Many backend jobs involve routine work from people who could be doing non-routine work if the CRUD routine job was automated. Within an industry or a profession it seems like there could be a mix of routine and non-routine work.
Similarly, how many people's jobs have changed from being routine jobs to non-routine jobs through either retraining or automation allowing them to take on higher order work? Again, doesn't say.
Also, interesting to note that the actual unemployment rate for routine congnitive, routine manual etc 2009 shock aside doesn't actually look anomalous compared to much of the last two decades of the graph is to be believed.
I think you've hit on the right point. I'm also always curious about how far these definitions can and should be pushed.
Talking in terms of "automation of routine tasks" sounds reasonably descriptive of how the spread of technology works. But, technology is a concept that is notoriously elusive in economics. That's because it's hard to clearly define in concrete terms useable in the context of economic theories, whether they're mathematical conceptual.
For example, we've always been imagining "robots" as tin humans that do stuff people where doing. You have science fiction movies, books and such being written right now with this imagery, just like the 1950s sci fi art, Jetsons. Just like the mechanical turk and automatons of the 1700s.
I think robots are a useful mental placeholder. "Technology will be doing task X." But in reality, technology is usually more like "tools." Imagine a mechanic in the future. Maybe the cars come in with better self diagnosis before he sees them. The parts he needs are already known so he has them ready ahead of time. An AR (or whatever) info delivery thingy tells him exactly how to install or remove parts. etc.
What you have is a more useful mechanic. As long as a mechanic is still involved, I think "tool" is a better description. If people are no longer involved, "robot" seems a bit better. Ahead of time, when you are trying to imagine where technology is going it is very hard to discern tools from robots. Is a lawnmwer a robot? Is a a self guiding scalpel a tool?
> But, technology is a concept that is notoriously elusive in economics. That's because it's hard to clearly define in concrete terms useable in the context of economic theories, whether they're mathematical conceptual
That's not true. The word "technology" is quite precisely defined in economics, and the definition is generally agreed upon by economists. This definition does indeed lend itself to useful economic theories.
The challenge is that the economic term "technology" does not map 1-1 with the colloquial use of the word "technology", which leads to an abundance of confusion for people unaware of this distinction when they interpret economic analyses.
Yup, potentially. In that case what you have is a more useful car, or cloud transport service.
But endgame, where it's "robots" as we all imagine it is always a moving target. Mechanics weren't needed 200 years ago either. So far, we've needed new professions. Maybe that will end.
My point was just that automation is a fairly fuzzy way of explaining what is going in.
A bookkeeper/accountant might be manually entering invoices into a system, emailing managers to approve payments and such. It takes 3 hours per day. This work is "routine" in the relevant sense (it can be automated) but our young, congenial and soon-to-be-replaced-by-robots accounts payable woman (her name's Lynne) also does and is capable of doing "non-routine" tasks. She can call up suppliers to negotiate payment terms, have lunch with the manager in the next office to clandestinely suss out some questionable expense charges, etc.
Calling Lynne a "routine worker" is kind of problematic. She does routine work because it needs doing. When that work disappears, she's not out of work by default. Generally when technology creates efficiencies, the unemployment rate does not just increase by the number of people that did that work yesterday. People who are capable of doing other useful things do those things, if it's useful to do more of those things. There's still a question of whether the economy can use up these newly available Lynne hours. Often it can.
What happens when some technology automates a lot of "routine" programming work? Programmers make more program(s).
Not necessarily. As a stereotypical "knowledge worker" my current work activities can be classified very broadly into two buckets: 1. Low-value routine grunt work that I am required to do and 2. High-value non-routine work that is ultimate optional but the more of it I do the better results I get at my job. I try to spend at least 10-20% of my work time figuring out ways to automate more and more of bucket 1 so that I have more and more time to do bucket 2. There's an unending amount of bucket 2 work available for me to do should I have time for it (trust me).
And here's the magical thing! Once all of bucket 1 is automated, a lot of my bucket 2 tasks start becoming routine--patterns emerge and I can imagine ways to even chip away at them with automation, allowing me to do even more high-value work, in theory making me more valuable to my employer.
Dynamic effects are really hard to talk about deterministically. Generally speaking, technology is always creating efficiencies and unemployment usually ranges in a range, over the long term.
Some technology advances seem to reduce unemployment. When factories were doubling efficiency several times in an average career-span, employment in manufacturing kept going up and so did pay. This was a long period. It started with farmworkers (replaced by automation) urbanising to work in the rapidly advancing, high tech manufacturing sector. The factories kept automating more and more. Efficiency went up. During long periods labour got a good cut of these gains, salaries rose.
