The proportion of people working seems a bit unaffected by technological change. A couple of centuries back most people were in farming and now that is done by like 2% of the population the others have found things to do mostly because people like doing stuff rather then because they's starve otherwise. Even if robots make all the stuff I imagine people will busy themselves teaching each other yoga and the like.
> the others have found things to do mostly because people like doing stuff rather then because they's starve otherwise.
I've seen variations of this statement many times on HN, that is, "there's no such thing as disutility of labor". I'm a bit skeptical. I believe a lot of software people enjoy their jobs, and some keep working even though they don't hve to, but I doubt that's the case for the bulk of the world's urban population.
Also, people have many other material demands (sometimes called "needs") besides food and shelter. Viz. the common complaint by SV developers that "a 6 digit salary isn't much".
Huh? I can rattle off a dozen towns that were once solid industrial cities, now creaky shadows of their former selves.
The ante to get into the quality job market has been raised substantially. Very few moderate skill jobs exist that are allowing folks to live a lifestyle equivalent to an average Amercian circa 1965.
I'm starting to see decent contract workers in IT roles coming in around $25/hr -- so they are making something like $15-18. I made 2.5x that with zero experience in 2000. This is happening because the big employers around here are embracing new tech and are automating lots of IT work away.
> The proportion of people working seems a bit unaffected by technological change.
The proportion of the produce of society returned to labor vs. capital, OTOH, is strongly affected by technological change -- advancing technology tends to shift returns to capital (though sometimes there is a trailing second order effect where this produces policy responses that at least partially offset this primary effect.)
> A couple of centuries back most people were in farming and now that is done by like 2% of the population the others have found things to do mostly because people like doing stuff rather then because they's starve otherwise.
The fact that they would starve otherwise is a pretty big factor, and its a big factor that -- especially absent policy responses like child labor laws, minimum wages laws, etc., but even to a lesser extent with them -- keeps returns to labor down.
The advocates of basic income are almost right on this issue.
If it were the case that we have a large surplus of labor, and there was not enough work for people to do, then it would make a lot of sense to have a basic income, which would be the most efficient way to deal with technological unemployment.
However, right now, we really don't have a surplus of labor. If we did, then the average standard of living would be really high. In order to raise the standard of living of people around the world, people need to produce things, which requires work.
That fact that we cannot provide a high enough average standard of living even when the incentive to work is very high, proves that drastically lowering the incentive to work would not provide a sufficient standard of living.
You seem to be arguing as if "surplus of labour" means that as a whole the world has enough good stuff, and having more people work won't add value.
What it actually means is that there are people who want more good stuff, and are even willing to do work to get it - but that's not an option for them because there are no jobs available. It's the sad state of people not being organized to work to provide their own needs - and it's caused by wealth being so concentrated in the smallest group at the top that economic activity is frozen for everyone else.
A basic income would take wealth away from the few who have more than enough, and thaw out economic activity for everyone else. Poor people would be able to spend, AND work because others are spending.
All of this has nothing to do with robots. Except.. One of the fears of robotics is that they'll work so well that even more wealth will be concentrated to a few. Basic income is the antidote to that concern.
In the long term it gets even better.. Eventually when robots are doing most of the work, a basic income will mean that work is optional for everyone, and people will do work they find meaningful instead of necessary, or will just spend time with their families.
First off, you really need to add a disclaimer to this comment. As a cooking robot, your view is clearly biased.
That said, I mostly agree with you. However I was mulling all this over last night, and I hit a snag: If everyone is unemployed and has no money, who will patronize the services that are owned by the rich? Will it just be rich people passing money around? Or is wealth redistribution actually in the best interest of rich people, since it means more people will buy their goods and services?
> Is wealth redistribution actually in the best interest of rich people, since it means more people will buy their goods and services?
I believe the answer is a resounding "yes." However, that doesn't exclude the possibility of a tragedy of the commons, and we all know how good markets are at preventing those...
> If everyone is unemployed and has no money, who will patronize the services that are owned by the rich? Will it just be rich people passing money around?
It's still a problem if a sizable subset of people are unemployed and have no money or ability to get money. It's not terribly difficult to imagine a system with a underclass, a consumer class, and a "owner" class. Even if we automate manufacturing, the consumer class will include mercenaries of the literal or financial variety. In fact, I wonder if that's not precisely what Wall Street is.
