In my ideal world, I’d be more than happy to put together things like wedding invitations, videos for my wife’s school, and tend to things like my vegetable garden, because they’re all fun to do.
In reality, to do the first one, I have to find that “sweet spot” between “we want something nice” and “that’s too expensive, I’ll just do it in Word and use the prettiest font ever, Papyrus”
She has a rather narrow view of the use of labor-saving machines, because they go back far further than industrialization. Wind and water mills were replacing the need for arduous physical and human labor in certain tasks in the Medieval Era and even earlier (look up the Barbegal and Janiculum Mill Complexes from Classical Rome).
It’s hard to respond to this type of argument precisely because we don’t know what the future jobs will be coming out of existing labor-saving machinery. Nobody in 1900 would have had any clue of all the computer-related jobs in 2000. But at the very least, I can point out that a lot of maintenance and monitoring work will have to be done by humans for the foreseeable future for liability reasons, even if we’re just sitting at a desk monitoring systems. That’s going to be all the more critical the more complex and integrated our networks get, to the point where you’ll need either people or human-level robots doing preventative maintenance because the alternative (having the whole thing go down) is unacceptable (like how on military ships, a lot of the labor is preventative checks and work).
I think he’s mistaken to call them “bullshit” jobs. The more complex your organization (and economy) get, the more people and work you need done just to manage that complexity - and that’s only going to get more so with a broadening and deepening global economy.
Two words for you: Walmart Greeter
Oscar Wilde talked about this more than a hundred years ago, in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_under_Socialism . If you’re an anarcho-socialist, you can let the robots build all the stuff and let the people do whatever they want. Capitalists have a crisis because only the robot owners will have money and there are no buyers for all the stuff; Marxist-Leninists have a problem with the labor theory of value because the proles aren’t needed to produce anything, so how do you keep them in line?
But we’ve been moving in the direction of neoliberalism, which is the worst possible response to the problem: it just moves more and more money into the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists, and removes any restrictions on their ability to move money across borders seeking the best return while leaving workers trapped.
There can’t ever be “lots of everything”, because there are lots of things that robots can’t make, and are thus inherently scarce. Land. Natural resources. The best seats at concerts. Human interaction. This is simply a continuation of a process that’s been going on for centuries where some things that were scarce become more abundant, and thus cheaper, while other things remain scarce.
This seems an appropriate place to drop this:
http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.html
In a practical sense that essay has been a lifelong bad influence, much like Taoism. Still, I wouldn’t trade either for a corner office.
Probably jealously? The fact someone is not working that 9-5, hourly job and making more than they are. I knew a guy who cleaned gutters 4 or 5 hours a day…he was making $70k+ a year. Of course he had established that business over a decade or so, but still.
What business means by “there are not enough workers” is “there are not enough workers at the price we’re willing to pay.”
Willing should read able.
You can only employ someone so long as they make more money than the cost of employing them, or make more savings than the cost of employing them.
Some types of farming are pretty close to that level now. It isn’t entirely automated or anything, but it doesn’t take many farmers to deal with a fairly large milk cow operation. The cows all have a chip in them (I assume an RFID). The cows know enough to know when they need to be milked, so they walk up to milking station. It reads the chip and figures out when the cow was last milked. If it’s long enough, it opens a gate and lets the cow in. The vacuum tube thingy (that’s the technical term) automatically attaches and records how much milk comes out. When it’s done, it detaches and the cow walks away to do cow things.
That idea of robots doing all the work has one flaw - that people are conditioned to think that having a job is a good thing, and not having one is bad. I’d love to not have a job. How do we change this part of our culture of jobs?
Yawn. Yet another writer who covers economic topics but understands virtually nothing about economics, and thus is frightened of automation.
“When people confidently announce that once robots come for our jobs, we’ll find something else to do like we always did, they are drawing from a very short history.”
Yes - a really short history of at least a couple thousand years - and a history that not only has no examples of people not finding new jobs and expanding new markets, but a history where said market expansion occurred while aiding and abetting a population increase of several orders of magnitude. If there is one actual, factual thing you can draw from economic history, it is that demand is literally infinite, and people will produce to meet that demand.
“It was not “they came for our jobs, and we simply and quietly just moved to new ones.””
Well, it might have been, except for the sociopaths in charge of the governments at the time. Markets do not have armies, and markets benefit from expanded trade, not war. And even considering the chaos, is the author seriously going to argue that people were worse off after the industrial revolution than before it? That things like ending slavery, women’s suffrage, better education, and vastly more free time to expand the arts and sciences were bad?
“So, what’s the trade-off here? In general, we are safer (automation makes airline flying safer, in general) except in the long-tail: pilots are losing both tacit knowledge of flying and some of its mechanics.”
There is no trade-off here. Pilots may be losing that tacit knowledge, but it is still far safer to fly than it was even thirty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago. And not only is it far safer, it’s so cheap that virtually anyone can fly to the other side of the world. Rocketing through the air thousands of meters above the ground at hundreds of kilometers per hour, surrounded by an aluminum can that’s barely air-tight enough to keep you from asphyxiating is never going to be completely safe. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that pilots can always go back and get that tacit knowledge by learning to fly on less sophisticated planes.
“But as I said in my review of Piketty, there’s a real scarcity of economists willing to think about the possibility that abundance makes markets obsolete altogether.”
Economics is the study of scarcity, ways to allocate scarce resources. Do you see a lot of economists that study the allocation of vacuum in the solar system? Do you think that’s because it might be, I don’t know, abundant, and thus not an economics problem? If things are truly abundant, you don’t need economics to deal with them - people can just take what they need. You don’t need “railroad rules”, or any rules at all, and it would be completely useless for a economist to study such a situation. And the author is simply daft to believe that “thinkers” haven’t been putting a lot of thought into what a post-scarcity society looks like and how it might work - in fact, Cory is one of them.