At other times and other technological events (including trade which is economically very similar to technology) unemployment went down in the sectors closely linked to the tech.
That's an unfounded assumption. There's lots of work that goes undone because it's cost prohibitive. Technology in this case increased overall value because it allowed Lynne to do something that no one was doing before.
Because technology gave us levarage, and lowered the cost. Lynne's pay is ultimately set by the market. Lower her pay and see if she leaves to make more somewhere else.
Assisting or caring for others is not a low-skill job! It may not require a doctorate in theoretical physics, but it requires a lot of emotional intelligence, stamina and ability to be present with other people. It's far from routine!
This immediate nitpick aside - I think it's great that routine task jobs are going away. The bulk of those are mind-numbing, dead-end jobs - do we really need to keep subjecting people to 40h/wk routine boredom?
I completely agree. My grandmother is in the Alzheimer's wing at her local nursing home, and I cannot begin to understand how the staff can do their jobs day after day. It's almost like running a daycare for elderly people.
They are so kind, and helpful, both to residents and their families, and they are just so superb at what are really difficult jobs. They deserve much more than most of them are making. They're some of the higher-paying jobs in the town, but relatively speaking, they're not high-paying.
Back when I was in middle and high school, my other grandmother was in the same home, though not in the Alzheimer's wing, and they seemed to take really good care of her, too. I wasn't as cognizant of it at the time, but talking to my parents and looking back, I can see that it's the case.
what if you want a mind-numbing dead-end job so you can spend your mental energy before/after work learning something else? Plenty of stories of people working a crappy job for a few years and after hours going to school or writing a book or learning a trade or starting a music career.
What happens if "crappy jobs" are not available anymore and all the available jobs require 1) non trivial credentials and 2) enough mental energy that after work you are "done" and can't do anything else? And what happens to people that are only capable of dealing with a routine task job?
Until there is something like universal income routine jobs seem to be the lesser evil, because the odds of universal income coming into being in our lifetimes seem pretty low, and having something to fall back on to pay the bills while you figure out what to do with your life can be quite helpful.
> This immediate nitpick aside - I think it's great that routine task jobs are going away. The bulk of those are mind-numbing, dead-end jobs - do we really need to keep subjecting people to 40h/wk routine boredom?
Sure, it's great that we are gaining this capability, and the people working towards it should be lauded for their progress. The issue is that many people rely on the ability to exchange 40h/wk of routine boredom for the basic necessities of living.
Our society assumes that most people will contribute enough value from their "work" that they can exchange for the things they need in life. If their work loses all value, then we need to figure out what else we can do for/with these people.
At this point, it seems as if our engineering ability is advancing beyond the pace of our social structures and legal system.
I think it was a poor choice of words. "Caring for others" can include things like making food, washing cars, and cleaning. Essentially another way of saying "labor for others."
Scary parallel here with the recent jeff dean talk about NN. He claims he won't let his team touch any 'research task' that takes more than a week, and prefers to stick to experiments that take under a day to set up and run -- that there's so much low-hanging fruit that every ML project should be simple.
Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a sense routine.
I hope I'm misquoting him. But my takeaway is that between manually coding processes that could be solved with ML & doing infrastructure profiling, most devs are spending half their time fixing problems that are 'routine' at the big three.
>Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a sense routine.
Isn't that more properly regarded as exciting than scary? The long term benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the temporary costs.
I would personally be very happy if my own current job- software developer- were somehow automated out of existence. Not only would it allow me to put my money where my mouth is regarding praising automation but it would mean huge gains for the human race.
> but it would mean huge gains for the human race.
This entirely depends on the model the human race is running off of. With the current state of mass-centralization in tech (see, again, the big 3), you will never get to experience such gains. In fact, you would quickly grow dependent on someone else to feed and shelter you, considering you can no longer provide a benefit to society that puts food on the table. In fact, most people wouldn't provide value anymore.
> The long term benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the temporary costs.
For some people, yes. You are correct when it comes to the numbers. GDP increases. A nation has more "wealth" to work with altogether. But the other side of the coin is that wealth disparity becomes more extreme.
Big however - If we ran off a decentralized model - arguably the way the Web was originally intended, I could see how the human race would be placed in an unprecedented position for future growth, and humanity would really thrive.
Granted, regarding the current state as ""exciting"" boils down to what you value, I guess.
When (not if) I automate myself out of existence, I'm sure as hell not telling anyone I did it.