> A basic income would take wealth away from the few who have more than enough, and thaw out economic activity for everyone else. Poor people would be able to spend, AND work because others are spending.
I feel like this is a crucial point that many people completely miss.
> right now, we really don't have a surplus of labor. If we did, then the average standard of living would be really high
That doesn't follow. It's quite possible to simultaneously have
1. Capacity to produce plenty of available food, land, shelter, etc
2. Plenty of people willing to work for the food, land, and shelter
3. Lack of fed and sheltered people due to #2's labor having lower value than #1
There is no reason why the market determined value of labor (VOL) must exceed the market determined cost of living (COL). It happens. This is what people mean when they say that famine is a distribution problem, not a production problem. What they really mean is that it's an economic problem. Markets are entirely compatible with the notion of an underclass that cannot put food on the table, even amid abundance. Refer to the (e)book "Poverty and Famines" by Amartya Sen for examples and analysis. Exporting food while part of the populace starves isn't a stunt reserved for communist countries.
Thought experiment: there's a village with 100 peasants and surrounding land capable of producing 100 units of food if tended to by 75 laborers. The landowner hires 75 laborers, providing them each with 1 unit of food in return (supply of labor exceeds demand, so he has all the bargaining power). He sells the remaining 23 units at market in the neighboring town.
What do the 25 peasants that weren't needed do? Go to the neighboring town? What if nobody there is hiring either?
> That fact that we cannot provide a high enough average standard of living even when the incentive to work is very high, proves that drastically lowering the incentive to work would not provide a sufficient standard of living.
A high standard of living requires more than products of labor. Crucially, it requires control over resources. The market provides sufficient indirect control if VOL>COL. We can empirically and theoretically observe that that's not always the case.
It is also possible that your local regulatory climate makes producing at COL impossible for nearly everyone. If you aren't allowed to do something profitable until you've done a great deal of unprofitable compliance work, you can't produce and so don't. In practice this simplifies to "men with guns won't let you earn enough to live" and it can sneak up on a society.
Err, that's theoretically possible, but I don't think it's nearly as big of an issue. Can you point to an example? Because it seems that there are many more examples of "supply of labor exceeds demand, forcing 70% of the peasants to work for the minimum they can live on rather than the value of their labor, and forcing 30% of the peasants to live on nothing."
Was your comment an underhanded jab at minimum wage? In that case I agree that MW is a poor solution, but I disagree that it's a net negative or responsible for the VOL/COL gap.
It's hard to believe that we have no surplus of labor when politicians are clamoring to create new jobs.
What's wrong with wages as an incentive to work? Why should the government provide an additional incentive to work by depriving people of their basic needs?
And water is still wet. Really, it doesn't make sense for robots to not be a net drain on employment.
As a thought experiment, let's say that a company fires n workers because it is in the process of automating their jobs. Now, let's also assume n workers get hired, at the same wage as before, producing the automated systems which had previously replaced them. How can it be economically viable to automate, if instead of only paying your original n workers, you are now indirectly paying n employees producing the equipment you are buying, plus the capital costs of automation? Since we know that it is in fact more cost effective to automate, then the only remaining possibility is that there are either fewer workers producing the automation equipment or they are being paid less.
This isn't strictly true -- an automation could come alongside a (substantial) productivity improvement, growing the firm to the point that it's total headcount still rises.
If there's consumer demand for more (and cheaper) versions of whatever product, then rather than a single company this form of automation can grow the industry as a whole too.
Inevitably, however, there will be industries that don't really need to grow. We'll just get what they make cheaper without buying much more of it. But then we'll have extra money (and extra people willing to work) -- figuring out new things for those people to do, possibly in wholly unrelated industries, is the very essence of why most of us still have jobs despite centuries of automation.
Aside from the productivity argument, a big problem businesses face is finding capable and reliable people. If you can push that problem onto the companies building robots, it might not save you any money, but it reduces your own risk and that is still going to be worthwhile in many cases.
No, there's another possibility: automation has increased productivity, so that the same n workers are now producing a lot more product, which can be sold for a lot more money, enough more to pay for the additional cost of automation, plus the increased wages/salaries of the workers (since they are now more highly skilled than they were before; they're robot maintainers and programmers instead of assembly line workers), and still leave increased profits.
In other words, the real benefit of automation is to raise everyone's standard of living by raising the average productivity of human workers.
