanal is more fun to do and quality of the goods means they are worth more. You can buy bread from a factory, or buy a sour dough bread from a hipster with a college degree. Lack of automation is the whole point there.
What the lockdown last year showed quite convincingly is that a lot of white collar jobs are not really that essential and it doesn't matter that much if productivity there drops by few tens of a percent. The economy suffered a little but mostly that's because of reduced consumption and not of reduced production. And even that is hardly proportional to the productivity loss of masses of people suddenly no longer doing what they were supposed to be doing or doing a lot less of it. A lot of those people never got back to their former level of "productivity" and it continues to not matter economically. Their most important job is spending the money they earn. The labor performed earning that money is secondary.
It's a great argument for basic income: give people money and get them to spend it in order to boost the economy. It's a lot more effective than funneling it to the offshore accounts of the 1 per-centers. They hoard rather than spend their money.
And it frees people up to do something more valuable than stare at a cubicle wall doing something that absolutely and provably does not matter economically. Like bake bread, create art, or do something else that people might spend on.
In many organizations, the lockdown showed productivity went up as white collar people worked from home. Some even worked longer hours of their own accord.
> The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades.
Per your source, the "productivity-pay gap" largely explainable through increases in pay inequality while the change in labor's share of income is a much smaller factor (and it's worth mentioning EPI is probably overstating the size of the gap in the first place[1]).
As an alternative to your hypothesis, my guess is that workers in jobs amenable to automation are reaping huge increases in pay (e.g. engineers) while jobs that are more difficult to automate are falling behind.
> We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally.
I wholeheartedly agree. I propose we find ways to automate low productivity jobs so all workers can enjoy the associated benefits.
[1] https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-the-pay-productivity-ga...
What you're describing was outlined pretty clearly in The New Ruthless Economy[1] in 2005. A very interesting read, given when it was publshed.
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-ruthless-eco...
Interesting, thanks! Will definitely give it a read.
the term "robotics" is beginning to expand in some ways though. "robotic process automation" refers to tools and techniques to automate a lot of the data-entry and human-facing software components of industrial workflows. so while hard robotics tend to dominate the media, it's important to remember that automation is making gains in many areas.
> The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation?
The effect of productivity improvements on the real incomes of workers ultimately depend on how the change affects productivity of the marginal worker. You need to look at more than a single firm to figure this out. If the availability of spreadsheets makes clerical workers so much more productive that overall demand for their services increases more than four-fold (which might be definitely possible), the marginal spreadsheet-tweaking activity will be paid quite a lot, and workers' income will increase.
That doesn’t match real world outcomes though. Quantity demanded goes down. Wages go down.
Mostly because automation isn’t making that person more valuable, it’s just removing it from that persons role. Skilled labor becomes unskilled labor. Supply goes way up. Clerks are a great example.
They used to do a lot for a store and had to know all the products. Now a clerk is just a last mile button presser. They don’t add much value at all. They’re not doing 4x the work. They’re doing 0.1x the work. Trying to say “but the value couldn’t be captured without that guy” is wishful thinking.
> They used to do a lot for a store and had to know all the products. Now a clerk is just a last mile button presser. They don’t add much value at all. They’re not doing 4x the work. They’re doing 0.1x the work. Trying to say “but the value couldn’t be captured without that guy” is wishful thinking.
Not to detract from your overall point, which is absolutely correct, but having been a grocery clerk there's a slightly different phenomenon in play there. Having a clerk who knows the products well is a big help, but you really only need one available at a time. So rather than make acquiring that knowledge an actual part of the job, they rely on scale to have enough workers who learn it through their own initiative.
> Skilled labor becomes unskilled labor.
Which is bad for skilled labor (wrt. that set of skills) but good for unskilled labor.
It's not good for unskilled labor because they get paid even less than unskilled labor as prices rise and wages stagnate.
> who benefits most in that equation?
That depends on how the extra profit is distributed, aka taxation and social welfare. Slaving away 40 hours a week on a bullshit job that can be trivially automated is not a benefit per se.
> Slaving away 40 hours a week on a bullshit job that can be trivially automated is not a benefit per se.
For some workers, that's a huge benefit. If they get ousted they have to find another degenerate position or work for a lower salary. Usually it's both.
I mean that money is the benefit, not the work itself. Our wealth distribution system is not suitable for significant levels of automation at all - that is the root of the problem, not automation itself.
People measure prosperity by employment, not the work they do, which is how we get backwards economics where it is better to destroy the planet.
Most things that are perceived as repetitive and therefore something you can automate aren't likely to be easily automated. The reason is that many repetitive tasks have contingencies that have to be mapped out. Even some of these aren't covered by employee training or corporate policies and so it depends on the judgment of the individual employees which in the end destroys the fantasy of robots everywhere and programs to replace paralegals and accountants.
> What about the spreadsheets, the computers, algorithms, industrial control systems, Python scripts, voice recognition systems, data pipelines, software powered gig economy, algorithmic traders?
At first I thought you were bringing these up to point out that the robots create other jobs, because robots don't just spring from the earth fully formed and ready to run forever. They require an army of engineers to build/operate/maintain them.
> We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades
Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.
For your first point: the new jobs required is of course much less than the jobs removed, or else there wouldn't be a point to automation in the first place because it's not saving on labor efficiency.
Agreed on your second point. Attack the inequality, not the automation.
> They require an army of engineers to build/operate/maintain them.
Yep agreed, but there's a key difference. Unlike most other jobs, your labor continues to provide the company profits even after you leave. I think that's why software engineers are typically paid a lot and are often paid with a stock option component.
> Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.
I think we could already do this. Obviously many workers would still be required, but they could be much more fairly compensated. Someone else mentioned Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, we're already inventing jobs just to keep people busy and spending. As Adam Curtis said[1], "your real job is shopping".
> Unlike most other jobs, your labor continues to provide the company profits even after you leave.
That's certainly the engineer's sales pitch, but let me introduce you to the engineer's fine print, tech debt.
> Unlike most other jobs, your labor continues to provide the company profits even after you leave.
Maybe in terms of pure job function, but anyone who's ever solved a problem at their job in a way that is still used when they leave has continued to provide the company profits.
The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist dystopia—except usually with more murder. So I would say the political problem is very much not solved and post-scarcity Utopianism isn’t going to get us there.
I don't think you're projecting as far as OP.
F U L L Y is Star Trek years away, not next Wednesday.
> The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist dystopia
Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) that replaces private capitalism as a hack to avoid the requirement of developing proletarian class identity in a developed capitalist system present in OG Marxism.
That this turns into a dystopian nightmare that mirrors and even exaggerates the horrors of private capitalism and fails to actually bypass private capitalism is a surprise to no one but Leninists, least of all non-Leninist Communists.