The assumption that the "current model" (I assume you mean capitalism) makes is that people, when placed in a position where they no longer provide a benefit to society and yet must in order to put food on the table, will find a way to provide a benefit to society.
In my experience, this is true over longer (1-2 year) timescales, even if it's not obvious how at the outset. Most people, when made redundant, find new ways to make themselves relevant. The process isn't exactly pleasant, but the outcome often results in a lot more lucrative and fulfilling career than they had before.
If you owned the product of your labor (i.e. the automation of your job) then it should make no difference. The trouble is, then when you create an automaton that replaces a $100K/year employee, then the creator gets f*ed.
Put another way, if you could create a way to automate your job entirely, then there also has to be a guarantee that doing so will not result in you getting fired. Alternatively, if you automate someone else's job, then the company needs to be responsible for training them to do a new job. Even if this is not practical or possible in all cases, it needs to be the case more often. Right now, corporations pay the government to solve this problem (not voluntarily), but the government does a pretty bad job of helping. Ideally corporations interested in any social responsibility need to solve this problem themselves. When the automation revolutions becomes real enough to threaten executive jobs, I suspect they'll solve it pretty quickly.
Or you could automate yourself out of a job and get a new job.
There's nothing that says that jobs are sacred. Indeed, most folks born since 1980 believe that they'll have to switch jobs every few years to a.) stay relevant and b.) get paid what they're worth.
Jobs are not sacred, but salaries are. Your automation has a certain NPV on it, just like your job, and just like the "value" of not working. So, there are really 3 scenarios.
a) do your job, same as always
b) automate your job, and either end up unemployed, or find a new job, still working xx hours/week.
c) don't tell anyone you automated your job, don't work, collect the money.
If you are capable of automating your job (you have the skills, the know-how etc.) then all of these options have different moral and economic tradeoffs.
a) if you like your job, you get to keep doing it, but, by not automating it, you are maybe not doing your job as well as it could be done, and/or are costing the company money which could be reallocated. As an employee, you maybe have a responsibility to automate your job and by not doing it, you are shirking your duties (its a stretch)
b)You automate your job, get a new job, and take everyone else who was doing the same job as you and automate their jobs as well. You end up ok, because you're talented enough to automate your job. the other people who weren't talented enough just get fired and have no shiny new credential.
c)You are definitely dodging the obligation to your employer, but at the same time, they don't know the difference. If the work is unchanged, then you are free to use your time for an alternative economic benefit. It seems unfair, since you get to double-spend your time.
In my mind, B is the choice most people worry about. There are fewer people who can automate a job than there are people currently doing that job, and that doesn't even touch the problem that few low-skill jobs are filled by the people that can self-automate their jobs. So, more worrying is that someone invents the roomba of floor waxers, or the self cleaning toilet stall and then we don't need janitors anymore.
> but the outcome often results in a lot more lucrative and fulfilling career than they had before
Not sure about that, that's not at all my experience coming from a poor area which has gone through several mass-scale outsourcing. ( i.e. a whole vertical slice of the economy just moves away )
You need an set of positive circumstances in order to make yourself relevant again. Access to appropriate education/resources, capability to identify a new opportunity, capacity to actually take it ( i.e. money, flexibility, ... ) If you miss any of that, you just enter a vicious circle that drags you down.
Over the course of a generation, what you say is true. Most of the youth has moved away from that poor area I came from, including me.
What are outcomes like for the people that did move away and retrain? A key point of the "redundant workers will find new work" hypothesis is that they make rational decisions to find & take advantage of opportunities elsewhere. These rational decisions can often be emotionally wrenching - like giving up your home, your identity, and your social support network - but I'm curious what happens to the folks who are willing to make those decisions.
The main problem is not the emotional aspect. After all the majority of the people affected had left their country only 1 generation before.
The real problem is that you don't know what is the rational decision at the time you need to take it, only in hindsight. It is not in the business owners to share their 10 year strategy with their employees. Everything is positive, all green, until the very day you have 2 weeks to pack. You don't necessarily know the big picture. Is your company having trouble or is the whole region is going to be in ruin. You can make the rational decision to start a local business and have your market vanish way before you have benefitted. Same thing with the local politician, we are always at the end of the tunnel.
Same problem with training and moving. How much do you leverage your current competence. As a DevOps, do you learn development, or plumbery ? How far do you need to move. It is even worse here as you have even less information about the target sector or region.
