Hatred of Robots Is Hatred of Workers

Real Clear Markets ^ | December 15, 2016 | Allan Golombek

[expat_panama]

Those who oppose outsourcing work to other countries -- or to robots - usually justify their opposition as a desire to protect Americans. But it actually reflects a lack of respect for working Americans, and for people in general - a failure to realize that skilled people, not the jobs they happen to occupy, are among the most valuable resources an economy can have.

Think of an economy as a double-entry balance sheet, with columns for assets and liabilities. Many look at the balance sheet and see jobs on the asset side of the ledger, in effect consigning people to the liability column. That is why so many favor infrastructure spending as a make-work program - "let's create some jobs for people who don't have them.'" In fact, a proper accounting would be the other way around: People are one of our most important assets. Jobs, on the other hand, are simply tasks that need to be performed. Eliminate a job, and you free up people to perform other tasks. Fewer welders and shippers equals more potential computer coders and aerobics instructors. Rather than cling to jobs we no longer require, we should shed them, freeing up people to perform other tasks.

If we try to resist shedding jobs, we can't create them. That is partly because employers won't hire unless they can fire, which is why countries with the strongest restrictions on layoffs have the highest unemployment rates, such as Spain (18.9 percent unemployment in the third quarter) and Italy (11.6 percent in October.)

Moreover, if we refuse to shed existing jobs, we won't have enough people to perform new ones. We won't have enough actual assets (people) to balance our real liabilities (tasks we wish to see performed).

A quick look back in history illustrates this. At the beginning of the 20th century over 40 percent of Americans worked in agriculture. By the end of the century, it was just 2 percent. Imagine if you could travel back to 1900 and explain to people that someday agriculture would provide jobs for only 2 in 100 Americans. What would be the reaction? Probably the same we see today when people learn that technology will make an increasing number of jobs redundant. After initial disbelief, the fact that farm jobs were disappearing would ignite fear and horror: Half of our jobs eliminated? How will we survive? But we haven't just survived, we've thrived - largely because we no longer require half the population to provide our daily bread, freeing them up to build cars and the roads they use, manufacture airplanes and fly them, cure the sick and care for the elderly, develop computers and invent pharmaceutical drugs. If half the population was still working the farms, who would have populated our factories, offices and laboratories? If half of us were still needed to till the fields, where would we find the people we need to make a modern economy function?

We can't look just at the jobs that are being shed, but also at the ones that are being created in their stead. When blue-collar jobs are made redundant in the Rust Belt, that means new-collar jobs have been spawned in the Sun Belt, performed by the people who create the job-displacing technologies. According to the Department of Labor, there are more than a half-million open technology-related jobs in the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, the department forecasts, the U.S. economy will see a 30 percent increase in jobs for software developers and database administrators, 25 percent for computer systems analysts, and more than 20 percent for information security analysts, web developers and computer network architects. These are jobs we couldn't have imagined just a few years ago. How many of us had grandparents who were web masters or information security analysts? But many of us have grandchildren who will be. In a dynamic economy, work doesn't disappear, it just changes form.

Our challenge is not to hang on to jobs we needed in the past; it is to give people the skills they need to perform the jobs we actually require today and in the future. Convincing people that redundant jobs will reappear only dissuades them from acquiring the skills they need to fill the jobs that exist. Clinging to outdated jobs undermines our ability to perform necessary ones. Shedding obsolete jobs frees up more human resources to perform vital ones.

 

Allan Golombek is a Senior Director at the White House Writers Group. 

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[Fiji Hill]

Robot Man--Connie Francis

[nathanbedford]

We can't look just at the jobs that are being shed, but also at the ones that are being created in their stead. When blue-collar jobs are made redundant in the Rust Belt, that means new-collar jobs have been spawned in the Sun Belt, performed by the people who create the job-displacing technologies.

I do not argue with the concept or the conclusion but I do have a problem with the verb tense. The implication of the quoted paragraph is that there is an equivalence of jobs created for jobs lost to robots or automation and I believe that is true but not at the same time, that is, not without a painful time lag.