Marx spent the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over how capitalism was increasing the productivity of labour to previously unthinkable levels [1].
He explicitly argued that this was what he believed would make communism possible.
So whatever else one thinks about Marx it's clear he did not think in terms of a fixed ratio.
The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state.
In Critique of the Gotha Programme he even pointed to the US as a better model for education (arguing that government-set standards but devolution of control over the actual provision of education was something to aim for) than the SPDs proposed state run education because he disapproved of giving the state control over even that, arguing that it was rather the state which needed to be educated by the public.
And in his work on the Paris Commune he lamented that one of the biggest errors he believed the commune made was to not go further and smash the rest of the state. The focus on centralised planning in the Soviet Union was Stalinist, not even Leninist, and certainly has nothing to do with Marx.
[1] E.g.: "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"
Marx was writing precisely at the time that the equation shifted to its modern form. A single spinning jenny operator could do the work of eight or more spinners.
> _Lenin_ called it "state capitalism.”
Lenin called a transitional phase that was intended to take 6 months to establish and another 6 months to phase out into socialism “state capitalism” (it may be the case that “war communism" of 1918-1921 was officially recognized as something of an extension of that phase necessitated by emergency), but state capitalism was never officially the long-term policy or the self-description of the state of the economy past that point; the criticism from non-Leninist Marxists is that what the steady state of what the USSR became was state capitalism, not socialism.
>If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation?
In a market economy competition will squeeze down those newfound profits. The owner of the company benefits, the employee benefits, and all the customers benefit.
The only possible outcome is automation of most if not literally all jobs. At this point, capitalism will necessarily break down because it depends on continuous consumption and there will be no disposable income with which to consume. Hopefully society will evolve into post scarcity at this point instead of a cyberpunk dystopia where gigacorporations create artificial scarcity economies just to maintain the status quo.
Frankly I think we're already at the tipping point for that. If I think about it, how many jobs are actually involved in:
* Providing food
* Providing shelter
* Providing healthcare
That divide became a lot more clear in the past 2 years with the acknowledgement of "essential workers". Without Google, Facebook, or auto insurance, we'd be inconvenienced. Without essential workers society as we know it would collapse. And almost all of those workers are paid less than an entry level Facebook engineer.
So now the question is, are we already post-scarcity? And perhaps we don't know it only because it hasn't been distributed equally.
Are we already post-scarcity?
Thanks to industrialization, in the first and second world yes for basic food, clothing and shelter, as well as other mass-consumed products.
Things that remain (increasingly) scarce in my view - globally - are broadly educated people, political/economic/behavioral freedoms, unspoiled nature and the temporal wealth and whim to access it regularly.
This is an important point that gets overlooked. It's likely that we already reached something like "the singularity," but most of the extra productive output didn't go towards finding ways to increase productivity, it went towards things without a positive impact and often a negative impact on society (advertising, junk food, conspicuous consumption, regulatory capture, sales, etc.).
I'm hopeful for a solarpunk future.
Completely blind to it? Not likely. Marx was writing about it in the 19th century. Computing based automation and management is just the accelerated evolution of the automation techniques from the industrial revolution.
It's complicated.
Is it complicated?
Greater efficiency is good, because it makes society "richer".
If that societal wealth increase doesn't go to the average person, then why should they care about efficiency?
The luddites didn't hate efficiency, or machines, they sabotaged the machines because that was one of the few ways they could hurt the interests of the people who were mistreating them. Specific machines were targetted because of who owned them, and the way they were treating workers.
For wider context this time the royal families of Europe were waging war to prevent democracy spreading. A great deal of this funding came from the UK, yet at the same time their poor people were rioting due to lack of food, and tax increases to fund the war. Folk songs at the time tell tales of people signing up to fight the French because the other option was starvation.
It's convenient that we remember these people as "silly folk who were scared of machines" rather than "downtrodden masses revolting against a cruel dictatorship waging war against democracy".
I'm sympathetic, for sure. I say complicated because it's not a straightforward linear causal relationship or one where we can just say "bad". Automation causes the rate of profit to rise for a period. And for some segment of the working population this can lead to increased prosperity. For others less so, as you point out.
But in the long run, competition between businesses leads to at least a short term equilibrium, where automation and labour exploitation rates are roughly equal, or monopolization has occurred. And then rates of profits can plummet and then it's really bad all around.
The point here is that I don't think it's automation itself that creates the unequal distribution of incomes. It's just the market economy. The market economy creates automation in order to gain competitive advantage.
Curtailing automation isn't going to improve wealth inequality. Might even make it worse.
Equalization of wealth requires the intervention of the working population either through unionization or forcing the state to intervene.
Robots don't matter much to the worker productivity of industrialized nations because manufacturing is mostly outsourced to less industrialized ones. Robotic automation matters to less industrialized nations.
Deep learning will eventually eat 99% of office jobs, including software and hardware development. Self-programming and self-designing systems seem as inevitable as killer robots. These automation technologies can lead to a rapid collapse of standards of living in industrialized nations that most people "won't see coming."
As a consequence of massive efficiencies, regulatory capture, and political influence, the long-term vicious cycle trend is towards most of humanity becoming borderline homeless with a small middle class and a tiny strata of insanely rich royalty.
There is an obvious solution to spiraling inequality "pure" capitalists refuse to consider on "religious" grounds: take past, present, and future absurd gains from the billionaires and redistribute them according to a needs-based formula.
I don't believe machine learning will ever reach the level of sophistication that you're thinking. The reality is that we can't even make 5th generation (goal oriented) programming languages yet. Mostly because we keep chasing the unicorn of generalized AI rather than building the foundations of useful programming standards. Like imagine using optimization the way we do with loops and branching to handle more complex strategy based problems. We don't even have that level of sophistication in our compilers yet. We're in what amounts to as the Neolithic Age of programming.
> yet.
You appear to be denying the progress made over the past 30 years by deep learning, ML frameworks, constraint solvers, and immense computing power.
Prolog has been around for 50 years. I suggest you look at what it can do.
Programming languages exist only for humans to specify and discuss intended computing behavior. There are plenty of goal-solving algorithms and heuristics already. Turing completeness is all that's necessary. "Flying car" programming languages are unnecessary because they offer no additional intrinsic power, only convenience of expressiveness that could be provided by libraries.
Self-programming and -designing systems, if left unconstrained, will develop their own IRs, design, and manufacturing specification protocols that would likely become rapidly incomprehensible. They won't need anthropocentric programming languages after several iterations because it would be an inefficiency. That's what the technological singularity will look like.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
> You appear to be denying the progress made over the past 30 years by deep learning, ML frameworks, constraint solvers, and immense computing power.
