Let me offer some perspective from outside the US.
This has already happened. You are already living in that future
That’s why so many people want to get in to the US in the first place.
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Old school types seem to be saying that if we didn’t have the rich to tell us what to do, we’d all starve in the dark and cold. I doubt this very much. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a petroleum economy or a hydrogen economy or even a gold economy. The main driving force behind this economy isn’t any single commodity, it’s fear. We go to work and do what we’re told because we’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t.
I call your scenario a preference economy where everyone does the things they want to see more of in the world. (or if I want it to be the opposite of fear and don’t mind sounding woo-woo, a love economy)
Robotics alone can’t magically grant us this wish. For one thing, we have had the choice to eat at automats, but mostly we don’t. Those robotic massage units don’t have much appeal compared to a human masseuse.
There will always be jobs that most people would rather not do, yet need to be done anyway. Yet right now they’re lost in a sea of jobs that don’t need to be done, yet somehow they’re being paid for because reasons. I think if we ever truly understand democracy in a deep sense, we’ll figure out how to allocate bads and time sucks at least as well as we allocate goods and services.
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That’s pretty astounding, and it makes me wonder about some of the signage I’ve seen around here.
Eh…some of us have been beating this drum for a while. Everyone always wants to look to the past on these things. Look, we’ve never had a history of a lack of jobs due to automation! I mean, hey, look at the Industrial Revolution! But the thing is, I’d say that’s a bad example, because the agriculture jobs were being replaced with factory jobs. You could leave the farm, and build tractors instead of doing the work the tractors were doing.
Ah, yes, job creation is being stifled solely by the government.
Meanwhile, I live in job-hostile Illinois, and virtually all the job growth is being done with a nudge and a wink: the local mines are operating again, not because they’ve found a great way to use that high-sulfur coal, but because it goes to China. They re-opened on the further condition that they pay no taxes. Yes, that’s right; the state’s broke, the counties and townships they operate in are almost certainly broke, they put all kinds of wear and tear on the local infrastructure, but they can’t be asked to help, that hurts the job creators!
And other than mines, it’s mostly service jobs coming in; retail, hotels, restaurants, and so on. And those McDonald’s food assembly line people are going to be replaced by machines, and many retail spaces are just unnecessary.
Here’s hoping that the new housing market doesn’t resemble the old housing market.
I live at the south end of Illinois. In some parts of the region, median household income is $26k. And in those places, you’ll see things that look like this:
The only people who can afford them are, as far as I know, specialists, people locked in to decent payscales, and politicians (and a few retirees and techies who, for whatever reason, choose to live here). Meanwhile, much more modest homes sit unused because there’s too many houses, and nobody can afford them.
Let’s let that sink in.
Hell, right before the bubble burst, there were companies building houses like crazy. As soon as they’d get one built, they’d put a realty sign out front, and move on to the next house. You’d have thought it was somewhere in Chicagoland, or Atlanta, not the ass-end of Illinois where there’s no money and no jobs (I exaggerate, but still.) Fields went from being productive food-producing areas to being subdivisions in nothing flat. My next-door-neighbor’s father-in-law did just that: he’d buy up farmland, get a loan, and have a crew build a house as quick as possible.
Many of those houses have been sold for a fraction of their original cost.
And what are builders doing now that the housing market is “recovering”? They’re back to building spec houses. Now, what the heck is a spec house? Oh, it’s like I just described: they get a loan, they build a house, and put it on the market and hope like hell that somebody buys it.
http://recodetech.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/early-vehicle-lores.jpg
I don’t think it’s that there will always be a lack of jobs from automation, but that innovation in automation is currently outpacing innovation in job creation, and our society has moved away from thinking that leisure time is OK.
If nothing else: yes, I know I’m not an economics major, but people tend to forget that the Luddites revolted because there was an immediate effect on their livelihood, whereas job replacement came later. Imagine the reaction if businesses decided that, instead of an economics or business degree, all one needed to do was demonstrate a proficiency in economics, meaning that people could compete against economics majors by studying on Khan Academy in their free time. I have a feeling econ professors would react differently to that than they do other job elimination…
Having worked in the newspaper business, I’m cynical about the market’s ability to adapt. They got handed this thing, and it was fucking golden: the Internet. No longer did they have to be constrained by their printing press and the type of paper and inks they could afford; if they could get a decent designer and decent hosting, they could move their subscriber base over to the Internet! Cheap devices were on the horizon! Instead, they treated it like it was a valueless commodity, something to throw their print content onto and ignore. Now, well, I linked to this a while back:
I used to work for that place. Look at that website. Just look at it.