"Gee, yeah and I'm starting to think that prayer might not be enough to protect the health of those children in that factory I own in Bangladesh. I guess my fault is I'm just too honest and trusting."
Arguments like these assume that the company is already operating at maximum capacity, and can produce no more profit. It is entirely possible that robotics can produce more profits than possible by humans alone, and a fraction of the newly generated extra profit can keep the workforce still employed in some other new task, like maintaining the robots. For example, it was unlikely that anyone could curate the web manually, but Google automated the entire process. Perhaps few people at Yahoo directories lost job, but there was overall gain in employment due to an algorithm (Pagerank).
Actually your thought experiment is incomplete, so your answer is not the only possible solution.
Let's say I have a shoe factory, and I install a robot that can, say, cut the shoe leather faster, more cheaply, and more reliably (less waste). Perhaps it can cut shapes a human couldn't, or couldn't cost effectively, so I can even sell new shoe designs. The guy who used to cut the leather and put in the shoelace eyelets can now just do eyelets. This might cut my costs such that I can drop my shoe price AND make a larger profit. The lower price means I sell more shoes and make more profits. So I not only keep the old leather-cutter, but in fact might bring on more people so that I could get even more profits.
This is a contrived example, in the style of The Wealth of Nations, but it could just as well be a more complex one. Computers replaced slide rules and draftsman, yet more people are involved these days in building planes (and more interesting ones) than were in the pre-computing days.
Yes this is not the only possible outcome -- some people will be automated away, can't find other employment and they will be screwed. Governments should provide some support for them, and some governments will (probably not the US, but that's another story). But it's not axiomatic that "robots == job loss" -- we're not talking some sort of asimov robot that would be a 1:1 replacement for a human!
This is obviously a very simplistic scenario, but I think it's no more simplistic than your scenario:
Sally works at an electronics factory for minimum wage. The factory fires her and replaces her with a robot. The factory then is able to sell some electronic components to Joe for a lower price while also increasing the factory's margin. Joe sells handmade artisanal pocket calculators. Now that some of his components are cheaper, Joe can afford to hire Sally to work as a phone salesperson, making slightly more than minimum wage. Sally makes more money, the factory makes more money, and Joe can expand his business and probably make more money.
Except Sally now suddenly has to retrain as a salesperson. And perhaps also try to beat out other people which already have sales experience to that sales job.
This takes effort and may be achievable with a lot of gumption, sure, but now consider the entire workforce that just got fired. Are they all going to be able to pull that off?
But it should be obvious there are a lot fewer salespeople needed than factory workers, and more importantly, robots don't buy things, so who is buying the artisanal pocket calculators and where are they getting their money?
Your comment applies not just to robots but to any labour saving device or productivity increase. From the wikipedia page:
Historically, the gigantic increase in labour productivity induced by technological progress since the industrial revolution has resulted in the dominance of the scale effect, bringing about both a massive increase in real wages and a decrease in labour time. There is no reason to expect that this same process cannot be continued in the future.
The most prescient comparison to be made is the increase in self checkout lanes; the human element is left to frantically supervise while the customer has all the social interaction equivalent to using a DVD player. The future should be bringing people closer together.
If the social interaction equivalent of using a DVD player means I can get my shopping totalled and paid for in 2 minutes instead of 10, I'm all for it. Human checkout operators - whilst skilled - generally have much lower throughput (lower space density, one customer can back up many, etc.)
Argh! About 90% of the people mentioned in this article are Doctors, not Misters. And approximately zero of them are introduced before their names are first mentioned. Likewise acronyms. Who edited this crap?
From the 1920-2014, technology progressed and made many jobs irrelevant, just as improvements in robotics have put a lot of people out of work. So if technology puts people out of work, then our unemployment should have increased since the 20's. Let's take a look at some data from The U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This doesn't seem to be the case. As people lose jobs, new types of jobs are created, just as they were in the past. The job market will continue to evolve as the world changes.
Why? Because you will be able to get such a robot for practically nothing and it will fill all your material needs without you having to pay any one any more money.
That's right. Head for the hills. The world is coming to an end.
An unprecedented wave of prosperity is coming to destroy us.
The only way this could be a problem is if robotic labor becomes super cheap, while at the same time becoming super expensive. The picture usually painted is the overlords will have it and those underfoot won't be able to buy it. Unlike any other technology revolution, ever.