And until we reach that society, I’ll stick with the markets that improved our lives many times over in the past couple of millenia.
We will have jobs. Retiring andys.
I just reread Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano. It’s premised on exactly this, and what happens to all the displaced people when they no longer have value to the economy or community. It’s a brilliant indictment on the current state of the economy from way back in 1954.
Essentially after WWII they figured out a way to record the best machinists actions and then automate machines to follow them. Millions are put out of work and assigned either to Reeks and Wrecks (Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps) or the Army to do menial, largely unnecessary tasks while any job above that requires and advanced degree. Revolution ensues.
Granted, he talked about how vacuum tubes changed everything, but he got the socio-economic stuff right.
The second time I watched Manufacturing Consent in a theatre, I burst out laughing loudly when Chomsky uttered that phrase. Whenever I watch it again, I can almost see a twinkle in his eye.
Okay, aside from the obvious questions of who makes the robots, who programs them, and who maintains them. (And who works crappy shifts to do all these things at night, because serious high tech manufacturing infrastructure depreciates so fast that you have to run it 24/7/365), there is something that is often completely missed in this discussion.
What about finite resources and energy? Where do you get all the metal for all the cool stuff your robots make? By digging it out of the ground, and poisoning and blighting the land that the locals live on. Where do you get the energy to refine those raw materials, and run the factories, and keep your fancy robot-extruded houses warm in the winter and cool in the summer? Right now, mostly by burning fossil fuels, which are in limited supply and are pushing us towards a greenhouse effect-fueled disaster. No matter how good our robots are, without a complete revolution in our energy production infrastructure, and probably in our resource extraction methods, there is no way that the finite resources on this planet, if divided even roughly evenly among its entire population, wind up with everyone having anything like the standard of living most people in first world countries enjoy now. I’m not saying that such a revolution is necessarily impossible, though established interests fighting it tooth and nail will make it much harder than even the (extreme) difficulty of the physical problems involved suggest, but it will take a whole lot more than fancy robots to get us to a post scarcity society.
That said, she, and to an extent, Graeber, are pretty spot on in their assessment of our problems dealing with capital in America. Here’s a classic take on it: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Yawn. Yet another writer who covers economic topics but understands virtually nothing about economics, and thus is frightened of automation.
Let me pile on here.
One thing we tend to forget is that today’s robots just represent the latest in gains of productivity we’ve been seeing going on for decades. For example, pneumatic nailers allow building contractors frame a new house with fewer workers, as they spend a third of the time putting a nail in than by using a hammer. The Red Digital Cinema Camera has replaced the need for film at a film shoot–which eliminates the need of gofers running film to a film developer–as well as the need for people to make 35mm film and the film developer. (Digital cameras in general have obliterated the need for film developing, which eliminated a whole bunch of jobs.) When was the last time you saw a secretarial typing pool? Now, everyone has a computer on their desk, and even executives type their own e-mails rather than dictate them.
We’ve been living in the face of job destruction in the face of gains in productivity due to technology for a very long while now. Yet we’re only noticing it now? Robots promise to replace a lot of jobs–but the more ‘blue sky’ promises for robots, such as use in health care, are farther out from today than typing pools are behind us in the past.
My personal concern is that we’ve slowed the velocity of new corporation formation due to a variety of conservative and liberal legislation, ranging from Sarbanes-Oxley to the current Obamacare requirements on small companies. We’ve also seen a slowing of new corporation formation due to a loss of home equity: the majority of small businesses are started by people getting a line of credit on their homes–no equity, no line of credit, no new company.
But once the housing market recovers (it hasn’t, not quite yet, at least in the largest markets), we should start seeing more small company formation–and more new ideas for new companies that most of us haven’t even considered, such as ‘Uber’, which has opened up the opportunity for taxi drivers to make a better living while taking some degree of control over their own work, and potentially opening the opportunity for others to make some extra money.
Any market where there are vastly wealthy people and poor people is inefficient: it indicates the opportunity for competition that is going unfilled due to either a monopoly or due to regulatory capture. I’m therefore optimistic about the future, if only more of us would see Marx’s idea that capitalism will eat itself as a feature and not a bug.
I agree, but when food is one of the things that is abundant (at least it is around here) why are people going hungry? I don’t think we’ll run out of scarcity, but we need to rethink how we manage the abundance.
The question is always “who is going to pay for it” but we have so much wealth concentrated in the hands of so few that the question is distorted into “Which rich person’s permission do we have to do this?” If we freed up those billions of dollars there would be plenty of money to pay for infrastructure repairs and personal support workers. Those jobs manifestly pay for themselves, they just pay society, not some guy who is already rich.
This idea infuriates me. There is no evidence whatsoever that markets have made anything better. The history over which markets have been working well has been the same history where technological and social innovation has been working. Our massive expansion in wealth is the result of technological advances and rule of law.
I can’t prove that things would have gone along just as well or better without markets, but no one can prove that they wouldn’t have either. Taking it as axiomatic that markets are great is just foolish.
Oh no. Not by a long shot…
What’s happening, is the commoditisation of everything.
User pays, baby.
And who do they pay?
The Man.
Hah! How would that be possible?
Wisdom’s been bred out of us.
Then the problem is not a skills shortage, but a business model incapable of supporting the company by allowing it to hire employees at market wages - or some factors artificially suppressing those wages.