Here is a reply which I wrote in July and partly in August, long before the election of Donald Trump:

We consider the implications of automation as conservatives. The implications are not limited to job displacement but to the very structure of our economic system and therefore the very existence of our liberties.

The public eternally argues whether automation produces more jobs than it eliminates. If we look at the Industrial Revolution which was a form of automation, it clearly produced more jobs than it cost. The problem was the Industrial Revolution affected farms greatly and made many agricultural workers redundant who flocked to the cities and infested places like London's gin alleys. The social dislocation was brutal and vividly described by Dickens.

But it was not "automation" alone that caused dislocations (a point we might keep in mind in an age of outsourcing), the cloture movement in England and Ireland and the Crofters in Scotland caused huge social dislocations. The Scots emigrated around the world giving us the likes of Carnegie. One can even connect the dots to the Irish potato famine, their migrations not just to America where they produced presidents like Barack Obama but throughout the Empire.

The dislocations, however caused, inevitably produced reactions. Those who cite the virtues of technological advancement cite the reaction of the Luddites as an example of overreaction and misplaced grievance. To destroy the looms being powered by water and later by steam in order to bring back a cottage industry was a futile reaction.

Eventually the Industrial Revolution caught up and provided jobs but the difficulty in human terms was seen in the time lag between redundancy and new industries creating new jobs. Besides the time lag there was also a culture lag. An agricultural worker who kept time by the sun and the seasons was not the sort of fellow to show up to work on time and tie himself to a tedious machine for 12 hours, six days a week. Something to consider when we seek to explain the failures of the Great Society and its training programs to make worker bees in the inner-city. In this context we think of a checkout employee at Walmart and we see a tedious repetitive task, highly automated and intentionally designed by very smart people to be operated as mindlessly as possible by less clever people who are utterly ignorant of the workings of the technology they operate. In fact, the whole idea of this transformation is to discourage individual initiative where the rubber meets the road. Human drones make the best employees in this situation.

In addition to the time lag and the culture lag there is an education lag which is extremely challenging because it is a moving target. As the digital revolution incessantly rolls over it becomes exponentially more sophisticated in bewilderingly short spaces of time, it's new technical skills require new language (literally so in computer programming), new ways of thinking (with the binary system instead of thinking in 10s), a whole new concept of time and space (your x-ray might well be read in real-time by a radiologist in India). The digital revolution requires a difficult to define alteration in conceptual thinking regarding sectors of the economy. Advertising in newspapers is going the way of delivering the mail by pony express. Marketing is now being redefined by social media. Delivery of medical services must now take into account the fact that I can look my symptoms up on the Internet and challenge my doctor's diagnosis, often to his ill-disguised annoyance. Meanwhile, there is a bit of irony which might be appreciated today by Luddites of old when an Englishman's x-ray is read by an Indian doctor, reversing the mercantilist manufacture of garments in England with Indian cotton. Old-fashioned industries are utterly revolutionized by computers: horizontal drilling and fracking in oil recovery; subterranean radar in mining and oil exploration; gene splicing of grains in agriculture, much feared by my neighbors here in Germany-or is theirs merely a protectionist reaction?

Since the object of automating labor is to substitute machines for people at a cost benefit, automation seeks low hanging fruit and is most profitably deployed where it will eliminate the most workers. These workers are human which means they come in many flavors: many will be intelligent but many will not be clever enough to adapt to cyber world; many will be ambitious but many will also be lazy and prone to dependency; many will be fit but many will also be alcoholic and drug dependent; many will be young but many will be old and uneducable; many will be mobile but many will also be tied to the soil or family and unable to pull up stakes to find employment in geographically as well as psychically far removed venues; many will be resilient but many will also be defeatist. We conservatives should never forget that victims as well as survivors of the computer revolution will vote. We should never forget that leftists will pander to the losers and demagogue capitalism for producing technological progress which they will describe as exploitation. They are liable to win this debate because they tend to win debates by controlling the language, co-opting institutions, and with cynical race and class demagoguery. They are liable to win because they are likely to get the government to subsidize their side.