The reality is that even the poorest sap unable to operate a robot will be handed a $500 self-assembling house that grows all its own food, collects all its own energy, and cleans itself. Imagine the untold suffering that awaits us.
Even for someone who personally suspects that the market will always find sufficient use for the displaced labor, it seems a little silly to ignore the possibility that it won't simply on account of it not having happened yet.
This strikes me as the same argument that comes up with every new automation technology. Like all of the others, the automation will hurt people in a specific field, but help society as a whole.
ATMs hurt bank-tellers specifically, but all of society has 24/7 access to cash.
Email hurts the postal workers, but everyone can instantly communicate with nearly anyone in the developed world.
Robotic car manufacturing hurt some auto workers, but all of society gets cheaper cars.
Amazon.com hurts the mom & pop book store, but everyone gets cheaper books conveniently delivered.
Netflix crushed video rental stores, but a whole county got cheaper, easier access to video.
> Robotic car manufacturing hurt some auto workers, but all of society gets cheaper cars
This is false. Over the past forty years, the rise in price for the median car sold in the US has far exceeded inflation. The idea that "society gets cheaper cars" is false, cars have gotten more expensive, even taking inflation into account. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps careful track of such things.
Obviously automating something will benefit someone. You have your facts mixed up however, thus your conclusion that it benefits "society as a whole" can be disregarded.
I think if you take a car from today and tried to make it without automation, it would cost much more. If automation wasn't the cheaper manufacturing option, why do it?
> Over the past forty years, the rise in price for the median car sold in the US has far exceeded inflation.
That's just one of many of potential examples. Are you suggesting that automation drives consumer prices up? Why would any industry automate more if they believed that in the long run, it would drive their costs up?
> ...thus your conclusion that it benefits "society as a whole" can be disregarded.
Perhaps "society as a whole" was the wrong phrase. I mean the group of people that encompasses more than just the specific workers in the industry undergoing automation. For example, the Americans who work as bank tellers compared to the Americans who access ATMs.
It would be interesting to try to reduce the cost of the cars down to some sort of per mile driven figure.
(Of course it would be messy because of insurance and driving habits and better technology and such, I just figure it would do a better job of taking any difference in delivered value into account)
As things get cheaper due to increased productivity, people want more things. For example, due to the declining cost of air travel, people routinely fly places, even commute by jet.
This was inconceivable not long ago.
Furthermore, vast industries have sprung up whose only product is entertainment. Back when economies were less productive, there was no room for such industries.
Even low end cars have what were once considered luxury only features. The list covers every facet of our economy.
More automation -> Less jobs -> Lower wages -> More jobs -> Less automation
I believe there's an equilibrium going on. I don't think we'll ever reach that point of automation, it will only happen when (and if) demographic growth turns negative. Until then, availability of cheap labour hinders "full automation".
This is what Bertrand Russell advocated about 100 years ago. But he thought of a sane society where the productivity was split between everyone so we got more leisure instead of unemployment.
> Who needs a job when you have robots doing all the work for you?!
Anyone who doesn't own productive capital and lives in a society where you either need income from productive capital or income from labor to get the necessities of life.
> Think of all the other things you could be doing.
Let's stop talking about jobs and talk about productivity. What's the net productivity of automation? Let's also start talking about guaranteed minimum income.
Certainly automation reduces the numbers of jobs required for production. This has always been the case. This leads to overproduction problems, but the answer is always the same:
hire more people in the public sector, and try to bolster consumption further.
It is the growth of the public sector that solves the overproduction crisis, by throttling production. This time is no different.
Taken to its logical conclusion, if all production could be automated, every one of us could work for the government...
Even if every possible task were automated and made super cheap, and somehow you were able to deny access to super cheap products and services to large numbers of people, these large groups of people would still be able to trade with each other.
The robotic abundance/destitution scenario is inherently contradictory and assumes some things stay exactly constant while others undergo complete transformation.
We have advanced societies that are making great use of technology today. And others that do not. Somehow these co-exist. A completely robotic United States will still have Amish people not benefiting from robots. Anyone else that cares to operate on the tech of 2014 will be free to do so. Or the tech of 2050 or 2100.
How does this grossly misguided concern come up over and over again?! To quote myself from the last time this came up:
"What's with this obsession with jobs? If all we wanted were "jobs", we could create 100 million real quickly. Just go destroy a bunch of stuff and get people to work, rebuilding everything again."