Most of the progress in the last 30 years was immense computing power, almost all foundations for todays ML are revised old concepts. What you propose is AGI, how you want to achieve that? We don't even know where to start in theory, this is not my opinion but current top names in ML world[1], which was discusses on HN many times.
1. https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/17/geoffrey-hinton-and-demis...
>Turing completeness is all that's necessary.
As a programmer and someone who's earned a computer science degree, I'm going to say you're wrong for many reasons but I'll point out a couple here. First, the problem with modern programming is the problem that all computing has struggled with: how do you define meaning (semantics). We've resolved almost all the issues of representation of syntactic reasoning (the ability to encode and process symbols) but to tell a computer the general meaning of a program, its limits, its problem space, and even potential issues that it will need to form strategies to resolve are the realm of pure research right now. And have been for decades, it's why most research has been focusing on things like machine learning, genetic algorithms, and neural networks because these can be trained on a specific set of problems with the hopes that given sufficient time that we can augment this via hardware improvements (it's why you see Google touting android phones with neural network processors and the like). The problem still remains that we can't just do a TNG science scene where you speak out constraints to a computer and it generates tentative results on those constraints.
Second, we have another problem that still persists to this day: how to get firms to fund such research. In the past, the military industrial complex (which still does to an extent) and monopolies would fund such research to keep ahead but in this day it seems most folks aren't keen to fund what won't produce profit within a few quarters and as such most research has been pared down to limited scopes. I believe this is an issue due to how much pure research in the past seventy years has resulted in the majority of gains seen in the private sector. Thus, the private sector assumed all progress was natural and not inevitable build up from decades, even centuries, of hard work. And without that pure research being allowed to exist and even fail in its pursuits, we've put ourselves at odds with the intergenerational aspect of all scientific research. Meaning, we're most likely only be able to achieve such gains many centuries from now.
>That's what the technological singularity will look like.
There won't be any technological singularity because in the past we never had one. People who think this are fools like Ray Kurzweil. Anyone with an inkling on the subjects of anthropology will know better. The advances of the human species before recorded history were building on the small steps of pre-human ancestors. There wasn't a magic Eureka moment for us and never will be.
There's a local burger joint with two screens where customers can ring up their own order. There's always a line at the register and never at the screens. I've walked in, keyed in my order, and received my food faster than people in line. And yet people just don't seem to want to use them. Yesterday I walked in and both screens had an "Out of order" sticky note on it. Minimum wage jobs have a few more years of life left.
I love those screens,so much easier than looking at the menu board,which they make increasingly confusing. I still remember this conversation at McDonald's a couple of years ago: do you have ice-cream? Yes. Can I have one. What type would you like? What have you got. Mcthis Mcthat,etc.. The hell is that I'm thinking. I ask for a random choice just to get out of the situation.
I don’t want to learn every point of sale system at every restaurant I go to. I sometimes have custom orders. If I screw something up, I want to be able to say, “sorry, can I change that?”. I have to touch a screen that others have touched. The UI might be bad, the machine might be slow. About 1/3rd of the time at Home Depot I end up having to wait for someone to come over for some reason at the self checkout.
Regardless of how I order at a fast food joint, I have to see someone hand me food, and it is a bit dehumanizing if there is no line for me to walk in and use a machine instead of talk to them, especially when they hand me the food. (I’d definitely use a self-order if there was a line and saved time)
An app is different - there is a clear benefit to ordering ahead and having food ready. The only expected interaction is the pickup.
I sympathize the dehumanizing bit and get where you're coming from, but in general I greatly prefer to use the touchscreen machines at fast food places. I like to look through all the options and take my time choosing, which translates to a very awkward verbal interaction, no matter how polite the person taking my order is.
Entirely dependent on location. In France those screens were used by people ( same as "automatic" checkout kiosques at supermarkets), but now post pandemic they're sometimes the only option to order, the register being only for paying with cash what you've ordered at the screens, and picking up your order. It makes sense in the pandemic world ( screens can be more spread out and more numerous that registers), and in general. It doesn't seem to me that has resulted in less employees though, from the looks of it there's roughly the same number of people as before, but now instead of accepting orders and doing payments they only focus on collecting prepared food and putting it in bags/plates/etc.
It's faster and more efficient ( mostly space-wise), for the restaurant and for customers.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you're living in the US, where I've heard there are some very weird ( for me) things expected from the service industry ( e.g. constant attention from a waiter in a restaurant, that the grocery store clerk will put your stuff in bags for you ( unless you're handicapped, what?!)), and that's probably what's driving a part of the reluctance you're seeing. Many people feel entitled to human service, above and beyond, and they feel that such jobs are beneath them ( "burger flipping"), hence their reluctance to do it themselves.
> Many people feel entitled to human service, above and beyond, and they feel that such jobs are beneath them ( "burger flipping"), hence their reluctance to do it themselves.
Your comment is a bit rude.
One reason I personally refuse to use these screens or the self-checkout line is to make sure the people working these jobs will still have a job...
> constant attention from a waiter in a restaurant
After being ignored in french restaurants (please, someone, anyone, give me water! please!!), I can only love and praise the professionalism of our waiters!
> some very weird ( for me) things expected
It's called good service. Something I was really not expecting in Europe, and something that, as expected, was not delivered :)
I can recall people saying similar things about grocery store checkouts. Lines were quicker if you went through the self-checkout, but people still stood around to have a person do the work and socialize. At some point in the last last few years that seems to have completely flipped, there are rarely people going through the human lines with the bulk doing self-checkout.
My hypothesis is that self-checkout created a new way to shop for groceries, that is, less more frequently. I'm certainly guilty of doing this, picking up odds and ends, but I still use a human to check me out if I need to use a cart to shop that day.
Every Mc Donalds in my town has 100% moved to these screens, you cannot place your order at the counter anymore. Burger King has an app you can order on, but still allows counter orders.
McDonalds has had an app for years now. There are lots of discounts if you use it, and it's extremely convenient to get your order when you arrive. No lines.
Franchise adoption has been scattered though, up until about a year only about half of my local McDonalds would take orders through the app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
There were "fully automated" restaurants (obviously more of a mechanical turk type operation) well over a hundred years ago. Doesn't seem like they've caught on yet.
By using these screens, you are quite literally rubbing your fingers in human waste. [1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/29/mcdonalds-touchscreen-kiosks...
What happens in a fast food restaurant is only the tip of the iceberg for the whole supply chain needed to get that hamburger into your mouth. All the agriculture, transportation and food processing that has to happen before anything makes it to a restaurant is already heavily automated.
I do that, literally for the reason I want to keep people in jobs in the community.
Ordering food by using some kind of machine is quite common in Japan.
there's a cultural factor to this, I've seen self-service kiosks earlier and more frequently used in other countries
>The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination.
Thanks to the likes of the Economist.