So what happened to people that made the right decision, they did alright of course. But there have been a lot of people that trained in using newer better technology of their field and that did not help them when the job moved to India. Some moved to Spain and France, but the crisis started a few years later there. A lot opened businesses, and failed as new businesses do, but also because the whole region went under. Same outcome for people that moved to different field in the same region, they were caught in the ripple effects. None of those decision were irrational, or necessarily easy. They were just not the right decisions when you have perfect information.
You keep using the word willing instead of the word you should be using capable. Case in point old manufacturing towns like Detroit and Flint where the literacy rate hovers around 50% graduation rates in the 20s and the likelihood that a graduate from the school district did not receive the same education as someone from a functioning school district(Standardized Tests Provide this Measure).
So how do these people "will" their way past illiteracy, plummeting home values (Makes it quite difficult to sell and start somewhere new), and the need to suddenly compete with all of their former co-workers? Economic data suggests these people simply become "Disassociated" from the Labor Force and are no longer counted as unemployed whether they found employment or not.
> In fact, most people wouldn't provide value anymore.
History has shown this not to be true. The labor force has evolved several times in the relatively short history of the US. Markets are able to adjust these changes pretty efficiently: people whose skills become obsolete learn new ones, and higher unemployment winds up encouraging companies to find uses for cheaper labor.
Sure, it's not in your best interest to tell your boss you found a way to automate your job, but it's definitely in everyone else's.
I'm sorry but the notion the the Labor force will evolve because it has in the past is just an over simplification of a complex process and presupposes most humans are capable of being retrained for a job not slated for obsolescence. Technology can only be useful to those who can use it, if we're honest with one another and looking at the futures for the uneducated masses of the planet most of them aren't necessary going forward. Like it or not seismic shifts in technology have often been coupled with massive reductions in human population, and this will most likely be the case as below replacement birthrates in first world nations sets us on a collision path in the next decade, which will be exacerbated by automation of repetitive task jobs.
> I would personally be very happy if my own current job- software developer- were somehow automated out of existence.
Considering that my own personal theory is that software developer (also my profession) is the last job that will ever be automated (there will have to be one last person that writes software to run "the robots" before "the robots" write all their software), I can't say that I share your excitement at this milestone.
But then again, maybe it's simply evolution and nothing to fear, since we are as temporary in the universe as the last species we evolved from.
Oh well, please let us not connect softwaredevelopment and management too much with non-routine work. On a daily basis I see so many people who work on less than 50% of their capabilities because they haven't created routines in their work, thinking that their work is 90% non-routine.
Think about the last time you heard how a developer tells you that you don't need to learn the ten finger system to program well, or that he is capable of using 10-20 programming languages. How can a person think about usability of his software and a debuggable architecture, if he has to think about how to put an "i" and an "f" in the text editor? How much time is left for genius ideas when he has to look up all the time if the current language requires him to write a try-catch or a try-except block?
I touch type ("ten finger system") but I can see a point to the argument that it's not necessary to program well.
Typing is only a small part of programming, and touch typing isn't a huge benefit even for that part, considering all the numbers and symbols used, auto-complete for identifiers and keywords, and macros for common idioms.
As a self-taught somewhat-ten-finger-system typist that bangs out 120 words per minute in English ...
I disagree. Being able to think through my fingers has helped a lot. It's hard to explain so let's use a driving analogy. Think back to how good your driving was when shifting wasn't muscle memory, when you had to think about the clutch every time, or when you had to think about just how much brake to apply and how much throttle in various situations. Or even when you had to think about how much to turn the wheel.
When all those basic tasks required higher-level brain function involvement. How much did you actually focus on the road? How much could you think about choosing the most optimal lane? Etc.
Even something as simple as keeping appropriate safety distance for the speed you're driving. When it becomes intuitive, you're free to think about other stuff.
Same for typing. When I think "string template" and `foo ${bar}` flies out on its own. That helps. It means I can think about more important things.
If you don't like my driving analogy. Pick up a skateboard. Or rollerblades. Or a hoverboard. And try to hold a conversation while you learn how to ride.
I completely agree, if you have to think about where to put your fingers to type, or look at the keyboard - then you're not thinking about the code you're writing (or at least, you're not 100% thinking about it).
I see your point. Typing is not the main part of programming, so just typing faster than your colleague doesn't make you feel that much more powerful.
Let me give you another example that maybe drives the point home better: Have you seen the videos of how Minecraft was made? A very short amount of time was spent on getting the I/O to the filesystem to work, of setting up a window and filling it with colors, of creating the basic 3D world. I believe that is a huge part why not everybody can write a successful game as Minecraft. Because I don't have trained the routines, I need to spend a considerable amount of time getting all these basic things done before I can start with an actual 3D game. Thus an experienced game developer is already done with his first demo in the time I am done with the basics. And at this point he has a demo to show for, I have nothing. So he even gains more motivation in the same time to continue, and he may even gain some first user feedback. This will make him code longer (huge benefit, I give up at this point) and he will also develop more in the direction that is fun for players (huge benefit two).