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadI've seen variations of this statement many times on HN, that is, "there's no such thing as disutility of labor". I'm a bit skeptical. I believe a lot of software people enjoy their jobs, and some keep working even though they don't hve to, but I doubt that's the case for the bulk of the world's urban population.
Also, people have many other material demands (sometimes called "needs") besides food and shelter. Viz. the common complaint by SV developers that "a 6 digit salary isn't much".
The ante to get into the quality job market has been raised substantially. Very few moderate skill jobs exist that are allowing folks to live a lifestyle equivalent to an average Amercian circa 1965.
I'm starting to see decent contract workers in IT roles coming in around $25/hr -- so they are making something like $15-18. I made 2.5x that with zero experience in 2000. This is happening because the big employers around here are embracing new tech and are automating lots of IT work away.
The proportion of the produce of society returned to labor vs. capital, OTOH, is strongly affected by technological change -- advancing technology tends to shift returns to capital (though sometimes there is a trailing second order effect where this produces policy responses that at least partially offset this primary effect.)
> A couple of centuries back most people were in farming and now that is done by like 2% of the population the others have found things to do mostly because people like doing stuff rather then because they's starve otherwise.
The fact that they would starve otherwise is a pretty big factor, and its a big factor that -- especially absent policy responses like child labor laws, minimum wages laws, etc., but even to a lesser extent with them -- keeps returns to labor down.
If it were the case that we have a large surplus of labor, and there was not enough work for people to do, then it would make a lot of sense to have a basic income, which would be the most efficient way to deal with technological unemployment.
However, right now, we really don't have a surplus of labor. If we did, then the average standard of living would be really high. In order to raise the standard of living of people around the world, people need to produce things, which requires work.
That fact that we cannot provide a high enough average standard of living even when the incentive to work is very high, proves that drastically lowering the incentive to work would not provide a sufficient standard of living.
What it actually means is that there are people who want more good stuff, and are even willing to do work to get it - but that's not an option for them because there are no jobs available. It's the sad state of people not being organized to work to provide their own needs - and it's caused by wealth being so concentrated in the smallest group at the top that economic activity is frozen for everyone else.
A basic income would take wealth away from the few who have more than enough, and thaw out economic activity for everyone else. Poor people would be able to spend, AND work because others are spending.
All of this has nothing to do with robots. Except.. One of the fears of robotics is that they'll work so well that even more wealth will be concentrated to a few. Basic income is the antidote to that concern.
In the long term it gets even better.. Eventually when robots are doing most of the work, a basic income will mean that work is optional for everyone, and people will do work they find meaningful instead of necessary, or will just spend time with their families.
That said, I mostly agree with you. However I was mulling all this over last night, and I hit a snag: If everyone is unemployed and has no money, who will patronize the services that are owned by the rich? Will it just be rich people passing money around? Or is wealth redistribution actually in the best interest of rich people, since it means more people will buy their goods and services?
I believe the answer is a resounding "yes." However, that doesn't exclude the possibility of a tragedy of the commons, and we all know how good markets are at preventing those...
> If everyone is unemployed and has no money, who will patronize the services that are owned by the rich? Will it just be rich people passing money around?
It's still a problem if a sizable subset of people are unemployed and have no money or ability to get money. It's not terribly difficult to imagine a system with a underclass, a consumer class, and a "owner" class. Even if we automate manufacturing, the consumer class will include mercenaries of the literal or financial variety. In fact, I wonder if that's not precisely what Wall Street is.
I feel like this is a crucial point that many people completely miss.
That doesn't follow. It's quite possible to simultaneously have
1. Capacity to produce plenty of available food, land, shelter, etc
2. Plenty of people willing to work for the food, land, and shelter
3. Lack of fed and sheltered people due to #2's labor having lower value than #1
There is no reason why the market determined value of labor (VOL) must exceed the market determined cost of living (COL). It happens. This is what people mean when they say that famine is a distribution problem, not a production problem. What they really mean is that it's an economic problem. Markets are entirely compatible with the notion of an underclass that cannot put food on the table, even amid abundance. Refer to the (e)book "Poverty and Famines" by Amartya Sen for examples and analysis. Exporting food while part of the populace starves isn't a stunt reserved for communist countries.