Leftists will be eager to demonize capitalism as the author of dislocation just as they exploit "climate change" to destroy capitalism. The strategy will be to create a class of victims of those left behind to create a political force to impose government controls over the entire economic system. Community organizing will be moved from a geographical locus to a class basis. Demagoguery will rise as the left seeks to divert inquiry away from other causes of job dislocation such as burdensome and ubiquitous government regulations, a suffocating tax structure, unwise trade deals promoting job exfiltration from America, unnecessary and misdirected environmental restrictions, open border infiltration of job seekers, an ever expanding and deadening public as well as private debt, a political system waxing increasingly corrupt as it increasingly engages in market distorting crony capitalism, a pathetically incompetent educational system, and, ultimately worse of all, a debilitating victim and dependency culture.

Here we see ingredients for a toxic cocktail of dislocation and systemic breakdown which could become a perfect storm if the timing is right. This list does not even contemplate several foreseeable crises such as the entitlement funding balloon bursting in a few years nor does it contemplate the unforeseeable black swan events which the gods whimsically introduce into human affairs to confound all wise men. In the storm, should it come, the left will not let a good crisis go to waste. History suggests the right will simply muddle. All of the leftist inspired, government imposed causes of job dislocation catalogued above will only be made the more acute by automation and the dislocation caused by robots. If Chinese factories are automating and eliminating 90% of their workers, the impact on American employment statistics will be devastating. In a perfect storm, or in a gradually gathering storm, the remedy offered by the left for failed socialism, that is for government policies which have brought us to this place will be more, not less, socialism. That is the whole idea of not letting a crisis go to waste.

Conservatives, however, do have the answers and have had the answers for years: abandon the nonsense that diversity is strength, stop immigration, preserve the tremendous benefits to our economy of international trade but render trade fair as well as free, end crony capitalism, get the federal government out of education, cut taxes, cut regulation, cut spending.

Finally, if conservatives do not left will certainly deal with the employment and social dislocations inevitably to be caused by technology which for short we might call "robotizing" which has been somewhat obscured by the wave of immigration but which is inevitable and is well advanced in some industries. The problem for conservatives will be to maintain the social fabric and to maintain a hold on the political destiny of the country and still maintain a conservative, capitalist policy where wealth is created by machines that do not pay Social Security, do not pay income taxes, and do not pay for health insurance. Those who can assemble the capital to create these machines can be made immensely wealthy and there is no present provision (or conservative ideology) either for providing for the workers the machines displace or for distributing not just goods and services made by these machines but that wealth created by the machines. We have a social system based on wages which provides taxation and the insurance and the mortgage money that makes our society work. What happens when the wage system is replaced by machines?

Yes, of course we have the historic examples of the Industrial Revolution which generated dislocations as an agrarian society was replaced with a modern industrial society that ultimately provided more jobs than it displaced. Ultimately, robotisastion will no doubt have the same effect but the pace of the dislocations will be far more rapid than that which occurred during the centuries since the industrial revolution began around 1800. The reaction of the Luddites, the squalor of London, the real suffering of people in those days occurred even though the transition took more than a century but the digital revolution has not just miniaturized technology, it has shrunk time. We must expect an acceleration, an extension, an intensification of the dislocations normally attendant on the introduction of revolutionary technology.

Perfect storm or gathering storm, conservatism must know what it believes in order to know what to do. If we do not provide conservative solutions we will find the voters accepting statist solutions which inevitably trade our liberty for leftist demagoguery.

Postscript: all of this is now coming to a head in the person of President-elect Trump. The point of this long reply in retrospect is to point out his responsibility not just to a few manufacturing jobs in the American Rust Belt but to the whole society, that is, he must understand that to save one portion of society from the rigors of outsourcing, immigration, automation, the digital revolution, or predatory trade wars, is inevitably to disfavor other sections of the economy. "Other sections of the economy" is a euphemism for the lives of real people.