And the kicker is, that company (the last I knew) was paying a pretty penny for designers and developers to make that, and it’s a company-wide thing. I’m sorry if any Gatehouse people read BoingBoing people read this, but…that thing’s terrible. Not only that, but it’s terrible for the local newspapers. So much of that content isn’t local. So much of the advertising you see there isn’t local, either. It’s just…well, it’s a mess.
Years ago, that newspaper, under the guidance of a different company, got rid of most of its staff at a time when their print circulation was much higher, thinking that they’d be able to make up the difference with canned content and productivity gains. Nope. But they keep trying. I guess if I’m getting anywhere with this, it’s this: this notion that gains will make life better and that new jobs will magically come into being because The Market Will Adapt reek of Magical Fairy Dust thinking.
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when all the jobs belong to robots, then we will all be unemployed, hence poor, hence the shit robots will manufacture we wont be able to buy
I am also outside the US. I agree that it is already happening - though the standard of living around the world is still on an upward trend (with some obvious problems areas). It is better to be born poor now than rich in 1850.
I am more concerned about when the trends diverge, and the 95% of us outside the wall descend into absolute squalor, while the ‘elite’ consume the vast majority of production and wealth, without the inconvenience of employees or wages to pay. When the concept of an ‘employee’ becomes a status symbol at most (like a butler).
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so we’re all going to be squatters and therapists?
The thing that bothers me most about this is that there are a ton of menial jobs that really SHOULD go to robots, which would make better products for cheaper. Making burgers is a perfect example…temperature correction, placement of ingredients, etc .etc .etc…all better done with by a machine. I’d much rather eat a burger like that than one made half-assed by a person earning minimum wage.
And then? Get that person serving the burger working instead on something that improves the lives of others. Ideally at a better wage, but even if the same wage, there are so many things in our society not being done properly that actually require the eyes and hands of a human.
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There might be some hipster robots that want a genuine old-fashioned hand polished wax job, so there might be some service jobs in that area…
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Never know, you might miss the spit…
Yeah, but those robots have to pay.
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I vote Diamond Age.
The problem is how do you reeducate the entire working class after N centuries of dogma about how “work is good, work is great, we all love work.” Which of course is bullcrap. If we could spend our days doing what we want (and only as much as we want do), we’d all be a lot happier.
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How about Keynes idea from the '30s that we’d all be working 15 hour weeks? Seems like lowering the workweek from 40 to 30 hours could get rid of unemployment pretty easily.
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No, the history of economic expansion is really quite short. We take GDP growth as a fact of nature, when it’s only been an observable phenomenon for 300 years at the very most, when industrial capitalism began to take off in England. At this same time there were also the first protests about jobs being made obsolete by technology - the Luddites. While derided for being anti-technology and shortsighted, which is a huge misunderstanding of them, their complaint is still very much valid, because it was about how the introduction of automation meant a huge drop in wages for skilled craftspeople, while all the benefits went to the owners of the machines. From about 1800 till about 1850, the standard of living for English workers actually declined while the overall economy expanded. After 1850, organized trade unions, government legislation, and foreign industrialization began to reverse this.
I don’t doubt that there can always be found something useful for people to do, but drawing on our short history of ever accelerating technological development, it’s very possible we will be destroying jobs faster than we can create them. With our current economic setup, this means a lot of people’s labour will be worth so little they cannot earn enough to survive. The irony of immiseration through abundance has been a recurring feature of capitalism.
This is completely at odds with the history of capitalism. The army was deployed against the English peasantry numerous times throughout the 17th and 18th centuries in order to squash resistance to the process of enclosure, where communal rights to the land were systematically eradicated in favour of private landlords. The 19th century was probably the golden age of using armies to open new markets around the world. If large numbers of people are put out of work by automation, you can bet the owners of the robots will be getting state protection from the protesters. They’ve gotten it almost every time in the past.
The problem is that those who benefit from how markets work are going to fight tooth and nail against any scenario where the benefits of automation are widely shared. There are plenty of historical examples of this happening before. Why should the future be any different? The writer perfectly understands this issue, so it’s a bit rich to accuse her of not knowing anything about economics when you think the history of markets and automation was uniformly beneficial to everyone, instead of one of uneven development, profound social dislocation, and a slower than possible standard of living growth so a tiny few can collect the majority of the economic surplus.