Their story on how copilot will make programmers redundant exemplified the way they framed automation - as an answer to their executive readership's prayers - a deus ex machina that will let them fire half of their employees while maintaining their margins.
To be fair, there is a litany of trashy economics studies thumping the same drum. E.g. there was a famous one from Ball State U that mathematically conflated automation and outsourcing to prove that the robots already took over and one from Harvard, I think, that measured job automatability through surveys about how "creative" workers thought their jobs were.
Oh my. Econonmists
>... a solid microeconomic foundation. ...more profitable and thus expand, leading to a hiring spree. Technology might also allow firms to move into new areas, or to focus on products and services that are more labour-intensive.
In my time spent studying economics, this is the sort of thing that micro-economists say all the time and it is not true.
The untrue bit is "solid foundation". It is post hock story told to give a quasi theoretical basis for an observation. The article, bless them, acknowledges separating causation and correlation is tricky.
Solid foundation, pfft!
Dr. Taleb? ;)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has done interesting work. But this is something different. His contribution was updating Knight's uncertainty for the modern world
Isn't the real development that automation and efficiency improvements move more and more people into bullshit jobs? So instead of becoming entirely obsolete, we continue working, not knowing what value we contribute, if any. That's why my intuition (and fear) is that in such BS jobs, the rewards will become more and more skewed. So instead of a 9-5 corporate BS job, one gets a highly competitive BS job (evaluated using metrics that are poor predictors and assessors of individual quality of work) in a high-pressure environment.
And if we ever manage to overcome that we will not have jobs at all and our mind will be full of things not relating to what sustains humanity. The longer we then embrace unproductivity the more horrific a single incident will be.
My take on it is that it is too early to tell. The automation envisaged has not arrived, yet. (Maybe it will take a long while.) Self driving trucks or book keeping systems without data entry are still not widespread.
At the same time, automation sometimes produces other results. Not many executives in medium sized companies have secretaries, rather the type their own messages, on a phone.
Jobs are not a necessity. People work because of they need money, country need people to work because they can tax and use the remaining to buy weapons. We don't need jobs, we just need hobbies. I am very optimistic about robots. It will be the time when there will be no slaves in this world, everyone will be truly free.
There’s one crucial issue with this view: robots need energy to work. And consuming energy destroys the planet and will continue to do so for quite a while, because clean energy solutions aren’t ready and we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions (among other things) right now. Time is running out and we can no longer afford the dream of a post-work society.
What about nuclear energy? Say we move robotic productions to areas we don't want to live, with nuclear plants, and keep renewable energy just for humans in cities. Or the idea from Bezos which I liked: move robots to a different plant, ship everything to Earth.
Nuclear energy isn’t magic. It’s an awesome technology but it won’t replace fossil fuels soon enough.
the energy crisis is not really a crisis with energy but a crisis with policy, there is a lot of energy floating around us that we do not harvest, the ocean is filled with energy that can be harvested safely without harming ecosystems. we really have a lack of resourcefulness problem, outdated systems in place that stop progress and keep us all asking why can’t we fix this?
I continue to believe in the idea that automation/AI will destroy entire sectors currently requiring labor. It is something that happens gradually, then suddenly.
I also believe there's "safe" sectors where this is unlikely to ever happen. Good luck making a robot plumber. By the time you solve that, you've solved everything and we're entirely obsolete.
Package delivery, cash registry, retail jobs...there's plenty of high employment sectors at danger. And perhaps many office jobs are at even more danger.
One idea is that "as always" we simply move on to "higher order" work. This is nonsense. We don't need billions of AI programmers, it would be really crappy AI if that was the case. Nor is it realistic that everybody can do such a demanding job. We're talking about billions of relatively lowly educated workers here.
Another idea is UBI, or even better...post scarcity. For the optimists, I guess.
I expect that neither will happen, instead we're already experiencing the solution. You just inject trillions of stimulation money into the economy, which creates (artificial) demand, hence allowing for jobs that otherwise might not exist.
Right now, somebody is inventing potato chips flavor #31,122. Nobody asked for it, the world doesn't need it, and I hope we can agree that it's unimportant. But somebody invents it anyway, somebody designs the packaging, and somebody ships it. You buy it, and might just like it.
All these activities aren't really demand or need driven, they're more like "because we can" jobs. Our world is largely supply and marketing driven, not demand driven from the bottom up. Fluff and endless meaningless luxuries. When I walk through a mall I wonder...do people really buy all this garbage?
Put harshly, you can call all of this bullshit jobs. Keeping each other busy. And that's what we'll continue to do no matter the state of technology. It's just a few dials in the financial system.
Have you never wondered why everybody deeply cares that one has a job (at any and all costs) yet there's never any serious inquiry about the point of the job? Nobody cares if you have a meaningless job, the point is that you have a job. Any job. This reality gives away how the system works.
> Our world is largely supply and marketing driven
Great way to put it. I've felt this way for awhile.
Advertising, for example, is low-hanging fruit in the world of useless things, but it's so embedded in US culture that efforts to displace it are stopped at the door.
I'm thankful for my humble background. I grew up in the 80s in Europe in the lower working class. All I owned was a bicycle and a few sets of clothing, that's it.
Importantly, I was super happy. There existed already lots of stuff, but I was mostly ignorant about it. To me this has been a key insight. Apparently, I can have limited stuff and be just fine and happy, but as soon as you're exposed to new options, advertising as you say, trouble arises.
Two decades later, I learned that at least 4 years of that decade consisted of a truly deep economic crisis. Really? I had no idea. Couldn't tell. I find that hilarious to reflect on.
Things are a whole lot more complicated now. Not only are we bombarded with stuff, it's also a social effect. Even if you manage to be an anti-consumer, you still may have a wife/husband, and you can't deny your kids the stuff their peers have.
But still I try. I have stuff but when it comes to durable goods, I try to buy what I call "forever" stuff. My furniture will attend my funeral. Actually, it's such heavy oak that nobody can move it, so there's that.
My TV is 17 years old and delivers a perfect picture at my viewing distance. My friends laugh at me for not replacing it, but I'm not the mad man. They are. The picture is fine and I engage with what I'm viewing.
I actually had a time capsule moment. I buy very little, and the little I buy, I do online. So it had been a decade since I visited a mall. Just like young me, I was largely ignorant of what was out there.
Unsuspecting I enter a home decoration shop. My mind was blown. Endless shelfs of garbage where for most items I feel sorry for the person needing to produce this. Angry about the misuse of resources in a world with so many issues. And disdain for the clueless people buying these absolutely meaningless products that have zero utility or quality.
I went on to visit a BBQ shop. Apparently it's a science now, you can buy about 17 trillion accessories just to show others how very advanced you are at grilling meat.