[Billthedrill]

It's really two separate topics. Quite a few people have speculated on what happens to human actualization when the necessities of labor are reduced or removed altogether. Plato, for one, Karl Marx for another. Neither was a laborer.

There was quite a to-do - remember the Luddites? - when agriculture began to shed its working population in favor of mechanization which was more productive, no doubt, but supported a population that was forced to find a means of support elsewhere, or starve. At no point was that extra productivity applied to the betterment of the dispossessed, at least until it became obvious that industry itself needed workers who had been bettered, which was also to be made more efficient. At that point Marx decided that the workers would suffer "immiseration" and dwindle, and he was correct for some; for others it was a ticket to prosperity. One seldom finds a starving factory worker these days - it's bad for the factories.

Marxian cynicism aside, the nature of labor changes and there absolutely are people who fall by the wayside. This is exacerbated when social engineers attempt to hurry the process along - recall Hillary's triumphant dismissal of the coal workers in the election it helped cost her. Shall we maintain entry-level positions in an attempt to place the occupants on a trajectory of self-betterment? We did, and it was working fairly well until somebody decided it needed to be at an insupportable cost and made that law. What happened hasn't benefited the worker. And it isn't as if nearly everyone didn't see it coming.

Increasing mechanization is going to happen, and if the social engineers stay out of the way fewer people are likely to be hurt than if they keep up with meddling based on washed-up social precepts and irrelevant political interests. Only the governing class stands to lose there. And they don't like the idea.

[marron]

People are naturally creative and entrepreneurial. Given the chance and the freedom to build and create, there would never be “surplus” workers. There will always be a demand for people, where people are free to think new thoughts and act on them.

The problem comes when an over-regulated society makes it impossible to act on your creative drive... or impossible at least to act on it *here*.

This is why the more important part of Trump’s promise isn’t his threat to impose tariffs, but his promise to clear out the regulatory weeds that make it to where you can’t build here. When its better to build your automated plant in China than California, you have a problem. Its not just about wages... since a robot makes the same wage in China as he does in Los Angeles.

[mongrel]

And just before the industrial revolution, no one could have imagined industrial jobs for the farm hands.

There will be jobs imagined and created that we’ve never heard of before. Some will be in virtual reality. Some will be in repair of parts.

[central_va]

Those who oppose outsourcing work to other countries -- or to robots - usually justify their opposition as a desire to protect Americans.

Stop reading right there. Linking the two things, together offshoring and automation, is disingenuous. Offshoring means the factory leaves the USA which is bad whether the factory is automated or not. The gloBULList Free Traitors™ always try to link these two things together. They portray protectionists as Luddites which nothing could be further from the truth. Are some protectionists Luddites? Perhaps a small minority. Trumps has never indicated he is against automation.

So stuff it gloBULLists.

[DesertRhino]

“Fewer welders and shippers equals more potential computer coders and aerobics instructors.”

And this globalist lunacy is why Trump won moron.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

At least there’s insurance;

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/old-glory-insurance/81303587/

[indthkr]

Automation bump for later.....

[RegulatorCountry]

What an absolutely Orwellian headline. The mind boggles. By this “logic,” hatred of blowup sex dolls is hatred of women.

[Gen-X-Dad]

For the first time in our world history, technology is good enough to replace things only human could do in the past as far as complex activities that require subjective decision making and precise dexterity to execute. We have over 90 million people no longer counted as part of the American work force, our manufacturing capability and productivity just keeps going up, and this productivity has decoupled from increasing the size and or wages of the work force.

The age of automation is a new problem for society to deal with that is unlike previous technology inflection points as we simply have permanently eliminated the need for a large majority of people to be in our labor force without missing a beat. This will most likely accelerate as the service and transportation industry will join the agriculture and manufacturing industry because of automation. If the demand side of the curve becomes broken from lack of income for consumers, even if you drop the prices down to zero the economy comes to a grinding halt. No one has a good solution to solving this problem besides blind faith that like previous times in our history it will work itself out.