Thought experiment: there's a village with 100 peasants and surrounding land capable of producing 100 units of food if tended to by 75 laborers. The landowner hires 75 laborers, providing them each with 1 unit of food in return (supply of labor exceeds demand, so he has all the bargaining power). He sells the remaining 23 units at market in the neighboring town.
What do the 25 peasants that weren't needed do? Go to the neighboring town? What if nobody there is hiring either?
> That fact that we cannot provide a high enough average standard of living even when the incentive to work is very high, proves that drastically lowering the incentive to work would not provide a sufficient standard of living.
A high standard of living requires more than products of labor. Crucially, it requires control over resources. The market provides sufficient indirect control if VOL>COL. We can empirically and theoretically observe that that's not always the case.
Was your comment an underhanded jab at minimum wage? In that case I agree that MW is a poor solution, but I disagree that it's a net negative or responsible for the VOL/COL gap.
What's wrong with wages as an incentive to work? Why should the government provide an additional incentive to work by depriving people of their basic needs?
As a thought experiment, let's say that a company fires n workers because it is in the process of automating their jobs. Now, let's also assume n workers get hired, at the same wage as before, producing the automated systems which had previously replaced them. How can it be economically viable to automate, if instead of only paying your original n workers, you are now indirectly paying n employees producing the equipment you are buying, plus the capital costs of automation? Since we know that it is in fact more cost effective to automate, then the only remaining possibility is that there are either fewer workers producing the automation equipment or they are being paid less.
If there's consumer demand for more (and cheaper) versions of whatever product, then rather than a single company this form of automation can grow the industry as a whole too.
Inevitably, however, there will be industries that don't really need to grow. We'll just get what they make cheaper without buying much more of it. But then we'll have extra money (and extra people willing to work) -- figuring out new things for those people to do, possibly in wholly unrelated industries, is the very essence of why most of us still have jobs despite centuries of automation.
In other words, the real benefit of automation is to raise everyone's standard of living by raising the average productivity of human workers.
Let's say I have a shoe factory, and I install a robot that can, say, cut the shoe leather faster, more cheaply, and more reliably (less waste). Perhaps it can cut shapes a human couldn't, or couldn't cost effectively, so I can even sell new shoe designs. The guy who used to cut the leather and put in the shoelace eyelets can now just do eyelets. This might cut my costs such that I can drop my shoe price AND make a larger profit. The lower price means I sell more shoes and make more profits. So I not only keep the old leather-cutter, but in fact might bring on more people so that I could get even more profits.
This is a contrived example, in the style of The Wealth of Nations, but it could just as well be a more complex one. Computers replaced slide rules and draftsman, yet more people are involved these days in building planes (and more interesting ones) than were in the pre-computing days.
Yes this is not the only possible outcome -- some people will be automated away, can't find other employment and they will be screwed. Governments should provide some support for them, and some governments will (probably not the US, but that's another story). But it's not axiomatic that "robots == job loss" -- we're not talking some sort of asimov robot that would be a 1:1 replacement for a human!
Sally works at an electronics factory for minimum wage. The factory fires her and replaces her with a robot. The factory then is able to sell some electronic components to Joe for a lower price while also increasing the factory's margin. Joe sells handmade artisanal pocket calculators. Now that some of his components are cheaper, Joe can afford to hire Sally to work as a phone salesperson, making slightly more than minimum wage. Sally makes more money, the factory makes more money, and Joe can expand his business and probably make more money.
This takes effort and may be achievable with a lot of gumption, sure, but now consider the entire workforce that just got fired. Are they all going to be able to pull that off?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Your comment applies not just to robots but to any labour saving device or productivity increase. From the wikipedia page:
Historically, the gigantic increase in labour productivity induced by technological progress since the industrial revolution has resulted in the dominance of the scale effect, bringing about both a massive increase in real wages and a decrease in labour time. There is no reason to expect that this same process cannot be continued in the future.
Much like how Swiss have implemented a min guaranteed wage - feed that wage payment by industry that benefit from implementing robotic workers...
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-16/inequality-f...
It is yet to pass. Less than 50% of Swiss referenda pass.