This isn't wealth. It's a pathetic fetishization of meaningless objects. None that make you happy, it's always about the next one. Until you have so many that you can't even keep track of it anymore.
People sit in bullshit jobs so that they can afford garbage made by other people in bullshit jobs. Our economy is about keeping this circle going, regardless of meaning or happiness.
Stop buying garbage. Cook a fresh meal and enjoy it with your family. Then go for a walk in the forest regardless of the weather and leave your silly devices at home. Take it slow, make time for friends, stop ignoring your pet and read a good book.
That's happiness. It worked in the 80s, it works now.
This is a very contemplative comment from you, so thank you!
I'm much younger than you, so advertising really caught me in the ear with catchy jingles that rang through the playground.
With online advertising it's become a different playground. It's nearly impossible to find reputable products among the ocean of meaningless one-dimensional rating systems, virality speculation, and cloaked endorsements to name a few symptoms.
My only solution is the tried and true word of mouth.
I can point to maybe 5 personal items, all of which I could do without, that I discovered on my own, and I will stand by as my solid oaks.
As a rule, if I see an ad for your product, the only signal I get is that you have enough bankroll to get eyes on. I immediately distrust advertisements because desperation in market emergence or social manipulation is never an indicator of quality.
> Cook a fresh meal
Just made 5 servings of chicken curry tonight for about $10 ;) cheers.
I just wanted to let you know that I loved your comment so much I saved it into my notes.
That makes me happy. It might as well be seen as an old man's rant.
Agree. The idea that having a job is the goal itself is crazy. A job is a tool that hopefully will help you achieve your real goals. Whatever they are.
The thesis of this article seems to be that robots won't eliminate jobs, but it really doesn't adduce evidence to support that:
> a recent paper ... put forward a “new view” of robots, saying that “the direct effect of automation may be to increase employment at the firm level, not to reduce it.”
"At the firm level" is quite the caveat! If a company can produce two widgets per worker instead of one by adding robots, it'll succeed and grow as a result - at the expense of its competitors. But if every widget maker adds those robots, and there's no more demand for widgets than before, a lot of factory staff will be out of work.
They touch on a related point near the end:
> Mr Aghion and his colleagues add that even if automation boosts employment at the level of the firm or industry, the effect across the economy as a whole is less clear. In theory robot-adopting companies could be so successful that they drive competitors out of business, reducing the total number of available jobs.
...but it seems to me like a major problem with the whole framing of the article, not just a "by the way".
What drives the adoption of automation is not "labour is expensive" but "labour is unavailable", "labour is too slow to obtain/train", "labour is imprecise", "labour is dangerous", "labour is untrustworthy" or "labour is unreliable".
Generic industrial automation solutions are still very expensive to integrate unless simplistic. Furthermore, if you automate one unit operation, the rest of your process line also needs automating or the adjacent operations will simply become the new choke points.
sounds a bit like how asynchronous programming is a 'virus' in that once you start applying the pattern, so much upstream and downstream code needs to start implementing the same pattern.
This is missing the obligatory reference to Bertrand Russell who said in 1932 that working hours will reduce to 15 hours/week [1] and this is good.
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
> This is missing the obligatory reference to Bertrand Russell who said in 1932 that working hours will reduce to 15 hours/week [1] and this is good.
It'd only be good if it came together with other social changes. So long as profit-seeking owners control employment, they will certainly not share the benefits of productivity improvements equitably. They'll cast some workers off to unemployment and pocket their wages, and the rest will be continued to be worked as hard as they are able.
David Graeber (from Bullshit Jobs fame) talked about this at some length [1]:
"Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true."
"But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones."
"These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”"
and goes on to come to the following conclusion: "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days."
Having just done Fritjof Capra's Systems View of Life course, channeling the ideas that:
a) "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" [2]
and
b) "All behaviour in complex systems is emergent"
A (vastly simplified) argument is that bullshit jobs is the emergent behaviour from a system compromising between the needs of:
a) People to work so they can earn money, be fulfilled and see a material increase in their wealth.
b) A political class keen to keep the workers busy less they revolt and upset the system.
c) A system of economics/a reductionist western/scientific worldview that increasingly externalised anything that didn't show everyone was better off (e.g. GDP).
d) Elites who were increasingly happy to take an increasing proportion of the wealth from the efficiency gains.
Everyone wins in relation to the amount of power they have relative to everyone else and the system sustains itself based on the fact no-one with enough power has enough incentive/will to overthrow it. Obviously the planet (which once indigenous peoples had been conquered) mostly lost it's voice in the conversation and so that's why we're where we are now.
[1] https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-...
I’ll just chip in here - home ownership in the US seems to be priced right at the level people can barely afford - and it takes a ton of time and requires 30 years to pay off (or trade up in just a few).
Home ownership is a way to keep people busy fixing the house, working or risk losing a basic need, and living at the edge of their means. Also invested in their own property and less willing to riot and revolt. Don’t get me wrong - I like my home a lot, but the cost is not much less expensive than rent after all the other associated expenses.
I'm not sure that is the whole story. Countries like Singapore don't have much home ownership yet they have a productive and compliant population.
There are problems with land ownership but to me they seem related to inequality rather than anything else.
> I like my home a lot, but the cost is not much less expensive than rent after all the other associated expenses.
The cost is the same, but benefits include not just living space, but also equity. You can't sell a rental.
> Home ownership is a way to keep people busy fixing the house, working or risk losing a basic need, and living at the edge of their means. Also invested in their own property and less willing to riot and revolt. Don’t get me wrong - I like my home a lot, but the cost is not much less expensive than rent after all the other associated expenses.
"No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do." - William Levitt
With your own house you can do whatever you like, not so much with a rented one.
Jokes on him, China today has a nearly 90% home ownership rate, same with the ussr of old
>The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination.
This "gloomy narrative" first and foremost served well for decades to depress wages and wage expectations and ensure a considerable supply of cheap labor exists.
The political argument was even spoken out quite freely from time to time, and it went like "well, if you [politicians] don't ensure labor is cheap, we [rich corporate owners] will simply automate away all the jobs and your voters will be left unemployed". The narrative of this development seemingly being "inevitable" and the necessary tech always being "just around the corner" for the automation of practically everything played so well into this, that it leads me to assume that interested circles knowingly pushed this narrative for exactly these political reasons. And a lot of technologists helped hugely in this push, often not because of political or economical gains (though quite some probably own tech stocks or work in the tech sector and thus stand to benefit potentially, but I also know tech enthusiasts for which these both don't apply) but because of tech fascination.