You’re right that post-scarcity society isn’t really an economics question - it’s a political one. We could have one right now, or at least a world without people starving to death. It’s not science fiction.
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The Diamond Age was still pretty deeply unequal if I recall. The ex working class got some sort of basic income, but that was to preserve the fundamentals of the economic system from being overthrown by the hungry unemployed. In a world with so much automation that most workers are superfluous, it seems really unnecessary (and insane) to maintain that kind of class hierarchy. Which I think was one of the book’s themes.
We could have a world without people starving to death - in fact, in many areas of the world, we do. And that is a direct result of market-based systems, economic freedom, technology, and productivity improvements. The only thing standing in the way of that is people, usually in government, who don’t like markets. When you look at the places that have starvation, they are quite uniform in their rejection of property rights, markets, and economic freedom. And after the experiences in India and China, you’d think the question would be settled - but people keep pushing the same old tripe without a shred of evidence.
“When all the jobs belong to robots, do we still need jobs?”
Gosh, I hope not. Because then the Singularity will be here and the question becomes meaningless.
I hope that was sarcasm, because I come to the opposite conclusion. When all the jobs belong to robots, all we have to do is hold our hands out and let food, goods, and services drop into our hands from the end of the conveyor belt (or nanofactory or what have you). We will all be rich.
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I’m going to point out something here, when people like this talk about “robots” they aren’t talking about automation, they are talking about some I Robot level of robotics. A fully functioning autonomous humanoid (or at least being able to interact with us) robot, not an automated grill at the local Micky D’s or an automated vacuum cleaner for your house. Robotics on that level vaguely exist as a few select one off custom creations at this point, which are more or less test platforms that have costs millions to build and develop. No robot on the planet can be dropped into a garage and change the oil in your car, no robot in a decade will be able to do that, and I wager that won’t happen in 30 years either.
What I don’t get about people who talk about the future is this vague sense of what’s it going to be? Is that even a valid question? Sure you can point to the rich getting richer, but at the same time everyone is moving upward. So doesn’t the question become not what is it going to look like, but how are we going to make that transition from having to work, to not having to? The only concern I have with full on humanoid AI robotics is not replacing humans to do work, but what if they decided to just replace us? Sure, yeah Skynet and all, but at some point you’ll end up with a factory that is run by AI using robots to build robots to service us. Or I suppose AI gets banned somehow and we all end up like Bruce Willis in Surrogates. My point is, left right liberal conservative - everyone will agree that working less and having our needs taken care of for essentially free is a goal we should and can be working toward. (It just has to be presented in the right context for each group you are dealing with.)
Personally the grey goo fear from nano tech scares me more than world wide war with robots.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Or more it’s that our current markets do not know how to efficiently organize abundant things. Why can’t our markets currently efficiently organize abundant things? Look no further than money that can only operate efficiently as a function of limited availability. You might say that is the root of the problem. I suspect making a new currency system that actually rewards the development of new things and unlimited open distribution of abundant things is entirely possible. I don’t think society is likely to get it exactly right on the first try. The other issue is convincing the entrenched to refuse to use and disrupt the old money. Still, an efficient currency won’t wipe out other’s wealth, it just will cause more to be exchanged and reward society in a more sustainable aesthetic.
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Over the broad trend of history, yes. Over the recent few years, no. The “economic recovery” after the last big downturn was captured more than 100% by the richest 10%. For the poorest things got worse during the downturn and have gotten worse ever since.
I absolutely promise you that this is not true - that a large number of people would argue that this would be a bad thing. And chiefly among those opposed to it would be people who are already on top who already get anything they want and who define themselves by social dominance. They don’t want everyone else to be as rich as them.
Technology yes, but how did the market create this situation? It is kludges that work against the market (and that people who love free markets argue against) that feed the poorest people. In the market - like in the state of nature - if you aren’t producing, you are left to die.
As I said above, we credit the market without evidence for advancements that may have been entirely the result of technology and social advancement. It’s quite possible that while science, democracy and rule of law were dramatically improving the lives of humans the market was a negative, parasitic influence. To be honest, I don’t even think we have a clear definition of what counts as a market. “Free market” proponents in the US are mostly advocating for oligarchy and the freest market in the world may be Hong Kong which is technically still semi-communist.
The Singularity happened in the 70s or the 80s. Note Moore’s Law and ask yourself - when was the last time we designed a new and improved computer without the help of an existing computer.