It is hard to connect directly the geometrical transformation math to making a game that is more for the players. It is in fact not directly connected. But if you don't sit down to learn the "boring math" you can't get there. That's what typing faster is for. It's not yielding benefits directly. But if you learn that, learn your text editor, learn your language, learn some design concepts, you will reach a level of competence that is not reachable without. Of course you could also do other things to get the ideas from your head into the computer faster, like voice input, or flow programming with touchpads. But then you need to get into these very well to get them out of your way as well.
> Let me give you another example that maybe drives the point home better: Have you seen the videos of how Minecraft was made? A very short amount of time was spent on getting the I/O to the filesystem to work, of setting up a window and filling it with colors, of creating the basic 3D world. I believe that is a huge part why not everybody can write a successful game as Minecraft. Because I don't have trained the routines, I need to spend a considerable amount of time getting all these basic things done before I can start with an actual 3D game. Thus an experienced game developer is already done with his first demo in the time I am done with the basics. And at this point he has a demo to show for, I have nothing. So he even gains more motivation in the same time to continue, and he may even gain some first user feedback. This will make him code longer (huge benefit, I give up at this point) and he will also develop more in the direction that is fun for players (huge benefit two).
I think Minecraft's success is mostly luck and doesn't really prove anything. A lot of very experienced game developers write games that fail, all the time.
You're right that as a programmer, when you start working on something you're not yet familiar with then there will be a period in which things that are routine and automated for someone experienced in that area are not yet routine for you and you haven't yet automated them. I just don't see that as particularly important. You learn how to do these things, then you automate them, and you've only needed a small one-off extra effort compared to the experienced programmer doing the same thing. 80% or more of the work of writing a program isn't solving business problems directly, it's writing the tools that make it straightforward to do the actual business problem solving. Most of the skill of doing this is transferable, and learning 10-20 languages really doesn't involve that much overhead.
Angry Birds' popularity was mostly luck and timing. Minecraft was doing something that wasn't very well represented in video games and touched on people's creativity, primed as children with Lego blocks, and helped create a whole new genre. I don't think there's a parallel universe where Minecraft was created and did not become a hit.
Sure, he did get lucky that Penny Arcade (and Kotaku, and a bunch of other sites) covered his minecart rollercoaster video to get that initial burst of attention to his project, and maybe you could argue that it was lucky that he stuck with the project's development for two years in relative obscurity for it to get developed enough to help reach its overnight success.
However, I definitely feel it was a novel enough of an experience that it would have eventually found a way to hit the mainstream and been a big hit regardless.
No, I haven't seen those videos, but they sound interesting. Could you provide a link?
I agree a mountain (of trivia, routine tasks, and communication barriers between man and machine) stands between our ideas and working code, and it's essential to deal with all that in some way.
I've been touch typing for years, and none of my fingers have experienced any strain, or ever been overworked. In fact, the reason I learned how to touch type was to _reduce_ the strain on all my fingers.
Interesting, I touch type okay enough but don't use the pinky for symbols/ENTER. I use the ring finger of my right hand for symbols/ENTER and and the pinky for just the shift while pressing symbols with middle/index finger. I use pinky on my left heavily though, I wonder if it's a sign of anything (unbalanced typing?).
If you use some symbols very often it makes sense to put them somewhere more accessible. For me { is Alt+j and } is Alt+k, [ and ] are a row above. Creating a custom keyboard layout is very simple.
I don't think you should be downmodded for asking an honest question.
There's a question of: If you know 20 programming languages, how well do you know any of them individually?
I don't think that's necessarily a fair statement, however it rings true when you talk about actual development. Library knowledge, beyond a certain point, is far more important than programming skill.
> There's a question of: If you know 20 programming languages, how well do you know any of them individually?
The real question is how well should you know each individual language to be productive?
Is knowing dark corners of some obscure language bears more value (in terms of productivity) than an ability to chose the most fitting language for your particular task you're doing at the moment?
And when I mentioned dozens of languages, I was talking about the DSLs primarily. A well-designed DSL does not need much learning effort at all.
> Library knowledge, beyond a certain point, is far more important than programming skill.
This must be very dependent on an industry you're in. Enterprise Java coding - maybe. HPC - partially true. Embedded - what libraries?!? Can't find any!