The truth however is that automation is a hard and costly business with clear limitations, and even many simple jobs are probably not automatable for decades to come. Automation often just helps to make certain jobs more efficient, but the efficiency gain is immediately being consumed by extensions in service and/or complexity that would not have been possible before, but leave us with a net zero in the change for the need for human employees (or even an increase!). But that did not stop the automation zealots from pushing their political agenda, because it's just too helpful in ensuring that most of the monetary value of the efficiency gains ends up with them and their shareholders instead of the human workforce.
So the newest paragraph in the book is "AI will automate away even all the complicated, brainy work!" and a surprising number of otherwise smart people fall for the same trap that has already been successfully used to "manage" the lower-paid untrained workforce for decades.
Automation will probably hit information workers before it hits manual labor workers. The reason is that information workers are expensive because it's harder to outsource to a poorer country, and we've got a long way to go before robots get good enough to compete against child labor (joking).
well, maybe less about ability as about energy consumption. Perhaps we've got a long way to go before robots can do the same work as kids for the same equivalent energy cost of three bowls of rice per day.
I cringe when I see an analysis begin with a trite conflict of interest argument like "Warning people of a jobless future has, ironically enough, created plenty of employment for ambitious public intellectuals looking for a book deal or a speaking opportunity." Yawn - that's charmingly glib, if factually dubious, public intellectualism is not a growth industry in general, let alone for bot-doubters.
Agreed. I likewise find analysis/comments that begin with some reference to journalists and clickbait pretty tedious.
Slightly off topic, but unemployment rate is one of those all but meaningless metrics that politicians and economists love to parade around (as meaningful). For example, you can be ineligible for unemployment (i.e., you are employed) but your income is so low you still get public assistance. Or you're living with 20+ other people.
It's also possible to stop being eligible for assistance, so they stop counting you as unemployed.
The point is, the unemployment rates rides a lot. Which is why politicians love it so.
As a percentage "rate" it does mean something very specific, and therefore not super intuitively useful.
But it's still helpful as a directional metric. If the U-3 unemployment rate goes up, it's likely the number of people in the other situations you mentioned has gone up as well.
It's still too high level. You can't make any meaningful decisions based on it.
For example, and we hear similar all the time, "...X jobs were created in the quarter and the unemployment rate fell to Y..."
But
1) What were those X jobs? Min wage (or less)? Or high paying?
2) Where were these jobs? Min wage in CA or NJ, or min wage where costs are less.
The quantity (i.e., direction) doesn't tell enough, we need quality - at least - as well.
Politicians love it as a metric because no one asks "what type of jobs? How well do they pay?" And that alone makes it suspect.
Sure, it's obvious that you can't capture that complexity in a single number.
I could tell you my weight, and it wouldn't tell you if I'm a smoker or a drunk, if I eat my veggies or exercise. But if I'm 400 pounds you can still reasonably predict I'm unhealthy, and if I lose weight from there that's a decent sign I'm getting better.
But that's the point, we have a metric that politicians, economists and the media love to parade around as meaningful. The problem is it's not meaningful. It's crap.
This is up there with presenting Wall Street IS the economy (for the rest of us).
How do we hold people accountable when we allow their bullshit to be accepted and normalized?
The article and headline asserts that economists view robots and automation as a threat to jobs. They don’t.
The conventional wisdom from most economists (defined as professors of Econ at major Universities) is the opposite, that automation leads to more jobs. This article is based on a strawman.
This strikes me as the "AI will replace..." problem. Everyone understands AIs are anything except intelligent.
Sure, but you don’t need to be intelligent for most jobs.
This is often repeated, but isn't true.
Almost every job has to deal with the inconsistencies and constructs of society (including law, morality, history and creativity) while also navigating the decisions constrained by the physical world (perception, physics). This is more than any machine, ever, has managed. I'm just thinking about food service, crossing guard and roofing, which isn't even a statistical blip.
What is true is more like "~80% of many jobs is routine enough to (theoretically) be handled by a machine."
This phenomenon is obvious with e.g. grocery store checkout machines. For every 5-10 machines, there needs to be one person to confirm I'm old enough to buy alcohol, or assure the machine I'm not stealing when I bag my onions in a way it doesn't recognize.
+ UPC doesn't appear in the system
+ Scales (bagging vs PoS) don't match
+ Temporary ID
The list goes on. There are lots of exceptions that can happen and those are trivial for a human and impossible for an AI.
Why do we care about the number of jobs? We use this as a proxy for individual well being, but having a job is not intrinsically valuable. What matters is that everyone in a society has their needs met.
We should not be optimising the number of jobs but the total output of society, while maintaining an equitable distribution of the said outputs. It may be the case that automation permanently makes some classes of workers unemployed, but with the increased benefits from automation we should still be more than capable of providing for them.
> What matters is that everyone in a society has their needs met.
Well, if they are not having an income stream then they very well are not having their needs met given that engagement with the economic system for the delivery of needs has as a prerequisite that the individual or entity have a baseline level of monetary spending ability
As someone with a bit of experience in robotics, I've always viewed these economists as "useful idiots", unknowingly doing the bidding of firms who sell us the dream of advanced automation (e.g. Tesla, Uber). The economists were clueless themselves, but the companies selling the dream profited immensely thanks to them.
Oh, it is very much the case, there's a famous saying that goes something like
There are two types of economists:
The ones that say what rich people want to hear, and the other ones that no one puts attention to
The vast majority of the population used to work in manual agricultural work, until it was largely automated to the point we're down to <1% in agri employment.
The result of this huge wave of automation was not profit for agricultural companies and farms. The average operating margin for farms is 11%. What else happened? The resulting plummeting food prices lifted billions out of poverty, to the point where extreme poverty is at the lowest level ever.
It's a little bit hard to see backroom fat cats with cigars behind this movement when automation has only ever brought massive benefits to society, including when 90% of the population worked in a vulnerable industry.
Your mistake is believing that humans have a fixed set of jobs and when jobs are removed from the job pool that the pool shrinks. In reality, the size of the pool is increasing while some jobs within the pool reduce in size and scope. From my perspective, it's also hard to see how automating back-breaking laborious jobs like cleaning, burger flipping or fruit picking is a bad thing. These jobs ruin your body. Ever see a manual laborer who was over 50 and didn't have at least one body ailment?
I was specifically commenting about economists who predicted that millions of drivers will be out of jobs in just a couple of years, and speculated what should be done about it, what will be the wider consequences etc. Basically uninformed and irresponsible blabbering under pretense of expertise.
"Automation" propaganda was always a threat aimed at labor and labor unions. The only significant "automation" has been 1) moving factories to countries with lower wages and to localities with lax regulations on working conditions, and 2) the gig economy (the culmination of Manpower's et al. temp revolution from the 90s) along with independent contracting in name only to dodge benefits and the costs of downtime.