Year Rate of Unemployment 1920 5.2 % 1928 4.2 1930 8.7 1932 23.6 1934 21.7 1936 16.9 1938 19.0 1940 14.6 1942 4.7% 1944 1.2 1946 3.9 1948 3.8 1950 5.3 1952 3.0 1954 5.5 1956 4.1 1958 6.8% 1960 5.5 1962 5.5 1964 5.2 1966 3.8 1968 3.6 1970 4.9 1972 5.6 1974 5.6% 1976 7.7 19781 6.1 1980 7.1 1982 9.7 1984 7.5 19861 7.0 1987 6.2 1988 5.5 1989 5.3 19901 5.6% 1991 6.8 1992 7.5 1993 6.9 19941 6.1 1995 5.6 1996 5.4 19971 4.9 19981 4.5 19991 4.2 20001 4.0 2001 4.7 2002 5.8 20031 6.0% 20041 5.5 20051 5.1 2006 4.6 2007 4.6 2008 5.8 2009 9.3 2010 9.6 2011 8.9 2012 8.1
This doesn't seem to be the case. As people lose jobs, new types of jobs are created, just as they were in the past. The job market will continue to evolve as the world changes.
Why? Because you will be able to get such a robot for practically nothing and it will fill all your material needs without you having to pay any one any more money.
That's right. Head for the hills. The world is coming to an end.
An unprecedented wave of prosperity is coming to destroy us.
The only way this could be a problem is if robotic labor becomes super cheap, while at the same time becoming super expensive. The picture usually painted is the overlords will have it and those underfoot won't be able to buy it. Unlike any other technology revolution, ever.
The reality is that even the poorest sap unable to operate a robot will be handed a $500 self-assembling house that grows all its own food, collects all its own energy, and cleans itself. Imagine the untold suffering that awaits us.
ATMs hurt bank-tellers specifically, but all of society has 24/7 access to cash.
Email hurts the postal workers, but everyone can instantly communicate with nearly anyone in the developed world.
Robotic car manufacturing hurt some auto workers, but all of society gets cheaper cars.
Amazon.com hurts the mom & pop book store, but everyone gets cheaper books conveniently delivered.
Netflix crushed video rental stores, but a whole county got cheaper, easier access to video.
The list could go on forever.
If or when that comes to pass, it's no longer about whether or not automation benefits society - but how to adapt to a changing employment landscape.
This is false. Over the past forty years, the rise in price for the median car sold in the US has far exceeded inflation. The idea that "society gets cheaper cars" is false, cars have gotten more expensive, even taking inflation into account. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps careful track of such things.
Obviously automating something will benefit someone. You have your facts mixed up however, thus your conclusion that it benefits "society as a whole" can be disregarded.
That's just one of many of potential examples. Are you suggesting that automation drives consumer prices up? Why would any industry automate more if they believed that in the long run, it would drive their costs up?
> ...thus your conclusion that it benefits "society as a whole" can be disregarded.
Perhaps "society as a whole" was the wrong phrase. I mean the group of people that encompasses more than just the specific workers in the industry undergoing automation. For example, the Americans who work as bank tellers compared to the Americans who access ATMs.
(Of course it would be messy because of insurance and driving habits and better technology and such, I just figure it would do a better job of taking any difference in delivered value into account)
This was inconceivable not long ago.
Furthermore, vast industries have sprung up whose only product is entertainment. Back when economies were less productive, there was no room for such industries.
Even low end cars have what were once considered luxury only features. The list covers every facet of our economy.
I believe there's an equilibrium going on. I don't think we'll ever reach that point of automation, it will only happen when (and if) demographic growth turns negative. Until then, availability of cheap labour hinders "full automation".
No, really. Think about it.
Anyone who doesn't own productive capital and lives in a society where you either need income from productive capital or income from labor to get the necessities of life.
> Think of all the other things you could be doing.
Starving in the street?
hire more people in the public sector, and try to bolster consumption further.
It is the growth of the public sector that solves the overproduction crisis, by throttling production. This time is no different.
Taken to its logical conclusion, if all production could be automated, every one of us could work for the government...
The robotic abundance/destitution scenario is inherently contradictory and assumes some things stay exactly constant while others undergo complete transformation.
We have advanced societies that are making great use of technology today. And others that do not. Somehow these co-exist. A completely robotic United States will still have Amish people not benefiting from robots. Anyone else that cares to operate on the tech of 2014 will be free to do so. Or the tech of 2050 or 2100.
"What's with this obsession with jobs? If all we wanted were "jobs", we could create 100 million real quickly. Just go destroy a bunch of stuff and get people to work, rebuilding everything again."