Isn't that the purposeful outcome of technology? "I could replace everything you do with a script."
I know for a fact that work I have done has contributed to the demise of many positions. Could you imagine the industry for "Internet Cataloging" if we didn't have search engines? Email if we didn't have Gmail?
Technology is a job killer. That idea is something that's been a part of society and literature for hundreds of years, sometimes in violent fashion. Our economy needs to evolve in such a way that the destruction of jobs is a net positive for society.
As an automation software developer in a manufacturing business, the software I've written has obsoleted a lot of positions but not the people in those positions. There's always something new for even unskilled, aged labor to do -- often, tasks that didn't exist before resources were freed up by the same automation.
Most of the population having access to most of the worlds knowledge in the palm of their hand is a gigantic boon to society.
What we should accept is that the time is approaching where a) it is possible for skill and lucky people to make many millions of times more money than those who are neither and that b) the cost communication has decreased so much that in many cases it no longer makes sense to employ people, instead it makes more sense to contract the work out.
This means we should do two things: stop talking about income differences and focus on making sure the poorest have tolerable lives and b) make it much, much, much easier to start your own small business. This means tax cuts but above all simplifications of the relevant law.
I think we need to be careful about what "tolerable lives" means too. I've seen "guaranteed income" proposals talking about something in the $25,000 USD range or similar. That's basically poverty level - and while that's better than nothing, it probably won't work as more and more jobs go away.
Imagine a world (or the US) where 75% of the people are at the poverty level and 25% are "rich". How long do you think that's going to last?
$25,000 is a very reasonable existence for a single person, as long as it's present buying power and after tax.
You can rent for less than $1000 and should be able to do utilities for ~$300.
That leaves about $200 a week, which is certainly not the lap of luxury, but it's plenty for food and necessities (I've done 2 people eating well enough for ~$100 a week so I really don't feel full of shit saying that).
There's no planning for the future in that, but part of the idea of a basic income is to de-risk things like that no?
$25,000 is plenty to live on for single people in certain parts of the country. When I was in college I could live large on about half that with no problem at all.
Maybe he believes we're somewhere to the right of the peak of the Laffer curve.
There's literally no evidence whatsoever for that, but evidence isn't what causes people to advocate for tax cuts for people making "many millions of times more money" than those who aren't lucky or talented.
I meant tax cuts and simplifications for the poor. Mostly the tax cuts would come as a result of the simplifications (eg if you import something with small import duties we can just do away with them, which will make them a little more money but mostly saves them time in not having to fill the paperwork and figure out which laws they fall under).
Large companies can afford the complexity but small companies typically can't. More importantly a neighborhood printshop isn't a complex business (it doesn't, for example, have overseas income on intellectual property taxes).
> Large companies can afford the complexity but small companies typically can't.
I love the idealism, but that's not how it works. Small or large, you will hire a company that specializes in customs to handle all the paperwork for you. It's about as complex as paying a bill for a small business.
The same applies to accounting, taxes, legal issues, etc. all businesses outsource this work to specialists.
The problem is that all facets of business have become so complex and specialized that you now need a specialist for everything. This isn't a burden on the business, since all businesses have to pay it and handle it in the same way.
It's a burden on the employees and consumers. They pay for all this complexity through lower salaries and higher prices.
I wonder if you can reliably classify jobs into "nonroutine" and "routine". There is element of routine in every work, and I'm pretty sure that even most boring and repetitive job can be done better with some degree of creativity. It would be really interesting to read more about reasoning behind classification presented in this article. I mean can you seriously say there is no "routine" in programming or management?
If your work is just following instructions, then it's probably routine.
As for me, I'd like to see most middle management go away, since I largely see it as a waste (basically, if people know how to manage themselves, you can get rid of most middle-managers).
It's not a knowledge problem it's a process problem. You can get rid of most middle managers but only once you have the conditions in the business where people can be both autonomous and aligned to the business goals.
Most middle managers end up achieving neither, but a layer of management is the default solution that companies most end up with.
That is an interesting thought. I would suggest that one of the goals of the company should be to teach people to be autonomous and aligned to the business goals.
You still need management as a way of reducing communication costs. Without any management you need (n!) communication channels in the worst case. With proper management you can achieve (n*C ~).
You don't need to have a person working full-time as a communicator. Your team can have a 'designated communicator,' and that role can even be swapped around so everyone learns to do it.
Then you are dynamically creating (and cutting I suspect) lots of communication channels. My suspicion is that for any large group something like that would require an extremely strong institution and lots of paper trail. This is a noble objective, but I'm not sure if it is always an option.