Actual automation is a comparison between workers, who are infinitely flexible, know their jobs better than their bosses, and are responsible for taking care of themselves, - and machines, which are morons that break down and require expensive workers to fix. Workers are better the vast majority of the time, and when we can get a machine to be cost-effective against them it's a good thing. It is just a rare, difficult thing.
> The only significant "automation" has been
I take it you've never stepped inside a modern factory?
Or modern warehouse...
Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
As someone who develops automation software for the capital markets industry its too early to state what the impact will be on jobs.
For sure what I have personally seen is backed by this article in that automation has not resulted on job losses.
It has however resulted in task losses - meaning tasks that humans would do are being done done by software autonomously - this has freed up time and the theory is this time is then deployed to more valuable tasks.
In my mind the jury is out how this is really working out but if the gain is shift from work -> leisure time without impact on growth then I also see that as a win but as we know the distribution of these gains is far from even across society which is a growing problem.
I don't understand people who argue that robots create jobs because they need to be programmed, built and maintained.
Of course those jobs are created, but many more jobs were destroyed in the process.
Not to mention education cannot make engineers out of thin air, it requires a lot of resources to educate people.
And for those who don't get educated, it's a net loss since the gains of productivity are not shared.
That is what Antiwork is about: there's enough shelter and food for everyone, so work can't be mandatory. What's the point of working in fast food or taxi driver as a permanent job?
This is a very narrow view.
The robots don't just create jobs for robot engineers. Entire new industries are built on their backs.
Look at the printing press. Did it destroy jobs hand copying books? Yes. Do we now have publishers, journalists, authors, distributors, illustrators, etc.? Also yes.
> Do we now have publishers, journalists, authors, distributors, illustrators, etc.? Also yes.
We sure do. When you obsolete labour, you free people up to do other things. However, I question how true this will be with the AI revolution.
The printing press is an example of mechanical automation which does not extend into either human creativity (content of writing) or other mechanical processes. It merely provides a means of making multiple copies and passing them along.
The printing press among others inventions from the industrial revolution are a false equivalence to the coming AI. AI with the ability to perform physical and mental tasks along with internet-like connectivity and an ability to learn will completely obsolete all work. If not immediately, that is the only foreseeable long-term outcome.
AI is not a printing press. It is a way to invent and apply the equivalent of a printing press to all existing and emerging labour markets in an exponential way. Very dangerous when you realize its impacts are not bounded like the industrial revolution. This is an existential threat that comments like yours waive away too easily.
> AI is not a printing press. It is a way to invent and apply the equivalent of a printing press to all existing and emerging labour markets in an exponential way. Very dangerous when you realize its impacts are not bounded like the industrial revolution. This is an existential threat that comments like yours waive away too easily.
I don't really see how you could possibly make this argument. When the printing press was invented people didn't know what would come of it... Do you know everything that will be possible with AI?
If AI makes programming obsolete, now everyone can create software that does cool things that people want. This would undoubtedly open up a plethora of new employment options.
How about people revising their views on the Economist (and its real job)
What is its real job?
We are seeing a boom as cloud and data spend is going up as internal IT struggles to go without it, which in turn makes a virtuous cycle for even more. Likewise, once you start doing things like GPUs for graph neural nets and visualization, it's like highspeed internet: our users don't want to go back. For folks doing real things with data, it's been busy times.
My issue is more like "we and our F500 users are asking for more GPUs than azure can supply", vs job loss and stagnation.
This is not at all surprising. The scholarship positing the opposite was a deviation from what has been the standard line of economic thought since more than a century ago.
Automation is the main cause of a 20 times growth in inflation-adjusted wages since 1820. Per capita GDP growth is mostly just labor saving innovation, which is primarily automation, and secondarily greater coordination, like division of labor and specialization, and that is mostly through trade.
Previously posted here:
> Automation might help a firm become more profitable and thus expand, leading to a hiring spree. Technology might also allow firms to move into new areas, or to focus on products and services that are more labour-intensive.
This is a good argument as long as machine learning doesn't get too good. Unfortunately, improvements in ML are accelerating, so we'll see if that holds up.
I’ve always laughed at this idea that automation will take all our jobs. If it were true, farm automation would have left all of us unemployed at least a century ago. Most humans used to barely survive trying to eke food out of the earth. Yet somehow there’s not mass unemployment even though now a small fraction of the population is in agriculture.
How is automation different from industrialization? This has been going on for 200 years more or less.
Maybe, if lower prices stops increasing consumption (and investment). So far, better automation has just made us build more.
But why should that all change now? If it does, the transition will probably be gradual and take decades.
Not while we place very little value on peoples time ( their sole existence on earth ever ).
Capitalism is happy for people to waste there lives doing things they don't want to do.
A society that values peoples time as it should would encourage automation.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/if-god-is-dead...
Capitalism is just people being free to own what they produce or acquire in trade, and do with it what they wish. What people do within this context, is up to them.
This attribution of a value system, e.g. consumerism or profit-seeking, to capitalism, is misguided, and a way for certain ideological camps to pathologize and stigmatize human freedom.
Capitalism here is what you are doing once the accumulation of further capital becomes the principal objective of you activities.
If you generate a lot of profit, but you use it all to finance a luxurious lifestyle of even just to keep you and your employees comfortable then you are not necessarily doing capitalism.
The pursuit of captial accumulation is always dependent on the exploitation of someone's labour / time somewhere.
If you really care about freedom why are you happy with a system that means all but the very rich must spend the majority of their lives in toil?
>>Capitalism here is what you are doing once the accumulation of further capital becomes the principal objective of you activities.
That is not the definition when used in the context of cross-economic-system analysis.
Individual objectives, values and motivations are completely orthogonal to whether capitalism is in place.
Eliminating capitalism doesn't mean changing people's objectives and values. It means depriving them of the right to keep what they produce and acquire in trade, and do with what they wish.
And no, profiting has no relevance to exploitation. That is just Marxist pseudoscience to pathologize success.
>>If you really care about freedom why are you happy with a system that means all but the very rich must spend the majority of their lives in toil?
The amount that people toil has decreased largely as a result of the ruleset I mentioned, that is associated with capitalism.
>>That's not a serious way to argue at all.
There is nothing of substance to argue against. Characterizing all profit as exploitation is completely baseless.
It's also extremely inflammatory, making this accusation totally irresponsible, and it unsurprising that every society which has accepted this pseudoscientific doctrine has turned into a Hellish dystopia full of repression.
>>No, it hasn't.
Economists who have studied development say it is:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...
> This attribution of a value system, e.g. consumerism or profit-seeking, to capitalism, is misguided
It's not. Capitalism is not exempt from the common sense notion of "You reap what you sow", and the history of Capitalism proves this indisputably.
> and a way for certain ideological camps to pathologize and stigmatize human freedom.