[trisham]

The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and self-employed weavers in the 19th century that used the destruction of machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting the use of machinery in a “fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices.[1] They were fearful that the years they had spent learning the craft would go to waste and unskilled machine operators would rob them of their livelihood.[2] One misconception about the Luddites is that they protested against the machinery itself in a vain attempt to halt progress of technology. As a result, the term has come to mean one opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation or new technologies in general.[3] The Luddite movement began in Nottingham and culminated in a region-wide rebellion that lasted from 1811 to 1816. Mill owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was brutally suppressed with military force.

Source: Wikipedia

[expat_panama]

...jobs created for jobs lost to robots or automation and I believe that is true but not at the same time, that is, not without a painful time lag...

Virtually all the work I did when I began my engineering career is now automated --and the automation was designed and implemented by enthusiastic award winning engineers like myself. 

The theory is that if all the engineering work is automated then all the engineers should be out of work, but reality is that engineers got more job openings than ever.  Same w/ folks in a lot of other fields, but for the big picture is that U.S. tech growth has come with job growth while underemployment was what we get when the morons take over. 

iow, painful problems w/ jobs come not from technology but with gov't bungling. 

[nathanbedford]

My problem is I cannot think of one example in history in which society was sufficiently unregulated to permit a contemporaneous Creation of spin off jobs To compensate for the losses generated by new technology.

[expat_panama]

By this “logic,” hatred of blowup sex dolls is hatred of women.

It isn't?

[varyouga]

This isn’t like the first industrial revolution with very basic manual machines that had no “intelligence” and required leagues of humans to service. The smartest supercomputer today is still very dumb in real-world tasks compared to even the dumbest human. Computers up until recently were merely an extension of human ability. Basically a super-fast mechanical abacus that you can write detailed directions for.

Now, the difference with the new deep-learning AI systems is they are actually showing the beginnings of true “thinking”. Observation, interpretation, making connections, self-improvement. You no longer have to direct every operation or worry about unknown situations. These machines learn simply by watching, can “think” on their own and adapt in real-time to new things. They actual mimic how the brain works and no doubt will start replacing EVERY job in order of complexity. Once the machines have the brainpower, they will do EVERYTHING for us.

The current economy is based on people/companies needing things from each other and trading for mutual benefit. And the only “thing” most people have to trade is their labor. If a machine can do anything a human can for a fraction of the resources, most humans become not needed for labor. Humans that own resources will have no more reason to give them to poorer humans in exchange for labor.

The possible outcomes I see:

1) Humans will remain more capable than machines through generic engineering. And will still be needed by each other.

2) All humans that are “not needed” will be killed by the owner class. Or population controlled.

3) Humans that are “not needed” will be given everything they need to live for free. Maybe with limits on population.

[17th Miss Regt]

This works if people all have the same intelligence, talent and ability. In fact, it's clear that they don't. What about the bell curve?

Let those on the lower end of the bell curve identify as people on the upper end. Then we have a situation where no one is on the lower end and everybody is about equally intelligent. And the problem you mention goes away so everyone can be a computer scientist or physicist or mathematician!

[pa_dweller]

Related reading - The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

[minnesota_bound]

Robot lives matter!

[ek_hornbeck]

Fewer welders and shippers equals more potential computer coders and aerobics instructors.

So let me understand this idiot's concept of a viable modern-day economic model for America and other developed nations.

Industry is gone, so the wealth elite are no longer entrepreneurs or investors, they're speculators who make their wealth through credit default swaps and by shorting currency - all of which produces nothing. For those outside this speculator class, a lucky minority will get reasonable wages by catering to the ruling elites' IT and other technical needs. Everyone else is supposed to become a minimum wage service sector drone - an "aerobics instructor," a dog walker, a WalMart door greeter, or a busboy.

That sure sounds like a recipe for a successful model of a hollowed-out economy, which is precisely what the internationalists want.