By the way, what is the largest organization you can think that follows that swaps 'designated communicators' roles with no management?
>By the way, what is the largest organization you can think that follows that swaps 'designated communicators' roles with no management?
Good question. I've worked at a fortune 500 company where people routinely ignored official communication channels in order to communicate with the people they needed. It becomes a lot harder to find the person you need at a large company and building relationships across departments becomes important.
It's rare in any organization that the people who have power are the same ones who get things done.
All of this points to the fact that work is a consumer good. We need to manufacture work just like we manufacture products. You buy work with time, and in return you get money; after all time is money. It should be work that we actually want to do, in an environment which we find to be psychologically positive. We need to just call it a day for capitalism and all the other garbage that goes with it. Let's throw away idiotic ideas like efficiency and productivity. And let's focus on meaning. Maybe we can build a fulfilling society rather than this madness and busi-ness we have created to produce garbage at breaknecks speeds so capital owners can do more of the same.
Not everyone's time is worth the same. Some people have more experience, intelligence, or can simply brute-force the task with determination. Productive societies reward people as such, and for good reason. You're talking about obliterating incentives as we know them. Perhaps you can test your hypotheses in a voluntary society before advocating for a coercive state to enact such policies.
It's easy to account for this in terms of education. Number of years of education should be added into the calculation for that. For instance for every year of schooling you get a a certain percentage more currency in terms of hours worked than someone with less schooling. And I am for all sorts of pilot programs to explore how else we can organize society.
As for "productive societies", I don't know what that will actually mean in the near future. Automation is 100% productive. It needs no people for that. These terms have meaning for industrial society where people are treated like robots. It has little meaning for society where robots produce more of the goods. And everything else is about simply organizing society so that people feel some sense of meaning and contentment.
At the end of the day in motivated people with money, and engineering society in that direction, we actually get a lot of ills like burnout, alcoholism, workaholics, etc. Yes people can be coerced by money, but often it's not for their own good. It for the good of the owners of money so they can make more profit. But at the same time, this sort of thing ruins the experience of life for the worker.
Because perfect (i.e. 100%) productivity is technically unobtainable because there will always be efficiencies to be made. Yes, machines are 'always on' and will complete a task in the most efficient way we tell them to, or that they learn to do themselves, but I think that humans will always play a role in raising productivity of even fully-automated systems by making efficiency improvements.
That is for the foreseeable future anyway, until AI starts making its own exponentially big efficiency improvements ;)
Whatever you get there rather quickly. Things are productive enough as it is now. It will only get better. It's irrelevant. It's sad how obsessed we have become over terms like these, when they should not matter at all. Reality is that art like entrepreneurship does not care about efficiency. Only factory work does, and when it is done by robots then yes I am sure some engineer will figure out how to squeeze that last bit of performance out of that before starting to hit diminishing returns and getting himself fired in the process. Eventually machines will learn how to optimize themselves, and at that point in a very very short time they will be fully optimized and stay that way forever. These terms will become redundant and irrelevant.
It's disconnected alright. There's only 3 companies advertising for jobs on his careers page. And one of them is a franchising company (Mr. Sparky). Trades are very competitive. Just look up the number of electricians in your area. It's a race to the bottom in the trades.
Do you have more sources on this? I've been looking for good data on the competitiveness of traditional blue-collar "trade" jobs/industry since it started becoming the go-to panacea to all our job woes a few years ago. It seems like plumbing, electrician work, HVAC, etc. would be pretty easily saturated areas; how many plumbing jobs can be sustained per neighborhood, for example?
Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward? Our society and economy aren't optimized for scenarios involving large scale unemployment. What use is automation if it only leads to mass human suffering?
> Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward?
The goal seems to be making the rich even richer.
You are right in that the goal is key, because much time and effort will be spent towards the goal. When Kennedy said we should go to the moon, we did. Our leaders today have other goals, and they too will reach their goals. Choose wisely.
Quite right. Almost everyone is quite rich in terms of available goods and services per median income, compared to 100 years ago. Even by 50 years old standards, I am super-rich, having the ability to travel though Europe many times per year, flexible working schedule, and having, say, an on-demand driver available on call by the push of the button on my portable phone... this is insanely rich even by original Wall Street movie standards! And I am not a Wall Street trader, I am just a self-educated software engineer, coming from relatively poor family. My wife is a mathematician, also enjoying similar privileges.
So yes, I am looking forward to get even more richer in time. Like most of people. And this is way easier than it ever was before.