The economic sphere of capitalism isn't free at all. It's firmly authoritarian. Most people today have no other choice than to sell their labour and thus their freedom for most of their lives to someone lucky enough to be wealthier than them. That's a very poor standard of "freedom". Sure, it can certainly get worse, but this wasn't the freedom that people dreamt of 100 years ago and beyond.
>>It's not. Capitalism is not exempt from the common sense notion of "You reap what you sow", and the history of Capitalism proves this indisputably.
You're making a lot of unsubstantiated assertions that are in the realm of conspiracy theory.
>>The economic sphere of capitalism isn't free at all. It's firmly authoritarian. Most people today have no other choice than to sell their labour and thus their freedom for most of their lives to someone lucky enough to be wealthier than them.
Nothing you wrote substantiates your first assertion that "The economic sphere of capitalism isn't free at all. It's firmly authoritarian."
As for being forced, by the prospect of starvation, to work: as Frédéric Bastiat wrote 170 years ago..
"Man recoils from trouble, from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd."
Someone wealthier offering a higher wage than the other options available to a person, and a person consequently choosing to work for them, is not authoritarianism.
What your argument is based on is inflammatory appeals to emotion, that upon even mimimal examimations, are revealed as totally without substance.
>>No, that's literally choosing between the least bad authoritarian entity available for oneself.
You're misdefining "authoritarian". Nothing I described in that example is authoritarian.
>>So let's push democracy into the economic sphere as well since according to you there would be no difference.
You're free to manage your own property however you wish.
If we had perfect robots creating almost limitless "free" labour, what would we as a civilization do? Ban the technology? Descend into a struggle to own the technology. Or forge a better and different society for ourselves
The more we automate jobs that people hate doing, the more time people will have to do jobs they are really good at and enjoy doing.
Hopefully creating TikTok videos won't be the majority of the creative jobs humans will focus on. There is always that danger.
Most automation is labor augmenting rather than labor replacing.
This doesn’t seem controversial in economics. If robots increase the value produced by non-robotic workers there will be increased demand for them.
At a firm level, sure. In aggregate that only works as long as aggregate demand for products and services rises faster than the output per unit of labour.
When has it not?
All of agriculture is a good example. We produce far more food today while agriculture employs a far smaller proportion of the population. The improved productivity in agriculture has in no way increased demand for agricultural labour proportional to the increases in productivity.
If you mean across all products, we're not there yet, not least because population growth has provided ongoing stimulus. Whether that continues as growth rates in more and more countries flatline remains to be seen.
Demand shifts to other things. We’ve always been capable of inventing new desires.
All this is wrong. The causalities are:
Low unemployment -> uppity expensive workers -> increasing rate of automation
Positive rate of automation -> more workers
> The world was supposedly in the middle of an artificial-intelligence and machine-learning revolution
“supposedly”
Tim Worstall said it better than I ever could:
https://www.timworstall.com/2011/03/peter-wilby-really-reall...
snippets:
Average wages in an economy are determined by the average productivity in that economy.
Individual wages are not set by what that individual does: but by the wages paid by the next possible alternative use of that individual’s labour.
. . .
Finally, as Marx pointed out, wages rise to meet average productivity, not wages falling as cheaper labour becomes more productive. This happens because capitalists compete for access to the profits that can be extracted from that labour. As the labour becomes more productive more profits can be extracted and the competition means that wages are bid up.
. . .
All of the things that we consume, now being made by these cheaper providers of labour, become cheaper, thus our real incomes rise. Their wages, now that they are becoming more productive, rise. Our wages on average, determined by our average level of productivity, move in step with our productivity, not the changes in the productivity of others. And our labour can go off and do those other things which will satisfy yet more human desires and wants: another way that we get richer of course, for satisfying two or three needs and desires instead of only one means that we are of course richer as long as we define wealth in any rational sense at all.
Wages are only bid up when there's a shortage of qualified labour.
As for the reference to Marx, Marx also argued that once capitalists run out of new markets to expand into, capitalist competition necessarily need to focus on driving down aggregate Labour costs.
Can we replace economists by AI?
Sadly that AI would need to be trained with something, and that something would likely be books of status quo economic thought, and after that's done the result would be an even more ruthless version of modern neoclassical economic thought
It makes one shudder at the thought
It makes me shudder as well, the first thing that comes to mind is the paperclip maximizer - https://terbium.io/2020/05/paperclip-maximizer/.
sounds interesting
Or https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Ffi...
12ft ladder for 10ft paywalls, eh? I hadn’t seen this before.. it’s got quite the aggressive charter:
https://12ft.io/
> Why?
> I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.
> You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter.
I find the current state of the web, post-AdWords, disappointing too.
edit: apologies, it was submitted and discussed a month ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29679716
If you hate the ad-driven web, bypassing paywalls seems wildly backwards.
Do we want to make sites attempting to do something other than SEO-spam harder to find in search?
I don't know. I won't pay for a single day or a single article from NYT or WSJ. If it is freely available I might read it.
I honestly have no solution for their problem. It's a bad position to be in. Their content is just not valuable enough to pay for. At least for me.
I pay for books and ebooks all the time, so I'm not opposed to paying for reading material. It's just that I value books much higher than news or opinion pieces.
Google tried this. It didn't work.
Can I please just have the government provide value for taxes and fund well reputable journalistic pursuits; some smaller ones locally, major ones nationally, and a trickle of funding globally (in aggregate among countries this should work out).
Sadly, it doesn't work on nytimes.com
I just turn off JS on NYT. It won't show the pictures though.
Click on the padlock in the chrome location bar, click on cookies, block cookies for the domain.
They have a 13ft paywall.
I wonder how serious that charter is. Sites don't use paywalls to get people to sign up for newsletters, they want people to pay. Bypassing their paywalls seems more likely to get them to use SEO garbage—not move away from it.
This kind of nonsense is at the heart of a lot of our problems. Yes, someone producing interesting content and making it available widely should be paid for their labour and expenses. But the marginal cost of each reader is very close to zero, unlike the candy. The root cause of the disconnect is greed; where people believe the extra value massive scalability in tech offers should just accrue to them directly as a seller, trying to drive per-unit margins back up towards the money they would get from selling a newspaper.
If digital advertising was banned and good journalism could be identified by "I have to pay a small amount for this", competition would drive the costs down in a way which makes proper use of that scalability, and we would all be better off.
> Stealing candy from a gas station is wrong, but stealing an article from behind a paywall is right, because.... The latter is easier to get away with
They don't give you the option to pay for an article. The only two choices are pay a couple hundred bucks for an annual subscription that you likely won't use more than a few times, or bypass the paywall.
To follow your analogy, this would be like if the gas station only sold gum in packs of 365 - you want a day's worth of gum, but you can only buy a yearly supply. I'll bet you'd see a lot more people stealing gum.