Posted on 10/13/2013 7:06:16 AM PDT by Kaslin
Moments ago, I responded to a reader James from the UK regarding automation on farms. James commented that he only need one laborer where decades ago it took 25 men to do the same job.
James asked "If we displace 90% of the workforce in the next 100 years - and we could well exceed this, given rapidly increasing levels of automation (with humanoid robots becoming commonplace in this time-frame) - how will the aggregate consumer afford to consume the average product? The level of work loss seems likely to exceed the level of new product development."
My Reply to James
History suggests innovation will at some point create more jobs.
We have lost jobs on farms but we gained them on the assembly line. We lost jobs on the assembly line and gained them on the internet. We lost jobs on the internet and ....
And I don't know what's next. I suspect something with energy but I do not know.
If nothing comes, I expect war.
Dark Vision For Jobs
Just as soon as I replied to James, I noticed another email on the same subject. Reader Andrew asked me to comment on the ComputerWorld article Gartner's Dark Vision for Tech, Jobs.
Science fiction writers have long told of great upheaval as machines replace people. Now, so is research firm Gartner. The difference is that Gartner, which provides technology advice to many of the world's largest companies, is putting in dates and recommending immediate courses of action.
The job impacts from innovation are arriving rapidly, according to Gartner. Unemployment, now at about 8%, will get worse. Occupy Wall Street-type protests will arrive as early as next year as machines increasingly replace middle-class workers in high cost, specialized jobs. In businesses, CIOs in particular, will face quandaries as they confront the social impact of their actions.
Machines have been replacing people since the agricultural revolution, so what's new here?
In previous technological leaps, workers could train for a better job and achieve an improvement in their standard of living. But the "Digital Industrial Revolution," as the analyst firm terms it, is attacking jobs at all levels, not just the lower rung. Smart machines, for example, can automate tasks to the point where they become self-learning systems.
Smart machines "are diagnosing cancer, they are prescribing cancer treatments," said Kenneth Brandt, a Gartner analyst. These machines "can even deliver [treatment] to the room of the patient."
Gartner sees all kinds of jobs being affected: Transportation systems, construction work, mining warehousing, health care, to name a few. With IT costs at 4% of sales for all industries, there's very little left to cut in IT, but there is a great opportunity to cut labor.
The companies on the leading edge of this trend include Amazon, which spent $775 million last year to acquire Kiva Systems, a company that makes robots used in warehouses. Google is also on the forefront, with its effort to develop driverless cars. Gartner applies a broader template, and says that the jobs most susceptible to machine replacement involve a range of back-office functions, including transactions, specialization, objectivity, high control, high scale, compliance and science.
This shift will affect employment, said Brandt, at Gartner's Symposium ITxpo. "We believe there will be persistent and higher unemployment."
Is It Different This Time?
Is it different this time? Is Gartner right? Or is innovation-history right?
I have commented numerous times, as early as 2009, if not before, to expect "structurally high unemployment for a decade".
Nonetheless, I have been generally optimistic over longer periods of time. History suggests some innovation will create jobs.
Is innovation-history right? Even if so, will jobs arrive in time? If not, war-history suggests a far darker view.
Are the optimists or the pessimists correct?
Translation: I'm going to cross my fingers and hope.
This is an important topic, and the Thinkers need to put some effort into it. The "easy" solution is more socialism and a guaranteed national income (Switzerland just put this in place, I believe). People who love freedom should take the problem seriously and think about a society that needs very little human labor but which is not dependent on getting a check from gov't..
If the robots take up more jobs, we’ll end up having more useless eaters.
Since the useless eaters are valuable to politicians for their ability to vote, they will be pandered to with taxpayer-funded goodies, creating a societal bias that favours the useless eaters over the producers. Over time, the useless eaters will have more resources to procreate and multiply, while the producers dwindle to pay for the resources that will be enjoyed by the useless eaters, until the system collapses into itself.
All this take about robots and automation is to cover up the transfer of our manufacturing and industry to Red China. Red China has the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world and yet employ FOUR times more people in their manufacturing sector that we do in our entire workforce. Germany has also has advanced, high productivity facilities with well compensated non-outsourced workers and their economy is one of the strongest in Europe.
Excellent comment.
Productivity is by definition a decrease in the human input needed to produce given goods or services. If productivity increases indefinitely, at some point infinite goods and services will be produced using zero human input.
I would really like to see some intelligent discussion of how this round of automation may be qualitatively different from previous rounds.
Instead of the Luddite claim that the machines will put us all out of work, and the optimistic response that new and better jobs will be created to replace those lost.
The optimists have been in general correct, up to now. But “past performance does not necessarily predict future performance.”
Is there something really different this time? I think there is.
There will continue to be demand, indeed increasing demand, for people that can figure out better and more efficient ways to run the machines. The problem is that these people are by definition way over on the right end of the IQ scale. A small minority.
There is presently little real demand for below-average IQ workers in our society, and I believe the IQ needed to really be in demand increases each year. I think something like one IQ point per year falls out of the bottom of our society, and the rate is probably increasing.
IOW, there will still be a demand for human workers, but most humans will not be capable of doing these types of jobs, no matter how much training they receive. The truck driver displaced by a Google-driven truck is not likely to be able to earn a living writing apps instead.
Human society, even if Marx did say it, has largely been organized to date around providing human needs and wants, the economy. What do we do as human input to produce things becomes less and less necessary? As the human contribution to the economy becomes less and less, does it make sense to claim that those few still needed by the economy should receive all the benefits of that economy? Is the creative destruction generated by capitalism in the process of destroying capitalism itself?
More importantly, what do those without a real place in the economy do with their lives?
History of people left with no purpose (see Indian reservations and inner cities) is not cause for optimism.
Belloc noted (and here I'm borrowing the phrase from Hayek, who came later) that socialism led us down the road to serfdom.
Belloc also thought that capitalism inevitably had a similar outcome -- fascism (though he didn't use the word). Big Business and Big Government inevitably twist market economies into capitalism and then into fascism.
Third way is preferable.
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