Not for the Luddites. This is one of the most consistently misunderstood and misused historical lessons I run into in tech circles. The true lesson of the Luddites isn't that "things will turn out better than you thought", it is that "there will be casualties".
The Luddites were basically correct - they were trading "good jobs" for fundamental unemployment. Demographically speaking the families involved did not on average recover from the damage for a few generations.
So while from a global perspective the overall change may be positive over time, you can't discount people out of hand for saying "wait a minute, we're going to get screwed hard here". They may well be right. It may still be the right thing to do.
What the policy implications of such are or should be is a separable issue.
Another potentially deep issue: the industrial revolution creating a bunch of new jobs and job categories does not demonstrate that the same will be true of a putative automation revolution that we are entering....
Technological advancements displace jobs at a relatively slow pace. It doesn't happen overnight. And as those jobs get replaced, the demand for the remaining people who can do those jobs goes up because not all companies can afford to automate initially. The "casualties" you mention are more likely the future workers for a particular profession, but they're unlikely to care much having, y'know, not been born yet.
No, that is not at all what happened with the Luddites.
Which is the point, really. This is exactly the sort of assertion that is often made ... and often the Luddites are trotted out as an example. But they are a better counterexample to what you assert than an example.
The problem the Luddites had is that they were skilled labour facing the possibility of destitution with no welfare state to provide time and money for retraining into new occupations. They could see that there was no future for their occupation, but they were arguing for better terms with their employers so that their short-medium term future wasn't so bleak (e.g. their family being sent to the [workhouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse), and likely a drawn out and dehumanising death).
We have a welfare state now in all developed countries (by varying degrees), so the problems that the Luddites faced have been greatly mitigated from those past extremes. However, all welfare states assume that any state of unemployment is merely temporary, and provides on that basis.
The past is not a wholly reliable indicator for the future, and present indications are that with increasing automation there won't be enough good (interpret as you will) new jobs. Further, many of the new good jobs will be out of reach for a significant portion of our populations without the luck of latent ability and/or the luck being born into the right (well-off) family with access to high quality education and social connections.
The institutions that solved the Luddite problem can't solve a problem of truly long-term/permanent unemployment or very irregular employment.
But why there is a conception that somebody should be entitled to a stable job for life?
I started my career as a journalist/editor when paper magazines were still a thing. Soon, the publishing house I was working in went out of business, so I have to learn the new trade: software development. Which also may become obsolete soon, at least for simpler tasks, so I'll be ready to learn something new.
Capitalism works because it needs rich enough customers on mass scale, the middle class. If there will be not enough jobs for the middle class to exist, there will be no capitalism anymore.
Just because it was true then, does not mean it will be true now. The Luddite Fallacy Fallacy; Gwern does a good job explaining it and supplying copious links on the subject: https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#neo-luddism
Please look out the nearest window that overlooks a street. Then compare with the next couple of minutes of this video (https://youtu.be/uYmbyOrM4gs?t=543). Compare the amount of human suffering. The difference is 116 years of the automation you so hate.
Unfortunately I can't show you what life was like before the industrial revolution, because we don't have images or movies from that time, suffice to say that life then "was short, brutish and hard". Child mortality was rampant, according to Adam Smith it was not unusual that a woman who had had 10 children didn't see any of them grew up to be adults.
There is no goal, but progress is moving as far away from that condition as humanely possible, as fast as possible. This is best achieved with capitalism.
If you want full scale employment just create another world war, so that we can draft everybody and piss all our wealth away.
I'm afraid you have completely misunderstood him/her. I'm pretty certain that he believes the industrial revolution eventually brought about amazing social change and genuine life improvements for everyone that made life much much less 'short, brutish, and hard'.
The point wasn't that automation is bad (it clearly is not), but that if we continue to automate without a plan for how we deal with mass unemployment, then automation will lead to mass human suffering of a different kind.
The site's layout seems to treat my 10" android tablet in landscape mode as if it were a first generation iPhone in portrait mode. I wonder what happens. Faaulty browser sniffing?
Many backend jobs involve routine work from people who could be doing non-routine work if the CRUD routine job was automated. Within an industry or a profession it seems like there could be a mix of routine and non-routine work.
Similarly, how many people's jobs have changed from being routine jobs to non-routine jobs through either retraining or automation allowing them to take on higher order work? Again, doesn't say.
Also, interesting to note that the actual unemployment rate for routine congnitive, routine manual etc 2009 shock aside doesn't actually look anomalous compared to much of the last two decades of the graph is to be believed.